Herman Whitaker - The Mystery of The Barranca

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.

“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.