The Valley of Adventure/Chapter 10
JUAN MOLINERO, for one, was glad to see the I soldiers quit San Fernando, where eight of them, under command of a corporal, had been stationed since the day he returned to his sanctuary from the trip to the harbor. They were an insolent crew, fattening on the bounty of the padres, to whom they returned little service and less thanks. The Indians could be managed easier without this menace of cruel oppression forever in their eyes, according to Juan's belief. Even Padre Ignacio said the time and the necessity for a military guard at the missions was past.
Padre Mateo had told Juan a thing about these military men that did not lift them an inch in the American's respect. Spain, recently engaged in a turmoil of wars, its ships driven from the seas by the French, had lost contact with its American colonies. No Spanish ships had come to California in five years past; the viceroy of Mexico had ceased sending money to pay the soldiers in the presidios and missions of Alta California. The New Spain was becoming a stranger to the old; bold talk of separation, bold plots of uprisings to form a nation apart, were carried forward in the light of day.
The governor of California had appealed to the missions for gold to pay the soldiers, many of whom, stationed at the presidios, were in hardship, their wives and children in necessitous want. This appeal, out of gratitude for past protection and assistance, was gladly met. It was so generously and promptly met, in truth, that the governor and the military men were surprised. They had found the key to the treasure-boxes of the missions, upon which they had fixed their covetous eyes so long.
From the first respectful, doubtful appeal it was only a step to another, this time with growing boldness in the security of their situation. It became, in modern expression, a graft, this preying on the mission treasure. Little of the gold thus easily secured reached the soldiers in the ranks. The governor, the officers, the favored citizens of influence in the settlements around the missions, profited in easy security by the gold drawn from the padres' generosity on the plea that the soldiers had protected them in the days of their weakness and should now be remembered in the hour of their own distress. The unworthy ones smiled, and put the gold in their own pockets, growing rich on the generosity of gratitude, as many other grafters have done in this moral world, before and since.
It had been a tremendous drain on the missions' treasury, the requirements of the beneficiaries growing as their respect gave way to insolence, their supplication to unfeigned demand. The missions could not carry the load without falling soon into a state of exhaustion. A halt was called; the golden stream was suddenly and inexorably checked. This happened about the time of Juan Molinero's arrival at San Fernando. The withdrawal of the soldiers from the mission now was part of a plan of coercion to open the golden arteries again.
Padre Mateo talked of this as he stood with Juan Molinero in the mill the morning after Sergeant Olivera's visit to the kitchen. They had seen the soldiers ride away to the Pueblo de Los Angeles a little while before, each man with a pack-mule carrying his goods and possessions, accumulated here in this profitable lodgment which they were in no keen zest to leave.
Inside the shed that housed the simple machinery of the mill there was the pleasant smell of flint on flint as the millstones spun, warm streams of flour pouring into the bins in bountiful cascades. The miller was an old Mexican whose hair was almost as white as the flour, one who had come a young man to the mission of San Diego de Acalá, and had followed Padre Serra, founder of the missions, into the north. The marvel of this admirable mill was over him like the effect of a miracle. In the most prolific year of all the many years that he had fed the hoppers of mills driven by Indians tramping a wearisome circle at the end of a sweep, he had not ground as much wheat as he had turned into flour these past two months. It was beyond him, this ingenuity of the man from a strange land. As he laved his hand in the stream of flour, guarding its temperature as carefully as a physician the heat of his patient, the gratitude for such bountiful outpouring was calm in his heart like a benediction.
Cristóbal had been advanced from the drudgery of the fields under Don Geronimo's lash to the station of assistant to the miller. His duty was to attend to the hoppers, and to tally off the number of bags ground daily. Padre Ignacio had withdrawn the mill from Don Geronimo's superintendence, placing it entirely in Juan's hands. Diplomatically, nicely as the priest had made this new arrangement, it had not been accomplished without umbrage on Don Geronimo's part. That gentleman's feather-edged dignity was as difficult to avoid trampling on as a cat's tail.
"So they are gone," said Padre Mateo, looking from the door of the mill toward the lumpy-backed low mountain that marked from a distance the point where the pass led into the valley of San Gabriel and the Pueblo de Los Angeles. "I, for one, have neither fears for the future nor tears for the present. The air seems sweeter to me this morning for having those gaming, drinking, dishonest fellows out of it. Let us hope that the road will be a long one that brings the next soldier here."
"I'll be able to cross the road, at any rate, without needing a young lady to scheme some plan to get me back," said Juan. "I've been wanting to see that big field with the two palms in it for a long time."
"You have been patient under the restrictions that have set bounds for your restless feet, my son," Padre Mateo commended him. "But when you come and go, always remember Captain del Valle, and another one."
"Don Geronimo would like to see him catch me, well enough," Juan said. "Well, I'll give him a clear field one of these days, I think, Padre Mateo. Now the soldiers will not be here to spy on me every step I take, I can cut a bee-line for the mountains one of these nights."
"It is the way of an honest man to think of home with a tender yearning," Padre Mateo said gently, "but it would give me a pang like losing a brother to see you go. Is there nothing here, no promise, no vision of future times, to hold you, my Juan?"
"The Indians tell me there's a way to the south," said Juan, evading the question, "that's easy to travel in winter when the rains come. It strikes the country of the Yumas, on the Colorado."
"It is the mission trail, an old road, well known. There was a mission once among the Yumas, until they rose in their wickedness and destroyed it, and all within. That is a bad country, Juan; you couldn't pass the Yumas."
"I'll risk it, when the rains begin," Juan returned. "What can a man do, or ever hope to do, in a country that condemns him to death for blundering into it?"
"Padre Ignacio has taken the matter up with our college of San Fernando, in Mexico. An appeal will be made to the viceroy for exemption in your case. When it comes, you may pass from one end of California to the other, the equal of any man."
"They'll find a way to deny you, Padre Mateo. There's a jealousy of our people held by the Mexicans on account of our late expansion of territory west of the Mississippi, unwarranted as we know it to be. You may be certain that Captain del Valle has given me a bad name at headquarters. No, Padre Mateo, I'm convinced that if I'm to save my neck I've got to risk the dangers that lie between here and Kentucky. They're bound to get me in time, if I stay here—I can't live on your charity forever—while I have a strong chance of escaping the Yumas, and the tribes east of them, if I'm watchful as I go along."
"It is not a question of bounty on our part, Juan, but one of the deepest gratitude for benefits conferred. You have helped us forward fifty years. What you might do, for us, for yourself, by remaining in California and becoming a citizen, is ingpiring to contemplate."
"Don Geronimo sneers at me for embracing your teligion, Padre Mateo. What"
"Sneers? Don Geronimo sneers at you for embracing the holy faith?"
"It was a matter of expedience, rather than honest conviction, I heard him say to Sergeant Olivera. He didn't know I understood."
"He is dishonest in his heart when he utters such words!" Padre Mateo declared. "Let me hear him repeat it, and I'll scorch him in a way he'll remember!"
"So what would he say, and other men like him of the snake-cold blood, if I changed my citizenship? I never could live among them, Padre Mateo, for I'll bear no man's scorn."
"It is proclaimed in the way your body stands, in the high courage of your face, my son. When you stood between Don Geronimo and poor Cristóbal that morning the grapes were put in the press, I never beheld more dignity in a man, or more commanding power. And there is a day coming when we shall need you here, Juan, to stand between others of us who may not strike in our own defense, and the greedy ones who are making their sacks ready now to strip us and carry away all we own."
"Yes, they're working to throw all the mission property over to the state; it's an infection that seems to have gone up and down California like a plague of smallpox. I've sat at the table with travelers the past month who passed words of their plotting from mouth to mouth, traitors to the hospitality they enjoyed. I've felt like pitching them out into the road more than once."
"I have seen it grow," Padre Mateo sighed, "fed on the false postulation that the missions are holding these forty thousand Indians in slavery. Our work is accomplished, they argue; the Indians have been redeemed from the state of heathens and lodged safely in the bosom of mother church. We should now lift our hands and let the full-fledged brood fly away, and to what, Juan Molinero? To debauchery, debasement, slavery of the bitterest, indeed. That is the desire of these men who have vast l-and-grants from the crown: Indian labor to turn their furrows, guard their herds, make them rich. It would be the same here as it was in the islands of the Spanish Main of old. Our poor simpletons would become slaves, indeed."
"It looks to me like they've got a pretty easy time of it," Juan declared. "I don't see any hardships in the lives of these Indians at San Fernando, granted that the lazy ones do get a little strap-oil now and then. Eight or nine hours a day"
"Seven, Juan. None of these Indians labors more than seven hours a day. Three hours we apportion for devbtional exercises, as you know, making ten hours in all that we require their duty to us and to God. In return we give them, in simply material comforts, good lodgment, good beds for their repose; good garments to clothe their nakedness, abundance of food such as they never knew in their former state, and could not provide for themselves if they were given their so-called freedom today. We give them the sanctity of marriage, we insure them repose in holy earth when life departs; and above all this, we have brought them into the inestimable heritage of eternal happiness beyond the grave."
"Padre Ignacio is coming, bringing some buyers for flour," Juan announced, breaking abruptly the thread of their not-too-happy discourse.
"So!" Padre Mateo made his eyes small, looking against the sun to see. "We'll soon have more customers than flour at the rate they've been coming. The fame of your mill has gone far."
Padre Ignacio was advancing along the dusty road beside the mother-ditch that carried the water to the fields, bareheaded, as he commonly went about, striding in long steps like a soldier. Three men followed him, coming a little way behind, talking among themselves, apparently discussing the flow of water in the irrigation ditch, to which they turned now and then with gesticulating hands.
"I doubt if these men are customers, Juan," Padre Mateo said, watching them narrowly, the broad brim of his flat hat pulled low to shade his eyes. "I see Vincente Felix, comisionado of Los Angeles, in the lead. He is not a man to buy flour."
"Isn't there another one you recognize?" Juan asked, a curious expression in his frank blue eyes.
"No-o-o," Padre Mateo deliberated, "I can't say—yet there seems to be something familiar in the figure of another, the second, something in his bulky shoulders—what is it? do you know him, Juan?"
"Not that I know him, Padre, but we have met. If I am not greatly mistaken, it is Sebastian Alvitre."
"So it is! late brigand, now a citizen of parts, but a rascal in any guise. It is no good wind that blows such geese as these to our water."
Padre Ignacio halted a little way from the door of the mill, waiting for the lagging trio to overtake him. They came up to him red and sweating, short-winded and puffing, for it was a hot morning and they were men of weight.
"Good father, you can outwalk a horse!" Comisionado Felix declared.
"I come like a tortoise behind you!" the third man of the party laughed, wiping his mottled face with an immense silk handkerchief of infernal hues.
Sebastian Alvitre made no comment. He had come up short, like a man running against a wall in the dark, on seeing Padre Mateo and Juan beside the door. He threw up his head, his face betraying his surprise as plainly as an exclamation, and shifted a foot as if to fall back into a posture of defense. There was neither shame nor fear in the man, whatever his other emotions on coming face to face with the one who had stripped him of his weapons in the house of Fabio Dominguez, and thus set him on the road to reformation. He turned to look over the vineyards and fields which he had just traversed, standing as if transported by the beauty of the scene, making an excellent pretense of it for a man so blunt.
"Brother Mateo, Comisionado Felix, of the pueblo, you know," Father Ignacio said, indicating that person with graceful turning of the hand. "This is Manuel Roja, citizen of the town, and this is Mr. Alvitre, who lately established himself in an inn on the plaza there."
"Whom I have met, under circumstances not so tranquil as the present," Padre Mateo said, giving Alvitre a bold, accusing look.
"I do not recall the pleasure," the rascal protested, all interest, alert, deferential; carrying it off with the assurance that only an unconscionable rogue can assume.
"You will remember the monk who laid you on the floor of Fabio Dominguez' house some weeks ago," Padre Mateo prompted him, severe as a judge. "It was not I, but this one. You remember his eyes?"
"Your humor embarrasses a man, good padre," Alvitre returned, looking indeed as if he spoke the truth. His companions, who knew very well that his pretense could not deceive anybody, made out to be so interested in the mill, the dam, and the water that rushed down the flume under the wheel, that they did not even hear this by-play between the former bandit and the priest.
"And my girdle, a good hempen rope it was, of two yards' length—what did you do with that?" Padre Mateo pressed.
"Some scoundrel masquerading, as many low fellows did in my unfortunate past," Alvitre protested. "If you ever encountered a man in Dominguez' house who said he was Sebastian Alvitre, that man was an outrageous liar!"
"I have no doubt of it," Padre Mateo assured him, heartily sincere.
"Comisionado Felix has led this delegation from the pueblo to investigate our mill, Brother Mateo," Padre Ignacio explained.
"You consider building one?" Padre Mateo inquired, turning to the comisionado.
The comisionado was a man who seemed enlarged to a disgusting puffiness by the virus of some festering complaint, evident in the pustules and pits which marred jhis face. His eyelids were redrimmed, his beardless lips purple from the congestion of much wine. He spread his hands, drew his mouth in grimace expressive of complete disclaimer, at Padre Mateo's question.
"Far from it," he replied. "As it is we have scarcely enough water to drink, and keep our cattle and goats alive, to say nothing at all of our trees and little gardens of beans, which perish where they stand."
"They claim that we are taking the water out of the river, robbing them to propel our millstones," Padre Ignacio explained, with the patience of a just man, however ill-founded he know the charge to be.
"It requires more water to drive two stones than one," said the little fat fellow called Roja, whose sharp eyes had been exploring the interior of the mill.
"That is true," Padre Ignacio replied, "and it is also true, as I told you before, that the water goes back into the river. You can see where the flume goes down, branching off there to the right."
"There is a gate, also, to shut it off," Alvitre said.
"The river-bed drinks it, the sand is so dry," Comisionado Felix complained. He shook his head gravely, as if to say he found things worse than he had expected.
"Very little comes over the spillway, it is only a dribble that a donkey could almost drink," said Roja.
"The mill is not always going, only seven hours a day," Padre Mateo explained. "We close the gate at the head of the millrace at night; you get all the water that runs in the river then."
"A great deal of water is required to irrigate these fields and vineyards, these trees, these gardens," Alvitre said, spreading his hand to include all. "And there is much water shut behind this dam; it would take the little river weeks to fill it at this time of the year. Consider our sufferings, then, in the pueblo. If this goes on, our beasts must die."
"Water is a thing which cannot be denied men who were Christian-born, for the benefit of lazy Indians who make a pretense of Christianity for the sake of their bellies, my good padres," Comisionado Felix said. "I was a soldier in this country many years; I have helped drive these savages to the baptismal font even here at San Fernando, and I say there is no justice in taking from men who were created in God's image to give to such as they."
Felix spoke with great earnestness, evidently sincere in his belief that the rights of the pueblo were being denied in favor of these beings whom he contemned, and placed among the inferiors of creation.
"There are two fountains wasting water constantly," Alvitre charged with severity, speaking to Padre Mateo as if he would humble him for what had gone before. "Must Indians have fountains to put their dusty toes in? Enough water is wasted in these two fountains every day to make many little gardens green."
"How many people are there in the pueblo now?" Padre Ignacio inquired, turning suddenly to Felix.
"More than five hundred, padre. They arrive on every ship."
"There is water enough in the river where the road crosses it to enter the pass, to supply three times that many people, and all their gardens, all their flocks and animals of every kind," Padre Ignacio maintained. "I crossed there only two days ago; there is water over the fetlocks of a horse."
"Four or five inches of it there, yes, in a little stream two yards wide," said Roja. "But it is miles away from the pueblo yet, the sand drinks it as it goes, and no more comes in along the way."
"The rains are six weeks off," Alvitre complained.
"It is not only the present, but the future," the comisionado argued.
"Would you have us tear out the dam, then?" Padre Mateo demanded, in tones of defiance.
"It is God's water," Roja contended. "No more for priests to divert away to the use of Indians than for citizens and their children."
"Peace!" Padre Ignacio commanded sternly, the wide sleeve of his gown running down his brown sinewy arm as he lifted his hand. "There is water enough. Return to the pueblo and let it be understood there will be no change made in the economy of this mission. If necessary, the pueblo can be established in another place, where there is water for all future needs. This work shall not be abandoned, our fields and vineyards left to shrivel in the sun, for the convenience or comfort of any who came to this land after us and established themselves in our shadow. Go back to the pueblo and tell them this."
"You talk of moving the pueblo as one speaks of lifting a box," Comisionado Felix said resentfully. "Well, Padre Ignacio, I have known you a long, long time, and I knew Padre Lasuen, who built this mission, before you, and I tell you that I never heard more unreasonable, more unwise words come out of the mouth of a priest. The day of your oppression in this place is nearly over, but the pueblo will be there when the walls of this mission are dust. Come, my friends; let us go."
The three at the mill door watched the visitors from the pueblo away, Padre Ignacio so indignant that he had no thought of attending them back to their horses at the mission door.
"So the admirable Comisionado Felix lays bare in a word the core of their complaint against us," Padre Mateo said. "Did you understand that mode of speech, Juan?"
"Only a word here and there."
"The base animal, calling us oppressors in a land that is incontestibly our own!" Padre Ignacio spoke with passionate indignation, his thin brown face reddening in the first gust of anger Juan ever had seen rise in him.
"That is the complaint of the trespasser everywhere," Padre Mateo said, "of the covetous who come to profit out of the labors of industrious men. We dominate this country, but no man can charge with justice that we oppress. We have made it; we shall hold it."
"If God wills, if God wills," Padre Ignacio said gently, his flush of anger gone.
"This is the core of their indictment, this charge of oppression," Padre Mateo went on; "they are making their argument for the confiscation of our property on that plea. Consider our poor Indians in the hands of such villains as that gallant three!"
"It may come, but we shall not live to see it, Brother Mateo," Padre Ignacio said. "The government is not so weak as to listen to such wretches."
"What will they do about the water?" Juan inquired, surprised that they should pass so lightly the nearer question of first importance for the speculative discussion of a political agitation that might never come to a head.
"They will do as they have done; clean out their ditch, perhaps, and let a little more into it from the river, the lazy rascals!' Padre Mateo replied.
"They loiter like the first pair leaving Eden," Padre Ignacio said, looking after the three men in displeasure. "Attend them, Juan; see them outside and on their way."
Juan followed quickly, glad for the order that gave him this detail, little honor as there was in attending Comisionado Felix and his friends. He had been wondering whether Alvitre would turn thief again if he chanced to see the horse that had carried him in many a foray on the highroad, dozing in the corral. But there was another thought that caused him to quicken his steps far more eagerly than concern for the horse: the thought of Tula Sinova, her fair head bent over a square of snowy linen, her delicate fingers drawing out long threads, working a design of airy, exquisite beauty, while her little charges drove clumsy needles in the lesson of the day.
That was not a sight for the lewd eyes of a Comisionado Felix to behold; not a picture, framed by the broad, low door, for Sebastian Alvitre to lick his lips over like a wolf outside the lambs' corral. Tula would be in the big room adjoining the dining-hall with her class of young women and girls at that hour, fresh as a bramble-rose on the trellis by the fountain, her eyes bent down upon her work, sitting near the door that opened into the court. These men from the dusty pueblo must not profane her with their eyes.