The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched
down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle
finger. The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees
of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery; but nothing
could abate the energy of this bony sage.
“They talk about their Atlantises,--their submerged continents!”
he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils. “Why,
Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a
Mesozoic--at any rate, Cenozoic--sea?”
The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner
with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic
responsibility. He was a man of about the professor’s age,--say, sixty
years,--but not like him in appearance. His figure was stately and
massive,--that of one who in his youth must have possessed vast physical
strength, rigidly developed and disciplined. Well set upon his broad
shoulders was a noble head, crowned with gray, wavy hair; the eyes and
eyebrows were black and powerful, but the expression was kindly and
humorous. His moustache and the Roman convexity of his chin would have
confirmed your conviction that he was a retired warrior; in which you
would have been correct, for General Trednoke always appeared what he
was, both outwardly and inwardly. His great frame, clad in white linen,
was comfortably disposed in a Japanese straw arm-chair; yet there was
a soldierly poise in his attitude. He was smoking a large and excellent
cigar; and a cup of coffee, with a tiny glass of cognac beside it, stood
on a mahogany stand at his elbow.
“Do you remember, Meschines, the time I licked you at school?” he
inquired, in a tone of pleasant reminiscence.
“I can’t say I do. What’s more, I venture to challenge your statement.
And though you are a hundred pounds the better of me in weight, and a
West Point graduate, I will wager my pipe (which is worth its weight in
diamonds) against that old woollen shirt of Montezuma’s that you showed
me yesterday, that I can lick you to-day, and forget all about it before
bedtime!”
“Well, I guess you could,” returned the general, with a little chuckle,
“even if I hadn’t that Mexican bullet in my leg. But you couldn’t,
forty-five years ago, though you tried, and though I was a year younger
than you, and weighed five pounds less. Come, now: you don’t mean to say
you’ve forgotten Susan Brown!”
“Oh--ah--hah! Susan Brown! Well, I declare! And what brought her into
your head, I should like to know?”
“Why, after breaking your heart first, and then mine, I lost sight of
her, and I don’t think I have seen her since. But it appears she was
married to a fellow named Parsloe.”
“Don’t fancy that name!” observed the professor, wagging his head and
frowning. “Has a mean sound to it. But what of it?”
“Well, she died,--rest her soul!--and Parsloe too. But they had a
daughter, and she survives them.”
“And resembles her mother, eh?--No, Trednoke, the time for that sort of
thing has gone by with me. Susan might have had me, five-and-forty years
ago; but I can’t undertake to revive my passion for the benefit of Mrs.
Parsloe’s daughter. Besides, I’m too busy to think of marriage, and
not--not old enough!”
At this tour de force, the general laughed softly, and finished his
coffee. An old Indian, somewhat remarkable in appearance, with shaggy
white hair hanging down on his shoulders, stepped forward from the room
where he had been waiting, and removed the cup.
“No letters yet, Kamaiakan?” asked the general, in Spanish.
“In a few minutes, general,” the other replied. “Pablo has just come in
sight over the hill. There were several errands.”
“Muy buen!--I was going to say, Meschines, her father and mother left
the girl poor, and she, being, apparently, clever and energetic, took
to----”
“I know!” the professor interrupted. “They all do it, when they are
clever and energetic, and that’s the end of them!--School-teaching!”
“Not at all,” returned General Trednoke. “She entered a dry-goods
store.”
“Entered a dry-goods store! Well, there’s nothing so extraordinary in
that. I’ve seen quantities of women do it, of all ages, colors, and
degrees. What did she buy there?”
“Oh, a fiddlestick!” exclaimed the general. “Why don’t you keep quiet
and listen to my story? I say, she went into a great dry-goods store in
New York, as sales-woman.”
“Bless my soul! You don’t mean a shop-girl?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? And why not?”
“Oh, well!--but, shade of Susan Brown! Ichabod!--what is the feminine of
Ichabod, by the way, Trednoke? But, seriously, it’s too bad. Susan may
have been fickle, but she was always aristocratic. And now her daughter
is a shop-girl. You and I are avenged!”
“You are just as ridiculous, Meschines, as you were thirty or fifty
years ago,” said the general, tranquilly. “You declaim for the sake
of hearing your own voice. Besides, what you say is un-American. Grace
Parsloe, as I was saying, got a place as shop-girl in one of the great
New York stores. I don’t say she mightn’t have done worse: what I say
is, I doubt whether she could have done better. That house--I know one
of its founders, and I know what I’m talking about--is like an enormous
family, where children are born, year after year, grow up, and take
their places in life according to their quality and merit. What I mean
is, that the boy who drives a wagon for them to-day, at three dollars
a week, may control one of their chief departments, or even become a
partner, before they’re done with him; and, mutatis mutandis, the same
with the girls. When these girls marry, it’s apt to be into a higher
rank of life than they were born in; and that fact, I take it, is a good
indication that their shop-girl experience has been an education and an
improvement. They are given work to do, suited to their capacity, be it
small or great; they are in the way of learning something of the great
economic laws; they learn self-restraint, courtesy, and----”
“And human nature! Yes, poor things: they see the American buying-woman,
and that is a discipline more trying than any you West Pointers know
about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family ARE
fathers, and the children ARE children to them... All the same, I fancy
the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as
you say they do, don’t, as a rule, make their shop girl days a topic of
conversation at five-o’clock teas, or put ‘Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so’ at
the bottom of their visiting-cards.”
“I believe, after all, you’re a snob, Meschines,” said the general,
pensively. “But, as I was about to say, when you interrupted me ten
minutes ago, Grace Parsloe is coming on here to make us a visit. She
fell ill, and her employers, after doing what could be done for her in
the way of medical attendance, made up their minds to give her a change
of climate. Now, you know, as she had originally gone to them with a
letter from me, and as I live out here, on the borders of the Southern
desert, in a climate that has no equal, they naturally thought of
writing to me about it. And of course I said I’d be delighted to have
her here, for a month, or a year, or whatever time it may be. She will
be a pleasure to me, and a friend for Miriam, and she may find a husband
somewhere up or down the coast, who will give her a fortune, and think
all the better of her because she, like him, had the ability and the
pluck to make her own way in the world.”
“Humph! When do you expect her?”
“She may turn up any day. She is coming round by way of the Isthmus.
From what I hear, she is really a very fine, clever girl. She held a
responsible position in the shop, and----”
“Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and
instructive conversation that we--or, to be more accurate, that I was
engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all
the indications are lacustrine?”
Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what
appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and
developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking
and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face,
with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,--
“What is lacustrine, papa?”
“Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?”
“I haven’t been asleep. What is lacustrine?”
“Ask the professor.”
“Lacus, you know, my dear,” said the latter, “means fresh-water
indications as against salt.”
“Then how does Great Salt Lake----”
“Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture,
evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break
the crust, and there you are!”
“Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?” rejoined the
hammock.
“There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why,” cried
the professor, interrupting himself, “when I was in Wyoming and around
there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--cliffs and buttes
of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods
long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil
bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the
fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch.”
“People’s bones?” asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing
a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.
“Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had
an anxious time of it!” returned the sage. “No, no, my dear. There
was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and
iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that
run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred
feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house.”
“How did they get there?”
“Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off
and left them high and dry.”
“But where did the water go to?”
The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. “She
knows more questions than you do the answers to them,” quoth he. “But I
wouldn’t mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to
see some of it back again.”
“Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There’s a hundred and thirty degrees
of heat in some of these valleys,--abysses, rather, three or four
hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this
region, too, and whatever water wasn’t evaporated from above would be
likely to come to grief underneath.”
“But, professor,” said the musical voice, “I thought there was a law
that water always seeks its own level. So how can there be empty places
below sea-level?”
“It’s the fault of the aneroid barometer, my dear. We were very
comfortable and commonplace until that came along and revealed
anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata,
which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all
through the desert; and there’s a good deal of lava oozing over them,
too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the
west, or the Colorado leaking in from the east.”
“In that case,” remarked the general, “a little more seismic disturbance
might produce a change.”
“It would have to be more than a little, I suspect,” returned Meschines.
“Kamaiakan told me that the Indians have a prophecy that a great lake
will come back and make the desert fruitful, and that there are some who
know the very place where the water will begin to flow.” And here the
hammock, with a final convulsion, gave birth to a beautiful young woman,
in a diaphanous silk dress and a white lace mantilla. She crossed the
veranda, and seated herself on the broad arm of her father’s chair.
“Why, that’s important!” said the general, arching his brows. “I wonder
if Kamaiakan is one of those who know the place? If so, it might be
worth his while to let me into the secret.”
“Oh, you couldn’t go there! It’s enchanted, and people who go near it
die. There are bones all about there, now.”
“This Kamaiakan appears to be a remarkable personage: where did you pick
him up?” inquired the professor.
“It was rather the other way,” Trednoke replied, taking one of his
daughter’s hands in his, and caressing it. “We are appendages to
Kamaiakan. You look so natural, sitting there, Meschines, that I forget
it’s thirty years since we met, and that all the significant events of
my life have happened in that time,--the Mexican war, my marriage, and
the rest of it! I have been a widower ten years.”
“And I’ve been a bachelor for over sixty!” said Meschines, with a queer
expression. “Your wife was Spanish, was she not?”
“Her father was a Mexican of Andalusian descent. But her mother was
descended from the race of Azatlan: there are records and relics
indicating that her ancestors were princes in Tenochtitlan before Cortez
made trouble there.”
“And I’ve been losing my heart to a princess, and never realized my
audacity!” exclaimed the professor, laying his hand on his waistcoat and
making an obeisance to Miriam.
She tossed her free foot, and played with the fringe of her reboso.
“I will tell my maid to look for it,” she said; “but I think you must
have left it in papa’s curiosity-room.”
“No: I’m an Aztec sacrifice!” cried the professor; and they all
laughed. “One would hardly have anticipated,” he resumed after a pause,
addressing Trednoke, “that you would have made a double conquest,--first
of the men, and then of the woman!”
“The woman conquered me, without trying or wishing to, and then, because
she was a woman, took compassion on me. Whether my country has benefited
much by the Mexican annexation, I can’t say; but I know Inez--made a
heaven on earth for me,” concluded the general, in a low voice. His
countenance, at this moment, wore a solemn and humble expression,
beautiful to see; and Miriam bent and laid her cheek against his.
Meschines knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and sighed.
“No woman ever took compassion on me,” he remarked, “and you see the
result,--ashes!”
“Ashes,--with their wonted fires living in them,” said Trednoke.
“We were talking about this Indian of yours,” said Meschines.
“Ay, to be sure. Well, he was attached to Inez’s family when I first
knew them. It was a peculiar relation; not like that of a servant. One
finds such things in Mexico. The conquered race were of as good strain
as their conquerors; the blood of Montezuma was as blue as the best
of the Castilian. There were many intermarriages; and there are many
instances of the survival of traditions and records; though the records
are often symbolic, and would have no meaning to persons not initiated.
But they have been sufficient to perpetuate ties of a personal nature
through generation after generation; and the alliance between Kamaiakan
and Inez was of this kind. His forefathers, I imagine, were priests, and
priests were a mighty power in Tenochtitlan. For aught I know, indeed
Kamaiakan may be an original priest of Montezuma’s; no one knows his
age, but he does not look an hour older, to-day, than when I first saw
him, over twenty years ago.”
“He must be!” said Miriam, with some positiveness. “He has told me of
seeing and doing things hundreds of years ago. And he says----” She
paused.
“What does he say, Nina adorada?” asked her father.
“It was about the treasure, you know.”
“Let us hear. The professor is one of us.”
“It’s one of our traditions that my mother’s ancestors, at the time of
Cortez, were very rich people,” continued Miriam, glancing at Meschines,
and then letting her eyes wander across the garden, blooming with
roses and fragrant with orange-trees, and so across the trellised vines
towards the soft outline of the mountains eastward. “A great part of
their wealth was in the form of jewels and precious stones. When Cortez
took the city, one of the priests, who was a relative of our family, put
the jewels in a box, and hid them in a certain place in the desert.”
“And does Kamaiakan know where the place is?” asked the general.
“He can know, when the time comes.”
“Which will be, perhaps, when you are ready for your dowry,” observed
the professor, genially.
“A spell was put upon the spot,” Miriam went on, with a certain
imaginative seriousness; for she loved romance and mystery so well, and
was of a temperament so poetical, that the wildest fairy-tales had a
sort of reality for her. “No one can find the treasure while the spell
remains. But Kamaiakan understands the spell, and the conjuration which
dissolves it; and when he dissolves it, the treasure will be found.”
“And, between ourselves,” added the general, “Kamaiakan is himself the
priestly relative by whom the spell was wrought. He bears an enchanted
life, which cannot cease until he has restored the jewels to Miriam’s
hands.”
“There might be something in it, you know,” said Meschines, after a
pause. “The treasures of Montezuma have never been found. Is there no
old chart or writing, in your collection of curiosities and relics, that
might throw light on it?”
“The scriptures of Anahuac were of the hieroglyphic
type,--picture-writing,” replied the other. “No, I fear there is nothing
to the purpose; and if there were, I shouldn’t know how to decipher it.”
“But, papa, the tunic!” exclaimed Miriam.
“Oh! has the tunic anything to do with it?”
“Is that the queer woollen garment with the gold embroidery?” inquired
the professor, becoming more interested. “I took a fancy to that, you
remember. Has it a story?”
“Well, it is a kind of an anomaly, I believe,” the general answered,
looking up at his daughter with a smile. “The Aztecs, you are aware,
dressed chiefly in cotton. Even their defensive armor was of cotton,
thickly quilted. Their ornaments were feathers, and embroidery of gold
and precious stones. But wool, for some reason, they didn’t wear; and
yet this garment, as you can see for yourself, is pure wool; and that it
is also pure Aztecan is beyond question.”
“Admitting that, what clue does it give to the treasure?”
“You must ask Kamaiakan,” said Miriam: “only, he wouldn’t tell you.”
“Possibly,” the professor suggested, “the place where the treasure is
hidden is the place whence the water is to flow out; and the water is
the treasure.”
“Seriously, do you suppose that such a phenomenon as the return of an
inland sea is physically practicable?” asked Trednoke.
“No phenomenon, in this part of the world, would surprise me,” returned
Meschines. “The Colorado might break its barriers; or it is conceivable
that some huge stream, taking its rise in the heights hundreds of miles
north and east of us, may be flowing through subterranean passages into
the sea, emerging from the sea-bottom hundreds of miles to the westward.
Now, if a rattling good earthquake were to happen along, you might awake
in the morning to find yourself on an island, or even under water.”
“A moderate Mediterranean would satisfy me,” the general said. “I
wouldn’t exchange the certainty of it for the treasures of Montezuma.”
“The thirst for gold and for water are synonymous in your case?”
“Give this section a moist climate, and I needn’t tell you that the
Great American Desert would literally blossom as the rose. Even as
it is, I expect a great deal of it will be redeemed by scientific
irrigation. The soil only needs water to become inexhaustibly
productive. Our desert, as you know, is not sand, like parts of the
Sahara; it has all the ingredients that go to nourish plants, only their
present powdery condition makes them unavailable. Now, I can, to-day,
buy a hundred square miles of desert for a few dollars. You see the
point, don’t you?”
“And all you want is expert opinion as to the likelihood of finding
water?”
“The man who solves that question for me in the affirmative is welcome
to half my share of the results that would ensue from it.”
“Why don’t you engage some expert to investigate?”
“One can’t always trust an expert. I don’t mean as to his expertness
only, but as to his good faith. He might prefer to sell the idea to
somebody who could pay cash,--which I cannot.”
“Why, you seem to have given this thing a good deal of thought,
Trednoke.”
“Well, yes: it has been my hobby for a year past; and I have made some
investigations myself. But this is the first time I have spoken of it to
any one.”
“I understand. And what of the investigations?”
“I can say that I found enough to interest me. I’ll tell you about
it some time. I should be glad to leave Miriam something to make her
independent.”
“I should say that her Creator had already done that!” said Meschines.
“By the way, I know a young fellow--if he were only here--who is just
the man you want, and can be trusted. He’s a civil engineer,--Harvey
Freeman: the Lord only knows in what part of the world he is at this
speaking. He has made a special study of these subterranean matters.”
“Don’t you remember, papa, Coleridge’s poem of Kubla Khan?--
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea!”
“Our sacred river, when we find it, shall be named Miriam.”
“It ought to be Kamaiakan,” she rejoined; “for, if anybody finds it, it
will be he.”
“I think I hear the wings of the angel of whom we have been speaking,”
said the general. “Yes, here he is; and he has got the letters. Let us
see! One for you Meschines. And this, I see, is from our friend Miss
Parsloe, postmarked Santa Barbara. Why, she’ll be here to-morrow, at
that rate.”
“Here’s a queer coincidence!” exclaimed the professor, who had meanwhile
opened his envelope and glanced through the contents. “The very man I
was speaking of,--Harvey Freeman! Says he is in this neighborhood, has
heard I’m here, and is coming down to pay me a visit. Methinks I hear
the rolling of the sacred river!”
“But you won’t mention it to him, until----”
“Bless me! Of course not. I’ll bring him over here, in the course
of human events, and you can take a look at him, and act on your own
intuitions. I won’t say on Princess Miriam’s, for Harvey is a very
fine-looking fellow, and her intuitions might get confused.”
“A civil engineer!” said Miriam, with an intonation worthy of the
daughter of a West-Pointer and the descendant of an Aztec prince.
Kamaiakan (who spoke only Spanish) had been gathering up some cushions
that had fallen out of the hammock. Having replaced them, and cast a
quick glance at Meschines, he withdrew.