Herman Whitaker - The Mystery of The Barranca

“ Quien sabe? ” Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. “They would think little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to it that they play you no more tricks.”

Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the back. “Up, swine!” And while they stood shivering before them he gave them their orders – first to recover the baggage, then to convey the señors in safety to their mine. “Fail me in one thing,” he concluded, with a frightful threat, “and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you out on the road.”

Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted before Seyd realized his intent. “You are not going?” he asked.

“Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own horse.”

“First let me thank you.”

Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing its plungings the other answered: “It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. Adios! ” And swinging the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off, leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.

Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces, looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion, fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. “Our friend’s football practice over there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I’ve seen a few walking-delegates in my time that I’d like to place under him. I’ll bet you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it ideal.”

“Yes.” Seyd laughed. “I have so much respect for it that I propose to keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If you’ll just settle down for a snooze I’ll take the first trick.”

His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the “conquest” and the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night that rose out of the valley’s black void, his fancies grew and possessed him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy’s interruption came as a surprise.

“I’ve slept four hours. Time for your snooze.”

“Phe-ew!” Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to the building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn from a kiln of their own burning. “I’d always imagined bricklaying to be a mere matter of plumb and trowel, but this darned craft has more crinkles to it than the differential calculus. This fellow makes me dizzy with his talk of ties and courses, flues, draughts, cornering, slopes, and arches.”

Leaning on his hoe, Seyd wiped his wet brow. “I’m finding out a few things myself. I’d always sort of envied a hod-carrier. But now I know that the humble ‘mort’ puts more foot-pounds of energy into his work than the average horse. As a remedy for dizziness caused by overstudy, mixing mortar has no equal. Come and spell me with this hoe.”

“‘And the last state of that man was worse than the first,’” Billy groaned. “ Can’t we hire a single solitary peon, Seyd?”

More eloquently than words, Seyd’s shrug testified to the sullen boycott which had been maintained against them for the past three weeks. On the morning of their arrival at the mine, while the fear of Sebastien Rocha still lay heavy upon him, Carlos had been half bullied, half persuaded into the sale of Paz and Luz at a price which raised him almost to the status of a ranchero. But that single transaction summed up their dealings with the natives. No man had answered their call for laborers at wages which must have appeared as wealth to a peon. The charcoal-burners who drove their burros past the mine every day returned to their greetings either muttered curses or black stares. They were as stubborn in their cold obstinacy as the face of the temple god. Indeed, in these days the stony face of the image had become inseparably associated in Seyd’s mind with the determined opposition that had routed his predecessors and now aimed to oust him. He saw it even in the soft, round faces of the children who peeped at him from the doorways of cane huts, a somber look, centuries old in its stubborn dullness.

Not that he and Billy were in the least discouraged. Once convinced that labor was not to be obtained, they had stripped and pitched in. In one month they rebuilt the adobe dwelling which had been somewhat shattered by the Dutchman’s hurried exit, dug a lime kiln, and hauled the wood and stone for the first burning. They had completed the laying out of the smelter foundation, filling in odd moments by picking for the first charge the choicest ore from the hundreds of tons that the Englishmen had unwisely mined before they ran head-on into the hostile combination of freights and prices.

This last had been an inspiriting labor, for so rich were the values which the ore carried that after a trial assay Billy had danced all over the place beating an old pan. It is doubtful whether young men ever had better prospects; and so, knowing that Billy’s present pessimism arose from a strong disinclination for physical labor in the hot sun, Seyd merely grinned. Sitting down on a pile of brick, he mopped his face and stared out over the valley.

Situated, as the mine was, on a wide bench which gave pause to the earth’s dizzy plunge from the rim three thousand feet above, Seyd sat at the meeting-place of temperate and tropic zones. A hundred feet below – just where they had climbed the stiff trail out of the jungle that flooded the valley with its fecund life – a group of cocoanut palms stood disputing the downward rush of the pine, and all along the bench piñon and copal, upland growths, shouldered cedars and ceibas, the tropical giants. While these battled above for light and room there came, writhing snake-like up from the tropics, creepers and climbers, vines and twining plants, to engage the ferns and bracken, the pine’s green allies. A plague of orchids here attacked the copal, wreathing trunk and limb in sickly flame. The bracken there overswept the riotous tropical life. All along the borderland the battle raged, here following a charge of the pine down a cool ravine, there mounting with the tropic growths to a sunlit slope. But in the valley below the tropics ruled clear down to the brilliant green of the San Nicolas cane fields.

“By the way” – Seyd spoke as his eye fell on these – “Don Luis is back from Mexico City. The hunchbacked charcoal-burner told me as he went past this morning.”

“The deuce he did!” Of all the black looks that came their way that of the cripple was the most vindictive. “You must have him hypnotized.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you had heard his accent. ‘El General is again at San Nicolas,’ just as though he were sentencing me to hang. Nevertheless, the news comes pat. I think it would be good policy for me to run down and pay the denunciation taxes before we begin work on the smelter. No, I don’t apprehend any trouble. Your Mexican hasn’t much stomach for litigation, and no doubt the old fellow feels quite safe in his pull with the metals companies and railroads. But while he is still in the mind we had better pay the money and complete title. If he once gets wind of the smelter – ”