Part 5

“With that we pursued the tracks, wondering always at their greatness. They went a little around the foot of the mesa, and then up a steep way to its top. When we came to the top, where was a cleft in the rocks, so that one could get up, we found a large level place, round, and with a rim of cliffs below, so that nowhere else was it possible to reach the summit. The trail went away among the junipers, and we followed it cautiously, knowing that the deer must be here, since no tracks led down. And of a sudden, crawling around a clump of trees, we stood before him. Ay, señor! How great he was! Great as a tall horse, and upon his head the keys [horns] were as the branches of a blasted cedar. There he stood, a thing of fifty yards away, looking at us with his head high, as if mocking. My heart forgot its count; for truly he was no thing of this earth—that beast with a look so cunning and so terrible.

“‘What a beast!’ Luís whispered. ‘At the throat, to break his neck. But save thou thy fire, for in case’—and putting his rifle firm as a rock, he fired. But as the smoke blew by, there stood the deer, wagging himself the head scornfully, for the bullet had rebounded from him. So it is with these beasts that are witches, for when they see you, no ball will enter their hide. And then, putting down his head till that the horns lacked but a foot from the ground, he came like a large rock leaping down the mountain.

“Now I knew well that he was no mortal thing, and that I had no right to shoot. But for sake of Luís, who was pouring new powder in his rifle, I cared not even if I should be accursed; and when the beast was very close I sprang to one side and gave him the ball, of an ounce weight, squarely upon the side. But it could not enter him. Luís jumped, too, and the brute passed between us like a strong wind. In a moment he turned and charged us again, and I am sure I saw smoke come from his nose. As for his eyes, they were pure fire. ‘Run for yourself!’ cried Luís, and he made for the tree, while I took the other way. Turning a juniper, I ran for the edge of the cliff; but just as I came there, there was a scream, and looking across my shoulder, I saw the deer making with his horns as one does with his spade upon hard ground.

“After that I could go no more to our camp, but came straightway to Abiquiu. When they heard what had been, all the town mourned—for Luís was well beloved. But none were surprised, for they said: ‘Always we told him of the Venado Encantado, but he would not believe. And now it has come true. Poor headstrong Luís!’

“As for me, I sickened, and was much time in bed. And always I saw the deer leaping upon Luís and tearing him, until it was not to be borne. When at last I was cured, I could think only to kill the Witch Deer, and avenge my poor _compañero_. I asked of all the old men if there was how to do it; but all said, ‘Beware, lest he trample thee also!’ And Josefa prayed me to think no more of it, for she would never marry one who put himself against the witches. I know not how, Don Carlos, for I too feared, but Luís would not let me rest.

“Twice I went alone to the mesa, for no one would companion me. _There_ was always the deer; but I kept under the rocks, where he could not reach me, and waited my turn. Once, when my aim was true upon his heart, the rifle only snapped; and when I went to prime with double care, the flint was all in cracks, so that it would not strike a spark. And again, when I shot him between the very eyes, from near, it did him nothing. So I saw it was useless.

“From then all went ill. Even the wild turkeys had no fear of me, for I could shoot nothing. And in Abiquiu I was mocked, for the young men had been jealous that formerly I had killed more game than any, and now they taunted me for ‘the starved hunter.’

“At the last I thought me of one who lived in the cañon of Juan Tafoya—a witch, they say, very wise in such things—and to him I went. When he had heard my story, he said: ‘But, man! knowest thou not that this is the Venado Encantado? How dost thou think to kill him? For he has in his horns a stone of great power, having the which he cannot be harmed. There is only one way in which it could be done, and that is to shoot him when he sees thee not. But that, even the best hunter cannot do, for the animal is very wise and of sharp sight. Only having an invisible stone could one do it.’

“‘And have other deer this stone?’ I asked; and he replied: ‘There are some, for this is not the only Witch Deer. But none of them canst thou kill if they see thee.’

“After that they saw me little in Abiquiu, for I was always hunting. For many months I pursued the trail of every buck deer, killing many. And at last, shooting from ambush one that passed me unsuspecting, I found in the first fork of its horns a stone like this, but not the half of it in size. This I proved in many ways, and clear it was that now my luck had changed.

“Being satisfied of this, then, I loaded my rifle with great pains, and went one evening in search of the Venado Encantado. Coming to the mesa by night, I camped among the rocks, without a fire, and in the morning, before the sun, climbed up without a little noise. In my pouch was the stone, and my rifle was well ready. When I came through the cleft at the top, there stood the deer, looking straight at me, not twenty yards distant, and I threw my rifle to my shoulder, giving myself up for lost. But he moved not, and watching him, I perceived that he did not see me at all—the which is proof that the stone makes one to be invisible. At this I took heart, and with a true aim on his throat, fired. He leaped _thus_ high in the air and fell dead; and coming to him, I found that the ball had broken his neck.

“His meat I did not touch, for besides being accursed, he had killed my Luís, whose bones I brought away to Christian ground in Abiquiu. But in the first fork of the horns, which were taller than my head, I found this stone which you see. Since I have that, I kill whatsoever deer with ease, because they cannot see me. What think you, then?”

We sat for a few moments silent, watching the flames that licked and twisted about the cedar sticks in the fireplace. Anastácio was voiceless, with an awe too strong even for his boyish excitement; and as for me, the story of Luís’s death had brought back some vivid and uncanny memories. But Don José, who really cared enough for me to wish to lead me out of the darkness of error, followed the matter up.

“Do you not see, Don Carlos, that there _are_ Witch Deer? For look at his fierceness, and that he could not be hurt until I had a charm-stone like his own. And you know that I tell you truth.”

“Yes, old fellow, I know you tell me the truth as you see it. But it is nothing strange for a buck to be _bravo_ in the fall—_that_ I myself have suffered by. And I fancy you _could_ have killed him before, if you had not felt so sure that you couldn’t.” Then I was rather ashamed to have said even so much, and as gently as it could be said, for I do not admire the always-superior person. But the old man understood, and was not offended; only he shook his head with real sadness, and said:

“Ah, that way was Luís. God keep you from being taught as he was!”

Felipe’s Sugaring-off.

Felipe’s Sugaring-off.

The great water-wheel was trundling as fast as ever the white impulse from the old stone aqueduct could kick it along. The wheel, indeed, grumbled at so much hard work; but the water only laughed and danced as the big iron jaws of the _trapiche_[24] chewed up the yellow culms of sugar cane and spat to one side the useless pith, while the sweet, dark sap crept sluggishly down the iron conduit toward the sugar-house. In front was a very mountain of cane brought from the fields by bullock carts; and half a dozen sinewy negroes were feeding it, an armful at a time, between the rolls of the mill. Behind it others with wooden forks were spreading the crushed cane to dry for a day, after which it would be used as fuel to boil its own plundered juice. Off beyond the sugar building gleamed the white Moorish walls of the tile-roofed chapel and manor house, built three hundred years ago, when Peru was the richest crown jewel of Spain. Everywhere else stretched the great fields of cane—to the very foot of the sandhills of the encroaching desert, to the very rim of the blue Pacific. What an immensity of sugar it all meant!

The same thought struck the grizzled _administrador_[25] this morning as he stood on a pier of the aqueduct—just where its stream pounced upon the lazy wheel—and swept the scene with those watchful old eyes. “Of a truth,” he was saying to himself, “the world must be very large, as they say, and many must eat nothing else, for here we make every day forty thousand pounds of sugar, three hundred days of the year, and there are many other sugar haciendas in Peru, though maybe none so big as Villa. Truly, I know not where it all goes. _Hola!_ Always that fellow!” and, springing to the ground as lightly as a boy, in two bounds he was at the mill.

There four of the negro laborers were in sudden struggle with a newcomer from the quarters—a huge black fellow, whose brutish face was now distorted by drunken rage. He was naked to the waist, and his dark hide bulged with tremendous muscles, as he swayed his four grapplers to and fro, trying to free his right hand, which clasped a heavy _machete_. This murderous combination of sword and cleaver, which lopped the stubborn cane at a blow, had found worse employment now, for a red stain ran down its broad blade, and on the ground lay a man clenching a stump of arm. Old Melito paused for no questions, but, plucking up a heavy bar of _algarroba_, smote so strongly upon the desperado’s woolly pate that the ironwood broke. The black giant reeled and fell, and one of the men wrenched away the _machete_ and flung it into the pool below the wheel.

“He came very drunk, and only because Roque brushed against him with an armful of cane he wanted to kill him,” said the men as they knotted their grimy handkerchiefs upon the wrists and ankles of the stunned black.

“You did well to hold him,” replied the _admimistrador_. “Bring now the irons and we will put him in the _calaboz_ till to-morrow. Then he shall go to Lima to the prison, for we can have no fighting here, nor men of trouble.”

A slender, big-eyed Spanish boy coming out a few moments later from the great castle arch of the manor house saw four peons lugging away between them the long bulk of the prisoner, and stopped to ask the trouble.

“Ah! That bad Coco. That he may never come back from Lima,” said the young Spaniard earnestly. “He is a terror to all, and now I fear he will kill Don Melito, for Coco never forgets. I shall ask my father to see the prefect, that they keep him away. And the sugar?”

Felipe never tired of following all the processes with a grave air, as if it all rested upon his small shoulders. A boy who never felt that he was “helping”—if such a very helpless boy ever existed—has lost one of the best things in all boyhood, and Felipe could not have understood such a boy at all. He went on now and joined Don Melito, and the two stood together watching the vat with professional eyes while two negroes plied their plashing hoes. It was very hot work even to watch it, but a good _administrador_ would never trust this to the laborers.

“Now you watch it a little,” said Don Melito suddenly, with roguish gravity, looking at the boy’s preoccupied face. “As for me, I must see how are the _pailas_,” and he climbed the steps to the platform where the caldrons were hissing with their new supply of sap.

Felipe, thus left alone with the heaviest responsibility he had ever borne, knit his smooth brows very hard and peered into the vat as if the fate of nations hung on his eyes. For the first time he began to doubt them. He wondered if it were not worked enough—if he had not better stop the hoes and get the molders to work. If only Don Melito would come back and decide for him!

But Don Melito was not here, and there were no signs of his coming. Perhaps he was leaving Felipe to find out the difference between knowing how some one else does a thing and how to do it one’s self. The boy fidgeted up and down and looked at the vat first from one end and then from the other, and grew more doubtful the more he looked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t _know_,” he cried to himself. “But sure it is that I must do something, for he left me in charge and perhaps is busy with other matters, thinking I would not let it be spoiled. Put it in the molds!”

The men leaned their candied hoes against the wall. The molders began ladling their buckets full, and, in turn, filling the shallow molds. The color there darkened again as sudden crystallization set in; but Felipe felt a great load lifted off his shoulders. He was very sure now that it was a good color—not a hint of the hateful underdone black, but a soft, rich brown, shading to gold at the thin edges.

Now he was free—the laborers could attend to the rest, as usual—and he would go and hunt for Don Melito. He ran up the steps and along the platform—and half way stopped short, as if he had run against a wall.

The rusty irons should never have been trusted with that giant’s strength! They might do for common men, but for Coco—as soon as consciousness came back to him, and with it the old rage, he had snapped them, and, wrenching out the iron bars from the window of the _calaboz_, had come for his revenge. Even now he was shaking his wrists, one still hooped with the iron band, before the old _administrador’s_ face, and hissing: “You! _You_ did me this! And now I will boil you!”

Don Melito stood still and gray as a stone, looking up into Coco’s eyes. His hat was in his hand on account of the heat; but now he put it on as if scorning to stand uncovered before the fellow—put it steadily upon the curling gray hair that reached barely to the level of those great naked chest muscles.

“I did strike you down and ordered you to be ironed, Coco,” he said quietly, “and I would do so again. Now I am going to send you to Lima. There is no place at Villa for people like you.”

But Coco leaped upon him like the black jaguar, and clutched him with those long, knotted arms. Melito was sinewy and lithe as a cat, but he was no match for this huge foe. He fought for life, but Coco with the equal desperation of hate. Struggle as he would, he was borne back and back until his legs cringed from the glow of the _paila_. At this he made so wild a lunge that it bore them back a few feet; but it was only for a moment. Inch by inch the negro urged him toward that bubbling roar which seemed to drown all other sounds. And even now, with a wild chuckle, the giant doubled him backward against the edge of the _paila_, with a black, resistless palm under his chin.

Only an instant had Felipe stopped, frozen, at sight of Coco; in another he had sprung to the rail, shrieking to the men below: “Juan! Sancho! Quico! Come!” And then, rushing at the struggle, he flung himself as ferociously upon Coco as Coco had attacked Don Melito. But it seemed as if he were back in some dreadful dream. He hammered with futile fists upon that bare and mighty back, and caught a fierce hold about one of those gnarled legs and tugged to trip it, and kicked it with crazy feet. But it was all with the nightmare sense that he was doing nothing by all his efforts. Indeed, it is half doubtful if the infuriated Coco knew at all of this attack in the rear. What to him were the peckings of a twelve-year-old boy?

Would the men never come? Felipe redoubled his kicks and blows, but with a sickening fear. Don Melito was weakening—already his head was thrust back over the steam of the _paila_. Only for his arms locked about the giant’s waist, he would go in. And now Coco’s huge hand came behind him and wrenched at the old man’s slender ones, tearing open finger by finger resistlessly. In another moment it would be too late to think.

Aha, Mr. Coco! The boy sprang to the second _paila_ and snatched the long-handled skimmer that leaned against it, and, dipping it full from the caldron, flung the molten sugar squarely upon Coco’s back. Howling, the negro whirled about, dropping the half-senseless _administrador_ from him, and sprang at Felipe. But the boy stood stiff and very white, holding the ladle back aloft. “This time in the eyes!” he cried, hoarsely. “If you touch Don Melito again, or me, I will throw it in your face!”

Even Coco hesitated at this. He was not too drunk with rage to know what boiling sugar meant. Plainly, this little fool had the advantage. He must be tricked—and then——. But just then a wan smile flitted across Felipe’s face, and, as Coco half turned his head to see what pleasing thing could be behind him, he got a glimpse of Pancho, the horse-breaker, and something dark and wavy in the air. He ducked forward, but a rope settled upon his broad shoulders, tightening like iron, and he was jerked backward to the ground, and a dozen men were upon him.

Coco made no more trouble on the hacienda of Villa. At Lima he found the prompt justice which sometimes happens in Peru. Don Melito was in bed several days, for he had been roughly handled in body and in nerves. The first day on which he could sit up a little, Felipe brought him a cake of _chancaca_.

“Thank you,” said the old man, laying it on the coverlet. Sugar was an old story to him.

“But you must taste this, my _administrador_, and see if it is all right.”

“It is good,” answered Melito, munching submissively. And then, with a sudden light: “It is _very_ good—as good as I could have made myself. Quite right. And I think you sent it to the molds at just the right time!”

Andrés, the Arriero.

Andrés, the Arriero.[26]

I.

“_Hupa mula! Que família!_”

The command was right enough, for the beast barely moved, and any one who ever had to do with mules may very likely have cried out, with Andrés, “What a family!” But no one but Andrés, I am sure, would have said it here. By the time you get up to 16,000 feet in the Andes, if you are not dead altogether, you certainly have no breath to spare—not even so much as to say, “This mouth is mine.” As for exhorting a pack-mule to “get up” or trying to make it ashamed of its blood relations, why, you couldn’t if you would. If some one were to stand at the head of the pass offering you a dollar a word for remarks, the chances are a hundred to one that you would find yourself without either the ambition or the lungs to earn a nickel. It is a very strange thing, as well as a very frightful one, how these great altitudes clutch you by the windpipe, and turn your heart’s strong beat to the last flutter of a wounded bird, and fill your eyes with strange red threads and your ears with a dull tap! tap! tap! so that you can count your pulse simply by listening. Worse still, how there seems to have been turned somewhere a sly faucet which has let the last drop of strength drip away before you knew it. But very lucky indeed are you if that is all. Many more than escape with these unpleasant symptoms have worse. There is a horrible nausea, as much beyond seasickness as that is beyond a plain stomach-ache, and nearly every one gets it above a certain height. Then come sudden hemorrhages from nose, mouth, ears, eyes, finger-tips, and so on to the last. These symptoms and any of them mean, “Get down stairs instanter.” If you cannot get down fast enough you will be carried down—too late to do you any good. I have seen great, powerful men fall there as an ox falls when the ax is laid to its head, and never rise again nor again be conscious. At less elevations I have seen robust men go dead in twenty-four hours with no disease on earth but the altitude. Only recently an acquaintance of mine visiting a town but 12,500 feet above the sea went to bed in perfect health and—“woke up dead in the morning,” as a Celtic mutual friend related in all sincerity.

Still, the only certain thing about it is that if you go high enough you will pay the penalty; but no one can tell you how high that is, nor can you yourself learn finally, even by experiment. You may start out with a party from one of the inland towns of Peru, say at an elevation of 7,000 to 8,000 feet—and even there many are greatly affected by the altitude. One of the party, and perhaps the most robust looking, may become so dangerously sick at 10,000 feet that he will have to be sent back at once. The rest may go on safely to 12,000 feet, and there another succumb, and so on. And you may (though it is very unlikely) toil on even up to 17,000 or 18,000 feet without serious symptoms, and then a few days later be so terribly affected at 10,000 feet that only the most rapid removal to lower levels will save your life. Myself, I have never felt the mountain sickness. But then, my constitution is a most extraordinarily pig-headed one, which seems to butt against almost any wall with impunity. I have climbed and worked hard at considerably over 19,000 feet, and for a long time lived from 12,000 to 15,000 feet above the sea, and never felt anything worse than room for an extra pair of lungs, there where is really precious little air to breathe. But warning was all around, so that I never felt quite sure my turn would not come next.

There is much in habit, of course. You all remember the Irishman’s horse which learned to live on shavings—though unfortunately it died just as it was becoming accustomed to this economical diet. And lungs, too, can get used to living on such shavings as the upper air—that is, if there are lungs enough and you give them long enough. Many die in the learning, but in centuries a type is fixed. So with Andrés. His fathers for a thousand years had breathed no heavier air than that of the great Bolivian plateau. He had been born on one of the “little hills” beside Lake Titi-caca, and brought up there. Leadville is the highest considerable town in North America, and it is too elevated for a great many people; but Andrés had never in his life got so low as 11,000 feet. If he were suddenly set down in New York his lungs would be almost as much embarrassed as would yours if you were so suddenly snatched up to his skyward home. He might almost call for an ax to break that thick air up into breathing chunks! And you, sitting with bloodshot eyes and open mouth, would be wondering what skim-milk atmosphere was this, that in ten minutes’ gasping you could not get as fair a fill to your lungs as you now get with every breath you draw.