THE WOLF-CUB
_A NOVEL OF SPAIN_
BY PATRICK and TERENCE CASEY
_WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
H. WESTON TAYLOR_
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
1918
_Copyright, 1918_,
BY PATRICK AND TERENCE CASEY
_All rights reserved_
Published, January, 1918
[Illustration: "It is my officer, my parent!" whispered the young
policeman]
THE WOLF-CUB
CHAPTER I
When Jacinto Quesada was yet a very little Spaniard, his father kissed
him upon both cheeks and upon the brow, and went away on an enterprise
of forlorn desperation.
On a great rock at the brink of the village Jacinto Quesada stood with
his weeping mother, and together they watched the somber-faced
mountaineer hurry down the mountainside. He was bound for that hot,
sandy No Man's Land which lies between the British outpost, Gibraltar,
and sunburned, haggard, tragic Spain. The two dogs, Pepe and Lenchito,
went with him. They were pointers, retrievers. For months they had been
trained in the work they were to do. In all Spain there were no more
likely dogs for smuggling contraband.
The village, where Jacinto Quesada lived with his peasant mother, was
but a short way below the snow-line in the wild Sierra Nevada. Behind it
the Picacho de la Veleta lifted its craggy head; off to the northeast
bulked snowy old "Muley Hassan" Cerro de Mulhacen, the highest peak of
the peninsula; and all about were the bleak spires of lesser mountains,
boulder-strewn defiles, moaning dark gorges. The village was called
Minas de la Sierra.
The mother took the little Jacinto by the hand and led him to the
village chapel. She knelt before the dingy altar a long time. Then she
lit a blessed candle and prayed again. And then she handed the wick
dipped in oil to Jacinto and said:
"Light a candle for thy father, tiny one."
"But why should I light a candle for our Juanito, _mamacita_?"
"It is that Our Lady of the Sorrows and the Great Pity will not let him
be killed by the men of the _Guardia Civil_!"
"Men do not kill unless they hate. Do the men of the Guardia Civil hate,
then, the _pobre padre_ of me and the sweet husband of thee,
_mamacita_?"
"It is not the hate, child! The men of the Guardia Civil kill any
breaker of the laws they discover guilty-handed. It is the way they keep
the peace of Spain."
"But our Juanito is not a lawbreaker, little mother. He is no _lagarto_,
no lizard, no sly tricky one. He is an honest man."
"Hush, _nino_! There are no honest men left in Spain. They all have
starved to death. Thy father has become a _contrabandista_ And if it be
the will of the good God, and if Pepe and Lenchito be shrewd to skulk
through the shadows of night and swift to run past the policemen on
watch, we will have sausages and _garbanzos_ to eat, and those little
legs of thine will not be the puny reeds they are now. _Ojala!_ they
will be round and pudgy with fat!"
The men of Minas de la Sierra were all woodchoppers and
_manzanilleros_--gatherers of the white-flowered _manzanilla_. Their
fathers had been woodchoppers and manzanilleros before them. But too
persistently and too long, altogether too long, had the trees been cut
down and the manzanilla harvested. The mountains had grown sterile,
barren, bald. Not so many cords of Spanish pine were sledded down the
mountain slopes as on a time; not so many men burdened beneath great
loads of manzanilla went down into the city of Granada to sell in the
market place that which was worth good silver pesetas.
There are no deer in the Sierra Nevada--neither red, fallow, nor roe.
There are no wild boar. There is only the Spanish ibex. And what poor
_serrano_ can provision his good wife and his _cabana_ full of lusty
brats by hunting the Spanish ibex? He has but one weapon--the ancient
muzzle-loading smooth-bore. And the ibex speeds like a chill glacial
wind across the snow fields and craggy solitudes, and only a man armed
with a cordite repeater can hope to bring him down.
Soon descended the mountains only men who had turned their backs upon
Minas de la Sierra and who thought to leave behind forever the bleak
peaks and the wind-swept gorges and the implacable hunger. Out of every
ten only one crawled back, beaten and bruised by the savage Spanish
cities and the savage Spanish plains. With those of Minas de la Sierra
who could not tear themselves away from their native rocks, these
broken-hearted ones continued on and with them slowly starved.
It was not the will of the good God that Jacinto Quesada should have fat
pudgy legs by reason of his father's endeavors. Shrewd were the dogs,
Pepe and Lenchito, but they were not so shrewd as were the Spanish
police. Came a pale and stuttering _arriero_, a muleteer, up to the
village one day. To Jacinto Quesada's mother he brought tragic news.
The men of the Guardia Civil had discovered poor Juanito as he was
unbuckling a packet of Cuban cigars from the throat of the dog Lenchito;
they had walked him out behind a sand dune; they had made him dig a
grave. Then they had shot down Lenchito; then they had shot down Juan
Quesada. And then the dog and the man were kicked together into the one
grave and sand piled on top of them both.
But make no mistake, _mi señor caballero_ reader! The men of the Guardia
Civil are not abominations of cruelty. They are not monsters, brutal and
depraved. _Quita!_ no.
There are twenty-five thousand men in the Guardia Civil; twenty thousand
foot and five thousand cavalry. By twos, eternally by twos, they go
through Spain, exterminating crime wherever crime shows its fanged and
evil head.
Every Spaniard is potentially a criminal. An empty belly goads him into
lawlessness; his very nature greases his wayward feet. The Spaniard is
by nature sullen, irascible, insolently independent, lawless. He is more
African than European. Prick a Spaniard and a vindictive Moor bleeds.
Then, whether it be his famishing hunger or lawless passion which has
caused him to rise above the law, the Spaniard, his crime writ in red,
flees from the police. Spain is a country of uncouth wilds. There are
the desolate high steppes and the savage mountains; there are the tawny
_despoblados_, which are uninhabitated wastes; there are the _marismas_,
which are labyrinthine everglades where whole regiments may lie
concealed.
But also, in Spain, there are railroads and telegraphs, and a most
efficient constabulary, the Guardia Civil. And, were it not for
_Caciquismo_, all evil-doers would be speedily apprehended by the
Guardia Civil, tried under the _alcaldes_, and incarcerated in the
Carcel de la Corte or the Presidio of Ceuta.
Caciquismo is not a tangible thing. It is a secret and sinister
influence. It is not the Tammany of New York; it is not the Camorra of
Naples. Yet it resembles both these corrupt edifices in its special
Spanish way. Its instruments are prime ministers and muleteers, members
of the _cortes_ and bullfighters, hidalgos and low-caste Gitanos.
A _cacique_ may be only the mayor of a tiny hamlet; again, he may be
privy councilor to the king. Yet high or low, he is but one of the many
tentacles of a gigantic octopus which lays its clammy shadow athwart the
land.
It is well known that Tammany, for reasons political or otherwise,
protected criminals. Well, even as did Tammany, so does Caciquismo. A
Spanish criminal may be captured, tried before a magistrate and all; but
if he be one in good standing with the caciques, never is he sent to the
Carcel de la Corte or Ceuta. The invisible eight arms of the gigantic
octopus uncoil and reach out, the thousand ducts along those arms open
to spew a flood of favors and gold, and magistrate and prosecutor are
bought and paid for, and the men of the Civil Guard who cannot be
bought, who are incorruptible, are in the Spanish courts betrayed!
Therefore, the men of the Guardia Civil are most high-handed and cruel.
The criminal caught in the deed never reaches the Spanish jail. He is
shot down on the spot. Bigots for justice are the men of the Guardia
Civil!
_Carajo!_ but there was wailing in Minas de la Sierra when came the news
of Juan Quesada's death. So many men had gone away and been murdered by
the police, and so few were left! Women who had been made widows in the
selfsame way as Jacinto Quesada's mother came to the hut and sought to
comfort her. But she would not be comforted. For three days she lay on
the earthen floor of her hut and beat her hands and her head against the
dust. Then she commenced vomiting and swooning like one sick unto death.
They thought it was the cholera. The cholera was forever scaling the
high mountains and skulking into the village in the night. A man of the
village went for the doctor, Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada. He
lived but a few miles from Granada, and the man had to go all down the
hills to summon him.
Torreblanca y Moncada was what is called a "hard man." He was a grandee
by birth and breeding, a hidalgo of the old granite-jawed, eagle-stern
and eagle-haughty Spanish sort--the Cortes y Monroy sort, the Hernan de
Soto sort. He worshipped his ancient name, his high hidalgo blood. His
personal honor was to him more precious than life, more sacred than a
sacrament, inviolable, consecrated.
When a young man, he had married a woman of race and beauty. She had run
off with a Gypsy picador. Don Jaime had put a Manchegan knife down his
boot and set off after them, vowing to follow them to the end of the
earth even, and to kill them both. But the train, in which the guilty
ones fled, had not reached Jaen when it was wrecked, and they both were
crushed out of all semblance to two sinful lovers.
With composure and reserve, Don Jaime heard the news. He did not even
laugh harshly or curse God for robbing him of his revenge. Only grim,
quiet and morose, he returned to his dishonored house and to his baby
daughter that had been robbed, sacrileged, and orphaned.
He was quite a rememberable-looking man. His hair had whitened quickly
in the years that followed; his skin, from exposure to wind and weather,
was a deep swarth; and his eyes were gray. Not many Spaniards have gray
eyes. The eyes of Torreblanca y Moncada were a clear, cold, agate gray.
All in all, there was about his appearance, especially the long aquiline
nose, the stony eyes and pointed white beard, something which seemed to
harken back to the days of ruffs and ready swords--the days of the
terrible Spanish infantry, the Armada, the Bigotes, the "bearded men"
the Conquistadores.
The mountaineers of Minas de la Sierra knew fear of him and awe. For
them he had only a contemptuous eye and a bitter smile and a harsh
imperious way. They said he had a granite boulder for a heart. But he
was very tender with the sick.
He was the sort of physician who looks upon his business of serving the
ailing as a sacred commission from on high. He was like one who had
taken Holy Orders with his doctor's degree. No Jesuit was more slave to
his oaths; no Jesuit worked with more zeal for God and the Society than
did Don Jaime for Humanity and Science. The most poverty-abased
_labrador_, the most filthy beggar, had but to summon him, and he would
arise from his table or his bed and ride across Spain to him who needed
healing.
He was the only physician who would journey up the mountains to Minas de
la Sierra. It mattered not to him that there were long climbing miles of
perilous goat-paths along howling gorges; it mattered not to him that
the mountaineers never had money to pay him his just due. He was indeed
a "hard man," haughty as Satanas, and grim and dour. But even as his
personal honor was to him more precious than life, so was his
physician's honor a covenant with Jehovah, tyrannical and imperious to
command him.
The old men of Minas were sitting under the cork-oak in the center of
the village when the hidalgo doctor came out of the hut of the sick
woman.
"Is it not the great illness, Don Jaime?" asked one of the old men, old
Castro. He was thinking of the dread cholera.
"No. She is merely sick with despair."
"Ah, that is the great illness of Spain! All Spain is sick with
despair!"
"Carajo! but you are right, my father!" answered the Senor Doctor in his
bitter way. "Spain despairs. And why not? Spain famishes. There is no
food for honest men to eat. And men turn dishonest, thinking by crime to
appease their gnawing bellies. They became contrabandistas, _salteadores
de camino_, _abigeos_, _ladrones_. And the men of the Guardia Civil take
them out on the mountainside and murder them.
"Our forefathers," he philosophized, "were refugees from the fall of
Troy. Black was their national color; black for their lost cause. They
should put a black stripe with the red and yellow stripes of our modern
Spanish flag. A black stripe for despair."
"_Bueno_, Don Jaime!" said the old men. One added:
"We have not studied at Salamanca like you, but we know what we know.
Every night the hungry children cry themselves to sleep. Our own
porridge bowls are never full. We have seen our sons grow desperate. We
have seen them one by one go away. There was Benito, my youngest. He
became a contrabandista, and the Civil Guard murdered him. There was
Adolpho, the son of my sister Teresa. He also went the same way. There
was Santiago Reyes and Mateo Pacheco and Ignacio Parral. And now follows
Juan Quesada."
"What would you?" asked the Senor Doctor, with sudden brutality. "The
Guardia Civil must keep the peace of Spain. And Spaniards must steal to
live. It is dog eat dog. It will always be dog eat dog while men are
Spaniards and Spaniards starve."
He turned abruptly away and entered once more the hut of Jacinto
Quesada's mother. When he came out again, he said to the women clustered
about the door:
"She is forever kissing the child Jacinto and moaning, 'My poor
Jacintito! What will become of thee, thou pale tiny one? My poor, poor
Jacintito!'
"It is better that he should be taken away from her until she is herself
again. His presence here only deepens her despair. I will carry him with
me down the mountain to my _casa_ outside Granada and keep him there for
a time. I have not much--what Spaniard is rich?--but he will be fed
well; he will be given the same food as is given my own daughter,
Felicidad."
"Ah, Don Jaime, you have the heart of gold!" cried one woman, her eyes
moist and tender.
"The Mother of God reward you, and mend your broken heart, proud
Torreblanca y Moncada!" cried another. And the others would have burst
out in a full litany of praises, had not the Senor Doctor fiercely said:
"Don't stand there making the monkey of me, you mountain jades! _Quita
de ahi! Pronto!_ Get the peasants' brat into his jacket and
_alpagartas_, and wrap him warmly in his shawl. I desire to get out of
this accursed hole as quick as possible. It smells bad, and I itch. The
place is lousy!"