In the great harsh fist of the hidalgo doctor Jacinto Quesada, who was
then ten years old, put his little trembling hand and went down the
mountains, and entered a new world.
The _casa_ of Don Jaime was large, decayed, dingy, and full of lizards
that lived between the crumbling adobe bricks. But it seemed to Jacinto
Quesada a sumptuous palace. Besides the hidalgo doctor, there lived in
the sumptuous palace two old servants and a pretty little girl with
golden hair and legs round and pudgy as would have been the legs of
Jacinto, had his father lived and prospered.
In the great rooms that were so bare with poverty, the two children
played together. The eyes of the little Jacinto, alert to see all in
this new strangeness, had noted a peculiar thing. One day he said to
Felicidad:
"Do you love your father, the Senor Doctor?"
The child knuckled her brow.
"It is not the love," she said thoughtfully. "Don Jaime is a very grand
and haughty hidalgo; it is not his desire that I should love him. But I
fear him much!"
Came a day when Felicidad was very naughty. She tore leaves from the
huge old sheepskin-bound books in the great gloomy library, and cut them
into paper dolls. It was Don Jaime's one delight to read and reread, in
the long hot afternoons, those yellow-leaved, richly illuminated
ancient volumes. Pedro, one of the old servants, informed the doctor of
Felicidad's naughtiness. The doctor's face went ashy; he shook all over
with rage. He brought out a short whip of horsehide, a _quirta_ such as
_vaqueros_ use. With the quirta he lashed Felicidad's legs and back
unmercifully.
Her screams drove like knives into little Jacinto Quesada's heart. He
was but ten years old and he was much afraid of the terrible hidalgo.
But as the whip pitilessly descended again and again, and Felicidad
screamed and writhed in agony, a hot anger welled up in him; he became
desperate as only a child becomes desperate; he went mad.
Screaming himself, he charged at the doctor and tore at his trousers
with his finger nails, and tried to leap up and upon him. The quirta
rose again and fell upon his head. Then he caught at the doctor's wrist
and sunk his teeth into it. With bulldog tenacity he hung on, until he
was beaten into insensibility, and his jaws forced open.
Strangely, Don Jaime conceived a sort of liking for Jacinto Quesada
after that. He took to calling him The Little Wolf of the Mountains. It
became his wont to greet Jacinto, when he stumbled across him in the
great bare house, with a look of savage admiration and the words:
"Ah, here is the wolf-cub! And how are the fangs to-day, hungry scrawny
one?"
Upon a time, Don Jaime, his hand still in bandages, discovered Jacinto
alone in the dusky library, bent over a quaint old account of the
battles and triumphs of the swineherd Pizarro.
"When did you learn to read, son of a mangy she-wolf?" asked the doctor
in great surprise.
"When I was but five. My mother taught me letters. She is a woman of
honest birth and of education," answered Jacinto proudly. "When she was
a child, she was sent to the convent of Santa Ursola in Granada."
"And what do you think of this swashbuckler, Pizarro? He robbed the
Indians of their golden suns and chalices and their silver bars, without
morality and without ruth, did he not? But--do you think him cruel?"
The boy nodded his head slowly. Then with the oldish quaintness of a
book-bitten child, he explained:
"I do think him cruel, mi senor don. But he would not have been Pizarro
had he been soft-handed and pitiful. He led three hundred and fifty
Spanish caballeros and four thousand Indians deep into the cordilleras.
About him were the millions of the Inca Empire. If he had been less
brave, less strong, less cruel, those many Peruvians would have swirled
about him like the waters of an ocean, and engulfed him and his poor few
Conquistadores. But he knew how to be most cruel. That was why he
conquered. That was why he was altogether the great captain!"
When first he discovered Jacinto in his library, Don Jaime had been of
the mind to send him bundling, and to lock the door between the peasant
boy and his precious old books. Now he turned about abruptly, said
"Humph!" and went thoughtfully away.
At last, came an arriero to take Jacinto Quesada back to Minas de la
Sierra. She stood beside the mule upon which Jacinto mounted, the
golden-haired little Felicidad, and held up her small fat hands for him
to kiss. The hidalgo doctor watched his departure from the dark of the
doorway. He looked after the great dust-cloud on the brown road for a
long time.
"The Little Wolf!" he muttered in his morose way. "He was as famished
for knowledge as he was for food. He would have gone blind if he
lingered in my library much longer. To see him rip the entrails out of
Bernal Diaz's 'Cortes' and the Lives of Balboa, De Soto, Coronado--what
a joy! He has eyes of gold for seeing things clearly--for seeing beyond
good and evil. And he has a heart of fire, he has gusto, that Spanish
boy! _Pizarro was cruel, but he was great, he was magnificent, because
he was cruel!_ What a Spanish answer!
"_Por los Clavos de Cristo!_ he will go far, that mountain brat! He will
be a great realist and philosopher like Cervantes. Or he will be a great
dramatist like Lope de Vega. Or a great poet or statesman. Or a great
captain like the Conquistadores whose lives he studied with such gusto
and whose strength he analyzed with such clear-sightedness!"
Then Don Jaime smiled very bitterly. For the moment he had forgotten
that his Jacinto Quesada had been born a Spaniard of the people. He
swore a vile oath.
"But no, he will be none of those things!" he said. "_Cascaras!_ I am
becoming an old driveling fool."
Don Jaime knew that God smiles sardonically upon the Spaniard of the
people who seeks to rise in the world. He knew that, just as the United
States is a country of unlimited opportunities, just so is Spain a
country of opportunities limited and few. The Spaniard of the people,
strong with heart and gusto, has but two careers open to him. By those
two careers and those two careers only, can your ambitious Iberian
attain to fame and fortune, and stand greatly above his countrymen.
"He will become a bullfighter, perhaps!" said Don Jaime.
Every man and boy in Spain is an _aficionado_, a bullfight "fan," a
frantic bullfight "bug." The successful bullfighter, be he matador, or
murderer of bulls, or only a _peon_ of the _cuadrilla_, is given rich
food with which to garnish his belly; he learns how gold feels when it
is minted into money; his photographs are purchased by romantic
_señoritas_; and wherever he goes, he is followed by crowds of tattered
street urchins who studiously and hopefully ape his swagger. The whole
universe salves and butters him with admiration and envy; and he, the
popular _picador_ or the distinguished _espada_, is in many ways more
truly a king of Spain than is Alfonso the King. Jacinto Quesada, he of
the heart of fire and the great gusto, might become a bullfighter.
But suddenly Don Jaime remembered that the little Jacinto was a boy of
the desolate mountains. He could never see the great bullfights of the
cities of the plains, those great bullfights so golden with glamor.
Hence never would be waked in him the ambition to become a bullfighter.
"_Ea pucs!_" said Don Jaime with grimness. "Well, then! There is naught
for my Jacinto to do but to become a _bandolero_!"
The bandolero sells no photographs of himself; he goes houseless in the
wind and rain; he bites upon gold coins but rarely; he is hunted
persistently by the Spanish police. And yet, from day to day, his deeds
have their place in the Hispanic newspapers; he is the hero of a
thousand household stories and ballads; the people give him the fat of
the countryside to eat; the people love him more even than once they
loved that greatest of all bullfighters, the negro Frascuelo!
"Quita!" exclaimed Don Jaime, chuckling. "God forbid!" It had struck him
that he might live to the day when people would say in his hearing:
"Jacinto Quesada? Ah, he is good, he is brave, he is like the very God
Himself. Watch over him in the mountains, Mary, Queen of Angels! and
protect him from the Guardia Civil and from treachery!" And he,
Torreblanca y Moncada, the prophet who, years before, had seen his
vision, would laugh and they would wonder why he laughed.
A bandolero is a Spanish highwayman, a Spanish Dick Turpin, a Spanish
Robin Hood. He is a man of a type altogether extinct in countries less
backward than Spain. In Spain the type has persisted for five hundred
years and still continues to persist. In Spain the type is obstinate,
ineradicable.
José Maria was a Spanish bandolero. Diego Corrientes, he who was loved
by a duchess, was a Spanish bandolero. And Spanish bandoleros were Visco
el Borje, Agua-Dulce, Joaquin Camargo, nicknamed El Vivillo, and
Pernales, the blond beast of prey. The bandolero is the blight of Spain.
But countries that have been exploited by Spaniards are also affected
with the Spanish blight. A bandolero of Mexico is Zapata. And a Mexican
bandolero is Pancho Villa, too.
One wintry gloaming of Jacinto Quesada's thirteenth year, there entered
Minas de la Sierra, a ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, burly man on horseback. He
was clad in weather-worn corduroys; a week's golden stubble was on his
broad, sunburned face; and his body smelled sourly of sweat. He guided
his horse with his knees and heels. In both hands he held half-raised a
Mauser carbine.
The horse halted under the cork-oak, but the man did not dismount. He
sat looking slowly from right to left, from left to right, along the
village street. Presently he shouted:
"Hola, _mis paisanos_! Why do you not come out to greet me?"
With trembling and hesitation they came forth from their doorways. They
were like so many wary brown lizards stealing out from their rocks. They
formed a tongue-tied ring about the quiet horseman and eyed him with
awe.
"I desire food," said he shortly.
"It is our wish to serve you, _maestro_," said Antonio Villarobledo,
speaking for the rest. "You shall have the best of our poor lean
store."
Then spoke up Carlos Machado, a showy and presumptuous man.
"Come to my house with me. I have a stew of lentils!"
"But I have a _puchero_!" another bid. "Come with me, _Gran Caballero_."
Suddenly a woman who had been hiding in her doorway ran out into the
street, crying shrilly:
"Do not listen to these selfish stingy Moors, maestro! Come with me--I
will kill a pullet for you, the last of my lot! Come with me, I beg you,
_caballerete_! To ask you to be my guest, I have the supreme right. My
husband was the last man of the village to be murdered by the Guardia
Civil!"
Carlos Machado and certain others turned wrathful faces toward Juan
Quesada's widow. But she had, indeed, the supreme right, and they dared
make no objection when the corduroy-clad _cabalgador_ said most
heartily:
"Well spoken, woman! I will go with you. Your husband shall not have
been murdered in vain and your pullet lived to no good purpose!"
Then he laughed in the faces of the others and said with sudden
imperiousness:
"Bring your lentils and your puchero to the widow's casa, mis paisanos!
My appetite is the most gorgeous appetite in Spain, and all you have
will not be too much for me. Besides you will do well to fat me up, you
Spaniards!"
He dismounted and followed Jacinto Quesada's mother, giving instructions
to certain of the villagers as to how they should water and fodder his
horse.