Suzanna

by Harry Sinclair Drago

  SUZANNA

  SUZANNA

  A ROMANCE OF EARLY CALIFORNIA

  HARRY SINCLAIR DRAGO

  M. EVANS

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by M. Evans

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1922 by The Macaulay Company

  First M. Evans & Company paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942914

  ISBN: 978-1-59077-412-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-59077-413-7 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  I THE KING’S HIGHWAY

  II A LADY’S NAME IS MENTIONED

  III THE HONOR OF THE DONS

  IV SUZANNA THE PEON

  V “DOES THE NAME MATTER?”

  VI THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF A PIECE OF SILK

  VII CHIQUITA DE SOLA

  VIII THE BLOOD STRAIN

  IX A STRANGER IS MADE WELCOME

  X THE RULE OF A GENTLEMAN

  XI A HOUSE IS PUT IN ORDER

  XII THE PADRINO

  XIII BLOOD WILL TELL

  XIV MISTRESS AND MAID

  XV ALVAREZ HAS A VISITOR

  XVI CROSS PURPOSES

  XVII THE PRICE OF FEAR

  XVIII “THE WORLD’S A STAGE”

  XIX “I WOULD SERVE YOU WELL”

  XX “IT WILL LEAD TO YOUR DEATH”

  XXI “PÉREZ, I NEED YOU”

  XXII THE GROOM TAKES HIS PLACE

  XXIII “THE WAY IS OPEN”

  XXIV “WHITHER DO WE GO?”

  XXV ALONE AT LAST

  SUZANNA

  A Romance of Early California

  SUZANNA

  CHAPTER I

  THE KING’S HIGHWAY

  IT was high-noon. Heat waves danced across the floor of the arid, sunburnt valley. The brown California hills, broken, irregular, arose in the distance to bar the way. The year was 1835, and summer so far gone that the young, tufted mountain quail were flying.

  Stretching away across the long desert leagues, white with its own dust, wound El Camino Real—the King’s highway—a well-worn trail at best, for all its high-sounding title. And yet, with perseverance, it won through deserts and over mighty ranges, circled mountain torrents or bridged chasms. Weeks and weeks away to the south and east it took you; but eventually one arrived in Mexico City, then the flower of the Americas.

  Where the road dipped down into this wide valley was but the starting point of that long trek southward. For, only some ten leagues behind those low hills to the north, lay Monterey.

  Wealth untold flowed back and forth over this highway. Doughty men-at-arms, ladies of surpassing beauty, humble friars, coarse ruffians and better mannered banditti suffered each in turn, or prospered, upon its bosom. From governor-general and high dignitaries of church to poorest Indian neophyte, not one but whose eyes turned from time to time to El Camino Real. It was much more than an artery of trade. For California, it was the source of news; the producer of revenue; the means by which the children of the conquistadores caught the pulse of the land of their fathers: also—because of the coarse ruffians and their more gently mannered brothers by profession—it became the abiding place of danger.

  But on this day, however, neither man nor beast appeared to break the somnolent spell of the torrid noon-time. One gazed in vain across the valley for sight of moving thing. Rabbits and coyotes had long since taken to the hills and the shade of the chamiso and manzanita. Only to the north did the eye catch the stir of living object,—a giant vulture, wheeling lazily in the cloudless sky.

  Round and round the grisly thing circled, disdaining to come to earth. Suddenly, then, it straightened its wings and rose in sweeping rushes until it was but a speck in the heavens. Five minutes later a small dust-cloud appeared above the pass where the road cut through the hills. The little cloud grew as it advanced. The cavalcade of mules and horses which caused it quickly came into view.

  Outriders rode ahead; armed horsemen brought up the rear. Between these guards rode some four or five men. Immediately behind them thundered an eight-mule-team pulling a heavily wheeled wagon.

  Once free of the pass, the little company closed up. Foam dripped from the muzzles of their mounts. The youthful leader held up his hand and the party slackened its pace.

  The captain of the cavalcade was hardly more than a boy, for all that he gave his orders with a fine sense of authority. He voiced a warm, carefree laugh as he sheathed his blade and lowered the hammers of his muzzle-loading pistol.

  “Safe!” he cried, turning toward the white-faced young man who rode at his side. “Bah, Miguel, you’ve no heart for danger. You and your books,—look to yourself, man; you’re white of face. Come, let’s have a smile.”

  The student colored and swallowed heavily under this banter; but he made no attempt to do as he was bidden.

  “Do not ask me to smile, Ramon, not after this mad ride,” he muttered. “Time to talk of smiling when we’ve come safely through yonder pass. Pérez knows that the smuggler is at anchor in the bay, and that there will be wagons coming back to the ranchos with goods. Don’t expect him to overlook such an opportunity.”

  Ramon’s eyes snapped with good-natured merriment. “Oyez!” he cried aloud. “Hear—hear! And did you not say the same thing as we approached this pass in back of us? You have seen Pérez under every clump of manzanita since we quitted Monterey. Indeed you are the true son of a lawyer. Gild pity poor Pérez if he is ever brought up before you.”

  Miguel threw up his head at this. “Fine talk you make of pity for him.”

  “And why not?” the aggravating Ramon demanded. “He is a professional man the same as yourself. You work with the law; he without it. What.’s the difference,—it’s only a matter of choice. You will grow rich; poor Pérez will lose his head. The pity all belongs to him.”

  “H’m,” the young lawyer snorted. “And you mean it—well I know you do. I half wish your abused bandit stops us. The man has robbed and murdered his way to Mexico City and back.”

  “Of course. The man is a success. But he only robs and kills the rich”—with a shrug of the shoulders—“the rich can stand it.”

  “You will be fair meat, then,” Miguel retorted hotly.

  His words brought a grin to Ramon’s face. They understood each other very well, indeed. And, although they were of different castes, and the family of one served the other, the impress of this new country had already set to work a spirit of broadness never known in ancient Castilla.

  “Indeed, what a sweet plum you would be for friend Pérez,” Miguel went on. “The son of the richest, caught—captured—led away into the hills. Why, he would bleed your father’s purse until it was as impoverished as my own family’s.”

  “Captured?” Ramon echoed. “But I hold myself no coward—and friend Pérez—by all accounts —is no poltroon, either. Why
talk of capture? We may meet; hut one will not run the other off.”

  “We shall see,” his friend replied glumly. “Things have come to a pretty pass when a man may not set forth without fear of his life. Conditions go from bad to worse. We are a nation of lawbreakers to-day.”

  “Oh, muchackito, you moralizing—you who have this day purchased contraband goods—clothing, shoes and what not—from a smuggler? Unless my eyes have failed me, I saw the advocate-general himself aboard ship haggling over the price of a piece of silk. And our neighbors,—our rich, haughty grandees—were they not there, too? And yet, you turn up your nose at poor Pérez. I tell you, it is each man for himself. Why should we pay a hundred per cent tax to Mexico? We are not pawns. Pérez, now, has some claim on us. He, at least, spends his gains in our cities.”

  The young lawyer made a wry face as Ramon went on. The boy’s talk was heretical, treasonable; but it was only a fair sample of what one heard on every side. The days of peace and plenty were, apparently, over. Mexico had granted California a constitution; with it had come a new order of things. Men of affairs in the colony were wondering already if they had moved in the right direction. Taxes had increased by leaps and bounds; civil law had become a jest; and worst of all, the soldiers, who had been sent in answer to urgent appeals for protection of some sort, were convicts, and often a greater source of evil than the bandits whom they were supposed to suppress.

  The state was being torn apart with jealousies of one sort and another. The wealthy families of the south were insisting that the capital be removed from Monterey to Los Angeles. And Mexico, starvation poor from her war with Spain, was unable to pay the officers of her army. Revolts followed; sectional leaders appeared, eager to enhance their own positions in this time of unrest.

  But this strife was directly traceable to, and quite overshadowed by an epoch-marking economic change which was destined to make history. Namely, the secularization of the Indian neophytes.

  By one means or another, the decree of the Spanish Cortes, ordering the secularization of the Mission Indians, had not been published in California until 1821. Since that time it had been a burning topic of conversation. And since it affected every man in the province, it followed, as a matter of course, that revolutions, bitterness and distrust came.

  One heard talk of the rights of peons, of Indians, of the sins of the friars—and this in a land where the Franciscans had been supreme for some fifty years, administering the moral, and oftentimes the civil law. They had preached the salvation of the soul; but, intellectually, the mission system had accomplished nothing. The red men were virtually slaves. They worked up wool, tanned hides, prepared tallow and produced the major amount of California’s exports. Economically, therefor, the missions were the life and blood of the province. Secularization meant the freeing of the Indians, the restoring to them of the rights of freemen.

  Republican ideas were abroad even at this early date in California. This element acclaimed the new order with triumph. The adherents of the Church, on the other hand, viewed it with consternation. It meant the passing of the missions; the loss of a kingly ransom to the papal coffers. In addition to these two parties there was a third, the owners of the great haciendas. Unhappily, this class was divided among itself. The freeing of the Indians was certain to affect them more than it would any other class in the province. Some said that secularization meant cheap labor, and they were for it on that account. Others saw the complete independence of the peon as the next step, should the neophytes be freed. Giving the peon the rights of freemen meant the establishing of him as a social as well as economic equal. The patrician dons revolted at this. Almost equally they resented the heavy hand of the Church, and so, as a compromise, they had espoused the cause of a strict military dictatorship.

  The storm of revolt against the old régime was not to be denied, however. The Republicans arose and drove Victoria, the military governor, out of the state. The Franciscans, realizing that the inevitable was about to happen, were plundering and destroying the Mission property. It was the beginning of the end. A new régime, “less mild, less hospitable, less contented; but better tempered for the building of a state” was about to be inaugurated.

  It may be surmised from the foregoing that more than one family found its members set against each other. It was so with the House of Gutierrez. Ramon, as can be judged from his talk, was violently Republican. His father, the aged Don Fernando—a true Castillian grandee—a royalist and conservatist without brook or hindrance. Between them there was the clash of unbending wills.

  This square jawed, dancing-eyed boy was the son of his father. The head of the House of Gutierrez drew what comfort he could from that thought. Hot words had passed between them already. Young Alvarez, the lawyer’s son, had heard the old Castillian threaten to disinherit the boy for his revolutionary ideas. Ramon had smiled.

  As the little cavalcade moved across the valley Miguel thought of his friend’s ability to smile in the face of such a calamity. He knew that he, for one, would have been among the last to smile. The old order of things quite satisfied young Alvarez. His father had risen to a position of dignity and some affluence through the good graces of his wealthy patrons and the protecting arm of the Church. Miguel had no ambition beyond striving to emulate his honored sire. Ramon’s free speech filled him with resentment. He did not doubt but what time would show his friend the folly of his ways. And Miguel took a secret pleasure in hoping that when enlightenment came it would sink its barb deep enough into Ramon’s soul to cure him of his cocksureness about everything in general.

  The heat became so intense that the boys’ conversation languished. Not until their horses began climbing the benchlands which led up to the pass ahead of them did Miguel speak again. Ramon slept in his saddle, swaying easily from side to side with the motion of his horse. The peon guard lounged along in the rear of the wagon, eyes closed, oblivious to any possible danger.

  Miguel glanced ahead to where the cool, inviting shadows of the pass met the eye. Its coolness called to him in vain. He knew there were narrow defiles and sharp turnings beyond which were made to order for the highwayman. Pulling up his horse, he dropped hack until he rode beside Ramon.

  “Ea, ea, brave one,” he exclaimed. “Do we go on without taking any precautions whatever?”

  Ramon yawned provokingly before replying.

  “Si, muchachito,” he murmured sleepily, “for your sake we will take every precaution.”

  Ramon’s tone was keenly sarcastic. Miguel’s face flushed as he saw him wave his guards ahead with an extravagant gesture.

  “Ruiz,” the boy heard him address the grim-visaged leader of the peons, “we will wait in the open until you sound the bell,—that is if friend Pérez has not stolen it, clapper and post.”

  Old Ruiz’s lips parted in a mirthless grin. His master jested; but Ruiz had heard tales of bandits carrying off the bells placed in the passes. These bells served the purpose of signals to the wagon-trains waiting in the more open country where they were less liable to be pounced upon. The custom was, as in this instance, to send ahead a mounted guard to explore the defile. When this advance guard had made sure that no foe lay in waiting, the bell would be sounded and the teams would dash through to the succeeding valley.

  Ramon caught the look in the old man’s eyes. “Madre de Dios,” he cried sharply. “We are not three leagues from the rancho. My father can muster a hundred men, if needs be. Do you think Pérez or his like court fighting against such odds? If this senseless talk keeps up we’ll all be slinking about the hacienda itself come another month. Get off now, and look to it that your own shadow is not sending you back a sniveling paisano.”

  Some ten men remained behind with the wagon. They were mounted, and now formed a circle about the train. Ramon smiled at Miguel as he saw the men take their places. “Art satisfied now, reckless one?” he demanded.

  Poor Miguel trembled in impotent rage as his friend baited him on. “I hold my head to better
things than prowess with a sword or accuracy with a pistol,” he answered wrathfully. “Had I but to please myself, as you so boldly do, I, too, had time for the graces of a caballero. Your Republican ideals but mock you in shaming me for having held my nose to books that I might win a place for myself in this new world.”

  Miguel’s words rubbed the smile from Ramon’s face; his eyes filling with contrition as he saw how deeply his friend was hurt. Impulsively he placed his hand upon the boy’s shoulder. “Forgive me, compañero,” he pleaded. “’Twas all in fun, and well you know it. Stick to your books say I. Indeed shall we need the like of you. The time comes when we shall be done with Mexico even as we were done with Spain. We shall have our own laws. And you, jovencito, shall help to frame them.”

  “There you go!” Miguel cried with a toss of his head, “tempering your humbleness with farther empty boastings. Your talk is well calculated to lead you to the gibbet, yet. I, for one, would not——” Miguel did not finish his admonition. His keen eyes had caught the movement of Ramon’s hand as he reached for his sword. He saw the boy’s mouth straighten, his body stiffen; and poor Miguel, dreading to confirm his instant suspicion, turned and gazed at the dark pass ahead of them.

  “Virgen santa!” he muttered, the words almost strangling him. Subconsciously he made the sign of the cross.

  Four men had broken from cover and were dashing toward the wagon-train. They waved their guns and gave voice to a series of wild, blood-chilling cries as they rode. At first Miguel look them for Ruiz and his guard; but as the boy continued to stare at them, mouth open, eyes wide with terror, the four men became eight, ten, twelve, fourteen!

  “Pérez!” broke with a shriek from the boy’s lips as understanding flashed within him. “It’s Pérez and his band of cut-throats!”

  A curse escaped the lips of the youthful leader as he perceived that Miguel spoke the truth. The peon guard was panic stricken already. The boy’s mouth straightened as he observed them. He was in for a fight, now, and although his party outnumbered the other, he realized the calibre of his men. That they would stand up before Pérez and fight was not to be hoped for. And yet, as the bandit crew dashed toward him, Ramon determined to resist them.