Wood Rangers: The Trappers of Sonora

Diaz departed to execute his orders, and Don Estevan caused his tent to be pitched again, that even in his absence his starry banner might float over the camp as a sign of his protective authority. This done, he threw himself on his couch, and slept the sleep of a soldier after a day of fighting and fatigue.

Little more than an hour after, Diaz stood before him, “Señor Don Estevan,” said he, “all is prepared for starting.”

The chief rose and found his horse awaiting him ready saddled.

“Diaz,” said he, “ask the sentinels if Gayferos has returned.”

Diaz questioned one of the men, who replied, “The poor fellow will probably never return. The Indians must have surprised and killed him before attacking us, and that probably was the cause of the firing that we heard in the afternoon.”

“I fear it is but too certain that he has been murdered,” replied Diaz; “but as for the firing that we heard, I believe that had a different origin.”

Don Estevan now mounted his horse, and the two set off in, the direction of the mountains.

Chapter Thirty Nine

The Islet

While the Indians, united in council, were deliberating on the means of attacking the camp of the gold-seekers, let us see how the three men on the island were occupied.

It was about four o’clock, and the fog was beginning to rise slowly from the water. Willows and aspens grew on the shores of the river Gila, within rifle-range of the little island, and so near the water that their roots were in the river. The spaces between the trees were filled up by vigorous osier and other shoots; but just in front of the island was a large open space. This had been made by the troops of wild horses and buffaloes, that came down to drink at the river; and through this opening any one on the island could see clearly over the plain.

The little island had been formed originally by trees that had taken root in the bed of the river; other trees, some green and others without branches or foliage, had rested against these, and their roots had become interlaced. Since then, many summers and winters must have passed; and grasses and sedges, detached from the banks by the water, had filled up the interstices. Then the dust, brought there by the wind, had covered these with a crust of earth, and formed a kind of solid ground for the floating island. Plants had grown along the banks; the trunks of the willows had sent forth vigorous shoots, and, with the reeds, had surrounded the island with a fringe of verdure. The island was only a few feet in diameter; but a man lying, or even kneeling upon it, was completely hidden by the willow-shoots.

The sun was going down, and a little shade was thrown by the leaves and trees; in this shade was stretched the form of Fabian asleep. Bois-Rose seemed to be watching over his sleep, hastily taken after the fatigues of a long march, while Pepé refreshed himself by plunging in the water. While Fabian slumbers, we shall raise the veil by which the young Count hid from the eyes of his two friends his most secret and dearest thoughts.

After his fall into the torrent, Pepé had forgotten that the enemy on whom he had sworn vengeance was escaping, and both he and Bois-Rose had thought only of rendering prompt assistance to Fabian. On returning to consciousness, Fabian’s first thought was to resume his interrupted pursuit. The acquisition of the Golden Valley, and even the remembrance of Doña Rosarita, were forgotten by the ardent wish of revenging his mother.

Pepé, on his side, was not the man to draw back from his vow; and as for Bois-Rose, his whole affections were centred in his two companions, and he would have followed them to the end of the world. Their first failure, far from discouraging them, did but excite their ardour; in hatred as in love, obstacles are always a powerful stimulant to vigorous minds. The pursuit had gradually presented a double object to Fabian; it brought him near to the Golden Valley in the desert; and he nourished a vague hope that the place pointed out to him was not the same as that which the expedition led by Antonio de Mediana proposed to conquer.

Fabian said to himself, that the daughter of Don Augustin doubtless only yielded obedience to the ambitious views of her father, and that it might yet be easy for him, noble and rich, to win the day against such a rival as Tragaduros.

Still, discouragement often seized upon Fabian; he loved the daughter of the haciendado with his whole soul; and the thought of owing her love only to the treasures that he might possess, distressed him. Moreover, he felt that the ardent and jealous affection of the Canadian, had founded on him the sole aim of his life, and that, like the eagle who carries away his young one and places it in an eyrie, inaccessible to the hand of man, Bois-Rose, who had forever quitted civilised life, wished to make of him his inseparable companion in the desert; and that, to disappoint the old man would be to throw a shadow over his whole future life. As yet, no confidence as to their future had been exchanged between them; but in face of a love that he believed hopeless, and of the ardent, though secret wishes of the man who now acted as a father to him, and who would half break his heart at a separation, Fabian had generously and silently sacrificed his tastes and hopes that would not die. He who had but to hold out his hand to seize the things that the whole world desires – riches, titles, and honours – was like one whose life tortured by an unhappy love, disclaiming the future, seeks within the cloister forgetfulness of the past. For Fabian de Mediana, the desert was the cloister; and his mother once revenged, it only remained to him to bury himself in it forever. Sad and inefficacious, as a remedy, would be solitude, with its mysterious voice, and the ardent contemplations that it awakens, for a passion so fondly awakened in the young heart of Fabian.

One single hope remained to him – that amidst the ever-renewed dangers of an adventurous life, the day was not far distant when his life would be cut short in some contest with the Indians, or in one of those desperate attempts that he meditated against the murderer of his mother. He had carefully hidden from the Canadian the love that he buried in the depths of his heart; and it was in the silence of the night that he dared to look into his own bosom. Then, like the light which shines in the horizon above great cities, and which the traveller contemplates with joy, a radiant and cherished image rose before his eyes in the desert, standing on that breach in the wall of the hacienda, where his last souvenirs carried him. But during the day, the heroic young man tried to hide under an apparent calm, the melancholy that devoured him. He smiled, with sad resignation, at those plans for the future which the Canadian sometimes enlarged on before him – he so happy in having found him, and who trembled to lose again his beloved Fabian, whose hand he hoped would one day close his eyes. The blind tenderness of Bois-Rose did not divine the abyss under the calm surface of the lake, but Pepé was rather more clear-sighted.

“Well,” said Pepé, after a long silence, “the inhabitants of Madrid would pay dearly for such a stream of water in the Manzanares; but we have not the less lost a day which might have brought us nearer to the Golden Valley, and from which we cannot now be far distant.”

“I allow that,” replied Bois-Rose, “but the child,” for so he called the vigorous young man before them, “is not so accustomed as we are to long marches, and though sixty leagues in twelve days is not very much for us, it begins to tell on him. But before he has been a year with us, he will be able to walk as far as ourselves.”

Pepé could not help smiling at this answer, but the Canadian did not perceive it.

“See,” said the Spaniard, pointing to Fabian, “how the poor lad has changed in a few days. For my part, at his age, I should have preferred the glance of a damsel and the Puerta del Sol at Madrid to all the magnificence of the desert. Fatigue alone has not produced this change in him. There is some secret which he does not tell us, but I will penetrate it one of these days,” added Pepé mentally.

At these words the Canadian turned his head quickly towards his beloved child, but a smile of joy from Fabian chased away the sudden cloud from the brow of his adoptive father. Fabian indeed smiled; he was dreaming that he was on his knees before Rosarita, listening to the sweet voice of the young girl, who was recounting her anguish during his long absence, and that Bois-Rose stood behind them leaning on his rifle and blessing them both. Ah! it was only a dream.

The two hunters looked for a moment silently at the sleeper.

“There lies the last descendant of the Medianas,” said Pepé, with a sigh.

“What care I for the Medianas and their powerful race?” replied the Canadian. “I know but Fabian. When I saved him, and attached myself to him as though he had been my own, did I ask about his ancestors?”

“You will wake him if you talk so loud,” said Pepé; “your voice roars like a cataract.”

“Why are you always recalling to me things that I do not wish to know, or rather wish to forget. I know that some years in the desert will accustom him – ”

“You deceive yourself strangely, Bois-Rose, if you imagine that with the prospects that await him in Spain, and the rights that he can claim, this young man will consent to pass his whole life in the desert. It is good for us, but not for him.”

“What! is not the desert preferable to cities?” cried the old sailor, who vainly tried to conceal from himself that Pepé was right. “I undertake to make him prefer a wandering life to a settled one. Is it not for movement, for fighting, and for the powerful emotions of the desert that man is born?”

“Certainly,” said Pepé, gravely, “and that is just why the towns are deserted and the deserts peopled!”

“Do not jest, Pepé; I am speaking of serious things. While I leave Fabian free to follow his own inclinations, I shall make him love this captivating life. Is not this short sleep, snatched hastily between two dangers, preferable to what one tastes after a day of idle security in the towns. You yourself, Pepé – would you wish to return to your own country, since you have known the charms of a wandering life?”

“There is between the heir of the Medianas,” replied Pepé, “and the old coast-guard man a great difference. To him will come a fine property, a great name, and a beautiful Gothic castle with towers like the cathedral at Burgos; while I should be sent to fish for mackerel at Ceuta – which is the most execrable life I know of and which I should have but one chance of escaping from – that of waking some fine morning, at Tunis or Tetuan, as a slave to our neighbours the Moors. I have here, it is true, the daily chance of being scalped or burnt alive by the Indians. Still the town is worse for me – but for Don Fabian – ”

“Fabian has always lived in solitude, and will, I trust, prefer the calm of the desert to the tumult of cities. How solemn and silent is all around us! See here!” and he pointed to Fabian, “how the child sleeps, softly lulled by the murmur of the waters, and by the breeze in the willows. Look there, in the horizon at those fogs just coloured by the sun, and that boundless space where man wanders in his primitive liberty, like the birds in the air!”

The Spaniard shook his head doubtfully, although he partook the ideas of the Canadian, and like him felt the charm of this wandering life.

“Look,” continued the old hunter, “at that troop of wild horses coming down to drink before going for the night to their distant pasturage. See how they approach in all the proud beauty that God gives to free animals – ardent eyes, open nostrils, and floating manes! Ah! I should almost like to awake Fabian in order that he might see and admire them.”

“Let him sleep, Bois-Rose; perhaps his dreams show him more graceful forms than those horses of the desert – forms such as abound in our Spanish towns, in balconies or behind barred windows.”

Bois-Rose sighed, as he added —

“Yet this is fine sight – how these noble beasts bound with joy at their liberty!”

“Yes, until they are chased by the Indians, and then they bound with terror!”

“There! now they are gone like the cloud driven by the wind!” continued the Canadian. “Now the scene changes. Look at that stag, who shows from time to time his shining eyes and black nose through the trees; he snuffs the wind, he listens. Ah! now he also approaches to drink. He has heard a noise, he raises his head; do not the drops that fall from his mouth look like liquid gold? I will wake the lad!”

“Let him sleep, I tell you; perhaps his dream now shows him black eyes and rosy lips, or some nymph sleeping on the banks of a clear stream.”

The old Canadian sighed again.

“Is not the stag the emblem of independence?” said he.

“Yes, until the time when the wolves assemble to pursue and tear him to pieces. Perhaps he would have more chance of life in our royal parks. Everything to its time, Bois-Rose; old age loves silence, youth noise.”

Bois-Rose still fought against the truth. It was the drop of gall that is found at the bottom of every cup of happiness; it is not permitted that there should be perfect felicity, for it would then be too painful to die; neither is unmixed misery allowed to mortals, or it would be painful to live. The Canadian hung his head and looked sad as he glanced at the sleeping youth, while Pepé put on his buffalo-skin buskins.

“Well! what did I tell you?” said he, presently; “do you not hear from afar those howlings – I mean those barkings, for the wolves have voices like dogs when they hunt the stags. Poor stag! he is, as you said, the emblem of life in the desert.”

“Shall I wake Fabian now?” said Bois-Rose.

“Yes, certainly; for after a love dream a stag hunt is the thing most worthy of a nobleman like him, and he will rarely see such a one as this.”

“He will see nothing like it in the towns,” cried the Canadian, enchanted; “such scenes must make him love the desert.”