The Mystery of The Barranca

“He did! Why, man alive! he hates gringos worse than – worse than I hate Mexicans. He offered you help? I doubt he’ll do it when he knows where you’re going.” In a last attempt at dissuasion he added, “But if he doesn’t I can’t see how you can win out with rates and prices at the same mark that wiped out the Johnnies.”

“That’s our business.” Seyd laughed. Then, warmed by the honest fellow’s undoubted anxiety, he said, “Do you remember any consignment of brick that ever came to this station?”

“Sure, three car loads, billed to the Dutchman. But what has that to do – ”

“Just this – that the man had the right idea. Though the mine is the richest copper proposition I have ever seen – besides carrying gold values sufficient to cover smelting expenses – it would never pay, as you say, to ship it out at present prices. But once smelted down into copper matte there’s a fortune in it, as the Dutchman knew. He had already laid out the foundation of an old-style Welsh smelter, and, though it isn’t very big, we propose to make it stake us to a modern plant.”

“So that’s your game!” The agent whistled.

“That’s our game,” Billy confirmed. “If dear cousin over there can only be persuaded to furnish the mules we will do the rest. Go ask him, Bob.”

Seyd hesitated. “I’m afraid that I turned him down rather roughly. Let’s try first ourselves.”

For the last half hour their baggage had formed a center of interest for the porters, mule-drivers, and hackmen who formed the bulk of the crowd, and the snap of the agent’s fingers brought a score of them running. Each tried to make his calling and election sure by seizing a piece of baggage. In ten seconds the pile was dissolved and was flowing off in as many different directions when Seyd’s answer to a question brought all to a sudden halt.

“To the mina Santa Gertrudis.”

Crash! the kit of mining tools dropped from the shoulder of the muleteer who had asked the question, and it had no more than touched earth before it was buried under the other pieces.

“I told you so,” the agent commented, and was going on when a voice spoke in from their rear.

“What is the trouble, señors?”

The hacendado had approached unnoticed, and, turning quickly, Seyd met for the third time the equivocal look, now lightened by a touch of amusement. Suppressing a recurrence of irritation he answered, quietly: “We wish to go to the hacienda San Nicolas, señor, upon which we have denounced the mining claim known as the Santa Gertrudis. For some reason no one of these men will hire. Perhaps you can tell why?”

“Now your fat’s in the fire,” the agent muttered.

Whether or no he had overheard Seyd’s answer to the muleteer, the man’s dark face gave no sign. “Quien sabe? Ask their blood brother, the burro. One would have little to do and time to waste if he attempted to plumb a mule-driver’s superstitions. Ola, Carlos.”

While he was talking the crowd had continued to back away, but it stopped now and stood staring, for all the world like a herd of frightened cattle. The big muleteer who had led the retreat returned on a shuffling run, and as he stood before the hacendado, sombrero in hand, Seyd saw the fear in his face.

“This fellow sometimes works for me. You will need” – he paused, overlooking the baggage – “three burros and two riding-mules. He has only two. Ola, Mattias!” When a second muleteer had come with the same breathless haste he gave the quiet order, “You will take these señors to Santa Gertrudis.”

Bowing slightly, he had walked away before Seyd could lay hands on enough Spanish to state his obligation, and as, pausing, he then looked back his face once more changed, expressing knowledge and sarcastic amusement at the mixed feelings behind Seyd’s halting thanks. His bow, returning the customary answer, was more than half shrug.

“It is nothing.”

“One moment, señor!”

The burrors having departed with their loads, Seyd and Billy were mounting to follow when the hacendado called to them from the platform. “To-night, of course, you will stay in Chilpancin. But to-morrow? By which trail do you travel?” When Seyd answered he added a word of counsel: “I thought so. Most strangers take that way. But there is a shorter by many miles. Instruct your drivers to take the old trail down the Barranca.”

Thanking him, they rode on.

In accordance with the mysterious and immutable law which places all Mexican cities at least a mile from the railroad, they traveled nearly half an hour before sighting, across a barranca, the town cuddled in a hollow beneath the opposite hills. Under the rich light of the waning sun the variegated color of its walls, houses, churches, merged in warm gold, glowed like a topaz in the setting of the dark hills. Paved with river cobbles and crooked as a dog’s hind leg, a street fell steeply down into the barranca from whose black depths uprose the low roar of rushing waters. Entering upon it, while still within sound of a freight engine puffing upgrade to the station, they dropped back four hundred years into the midst of a life that differed but little from that of the Aztecs under the Montezumas.

On both sides of the street one-story adobes flamed in all the colors of the rainbow – roses, purples, umber, greens – a vivid alternation which was toned only by the weathered gray of heavy doors and massive oaken grills across the windows. At the tinkle of their bells there would come a flash of Spanish eyes in the cool dusk behind the windows, and a pretty face would emerge from deep shadow to fade again before Billy’s smile. The peons and hooded women on the narrow causeways were equally reserved. They either passed without according them notice or returned to their glances a stolid stare. Theirs were the dark, impenetrable faces of old Mexico.

While they were climbing at a snail’s pace the opposite hill, dusk fell over the town, but presently, riding out of a black alley into the main plaza, they emerged on a scene that caused even the matter-of-fact Billy to exclaim in wonder. On all four sides hundreds of torches blossomed in the dusk, toning with soft rich lights the vivid adobes, tinting the cold white blankets and garments of the hucksters who squatted by their displays – guavas and pineapples, cocoanuts, mangoes, alligator pears, and other fruits of the tropics which shared the same straw mat with cabbage, squash, onions, and other familiar produce of the cold North. In accordance with the shrewd policy that has always kept the Roman Church in close touch with its world, the booths extended to the very doors of a stone church which occupied one side of the square, and the heavy odors of fried garlic mingled with the breath of incense that floated out through the wide doors.

A religious fiesta was in full blast, and they had to turn the mules to avoid the stream of worshipers who shuffled across the square, up the stone steps, and the length of the paved aisles to the great altar which blazed with the light of a thousand candles. Looking, as they rode past, they saw a peon – whose spotless blanket shone whiter by contrast with the scarlet serape which had fallen backward across his calves – erect on his knees, arms extended in a rigid cross, a figure of deathless adoration before the Virgin. It required only the brazen storm of bells that just then broke overhead to complete the atmosphere of savage medievalism. The worshipers might easily have been the first Aztec converts crawling before the superior altars of the Spanish conquerors’ God.

Seyd, always thoughtful and sensitive to impression, felt the influence of the scene, and the feeling deepened as their mules struck hollow echoes in the vaulted passage of the hotel whose iron-studded gates, barred windows, yard-thick walls all bespoke a life which had not yet progressed beyond the era of sieges. A runway led down into a wide courtyard and to the stables which lay under a tiled gallery, the hotel proper, for the cell-like sleeping-rooms used by the better class opened upon it.

But the real life of the place surged in the patio, or courtyard, below, and, after they had dined on rice, eggs, and beans, or frijoles, Billy and Seyd perched on the balustrade of the gallery to watch its ebb and flow. Into the great stone inclosure muleteers of Tepic, freighters of Guadalajara, potters of Cuernavaca and Taxco, pilgrims to the far shrines, and their first cousins in dirt and importunity, the beggars, had poured from three main lines of travel, and they were so crowded that it was difficult to find space among the mule panniers, crates, and bundles for their tiny cooking-fires. On occasion a face, plump and darkly pretty, would bloom out of the dusk as a woman fanned the charcoal under her clay cooking-pots. Again, a leaping flame would illumine a hawk face, deeply bronzed and heavily mustached, or lend a deeper dye to the scarlet of some sleeper’s serape. In its rich somber color the scene made a picture that would have been loved by Rembrandt. Just as it had done for centuries before the great master was born to his brush, the scene changed and mingled, ebbed and flowed, while its units passed among the fires, exchanging the gossip of the trails. The hum of it rose to the gallery like the low roar of a distant torrent, but out of it Seyd was able to catch and translate isolated scraps.

“Take not thy aguardiente to El Quiss, amigo. The administrador – I tell it to my ruth, since I was well skinned by him – is a thief of the nether world. He would flay a flea for the hide and fat.”

“Ola, Carlos! The jefe [chief of police] of San Pedro is keeping an eye for thy return ever since he bought the last load of charcoal.”

“The swine! Is it my fault that he expects good oak burning for the price of soft ceiba?”

One remark caused Seyd to prick his ears, for it was addressed to one of their own muleteers. “Where go the gringos, amigo? To Santa Gertrudis? And thou art driving for them? Hombre, hast thou so little regard for thy neck?”

The answer was lost in the sudden braying of a burro in the stables underneath, but the voice of the questioner, a strident tenor, rose over all. “An order from Don Sebastien? Carambar-r-r-r-a! And you go by the old trail down the Barranca? But, hombre! It is – ” The voice lowered so that Seyd could not hear.

Imagining that the talk bore merely on the condition of the trail, he dismissed it from his mind and returned to his study of the crowd, permitting his gaze to wander here, there, wherever the incessant movement brought to the surface some bit of color or trait of life. In this he obeyed a natural instinct. Endowed with a temperament nicely balanced between the philosophical and the practical, he had taken an auxiliary course in “letters” along with his mining for the sole purpose of broadening his viewpoint and widening his touch with life. Indeed, he had bent his profession to the same end, using it as a means to travel and study, in which he differed altogether from Billy, who was the mining engineer in every dimension. Where Billy saw only the externals, humors, and absurdities, and the picturesqueness of that teeming life, Seyd’s subtle intelligence took hold of the primordial feeling under it all. Contributing only an occasional answer to the other’s chatter, he bathed in the atmosphere and absorbed the wild medievalism of it while reviewing in thought the events of the day. The girl and her dog, her uncle the General, Don Sebastien the hacendado – the latter was in his mind when the sudden leaping of a fire at the far end of the patio revealed his face.

“Look!” But in the moment Seyd grasped Billy’s arm the blaze fell. “I thought I saw him – that fellow, Sebastien – talking to Carlos, our mule-driver.”

“Well, why not?” Billy answered. “I gathered that he lives far out. Like ourselves, probably too far to start out to-night.”

“Of course.” Seyd nodded. “He just happened to be in my mind. Only why should he be in talk with our mule-driver?”

“Search me.” Billy shrugged. “But if he was, it is easy to prove it. There’s Carlos now. Call him up here.”

The muleteer, when questioned a minute later, shook his head. “No, señor, Don Sebastien is not here. He rode out at sunset, is now leagues away on the trail.”

If he were lying, his brown stolid face gave no sign; and, having given him his orders for next day, Seyd returned to his study of the crowd. He had forgotten the incident by the time Billy dragged him away to bed.

CHAPTER III

“If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early in the afternoon,” Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day’s hot travel, they did not awaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window bars and laid a golden finger across Billy’s eyes.

“We shall have to hustle now.” Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican mozo in general while they were dressing. “For you must see the Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand as the Colorado Cañon. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a proposition as the one I went by on the last trip, I’d rather not tackle it after dark.”

It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, for after breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Paz and Luz, the mules the señors were riding! And having roundly cursed the memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocent colthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon such misbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them:

“Never were there such ungrateful brutes, señors. Not content with the good barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out of Padre Celso’s arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle and Book. And the curse sticks, señors, working itself out by means of this devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the jefe of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year’s earnings that trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that ever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas and the Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But this shall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the end of this trip.” In the mean time would the señors be pleased to wait for an hour?

There being no other choice, the señors would, and, returning to their last night’s perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorge its dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, the sunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on the opposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illumined silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads – to which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch – a comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing travelers, for only after an altercation which always required the witness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were the gates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oaths they went out, one by one, cargadores and peons, beggars and pilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and not until the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at his watch.

“Nine o’clock. What has become of those – ”

Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned and foredoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkled pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail up a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corn grew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between the stones.

Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all over the land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light wind in the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been riding an hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging the mules grew fainter in Seyd’s ears, and, though he was conscious in a dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling, falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into the copal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him to a grisly sight – the dozen and odd mummies whose withered limbs clicked in the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of a banyan.

“Bandidos, señor, thieves and cutthroats.” The bigger of the two muleteers answered Seyd’s question. “They were hanged by Don Sebastien.”