CHAPTER I

AN OUTPOST OF SPAIN

A hundred years ago, in a valley that lies on the slope of flame-shot mountains, a little town of ancient crooked streets slept in the sun, entirely shut away from outside civilization--a bit of old Spain, lying in rare and mellow beauty in the mountains of the Sangre de Cristo. Beyond the Cordilleras lay other ranges of rocky, snow-capped peaks, and beyond these again stretched hundreds of miles of barren desert, succeeded by still other hundreds of miles of rolling plains--a land of red men and bearded bison.

Through the streets of the adobe-walled _Villa_, the town of Santa Fe, life flowed with a sluggish content or took siesta. At this moment it was taking siesta. The cook slept with her bare toes spread in the cool mud beneath a dripping _olla_, the wood boy and his _compadre_, the burro slept within a few feet of each other, the burro standing in the sun, the boy lying in the blue shadow of a wall. Doña Gertrudis Chaves y Lopez slept with open mouth, through which issued contented little whistles of escaping steam. Don Anabel Lopez himself slept, but not even sleep could relax the pride of his hawk nose, the defiance of his well-bred snore.

But Consuelo Lopez did not sleep; she lay in her bedroom, sulking. She was bored as only sixteen can be bored, and waved a naked foot in the air in rage. “_Bestia!_” she exploded, venting her angry thought. “_Moribundos!_ The dead ones!” Reaching under her pillow, Consuelo drew out a silver case from which she extracted a cigarette. Slipping to a window where one long dazzling shaft of sunshine pierced a crack in the shutter, she held a small burning-glass over a wisp of paper. It flamed in a moment; the cigarette was lit, and she resumed her pose. A step sounded outside the door. Consuelo threw the cigarette disdainfully behind the bed, but the step passed on and she recovered it again before it had time to go out. It was fortunate that Doña Gertrudis was so insistent upon her daughter’s beauty sleep. Consuelo would be permitted to indulge her boredom undisturbed for another hour. A raging boredom she rather enjoyed, but not a languid one.

“They think it enough for me to sit here and twiddle my fan. To sit here and listen to Manuel! Tink-a-tinkaa, tink-a-tink, Thy heart so true! _Caramba!_ I know everything he can say by heart. Rather would I marry myself to one of the rope-haired trappers or the barbaric Yanqui caravaners that come over the plains a-trading. _They_ are men. What if they do lack _cultivacion_, and cannot roll their r’s. They appeal to me. Yes!

“Ah, would but Don Tiburcio Garcia arrive, with something of the outside world about him, and the latest news from Chihuahua and Mexico City. And clothes, ah, what clothes! What will he think of me?”

Consuelo stretched herself reflectively upon the bed, tossing aside a hand-woven coverlet of drawn threads, and lifted the bare foot to catch a breeze stirring through deep-silled windows. She took from the carved chest of drawers beside her a wrought-gold mirror studded with pink semi-precious stones and carefully regarded her face from this angle and that. The sole imperfections that appeared within its frame were those of a cracked mercury back. Consuelo considered and approved the mirror’s various reflections. They were more pleasant than her thoughts. In fact, her mirrored face was all that she cared about at the moment. Hers was that most charming of Spanish types, which in profile is straight-nosed, delicately cut, but which in full face appears childish, the nose short, a trifle broad, the eyes large and heavy-lidded, the lips full, petulant. There was strength in the squaring of the jaw and in level, heavily marked brows, scowling now with her rebellions.

Everything one wanted to do was prohibited--to dance with the caravaners, for example. Only disagreeable things were permitted. How could one consider one’s suitors seriously if they were like Manuel, her second cousin, so eager that he bored beyond insults? He would be on hand this afternoon, singing his interminable verses. Well enough to have him as a sort of permanent court, even though Luis did make all sorts of fun of his cousin. But then, Luis was critical of everything; brothers generally were. He’d be a bit more respectful when he heard about Don Tiburcio! A _caballero_ from the City of Mexico, a veritable Spanish grandee? Consuelo did not dream, after Don Tiburcio had visited Santa Fe the summer before, that he could ever again be interested in her. Yet he had sent word to Don Anabel that he was coming, and had made special inquiry for her. She blushed with embarrassment when she thought of the outrageous manner in which she had treated Don Tiburcio; she’d slapped his face when he raised her hand and was about to implant a kiss upon it!

But then, she was only a little girl last year. Now she could appreciate what it meant to have so courtly and traveled a suitor. In a few days his pack train should arrive from Chihuahua and life would be vastly more exciting. There would be new clothes for her, too. Kid shoes--oh, she would be furious if they were not lefts and rights--brocade, perhaps some sapphire earrings.... It was time to dress for the afternoon. Still Consuelo lay looking idly from her mirror to the windows. Who knew at what moment one might hear the call, “The caravan is coming!” and she, with every other girl and woman in Santa Fe, would dash to window or door to gaze at the Yankee traders as they rode into town. Then there would be the delight of new goods to buy from those unknown lands beyond the rising sun, new faces to see, new thoughts to think upon.

The very thought brought Consuelo to her feet. Throwing off the ancient blue Chinese mantle brought in for her from the Orient by her father, she tried the effect of a high comb in her hair. Dipping a wide-toothed tortoise comb into the tepid water that still stood in a heavy silver washbasin by her bed, she ran it through the dark waves till they curled crisply, with a shining order. Pulling at the sides till a few loose ringlets detached themselves, she set the comb atop the coiled mass, draped over it a white lace mantilla, and stood entranced. She would wear it to the _baile_ when the caravan came.

Somehow a greater thrill lay in the advent of the lean, ruddy strangers from America than in the coming of the Spaniard’s train. From the arrival of one caravan to another she could scarcely wait--the creaking wheels, the clatter of chains, the shouting and talking, the strange English tongue. She introduced herself before the mirror and smiled demurely at the imaginary gentleman she was meeting.

Then tossing comb and lace aside, she threw herself on the bed again and shouted, “Fay-lee-cita! Fay-lee-ee-cita!” It was some time before Felicita, Consuelo’s peon slave, appeared; she was met by a small red shoe thrown at the door, but hitting the girl squarely as she entered the room.

“Why do you keep me waiting for my water every single day?” Consuelo was shouting; but she stopped now, a bit abashed. “How could I tell you would come this time so soon? But I must be dressed, quick!” She had suddenly remembered that at five some young trappers would be down from Taos to talk with her father on business, and she wished to be dressed and sitting in the _patio_, from where one could see and be seen when visitors entered the _zaguan_ and sat with Don Anabel in the living room.

Felicita backed out of the door and fairly ran after the water, and Consuelo began to throw clothing about the room, already disorderly, but quaint and full of charm, a curious combination of luxury and crudity. Large and high-ceiled, its adobe walls were tinted a salmon pink; the two windows, square-paned, deeply recessed by the three-foot walls, were curtained with lace, and the great carven bedstead was draped with rose-red damask hangings from Spain. On the high chest of drawers were a pair of silver candlesticks, and above hung a heavily framed mirror of old Spanish make. Before a small corner fireplace with an Indian chimney lay a thick and enormous buffalo skin, and the rough board floor was strewn with other peltries. On each side of the bed lay a tinted white Angora sheepskin. At the foot of the bed stood a high carven chest in which lay Consuelo’s clothing, gowns brought over many weary hundreds of miles, packed securely on the backs of burros that wound mountain passes, crossed ravines, and plodded over deserts in the long journey up from Vera Cruz, the eastern port of Mexico.

There were many shawls, black Spanish lace from Seville, a bright embroidered peasant challis, gold and salmon flowers on a white ground, fine merinos and cashmeres of European peasant patterns. Consuelo chose now a white dress of sheer batiste, embroidered heavily in white, full-skirted, with a short plain bodice. She donned the red shoe that still lay under the bed, and when Felicita had brought her the other from the doorway, she permitted the peon woman to throw the flowered shawl over her shoulder, and stepped out into the _corredor_. Then she turned impulsively and ran back. Snatching a silk scarf from the bed, she draped it over Felicita’s head.

“Here. Did I hurt your tummy? Take this.”

Her mother was waiting for her in the living room. Across the table from Doña Gertrudis sat Manuel, plucking his guitar tentatively, persuasively. Not everyone in New Spain rose when a lady entered the room, but Manuel always stood when Consuelo appeared in the doorway. Her mother did not glance up from the altar-piece which she embroidered; it was the only work that her plump fingers had ever been engaged upon. Doña Gertrudis was fat, small-boned, her chin lost in the amiable creases which had engulfed the beauty of her youth. In spite of the heat of the August day, she was dressed in the favorite black of the Mexican woman of Spanish descent. Heavy rings of yellow gold, set with garnets, roughly cut but of marvelous color, covered her fingers, a bracelet to match weighted her small wrist, and weighty gold earrings pulled down the lobes of her fat little ears. Her dress of black silk was voluminous and hung straight from her shoulders,--a fact which the shawl about her shoulders could not hide.

“And we shall have roast young pig, joint of young antelope, guinea-fowl, when Don Tiburcio arrives,” she was saying as Consuelo came in. “Manuel has a new _copleta_, Consuelo _querida_, composed specially for you, today,” she went on. Doña Gertrudis had been a famous coquette in her own time, and although the announced visit of Don Tiburcio Garcia had opened up wider vistas matrimonially for her daughter than New Spain had previously afforded, she had a family fondness for her cousin’s son and was too diplomatic to slight him.

Manuel, taking silence as assent, was already strumming, and intoning his new _copleta_ in a plaintive nasal tenor. But his presence and his plinking were quite ignored by the girl, who swished to a chair near the window and looked steadfastly out, leaving Doña Gertrudis to keep time with her foot and dream of love.

* * * * *

As to Don Anabel Lopez, _hidalgo_, master of the house and lord of vast lands granted to his family by the Spanish crown a century and a half before, he was not at all pleased with the prospect to which Consuelo looked forward with secret delight and anticipation. The coming of the Yankee traders across the plains with their freighted caravans of mules and covered wagons, was an event to be tolerated only for the gain it brought. Bitterly Don Anabel resented the intrusion of the hated “English” into the province conquered by Spain two centuries before.

Yet he could trade the pelts of beaver, lynx, fox, the robes of buffalo and of deer, brought in to his post by trappers white or red, at a profit that would have made Connecticut Yankees wince had they known that he himself had acquired them for a handful of tawdry merchandise, and stores that were cheaper from New Orleans and St. Louis than from Vera Cruz and Mexico City.

On this warm and sunny afternoon of late summer Don Anabel stood before the door of his store and warehouse, scowling. He could look up the little winding street to the Mountains of the Blood of Christ, as they had been passionately and piously named by the early Conquerors, and red-streaked they were now even in the yellow light of the afternoon sun. Don Anabel looked to the passes that led north and east; he was perturbed.

“Luis,” he called sharply to the young man who lounged through the doorway, a languid cigarette hanging from his lips, “I see a rider coming down the trail from Lamy. Can you see any one following? I believe it must be either an advance of the caravan arriving over the Santa Fe Trail or else the trappers I expected down from Taos, coming by the lower route.

“I only hope it is the trappers, for I would like to get their business over with before the _caravan_ arrives. This Gringo trade from beyond the mountains has cut so largely into our own rightful business within the province that we must make whatever profit we can out of the goods they take back with them. The peltries they buy are cheap at the price, anyway.”

“What is the Governor charging them a load this year?” asked Luis, who was rather a handsome young fellow of eighteen or twenty, with a straight nose and loose, full lips.

“Just what was charged two years ago when the first _caravana_ of wagons entered the territory--five hundred dollars each wagon-load; and, Santa Maria! it is little enough.”

“Little indeed,” assented Luis, indifferently. “When does the excellent Don Tiburcio arrive? Have we been taming the little sister so that she won’t scratch this time?”

“I expect Don Tiburcio at any time now. That may be the dust of his caravan. He is bringing camlet cloth and silken grogram, shawls, combs, white sugar, ammunition, the usual merchandise. And Heaven send he arrive before the Americanos with their cargo from the United States, and have his goods disposed of.”

“And my linen shirts?” Luis inquired with more animation than he had yet shown. He followed his father back into the storeroom.

Don Anabel nodded, a trifle annoyed. “I believe he brings linen. But with the four frilled camisas which I gave you at Easter-time you should have no urgent need for more shirts at present. By the way, you do not wear the ruby ring which your parents gave you at Christmas.” He eyed his son keenly. Luis flicked an ash from his cigarette and replied, evenly: “Not all the time. It is a trifle large, and much too fine a stone to run the risk of losing.”

“So I thought when it was presented to you,” remarked Don Anabel, drily. “How does it happen, then, that I find it on the finger of the gaming friar of Albuquerque----?”

Luis flushed. He did not reply, but looked away in embarrassment.

“The usual thing? Tell me no lies, Luis.”

“I exacted the promise that I might redeem it, and expect to do so very shortly now.”

“Well, I trust that you will. But not from the _fray_. Come to me when you are ready.” Don Anabel drew his hand from his pocket and, opening it palm upward, showed a splendid garnet ring, set in dull heavy gold. “It has cost me three hundred duros to get back your pledge, several times the amount of your losses; but it is too fine a gem to have imported but to lose.”

His words were cut short by a commotion outside in the streets, and shouts coming down the canyon road.

“They are coming! They are coming!” shouted ragged children capering in the roadway.

“Who comes? Who comes?” the cry went up from doorway and street. People poured out into plaza and lane, siestas abandoned for so great an occasion.

“A caravan, from Mexico.” A rider came galloping down the street and drew up in a cloud of dust before Don Anabel’s warehouse. He leaped from the sweating horse, bowed low before Don Anabel, and spoke, “Don Tiburcio Garcia follows on the trail, and his _caravana_ is but a short distance behind him.”

Hastily Don Anabel sent a messenger to his house with the news, but already it had traveled ahead, and as the entire establishment had known for days just what was to be done for the guest from the capital, all was immediately thrown into a fury of activity. The great open square in the center of the Villa became suddenly alive, the loungers before the palace of the Governor all hurried up the street; blanketed Indians from the pueblos followed in leisurely dignity; girls and women flocked to windows and doors; and shouting filled the air.

“Here comes the cavalier from Mexico. The cavalcade of Don Tiburcio de Garcia is arriving.”

Now that the moment was at hand, Doña Gertrudis flew out of her customary placidity like a nervous ground bird fluttering about its nest. She toddled hither and thither on her ridiculous little feet, scolding, all but weeping; she smelled the distilling coffee, threw up her hands, shrieking. “What miserable _café_! Tepid water!” The beverage was in reality almost a pure caffein that had distilled and dripped for two hours, a potent drug.

“And make the chocolate thick, do you hear, Concha? Three eggs in it--three--and beaten a half-hour.” Concha knew well how to make the chocolate, the favorite drink of Spaniard, and of ancient Aztec before him. It was her special province to make it, rich, thick, sweet, beaten like a mousse. Doña Gertrudis tasted the red-hot chili, ordered the house servants this way and that. The corral behind the kitchen was filled with the squawking of unfortunate fowls being chased to their destiny--_arroz con pollo_ (chicken with rice).

Having thoroughly demoralized the slow but eventually sure processes of Lupe, the cook, Doña Gertrudis bustled into her bedchamber to put on more jewels and daub a fine white flour over her cheeks and neck, while she chattered like a parakeet through the doors to Consuelo, who had abandoned Manuel for her mirror.

When the mirror had told her that the necklace of tawny topaz was prettier with white than was the opal chain, she lingered till the sound of horses and a company of men so excited her curiosity that she had to pull back the _persianas_ and peer out. Herded by the shouts of the _arrieros_, a caravan of a hundred mules and burros was being crowded into the plaza. Had they brought her new satin shoes and brocaded skirt? There was Don Tiburcio! In the high hat, a wrought leather jerkin over a gold-embroidered vest, a wide copper-studded belt, and as he dismounted a bit stiffly from his lathered horse Consuelo took note of beautiful tight-fitting trousers, fawn-colored, over which were riding leggings of Mexican leather. All this in a flash, then Consuelo’s eyes swept to the travel-worn face of the southern Don.

A true son of the Conquerors of the New World was Don Tiburcio de Garcia y Mendoza. A dark, lean man of thirty, who looked ten years older, he was tall, and hatchet-jawed, with a nose of perfect aquilinity, and a thin mouth made somewhat prominent by large even teeth. The mouth seemed harsh, cruel even, till it broke into a smile. His brow was high and narrow, and his well-cut ears lay close to his aristocratic head. Don Tiburcio was filled with the adventurous spirit of his forbears or he would not himself come trading at the head of his caravans up the Cordilleras from Mexico, enduring every sort of physical hardship and running the gantlet of fiercely treacherous Indian tribes.

His father, Don Diego Alvar Roybal de Garcia, never left his broad estates in Guadalajara not even to travel north to the immense cattle ranches of the Garcias in Chihuahua. The supervision of all that he left to his son, and as the caravan journeys to the north proved highly gainful, he made no objection to them. Romance called to the young man. The lure that first brought the Spanish Conquistadores up through this country had drawn him--gold and gain, perhaps undiscovered treasure waiting there--and, indeed, at the end he had found beauty, too. Nowhere in the southern provinces had Don Tiburcio seen a face to compare in his estimation with that of the little hoyden who had slapped him the summer before. And to speak truthfully, it was the conquest of that untamed child which had lured him back this time over the hot stretches of desert between Santa Fe and Chihuahua as urgently as the money to be gained in trade.

Night had fallen before arrangements for the caravan had been disposed of and the weary pack animals relieved of their cargo. Don Tiburcio refreshed himself and removed the stains of travel, making ready to present himself in the candlelit _sala_ of Don Anabel’s house and to meet the ladies. He made a fine figure in his velvet short jacket, his silver-buttoned breeches, and a pair of excellent boots with inch heels. He was taller than either his host or Luis, both of whom wore their best heeled boots also, and their finest shirts of frilled white linen, their handsomest serapes and sashes, brought from Mexico the year before. Father and son stood until their guest had seated himself in a heavy low chair. A slippered servant brought small silver goblets and a pitcher, and Don Anabel poured a fragrant drink. “My peach brandy, señor,” he offered. “_Saludes_ [Your good health]! It seems to me that it has an exceptional flavor. The peaches are from the Valley of the Rio Grande.”

The visitor from Mexico sipped critically and settled down with the appreciation of the connoisseur. “It is quite perfect, señor. And well I remember the most excellent grape of last year.”

“You shall taste of a still older vintage at supper, Don Tiburcio.”

“And is not that the _indiana_ we brought you last year?” Don Tiburcio nodded at the red calico tacked shoulder high about the whitewashed walls to protect the backs of those who sat around the room. The simple hangings looked, in the glimmer of yellow candlelight, like a rich tapestry, a proper setting for the heavy, brass-studded chairs, for the florid oak table, the massive candlesticks. The rough floors were covered with buffalo robes and with rich Mexican shawls, serapes, and serapes also draped the sofas at each side of the room. On the wall above the mantle of the low fireplace hung a painting, dark and old and cracked and priceless. Don Anabel prized it above all his possessions, claiming it was a Murillo; and because of his affection for the painting, which he related had been brought over a century and a half before, his family also venerated the canvas. It was a Madonna and Child, with cherubim. Don Tiburcio looked for and found the painting.

“Two possessions of yours I would like to take away with me, Don Anabel,” the Mexican visitor said with that air of courteous compliment of the grandee.

“_Mi casa es suya, señor_ [My house is yours],” Don Anabel was repeating the formal phrase of Spanish hospitality.

“This painting is one,” Don Tiburcio continued, knowing well that it was almost the last thing in the world that Don Anabel would part with, “and the other----” His words remained unspoken, for at this moment the ladies entered the _sala_, Doña Gertrudis first, billowing in importantly, glowing with rose garnets and pearls. Consuelo followed demurely, decorously, with lowered eyes, yet inclining her head to Don Tiburcio’s bow. Within her bodice her heart was beating furiously, but from the tail of her eyes she watched the distinguished visitor.

“It is a great pleasure to see you once again, señora, and you, señorita. Your servant.”

“_Igualmente, igualmente_ [Equally, equally], señor!”

“And now let us sup.” Don Anabel led the way toward the dining room, which was at the rear of the house, near the kitchen. They passed through the entrance hall, out into the patio, and crossed to the other side. Don Anabel’s house, like all large Mexican houses, was a square built about an inner court, into which most of the rooms opened. Into a long cozy room they stepped, where dining and serving tables were heaped with the efforts of the good Lupe. Every dish was of purest silver, plate and goblet, bowl and salver; candlelight; linens of finest drawnwork; a young roast pig served whole on a massive platter; chicken and rice flanked with squash; stewed corn; melon cooled in the fountain; wines from the grapes of the Tesuque Valley near Santa Fe; pickled watermelon; apricot pastries. It was a scene of mediæval plenty. The guest tasted everything, to Doña Gertrudis’s satisfaction, and ate well, slowly, savoring the feast after the rough fare enforced during the long journey up into the province.

“I am reminded,” he addressed Doña Gertrudis, “that I captured far to the south of here, señora, a number of young _javalinas_ [peccary], and I have brought one alive for you. I think you will like the flavor, for it is even more delicate, if possible, than the shoat here.”

Thus the talk turned to his voyage. The Indians to the south, while not on the warpath, were far from being peaceful. Acoma, that strange Indian pueblo perched upon the high rock, held a deadly hatred for all Spaniards, the visitor said, and there were, southward a few days’ travel, bands of plains Indians that strayed over from eastward, who were more fierce than any he had yet seen. But the country was rich and fertile. Corn he had seen fourteen feet high; peaches that would not enter a pint cup; and beaver enough to line all the capes of all the crowned heads in Europe. He held the company enthralled with brave tales of many perilous escapes upon this journey, and strange sights that he had seen in the desert.

When he had left the northern part of Chihuahua behind and was looking for the Valley of the Rio Grande he had somehow missed it, his scout not having recognized the river bed, in that season bone dry, and he had gone some miles to the east, following up a strange spur of mountains which resembled the carven spires of a church or the colored pipes of a great church organ. Not finding a pass over this rocky spur which lay between him and the river valley, he and his caravan had kept along the foot of it, going northward for perhaps sixty _leguas_. Then they had come upon the strangest sight that ever it had been his lot to behold in the desert country. At first Don Tiburcio related he had thought he was seeing a mirage; it seemed to him he saw snow. As he went nearer and nearer, and snow it still remained, he doubted but that he must be mad. Yet when they had reached the place there rose before them a great hill of dazzling white stuff which had the brilliance of snow in sunshine, and which the light desert breeze blew off in a fine white mist. And this curious salt, for such he deemed it to be, drifted in waves, and whatever was lost in it was nevermore found--so the Indians whom he had encountered above the spot had told him. And in those mountains which he had skirted was silver, aye, and even gold, so vowed a Pueblo Indian from the place called Isleta!

“And you did not remain there to discover whether or not it were so, señor?” inquired Luis, aghast.

“Ah no! We were weary, and the animals needing water, and there would be gold aplenty--and other matters more important at my journey’s end.” Don Tiburcio replied, suavely, and looked directly at Consuelo.

Flushed with excitement, she flashed and sparkled now, plying the Don with eager questions about his trip. And so the evening passed, and when she lay upon her pillow late that night Consuelo wondered if with that lean, fascinating _caballero_ lay her future and her fate. Impersonally she dreamed, stirred from the monotony against which she had been rebelling; but somehow her fancies were not real to her, no pictures of the future arose to her sleepy brain. Yet as she slipped into a dreamless slumber that future was shaping, moving toward her as rapidly as the lumbering feet of oxen could move.