CARAVANS TO SANTA FE

Quivering with rage, Consuelo stood still.

CHAPTER I AN OUTPOST OF SPAIN

A hundred years ago, in a valley that lies on the slope of flame-shot mountains, a little town of ancient crooked streets slept in the sun, entirely shut away from outside civilization—a bit of old Spain, lying in rare and mellow beauty in the mountains of the Sangre de Cristo. Beyond the Cordilleras lay other ranges of rocky, snow-capped peaks, and beyond these again stretched hundreds of miles of barren desert, succeeded by still other hundreds of miles of rolling plains—a land of red men and bearded bison.

Through the streets of the adobe-walled Villa, the town of Santa Fe, life flowed with a sluggish content or took siesta. At this moment it was taking siesta. The cook slept with her bare toes spread in the cool mud beneath a dripping olla, the wood boy and his compadre, the burro slept within a few feet of each other, the burro standing in the sun, the boy lying in the blue shadow of a wall. Doña Gertrudis Chaves y Lopez slept with open mouth, through which issued contented little whistles of escaping steam. Don Anabel Lopez himself slept, but not even sleep could relax the pride of his hawk nose, the defiance of his well-bred snore.

But Consuelo Lopez did not sleep; she lay in her bedroom, sulking. She was bored as only sixteen can be bored, and waved a naked foot in the air in rage. “Bestia!” she exploded, venting her angry thought. “Moribundos! The dead ones!” Reaching under her pillow, Consuelo drew out a silver case from which she extracted a cigarette. Slipping to a window where one long dazzling shaft of sunshine pierced a crack in the shutter, she held a small burning-glass over a wisp of paper. It flamed in a moment; the cigarette was lit, and she resumed her pose. A step sounded outside the door. Consuelo threw the cigarette disdainfully behind the bed, but the step passed on and she recovered it again before it had time to go out. It was fortunate that Doña Gertrudis was so insistent upon her daughter’s beauty sleep. Consuelo would be permitted to indulge her boredom undisturbed for another hour. A raging boredom she rather enjoyed, but not a languid one.

“They think it enough for me to sit here and twiddle my fan. To sit here and listen to Manuel! Tink-a-tinkaa, tink-a-tink, Thy heart so true! Caramba! I know everything he can say by heart. Rather would I marry myself to one of the rope-haired trappers or the barbaric Yanqui caravaners that come over the plains a-trading. They are men. What if they do lack cultivacion, and cannot roll their r’s. They appeal to me. Yes!

“Ah, would but Don Tiburcio Garcia arrive, with something of the outside world about him, and the latest news from Chihuahua and Mexico City. And clothes, ah, what clothes! What will he think of me?”

Consuelo stretched herself reflectively upon the bed, tossing aside a hand-woven coverlet of drawn threads, and lifted the bare foot to catch a breeze stirring through deep-silled windows. She took from the carved chest of drawers beside her a wrought-gold mirror studded with pink semi-precious stones and carefully regarded her face from this angle and that. The sole imperfections that appeared within its frame were those of a cracked mercury back. Consuelo considered and approved the mirror’s various reflections. They were more pleasant than her thoughts. In fact, her mirrored face was all that she cared about at the moment. Hers was that most charming of Spanish types, which in profile is straight-nosed, delicately cut, but which in full face appears childish, the nose short, a trifle broad, the eyes large and heavy-lidded, the lips full, petulant. There was strength in the squaring of the jaw and in level, heavily marked brows, scowling now with her rebellions.

Everything one wanted to do was prohibited—to dance with the caravaners, for example. Only disagreeable things were permitted. How could one consider one’s suitors seriously if they were like Manuel, her second cousin, so eager that he bored beyond insults? He would be on hand this afternoon, singing his interminable verses. Well enough to have him as a sort of permanent court, even though Luis did make all sorts of fun of his cousin. But then, Luis was critical of everything; brothers generally were. He’d be a bit more respectful when he heard about Don Tiburcio! A caballero from the City of Mexico, a veritable Spanish grandee? Consuelo did not dream, after Don Tiburcio had visited Santa Fe the summer before, that he could ever again be interested in her. Yet he had sent word to Don Anabel that he was coming, and had made special inquiry for her. She blushed with embarrassment when she thought of the outrageous manner in which she had treated Don Tiburcio; she’d slapped his face when he raised her hand and was about to implant a kiss upon it!

But then, she was only a little girl last year. Now she could appreciate what it meant to have so courtly and traveled a suitor. In a few days his pack train should arrive from Chihuahua and life would be vastly more exciting. There would be new clothes for her, too. Kid shoes—oh, she would be furious if they were not lefts and rights—brocade, perhaps some sapphire earrings.... It was time to dress for the afternoon. Still Consuelo lay looking idly from her mirror to the windows. Who knew at what moment one might hear the call, “The caravan is coming!” and she, with every other girl and woman in Santa Fe, would dash to window or door to gaze at the Yankee traders as they rode into town. Then there would be the delight of new goods to buy from those unknown lands beyond the rising sun, new faces to see, new thoughts to think upon.

The very thought brought Consuelo to her feet. Throwing off the ancient blue Chinese mantle brought in for her from the Orient by her father, she tried the effect of a high comb in her hair. Dipping a wide-toothed tortoise comb into the tepid water that still stood in a heavy silver washbasin by her bed, she ran it through the dark waves till they curled crisply, with a shining order. Pulling at the sides till a few loose ringlets detached themselves, she set the comb atop the coiled mass, draped over it a white lace mantilla, and stood entranced. She would wear it to the baile when the caravan came.

Somehow a greater thrill lay in the advent of the lean, ruddy strangers from America than in the coming of the Spaniard’s train. From the arrival of one caravan to another she could scarcely wait—the creaking wheels, the clatter of chains, the shouting and talking, the strange English tongue. She introduced herself before the mirror and smiled demurely at the imaginary gentleman she was meeting.

Then tossing comb and lace aside, she threw herself on the bed again and shouted, “Fay-lee-cita! Fay-lee-ee-cita!” It was some time before Felicita, Consuelo’s peon slave, appeared; she was met by a small red shoe thrown at the door, but hitting the girl squarely as she entered the room.

“Why do you keep me waiting for my water every single day?” Consuelo was shouting; but she stopped now, a bit abashed. “How could I tell you would come this time so soon? But I must be dressed, quick!” She had suddenly remembered that at five some young trappers would be down from Taos to talk with her father on business, and she wished to be dressed and sitting in the patio, from where one could see and be seen when visitors entered the zaguan and sat with Don Anabel in the living room.

Felicita backed out of the door and fairly ran after the water, and Consuelo began to throw clothing about the room, already disorderly, but quaint and full of charm, a curious combination of luxury and crudity. Large and high-ceiled, its adobe walls were tinted a salmon pink; the two windows, square-paned, deeply recessed by the three-foot walls, were curtained with lace, and the great carven bedstead was draped with rose-red damask hangings from Spain. On the high chest of drawers were a pair of silver candlesticks, and above hung a heavily framed mirror of old Spanish make. Before a small corner fireplace with an Indian chimney lay a thick and enormous buffalo skin, and the rough board floor was strewn with other peltries. On each side of the bed lay a tinted white Angora sheepskin. At the foot of the bed stood a high carven chest in which lay Consuelo’s clothing, gowns brought over many weary hundreds of miles, packed securely on the backs of burros that wound mountain passes, crossed ravines, and plodded over deserts in the long journey up from Vera Cruz, the eastern port of Mexico.

There were many shawls, black Spanish lace from Seville, a bright embroidered peasant challis, gold and salmon flowers on a white ground, fine merinos and cashmeres of European peasant patterns. Consuelo chose now a white dress of sheer batiste, embroidered heavily in white, full-skirted, with a short plain bodice. She donned the red shoe that still lay under the bed, and when Felicita had brought her the other from the doorway, she permitted the peon woman to throw the flowered shawl over her shoulder, and stepped out into the corredor. Then she turned impulsively and ran back. Snatching a silk scarf from the bed, she draped it over Felicita’s head.

“Here. Did I hurt your tummy? Take this.”

Her mother was waiting for her in the living room. Across the table from Doña Gertrudis sat Manuel, plucking his guitar tentatively, persuasively. Not everyone in New Spain rose when a lady entered the room, but Manuel always stood when Consuelo appeared in the doorway. Her mother did not glance up from the altar-piece which she embroidered; it was the only work that her plump fingers had ever been engaged upon. Doña Gertrudis was fat, small-boned, her chin lost in the amiable creases which had engulfed the beauty of her youth. In spite of the heat of the August day, she was dressed in the favorite black of the Mexican woman of Spanish descent. Heavy rings of yellow gold, set with garnets, roughly cut but of marvelous color, covered her fingers, a bracelet to match weighted her small wrist, and weighty gold earrings pulled down the lobes of her fat little ears. Her dress of black silk was voluminous and hung straight from her shoulders,—a fact which the shawl about her shoulders could not hide.

“And we shall have roast young pig, joint of young antelope, guinea-fowl, when Don Tiburcio arrives,” she was saying as Consuelo came in. “Manuel has a new copleta, Consuelo querida, composed specially for you, today,” she went on. Doña Gertrudis had been a famous coquette in her own time, and although the announced visit of Don Tiburcio Garcia had opened up wider vistas matrimonially for her daughter than New Spain had previously afforded, she had a family fondness for her cousin’s son and was too diplomatic to slight him.

Manuel, taking silence as assent, was already strumming, and intoning his new copleta in a plaintive nasal tenor. But his presence and his plinking were quite ignored by the girl, who swished to a chair near the window and looked steadfastly out, leaving Doña Gertrudis to keep time with her foot and dream of love.

As to Don Anabel Lopez, hidalgo, master of the house and lord of vast lands granted to his family by the Spanish crown a century and a half before, he was not at all pleased with the prospect to which Consuelo looked forward with secret delight and anticipation. The coming of the Yankee traders across the plains with their freighted caravans of mules and covered wagons, was an event to be tolerated only for the gain it brought. Bitterly Don Anabel resented the intrusion of the hated “English” into the province conquered by Spain two centuries before.

Yet he could trade the pelts of beaver, lynx, fox, the robes of buffalo and of deer, brought in to his post by trappers white or red, at a profit that would have made Connecticut Yankees wince had they known that he himself had acquired them for a handful of tawdry merchandise, and stores that were cheaper from New Orleans and St. Louis than from Vera Cruz and Mexico City.

On this warm and sunny afternoon of late summer Don Anabel stood before the door of his store and warehouse, scowling. He could look up the little winding street to the Mountains of the Blood of Christ, as they had been passionately and piously named by the early Conquerors, and red-streaked they were now even in the yellow light of the afternoon sun. Don Anabel looked to the passes that led north and east; he was perturbed.

“Luis,” he called sharply to the young man who lounged through the doorway, a languid cigarette hanging from his lips, “I see a rider coming down the trail from Lamy. Can you see any one following? I believe it must be either an advance of the caravan arriving over the Santa Fe Trail or else the trappers I expected down from Taos, coming by the lower route.

“I only hope it is the trappers, for I would like to get their business over with before the caravan arrives. This Gringo trade from beyond the mountains has cut so largely into our own rightful business within the province that we must make whatever profit we can out of the goods they take back with them. The peltries they buy are cheap at the price, anyway.”

“What is the Governor charging them a load this year?” asked Luis, who was rather a handsome young fellow of eighteen or twenty, with a straight nose and loose, full lips.

“Just what was charged two years ago when the first caravana of wagons entered the territory—five hundred dollars each wagon-load; and, Santa Maria! it is little enough.”

“Little indeed,” assented Luis, indifferently. “When does the excellent Don Tiburcio arrive? Have we been taming the little sister so that she won’t scratch this time?”

“I expect Don Tiburcio at any time now. That may be the dust of his caravan. He is bringing camlet cloth and silken grogram, shawls, combs, white sugar, ammunition, the usual merchandise. And Heaven send he arrive before the Americanos with their cargo from the United States, and have his goods disposed of.”