WHITE as a dove that had come to rest in that green valley with her breast against the warm fair earth, the mission of San Fernando Rey de España appeared to one approaching from the north, its small grey adobe buildings nestling around it like an unfledged brood. From the south, along the Camino Real, or royal road, the traveler came upon it in a manner unexpected, there in its place called the Valley of the Encinas, that is to say, the evergreen oaks. But come to it from what direction one might, white-plastered adobe walls and soft-red tiles partly hidden behind green boughs of oak and willow, the savor of its kitchen came on the wind to greet him like the word of a hearty host.
It seemed there was always a roast upon the mighty grate—it would uphold the carcass of an ox—that stood under the archway built against the kitchen wall; for guests came at all hours of the day to the broad doors of the hospice, from which none departed unfed. Here Magdalena Lozano, cook extraordinary to the mission fathers and all who put feet beneath their plenteous table, reigned in dignity, with hams and bacon hanging on the joists which crossed the deep chamber midway between floor and roof, the unctuous condensations of countless dinners caked black and thick upon her walls.
There was no chimney to Magdalena's grill, where meats were roasted and broiled above the living coals, and vast cauldrons hung on giant cranes to boil and mingle their savory contents. It was not the fashion of the Franciscan padres who built their thick-walled missions in Alta California to trifle with such vain comforts as chimneys in kitchens. An arch thrown against the kitchen wall to confine the coals, and perhaps shunt the smoke out over the cook's head, diffuse and spread it better among the hams and bacon hung to cure and keep in the weevil-discouraging atmosphere, was all a right-minded cook, duly grounded in the faith, could require. So it had been in Spain for a thousand years; so it was in Mexico, whence the padres marched to the conquest of souls in Alta California. It was enough. The baking was done outdoors, in the great cave of an oven that looked like a cistern standing above ground.
The kitchen in itself was a chimney, some thirty feet high from tiled floor to the eaves of tiled roof, and was not so smoky and stifling as one might think, judging from the appearance of the walls, except in falling weather and times when the santanas blew from the northeast, carrying clouds of sand. Then one must shut the door to fend off the pestiferous drafts, and the smoke was sluggish between walls, and slow to find its way out under the rafters and through the tiles.
And a pleasant smoke it was which came from the dry cedar under Magdalena's grill, sweet with the incense of old romances; blowing down, it seemed, from the camp fires of the beginning, when mankind was young on the mountains and in the green forest glades. There is a mystery in the scent of sweet cedar blazing lazily on an open fire, a reminiscent melancholy, a quickening of strange, dear things which struggle in the recollection for voices, yet all of them commingled and obscure, woven in the fibre of mind and memory, indefinable, unknown. No other smoke will move such outreaching, vain soft gropings in the human mind. It is the incense of romance.
Magdalena, wife of Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, was not so much interested in the company gathered at table in the great dining-hall that autumn evening as she was in the company at hand: two men who sat under her smoky joists with a candle between them, feeding from the sheep's haunch set for their refreshment. Her eyes were more than half for them as she stood before her grill where a saddle of mutton was sputtering over the coals, her ears wholly for them, eager for the refreshment of news which seldom came to her kitchen from the far places of Alta California and the world beyond. The usual route of news was by way of the great front doors and the dining-hall, through the ears of the padres, with a word here and there which splashed over that one might pick up like a bird catching drops from a fountain. Only such news as the padres believed would not disturb the tranquillity and decorum of the mission ever passed to the kitchen and the mayordomo's quarters in the quad behind the vast building. Padres as censors of the news were most unsatisfactory creatures, as Magdalena would have told anyone who would have permitted her his ear.
It was no hard matter, either, for Magdalena to secure auditors, for she was a comely woman, with a sweet tongue in her teeth. Tall, under forty, supple and quick; her face not rounded and short in the general Spanish mold, but rather spare, as with Gipsy leanness, which lent sympathy and seriousness to her look; dark, with eyes brown and clear as polished agate, small even teeth, white as mother-of-pearl, which quickened her face like a light when she parted her serious calm lips in an unexpected smile.
Handsome, this Magdalena, to have come so far from the gaieties of life, the never-ending marvel of travelers who were so fortunate as to behold her at the kitchen door. When she served the grill, as now, she bound her smooth black hair under a red and yellow kerchief, drawing it tight across her forehead and knotting it behind. This added to the Gipsy piquancy of her dark face, the Gipsy mystery of her melancholy eyes, which seemed always to speak so much and yet to say so little that men could understand.
One of these men at Magdalena's kitchen table—the legs of it were hewn from cedar beams, it would have upheld an elephant—was a familiar figure in that smoky room. Borromeo Cambon, this was, a man who could beat out on his anvil any tool or instrument of metal that the need of man required, let it be a fishhook or hoe, copper cauldron or griddle-iron, scythe or sword. Borromeo was a man of great stature and strength, a man whose broad hands were the endowment of generations of men grown mighty in the wrestle with stubborn metals. His black beard was short and curly, his face red-brown, like a tile.
The other man taking refreshment from Magdalena's bounty wore a soldier's garb; a beardless lean and weathered man. His sword-belt and brassbound pistols hung on his chair-post close to his hand, as if he had compromised between the exactions of hospitality and the demands of duty, not going very far in either direction, This soldier appeared worn from many years afield; his brindled hair was shaggy, rough and long, but there was a merry light in his quick grey eyes, a smile that came easily to his close-fitting lips. The hardships and sacrifices of the wilderness, long association with austere and exacting men, had not caused him to forget that even a good soldier may laugh now and then and be better for such indulgence.
Sergeant Miguel Olivera had arrived only that evening at San Fernando, riding in at the head of ten troopers, brought to reënforce the command of Captain del Valle, officer in charge of the king's dignity within the jurisdiction of the Pueblo de Los Angeles. There was a business in the bosque, as Magdalena said, calling these soldiers down from Monterey, a business that these two men were discussing as they made their supper from the great loaf and the red haunch of sheep.
"You'll never catch him," said Borromeo Cambon, rolling his big head with an air of confidence that was almost defiance in the soldier's face. "Sebastian Alvitre is not a man to be approached while he lies asleep in the canyon."
"Who knows?" said Sergeant Olivera, indifferent, it seemed. He cut himself more meat from the reddest portion of the joint. "Who knows?" said he again, after a little while.
"I know that gold is scarce on the road since Sebastianito came riding here from Baja California with his wild black devils," Borromeo said. "No more than two days ago he came down like an eagle upon a lamb and carried off no man knows how many thousand dollars from two fathers who were traveling from Capistrano to San Gabriel. It was a thing to make a man laugh, the four soldiers who were along with the fathers to protect them. It is said they flew away like sparrows."
"Then the king must lift the ancient law and permit the priests to carry arms," the sergeant said, unmoved by the jeer at the valor of his kind.
"Or send women to guard them," the blacksmith suggested.
"When you have been in California as long as I have," Sergeant Olivera reproved him, pausing with knife upended in one hand on this side of his plate, fork clasped in like manner on the other, "you will be kinder in your judgment of all men, including soldiers. It is a hard way, comrade; a man has to be deeper than the crown of a hat to know it all."
"Eight years ago I came to this mission," said Borromeo, resenting the implication of unseasoned judgment, "marching from Baja California in the track that Brother Padre Serra himself made across the wilderness when he came to found the king's missions in this land for the reclamation of the gentiles' souls. Yes."
"It is a distinction to come in the footsteps of Father Junipero," Sergeant Olivera declared, nodding seriously. "You are honored to follow in the path of that sanctified man."
"I don't know that I'm honored more than old Padre Serra," Borromeo contended, bristling like a boar from his manner of drawing the skin of his forehead down toward his eyes, throwing his short-clipped stiff hair erect on his crown. "He was the king's priest; I am the king's blacksmith."
"That is well said, blacksmith," Sergeant Olivera nodded, "every man for his own calling. But people will have their own opinions, for all of that."
"What is a soldier's opinion of any man? A soldier is a slave!"
"It is a question," Sergeant Olivera returned. "But there is no question about artisans who come to Alta California to teach these savage neophytes their craft. They are men from the prisons, given parole on condition; they are thieves."
"Some of them may be thieves, little soldier, but I am no thief!" Borromeo's voice was a rumble in his chest, a cloud seeming to sweep a darker shadow over his fire-reddened face. "No, I will not permit any man to call me thief. I killed a man in Sinaloa, and I am ready to kill another one!"
"I implore your pardon, friend killer," Sergeant Olivera said, with sarcasm that was softened by a humorous kindling in his eyes. "It is a much greater distinction. But I am not ready to be killed my first night in San Fernando; there are several things that I want to live on a little while to see."
"You will not live to catch Sebastian Alvitre, anyhow, if God gives you two hundred years."
"Maybe not, Vulcan."
"No names, no names!" Borromeo leaned over the table to warn against such liberty, his great arms spread to reach and clasp the table's edges, a hand on either side.
"I make you a compliment," the soldier laughed, not disturbed by the blacksmith's savage squaring off as for a leap the length of the board. "What, man! have you never heard of Vulcan? He was the god of ancient blacksmiths, as well as blacksmith of the ancient gods; all of your tribe came from him, he was the father of them all. He was lame in a leg, he went with a hobble."
"Devil take him! he was no father of mine if he was lame, I say. All of my people came into the world sound, no matter if some of them left it in pieces. No, you will never live to catch Sebastianito."
"What does it matter, as long as I live to see the first wine run from the only press in Alta California? I hear they are to trample out the first grapes tomorrow. After that, let me die."
Magdalena smiled, and turned quickly to her roast as if to snatch away from the soldier's eyes the delight they seemed to have discovered that moment in her face. Borromeo Cambon also smiled, his thick beard spreading back from the crease of his wide lips.
"What you or I, or any other man, gets out of that vintage he will pay for," he said. "These lean-shanked priests are not loose-handed men, comrade; they are the kind to make money grow on the top of a rock."
"There is much dependent on them," the soldier said, considerately, "all these poor devils of Indians, ignorant animals who would starve if turned loose to make their way without a hand over them now."
"They are no good, they are not worth the meat they eat," the blacksmith declared with strong contempt. "As for salt, they do not eat any. Comrade, they are not worth a curse. They have been long enough under the fathers' teaching to forget the way of making a living in the woods, but not long enough to know how to get it out of the ground like civilized men."
"That is why the priests have to watch the dollars, Vulcan. Well, when they get to making wine and brandy the money will come easier."
"I have made them a still," the blacksmith nodded his head in solemn confirmation of his word, "of two hundred gallons depth. There will be brandy enough as soon as the wine is ripe."
"I can see it isn't going to be such a melancholy life for a soldier to be stationed at this mission," the sergeant said, his eyes following Magdalena as she bent to baste the roast.
"There is but one Magdalena," the blacksmith complained, "and a man might as well expect favors from Our Señora by the side of the altar."
"I am sure you speak a true word," the soldier returned. If Magdalena heard she did not turn up an eye. She pushed the dripping-pan under the roast and dipped up the rich liquid, in which pepper pods swam, and the cloves of garlic, and laved the brown savory meat.
"As for these Indian women, they are animals. The fathers say they are Christians, but consider a man married to a woman who eats bugs!"
"Cheer up, then comrade," the soldier encouraged him. "What? Haven't you heard the news?"
"News?" the blacksmith rolled his eyes, turning the whites of them like an ox straining at the yoke, ill-favored at the thought of being chaffed. "What neophyte has run away to get brandy from the soldiers at Buena Ventura? What rancher is complaining now against the mission sheep? Friend soldier, such news as this is all that tickles a man's ears in San Fernando."
"I would be the last one to laugh at a lonely man sick for the smile of a Christian woman. Haven't you heard the word our governor sent to the viceroy at the capital?"
"The walls of San Fernando are thick," said Magdalena, her wistful eyes on the soldier's face.
"The governor is a wise man in his day, according to my opinions," Sergeant Olivera said, "his clerk is a man from my own street in the capital, a man I know well. I had this from his clerk, but it is no state secret, it is a thing for everybody to know."
The soldier shifted his chair from the table-end, his meal finished, the scabbard of his long sabre scraping the tiles. Magdalena was quick with a blazing splinter for his cigarette; he rose to receive it from her, bending low in his acknowledgment of the favor, hand upon his breast.
"Well, it takes you a devil of a while to get it out of your mouth!" the impatient blacksmith grumbled. "What was it this famous governor said to the viceroy, which your so-good friend peeped into and read, my brave soldier? Come now; give it to us."
Sergeant Olivera looked at Magdalena and smiled. He offered cigarettes to the complaining man, who spurned them with repellent hand.
"Cigarettes?" said Borromeo. "No, I don't favor the little things. There's only a mouthful of smoke in one of them for a man, and they burn his beard besides. If you've got a long cigar about you, let me have it. Very well; my pipe is better, anyhow. And the governor wrote to the viceroy on a matter, heh?"
"In effect, it was this: Padres with Indian neophytes gathered around their missions are all very well, but padres and Indians never will develop the glorious possibilities of Alta California. It will take," said the wise governor in his letter to the viceroy, "at least a hundred years to bring the Indians up to a state of even crude civilization."
"Four hundred!" Borromeo declared. "There is not one man in five hundred of them with sense enough inside his head to learn how to make a shoe for a mule."
"I think the governor was nearer the truth, for I have seen many Indians of the second and third generation under the padres who are skilled in the crafts of hand."
"It is the young ones," the blacksmith agreed, nodding his head slowly; "the old ones can mix mud for adobes, and that is all. So the governor said?"
"The man who has the love of land in his heart, the man who makes a home, and spreads green fields and vineyards around him, he is the man to build a colony to the king's glory. There are such men in California, the governor wrote, good soldiers, valiant men, faithful servants of the king, many of them retired from age and wounds, but not too stiff to plant a vineyard, not too old to be the fathers of families. But to have a family, even a soldier must first have a wife. Send me, then, the governor requested of the viceroy, a shipload of women, to be wives to my soldiers in Alta California."
"What a fool!" said Magdalena.
"And his blacksmiths, his masons, his tilers—let them go to the devil! said the governor."
"No, I think there was a general provision, with soldiers first, certainly soldiers first. When the ship comes, I am sure you will get your lady, Mr. Blacksmith, along with the rest of us."
"What a fool!" said Magdalena again. "As if any women would leave Mexico to come to this wild country only to marry men!"
"But you are here," the sergeant said, "and it appears you are married to a man, one to be envied by all men, by the garment of Our Señor!"
"It is another thing, "Magdalena returned, bending her head, pleased with the vehement compliment. "I was married before I came; I was not sent like a hen to the market."
"And the ship?" Borromeo inquired eagerly; "you spoke of a ship. Is it on the way?"
"It is expected at San Pedro bay within a week."
"If it brings one lady, only one, Mr. Soldier, she is for the blacksmith of San Fernando. Let any man step between us, and I will crack his head with my hammer as I would crack an egg."
"You are a valiant man," said Sergeant Olivera, lifting a shoulder in a strangely expressive little shrug, not so complimentary as Borromeo might have wished.
"I killed a man in Sinaloa for stealing my wife, Mr. Soldier; that is the kind of a man I am. Well, I killed the woman too, if anybody wants to consider that worth thinking about. I cut their necks like rabbits and left them where I found them. That is why I am here. Ask Magdalena; she can tell you what kind of a man I am."
"Even the testimony of the beautiful is not required to give character to the brave," Sergeant Olivera said. He did not turn his eyes from the red coals under Magdalena's grate, which he seemed to contemplate with visionary gaze, as if he saw the ship of which he had spoken there, the lady of his longing on its deck. The contempt that underlay the suavity of his words vain, boastful Borromeo seemed too dull to catch or understand.
"Remember your last penance, Borromeo," Magdalena cautioned him. Her eyes were gentle with him as she turned to where he sat, his rough bare arms folded across his breast.
"But if there is one woman on that ship, she is mine," Borromeo stolidly persisted.
"What does a soldier want with a wife at his heels, following him from mission to mission?" Magdalena inquired, turning to Sergeant Olivera. "That is no life for a woman, at least for a woman fit to be the wife to a gentleman like you, Sergeant Olivera."
"I shall retire from the service in another year, if God spares me that long, doña. Then a ranch with a stream of living water through it, a herd, a flock of sheep. That would be paradise for a man, I think, doña, if he had a woman to hold his head when he is weary."
"What a man!" said Magdalena.
"It's safer to have a woman here than in Mexico," Borromeo reflected, "there are not so many men to put poison in her ears while her husband is at work at his anvil. Give me a chance with another one, I say, and I'll keep her till her teeth fall out."
"Devils!" said Sergeant Olivera, dodging, striking with his hand as at an insect that annoyed him. "What is it dripping down on a man in your kitchen, Doña Magdalena? Surely the rains have not begun in September?"
"It is the fathers' ham," the blacksmith enlightened him, laughing to see the spreading grease-spot on the soldier's sleeve. "This time of the year they drip like an olla of cold water hung in the door."
Sergeant Olivera looked overhead. Hams and bacon hung thick on the joists fifteen feet above him, dim in the smoke and shadows.
"There's many a sweet morsel there, heh, soldier?" Borromeo licked his lip, his hunger moved by the piquant thought, full as he was of mutton, turning his broad face up to see, his curling short beard crisp as charcoal. More Jove than Vulcan he appeared in the candle's light.
"It would take a long arm to reach them, anyhow," the sergeant laughed. "Well, I have fared heartily at your table, Doña Magdalena," Sergeant Olivera rose, preparing to depart, laying hand on his sword-belt. "I do not envy the fathers their hams."
"It is nothing," said Magdalena, throwing out her hospitable hands.
"Tomorrow I shall not fare so well, doña; I shall eat a soldier's supper in the company of soldiers; there will be ashes on my bread."
"You would be welcome every day to this table, Sergeant Olivera. The house is yours, and all that is in it."
"And the fathers' hams, and the fathers' wine casks in the cellar—all yours, soldier; help yourself." Borromeo laughed, rolling back in his chair as the thought enlarged in him, smiting the table with his big sledge fist until the platters jumped. "And your bed, doña—of course that is his, also, at least half"
"Silence, fool!" Magdalena commanded, more a Gipsy now than before as she scowled at the blacksmith with eyes drawn small, her forehead wrinkled in an angry threat.
"'Take the sergeant to the kitchen, Borromeo, and sit with him at the table,' Geronimo said to me. I leave my olla of beans with the wild onions from the hills, I come to guard the honor of the mayordomo's house, and what does the doña offer me? 'All is yours,' she tells the soldier, leaving the blacksmith with his finger in his mouth."
Borromeo roared again, throwing his head back, his mouth stretched so wide that one of the hams must have gone down his great gullet if it had broken its rawhide thong and dropped. Sergeant Olivera looked at him with dry humor wrinkling about his eyes, his nimble fingers drawing his sword-belt snug around his spare soldierly body.
"Vulcan, your wit is heavier than your hand," he said. "Will you come with me? Doña, I kiss"
"Ha! here is little Geronimo," the blacksmith said.
Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, overseer of nine hundred neophytes, as the Indian converts to Christianity were called by the priests, stepped into the light of the kitchen door as if the blacksmith's word had commanded him up from the night. He paused a moment in the door, hand lifted in grave and courteous salute to the guests of his fireside.
The mayordomo wore a hat with high peaked crown and broad, pliant brim, a short jacket with wide collar, dark velvet pantaloons, tight fitting as his own skin, and boots which struck him at the knees. There was a glinting of white metal at the heels of his boots, a click of spurs when he stepped over the threshold upon the tiled kitchen floor. Geronimo Lozano was a tall man, taller even than Sergeant Olivera, and lean and sinewy as the ascetic priests themselves, bearded after the fashion of that time among those who made pretensions to consequence or filled stations of authority. One remembered his nose, high and thin, and his eyebrows, short tufts of thick blackness which set obliquely toward his nose. He wore flaring gauntlets which reached to his elbows.
"Sergeant Olivera, a thousand pardons for this late appearance," the mayordomo begged. "There was a business that held me. No, you must not go before emptying a goblet or two. A soldier should never go to battle unshrived nor to bed without wine."
"It's a good maxim," said the soldier. He stood with hand on his chair, his long sword at his side, his brass-lined pistols shining in their scabbards, his plumed hat in his hand.
"And a blacksmith, a blacksmith can go to the devil without even his apron to his legs!" Borromeo said, with great feeling of resentment.
The mayordomo clapped him genially on the shoulder, laughing at his surly complaint. Magdalena was bending over the roast that she had basted and browned with such exquisite care, lifting it to a platter with a great two-tined fork that had been beaten out by Borromeo's cunning hand.
"There will be a sup for you, Borromeo, old dog," Geronimo declared. He stripped the thong of a whip from his wrist, and reached to hang it on a crude, hand-hammered nail driven into the doorframe almost the height of his head from the floor. The whip was made of rawhide strips, finely cut, closely braided. It was pliant as from much use and careful oiling; its long lash touched the floor as it swung from the nail.
"Yes, there was a business of a young man who stole a horse and tried to run away," the mayordomo said. He smiled, ran his hand down the lissom whip, rolling the lash of it, damp as if from dragging over grass wet with dew, between his fingers.
"So?" said Sergeant Olivera, looking at him with keen questioning.
"He had an ambition to make a bandit of himself, to join Sebastian Alvitre, but he is wiser now," the mayordomo said.