has entered my materials free of duty, seeing that I come on a scientific
mission; and in return, that your native artists shall not have whereof
to complain, I am pledged to sell no pictures. It often pains me,
knowing how one feels for a picture here where artists are few. But in
any event, I make _vistas_ only for the one purpose, and need all the
plates we brought.”
The maskers evidently did not credit any such absurd story. The gringo—he
was a gringo, of course, in spite of his comfortable Spanish—_pues_, he
knew them for rich and was holding off for a big offer.
“Well, we will give fifty _bolivianos_.[30] Get in and we will carry you
to the _chacra_. There is your home. You shall stay so much as you will;
and there is much hunting and such views of Illimani as you have not
seen. Also, there are strange monuments of the ancients. Eh? Then one
hundred _bolivianos_!”
“I give you the most expressive thanks, gentlemen, and would willingly
see your _chacra_. But I am bound for Tiahuanaco. And, in any event, you
must know that I talk not lumber, but truth. I cannot make your pictures.”
“Listen, then,” muttered the Bolivian angrily, turning to his
fellow-mask, “how hard-headed are these gringos! Come,” addressing
the traveler again, “you are too dear. But we will say two hundred
_bolivianos_,” and he held up a huge roll of small red bank bills.
By now there was a considerable wrinkle in the traveler’s brow. “God give
you good evening, cavaliers,” he said, curtly. “I am of one yes and one
no. If you want _retratos_ I know no place nearer than La Paz where you
can get them. _Adios._”
He set spurs to his mule and rode off down hill. The two maskers looked
blankly at one another a moment, and then their mules began to plod up
the slope amid a volley of Spanish expletives. Andrés had prodded the
pack-beast to a lurching trot, and ran easily at its heels.
“_Mps, viracocha_,” he said, in a loud whisper, taking off his hat
again as he drew alongside the traveler. “But those are the Jaúregui,
and it would be better to please them. They are most powerful, and very
hard-headed, too.”
“Then let them butt against a harder head. I can’t—_hola!_ Vicuñas, no?”
The frown had smoothed out, and he was snatching the rifle from its
holster strapped along the saddle. Away over on an opposite slope a
little brown cloud was drifting.
“_Si!_ But they go!” cried Andrés.
The cloud was, indeed, breaking up in a score of wee brown dots that
scudded like so many shadows.
“Too far! And I wanted some pelts for a little girl I know. To try,
anyhow!” The traveler jerked the rifle to his shoulder and fired.
“Nothing,” he sighed. “Of course not—it was a shot thrown away.” But
Andrés cried: “You touched! See yonder, how he makes lame!”
“Your eyes for it—mine don’t reach so far. But one does look to have
fallen behind. Too bad! Now it is to run him down—a man even in a hurry
can’t leave the poor wounded brute to be gouged piecemeal by the condors.
Go on thy best with the pack-beast, Andrés, and I’ll catch thee at the
_tambo_, or sooner.”
The arriero ambled on, with now and then a reminding cudgel to his
charge. A funny man, this—no? But then, no doubt all gringos were a
little wrong in the head. To refuse two hundred _bolivianos_ for a
picture, and then go ramping off to kill a wounded vicuña! Smart are the
Yanquis, yes—but of reason, not much. As if the condors were to blame
if they could catch a thing injured! And it can be that they will have
mule as well as vicuña for supper. The _viracocha_ evidently forgets that
he is on the ground of the mountain sickness. Pity if it should catch
him—since he is very good, unbrained though he be.
But at a turn in the trail Andrés found other matters to be thought of
than the general follies and occasional virtues of the Yanquis. Other
ears than his had heard the rifle, and other eyes noted the traveler’s
tangent; and now the young Indian gave a start very like one of fear at
the rattle of wheels behind him and an imperious call of “_Alto!_”
II.
Andrés glanced over his shoulder and faced about in his tracks. It was
only for an instant that he thought of running. He might make a break
down the rough hillside, where the carriage could not follow, yes. But
the pack-mule, sagging under those boxes, of which the _viracocha_ was so
tender! The boy’s thick lips drew tight across his large, white teeth.
He would stay. The instant he ceased to beset its heels the fagged beast
stopped too, and there they stood like two shabby statues, while the
carriage drew alongside.
“So the gringo hunts, eh?” spoke one of the maskers, briskly, stepping
down from the buggy. “But he is very high priced, it seems—as much as
unamiable. Come, tell us how much he does get—for in truth I thought we
offered enough.”
“Who knows, your excellency?” stammered Andrés. “It is a month that I am
with him as arriero, and until now he pictures only the monuments. And
even of those I have not yet seen the _retratos_, for he says he is to
finish them when we shall reach La Paz. Of people he always refuses—as
your excellency saw. Except that once, in Copacabana, he pictured an
ancient beggar at the gate, taking no money.”
“Ay, but these gringos are many sorts of fools—and this one _all_ sorts.
Come, then, these _vistas_ he has made, they will be in the _chipas_. To
see them!”
The speaker’s air and tone were plainly those of one who has no dream
of not being obeyed, and he fairly stiffened with astonishment when the
arriero, rather pale and very much embarrassed, stammered:
“_P-pero_, excellency, I—I—cannot!”
“_Mira!_ Another who ‘cannot!’ It is contagious, then, this ‘_no puedo!_’
_Oyez!_” and now the command was sharp and stern, “Open me those boxes!”
Andrés backed off a step. His brown cheeks were unmistakably gray, and
his voice faltered as he replied, humbly, but stolidly: “Do not shame
me, Excellency. This _viracocha_ hires me, treating me kindly. For
arriero, yes—but even more, he has me to guard the machine when he is not
beside it. For so many wish to peep in, and he has things in little flat
boxes which he opens only at night in a room without candles, and not
even smoking his _cigarro_. He says that to let in a so-little of light
would destroy all. For that I am promised, that no one shall open them
nor touch them. Do not ask me, then, excellency.”
“_Ask_ thee, cannibal! A Jaúregui asking thee? _Vaya!_ I _order_ thee.
And between winks, too, lest thou taste the quirt!” He snatched from his
driver the short, leaden-butted bull whip.
Andrés backed away still farther, till he ran up against the pack of his
dejected mule, which stood as if petrified there.
“_No puedo, taita!_” he repeated, with an appealing glance. Then, as the
man reached forth to pluck the knot of the cinch rope, Andrés extended
his arm as a barrier, crying, “_Haniwa!_ Your excellency must not!”
At this actual obstruction the personage in the white hood clearly lost
an already ruffled temper. He drew the quirt whistling around those
sturdy, bare calves, and a blue welt stood up there. Another cut, and
another. The stolid face changed little, but the legs shifted uneasily.
“_Haniwa_, is it?” The ambushed eyes seemed fairly outside the mask now,
so angrily they shone. “Then we will see! To beat a little more manners
into that thick skull.” He shifted the quirt in his hand, clubbing the
loaded end over Andrés’s head. The arriero flung up his hands. He was
a sinewy young man, very probably much more powerful than his tall
assailant. Nor was he thinking of the odds of those two more in the
carriage. It was tradition, not cowardice, that stayed his hands—how
could this arriero and son of arrieros think to strike a don? For he
was born and bred in a country where there is still such a thing as
respect—sometimes misapplied, as now; but broadly so honorable that I
wish some reciprocity treaty might enable us to import some of it for
northern use.
The leaden butt fell across his guard, and one hand dropped to his side.
The other he drew before his eyes.
“Come! Will thou open, or shall I crack that foolish squash-head?”
Andrés did not move. “_Haniwa!_” he muttered in the same slow, stupid
way, shutting his eyes as the club rose again. But just then a voice
called from the carriage:
“To what use, brother? They are no more than clods. Beat one to death,
and you shall not change him. Let Pepe tie him and then we can verify the
boxes.”
The one with the quirt hesitated a moment. His blood was hot, and the
brute in him ached to beat away at this maddening stupid. His hand
dropped reluctantly, and he growled:
“As thou wilt. Rope him then, Pepe.”
But if the arriero had stood dumb under the lash of his superior, it
was another page in the almanac when a brown fellow of his own blood
and station caught him by the arms and started to pass a reata around
him. Andrés doubled forward at the waist, clumsily but resistlessly. His
tousled head struck Pepe on the mouth, and that too-ready henchman rolled
heavily in the road. Andrés sprang upon him and flung fistfuls of dust in
his face, shaking him as a terrier does a rat.
“Pig! Who lent thee a candle in this funeral? Thy master I could not
fight. But thou, barbarian——”
“_Socorro!_” bawled Pepe, quite helpless in the clutch of his exasperated
rider. “Take him off!”
“I’ll take him off!” growled the master, and he ran forward, swinging the
club about his head. Woe is me for thy skull, Andresito, if that ounce of
lead befall it squarely from behind!
III.
When the “gringo” and his laboring mule pitched down the side of a very
considerable _barranca_, their quarry was plainly visible four or five
hundred yards up the opposite hill. The rest of the flock had long ago
disappeared, and by now was miles away—for they run almost like antelope,
these airy beauties of the Andes, the tiniest camels in the world, and
the only graceful ones. But when mule and rider struggled up the farther
bank, the wounded vicuña was nowhere to be seen.
“Plague! But I must not kill _thee_, in trying to be merciful to him,”
muttered the rider, and he sprang to the ground. It was high time. The
mule stood gasping in his tracks, head down, chin hanging and knees
quaking violently. The traveler looked up and down him, remorsefully but
critically.
“With a rest, thou’rt all right. But I ought to beg thy pardon for giving
thee a fool for a rider! Now, my legs for it—and rest thou here.”
The involuntary object of all this trouble was certainly inconsiderate.
Having been so foolish as to go and get wounded, he should have waited
at least for the Samaritan to come up and give him the blow of mercy.
But, instead, he hobbled bleating on in pursuit of his fellows, even long
after they had vanished. It was astonishing how this delicate, fawn-like
creature could run so far with a broken leg, and his well-meaning
pursuer began to find it more than astonishing. Plague take the little
imbecile—he was bound to make it as hard as possible to do him a good
turn! It is odd how our minds can contradict themselves—how we sometimes
start out on a thoroughly praiseworthy errand, and fall into very
unamiable moods by the way.
The pursuer was by now decidedly angry—which is a very unwise luxury to
be indulged in, at least among the Andes. His temper was by no means
calculated to soothe the stampeding gallop of his heart; and to see him
gasping up yonder _cumbre_, with a purpling face and protruding tongue,
and a scowl on his brow, probably no stranger would have dreamed that he
was really on a generous errand.
“Belike the condors will have to have thee!” he groaned inwardly—since
not for his life, now, could he have articulated the words: “I’m done up!
This one more ridge and it must end.”
But as he reached the top of that last ridge, there was a tremendous
_swoosh_ of wings past him, and then, from the hollow beyond, a scream
almost human in its agony. At that he plucked new vigor, and went racing
down the slope in a surprising spurt. The truth was that, once started,
he had no longer the strength to stop on that stiff pitch, and must keep
on till he should fall or fetch up against some obstacle. His sight was
blurred, his head roaring, his legs numb, and where his heart should be,
a strange, suffocating emptiness seemed to have come—and still he spun
on. Then, in a reeling way, he swung the six-shooter thrice, firing as
fast as finger could pull the trigger; in the same second, sprawling
headlong in a confusion of bleats and silken fur and beating wings. A
tremendous blow from one of the latter cut his scalp clear across the
occiput. The revolver blazed again, and, after a wild thrashing, all was
still.
It was some minutes before the hunter sat up, gazing about him in a dazed
way. The rest and the chilly air and the loss of blood were beginning to
counteract the effects of his imprudent chase.
“Well! The next time I shoot before I think, I won’t shoot!” he informed
himself without expense of breath, and with the ghost of a smile. “Wonder
I hadn’t killed myself with such a race, up here. But if you start,
finish!” and he looked complacently down at the little dead vicuña
against which he leaned; and not a rod away the huge vulture sprawled
upon its back, its wings outstretched a full dozen feet, its feet
clenched in the empty air.
“He got only one swipe at thee, it seems. It’s all right, so that I came
in time to give thee a more merciful death. So we won’t grudge the breath
it cost me. But the least thanks thou canst give me is that precious
pelt.” Drawing his knife, the hunter soon removed that very softest and
most exquisite of all furs. Then with an uneasy glance at the clouds he
turned away, walking as briskly as his protesting lungs would allow.
Good! There was the mule all right. It had not budged a foot; and now,
though still in an attitude of utter dejection, was clearly out of
danger. Directly, master and mule were jogging off toward the trail at a
most doleful gait—which doubtless would have been mended, if they could
have seen through the rounded hill just ahead. But the hill was opaque,
as hills and circumstances ahead are so prone to be; and they pottered
along lazily, until, at a turn over the ridge, the spurs went drumming
such an unexpected tattoo upon his echoing ribs that the mule quite
forgot himself, and went pitching down the hill at a pace he had not
taken in a month.
IV.
Away down yonder, a superannuated buggy and its team stood in the trail.
A few rods ahead of it, and just at the heels of a wilted pack-mule,
two men were scuffling in the dust; and over them a hooded figure was
bringing down a heavy club. At that instant the pack beast wakened enough
to turn his head interrogatively, cocking one ear forward and the other
back. Even as he did so, his nigh hind leg could be seen to gather itself
and suddenly lunge out behind. A long, linen-shrouded form, white capped
at one end, thereupon doubled in half, and rose in the air and went
whirling like a boomerang. It fell a full rod away and did not rise. Then
a similar figure sprang from the buggy and rushed at the wrestlers; but
midway went down all at once in a loose heap, as if struck by a bullet.
No wonder the stranger up yonder drummed with his heels, and jockeyed,
and whooped; and, finding his charger still too slow, leaped from its
back and came bounding down the hillside like a loosened rock.
Andrés was sitting placidly astride his prostrate foe, breathing rather
hard, but looking stupidly good-natured as ever. One of his fingers was
broken, and blood from a gash on his forehead trickled down his nose.
“_Mps, viracocha_,” he answered to the breathless traveler’s glance of
inquiry, “the _caballeros_ were set to see the inside of your boxes, and
because I refused they went to beat me. But when this cannibal here came
upon me, then it was to fight. The blows of a gentleman, yes—but not of
a _chuncho_.[31] So I measured him, thus. And when the gentleman went to
crack me the squash with his quirt, then did Big-Ears here, forgetting
respect to the powerful, set heel to his stomach and lift him until over
yonder.”
“And this? I saw him fall as he ran at you,” the _viracocha_ mustered
breath to say.
“He? _Mps_, but it will be the _sorojchi_—see you not how the blood falls
from his mouth? And you see, _viracocha_, how strong is the coca! Because
I sacrificed at the _apacheta_, as one should, to the spirits of the high
places, it has all come as the mouth would ask. Without that, then, the
gentlemen would have left me here, of no more use to your grace, and the
magic boxes would be emptied in the light.”
* * * * *
When night came down on the Quimca-chata, a gusty snowstorm, with howling
intervals of hail, beset the pass. It roared at the hills, it swooped
down the cañons as if in search of some living thing it might turn to
ice before morning. But inside the low, dirty _tambo_, they only laughed
at its rage. The bald stone hut in a little nook under the shoulder
of a hill had neither window nor chimney; and a heavy poncho of llama
hair was the temporary door. It was a fair type of the _tambos_ of the
Andes—those tenantless, cheerless wayside shelters that save the traveler
in those bleak lands from perishing. On the sooty hearth a faint blaze
of _taqui_ wavered, and the smoke wandered out as best it could or made
itself at home in the bare room. Upon the rough stone bench along the
walls sat five men, and in the farther corner six mules nosed wistfully
in a rubbish heap for casual straws. Of the men two were Indians, and
both wore bandaged heads. The third guest of this inn without a landlord
appeared to be an American, and he also had a handkerchief bound about
his skull. The two others were handsome, swarthy men in costly vicuña
ponchos. They sat on linen dusters, from the pockets of which peeped the
tasseled ends of two white caps.
One member of the party cast now and then a sly glance at these. So,
instead of clowns going to some feast, these were two wealthy Bolivians.
And those astonishing head masks which had so mystified him were merely
to save their faces from that trying mountain air—so Andrés had informed
him, with an evident effort not to pity his ignorance. And looking at
those coffee complexions he had serious work to keep from smiling at the
thought of trying to keep them from sunburn.
“_Pues_, it is as well the _tambo_ was near, for none of us were in shape
to go much farther to-night, even forgetting the storm. _Ea!_ But how it
howls, as if disappointed!”
It was the American who broke the silence, though he spoke, of course, in
Spanish—the only common possession of the five tongues.
“You have reason, _caballero_,” answered the taller of the two dons,
courteously. “And even more am I glad that we make ourselves pardoned. Of
a truth, we were most ignorant that to open your cases would spoil all;
nor could we have thought to take the liberty, but that we believed you
a—a seller baiting us for higher pay. But we were well answered. Your so
obstinate arriero made me forget myself, and I give you a _caballero’s_
apology. But that mule—_ay de mi!_ I thought Illampu itself had tumbled
upon me!”
“Verily, señor! I saw it from the hill, and it was so prettily done as I
never could have believed. Why, señor, he shut you at the waist like a
knife with a strong spring!”
The cavalier smiled a trifle weakly at the description, but he said
frankly:
“He did but justice. I have shame to think how I lost a gentleman’s
temper. And so little more and I could have broken your man’s head. But
since you have the fineness to hold no malice, it is well.”
“Oh, I know curiosity and temper both. Only that it is Andrés’s head and
not mine. But his need not be too sore—for you have caused me to double
his wages from to-day. An arriero that will stand a broken head to guard
the _amo’s_ load—well, I haven’t found him very abundant in Bolivia, nor
anywhere else.”
“You have reason always. And—er—understood that—_pues_, you know that
Don Juan de Jaúregui cannot say to an arriero, ‘pardon’! But in purity
of truth, he is faithful, and I would be glad to give him a well paid
position on the _chacra_.”
“Eh, Andrés? The cavalier offers justly. What sayest thou?”
Andrés’s face beamed simply, and he twisted his skull cap as he rose with
a clumsy bow.
“I shall be glad,” he stammered. “But only if—until—when that the
_viracocha_ shall have no more need of an arriero. For while the
magic boxes have to ride on the ribs of a mule, it is safer that I be
driver—since the _viracocha_ has shown me, and I know how they must be
treated. ‘Gently! Gently! And for the life of you, let no light come into
them!’”
Our Yellow Slave.
Our Yellow Slave.
The only metal in the world that is yellow is the most precious of them
all—gold. Brass is not a metal, but an alloy, a compound. And the color
which gold shares with the sun has a great deal to do with its value. I
do not suppose it would be possible that we should ever have come to love
and admire any metal so much as to choose it for our highest currency and
our ornaments, no matter how rare or ductile it might be, if it were of a
dark, dull, gloomy color. The human eye never gets too old to be pleased
with very much the same things which pleased it in childhood; and no eye
is insensible to that precious yellow.
I like sometimes to think back to the first man of all men that ever
held that rock of the sun in his savage hand, and to imagine how he
found it, and how it made his sharp eyes twinkle, and how he wondered at
its weight, and pounded it with one smooth rock upon another and found
he could flatten it. All these things come by accident, and gold was
an accident that befell when the world was very young. No doubt there
had been a great rain, that washed the heavy lump from its nest in some
gravelly stream bank, and the prehistoric man, in his tunic of skins,
chanced that way and found it. Mayhap it was the very rain of the Flood
itself, and the poor barbarian who picked up the yellow nugget sank with
it still in his swarthy fist.
We do not even know the name of the man who first discovered gold, nor
where he lived, nor when. But it was very, very long ago. Before the
time of Joseph and the coat of many colors, gold had already become not
only a discovered fact, but a part of the world. The early Egyptians got
their gold from Nubia, so very likely the discovery was first made in
Africa. At all events, it dates back to the very childhood of the race;
and before Cadmus had found those more important nuggets of the alphabet,
mankind had achieved the prettiest plaything it ever found.
In the very first chapter of the first and noblest of poems, Homer tells
of the priest who came with a golden ransom to the camp of the Greeks
before Troy, to buy his daughter free; and the sunny metal figures
everywhere in the oldest mythology we know. You have all read—and I hope
in Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood Tales,” where the story is more beautifully
told than it was ever elsewhere—of Jason and the Argonauts and of how
they sailed to find the Golden Fleece. That was a fabulous ram-skin,
whose locks were of pure gold. No wonder the deadly dragon in the dark
groves of the Colchian king guarded it so jealously. Of course the myth
is only a poetic form—as stories generally assume in the folk-lore of
an undeveloped race—of saying that Jason and his bold fellow-sailors of
the Argo sailed to the gold fields of Asia, and found them. The mines
whose fabled richness tempted them to that adventurous voyage in their
overgrown row-boat of fifty oars, were in the Caucasus mountains, and
produced a great deal of the gold which was used by the ancients. They
were doubtless among the first gold mines in the world, and their product
gilded the splendor of many of the first great monarchs of history. As
late as 1875 an attempt was made by Europeans to work these mines, but
nothing came of it.