Yaqui’s wife. Indians had hearts and souls the same as white people.
It was a ridiculous and extraordinary and base thing to be callous to
the truth. Montes had spent not a little time in the pampas among the
Gauchos and for that bold race he had admiration and respect. Indeed,
coming to think about it, the Gauchos resembled these Yaquis. Montes
took the trouble to go among English and American acquaintances he had
made in Progreso, and learned more about this oppressed tribe.
The vast plateau of northwestern Mexico, a desert and mountainous
region rich in minerals, was the home of the Yaquis. For more than one
hundred and sixty years there had been war between the Yaquis and the
Mexicans. And recently, following a bloody raid credited to the Yaquis,
the government that happened to be in power determined to exterminate
them. To that end it was hunting the Indians down, killing those who
resisted capture, and sending the rest to the torture of the henequen
fields.
But more interesting was the new information that Montes gathered. The
Yaquis were an extraordinary, able-bodied, and intelligent people. Most
of them spoke Spanish. They had many aboriginal customs and beliefs,
but some were Roman Catholics. The braves made better miners and
laborers than white men. Moreover, they possessed singular mechanical
gifts and quickly learned to operate machines more efficiently than
most whites. They possessed wonderful physical development and a
marvelous endurance. At sixty years Yaquis had perfectly sound white
teeth and hair as black as night. These desert men could travel seventy
miles on foot in one day with only a bag of pinole. Water they could
do without for days. And it was said that some of the Yaqui runners
performed feats of speed, strength, and endurance beyond credence.
Montes, remembering the seven-foot stature of that Yaqui chief and the
spread of shoulders and the wonder of his spare lithe limbs, thought
that he could believe much.
The act of Perez in deliberately parting the chief from his loved
ones was cruel and despicable; and it seemed to establish in Montes’s
mind an excuse for the disgust and hate he had come to feel for the
tyrannical little officer. But, being frank with himself, Montes
confessed that this act had only fixed a hate he already had acquired.
The Brazilian convinced himself that he had intuitively grasped a
portent apparently lost on Perez. One of those silent, intent-faced
Yaquis was going to kill this epauleted scion of a rich Yucatecan
house. Montes had read it in these faces. He had lived among the
blood-spilling Gauchos and he knew the menace of silent fierce savages.
And he did not make any bones about the admission to himself that he
hoped some Yaqui would kill the peacocked Mexican. Montes had Spanish
in him, and something of the raw passion of the Gauchos he admired;
and it suited him to absorb this morbid presentiment. The Yaqui chief
fascinated him, impelled him. Montes determined to learn where this
giant had been sent and to watch him, win his confidence, if such a
thing was possible. _Quién sabe?_ Montes felt more reasons than one for
his desire to get under the skin of this big Yaqui.
III
In the interior of Yucatan there were vast barren areas of land fit
only for the production of henequen. Nothing but jungle and henequen
would grow there. It was a limestone country. The soil could not
absorb water. It soaked through. Here and there, miles apart, were
_cenotes_, underground caverns full of water, and usually these marked
the location of a hacienda of one of the rich planters. The climate was
hot, humid, and for any people used to high altitudes it spelled death.
The plantation of Don Sancho Perez, father of the young
lieutenant, consisted of fifty thousand acres. It adjoined the
hundred-thousand-acre tract of Donna Isabel Mendoza. The old Don was
ambitious to merge the plantations into one, so that he could dominate
the fiber output of that region. To this end he had long sought to win
for his son the hand of Donna Isabel’s beautiful daughter.
The big Yaqui Indian who had been wantonly separated from his wife by
young Perez was in the squad of prisoners that had been picked out by
the young officer to work on his father’s plantation.
They were manacled at night and herded like wild beasts into a pen and
watched by armed guards. They were routed out at dawn and put to work
in the fiber fields. For food they had, each of them, a single lump
of coarse soggy bread--one lump once every day. When the weaker among
them began to lag, to slow down, to sicken, they were whipped to their
tasks.[1]
Yaqui knew that never again would he see his wife and baby--never hear
from them--never know what became of them. He was worked like a galley
slave, all the harder because of his great strength and endurance. He
would be driven until he broke down.
Yaqui’s work consisted of cutting henequen fiber leaves. He had a
curved machete and he walked down the endless aisles between the lines
of great century plants and from each plant he cut the lower circle
of leaves. Each plant gave him a heavy load and he carried it to the
nearest one of the hand-car tracks that crossed the plantation. The
work of other Indians was to push hand cars along these tracks and
gather the loads.
[Illustration: YAQUI KNEW THAT NEVER AGAIN WOULD HE SEE HIS WIFE AND
BABY--NEVER HEAR FROM THEM--NEVER KNOW WHAT BECAME OF THEM]
It took Yaqui six days to cut along the length of one aisle. And as far
as he could see stretched a vast, hot, green wilderness with its
never-ending lines and lanes, its labyrinthine maze of intersecting
aisles, its hazy, copper-hued horizons speared and spiked by the great
bayonet-like leaves. He had been born and raised on the rugged mountain
plateaus far to the north, where the clear, sweet, cold morning air
stung and the midday sun was only warm to his back, where there were
grass and water and flowers and trees, where the purple canyons yawned
and the black peaks searched the sky. Here he was chained in the thick,
hot, moist night, where the air was foul, and driven out in the long
day under a fiery sun, where the henequen reeked and his breath clogged
in his throat and his eyes were burning balls and his bare feet were
like rotting hoofs.
The time came when Montes saw that the Yaqui looked no more toward that
northland which he would never see again. He dreamed no more hopeless
dreams. Somehow he knew when his wife and baby were no more a part of
him on the earth. For something within him died and there were strange,
silent voices at his elbow. He listened to them. And in the depths of
his being there boiled a maelstrom of blood. He worked on and waited.
At night in the close-crowded filthy pen, with the dampness of tropical
dews stealing in, and all about him the silent prostrate forms of his
stricken people, he lay awake and waited enduringly through the long
hours till a fitful sleep came to him. By day in the henequen fields,
with the furnace blasts of wind swirling down the aisles, with the
moans of his beaten and failing comrades full in his ears, he waited
with a Yaqui’s patience.
He saw his people beaten and scourged and starved. He saw them sicken
and fail--wilt under the hot sun--die in the henequen aisles--and be
thrown like dogs into ditches with quicklime. One by one they went and
when they were nearly all gone another squad took their places. The
Yaqui recognized Indians of other tribes of his race. But they did not
know him. He had greatly changed. Only the shell of him was left. And
that seemed unbreakable, deathless. He did not tell these newcomers to
the fields what torture lay in store for them. He might have been dumb.
He only waited, adding day by day, in the horror of the last throes of
his old comrades, something more to that hell in his blood. He watched
them die and then the beginning of the end for his new comrades. They
were doomed. They were to be driven till they dropped. And others would
be brought to fill their places, till at last there were no Yaquis
left. The sun was setting for his race.
The Yaqui and his fellow toilers had one day of rest--the Sabbath.
There was no freedom. And always there were guards and soldiers. Sunday
was the day of bull fights in the great corral at the hacienda. And on
these occasions Yaqui was given extra work. Montes knew the Indian
looked forward to this day. The old Don’s son, Lieutenant Perez, would
come down from the city to attend the fight. Then surely Yaqui fed his
dark soul with more cunning, more patience, more promise.
It was the Yaqui’s work to help drag disemboweled and dying horses from
the bull ring and to return with sand to cover up the gory spots in the
arena. Often Montes saw him look up at the crowded circle of seats and
at the box where the gray old Don and his people and friends watched
the spectacle. There were handsome women with white lace over their
heads and in whose dark and slumberous eyes lurked something the Yaqui
knew. It was something that was in the race. Lieutenant Perez was there
leaning toward the proud señorita. The Indian watched her with strange
intensity. She appeared indifferent to the efforts of the _picadores_
and the _banderilleros_, those men in the arena whose duty it was to
infuriate the bull for the artist with the sword--the matador. When
he appeared the beautiful señorita wakened to interest. But not until
there was blood on the bright blade did she show the fire and passion
of her nature. It was sight of blood that quickened her. It was death,
then, that she wanted to see.
And last the Yaqui let his gaze rivet on the dark, arrogant visage of
young Perez. Did not the great chief then become superhuman, or was
it only Montes’s morbid fancy? When Yaqui turned away, did he not feel
a promise of fulfillment in the red haze of the afternoon sun, in the
red tinge of the stained sand, in the red and dripping tongue of the
tortured bull? Montes knew the Yaqui only needed to live long enough
and there would be something. And death seemed aloof from this Indian.
The ferocity of the desert was in him and its incalculable force of
life. In his eyes had burned a seared memory of the violent thrust with
which Perez had driven his wife and baby forever from his sight.
Montes’s changed attitude evidently found favor in the proud señorita’s
eyes. She had but trifled with an earnest and humble suitor; to the
advances of a man, bold, ardent, strange, with something unfathomable
in his wooing, she was not indifferent. The fact did not cool Montes’s
passion, but it changed him somehow. The Spanish in him was the part
that so ardently loved and hated; his mother had been French, and from
her he had inherited qualities that kept him eternally in conflict with
his instincts.
Montes had his living quarters in Mérida, where all the rich henequen
planters had town houses. It was not a long horseback ride out to
the haciendas of the two families in which Montes had become most
interested. His habit of late, after returning from a visit to the
henequen fields, had been to choose the early warm hours of the
afternoon to call upon Señorita Mendoza. There had been a time when
his calls had been formally received by the Donna Isabel, but of late
she had persisted in her siesta, leaving Montes to Dolores. Montes
had grasped the significance of this--the future of Dolores had been
settled and there no longer was risk in leaving her alone. But Montes
had developed a theory that the future of any young woman was an
uncertainty.
The Mendoza town house stood in the outskirts of fashionable Mérida.
The streets were white, the houses were white, the native Mayan women
wore white, and always it seemed to Montes as he took the familiar
walk that the white sun blazed down on an immaculate city. But there
were dark records against the purity of Mérida and the Yaqui slave
driving was one of them. The Mendoza mansion had been built with money
coming from the henequen fields. It stood high on a knoll, a stately
white structure looking down upon a formal garden, where white pillars
and statues gleamed among green palms and bowers of red roses. At
the entrance, on each side of the wide flagstone walk, stood a huge
henequen plant.
On this day the family was in town and Montes expected that the
señorita would see him coming. He derived pleasure from the assurance
that, compared with Perez, he was someone good to look at. Beside him
the officer was a swarthy undersized youth. But Montes failed to see
the white figure of the girl and suffered chagrin for his vanity.
The day was warm. As he climbed the high, wide stone steps his brow
grew moist and an oppression weighed upon him. Only in the very early
morning here in Yucatan did he ever have any energy. The climate was
enervating. No wonder it was that servants and people slept away the
warmer hours. Crossing the broad stone court and the spacious outside
hall, Montes entered the dim, dark, musty parlors and passed through to
the patio.
Here all was colorful luxuriance of grass and flower and palm, great
still ferns and trailing vines. It was not cool, but shady and moist.
Only a soft spray of falling water and a humming of bees disturbed the
deep silence. The place seemed drowned in sweet fragrance, rich and
subtle, thickening the air so that it was difficult to breathe. In a
bower roofed by roses lay Señorita Mendoza, asleep in a hammock.
Softly Montes made his way to her side and stood looking down at her.
As a picture, as something feminine, beautiful and young and soft and
fresh and alluring, asleep and therefore sincere, she seemed all that
was desirable. Dolores Mendoza was an unusual type for a Yucatecan of
Spanish descent. She was blond. Her hair was not golden, yet nearly
so; she had a broad, low, beautiful brow, with level eyebrows, and the
effect of her closed lids was fascinating with their promise; her nose
was small, straight, piquant, with delicate nostrils that showed they
could quiver and dilate; her mouth, the best feature of her beauty, was
as red as the roses that drooped over her, and its short curved upper
lip seemed full, sweet, sensuous. She had the oval face of her class,
but fair, not olive-skinned, and her chin, though it did not detract
from her charms, was far from being strong. Perhaps her greatest
attraction, seen thus in the slumber of abandon, was her slender form,
round-limbed and graceful.
Montes gazed at her until he felt a bitterness of revolt against the
deceit of Nature. She gladdened all the senses of man. But somehow she
seemed false to the effect she created. If he watched her long in this
beautiful guise of sleep he would deaden his intelligence. She was
not for him. So he pulled a red rose and pushed it against her lips,
playfully tapping them until she awoke. Her eyes unclosed. They were
a surprise. They should have been blue, but they were tawny. Sleepy,
dreamy, wonderful cat eyes they were, clear and soft, windows of the
truth of her nature. Montes suddenly felt safe again, sure of himself.
“Ah, Señor Montes,” she said. “You found me asleep. How long have you
been here?”
“A long time, I think,” he replied, as he seated himself on a bench
near her hammock. “Watching you asleep, I forgot time. But alas! time
flies--and you awoke.”
Dolores laughed. She had perfect white teeth that looked made to bite
and enjoy biting. Her smile added to her charm.
“Sir, one would think you liked me best asleep.”
“I do. You are always beautiful, Dolores. But when you are asleep you
seem sincere. Now you are--Dolores Mendoza.”
“Who is sincere? You are not,” she retorted. “I don’t know you any
more. You seem to try to make me dissatisfied with myself.”
“So you ought to be.”
“Why? Because I cannot run away with you to Brazil?”
“No. Because you look like an angel but are not one. Because your
beauty, your charm, your sweetness deceive men. You seem the
incarnation of love and joy.”
“Ah!” she cried, stretching out her round arms and drawing a deep
breath that swelled her white neck. “You are jealous. But I am happy.
I have what I want. I am young and I enjoy. I love to be admired.
I love to be loved. I love jewels, gowns, all I have, pleasure,
excitement, music, flowers. I love to eat. I love to be idle, lazy,
dreamy. I love to sleep. And you, horrid man, awake me to make me
think.”
“That is impossible, Dolores,” he replied. “You cannot think.”
“My mind works pretty well. But I’ll admit I’m a little animal--a
tawny-eyed cat. So, Montes, you must stroke me the right way or I will
scratch.”
“Well, I’d rather you scratched,” said Montes. “A man likes a woman who
loves him tenderly and passionately one moment and tears his hair out
the next.”
“You know, of course, señor,” she replied mockingly. “The little Alva
girl, for instance. You admired her. Perhaps she--”
“She is adorable,” he returned complacently. “I go to her for
consolation.”
Dolores made a sharp passionate gesture, a contrast to her usual
languorous movements. Into the sleepy, tawny eyes shot a dilating fire.
“Have you made love to her?” she demanded.
“Dolores, do you imagine any man could resist that girl?” he rejoined.
“Have you?” she repeated with heaving breast.
Montes discarded his tantalizing lightness. “No, Dolores, I have not.
I have lived in a torment lately. My love for you seems turning to
hate.”
“No!” she cried, extending her hands. She softened. Her lips parted. If
there were depths in her, Montes had sounded them.
“Dolores, tell me the truth,” he said, taking her hands. “You have
never been true.”
“I am true to my family. They chose Perez for me to marry--before I
ever knew you. It is settled. I shall marry him. But--”
“But! Dolores, you love me?”
She drooped her head. “Yes, señor--lately it has come to that. Ah!
Don’t--don’t! Montes, I beg of you! You forget--I’m engaged to Perez.”
Montes released her. In her confession and resistance there was proof
of his injustice. She was no nobler than her class. She was a butterfly
in her fancies, a little cat in her greedy joy of physical life. But in
her agitation he saw a deeper spirit.
“Dolores, if I had come first--before Perez--would you have given
yourself to me?” he asked.
“Ah, señor, with all my heart!” she replied softly.
“Dearest--I think I must ask you to forgive me for--for something I
can’t confess. And now tell me--this reception given to-morrow by your
mother--is that to announce your engagement to Perez?”
“Yes and I will be free then till fall--when--when--”
“When you will be married?”
She bowed assent and hesitatingly slid a white hand toward him.
“Fall! It’s a long time. Dolores, I must go back to Brazil.”
“Ah, señor, that will kill me! Stay!” she entreated.
“But it would be dangerous. Perez dislikes me. I hate him. Something
terrible might come of it.”
“That is his risk. I have consented to marry him. I will do my duty
before and after. But I see no reason why I may not have a little
happiness--of my own--until that day comes. Life for me will not
contain all I could wish. I told you; now I am happy. But you were
included. Señor, if you love me you will remain.”
“Dolores, can you think we will not suffer more?” he asked.
“I know we will afterward. But we shall not now.”
“Now is perilous to me. To realize you love me! I did not think
you capable of it. Listen! Something--something might prevent your
marriage--or happen afterward. All--all is so uncertain.”
“_Quién sabe?_” she whispered; and to the tawny, sleepy languor of her
eyes there came a fancy, a dream, a mystic hope.
“Dolores, if Perez were lost to you--one way or another--would you
marry me?” he broke out huskily. Not until then had he asked her hand
in marriage.
“If such forlorn hope will make you stay--make you happy--yes, Señor
Montes,” was her answer.
* * * * *
There came a time when Yaqui was needed in the factory where the
henequen fiber was extracted from the leaves. He had come to be a
valuable machine--an instrument of toil that did not run down or go
wrong. One guard said to another: “That big black peon takes a lot of
killing!” and then ceased to watch him closely. He might have escaped.
He might have crossed the miles and miles of henequen fields to the
jungle, and under that dense cover had made his way northward to the
coast. Yaqui had many a chance. But he never looked toward the north.
At first they put him to feeding henequen leaves into the maw of a
crushing machine. The juicy, sticky, odorous substance of the big
twenty-pound leaf was squeezed into a pulp, out of which came the white
glistening threads of fiber. These fibers made sisal rope--rope second
in quality only to the manila.
By and by he was promoted. They put him in the pressing room to work
on the ponderous iron press which was used to make the henequen bales.
This machine was a high, strange-looking object, oblong in shape,
like a box, opening in the middle from the top down. It had several
distinct movements, all operated by levers. Long bundles of henequen
were carried in from the racks and laid in the press until it was half
full. Then a lever was pulled, the machine closed on the fiber and
opened again. This operation was repeated again and again. Then it was
necessary for the operator to step from his platform upon the fiber in
the machine and stamp it down and jump upon it and press it closely all
round. When this had been done the last time the machine seemed wide
open and stuffed so full that it would never close. But when the lever
was pulled the ponderous steel jaws shut closer and closer and locked.
Then the sides fell away, to disclose a great smooth bale of henequen
ready for shipment.
The Yaqui learned to operate this press so skillfully that the work was
left to him. When his carriers went out to the racks for more fiber he
was left alone in the room.
Some strange relation sprang up between Yaqui and his fiber press.
For him it never failed to operate. He knew to a strand just how much
fiber made a perfect bale. And he became so accurate that his bales
were never weighed. They came out glistening, white, perfect to the
pound. There was a strange affinity between this massive, steel-jawed
engine and something that lived in the Yaqui’s heart, implacable and
immutable, appalling in its strength to wait, in its power to crush.
IV
There seemed no failing of the endurance of this primitive giant, but
his great frame had wasted away until it was a mere hulk. Owing to his
value now to the hacienda, Yaqui was given rations in lieu of the ball
of soggy bread; they were not, however, what the Indian needed. Montes
at last won Yaqui’s gratitude.
“Señor, if Yaqui wanted to eat it would be meat he needed,” said the
chief. Then Montes added meat to the wine, bread, and fruit he secretly
brought to the Indian.
When Montes began covert kindnesses to the poor Yaqui slaves the chief
showed gratitude and pathos: “Señor Montes is good--but the sun of the
Yaquis is setting.”
Perez in his triumphant arrogance evidently derived pleasure from being
magnanimous to the man he instinctively knew was his rival.
One day at the hacienda when Montes rode up to meet Donna Isabel and
Dolores he found them accompanied by Perez and his parents. Almost
immediately the young officer suggested gayly:
“Señor, pray carry Dolores off somewhere. My father has something to
plan with Donna Isabel. It must be a secret from Dolores. Take her a
walk--talk to her, señor--keep her excited--make love to her!”
“I shall be happy to obey. Will you come, señorita?” said Montes.
If they expected Dolores to pout, they were mistaken. Her slow, sleepy
glance left the face of her future husband as she turned away silently
to accompany Montes. They walked along the palm-shaded road, out toward
the huge, open, sunny space that was the henequen domain.
“I hate Perez,” she burst out suddenly. “He meant to taunt you. He
thinks I am his slave--a creature without mind or heart. Señor, make
love to me!”
“You will be his slave--soon,” whispered Montes bitterly.
“Never!” she exclaimed passionately.
They reached the end of the shady road. The mill was silent. Montes
saw the Indian standing motionless close at hand, in the shade of the
henequen racks.
“Dolores, did you mean what you just said?” asked Montes eagerly.
“That I will never be Perez’s slave?”
“No; the other thing you said.”
“Yes, I did,” she replied. “Make love to me, señor. It was his wish. I
must learn to obey.”
With sullen scorn she spoke, not looking at Montes, scarcely realizing
the actual purport of her speech. But when Montes took her in his arms
she started back with a cry. He held her. And suddenly clasping her
tightly he bent his head to kiss the red lips she opened to protest.