struggle; had he done so, they might have dealt more cruelly with him.
But he knew his Indians, and that when once they had collectively made
up their pueblo mind ... Moreover, he was a proud old Spaniard, and had
a certain fortitude lodged in his well-nourished body. He was accustomed
to command, not to entreat, and he retained the respect of his Indian
vassals to the end.
They carried him down the ladder and through the cloister and across the
rock to the most precipitous cliff--the one over which the Ácoma women
flung broken pots and such refuse as the turkeys would not eat. There
the people were assembled. They cut his bonds, and taking him by the
hands and feet, swung him out over the rock-edge and back a few times.
He was heavy, and perhaps they thought this dangerous sport. No sound
but hissing breath came through his teeth. The four executioners took
him up again from the brink where they had laid him, and, after a few
feints, dropped him in mid-air.
So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had
liked very well. But everything has its day. The execution was not
followed by any sacrilege to the church or defiling of holy vessels, but
merely by a division of the Padre's stores and household goods. The
women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the garden pine and waste away
from thirst, and ventured into the cloisters to laugh and chatter at the
whitening foliage of the peach trees, and the green grapes shrivelling
on the vines.
When the next priest came, years afterward, he found no ill will
awaiting him. He was a native Mexican, of unpretentious tastes, who was
well satisfied with beans and jerked meat, and let the pueblo turkey
flock scratch in the hot dust that had once been Baltazar's garden. The
old peach stumps kept sending up pale sprouts for many years.
BOOK FOUR
_SNAKE ROOT_
1
THE NIGHT AT PECOS
A MONTH after the Bishop's visit to Albuquerque and Ácoma, the genial
Father Gallegos was formally suspended, and Father Vaillant himself took
charge of the parish. At first there was bitter feeling; the rich
_rancheros_ and the merry ladies of Albuquerque were very hostile to the
French priest. He began his reforms at once. Everything was changed. The
holy-days, which had been occasions of revelry under Padre Gallegos,
were now days of austere devotion. The fickle Mexican population soon
found as much diversion in being devout as they had once found in being
scandalous. Father Vaillant wrote to his sister Philomène, in France,
that the temper of his parish was like that of a boys' school; under one
master the lads try to excel one another in mischief and disobedience,
under another they vie with each other in acts of loyalty. The Novena
preceding Christmas, which had long been celebrated by dances and
hilarious merry-making, was this year a great revival of religious zeal.
Though Father Vaillant had all the duties of a parish priest at
Albuquerque, he was still Vicar General, and in February the Bishop
dispatched him on urgent business to Las Vegas. He did not return on the
day that he was expected, and when several days passed with no word from
him, Father Latour began to feel some anxiety.
One morning at day-break a very sick Indian boy rode into the Bishop's
courtyard on Father Joseph's white mule, Contento, bringing bad news.
The Padre, he said, had stopped at his village in the Pecos mountains
where black measles had broken out, to give the sacrament to the dying,
and had fallen ill of the sickness. The boy himself had been well when
he started for Santa Fé, but had become sick on the way.
The Bishop had the messenger put into the wood-house, an isolated
building at the end of the garden, where the Sisters of Loretto could
tend him. He instructed the Mother Superior to pack a bag with such
medicines and comforts for the sick as he could carry, and told
Fructosa, his cook, to put up for him the provisions he usually took on
horseback journeys. When his man brought a pack-mule and his own mule,
Angelica, to the door, Father Latour, already in his rough
riding-breeches and buckskin jacket, looked at the handsome beast and
shook his head.
"No, leave her with Contento. The new army mule is heavier, and will do
for this journey."
The Bishop rode out of Santa Fé two hours after the Indian messenger
rode in. He was going direct to the pueblo of Pecos, where he would pick
up Jacinto. It was late in the afternoon when he reached the pueblo,
lying low on its red rock ledges, half-surrounded by a crown of fir-clad
mountains, and facing a sea of junipers and cedars. The Bishop had meant
to get fresh horses at Pecos and push on through the mountains, but
Jacinto and the older Indians who gathered about the horseman, strongly
advised him to spend the night there and start in the early morning. The
sun was shining brilliantly in a blue sky, but in the west, behind the
mountain, lay a great stationary black cloud, opaque and motionless as a
ledge of rock. The old men looked at it and shook their heads.
"Very big wind," said the governor gravely.
Unwillingly the Bishop dismounted and gave his mules to Jacinto; it
seemed to him that he was wasting time. There was still an hour before
nightfall, and he spent that hour pacing up and down the crust of bare
rock between the village and the ruin of the old mission church. The sun
was sinking, a red ball which threw a copper glow over the pine-covered
ridge of mountains, and edged that inky, ominous cloud with molten
silver. The great red earth walls of the mission, red as brick-dust,
yawned gloomily before him,--part of the roof had fallen in, and the
rest would soon go.
At this moment Father Joseph was lying dangerously ill in the dirt and
discomfort of an Indian village in winter. Why, the Bishop was asking
himself, had he ever brought his friend to this life of hardship and
danger? Father Vaillant had been frail from childhood, though he had the
endurance resulting from exhaustless enthusiasm. The Brothers at
Montferrand were not given to coddling boys, but every year they used to
send this one away for a rest in the high Volvic mountains, because his
vitality ran down under the confinement of college life. Twice, while he
and Father Latour were missionaries in Ohio, Joseph had been at death's
door; once so ill with cholera that the newspapers had printed his name
in the death list. On that occasion their Ohio Bishop had christened him
_Trompe-la-Mort_. Yes, Father Latour told himself, _Blanchet_ had
outwitted death so often, there was always the chance he would do it
again.
Walking about the walls of the ruin, the Bishop discovered that the
sacristy was dry and clean, and he decided to spend the night there,
wrapped in his blankets, on one of the earthen benches that ran about
the inner walls. While he was examining this room, the wind began to
howl about the old church, and darkness fell quickly. From the low
doorways of the pueblo ruddy fire-light was gleaming--singularly
grateful to the eye. Waiting for him on the rocks, he recognized the
slight figure of Jacinto, his blanket drawn close about his head, his
shoulders bowed to the wind.
The young Indian said that supper was ready, and the Bishop followed him
to his particular lair in those rows of little houses all alike and all
built together. There was a ladder before Jacinto's door which led up to
a second storey, but that was the dwelling of another family; the roof
of Jacinto's house made a veranda for the family above him. The Bishop
bent his head under the low doorway and stepped down; the floor of the
room was a long step below the doorsill--the Indian way of preventing
drafts. The room into which he descended was long and narrow, smoothly
whitewashed, and clean, to the eye, at least, because of its very
bareness. There was nothing on the walls but a few fox pelts and strings
of gourds and red peppers. The richly coloured blankets of which Jacinto
was very proud were folded in piles on the earth settle,--it was there
he and his wife slept, near the fire-place. The earth of that settle
became warm during the day and held its heat until morning, like the
Russian peasants' stove-bed. Over the fire a pot of beans and dried meat
was simmering. The burning piñon logs filled the room with
sweet-smelling smoke. Clara, Jacinto's wife, smiled at the priest as he
entered. She ladled out the stew, and the Bishop and Jacinto sat down on
the floor beside the fire, each with his bowl. Between them Clara put a
basin full of hot corn-bread baked with squash seeds,--an Indian
delicacy comparable to raisin bread among the whites. The Bishop said a
blessing and broke the bread with his hands. While the two men ate, the
young woman watched them and stirred a tiny cradle of deerskin which
hung by thongs from the roof poles. Jacinto, when questioned, said sadly
that the baby was ailing. Father Latour did not ask to see it; it would
be swathed in layers of wrappings, he knew; even its face and head would
be covered against drafts. Indian babies were never bathed in winter,
and it was useless to suggest treatment for the sick ones. On that
subject the Indian ear was closed to advice.
It was a pity, too, that he could do nothing for Jacinto's baby. Cradles
were not many in the pueblo of Pecos. The tribe was dying out; infant
mortality was heavy, and the young couples did not reproduce
freely,--the life-force seemed low. Smallpox and measles had taken heavy
toll here time and again.
Of course there were other explanations, credited by many good people in
Santa Fé. Pecos had more than its share of dark legends,--perhaps that
was because it had been too tempting to white men, and had had more than
its share of history. It was said that this people had from time
immemorial kept a ceremonial fire burning in some cave in the mountain,
a fire that had never been allowed to go out, and had never been
revealed to white men. The story was that the service of this fire
sapped the strength of the young men appointed to serve it,--always the
best of the tribe. Father Latour thought this hardly probable. Why
should it be very arduous, in a mountain full of timber, to feed a fire
so small that its whereabouts had been concealed for centuries?
There was also the snake story, reported by the early explorers, both
Spanish and American, and believed ever since: that this tribe was
peculiarly addicted to snake worship, that they kept rattlesnakes
concealed in their houses, and somewhere in the mountain guarded an
enormous serpent which they brought to the pueblo for certain feasts. It
was said that they sacrificed young babies to the great snake, and thus
diminished their numbers.
It seemed much more likely that the contagious diseases brought by white
men were the real cause of the shrinkage of the tribe. Among the
Indians, measles, scarlatina and whooping-cough were as deadly as typhus
or cholera. Certainly, the tribe was decreasing every year. Jacinto's
house was at one end of the living pueblo; behind it were long rock
ridges of dead pueblo,--empty houses ruined by weather and now scarcely
more than piles of earth and stone. The population of the living streets
was less than one hundred adults.[1] This was all that was left of the
rich and populous Cicuyè of Coronado's expedition. Then, by his report,
there were six thousand souls in the Indian town. They had rich fields
irrigated from the Pecos River. The streams were full of fish, the
mountain was full of game. The pueblo, indeed, seemed to lie upon the
knees of these verdant mountains, like a favoured child. Out yonder, on
the juniper-spotted plateau in front of the village, the Spaniards had
camped, exacting a heavy tribute of corn and furs and cotton garments
from their hapless hosts. It was from here, the story went, that they
set forth in the spring on their ill-fated search for the seven golden
cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and concubines ravished from
the Pecos people.
As Father Latour sat by the fire and listened to the wind sweeping down
from the mountains and howling over the plateau, he thought of these
things; and he could not help wondering whether Jacinto, sitting silent
by the same fire, was thinking of them, too. The wind, he knew, was
blowing out of the inky cloud bank that lay behind the mountain at
sunset; but it might well be blowing out of a remote, black past. The
only human voice raised against it was the feeble wailing of the sick
child in the cradle. Clara ate noiselessly in a corner, Jacinto looked
into the fire.
The Bishop read his breviary by the fire-light for an hour. Then, warmed
to the bone and assured that his roll of blankets was warmed through, he
rose to go. Jacinto followed with the blankets and one of his own
buffalo robes. They went along a line of red doorways and across the
bare rock to the gaunt ruin, whose lateral walls, with their buttresses,
still braved the storm and let in the starlight.
[Footnote 1: _In actual fact, the dying pueblo of Pecos was abandoned
some years before the American occupation of New Mexico._]
2
STONE LIPS
IT was not difficult for the Bishop to waken early. After midnight his
body became more and more chilled and cramped. He said his prayers
before he rolled out of his blankets, remembering Father Vaillant's
maxim that if you said your prayers first, you would find plenty of time
for other things afterward.
Going through the silent pueblo to Jacinto's door, the Bishop woke him
and asked him to make a fire. While the Indian went to get the mules
ready, Father Latour got his coffee-pot and tin cup out of his
saddle-bags, and a round loaf of Mexican bread. With bread and black
coffee, he could travel day after day. Jacinto was for starting without
breakfast, but Father Latour made him sit down and share his loaf. Bread
is never too plenty in Indian households. Clara was still lying on the
settle with her baby.
At four o'clock they were on the road, Jacinto riding the mule that
carried the blankets. He knew the trails through his own mountains well
enough to follow them in the dark. Toward noon the Bishop suggested a
halt to rest the mules, but his guide looked at the sky and shook his
head. The sun was nowhere to be seen, the air was thick and grey and
smelled of snow. Very soon the snow began to fall--lightly at first, but
all the while becoming heavier. The vista of pine trees ahead of them
grew shorter and shorter through the vast powdering of descending
flakes. A little after midday a burst of wind sent the snow whirling in
coils about the two travellers, and a great storm broke. The wind was
like a hurricane at sea, and the air became blind with snow. The Bishop
could scarcely see his guide--saw only parts of him, now a head, now a
shoulder, now only the black rump of his mule. Pine trees by the way
stood out for a moment, then disappeared absolutely in the whirlpool of
snow. Trail and landmarks, the mountain itself, were obliterated.
Jacinto sprang from his mule and unstrapped the roll of blankets.
Throwing the saddle-bags to the Bishop, he shouted, "Come, I know a
place. Be quick, Padre."
The Bishop protested they could not leave the mules. Jacinto said the
mules must take their chance.
For Father Latour the next hour was a test of endurance. He was blind
and breathless, panting through his open mouth. He clambered over
half-visible rocks, fell over prostrate trees, sank into deep holes and
struggled out, always following the red blankets on the shoulders of the
Indian boy, which stuck out when the boy himself was lost to sight.
Suddenly the snow seemed thinner. The guide stopped short. They were
standing, the Bishop made out, under an overhanging wall of rock which
made a barrier against the storm. Jacinto dropped the blankets from his
shoulder and seemed to be preparing to climb the cliff. Looking up, the
Bishop saw a peculiar formation in the rocks; two rounded ledges, one
directly over the other, with a mouth-like opening between. They
suggested two great stone lips, slightly parted and thrust outward. Up
to this mouth Jacinto climbed quickly by footholds well known to him.
Having mounted, he lay down on the lower lip, and helped the Bishop to
clamber up. He told Father Latour to wait for him on this projection
while he brought up the baggage.
A few moments later the Bishop slid after Jacinto and the blankets,
through the orifice, into the throat of the cave. Within stood a wooden
ladder, like that used in kivas, and down this he easily made his way to
the floor.
He found himself in a lofty cavern, shaped somewhat like a Gothic
chapel, of vague outline,--the only light within was that which came
through the narrow aperture between the stone lips. Great as was his
need of shelter, the Bishop, on his way down the ladder, was struck by a
reluctance, an extreme distaste for the place. The air in the cave was
glacial, penetrated to the very bones, and he detected at once a fetid
odour, not very strong but highly disagreeable. Some twenty feet or so
above his head the open mouth let in grey daylight like a high transom.
While he stood gazing about, trying to reckon the size of the cave, his
guide was intensely preoccupied in making a careful examination of the
floor and walls. At the foot of the ladder lay a heap of half-burned
logs. There had been a fire there, and it had been extinguished with
fresh earth,--a pile of dust covered what had been the heart of the
fire. Against the cavern wall was a heap of piñon faggots, neatly
piled. After he had made a minute examination of the floor, the guide
began cautiously to move this pile of wood, taking the sticks up one by
one, and putting them in another spot. The Bishop supposed he would make
a fire at once, but he seemed in no haste to do so. Indeed, when he had
moved the wood he sat down upon the floor and fell into reflection.
Father Latour urged him to build a fire without further delay.
"Padre," said the Indian boy, "I do not know if it was right to bring
you here. This place is used by my people for ceremonies and is known
only to us. When you go out from here, you must forget."
"I will forget, certainly. But unless we can have a fire, we had better
go back into the storm. I feel ill here already."
Jacinto unrolled the blankets and threw the dryest one about the
shivering priest. Then he bent over the pile of ashes and charred wood,
but what he did was to select a number of small stones that had been
used to fence in the burning embers. These he gathered in his _serape_ and
carried to the rear wall of the cavern, where, a little above his head,
there seemed to be a hole. It was about as large as a very big
watermelon, of an irregular oval shape.
Holes of that shape are common in the black volcanic cliffs of the
Pajarito Plateau, where they occur in great numbers. This one was
solitary, dark, and seemed to lead into another cavern. Though it lay
higher than Jacinto's head, it was not beyond easy reach of his arms,
and to the Bishop's astonishment he began deftly and noiselessly to
place the stones he had collected within the mouth of this orifice,
fitting them together until he had entirely closed it. He then cut
wedges from the piñon faggots and inserted them into the cracks between
the stones. Finally, he took a handful of the earth that had been used
to smother the dead fire, and mixed it with the wet snow that had blown
in between the stone lips. With this thick mud he plastered over his
masonry, and smoothed it with his palm. The whole operation did not take
a quarter of an hour.
Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire. The
odour so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the fragrance
of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same
time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father
Latour's head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring
in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he
grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this
cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant
drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The
slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the
cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow
him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof grew
much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down
over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was
plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife,
he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the
Bishop to do likewise.
Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite
the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of
the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great
underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was
far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood
moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a
rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and
power.
"It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.
"_Si, Padre_." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of
the seam, and plastered it up again.
When they returned to the fire, the patch of daylight up between the two
lips had grown much paler. The Bishop saw it die with regret. He took
from his saddle-bags his coffee-pot and a loaf of bread and a goat
cheese. Jacinto climbed up to the lower ledge of the entrance, shook a
pine tree, and filled the coffee-pot and one of the blankets with fresh
snow. While his guide was thus engaged, the Bishop took a swallow of old
Taos whisky from his pocket flask. He never liked to drink spirits in
the presence of an Indian.
Jacinto declared that he thought himself lucky to get bread and black
coffee. As he handed the Bishop back his tin cup after drinking its
contents, he rubbed his hand over his wide sash with a smile of pleasure
that showed all his white teeth.
"We had good luck to be near here," he said. "When we leave the mules, I
think I can find my way here, but I am not sure. I have not been here
very many times. You was scare, Padre?"
The Bishop reflected. "You hardly gave me time to be scared, boy. Were
you?"
The Indian shrugged his shoulders. "I think not to return to pueblo," he
admitted.
Father Latour read his breviary long by the light of the fire. Since
early morning his mind had been on other than spiritual things. At last
he felt that he could sleep. He made Jacinto repeat a _Pater Noster_
with him, as he always did on their night camps, rolled himself in his
blankets, and stretched out, feet to the fire. He had it in his mind,
however, to waken in the night and study a little the curious hole his
guide had so carefully closed. After he put on the mud, Jacinto had
never looked in the direction of that hole again, and Father Latour,
observing Indian good manners, had tried not to glance toward it.
He did waken, and the fire was still giving off a rich glow of light in
that lofty Gothic chamber. But there against the wall was his guide,
standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the
rock, his body flattened against it, his ear over that patch of fresh
mud, listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he
looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his
solicitude. The Bishop closed his eyes without making a sound and
wondered why he had supposed he could catch his guide asleep.
The next morning they crawled out through the stone lips, and dropped
into a gleaming white world. The snow-clad mountains were red in the
rising sun. The Bishop stood looking down over ridge after ridge of
wintry fir trees with the tender morning breaking over them, all their
branches laden with soft, rose-coloured clouds of virgin snow.