many months I pursued the trail of every buck deer, killing many. And at
last, shooting from ambush one that passed me unsuspecting, I found in
the first fork of its horns a stone like this, but not the half of it in
size. This I proved in many ways, and clear it was that now my luck had
changed.
“Being satisfied of this, then, I loaded my rifle with great pains, and
went one evening in search of the Venado Encantado. Coming to the mesa
by night, I camped among the rocks, without a fire, and in the morning,
before the sun, climbed up without a little noise. In my pouch was the
stone, and my rifle was well ready. When I came through the cleft at
the top, there stood the deer, looking straight at me, not twenty yards
distant, and I threw my rifle to my shoulder, giving myself up for lost.
But he moved not, and watching him, I perceived that he did not see me at
all—the which is proof that the stone makes one to be invisible. At this
I took heart, and with a true aim on his throat, fired. He leaped _thus_
high in the air and fell dead; and coming to him, I found that the ball
had broken his neck.
“His meat I did not touch, for besides being accursed, he had killed my
Luís, whose bones I brought away to Christian ground in Abiquiu. But in
the first fork of the horns, which were taller than my head, I found this
stone which you see. Since I have that, I kill whatsoever deer with ease,
because they cannot see me. What think you, then?”
We sat for a few moments silent, watching the flames that licked and
twisted about the cedar sticks in the fireplace. Anastácio was voiceless,
with an awe too strong even for his boyish excitement; and as for me, the
story of Luís’s death had brought back some vivid and uncanny memories.
But Don José, who really cared enough for me to wish to lead me out of
the darkness of error, followed the matter up.
“Do you not see, Don Carlos, that there _are_ Witch Deer? For look at his
fierceness, and that he could not be hurt until I had a charm-stone like
his own. And you know that I tell you truth.”
“Yes, old fellow, I know you tell me the truth as you see it. But it is
nothing strange for a buck to be _bravo_ in the fall—_that_ I myself
have suffered by. And I fancy you _could_ have killed him before, if you
had not felt so sure that you couldn’t.” Then I was rather ashamed to
have said even so much, and as gently as it could be said, for I do not
admire the always-superior person. But the old man understood, and was
not offended; only he shook his head with real sadness, and said:
“Ah, that way was Luís. God keep you from being taught as he was!”
Felipe’s Sugaring-off.
Felipe’s Sugaring-off.
The great water-wheel was trundling as fast as ever the white impulse
from the old stone aqueduct could kick it along. The wheel, indeed,
grumbled at so much hard work; but the water only laughed and danced as
the big iron jaws of the _trapiche_[24] chewed up the yellow culms of
sugar cane and spat to one side the useless pith, while the sweet, dark
sap crept sluggishly down the iron conduit toward the sugar-house. In
front was a very mountain of cane brought from the fields by bullock
carts; and half a dozen sinewy negroes were feeding it, an armful at a
time, between the rolls of the mill. Behind it others with wooden forks
were spreading the crushed cane to dry for a day, after which it would
be used as fuel to boil its own plundered juice. Off beyond the sugar
building gleamed the white Moorish walls of the tile-roofed chapel and
manor house, built three hundred years ago, when Peru was the richest
crown jewel of Spain. Everywhere else stretched the great fields of
cane—to the very foot of the sandhills of the encroaching desert, to the
very rim of the blue Pacific. What an immensity of sugar it all meant!
The same thought struck the grizzled _administrador_[25] this morning as
he stood on a pier of the aqueduct—just where its stream pounced upon
the lazy wheel—and swept the scene with those watchful old eyes. “Of a
truth,” he was saying to himself, “the world must be very large, as they
say, and many must eat nothing else, for here we make every day forty
thousand pounds of sugar, three hundred days of the year, and there are
many other sugar haciendas in Peru, though maybe none so big as Villa.
Truly, I know not where it all goes. _Hola!_ Always that fellow!” and,
springing to the ground as lightly as a boy, in two bounds he was at the
mill.
There four of the negro laborers were in sudden struggle with a newcomer
from the quarters—a huge black fellow, whose brutish face was now
distorted by drunken rage. He was naked to the waist, and his dark hide
bulged with tremendous muscles, as he swayed his four grapplers to and
fro, trying to free his right hand, which clasped a heavy _machete_.
This murderous combination of sword and cleaver, which lopped the
stubborn cane at a blow, had found worse employment now, for a red stain
ran down its broad blade, and on the ground lay a man clenching a stump
of arm. Old Melito paused for no questions, but, plucking up a heavy bar
of _algarroba_, smote so strongly upon the desperado’s woolly pate that
the ironwood broke. The black giant reeled and fell, and one of the men
wrenched away the _machete_ and flung it into the pool below the wheel.
“He came very drunk, and only because Roque brushed against him with an
armful of cane he wanted to kill him,” said the men as they knotted their
grimy handkerchiefs upon the wrists and ankles of the stunned black.
“You did well to hold him,” replied the _admimistrador_. “Bring now the
irons and we will put him in the _calaboz_ till to-morrow. Then he shall
go to Lima to the prison, for we can have no fighting here, nor men of
trouble.”
A slender, big-eyed Spanish boy coming out a few moments later from the
great castle arch of the manor house saw four peons lugging away between
them the long bulk of the prisoner, and stopped to ask the trouble.
“Ah! That bad Coco. That he may never come back from Lima,” said the
young Spaniard earnestly. “He is a terror to all, and now I fear he will
kill Don Melito, for Coco never forgets. I shall ask my father to see the
prefect, that they keep him away. And the sugar?”
Felipe never tired of following all the processes with a grave air, as
if it all rested upon his small shoulders. A boy who never felt that he
was “helping”—if such a very helpless boy ever existed—has lost one of
the best things in all boyhood, and Felipe could not have understood such
a boy at all. He went on now and joined Don Melito, and the two stood
together watching the vat with professional eyes while two negroes plied
their plashing hoes. It was very hot work even to watch it, but a good
_administrador_ would never trust this to the laborers.
“Now you watch it a little,” said Don Melito suddenly, with roguish
gravity, looking at the boy’s preoccupied face. “As for me, I must see
how are the _pailas_,” and he climbed the steps to the platform where the
caldrons were hissing with their new supply of sap.
Felipe, thus left alone with the heaviest responsibility he had ever
borne, knit his smooth brows very hard and peered into the vat as if the
fate of nations hung on his eyes. For the first time he began to doubt
them. He wondered if it were not worked enough—if he had not better stop
the hoes and get the molders to work. If only Don Melito would come back
and decide for him!
But Don Melito was not here, and there were no signs of his coming.
Perhaps he was leaving Felipe to find out the difference between knowing
how some one else does a thing and how to do it one’s self. The boy
fidgeted up and down and looked at the vat first from one end and then
from the other, and grew more doubtful the more he looked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t _know_,” he cried to himself. “But sure it is
that I must do something, for he left me in charge and perhaps is busy
with other matters, thinking I would not let it be spoiled. Put it in the
molds!”
The men leaned their candied hoes against the wall. The molders began
ladling their buckets full, and, in turn, filling the shallow molds. The
color there darkened again as sudden crystallization set in; but Felipe
felt a great load lifted off his shoulders. He was very sure now that it
was a good color—not a hint of the hateful underdone black, but a soft,
rich brown, shading to gold at the thin edges.
Now he was free—the laborers could attend to the rest, as usual—and he
would go and hunt for Don Melito. He ran up the steps and along the
platform—and half way stopped short, as if he had run against a wall.
The rusty irons should never have been trusted with that giant’s
strength! They might do for common men, but for Coco—as soon as
consciousness came back to him, and with it the old rage, he had snapped
them, and, wrenching out the iron bars from the window of the _calaboz_,
had come for his revenge. Even now he was shaking his wrists, one still
hooped with the iron band, before the old _administrador’s_ face, and
hissing: “You! _You_ did me this! And now I will boil you!”
Don Melito stood still and gray as a stone, looking up into Coco’s eyes.
His hat was in his hand on account of the heat; but now he put it on as
if scorning to stand uncovered before the fellow—put it steadily upon the
curling gray hair that reached barely to the level of those great naked
chest muscles.
“I did strike you down and ordered you to be ironed, Coco,” he said
quietly, “and I would do so again. Now I am going to send you to Lima.
There is no place at Villa for people like you.”
But Coco leaped upon him like the black jaguar, and clutched him with
those long, knotted arms. Melito was sinewy and lithe as a cat, but he
was no match for this huge foe. He fought for life, but Coco with the
equal desperation of hate. Struggle as he would, he was borne back and
back until his legs cringed from the glow of the _paila_. At this he made
so wild a lunge that it bore them back a few feet; but it was only for a
moment. Inch by inch the negro urged him toward that bubbling roar which
seemed to drown all other sounds. And even now, with a wild chuckle, the
giant doubled him backward against the edge of the _paila_, with a black,
resistless palm under his chin.
Only an instant had Felipe stopped, frozen, at sight of Coco; in another
he had sprung to the rail, shrieking to the men below: “Juan! Sancho!
Quico! Come!” And then, rushing at the struggle, he flung himself as
ferociously upon Coco as Coco had attacked Don Melito. But it seemed as
if he were back in some dreadful dream. He hammered with futile fists
upon that bare and mighty back, and caught a fierce hold about one of
those gnarled legs and tugged to trip it, and kicked it with crazy feet.
But it was all with the nightmare sense that he was doing nothing by all
his efforts. Indeed, it is half doubtful if the infuriated Coco knew
at all of this attack in the rear. What to him were the peckings of a
twelve-year-old boy?
Would the men never come? Felipe redoubled his kicks and blows, but with
a sickening fear. Don Melito was weakening—already his head was thrust
back over the steam of the _paila_. Only for his arms locked about the
giant’s waist, he would go in. And now Coco’s huge hand came behind him
and wrenched at the old man’s slender ones, tearing open finger by finger
resistlessly. In another moment it would be too late to think.
Aha, Mr. Coco! The boy sprang to the second _paila_ and snatched the
long-handled skimmer that leaned against it, and, dipping it full from
the caldron, flung the molten sugar squarely upon Coco’s back. Howling,
the negro whirled about, dropping the half-senseless _administrador_
from him, and sprang at Felipe. But the boy stood stiff and very white,
holding the ladle back aloft. “This time in the eyes!” he cried,
hoarsely. “If you touch Don Melito again, or me, I will throw it in your
face!”
Even Coco hesitated at this. He was not too drunk with rage to know
what boiling sugar meant. Plainly, this little fool had the advantage.
He must be tricked—and then——. But just then a wan smile flitted across
Felipe’s face, and, as Coco half turned his head to see what pleasing
thing could be behind him, he got a glimpse of Pancho, the horse-breaker,
and something dark and wavy in the air. He ducked forward, but a rope
settled upon his broad shoulders, tightening like iron, and he was jerked
backward to the ground, and a dozen men were upon him.
Coco made no more trouble on the hacienda of Villa. At Lima he found the
prompt justice which sometimes happens in Peru. Don Melito was in bed
several days, for he had been roughly handled in body and in nerves. The
first day on which he could sit up a little, Felipe brought him a cake of
_chancaca_.
“Thank you,” said the old man, laying it on the coverlet. Sugar was an
old story to him.
“But you must taste this, my _administrador_, and see if it is all
right.”
“It is good,” answered Melito, munching submissively. And then, with a
sudden light: “It is _very_ good—as good as I could have made myself.
Quite right. And I think you sent it to the molds at just the right
time!”
Andrés, the Arriero.
Andrés, the Arriero.[26]
I.
“_Hupa mula! Que família!_”
The command was right enough, for the beast barely moved, and any one who
ever had to do with mules may very likely have cried out, with Andrés,
“What a family!” But no one but Andrés, I am sure, would have said it
here. By the time you get up to 16,000 feet in the Andes, if you are not
dead altogether, you certainly have no breath to spare—not even so much
as to say, “This mouth is mine.” As for exhorting a pack-mule to “get up”
or trying to make it ashamed of its blood relations, why, you couldn’t
if you would. If some one were to stand at the head of the pass offering
you a dollar a word for remarks, the chances are a hundred to one that
you would find yourself without either the ambition or the lungs to earn
a nickel. It is a very strange thing, as well as a very frightful one,
how these great altitudes clutch you by the windpipe, and turn your
heart’s strong beat to the last flutter of a wounded bird, and fill your
eyes with strange red threads and your ears with a dull tap! tap! tap! so
that you can count your pulse simply by listening. Worse still, how there
seems to have been turned somewhere a sly faucet which has let the last
drop of strength drip away before you knew it. But very lucky indeed are
you if that is all. Many more than escape with these unpleasant symptoms
have worse. There is a horrible nausea, as much beyond seasickness as
that is beyond a plain stomach-ache, and nearly every one gets it above
a certain height. Then come sudden hemorrhages from nose, mouth, ears,
eyes, finger-tips, and so on to the last. These symptoms and any of them
mean, “Get down stairs instanter.” If you cannot get down fast enough
you will be carried down—too late to do you any good. I have seen great,
powerful men fall there as an ox falls when the ax is laid to its head,
and never rise again nor again be conscious. At less elevations I have
seen robust men go dead in twenty-four hours with no disease on earth but
the altitude. Only recently an acquaintance of mine visiting a town but
12,500 feet above the sea went to bed in perfect health and—“woke up
dead in the morning,” as a Celtic mutual friend related in all sincerity.
Still, the only certain thing about it is that if you go high enough
you will pay the penalty; but no one can tell you how high that is, nor
can you yourself learn finally, even by experiment. You may start out
with a party from one of the inland towns of Peru, say at an elevation
of 7,000 to 8,000 feet—and even there many are greatly affected by the
altitude. One of the party, and perhaps the most robust looking, may
become so dangerously sick at 10,000 feet that he will have to be sent
back at once. The rest may go on safely to 12,000 feet, and there another
succumb, and so on. And you may (though it is very unlikely) toil on
even up to 17,000 or 18,000 feet without serious symptoms, and then a
few days later be so terribly affected at 10,000 feet that only the
most rapid removal to lower levels will save your life. Myself, I have
never felt the mountain sickness. But then, my constitution is a most
extraordinarily pig-headed one, which seems to butt against almost any
wall with impunity. I have climbed and worked hard at considerably over
19,000 feet, and for a long time lived from 12,000 to 15,000 feet above
the sea, and never felt anything worse than room for an extra pair of
lungs, there where is really precious little air to breathe. But warning
was all around, so that I never felt quite sure my turn would not come
next.
There is much in habit, of course. You all remember the Irishman’s
horse which learned to live on shavings—though unfortunately it died
just as it was becoming accustomed to this economical diet. And lungs,
too, can get used to living on such shavings as the upper air—that is,
if there are lungs enough and you give them long enough. Many die in
the learning, but in centuries a type is fixed. So with Andrés. His
fathers for a thousand years had breathed no heavier air than that of the
great Bolivian plateau. He had been born on one of the “little hills”
beside Lake Titi-caca, and brought up there. Leadville is the highest
considerable town in North America, and it is too elevated for a great
many people; but Andrés had never in his life got so low as 11,000 feet.
If he were suddenly set down in New York his lungs would be almost as
much embarrassed as would yours if you were so suddenly snatched up to
his skyward home. He might almost call for an ax to break that thick air
up into breathing chunks! And you, sitting with bloodshot eyes and open
mouth, would be wondering what skim-milk atmosphere was this, that in ten
minutes’ gasping you could not get as fair a fill to your lungs as you
now get with every breath you draw.
The mule was a well-seasoned mule, born in Puno and never any nearer
sea level than that 12,500-foot town. True, it was now some 4,000 feet
nearer the sky, and barely crawling up the pass. At every half-dozen or
dozen paces it paused to groan despairingly, panting full five minutes
before it could go another step. But that was a good mule. If you wished
to see what an ordinary mule did in the pass, you had only to look at
either side of the trail almost anywhere. There were hundreds of bleached
skeletons lying just where they had fallen, but white as the snows upon
the peaks above. Here and there were even the bones of the llama[27]—the
highest-dwelling quadruped on earth. As for horses, their usefulness
ceases long before reaching such altitudes as that of the Quimca-chata.
I have seen people who had an air of feeling that the mule ought always
to be begging pardon for being alive, and that nature was in pretty small
business when she made him. But that, of course, is a notion of very
uninformed folk. In fact, as all know who have stirred out a little, the
mule is the most broadly useful animal in the service of man. The horse
can run faster, the elephant carry heavier loads, the llama climb higher
above the clouds; but no other beast can carry so much so far, so fast,
so low and so high as this unpretentious and maligned big-ears; and
wherever civilized man has had to conquer the wilderness this has been
his best friend.
Something of this was in the thought of the traveler sprawled beside the
_apacheta_ at the head of the pass—watching now the gasping saddle-mule
near him, and now the rest of his small caravan as it crept upward. He
was breathing with open mouth, but otherwise showed no traces of the
hour’s climb since he left Andrés and the pack-beast, and tramped on,
driving his own mule ahead rather than ride the distressed beast.
“Yes,” he was saying (but to himself, which called for no expenditure of
breath), “old Tom Moore, Crook’s chief packer, was right when he used to
say, ‘God made mules a-purpose!’ How they have been the right hand of the
pioneer in both Americas. _Bien_, Andrés—so you got him up at last.”
Andrés took off his frowsy hat, leaving upon his head the long-peaked
knit cap of vicuña[28] wool, removed from his mouth the quid of coca
leaves he had been chewing, and flung the wad against the rough, upright
stone, which was already pimpled all over with similar offerings. No
mountain Indian of Bolivia would any more think of passing such a
monument at the crest of a pass without making this sacrifice than you
would think of going into church with your hat on.
“_Si, viracocha_,” he answered, with a slow, good-natured smile; and went
on in his stumbling mixture of Spanish and Aymará. “You ought to bite the
coca, _ps, viracocha_, that the _sorojchi_ catch you not. For so do we of
the mountains, and by it we get our strength. Take”—and he drew from his
left-hand pouch a pinch of the dried leaves and a bit of lime.
The American shook his head, with a smile, as much as to say: “Thanks,
but I need it not.” Then he rose, with a significant glance at the
clouds, and made a gesture of haste, pointing to the trail which from
their feet dipped far downward to the east.
Andrés cinched up the sagging _chipas_ on the pack-mule, setting his bare
foot against its ribs and hauling at the hair rope with main strength.
The traveler likewise tightened his saddle-girth and swung up. Half an
hour more, and they were some miles down the slope, descending at a gait
which was decidedly smart compared with the snail’s pace of the last few
hours. Through gaps in the foothills ahead came now and then wondrous
outlooks across the upper Bolivian plateau. Off to the left was the
glorious blue of Titi-caca, highest great lake in the world; behind it,
and stretching far to the right, the still more glorious white of the
great Andes of Bolivia.
“There, _mps_, is Mururata, the Beheaded,” said the arriero, pointing to
a flat-topped peak far lower than the rest, but still tall enough to wear
eternal snow. “The gods cut off its head long ago, to punish pride, and
set it over yonder, where you will soon see it smoke—for now it is a fire
mountain.” Andrés trotted along, pointing, chattering, smiling, as if
breath were quite the cheapest thing on earth.
Just then the traveler found a little, too—but not for the lost head of
Mururata. He was staring across a saddle in the hills with very much such
a face of incredulity and bewilderment as one might wear at sight of a
ghost.
“Seest thou?” he demanded of the arriero. “Confuse me, but I thought
there was no such thing as a wheel in the country, except the Chililaya
stage.”
“Oh, _si, viracocha_—in La Paz are five or six carriages! And yonder will
be the Jaúregui going to their _chacra_.”[29]
A top buggy of most ancient pattern was creeping up around the turn at
the heels of four tired mules. In a few moments the travelers were not
far apart; and now Andrés’s employer broke out afresh, but in a lower
tone:
“_Oyez!_ But where is the feast to which these _maromeros_ go?”
They did look clown-like enough, to be sure. The driver was clearly an
Aymará Indian, and showed nothing more peculiar than the quaint garb of
his people. But at his left sat two tall and surprising figures in long
linen dusters and white peaked caps. The latter were shaped something
like fools’ caps; but instead of ending at the ears came down upon the
shoulders, over the whole head. Eye and mouth holes and a woven nose gave
them a finish as uncanny as it was strange.
“_Á Diós, caballero!_” cried a muffled voice in clearly well-bred
Spanish; and the Indian driver pulled the willing mules to a halt. One
of the masks leaned from the carriage, and from behind the white yarn a
pair of keen, black eyes stared first at the pack-mule and then at the
American.
“Pardon the molesting, but you carry a machine of the photograph, is it
not?”
The tripod stretching along the pack-beast from ears to tail, and the
square, leather boxes in the _chipas_ were clear enough, and the traveler
replied politely:
“As you see, sir.”
“Good! And how much is worth a picture? Come, we will occupy you.”
“Infinite thanks, cavaliers, but I do not sell. And pardon, for I am in
haste.”
“How not?” There was an incredulous flash in the ambushed eyes, and the
voice had lost the edge of its courtesy. “We have money in hand, and we
wish to take out our pictures.”