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THE ENCHANTED BURRO
[Illustration: THE ENCHANTED BURRO]
THE ENCHANTED BURRO
And Other Stories as I Have Known Them
From Maine to Chile and California
by
CHARLES F. LUMMIS
Author of
Strange Corners of Our Country, A Tramp Across the Continent,
Mexico Today, The Spanish Pioneers of America, My
Friend Will, The Gold Fish of Gran Chimú,
The Land of Poco Tiempo, Pueblo
Indian Folkstories,
etc., etc.
New Edition
With Many New Stories and Illustrations
[Illustration]
Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912
Copyright, 1897, by Way & Williams
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912
Published September, 1912
M. F. Hall Printing Company
Chicago
_To AMADO and AMADO_
The name that stood for such a friend is tall enough for two—
My oldest on the old frontier, my newest on the new.
Nor is it on my heart to pray my baby’s feet be spared
So rugged paths (companioned so) as once his father fared.
Contents
PAGE
THE ENCHANTED BURRO (New Mexico) 1
THE MUMMY-MINER (Peru) 25
A BOY OF THE ANDES (Peru) 43
A DAUGHTER OF THE MISTI (Peru) 65
THE WITCH DEER (New Mexico) 85
FELIPE’S SUGARING-OFF (Peru) 99
ANDRÉS, THE ARRIERO (Bolivia) 111
OUR YELLOW SLAVE 141
THE PEAK OF GOLD (New Mexico) 161
PABLO’S DEER HUNT (New Mexico) 179
CANDELÁRIA’S CURSE (New Mexico) 203
THE HABIT OF THE FRAILE (Peru) 219
THE GREAT MAGICIAN 241
THE SILVER OMELET (Mexico) 257
A DUEL IN THE DESERT (California) 275
A ’RASTLE WITH A WILDCAT (New England) 285
A TAME DEER (California) 299
THE REBEL DOUBLE RUNNER (New England) 315
THE BALSA BOY OF LAKE TITI-CACA (Bolivia) 333
Illustrations
PAGE
THE ENCHANTED BURRO _Frontispiece_
LELO 17
THE HOME OF THE SOROCHE 55
IN TA-BI-RÁ 179
“THE BONES OF TA-BI-RÁ” 186
THE PATIO PROCESS AT GUANAJUATO 257
WILDCAT AND OWL IN DEATH-STRUGGLE 280
Foreword
The Truly Clever know enough to make books of a country by a few days of
Pullman and hotel—or even by skimming the public library at home, without
the bother and expense of travel at all.
But the few Dullards now left can arrive in Knowledge only by plodding;
not “as on wings of eagles” and Inspiration, but by the drudgery of
learning.
It has taken more than twenty-five arduous years to beat into me what
little I hope I know about the Frontiers of the Three Americas. To learn
several new languages and digest innumerable old chronicles was but one
side of the task: everywhere, and among many peoples, I had to win slow
adoption from Stranger to Friend; to travel footsore or saddleweary; to
share their beds, their feasts, their famine, their speech, their ideas,
their pleasures and their hardships—in fact, to live their life. And it
_was_ Life—Human and warm, even at its rudest.
Part of these stories, under this same title, were published in 1897 by
an amateur firm which very presently succumbed—_post hoc_, indeed, but
I trust not _propter_. So the book has been out of print for a dozen
years. It was very gently entreated by critics and public while its young
godfathers lasted.
I now add five stories and 4,000 miles of geography—clear back to my
venerable boyhood. Born and bred a Yankee, I Escaped In Time (at 23),
and have become a much better Indian, New Mexican, Mexican, Peruvian,
Californian and composite _Paisano_ of the Frontier. It may be that other
graduate New Englanders will find here some echo to memory of what they
and I used to think we knew of the Stern and Rockbound, so long ago; and
that the Unremoved will pardon my lapses, in view of my enduring Alibi.
As to anything this side of New England, I won’t “either apologize or
fight.” This part is not remote and precarious memory of the only true
Golden Age—the Age when we Haven’t Any—but the indelible autograph of
thirty older years, scarred and wrinkled upon me inside and out. It can
take care of itself.
Most of these stories, in both instances, are of episodes in which I had
some part. Not all are “True Stories,” but all are truthful. I hope that
makes them no duller than if they had been guessed out of whole cloth and
innocence.
C. F. L.
LOS ANGELES, CAL.
The Enchanted Burro.
The Enchanted Burro.
Lelo dropped the point of his heavy irrigating hoe and stood with chin
dented upon the rude handle, looking intently to the east. Around his
bare ankles the rill from the _acéquia_[1] eddied a moment and then
sucked through the gap in the little ridge of earth which bounded the
irrigating bed. The early sun was yellow as gold upon the crags of the
_mesa_[2]—that league-long front of ragged cliffs whose sandstones,
black-capped by the lava of the immemorial Year of Fire, here wall the
valley of the Rio Grande on the west. Where a spur of the frowning
Kú-mai runs out is a little bay in the cliffs; and here the outermost
fields of Isleta were turning green with spring. The young wheat swayed
and whispered to the water, whose scouts stole about amid the stalks,
and came back and called their fellows forward, and spread hither and
yon, till every green blade was drinking and the tide began to creep
up the low boundaries at either side. Up at the sluice gate a small but
eager stream was tumbling from the big, placid ditch, and on it came
till it struck the tiny dam which closed the furrow just beyond Lelo,
and, turning, stole past him again to join the rest amid the wheat. The
irrigating bed, twenty feet square, filled and filled, and suddenly the
gathered puddle broke down a barrier and came romping into the next
bed without so much as saying “By your leave.” And here it was not so
friendly; for, forgetting that it had come only to bring a drink, it went
stampeding about, knocking down the tender blades and half covering them
with mud. At sound of this, Lelo seemed suddenly to waken, and lifting
with his hoe the few clods which dammed the furrow, he dropped them into
the first gap, and jumping into the second bed repaired its barrier also
with a few strokes. Then he let in a gentler stream from the furrow.
“_Poco_, and I should have lost a bed,” he said to himself,
goodnaturedly. Blas always took things easy, and I presume that is the
reason no one ever called him anything but Lelo[3]—“Slow-poke”—for Indian
boys are as given to nicknames as are any others, and the _mote_ had
stuck to him ever since its invention. He _was_ rather slow—this big,
powerful boy, with a round, heavy chin and a face less clear-cut than was
common in the pueblo. Old ’Lipe had taken to wife a Navajo captive, and
all could see that the boy carried upon his father’s strong frame the
flatter, more stolid features of his mother’s nomad people.
But now the face seemed not quite so heavy; for again he was looking
toward the pueblo and bending his head as one who listens for a far
whisper. There it came again—a faint, faint air which not one of us could
have heard, but to this Indian boy it told of shouts and mingled wails.
“What will be?” cried Lelo, stamping his hoe upon the barrier, and
with unwonted fire in his eyes. “For surely I hear the voice of women
lamenting, and there are men’s shouts as in anger. Something heavy it
will be—and perhaps I am needed.” Splashing up to the ditch, he shut the
gate and threw down his hoe, and a moment later was running toward Isleta
with the long, heavy, tireless stride that was the jest of the other boys
in the rabbit hunt, but left Lelo not so very far behind them after all.
In the pueblo was, indeed, excitement enough. Little knots of the swart
people stood here and there, talking earnestly but low; in the broad,
flat plaza were many hurrying to and fro; and in the street beyond was a
great crowd about a house whence arose the long, wild wails of mourners.
“What is, _tio_ Diego?” asked Lelo, stopping where a number of men stood
in gloomy silence. “What has befallen? For even in the _milpa_[4] I heard
the cries, and came running to see.”
“It is ill,” answered the old man he had addressed as uncle. “It seems
that Those Above are angry with us! For this morning the captain of war
finds himself dead in bed—and _scalped_! And no tracks of man were about
his door.”
“Ay, _all_ is ill!” groaned a short, heavy-set man, in a frayed blanket.
“For yesterday, coming from the _llano_[5] with my burro,[6] I met a
stranger—a _bárbaro_. And, blowing upon Paloma, he bewitched the poor
beast so that it sprang off the trail and was killed at the bottom of the
cliff. It lacked only that! Last month it was the raid of the Cumanche;
and, though we followed and slew many of the robbers and got back
many animals, yet mine were not found, and this was the very last that
remained to me.”
“_Pero_, Don ’Colás!” cried Lelo, “your burro I saw this very morning
as I went to the field before the sun. Paloma it was, with the white
face and the white hind foot—for do I not know him well? He was passing
through the bushes under the cliffs at the point, and turned to look at
me as I crossed the fields below.”
“_Vaya!_” cried Nicolás, angrily. “Did I not see him, with these my eyes,
jump the cliff of two hundred feet yesterday, and with these my hands
feel him at the foot that he was dead? Go, with your stories of a stupid,
for——”
But here the alguazil, who was one of the group, interrupted: “Lelo has
no fool’s eyes, and this thing I shall look into. Since this morning,
many things look suspicious. Come, show me where fell thy burro—for to me
all these doings are cousins one to another.”
Nicolás, with angry confidence, accompanied the broad-shouldered Indian
sheriff, and their companions followed silently. Across the adobe-walled
gardens they trudged, and into the sandy “draw,” whose trail led along
the cliff and up among the jumble of fallen crags at one side.
“Yonder he jumped off,” said ’Colás, “and fell——” But even then he rubbed
his eyes and turned pale. For where he had left the limp, bleeding
carcass of poor Paloma only twenty-four hours before, there was now
nothing to be seen. Only, upon a rock, were a few red blotches.
“What is this!” demanded the alguazil, sternly. “Hast thou hidden him
away? _Claro_ that something fell here—for there is blood and a tuft of
hair upon yon stone. But where is the burro?”
“How should I hide him, since he was dead as the rocks? It is witchcraft,
I tell you—for see! There are no tracks of him going away, even where the
earth is soft. And for the coyotes and wildcats—they would have left his
bones. The Gentile I met—_he_ is the witch. First he gave the evil eye to
my poor beast, that it killed itself; and now he has flown away in its
shape to do other ills.”
“It can be so,” mused the sheriff, gravely; “but in the meantime there
is no remedy—I have to answer to the Fathers of Medicine for you who
bring such stories of dead burros, but cannot show them. For, I tell you,
this has something to say for the deed that was done in the pueblo this
morning. _Al calaboz!_”
Half an hour later, poor Nicolás was squatted disconsolately upon the
bare floor of the adobe jail—that simple prison from which no one of
the simple prisoners ever thinks to dig out. It is not so much the clay
wall that holds them, as the authority of law, which no Pueblo ever yet
questioned.
“’Colás’s burro” was soon in every mouth. The strange story of its death
and its reappearance to Lelo were not to be mocked at. So it used to
be, that the animals were as people; and every one knew that there were
witches still who took the forms of brutes and flew by night to work
mischief. Perhaps it was some wizard of the Cumanche who thus, by the
aid of the evil ones, was avenging the long-haired horse-thieves who had
fallen at Tajique.[7] And now Pascual, returning from a ranch across
the river, made known that, sitting upon his roof all night to think of
the year, he had been aware of a burro that passed down the street even
to the house of the war captain; after which he had noticed it no more.
Clearly, then!
Some even thought that Lelo should be imprisoned, since he had seen the
burro in the morning. And when, searching anew, they found in a splinter
of the captain’s door a long, coarse, gray hair, every man looked about
him suspiciously. But there was no other clew—save that Francisco, the
cleverest of hunters, called the officials to a little corner of the
street, where the people had not crowded, and pointed to some dim marks
in the sand.
“_Que importa?_” said the gray haired governor, shrugging his shoulders,
as he leaned on his staff of office and looked closely. “In Isleta there
are two thousand burros, and their paths are everywhere.”
“But see!” persisted the trailer. “Are they like this? For this brute was
lame in all the legs, so that his feet fell over to the inside a little,
instead of coming flatly down. It will be the Enchanted Burro!”
“_Ahu!_” cried Lelo, who stood by. “And this morning when I passed the
burro of Don ’Colás in the bushes, I saw that it was laming along as if
its legs were stiff.”
By now no one doubted that there was witchcraft afoot, and the officials
whose place it is were taking active measures to preserve the pueblo.
The cacique sat in his closed house fasting and praying, with ashes upon
his head. The Cum-pa-huit-la-wen were running here and there with their
sacred bows and arrows, prying into every corner, if haply they might
find a witch. In the house of mourning the Shamans were blinding the
eyes of the ghosts, that none might follow the trail of the dead captain
and do him harm before he should reach the safe other world. And in the
medicine house the Father of All Medicine was blowing the slow smoke
across the sacred bowl, to read in that magic mirror the secrets of the
whole world.
But in spite of everything, a curse seemed to have fallen upon the
peaceful town. Lucero, the third assistant war captain, did not return
with his flock, and when searchers went to the _llano_, they found him
lying by a chapparo bush dead, and his sheep gone. But worst of all, he
was scalped, and all the wisdom of that cunning head had been carried
away to enrich the mysterious foe—for the soul and talents of an Indian
go with his hair, according to Indian belief. And in a day or two came
running Antonio Peralta to the pueblo, gray as the dead and without his
blanket. Herding his father’s horses back of the Accursed Hill, he sat
upon a block of lava to watch them. As they grazed, a lame burro came
around the hill grazing toward them. And when it was among them, they
suddenly raised their heads in fear and snorted and turned to run;
but the burro, rising like a mountain lion, sprang upon one of them
and fastened on its neck, and all the herd stampeded to the west, the
accursed burro still perched upon its victim and tearing it. Ay! a gray
burro, _jovero_,[8] and with a white foot behind. Antonio had his musket,
but he dared not fire after this witch beast. And here were twelve more
good horses gone of what the Cumanche robbers had left.
By now the whole pueblo was wrought to the highest tension. That
frightful doubt which seizes a people oppressed by supernatural fears
brooded everywhere. No man but was sure that the man he hated was mixed
up in the witchcraft; no man who was disliked by any one but felt the
finger of suspicion pointing at him. People grew dumb and moody, and
looked at each other from the corner of the eye as they passed without
even a kindly “_Hina-kú-p’wiu_, neighbor.” As for work, that was almost
forgotten, though the fields cried out for care. No one dared take a
flock to the _llano_, and few went even to their gardens. There were
medicine makings every night to exorcise the evil spirits, and the
Shamans worked wonders, and the medicine guards prowled high and low for
witches. The cacique sat always in his house, seeing no one, nor eating,
but torturing his flesh for the safety of his people.
And still there was no salvation. Not a night went by but some new
outrage befell. Now it was a swooping away of herds, now some man of the
wisest and bravest was slain and scalped in his bed. And always there
were no more tracks than those of a burro, stiff-kneed, whose hoofs did
not strike squarely upon the ground. Many, also, caught glimpses of the
Enchanted Burro as they peered at midnight from their dark windows.
Sometimes he plodded mournfully along the uncertain streets, as burros
do; but some vowed that he came down suddenly from the sky, as alighting
from a long flight. Without a doubt, old Melo had seen the brute walk up
the ladder of Ambrósio’s house the very night Ambrósio was found dead in
the little lookout room upon his own roof. And a burro which could climb
a ladder could certainly fly.
On the fourth day Lelo could stand it no longer. “I am going to the
field,” he said, “before the wheat dies. For it is as well to be eaten
by the witches now as that we should starve to death next winter, when
there will be nothing to eat.”
“What folly is this?” cried the neighbors. “Does Lelo think he is
stronger than the ghosts? Let him stay behind those who are more men.”
But Lelo had another trait, quite as marked as his slowness and good
nature. When his deliberate mind was made up there was no turning him;
and, though he was as terrified as anyone by the awful happenings of the
week, he had decided to attend to his field. So he only answered the
taunts with a stolid, respectful: “No, I do not put myself against the
ghosts. But perhaps they will let me alone, knowing that my mother has
now no one else to feed her.”
The flat-faced mother brought him two _tortillas_[9] for lunch; and
putting her hands upon his shoulders, looked at him a moment from wet
eyes, saying not a word. And slinging over his shoulder the bow-case and
quiver, Lelo trudged away.
He plodded along the crooked meadow road, white-patched here and there
with crystals of alkali; jumped the main irrigating ditch with a great
bound, and took “across lots” over the adobe fences and through the
vineyards and the orchards of apple, peach and apricot.
In the farther edge of the last orchard stood a tiny adobe house, where
old Reyes had lived in the summer-time to guard her ripening fruits.
Since her death it had been abandoned, with the garden, and next summer
the Indian congress could allot it to any one who asked, since it would
have been left untilled for five years. The house was half hidden from
sight—overshadowed on one side by ancient pear trees and on the other by
the black cliffs of an advance guard of the lava flow.
As he passed the ruined hut Lelo suddenly stooped and began looking
anxiously at a footprint in the soft earth. “That was from no moccasin
of the Tee-wahn,” he muttered to himself, “for the sole is flatter than
ours. And it comes out of the house, where no one ever goes, now that
Grandmother Reyes is dead. But _this_! For in three steps it is no more
the foot of a man, but of a beast—going even to the bushes where I saw
the Enchanted Burro that morning”—and all of a tremble, Lelo leaned
up against the wall of the house. It was all he could do to keep from
turning and bolting for home—and you need not laugh at him. The bow-case
at his side was from the tawny mountain lion Lelo had slain with his
own hands in the cañons of the Tetilla; and when Refúgio, the youngest
medicine-man, fell wounded in the fore-front of the fight at Tajique,
it was Lelo who had lumbered forward and brought him away in his arms,
saving his life and hair from the Cumanche knife. But it takes a braver
man to stand against his own superstitions than to face wild beast
or wilder savage; and now, though Lelo did not flee, his knees smote
together and the blood seemed to have left his head dry and over-light.
He sat down, so weak was he; and, with back against the wall, he tried to
gather his scattered thoughts.
At that very moment, if Lelo had turned his head a very little more to
the left and looked at one particular rift in the thorny greasewoods
that choked the foot of the cliff, he might have seen two dark, hungry
eyes fixed upon him; but Lelo was not looking that way so much as to the
corner of the cliff. There he would have to pass to the field; and it was
just around that corner that he had seen the Enchanted Burro. “And there
also I have seen the mouth of a cave, where they say the ogres used to
live and where no one dares to enter”—and he shivered again, like one
half frozen. Then he did look back to the left, but saw nothing, for
the eyes were no longer there. Only, a few rods farther to the left, and
where Lelo could not see for the wall at his back, the tall, white ears
of a burro were moving quietly along in the bushes, which hid the rest of
its body. Now and then the animal stopped and cocked up its ears, as if
to listen; and its eyes rose over the bush, shining with a deep, strange
light. Just beyond was the low adobe wall which separated Reyes’s garden
from the next—running from the foot of the cliff down past the old house.
To go on to the field needed even more courage than to keep from fleeing
for home; and stubborn as he was, Lelo was trying to muster up legs and
heart to proceed. He even rose to his feet and drew back his elbows
fiercely, straining the muscles of his chest, where there seemed to be
such a weight. Just around the corner of the house, at that same moment,
a burro’s head, with white ears and a blazed face, rose noiselessly above
the adobe fence, and seeing nothing, a pair of black hoofs came up, and
in a swift bound the animal was over the wall—so lightly that even the
sharp Indian ears not fifteen feet away heard nothing of it.
But if Lelo did not notice, a sharper watcher did. “_Kay-eé-w’yoo!_”
cried a complaining voice, and a brown bird with broad wings and a big,
round head went fluttering from its perch on the roof. Lelo started
violently, and then smiled at himself. “It is only _tecolóte_,” he
muttered, “the little owl that lives with the _túsas_,[10] and they say
he is very wise. To see where he went.”
The boy stole around the corner of the house, but the owl was nowhere to
be seen, and he started back.
As he turned the angle again, he caught sight of a burro’s head just
peeping from around the other corner; and Lelo felt the blood sinking
from his face. The beast gave a little start and then dropped its head to
a bunch of alfalfa that was green at the corner. But this did not relieve
Lelo’s terror. It was Paloma—dead Paloma—now the Witch Burro. There was
no mistaking that _jovero_ face. And plain it was, too, that this was no
longer burro-true, but one of the accursed spirits in burro shape. Those
eyes! They seemed, in that swift flash in which they had met Lelo’s, to
be sunk far, far into the skull; and he was sure that deep in them he saw
a dull gleam of red. And the ears and head—they were touched with death,
too! Their skin seemed hard and ridgy as a rawhide, instead of fitting as
the skin does in life. So, also, was the neck; but no more was to be seen
for the angle of the wall.
[Illustration: LELO]
There are men who die at seventy without having lived so long or suffered
so much as Lelo lived and suffered in those few seconds. His breath
refused to come, and his muscles seemed paralyzed. This, then, was the
Enchanted Burro—the witch that had slain the captain of war, and his
lieutenants, and many more. And now he was come for Lelo—for though he
nosed the alfalfa, one grim eye was always on the boy. So, no doubt, he
had watched his other victims—but from _behind_, for not one of them had
ever moved. And with that thought a sudden rush of blood came pricking
like needles in Lelo’s head.
“No one of them saw him, else they had surely fought! And shall I give
myself to him like a sheep? Not if he were _ten_ witches!” And with the
one swift motion of all his life, the lad dropped on one knee, even as
hand and hand clapped notch to bowstring, and, in a mighty tug, drew the
arrow to the head.
Lightning-like as was his move, the burro understood, and hastily reared
back—but a hair too late. The agate-tipped shaft struck midway of its
neck with a loud tap as upon a drum, and bored through and through till
the feathers touched the skin. The animal sprang high in air, with so
wild and hideous a scream as never came from burro’s throat before, and
fell back amid the alfalfa, floundering and pawing at its neck.
But Lelo had waited for no more. Already he was over the wall and running
like a scared mustang, the bow gripped in his left hand, his right
clutching the bow-case, whose tawny tail leaped and fluttered behind
him. One-Eyed Quico could have made it to the pueblo no faster than the
town slow-poke, who burst into the plaza and the porch of the governor’s
house, gasping:
“The Enchanted Burro! I have—killed—him!”
Fifteen minutes later the new war captain, the medicine men, the
governor, and half the rest of the men of the pueblo were entering
Reyes’s garden, and Lelo was allowed to walk with the _principales_. All
were very grave, and some a little pale—for it was no laughing matter
to meddle with the fiend, even after he was dead. There lay the burro,
motionless. No pool of blood was around; but the white feathers of the
arrow had turned red. Cautiously they approached till suddenly Francisco,
the sharpest eyed of trailers, dashed forward and caught up the two hind
legs from amid the alfalfa, crying:
“Said I not that he tipped the hoofs? With reason!”
For from each ankle five dark, naked toes projected through a slit in the
hide.
“Ay, well bewitched!” exclaimed the war captain. “Pull me the other
side!” And at their tug the belly of the burro parted lengthwise, showing
only a stiff, dried skin, and inside the cavity a swart body stripped to
the breech-clout. Alongside lay arrows and a strong bow of buffalo horn,
with a light copper hatchet and a keen scalping knife.
“_Sácalo!_” ordered the war captain; but it was easier said than done.
They bent the stubborn rawhide well apart; but not until one had run his
knife up the neck of the skin and cut both ends of Lelo’s arrow could
they haul out the masquerader. The shaft had passed through his throat
from side to side, pinning it to the rawhide, and there he had died.
When the slippery form was at last dragged forth, and they saw its face,
there was a startled murmur through the crowd; for even without the long
scalp lock and the vermilion face-paint, there were many there who would
have known the Cumanche medicine man, whose brother was the chief that
fell at Tajique. He, too, had been taken prisoner, and had taunted his
captors and promised to pay them, and in the night had escaped, leaving
one sentinel dead and another wounded.
The Enchanted Burro was all very plain now. The plains conjurer, knowing
well by habit how to play on superstitious fears, had used poor Paloma
as the instrument of his revenge—hiding the carcass and drying the skin
quickly on a frame with hot ashes, so that it stood perfectly in shape
by itself. The bones of the fore legs he had left in, to be managed with
his hands; and in the dark or amid grass, no one would have noticed the
peculiarity of the hind legs. He had only to pry open the slit in the
belly and crawl in, and the stiff hide closed after him. Thus he had
wreaked the vengeance for which, uncompanioned, he had followed the
Pueblos back to their village. In the cave behind the greasewoods were
the scalps of his victims, drying on little willow hoops; but instead of
going to deck a Cumanche lodge in the great plains, they were tenderly
buried in the old church-yard, restored to their proper owners.
After all these years there still are in the pueblo many tales of the
Enchanted Burro, nothing lost by the re-telling. As for the skin itself,
it lies moth-eaten in the dark storeroom of the man who has been first
assistant war captain for twenty years, beginning his novitiate the very
day he finished a witch and a Cumanche with a single arrow.
The Mummy Miner.
The Mummy Miner.
There was certainly nothing suggestive of antiquity about Faquito’s
appearance. His droll, brown face, his thickset boyish figure and the
alarming tatters of his scant apparel were all undignified as his
name—which had got to the most disrespectful distance possible from the
stately Francisco of the baptismal font. There could be no worthier name
for a boy of Peru than that worn by the great _conquistador_ Pizarro. But
it is hard to live up to the dignity of the christening, and Francisco
degenerates into Francisquito, which is fond; and then to Franco, which
is familiar; and finally to Faquito, which is positively rude. Probably
it never occurred to the lad to be comforted with thinking that the
greatest conqueror of the Americas was called Faquito, too, when he was
herding his pigs in Truxillo; and that if one Faquo could grow up to be
Don Francisco, so might another. These consolations of philosophy never
do come to us until we are too old to need them so much.
But perhaps you are thinking: “Well, why _should_ a twelve-year-old
_cholo_ boy look antiquated? Are lads of that age in Peru expected to be
ancient, any more than in New York or Boston?”
N-no, not exactly that—though in the quick tropics a boy _is_ older at
twelve than is one of the same years in the temperate zone; bigger and
more mature. But it was Faquito’s occupation rather than his age which
made me think of him as rather paradoxical. You will admit that to find
this irresponsible, twinkling face set in one of the most century-worn
frames on earth might well seem incongruous, not to say startling. The
sight of this half Spanish, half Indian[11] boy of to-day, playing with
lives and thoughts that were forgotten five hundred years ago—aye, and
some of them, perhaps, that long before the Old World dreamed there was a
New—was enough to make any explorer rub his eyes.
Doubtless we shall understand each other better by a little translation.
_Huaco_ is a word not found in the Spanish dictionaries, for it belongs
only to Peru. It is from the Quichua, or speech of the Incas, of whom
you have heard so many remarkable (and not very accurate) stories;
and as adopted into the Spanish of Peru means specifically a relic of
the ancient Indian “civilizations” which occupied this strange land
before the coming of Europeans. _Huaquero_ is the Spanish derivative
to mean a digger of these antiquities—in other words, a _mummy miner_.
This is a regular profession in Peru, just as much as gold mining. A
competent huaquero commands as good wages as a skilled laborer in the
marvelous silver mountain of Cerro de Pasco; and, if he works “on his
own hook,” _may_ earn much more. Peru is dotted everywhere with the
ruins of large towns of the Incas and other tribes—some of them that we
have so long been taught to regard as “kings” and the like, while in
fact they were tribes very much like the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico;
remarkably advanced in some things, but still entirely Indians socially,
politically and mentally. Some of these ruins have been deserted for
uncounted centuries, and no man can say who built them nor when they were
abandoned. In fact, Peru is the American Egypt in antiquity; and a more
than Egypt in richness. It was in its time the richest country in the
world. Even before Europeans came to tap its peaks of silver and valleys
of gold, the ancient Peruvians had discovered a way to treat the precious
metals, and used them to adorn themselves and their temples. Like the
Indians they were, they had the invariable Indian idea of the next world;
and always buried with their dead the best clothing and other property,
to give the wanderer a handsome start beyond the grave—precisely as our
aborigines do still. And as the dryness of the Peruvian desert preserves
mummies indefinitely through the ages, you will begin to see how mummy
mining has become one of the important industries of Peru. There are
mummies everywhere; and each mummy has still what was its wealth in life.
The gold and silver trinkets, the exquisite cloths and potteries of these
strange folk of old, and all the other relics of their handiwork, fetch
high prices from museums and collectors.
So that was Faquo’s business—and a very hard and unpleasant business it
is. _Taita_[12] Pedro should have provided for his family; but _taita_
Pedro much preferred to lie around the great sugar plantation in the next
valley beyond the arm of desert, and keep his swarthy hide full of the
cheap rum which is the last and worst gift of the sugar cane. He never
came home to the little cabin at Lurin—a hut of _quincha_, or wattled
bamboos plastered with adobe—except to get money. Poor, fat Maria would
have had a very rough time caring for her fat brood, if it had not been
for Faquito. She worked in the cane fields of the nearer hacienda, and
washed for the priest; but the few _reales_ she could earn would not have
been enough to put a cotton shirt on half the backs she was responsible
for, after feeding all the mouths. Mariquita was a perfect little woman
for ten years old; but she could only attend to the babies—which was
indeed contract enough for a much older nurse. So it had been a great
relief when Faquo got big enough to be a producer—with the equal good
fortune that the sandy headland only two miles away was crowned by the
mighty ruins of Pachacámac.
Every day, except Sundays and _fiestas_, Faquito was early trudging
the dusty road to the ruins, his spade over his shoulder, his fat face
screwed up sometimes to whistle a doleful yaraví (the only air he knew),
or as often equally twisted with munching sugar cane. It was very
convenient to have one’s candy growing by the roadside—particularly as
there were no stores. All a boy had to do was to clamber over the adobe
wall, cut a stalk of the _caña dulce_ from amid its dense bristle of
sword leaves, and clamber back to chew upon this pithy molasses candy
at leisure. There was generally a culm in Faquito’s hand as he trudged
across; and when he got tired of chewing the obstinate fiber, he would
rest his jaws with whistling.
When he had crossed the flat, and waded the shallow brook of Lurin, there
was a great scramble up the precipitous bluff which is the jumping-off
place of the desert; and even Faquo was always puffing hard by the time
he came to the top. An ancient wall was there; and under the long,
morning shadow of this he used to sit down a moment—partly for a bit of
a rest, and partly because he liked to gaze upon that strange vista in
the hot, level light. Behind was the lovely valley, dense green with
tropic cane-fields and bananas and palms; but in front was the great,
gray desert, unspotted by one living blade. On the rolling sand hills
close before him was a wild, mysterious huddle of mighty walls, tall
and broken and gray in the sunlight, with black shadows lurking in
their angles—walls and walls in a bewildering labyrinth. At his left
was the huge castle on its tall headland, boxed about with tier after
tier of walls thirty feet high; and in front of him the central hill,
crowned with an enormous building. In a hollow at the foot of the castle,
fifty acres were thick-dotted with dark, irregular holes, around which
thousands of white specks gleamed in the sun. Momently, too, little puffs
of dust flew up here and there. Castro and Juan and Pancho, the grown-up
huaqueros from Lima, were already at work down there amid the bleaching
skulls, each at the bottom of his dusty shaft, hoping at any moment to
find a rich tomb—perhaps even the “Big Fish” of Peruvian folk lore. That
is what Faquito was dreaming about, too. How many times he had heard of
the hundreds of man-loads of gold that the Yuncas buried in Pachacámac
when Hernando Pizarro came pricking down from the mountains, every horse
of his cavalcade shod with silver!
If he could only find the _Pez Grande_! Or even the tail of it! He got up
from under the wall with a sigh and started down the dusty trail toward
where the men were at work. His “mine” was there too—where he had dug a
week without finding any but the poorest graves.
Just then an owl—the little brown owl of the desert—flew up almost at his
very feet and alighted upon a wall a few rods away. How Mariquita would
like it for a pet! Faquo crept up behind the wall; but just as he was
about to clap his hat over the bird it fluttered off a few rods farther.
It was so stupid with the sun that Faquo felt sure he would get it this
time, and again he crept up. But stupid as the owl was, it was just too
smart for Faquo. A dozen times it was almost in his hands; but a dozen
times, too, it fluttered away again—until it had led him up the central
hill, through the great ruined building there, and down the other side.
At the foot of an adobe wall sixty feet high it settled upon the edge
of some deep-sunken rooms. Faquo scrambled down a gap and stole out
along the parapet; and suddenly reaching up from this shelter caught the
astonished bird by the wing. But he had forgotten the beak and claws,
which the very field-mice know. As they hooked savagely into his brown
fist he drew back sharply—and just too far. The ledge was very narrow;
and overbalanced by his recoil, he fell sprawling twenty feet into the
great cell below.
Luckily there was at the bottom nothing harder than the universal
in-blown sand; and though sadly shaken up by the fall Faquo was not
seriously hurt. For a few moments he lay there half stunned; then slowly
gathered himself up and looked about in a dazed way.
The owl was still in his hand—less by his grasp than by the obstinate
clenching of its own curved claws, which now began to hurt again. He
unhooked them painfully, one by one, tore a tatter from his shirt and
tied it about those mischievous feet. A rather stubborn boy, Faquo. It
was very hard to turn his attention from anything upon which he had once
started, until it was finished.
At last, when his prize was safely anchored to a clod of adobe, he was
free to think of more important matters. _Pues!_ He had walked into a bad
trap. There were no doors nor windows down here—clearly the ancients had
descended into these cellar-like rooms by ladders, which had long ago
disappeared. And how was he to get up that twenty feet? In this adobe he
could cut steps to the top; or even, in time, burrow through the base of
that eight-foot wall—but his spade stood away up there on the ledge,
leaning against the parapet where he had left it.
“Castro! Cas-tro-o!” he screamed at the top of his lungs—but it seemed
that his voice did not rise at all out of the sunken chamber. How buried
and pent it was! He shouted until he was hoarse; but knew as well that
the huaqueros did not hear him, as if he could have seen them still
digging stolidly away, far down the other side of the hill.
The place grew terrible to him. In such a maze of ruins they might not
find him until too late. Maria would come to look, surely, if he were not
home by dark; but how could she expect to find him so far from where he
always worked?
He knew well, this boy of the edge of the desert, that one does not last
long on such a gridiron of the tropics. Without food one may do for
several days; but without water, under that sun——! Already his mouth was
parched.
And that _maldito_ owl—that was to blame for it all! He started up
angrily with a clod of adobe to throw at it. But his arm dropped
suddenly. “No! _Nana_ says always that the birds, too, are children of
_Taita Diós_, and that He loves best those who are good to them. So
perhaps I am punished for catching it. _Pobrecito!_ For now we both are
caught.”
The owl did not seem to mind so much. It sat bunched upon its tethered
feet, blinking back at Faquo. It looked so very grave, so very wise!
_Quiza_ it knew very much about the ruins; for here it had lived, and its
people, very long now. Perhaps it even knew where was the Big Fish!
Even as Faquo looked at it with these thoughts, the owl turned its head
down on one side, and looked at him soberly along its shoulder. Some
might have laughed at this proceeding, but not so Faquito. He was too
good an Indian to despise the wisdom of them that talk not; and suddenly
he asked with great earnestness: “In truth that thou dost know, friend
owl! No?”
At this direct question the owl turned its head down upon the other
shoulder, and looked wiser than ever. Surely, he knew!
“But where?” cried the boy. “Tell me, owl friend!”
But the bird said not a word. Only it gazed at Faquo very seriously; and
then, turning its head as upon a pivot, began to spruce up the feathers
upon its back, as much as to say: “Oh, that you must find out for
yourself, as I did.”
Such a wise bird, but so unspoken! Really, how convenient it must be to
be able to turn one’s head square around that way, and look straight
back! It must be that he can even see that spot on the wall just behind
him and above his head—that round place where the adobe is yellower than
the rest. Probably the plaster was broken there, and they patched it.
Faquo got up idly, and set the owl carefully to one side, and passed his
hand over the spot. It was somewhat larger than his head—just a round
patch of adobe plaster, centuries old, yet evidently newer than the rest
of the wall.
He picked aimlessly at its edge. A pebble came out under his fingers, and
showed, behind, a small crevice—as if a deep hole had been filled up,
instead of a little break in the wall plaster. Instantly the boy’s eyes
waked up, and a queer, professional look settled upon his face.
“It will be a wall niche,” he said gravely. “And sometimes they filled
them up to change the wall; but why did the owl sit by this one, if that
was all?”
He pried and pulled until his fingers were sore, and pounded with
his fist upon the yellow patch; but the adobe was very stubborn. How
aggravating to have the spade perched away up there, when he wanted to
open this niche! For by now he had quite forgotten about getting out of
his prison. The strange fascination that all miners know was upon him.
Plague take the spade! He picked up again the strong lump of adobe which
had fallen with him from the upper wall, and flung it at the offending
spade. It struck the sandy shelf, and a little stream of sand fell down
with the missile. That gave him a thought; and he picked up his clod and
threw it again and again and again.
Each time it fell back a little smaller, but each time a little more sand
sifted down. Then the sand, thus started, began frittering down of its
own accord, and the undermined shovel began to creep, stopped, slid a
little, and at last pitched down and fell at Faquo’s feet.
He jabbed at the adobe with the corner of his spade, and the hard lumps
showered down upon his bare toes. In a few moments a smooth-rimmed
opening was revealed, and he thrust in his arm.
It was not like any of the niches he knew—the ones that have never
been closed, but remain as they were 500 years ago, when the people of
Pachacámac kept on these odd shelves their ornaments and trinkets. This
one was like a nest of the “God-give-you” bird—with a small opening, but
large inside. In the big hollow was something soft; and Faquo drew out
his hand full of beautiful yellow floss.
“The wool of the vicuña, only,” he mumbled, disappointedly, but with the
expert’s air. “But why should they ceil _that_ up? Perhaps there is also
cloth.”
In went the brown fist again; and rummaging down through the silken
fleece, his fingers met something firmer. In a moment he had it out—a
long bundle of that matchless weaving of old Peru; of cloth as soft and
strong as silk, woven with strange figures of men and gods and beasts;
such fabrics as never unthinking loom has woven, nor any machine less
wondrous than the fingers of a man.
“Ay! It will be worth twenty _soles_!” cried Faquo softly. “But it is so
heavy! Perhaps they have wound it on a stone.”
Very tenderly he unrolled it, that none of those bright threads—stronger
than all the centuries, but brittle to a careless touch—might be broken.
But when the last fold came off, this very stupid Indian boy fell down on
his knees in the sand, and cried and cried. For it was not a stone at all.
* * * * *
If you will go to the _Exposicion_ in Lima, among the bewildering
collections of Peruvian antiquities, you can see two priceless idols,
each big as a large doll. They are like human figures, excellently
sculptured; and the strangest thing about them is that they are made of
alternate zones of gold and silver from feet to head, so that they remind
one of that great image we read of in Revelations.
That is the nearest Faquito ever came to finding the _Pez Grande_—and
quite near enough for one poor boy. And that is what took my breath away
when I had wakened and hauled up with my reata the little, ragged cholo I
accidentally spied in the trap where he had cried himself to sleep over
something hugged in his arms.
When he had laid the precious images and the spade on the broad top of
the wall, and told me all about it, he insisted on being lowered again on
the rope to get the owl, which he loosed and let go, saying, in the tone
of an old man:
“_Taita Diós_—God our Father—sends us friends we know not. For the owl
brought me here and showed me the place, so that now we are very rich.
And even so, I could have died there without the help of you. So I think
your grace may be even as wise as the owl, which knows where is the _Pez
Grande_.”
A Boy of the Andes.
A Boy of the Andes.
Probably they would not have seen Ramon Ynga at all, but for the llamas.
There was enough else to look at. The overpowering walls of the mountains
on both sides seemed to turn the eyes, even as they turned the foaming
Rimac, into a channel from which there was no escape. Up at the end of
the cleft was such a sight as no man can long hold his eyes from—the
black peak of Chin-chán, bent down with its load of eternal winter.
There is something awful about the snow that never melts—the great blank
fields, the wrinkled glaciers, the savage ice cornices, the black rocks
that peer out hopelessly here and there. It is so different from the
friendly white we know and welcome for its sleigh rides and coastings,
its snow men and snow-ballings.
It was far up the summit of the Peruvian cordillera, at the very foot of
the last wild peaks that stand 18,000 feet in the sky. Where the panting
mules trudged, 3,000 feet below the peaks, was low, green herbage; and
500 feet lower yet the little torrent, white as its mother snows, roared
and chuckled alternately to the uneven wind. But up yonder all was so
white and still; their eyes kept lifting up to it, forgetful of the
dangerous trail—the mules could take care of that. They, poor brutes,
seemed ill at ease. They breathed in short, loud gasps; and every forty
feet or so they stopped and rested for a few moments, unmindful of the
spur. Then, when they were ready, they started up again of their own
accord, sighing heavily. They would not last much longer, at this rate.
“I think I’ll get off and walk awhile,” said the younger of the two, a
bronzed, sinewy man of twenty-five. “It spoils even this scenery for me,
to see the suffering of the mules. One wouldn’t think they’d play out so,
on such a good trail.”
“It is not the grade,” remarked the Professor, quietly, “as perhaps you
will learn. _I_ am sorry for the mules, too; but it is better to risk
them than something more important.”
“Why, you speak as though there were some danger about it!” said the
younger man, who was now striding sturdily along, leaving his animal to
follow. Many a time he had climbed Pike’s Peak and its brother giants
of Colorado, and once had stood on the cone of Popocatépetl. A peak was
nothing to him; and as for this excellent path—pooh! It was mere child’s
play.
The Professor watched him without a word, but with an expression half
quizzical, half grave. After a hundred yards he spoke:
“You don’t seem quite so springy, Barton. I never saw _you_ heavy-footed
before.”
“Well, the truth is, Professor,” gasped Barton, rather shamefacedly, “I
feel most remarkably queer. My knees ache as they never did before—though
I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I cannot seem to breathe well. Here
my heart and lungs are pounding away, as if I’d been sprinting for the
220-yard record! It’s enough to make a man ashamed of himself.”
“No cause at all for shame, my dear boy; you are simply learning what
everyone has to learn who tempts great altitudes. Now get on your mule.”
“No, I’ll wear this thing off!” cried the athlete, impatiently. “I’m no
puny boy, to give up just because I feel a little wrong. I’ll just keep
at it, and beat it yet!”