But the quaking fit passed off, too, as the indignant glow had done; perhaps the hard work helped her through. "They can't do more than kill me," said she to herself. "I can stand it. But have old Ignacio I won't."
Then she thought of Felipe. She had not much fear for him. His own father certainly wouldn't beat him. For one thing he couldn't, for the son was the stronger; and as for Ignacio, she fairly laughed to herself at the idea of the ugly old fellow attacking Felipe. "Why, Felipe would put him on the ground in a moment, and keep him there, too, as long as he wanted," she thought, and felt a grim satisfaction at the idea. The only danger she feared for him was lest he should get furious and use his knife, and kill Ignacio, and be hanged for it. But Felipe had promised her never, never to do such a thing, and he would keep his word. Such a thing had not happened in the pueblo for forty years--not since old Fernando was a youth, when he had quarrelled in a fit of jealousy with another Indian and stabbed him, and had been arrested, and afterwards pardoned.
Towards evening it was reported that the ditch was running again, and Josefa and her step-sisters went out to draw water. With the great earthen jars on their heads, they filled out one after another, and marched off to the waterside. Here they lowered their burdens to the ground, and slowly filled them by dipping up cupfuls of water with their gourds. There were several other women at the waterside doing the same thing, and there was much animated talk about the blasting of the acequia--for they had heard the explosions quite distinctly at the village--and about the improvement of the ditch, which was fuller now than it had ever been before.
Then some of the younger girls took to playing and splashing each other, and one said something sly to Josefa about Ignacio. She flushed up and was on the point of flying into a rage, but calmed herself in a moment, returned a laughing retort, and joined in the fun and the splashing. Her step-sisters were surprised, for they well knew her feelings on the subject of the intended marriage; but they supposed that perhaps she was growing more reconciled to the idea of it.
At last the welcome interval of fun and gossip came to an end. One by one the jars, now full and very heavy, were carefully elevated on the heads of their owners, the party broke up, and the women returned to their respective homes. Josefa was hoping for the appearance of the figure she desired to see, and lingered as long as possible; but when the rest of the party had assumed their burdens she could delay no longer, and, taking up hers, moved after them, the last of the file.
As they re-entered the village she saw with joy that her manoeuvre had succeeded. Felipe was strolling very slowly, and apparently quite unconcerned, up the street, leading the mare and mule towards the corrals.
They dared not speak, but they had devised a little code of signals of their own. A shake of the head conveyed to her, "I have failed"; a crook of the forefinger, "I am coming to-night." An answering crook from her said to him, "I will meet you"; and they passed on their ways, no one but themselves the wiser for the little exchange of messages that had taken place. But Josefa's heart sank lower still as she crossed the threshold and thought that one of the precious three days was already gone, and no means of escape was yet provided.
At sunset her father returned. The acequia round the point had been properly embanked on its lower side, and the stone dislodged by the blasts cleaned out of its channel. He was in high good humour at the success of the work, which would render memorable his term of office. He brought his saddle indoors, and, taking down a key from a sort of shelf of wickerwork, which was slung by cords from the roof beams, he took his horse to the stable. He did not keep him at the corrals, where the prospector kept his mare and mules, but was the proud possessor of a mud-built stable, with a lock on the door.
His coming set Josefa thinking again. "Our great difficulty," said she to herself, "is a horse. Why not take my father's? If I could only get the key we could manage it. I could not indeed get down the saddle and take it out of the house without making a noise, but Felipe must find a saddle. And if I can get the key and we take my father's horse, he will have nothing to pursue us on, which is double reason for taking it."
Filled with this idea, she got some more corn and began to grind again, so that when her step-mother went into the kitchen to prepare the evening meal she was left alone in the outer room. Her father came back from the stable and replaced the key on the shelf, and then went out again without speaking to her. Now was her chance. She darted silently across the room, seized the key, and flew back to her work so quickly that no one in the next room could have suspected what she had done.
She was so bright and cheerful that evening that her family thought she must have ceased her opposition and become reconciled to the match.
"Ah," said her step-mother, "if Ignacio only gives you work enough, and doesn't spoil you, he'll have a docile wife as any in the pueblo."
Josefa laughed aloud. "He will have a docile one when he gets me!" she said. But she laughed to think how blank they would look at daybreak next morning when they found her flown.
After supper the cacique and the chiefs went in a body to call upon Stephens. They entered the room and seated themselves against the wall on the ground, sitting on sheepskins or on mats which they had brought with them. Stephens passed round the tobacco-bag and some corn husks cut square for cigarette papers. Presently old Tostado began to speak.
"We are very grateful, and we give you thanks, Sooshiuamo," said he, "for the work that you have done for us to-day. Ever since the year of the great eclipse of the sun, which is the most ancient thing the oldest man of us can remember, the point of rocks has been that which has given trouble to us all, and our fathers told us it was so when they were little boys. We have had to be always mending it, and then just when we had most need of water it always broke. Then you came among us to stay.
You know that we like to live apart from the rest of the world. We do not like to have strangers come here to live. Our fathers never allowed it, and they have handed down to us as sacred the command that we should never allow it either. We have obeyed their command until now, and never till this day have we proposed to make an exception to our rule in favour of anybody. The Mexicans, and others who wish, may live at San Remo, and they may live at Rio Feliz, and at other places in the world, where they belong, but here, No. It is not our custom. We do not want it, and we have the right to prevent it. When our fathers made peace with the old kings of Spain, many generations ago, they had the right given them for ever to keep all strangers away. It is written in our grant, and it is a very good law to have. See how in Abiquiu the Indians let the Mexicans come in, and now they are a sort of mixed people, and not proper Indians at all. But we are the Indians of Santiago, and we wish to remain the same. But you came among us, and we gave you a name, and you lived quietly and did not interfere with anyone, and we saw that you were good. Then we gave you leave to stop on and to go and hunt in the mountain the wild cattle, which are the children of the cattle of the Indians. And you stayed with us all this winter past, and you have been happy here among us; but now you say that you must go far away again, following your business. Now we say this: you have done a thing to-day that we are glad of, and our children will be glad of, and their children, too, for ever. Now we say this: you live alone, and life alone is very lonesome. It is good that you should give up the life of wandering so far and being so lonesome. It is good that you should live here with us, and we will build you a house, and we will give you a wife, a young one and a good one, whichever one you please among the girls, and we will assign you pieces of land of the village, and you shall have it to cultivate the same as we do. If you do not want to work with the plough and the hoe yourself, you have money and you can hire others to work. And you shall live here safe and at ease, and if we want to do more to the ditch, or to keep the smallpox away, you shall do it, because you are wise and know the arts of the Americans. We have talked it over, and that is what we think." And he closed his oration and folded his blanket about him, not without dignity.
Stephens was sitting on the side of his bed, leaning forward and looking down, with his pipe in his mouth, when Tostado began his speech. As it proceeded, he stopped smoking, and still sat looking thoughtfully on the ground, holding his pipe in his hand, and a curious smile came over his features.
"People seem determined to make a squawman out of me somehow," he meditated. "First a lying stage-driver goes and swears to Sam Argles that I'm one already, and now here comes this worthy Tostado with an extremely public offer of the pick of the bunch. Well, how am I going to decline? Shall I say, 'Thanks very much, my good friend, but I'm not taking any, this time'? Pretend to blush and be embarrassed, and play the funny man generally? Not much, I guess. My jokes with these people don't seem to come off. They're not their style. No, I'll just refuse civilly; but, seeing that they're making themselves so particularly sweet to me at this moment, I believe I'll trot out my best card and ask for the mine."
He waited till the applause that followed Tostado's peroration had quite died away, but instead of rising to make a formal speech in reply, he remained sitting on the side of the bed.
"I'm sure I'm very much obliged to you, Tostado," he began conversationally, looking at the friendly face of the Turquoise headman, "and to all of you chiefs here present,"--he cast a comprehensive glance round the circle,--"for the good opinion you say you have of me, and for your proposal that I should settle down among you. I take it very kind of you that you offer me a wife and a home here. But I'm not quite prepared to settle at present. You said, Tostado, that I had money; so I have, but only a little, not enough, not as much as I want. Now, I've got this to say to you. There's just one thing that would induce me to remain here, and not go away. Don't be startled, it's a very simple matter; you know that I'm a miner, and live by finding and working mines. Well, I want you to give me leave to open and work your silver mine, the silver mine that you have up in the mountains, and that you keep so carefully hidden. If you'll make a contract with me to do that, I'll stay on here and work the mine for you. What do you say?"
Never was the admirable facial self-control of the red man better exemplified than in the reception of this speech. To the Indians the very name of mines in connection with themselves was a horror. They had awful traditions of ancient Spanish cruelties, of whole villages stripped of their young men, who were forcibly carried off to work in a slavery which was degradation and death. Spanish enterprise in that line had ceased with the exhaustion of the labour supply, and the accumulation of water in the shafts which they had no steam-pumps to remove. But the terror of those evil days lay upon the souls of the red men. They had hidden those ancient shafts where their forefathers laboured in the damp, unwholesome darkness, till sickness and misery found their only respite in death. They guarded the secret of them jealously, and never with their goodwill should they be reopened.
At the words of the American, the chiefs turned one to another with looks of astonishment, and acted their little play admirably.
Tostado remained silent, and the cacique was the first to speak.
"Silver mine?" he innocently asked. "What silver mine?" thus ignoring the fact that the prospector had broached the idea to him already. "_We_ have no silver mine. _We_ know nothing of such things. The Mexicans have some, far away in the south. The Americans have some, far away there,"
he pointed to the north. "But there never have been any here, never. Is it not true, my brothers?" He appealed to the circle of chiefs. There was a chorus of replies: "It is true." "There never have been any."
"None of us ever heard of such things here."
"Nonsense, Salvador," retorted Stephens, laughing as good-humouredly as he could by way of reassuring the suspicious redskins. "Everybody round here knows that you fellows have a mine that you keep well covered up so that nobody shall find it. Very sensible plan that of yours, too. Quite right not to let other people get hold of it. I allow that. But you're all wrong about one thing. You're afraid the Spaniards may come back and force you to work in the mine again. No fear. The Spaniards have gone for keeps, and the American Government has come, and it's going to stop.
There's absolutely nothing to be afraid of. I've heard of your mine; now, you let me work it for you; I'll make money out of it for myself and money for you. The money will buy you lots of cows and sheep and horses, and improved ploughs and good guns, and all sorts of things. You say you have got confidence in me, here's your chance to show it."
He might as well have expended his eloquence upon the dead adobe walls.
The chiefs stared at him vacantly. When Stephens ceased there was a pause, and then Tostado took up the subject.
"It is quite true what you say, Sooshiuamo. You are our friend. The American Government is our friend; it has protected us from the Mexicans when they tried to ride roughshod over us, and we are grateful to the American Government. But the stories about a silver mine are foolishness. These Mexicans must have been yarning to you; they are idle talkers. We have no mine. We never had a mine. We don't know anything about mines, and never did." And again all the chiefs chorused:
"We know nothing of a mine; nothing whatever."
For a whole hour Stephens argued with them. Vain effort. No solid rock was ever more impenetrable than an Indian who has made up his mind, and the baffled and wearied prospector gave it up in despair.
His thoughts drifted away to earlier days when he first found himself in the midst of that wonderful rush to the El Dorado of this century, the Far Western goldfields. He thought of his hopes, his failures, and his struggles; how he had always intended "when he had made his pile," to go back East and marry a nice girl of his own race, and settle down comfortably. When he had made his pile!--the will-o'-the-wisp that has led many a man such a weary dance through the sloughs of life. He had to admit to himself that he had lowered his figure. He had set it at first at a million, a brownstone front, and a seat in the United States Senate. It had come down step by step in the last ten years, till it stood now at ten thousand dollars,--enough to buy a nice little place back East, and stock it, and have something left on hand; but, alas! he was not half-way yet even to that goal--and now there was offered him a mud home, an Indian squaw, and a corn patch. "Not yet, I reckon," said he to himself, with a grimmer smile than ever. "I've not come to that quite yet. Not but what these Indians are the honestest and most virtuous folks to live among that ever I knew. But I can't quite go turning squawman yet."
"Much obliged to you, Tostado," said he in response to a renewed offer, "but I don't want to settle down just now. No, thank you. I have business to see after far away, beyond the country of the Navajos. Not that I don't like you here. I consider you as my friends. You know that.
Perhaps some other day I may think about settling down, but now I have other business. But I am much obliged to you, all the same."
"No," said the Indian; "it is we who are obliged to you for what you have done for us. It is a great thing, and we are grateful to you for it. There is nothing we would not do for you." And then he went on to praise and compliment Stephens, and the Americans generally; for he was no mean proficient in the art of oratory, and enjoyed doing what he knew he could do well, and what his people admired him for.
Poor Stephens could not escape from the flow of language by quietly walking off, as he had done in the morning; and though he wanted badly to get free to finish reading his San Francisco weekly paper, he could not be so discourteous as to cut the speech short abruptly. But all things come to an end at last, and finally the chiefs, having made speeches to their heart's content, took their leave, folded their blankets around them, and filed off into the moonlight.
CHAPTER X
AN ELOPEMENT
Once again Felipe waited patiently for the setting of the moon, in the dark corner between the mud oven and the wall where we saw him first.
Thoughts keen almost as sensations chased each other through his mind as he crouched there watching. Dominant was the feeling of the eternal sense of need: "I want her and I'll have her." All this trouble, and strife, and disappointment only made him more obstinate. "I will succeed," he said to himself. "I will. If I fail now I shall be a loser all my life--always wanting, never getting. If I win I shall have what I desire all my life and be happy." This was frank egoism. Felipe's moral standpoint may be guessed from the fact that had he been told he was egoistic he would not have understood the implied reproach. To himself his position was simply natural.
But it would be wrong to suppose that generous and unselfish impulses did not run side by side with self-regarding ones. He thought of Josefa, lonely and sad in her father's house. His anger rose as he thought of the unkindness and the threats she had to endure, and of the heartless way in which she was being disposed of. He longed to save her from the present trouble and from the hateful future that threatened her. How sweet she was and how beautiful! Every fibre in his frame thrilled at the thought of becoming her protector, at the delicious idea of her seeking safety in his arms, while he acted as her shield against tyranny and wrong. And through her sweet eyes there looked out, he knew, the faithful soul of a true and loving woman. She was good. He felt as sure of that as he did of his own existence. Her kindness and dutiful spirit he knew, for he had seen her behaviour in the daily life of the village.
What a shame it was that she should be so ill-treated just because she was by nature gentle and obedient! Poor girl, she would want to be comforted a great deal to make up for all the trials she was undergoing now. He would have to be very good to her in every way, and he swore to himself that he would be so; he would do his best to make her happy. Ah, if they could but once get to the padre at Ensenada and be married by him, it would be all right; and at the thought his pulse beat high.
At last the welcome hand appeared at the hole in the wall he had been watching so long, and he flew to the spot.
"Is that you, sweetheart?" he whispered as he stretched his hand along the wall to meet the little fingers. "I always tell myself you will not come, just to tease myself, for I know all the time that you will. And at last I see the signal and I know it is all right."
"You know I always do come," she returned, "you bad boy, as soon as I feel sure they are sound asleep. But now tell me what news you have."
"Bad enough," said he despondently. "I asked the American--I begged hard of him; but he would not lend me one of his beasts. I waited till he was in a good temper, after he had blasted the rock; but it was no use. I will go to-morrow to the sierra for my father's horse and I will come back for you in the night. He is thin and cannot travel fast, so you must come early before the moon sets or we shall not have time enough; but we must take our chance as we can get it. I will tie him away off on the edge of the mesa, so that there will be no horse tracks for them to follow close here. You must come afoot so far."
"Stay, Felipe," said she. "I have been thinking. Can you get a saddle--now--to-night?"
"I can get one of the American's," he said. "He has an old one he never uses. He would lend me that, I know."
"Yes, but can you go to him to-night, Felipe?"
"Oh, yes," he answered. "I would wake him--he doesn't mind what I do.
But what horse are you thinking of? One of his?"