The Valley of Adventure/Chapter 9
DON GERONIMO sat at supper with Sergeant Olivera in the mission kitchen, as on another night more than two months before. The long whip was hanging in its place beside the door, the hams' and bacon were dim in the slow-moving smoke among the dark beams. Magdalena sat opposite her thin-visaged, bearded husband, proud of his handsome carriage, his erect shoulders, his commanding eye. Truly, if Don Geronimo had not been born caballero he had made one of himself, and that of the first.
Magdalena was as neat and comely as it was her customary habit to be, a yellow kerchief with scarlet crescents binding back her fine dark hair. Her youthful, plump arms were bare to the elbows; in unconscious grace she leaned them on the cloth, her slender brown hands clasped restfully.
Sergeant Olivera was the same as yesterday, as ten years before, as he would be ten years after. A sun-cured man, brown and grey, enduring as oak, tireless as an eagle. His sabre and pistols hung on the post of his chair, his soft grey hat, its broad brim turned up on one side and fastened against the low crown with a leather cockade, lay on a corner of the table near his hand.
"It is incredible news you bring, Sergeant Olivera," Don Geronimo said, his grizzly thick eyebrows lifted until they arched high in his lofty forehead. "Sebastian Alvitre given full pardon by the governor, and to become an honest tavern-keeper in the pueblo! It passes the belief of a credulous man."
"How honest a tavern-keeper is another thing, but a tavern-keeper in all sobriety. As to the governor's motives, Don Geronimo, you will pardon my silence."
"Certainly, Sergeant Olivera. A soldier's tongue must wear a bridle. As for myself, I can see nothing in the whole business but the beginning of some new rascality."
"We shall see," said the sergeant, his leathery face as secret as a closed purse.
"Well, you have been a long time away, you missed the wine-making after all. Are the grapes of San Diego de Acalá abundant this year?"
"Small and dry. And the brandy-still? does it work, Don Geronimo?"
"Like magic. We have eight barrels already distilled, and shall make more—perhaps twenty in all. That will not be a poor beginning."
"Alvitre will be a customer," the soldier said, looking shrewdly at the mayordomo, humor in his eyes.
"And pay for it with gold stolen from the padres on the king's highway," Don Geronimo nodded, the humor of such a situation quite beyond him. "Let the scoundrel come here, and I will flog him back to the pueblo like a dog."
"Here is Borromeo," said Magdalena, her face toward the door.
Borromeo Cambon appeared out of the night, pausing a moment in the door to make a ceremonial bow to Magdalena, who laughed and applauded the effect with clapping hands. Borromeo was arrayed as for an occasion, with gilt-braided green jacket and buff pantaloons so tight on his big thighs that the skin itself must have been crowded. These were buckled under his insteps, making it appear a question, and a disconcerting one, how the blacksmith was to sit down.
"Well, soldier!" Borromeo hailed in booming voice, coming in with a swagger to his broad shoulders, putting out a hand in greeting. "Where have you been since I drank the last cup with you at this table more than eight weeks ago?"
"I have been in the south," the sergeant replied, rising to meet the hearty fellow on equal terms. "What is this? You are dressed like a lover, there is perfume on your beard."
Borromeo's dark face grew darker for a slow mounting of blood. He lifted his shoulders, raised his eyebrows, rocked his head.
"A man is not old at thirty-seven," he said.
"I remember; there was one lady on the ship. Did you get her, according to your oath, Borromeo?"
"A man is not an old man at thirty-seven, as I have said." Borromeo looked about him, a challenge in his bearing to any man who might have the courage to question the pertinacity of his emphasized repetition.
"Nobody denies it, Borromeo," Don Geronimo said. "Sit; there is wine in the pitcher."
"And where is the barbarian?" Sergeant Olivera inquired. "Has he put on his hairy skins and gone back to his kind?"
"He is sitting by a candle, a book under his nose, spelling out large words which he will try to pronounce to me tomorrow," Borromeo laughed. "He is a savage no longer, my brave soldier."
"No? It is a miracle," the soldier said, amusement, depreciation, in his words.
"He has been baptized," Magdalena told him, speaking with reverence.
"Like an Indian caught out of the woods," Sergeant Olivera smiled. "Do not trust him; it may be only a pretense."
"It is to be seen," said Don Geronimo, very grave, shaking his head as if in pity of the priests' credulity.
Magdalena said nothing. She reached for the pitcher and filled her husband's glass.
"Now, I will tell you, gentlemen," said Borromeo, puffing after a tremendous swig at the earthen mug that held his quart of sour claret, "I believe he is as true a man and as worthy a Christian as ever put beans in his mouth. That much I will say for Juan Molinero, who has worked by my side in the forge many a good day."
Magdalena turned a look upon the blacksmith that would have given a coward courage. Perhaps for the peace of her hearth she held her own words under her tongue.
"You were not here," Borromeo addressed himself to the sergeant, "the day he escaped from Captain del Valle. You do not know the story of that day?"
"It wasn't through his own valor or shrewdness that he got away, I have been told," Sergeant Olivera replied.
"The way was opened by another, that is true, and if I had been there I would have stood ten soldiers on their heads to help him," Borromeo declared. "You would not speak lightly of his courage or his honor if you knew him, little soldier. Have you been told that he wanted to go back and deliver himself into Captain del Valle's hands that day? thinking that honor bound him because he got away by the comical trick of that smart girl. Well, that is the truth of it, as Magdalena here can tell you. How many soldiers would have been troubled by a call of honor with a wall eight feet thick between them and their enemy?"
"That is another thing," Sergeant Olivera said testily, frowning into his cup.
"There is not much honor among soldiers," Borromeo said, with dispassionate, simple earnestness. "I have seen them lasso Indian women in the camps of those who are still gentiles, and drag them to their tents."
"There are ruffans in every company, not excepting this," Sergeant Olivera returned, very little concerned by the blacksmith's opinion, not in the least disturbed.
"Where there is one soldier there is always a ruffian," Borromeo growled.
"Your wit improves, Vulcan," Sergeant Olivera said, smiling with easy good-nature. "You must have been at the brandy barrels."
Borromeo made a grimace that involved all his facial apparatus, unmistakable in its intent of denial and, more than denial, confession of defeat in all his hopes for this extracted fire of the grape.
"It is not to be permitted, Padre Ignacio says. The guests in the front of the house may sip it like hungry bees, Don Geronimo, perhaps, will fill his bottle now and then, but the poor devils that built the still to cook it in and the barrels to hold it, they must be happy to breathe even the smell."
"Remember your penance, Borromeo," Magdalena prompted him, gently.
"Doña, I do not forget," Borromeo replied, his broad simple face suddenly grave, his booming voice subdued.
"You are a good man, Borromeo," she praised him; "you are becoming a better man every day."
"What of the mill, Don Geronimo, that this stranger was to build for Padre Ignacio? Does it go?" Sergeant Olivera made the inquiry in light derisiveness, as a man speaks of another's ridiculous simplicity to the one who has borne the affliction of it, certain that he has pitched his tune to a sympathetic ear.
"It goes," Don Geronimo replied without enthusiasm, grudgingly, as the flatness of his voice betrayed. "There is a devilish ingenuity in the hand of that man. What calamities his innovations shall bring to this mission I shrink to contemplate."
"Calamities?" Sergeant Olivera repeated the word curiously, as a man turns, with a puzzled face, a thing that he does not understand.
"Saving labor to these Indians is not wise," Don Geronimo answered gloomily. "They see the water doing their work in one thing; presently they will demand that the water do it in-all things. No, the millstones with the sweep were better than this arrangement; I do not care if the stranger's mill grinds ten times as much."
"And it goes?" said Sergeant Olivera, keenly curious, leaning a little in his eagerness to learn more.
"I will tell you how Don Juan and I made the machinery that turns this mill with such marvelous ease," Borromeo interrupted, assuming an undertaking which Don Geronimo willingly yielded to his forward tongue. "With your permission, Don Geronimo," he amended, seeing the corner of Magdalena's eye.
"Speak until you are empty, Borromeo," Don Geronimo granted.
"I am listening," Sergeant Olivera said.
"Then it was this way we accomplished it, against the belief of all men but Padre Ignacio," Borromeo began. He stretched his legs under the table, and leaned back at elegant ease, one arm hooked over the chair-post, one free to emphasize and illustrate his points. "In the beginning, Don Juan came to me to inquire if I had a furnace for melting iron. He was not surprised when I showed him the little melting-pot that I had made of clay, for running metal to cast many little things which save me long hammering at the anvil. He saw at once that I was a craftsman who knew metal from the very ore. That made it simple for him; half the work was already done.
"Then this Don Juan shapes a model of parts out of wood, his cog-wheels and his stems. We pack dry sand around them, and withdraw them with care, leaving the impression, the form. But when I pour in the metal, there is a disturbance, for the sand is not just so dry. So, this first casting is not good. Again, and again, many times we try, until at last it comes perfect from the mold. A bevel gear, as Don Juan calls it. Those are the English words for it: bevel gear. It is strange about this English, a very simple and easy language to speak. The word no means the very same thing that it does in Castilian."
"Simpleton!" said Magdalena laughing until her cheeks were red.
"A bevel gear," Sergeant Olivera repeated, thoughtfully. "But it is nothing new in mechanics, Don Geronimo?"
"Not at all; but new to the simple padres, applied for the first time in California. We have two buhrstones turned by the contrivance; I grant that it is a labor-saving machine, which is all this American yankee thinks of—saving human energy, the most plentiful and the cheapest thing in the world."
"That is not all that Don Juan has accomplished," Borromeo said with pride. "He has shown us how oxen are yoked in America, with the yoke resting on the necks close against the shoulders, in place of being tied to the horns, as we do it, as it has been done in Spain for ten thousand years."
"Oh, not so long, Borromeo," Magdalena asserted. "The world has not been created as long as that."
"Well, as long as it has been made, then," Borromeo insisted.
"I do not see the advantage of the method," Sergeant Olivera said, considering it for its merits with an unprejudiced mind. "It may be more comfortable for the beasts, if any man is such a fool as to devise arrangements for that."
"Put yourself in the place of an ox," Borromeo proposed in entire seriousness, "and imagine me in the place of another, yoked to you horn by horn. There is a diabolical fly with a green head on my ribs; another, maybe its wife, on yours. I fling my head to knock off the beast that is sucking my blood; you do the same. Then where do we go, my friends? for the way one head goes, that way the other must go. So we suffer from these animals that eat us alive while head pulls against head and our eyes roll white as onions."
"It is for the flies that this humane Don Juan has devised the beautiful yoke, then?" Sergeant Olivera mocked.
"An ox is like a man, take him as you will," said Borromeo. "Give him comfort and he works with spirit. And that is one thing. Another thing is that one span of oxen will draw a load as heavy as three span yoked in the old way. And that is something else, heh?"
"It is something to consider," Sergeant Olivera admitted, honestly interested in what he had heard.
"And Don Juan has made a plow that throws a furrow like a wave, a great wide plow with one turning-side to it, not like the iron-shod beam that has been used in Spain for eight"
"Hundred," Magdalena prompted.
"Too long, even at that," Borromeo complained. "We knew no better until Don Juan proved what his plow could do. It will increase the yield of our fields, it will throw the diabolical worms that eat the roots of our plants up to perish in the sun."
"I must see this plow," Sergeant Olivera said.
"I am making another one now, after the pattern of the first; I shall make many more. You are welcome to come to the forge tomorrow and learn the ways of progressive men, so that when you have the ranch you spoke of at our first meeting, you will know where to come for an implement."
"Just so," the soldier said, nodding seriously.
"Yes, Don Juan is a marvelous man, he is like a brother to me," Borromeo declared. "He knows the name of every tool in the forge, he can talk enough Castilian already for daily use, more than many of these neophytes who have had it beaten into them for twenty years."
"That is no marvel of intelligence," Don Geronimo said, cold in the heat of all this praise, which Sergeant Olivera knew very well was distasteful to him as a bitter pill. "Castilian is the natural language of man; it is the speech that God put into Adam's mouth at the beginning."
"Does he sit at this table?" the soldier inquired.
"No. Padre Ignacio has him at table, with Padre Mateo and the guests," Don Geronimo replied.
"It is like a family; he is the same as a son to Padre Ignacio," Magdalena said.
"This is interesting," Sergeant Olivera assured them, rising to take his leave. "With your permission, Doña Magdalena, Don Geronimo, I shall go to my repose. Tomorrow I leave you again, to return to the mission no more, except only as a friend to see his friends."
"What is this?" Don Geronimo asked, his face turning pale.
"My captain has returned from Monterey with orders to establish the military forces in the Pueblo de Los Angeles, withdrawing the troopers from this mission and the Mission San Gabriel."
Don Geronimo bent his head, and stood a little while in silence, as a man stands to collect himself when he has heard heavy news.
"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "Tle pueblos will be built at the sacrifice of the missions. That is the mistaken policy of the viceroy, urged on by politicians who wait to pick our bones."
Don Geronimo went with the soldier to the door, where he stood looking into the night. Magdalena knew by the turn of his head that he was facing toward the village where the Indians lived. What thoughts, what fears, were crowding into his mind that moment she could not know, but a terrible cloud of menace and unrestrained passion rose in her own vision, making her eyes big as if she looked on unspeakable things. There was hatred and smoldering vengeance laid up against Don Geronimo in the brown huts of the clustered village, where many a back was sore that night from the bite of the long black whip that hung beside the door.