The Valley of Adventure/Chapter 23
PADRE IGNACIO was up later than usual that night. It was his established habit to retire early to refresh himself against the duties of the day, which began at dawn with his attendance before the altar at the early celebration of mass, and continued unbroken until the last word in the minute chronicle of the day was entered in his books.
This work tonight had been delayed on account of his sitting long at table with the governor; the gentle padre's candle-beam was bright in his north window long after Gertrudis finished her painful walk. Even after he had closed the record book, where all the doings of the mission were set down for the president's information, he sat involved in a web of speculations that kept the desire of sleep from his eyes.
In the chamber adjoining, Governor José Joaquin de Arrillaga lay asleep. It was the first time in his six years as governor of California that he had visited the south. Now he had come on the persistent complaint of the people of the Pueblo de Los Angeles and ranchers of consequence whose lands bordered those of the Mission San Fernando, to hear at first hand the pleas and defense.
Governor de Arrillaga was a friend of the missions; he understood fully their importance, the vast spiritual and industrial labors which they sustained to the glory of God and the welfare of man. Padre Ignacio was fully aware of this. Yet the priest was not animated by any great hope that the outcome of this controversy between the mission and the people, whom he looked upon as interlopers, would be decided as he would have it closed. The governor was a diplomatic man, genial, friendly; but so guarded of word that his mind seemed fallow ground, in which the seed of testimony must be sown and brought to fullness before he would deliver his opinion.
Well enough, quite within the practice of justice, Padre Ignacio admitted. Yet the cause of the missions was so evident that no man could deny the justice of it, except those politicians and schemers whose hands burned to lay hold of these vast enterprises and divide their treasures among themselves.
Not only the treasures of hemp lands, and wheat lands; orchards, vineyards, fair gardens; cattle and sheep numbered by the hundreds of thousands on the ranges of the missions between San Diego and Monterey; not only these, but the poor simple wards of the padres, the Indians redeemed by the faithful labors and marvellous patience, zeal and tender love of these men whose reward was not among the things of earth. These defenseless creatures, only a step removed from the most barbarous state that man ever descended into, the greedy rascals who pressed closer day by day would tear away from the mission shelter and enslave.
Here lay the broad spread of cultivated lands, the impounded waters of rivers led into them to make them glad and green, developed by foresight and wisdom, and unremitting toil. It was so much easier for the adventurers to reach out and take what other hands had brought to this state of fruitfulness than to expend long years in building plantations out of the raw land; much easier, also, to sit and grow rich from the profit of an enslaved people's labor than to trim their own vineyards and hackle their own hemp.
It was charged, indeed, that the Indians were slaves under the padres, that they suffered abuses and cruelties, and punishments which revolted the hearts of the humanitarians who complained. That was one of the charges which the governor had come to investigate. True, Padre Ignacio owned in the honesty of his unequivocal mind, the Indians must be disciplined at times, as children of parents never so kind and generous must be held within bounds and administered corrections. There was no denying that these measures had been applied with little judgment at times; the present state of things at San Fernando was evidence of that. Yet this was far from the general rule. Even under the harsh authority of Don Geronimo the Indians had been happy at San Fernando. Padre Ignacio sighed. There had been disturbing days, there had been insubordination and rebellion. But it was quiet again. What a serene breathing of peace there was over everything tonight.
The quietude of the night soothed him; the desire of sleep descended on him heavily. He drew the candle forward, leaning to puff the flame. There was no thought in his mind of Gertrudis and the sacrifice she had proposed to make in the simplicity of her deep faith; the sorrowful act of devotion had been carried through so quietly that no murmur of those who witnessed it had reached to his open window, and he had been so deeply occupied with the business which crowded his mind that he had not looked out upon the arcade, or the white gleaming church at its farther end until this moment.
"It is almost as light without as within," he said, his hand held for a moment between the candle and his eyes. "It is the hour of peace."
Padre Ignacio blew out his candle. The moon was shining in at his eastern window, the bars across its face in curious effect. Padre Ignacio sat looking at it in a calm reverie.
"Padre Ignacio! Padre Ignacio!"
The voice was beneath his north window, where the gleam of his candle had shone but a moment before. Sharp, clear, insistent in its clamor, its emphasis of alarm. Padre Ignacio sprang to his feet, to the window.
"Who calls?" he demanded, straining to see directly below him, whence the voice sounded.
"Padre Ignacio! The Angelenos—they are breaking down the dam!"
"Who calls?" Padre Ignacio demanded again, bristling with a cold thrill at the wild note of that shrill voice.
"The Angelenos—they are placing a blast of powder in the dam!"
Padre Ignacio heard the swift scuttle of soft-shod feet across the pavement of the court as the messenger who had shouted this disturbing news into his peaceful window ran in the direction of the blacksmith shop. The thickness of the wall at his window sill, the bars outside it, prevented Padre Ignacio seeing who this person was. The earnestness of the shouted warning, the tremulous eagerness of its wild note, seemed to echo yet in the great empty room. Padre Mateo was aroused; he was making a noise at his window.
"Who is bellowing there?" Padre Ignacio heard him demand, the huskiness of sleep in his throat.
"I will hasten to the dam," Padre Ignacio said, putting his head a moment in at Padre Mateo's door as he passed.
"I will be at your heels," Padre Mateo returned, his head already in his gown.
Padre Ignacio did not wait. He ran toward the church, bristling with indignation against this sneaking trespass by the Angelenos, not doubting for a breath that the warning had been an honest one. The high, tremulous, anxious voice still sounded in his ears, like the pain of a thorn in the hand.
"I seemed to know that voice," he muttered as he ran, his long legs cutting the distance like a swallow's wings. "I seemed to know it, but it evades me like an echo." He hurried on, flitting from arch to arch like a swift bird.
He cut through the corner of the vineyard to the vestry door outside which Captain del Valle had fallen. In a moment he was out again, carrying with him the tall black cross borne at the head of processions. It was more than half as high as Padre Ignacio. A figure of Our Señor was carved upon its tree.
Governor de Arrillaga's sleep had been cut by the alarm beneath Padre Ignacio's window; his waking had been as sudden as a fall. Now he was moving about his chamber.
"What is this?" he called, his head thrust out of his door. "What alarm is this under my window, Padre Ignacio?"
"There is an assault on the dam by those rascals of the pueblo," Padre Mateo informed him, coming to his door a little way along the dark passage under the bare rafters. "Padre Ignacio has gone to stop them—I am going. Compose yourself until we return."
"Stay!" the governor commanded. "Guide me to the dam—in a moment I'll be with you—in a moment—where the devil is my sword!"
Padre Mateo, boiling as he was with rage against the skulking rascals who had come to work them this incalculable damage, had no choice but to curb his passion and his feet. He heard the governor let his sword fall with a loud clatter on the tiles, and the muttered curses of the great man as he snatched the various pieces of his apparel. Padre Mateo made ready his candle to light the governor down the stairs.
For an elderly stout man, Governor de Arrillaga was quick about getting into his clothes. Although it seemed long to Padre Mateo's fuming inipatience, it could not have been more than a minute or two until the governor appeared in his boots, his trousers pulled on with rather a stuffy appearance over his nightgown. He was carrying his sword in his hand.
"Now, my good padre, I'm with you," he said. "Lead away—let me get a sight of these precious citizens at their admirable work!"
Padre Ignacio arrived in breathless precipitation at the dam, having run all the way. He burst among the wreckers, who were so intent on their preliminary work of destruction that they had not seen him until he was within two rods of them, holding the cross before him with extended arms like a peace offering or a shield.
"Hold your work here, lawless men!" Padre Ignacio commanded. He pushed among them to the spot where two men, under the direction of no less important person than Comisionado Felix himself, were drilling a hole with a crowbar deep into the adobe-and-bowlder dam.
There were not more than nine or ten men in the crowd; their horses were tied near the mill. The moon was so bright that the features of every man there were laid plainly before Padre Ignacio's searching eyes, and he was not in the least surprised to see the other two members of the committee who had waited on him not long past in company with the comisionado: Sebastian Alvitre, late outlaw of the king's road, now innkeeper at the pueblo; and Manuel Roja, citizen, of no particular calling. The others were unknown to Padre Ignacio, but he made such note of their faces as to be able to identify every one of them when necessary.
The men who were drilling the hole dropped the bar and drew away from the cross as from a firebrand, one of them stumbling blindly against the pail of water they had been pouring into the hole to soften the sun-dried bricks, upsetting it over Sebastian Alvitre's feet. Padre Ignacio saw that several holes had been started and abandoned, due to striking imbedded boulders. This one they had down four feet or more, already below the water line. The priest planted the cross in the mouth of this hole, pushing it down solidly, leaving it standing there in its sacred defiance.
"So I see you here, Vincente Felix," he said sternly, "a man sworn to uphold and enforce the law, setting your hand to this outrageous deed! Sebastian Alvitre, this is the manner in which you repay the mercy of those whose generosity saved your neck from the hangman's rope."
Alvitre had not moved an inch at Padre Ignacio's approach. He stood within arm's reach of the cross, the shadow of his broad hat across his dark face.
"We have not come on a lawless expedition," Comisionado Felix denied. He came forward, Padre Ignacio and his cross between. The others had fallen back, leaving a broad clear space: around the point of their interrupted operations.
"There, Padre Ignacio, there is our reason for coming," said Alvitre, pointing to the spillway. "See that little trickle of water that you spare us from the plenty you have stored up behind this dam. That is our reason for coming here tonight, after our prayers and petitions to you have failed."
"It wastes away before it comes to the pueblo, our gardens have withered, our cattle are dying, our women and children are suffering the pangs of thirst," Comisionado Felix declared. He set himself in dramatic attitude, arms thrown out as if he laid his purpose and its motives bare to all the earth.
"You have come like cowards and dishonest men to take what does not belong to you," Padre Ignacio replied.
"You wrong us, good padre," Alvitre boldly defended. "We have come only to take what is our right. Your oppressions cry out to God!"
"Miserable man! Away with you, now—all of you! Begone from here! If any man puts hand to the destruction of this work again, he"
"I have heard curses, and I have been cursed, padre; they don't hurt a man," Alvitre interrupted. "But I will tell you, Padre Ignacio, we are reasonable men. If you value your water so dearly, maybe you are ready to pay us the damages we have suffered, and keep it where it is. The soldiers have not eaten up all of your gold."
"You discover the honesty of your purpose here, Alvitre," Padre Ignacio returned, contemptuous of this offer to compromise for a price.
"And there is a horse at this mission belonging to me," Alvitre pursued, unshaken, unabashed, bold as he ever was when he took away a man's money on the king's road. "I must include the horse in my terms of settlement. Bring us two thousand dollars in gold, good padre, and my horse, and you will see us ride away from here. With that money we can put down wells; we can endure till the rains come."
The others, some of whom were drawing off at the priest's half-spoken threat of the church's awful displeasure, Manuel Roja, the fat citizen among them, came crowding near again when Alvitre began this proposal of compromise. Comisionado Felix, little better than his second, caught at this offered adjustment with hungry zeal.
"Indemnity, that is all we ask, or it might be said with more truth, aid in finding water somewhere in the ground that we can't find in the river any longer, since the padres at San Fernando shut it up to their own selfish use," Felix said.
"It is plain that your purpose is robbery, if not of one thing, then another," Padre Ignacio replied, more sad than indignant to see such rascality stripped of all pretense. "Poor knaves! you do not understand the enormity of the thing you propose. But you shall take neither water nor gold from San Fernando tonight. It is enough. Go now—away with you!"
"Roja, do you desert us?" Alvitre demanded, roughly challenging the citizen who was starting again toward his horse, followed by three or four.
"I have misunderstood your purpose, and I did not come to fight a priest," Roja replied.
"Go your way, coward! there are enough without you. I am not afraid of a piece of wood, nor any man's curse!" Alvitre snatched the cross, flung it aside and set his foot over the hole. "Bring the powder and fuse! Felix, watch that man!"
Padre Ignacio would bear watching, indeed. Fired by overmastering resentment of this ruffian's contempt of the church's authority, he sprang and picked up the cross. He swung it with all the passion of his heart, all the strength of his sinewy arms, and would have struck Alvitre down in a moment only for the interference of a tall bearded man who leaped and caught his arm from behind. The rascal laughed lightly, as if he had overpowered a defiant boy, twisted the cross out of Padre Ignacio's hands and stood holding him by the wrists.
"Take yourself away from here in peace, padre, before I tie you with your girdle to yonder post and leave you to enjoy the spectacle of the blast that's going to blow your dam to pieces in a minute or two," Alvitre counseled.
"You shall blow me to pieces with it, then! I'D not move a foot!"
Alvitre lifted his head from the work of pouring powder into the hole. He looked at Padre Ignacio a moment, his hat pushed back, the moonlight on his face. There was a gleam of his teeth between his parted lips.
"You poor old fool! I believe you'd do it!" he said. "Take him over behind the mill—see to it Felix—where he'll be out of harm, and tie him securely. It will do him good to hear the water rush."
"Come away, padre, come away," Comisionado Felix requested, his voice in a degree respectful, his hand lightly on the priest's shoulder. "We must have our water, you understand. You can see the river is dry, so dry. I tell you good padre, that it is no more than a mule can drink three miles below the dam."
Alvitre had stepped into command of the expedition as naturally as if he had been appointed captain of it instead of Comisionado Felix. Whatever justice there might be behind their complaint of oppression in this matter of shutting off the river, their act was an unlawful one, outrageous as it was cowardly. All these phases of it fitted it peculiarly to Alvitre's hand. He put down the bag of powder with a curse when he saw that Padre Ignacio moved neither at his command nor the comisionado's entreaty.
"We're not going to have a martyr here, old man," he said rudely. "Now, march away before you set me on fire with a passion that jumps up in me quicker and hotter against a priest than any other man. You're not different from other people, you priests; you've got legs under that long gown. Let me see you march on them this moment!"
"Here is somebody coming!" said the man who held Padre Ignacio's arms.
"Nothing but another gown, and that serpent Geronimo Lozano," Alvitre said, contemptuous of their coming. "I'll make a martyr of him, with very great pleasure."
Padre Mateo and the governor were approaching along the dam from the direction of the mill, which stood not more than twenty or thirty yards away. Roja and those who were leaving with him, paused in the shadow of the mill to hear, perhaps, whether some new negotiations would begin, in the result of which they might return and share. Alvitre, indifferent to the arrival of this pair, was tamping down the blast with the smaller end of the bar.
Governor de Arrillaga came ahead, puffing from his run. He laid sudden hand on the man who was holding Padre Ignacio, and flung him aside, sending him sprawling down the bank.
"What do I behold?" he roared. "Citizens of the pueblo in this most despicable design!"
"Comisionado Felix, guardian of the law in the Pueblo de Los Angeles," said Padre Mateo, "and on your other hand, Governor de Arrillaga, one Sebastian Alvitre, who places the powder to wreck our dam. Excellent gentlemen, both!"
"You have arrived in good time to learn the honest character of those who make the outcry of oppression against us, excellency," Padre Ignacio said. He spread his hands, rather ashamed of the sight before the governor's eyes, it seemed. "Yes, I would to God they had gone before you came to see them in their shame."
Comisionado Felix was speechless before the governor, turning his head in anxious calculation first toward his horse, then toward the chief executive at whose mercy he stood. What was passing in his mind was not worth the trouble of stopping to read, for it could have been only subterfuge and plans of excuse and evasion, or perhaps of treachery to those whom he had involved.
Sebastian Alvitre was more collected, for he had been confronted in his villainy many times in his life. He leaned on the bar, his eyes drawn to a scowling point.
"So, it is the governor, heh?" he said.
"Comisionado Felix, I will have my hour with you," the governor said, dismissing him with that. Felix started away, slinking and afraid. The man who had held Padre Ignacio, who was, in fact, nothing more than one of Alvitre's former companions of the road, had scrambled up the bank again. Two others and Alvitre, of the raiders, remained.
"You are Sebastian Alvitre, then?" said the governor, advancing a step, leaning to look sharply at the fellow, "whom I pardoned at the petition of Captain del Valle, on assurance that you were an honest man at the bottom, and one who had rendered service to the state."
"It is I," Alvitre returned, insolent under the governor's severity where an honest man would have been ashamed.
"Your pardon is revoked. Stand! you are under arrest." The governor's sword flashed in the moonlight as he spoke. He presented it at Alvitre's breast. "And I tell you, villain, that you shall hang for this night's work!"
"I'll have something to hang for, then!" Alvitre said. He sprang back, snatched a pistol from his sash, the governor's sword-point pressing him. The cap flashed in the governor's face; Alvitre flung the pistol down with a curse, retreating nimbly before the governor's sword.
"Stand!" the governor commanded; "stand, or you're a dead man!"
Alvitre's foot struck the cross that he had contemptuously wrenched from the place where Padre Ignacio had planted it. He bent as swift as a swallow, laid hold of it, guarding himself against Governor de Arrillaga's lunges with desperate dexterity. A smashing blow sent the sword whirling down the embankment; Alvitre, a cry of rage in his throat, lifted the cross high to strike the governor dead.
A swishing sound, as of the wing of a waterfowl rushing in the panic of flight above the hunter's head; a noise of impact, sudden, sharp, as an apple falling from the bough at night. Sebastian Alvitre caught his breath with a choking sharp gasp, flung out his hands and fell upon his face, the cross beneath his body.
"The Indians!"
The man who had held Padre Ignacio in his insolent strength gave this alarm, plunging down the embankment of the dam as he spoke. His companions followed. While the two priests and the governor bent over the fallen man, the raiders mounted and rode hard toward the hills.
"An arrow!" Padre Ignacio muttered.
"It was heaven-sent, it saved my life!" the governor said.
Padre Mateo was looking toward the willows which fringed the margin of the lake.
"There are two men yonder!" Governor de Arrillaga said, pointing.
"Advance!" Padre Mateo cried, his voice trembling with emotion indescribable, a quick strange gladness that thrilled him to the marrow.
The two men were only a few yards distant; Padre Ignacio ran a little way to meet them, stopped, his hands lifted in astonishment.
"Juan Molinero! Cristóbal! Juan!" he said, amazement making his utterance weak.
Juan leaped forward like a man from his prison door, to fall on his knees at Padre Ignacio's feet. The wondering priest laid his hands in benediction on the young man's head, lifted him gently, saying nothing; turned his face to the moonlight and looked anxiously into his eyes.
"You see!" he said.
"Thank God for his mercy!" Juan returned.
"It is a miracle!" Padre Mateo declared.
"It seems no less," said Juan, his voice hushed in the great flood of his thankfulness.
"When did this come to you, Juan? When were you restored?" Padre Ignacio inquired.
"I heard Cristóbal give the alarm"
"Ah, Cristóbal; it was Cristóbal. I knew, and yet I did not know. And then?"
"I sprang from my bed, Padre Ignacio, forgetting for the moment that I was blind. You know it is the way of a man who has depended on his eyes to tell him things, to think of seeing first. I was alarmed at the thought of the dam, standing there in the dark. Cristóbal called you again; I rushed toward the window, I tore the bandage from my eyes, and I could see!"
"It is a miracle!" Padre Mateo whispered. "Juan Molinero, thank God for the devotion of a pure heart whose pleading and suffering brings back to you this inestimable treasure."
"Gertrudis! What has she done? Where is she? What—what"
"Patience, patience, my son," Padre Ignacio calmed him, hand on his shoulder to stop him as he stood ready to bound away to seek her.
"She is safe," Padre Mateo said.
"Where is she?" Juan demanded, his voice and manner so stern that Padre Mateo drew back a little as if in fear.
"Before the altar. I saw her there as I passed the church door but a little while ago. Calm yourself"
Juan did not wait to hear the pacific words. He leaped past them like a fugitive who fled for life; they could see him running swiftly along the white cart-track that led past the great church door.