DON ABRAHAN had entered the courtyard as Don Felipe spoke. He was smoking his evening cigar, walking meditatively, yet with an eye to what had been put into the storehouse in the way of hides that day. Henderson approached him without formality, servility being the farthest thing from his bearing. Without preliminaries he placed his request for a settlement before Don Abrahan, respectfully, yet boldly, as a man confident in his rights.
"So you would leave me?" said Don Abrahan, after a little silence, looking slowly from his meditative pose. "Is gratitude so short in your memory?"
Henderson protested that ingratitude was a stranger to him; that he had labored to prove, by every hour of his employment there, that he was glad to bear the hardest burdens, labor the longest hours, out of no other consideration than gratitude for a favor past.
"I couldn't be more grateful to you than I am this moment, Don Abrahan. It isn't that I'm not appreciative of your help, only that I don't want to remain a laborer all my life. I want to take a look around this country and see if it holds any chance. If not, then I'll manage to return to my own."
"It is very well, I have no objection," Don Abrahan said, but coldly, with a distant withdrawing. "If you are prepared to make settlement with me in full, you are free to go your way."
"Settlement? in full?" Henderson repeated the words in uncomprehending amazement.
"Surely. There was fifty dollars that you owed me from the beginning," Don Abrahan calmly claimed.
"Fifty dollars that I owed you? Is that the way you make a joke in this country, Don Abrahan?"
"There was fifty dollars offered for your return to the ship. When I protected you I lost that sum. I had only to deliver you—is it not so?"
"It is a strange stand for a man of your consequence to take, Don Abrahan," Henderson said, profoundly disappointed, saddened not a little by this revelation of the patron's crafty narrowness. "But let that go; grant that I did owe you fifty dollars on that account. I have paid it, and more."
Henderson's anger was slow to rise. That fact alone had saved him many a blow under Captain Welliver's calloused mate, spared him the responsibility for Captain Welliver's life that day he laid him low with the broken oar. He had not struck so much in anger as in defense. If he had allowed his just wrath to expend itself on the captain that day, he would have been branded this hour with a name more detestable, more terrible, than that of debtor servant whose situation was that of a slave.
"To be added to that, twenty-five dollars for clothing furnished in your naked state when you arrived," Don Abrahan continued, over-looking Henderson's protest as if he had not heard.
"I've had two shirts, a pair of jeans trousers and a pair of Boston brogans. The whole outfit wasn't worth more than five dollars."
"You must consider the transportation, the freight," said Don Abrahan mildly, advancing the excuse for extortion which became general among the commercial pirates of California of a later day.
Henderson had believed the ship's slop-chest incomparable for high prices anywhere on the globe. Captain Welliver had been willing to trade on a profit of two hundred per cent.; Don Abrahan, benevolent gentleman, must have five hundred. Henderson saw that the longer he remained on that plantation the deeper he would be in debt. It seemed a marvel to him that Don Abrahan had not taken the thirty dollars which he carried with him when he deserted ship, and charged that up against him also.
"How much do you figure I'm in debt to you as we stand?" he inquired.
"It amounted to seventy-five dollars at the beginning. You have been here two months?"
"A little more than a month and a half."
"You can see then how the account will stand. Seventy-five dollars, at five dollars a month, will require fifteen months to pay."
"Five dollars a month! I'll not work for any man for five dollars a month, Don Abrahan!"
"That is the highest wages I pay to any peon on my ranch," Don Abrahan said loftily. "You can see how the matter stands."
"You didn't say what wages you paid, what you were going to pay me," Henderson protested, knowing as he spoke that his position was weak; that he had been foolish to go into the service of this man without a definite agreement from the beginning.
"You did not ask me, Gabriel, my son."
"I guess I'll have to owe you for a while, then," Henderson said, determination in his manner. "According to the value I put on my services, I've paid you the fifty dollars you charged me for helping me get away from the ship. That's all right; it was worth that to me, and a great deal more. I'll find something to do at better pay and send you the rest of it as soon as I can."
"It is impossible to permit you to desert me in this way," Don Abrahan said, gently enough, even a tinge of sorrowful regret in his soft tone for being under the necessity of taking this apparently unfriendly stand. Yet he was coldly firm beneath his suavity; merciless, inflexible. The threat that lay behind his manner caused Henderson's heart to grow cold in a foreboding of trouble.
"I give you my word that you'll be paid, even though I consider your claim unjust and exorbitant," Henderson declared.
"What security have you to leave behind?" Don Abrahan inquired, with cynical humor. A smile glimmered in his slow dark eyes, twitched in his beard, died away slowly, leaving his thin face harsh and severe.
"Nothing but my word," Henderson returned, meeting him eye to eye.
Don Abrahan lifted his shoulders, tilted his chin, raising his well-groomed beard. It was a slight movement, yet expressive in its discount of the proffered security.
"The body and services of the debtor are a man's security in this country, my son," he said.
"You mean you'll not let me go—that you'll hold me here, a slave, till this contrived, preposterous debt to you is paid?"
"It is the law."
Don Abrahan seemed to disclaim all responsibility in the manner of his reply, laying it all upon the law. What was a creditor, he seemed to ask, in the invincible machinery of the law, but a creature to do its bidding?
"You may be able to make slaves of these poor Indians and Mexicans under that law, but I'm no man's slave, I'm free to come and go. Your law cannot be applied to an American citizen, Don Abrahan."
Don Abrahan beamed on the defiant young man kindly. Benevolence seemed to sit in his soft dark eyes, to lurk in his fine gray beard. A little while he stood thus regarding the rebellious servant, his cigar held in his fingers daintily on a level with his mouth.
"You have much to learn," he said at last.
So speaking, he turned and sauntered away, following, it seemed, his train of meditation with serene and unruffled mind.
Henderson felt the hot blood of resentment in his face as he stood looking after the benevolent tyrant, hotter words checked on his tongue. He realized that this was not a time for further words; that for Don Abrahan the question was settled, not to be opened again. The man's carriage said as much as he walked on his slow, meditative way.
Henderson's contempt for this law that made a man's body the security for his debts was mounting with his determination to defy Don Abrahan, the country and its institutions of slavery, by deserting the ranch that night. He was not ready to accept Don Abrahan's word for it that the law would bind a citizen of another country in slavery. There would be some American at Monterey, where he had heard there was even a United States consul, who could inform him of his rights in this feudal land.
The mayordomo stood outside his office door as Henderson turned back in that direction. It was as if he waited for Henderson to be passed on to him from his patron's hands, like a tennis ball. He stood so, his small hands on his hips, a despicable sycophant, Henderson believed, in his place of authority over men and women who were little better than slaves. Henderson would have passed without speaking, but Don Felipe raised a hand to halt him.
"You have had your accounting, you understand Don Abrahan?" he asked.
"I understand him perfectly," Henderson replied, his indignation over the imposition that had been put upon him still outweighing all other concern.
"You think you will run away from this debt and cheat Don Abrahan," the mayordomo said, squaring himself around to stand directly in front of Henderson, as if to block this treasonable intention with his own body. "That is a thought of foolishness. Look!"
Don Felipe laid hold of Henderson's arm, turning him to face the hills at the foot of which the ranch buildings stood. Mangy, shaggy, harsh and forbidding as these hills, almost mountainous in height, appeared in the glare of day, they now seemed softened and subdued, friendly and secure, in the chastening twilight. There was a dying flush upon the sky, repeated faintly in the canyons where the mists were gathering; the gray of crumbling ledge, the brown blotches of barren soil, soothed out and blended in harmonious beauty with sage and greasewood, the dark green of chaparral and holly. Sharply the line of the hills stood against the sky, as if the world ended there, as if nothing lay beyond.
"Look!" Don Felipe repeated, pointing to the hills. "And here again, look!" Don Felipe pointed to the east. "Mountains stand behind these hills, growing up into the clouds. And in the east here, there is a desert when a man goes over the mountains. There is no water there but the dew of night, no blade of grass for it to fall upon. Hundreds of miles, this desert, and when a man is done with that, mountains again, more terrible than any in all the world. But no man lives to pass that desert. Man dies there, he swells big, he bursts like a gun. No, there is no way to leave this land, only by the sea. There is death in many ways for the man who runs before the law in this country. Quick goes the word, a thousand hands are ready when he passes. Oh, yes. A man who runs before the law in this country is shot down like a wolf."
"I suppose that might happen to him," Henderson admitted, cooled considerably, his naturally diplomatic disposition and good sense asserting. "I wouldn't try it; I'm not going to run before the law. Well, a man would have to have something to run for, in the first place."
"If a man steals sheep," said Don Felipe, his eyes still on the hills, "or kills a man, or owes his patron money, a man sometimes runs away."
"If I stole sheep or killed a man, I might run away," Henderson granted, soberly enough. "But not because I owed my patron money. That would be a scoundrelly sort of trick."
"How much more sensible for a man who owes his patron money to stay in the reach of his arm," said Don Felipe, with unctuous, persuasive argument. "Only a fool runs away."
"That's what I think about it," Henderson agreed.
He had come around, in the past few minutes, to a decision on a more diplomatic course. He saw at once the obstacles that would present in the way of an escaping debtor; he realized that Don Felipe was not boasting when he said the word went abroad quickly, that a thousand hands would be ready to pull him down. How much more eager these hands would be to snatch at a foreigner, one of a nation for which there was already much jealousy, suspicion and hate.
"Still, you considered running away only a little minute ago," Don Felipe charged.
"It was only because I forgot for the moment how much I really owe the good patron," Henderson replied contritely, by way of confession. "He saved my life the day I deserted ship, the captain would have shot me if he hadn't stepped in front of his pistol and made him put it away. If I owed him money only, Don Felipe, I would run away. But when a man owes another his life he does not run away and forget—if he is a man."
Don Felipe was caballero, gentleman, in spite of his subordinate position in Don Abrahan's service. His fortunes were in eclipse, his father having been ruined by his loyalty to Spain during the Mexican revolt for freedom, and banished the country, his vast possessions confiscated. Don Felipe, his only son, a stripling then, had taken up the cause of freedom, but had not been well received on account of his hidalgo extraction. Yet he was free to remain in California, the land of his birth, and lay the foundation of a new fortune if he might.
So Don Felipe swelled a bit on hearing this expression of loyalty to his employer. He offered his hand with an impetuosity that surprised Henderson; his face glowed with pleasure; a glistening as of tears was in his eyes.
"A man that sees the way of honor is my friend!" Don Felipe declared. "What is the misfortune of a day that it should debase one man below another? Nothing! I, also, have had my day of misfortune, Don Gabriel. We are both gentlemen; we can forget our differences in our present situation—for this hour."
It seemed an approach with reservations, an unbending with one hand behind the back. Yet Henderson was vastly surprised by it. It was the first word without a taint of oppression and contempt that Don Felipe had spoken to him since his coming to the ranch. He took the proffered hand, clasped it warmly, not without a feeling of friendship and gratitude for the little man who stood upon feet smaller than most women's, and was proud of them.
"It will be my pleasure to inform Don Abrahan of your deep sense of gratitude, of your wise decision to remain here. A man with capability may rise to great heights here in Don Abrahan's employment; like an eagle he may sail over the heads of little men."
Don Felipe looked skyward, describing the evolutions of his figurative eagle by a circling sweep of the arm. Those who crossed the courtyard, going slowly through the dusk about the interminable tasks of that place, looked with wonder on Don Felipe fraternizing on terms of equality with the yanqui, for whom there was little liking on the ranch.
"A man needs the comfort of a woman in his youth," Don Felipe said. "There is old Cecilia's Liseta, ready for marriage now. Don Abrahan, the good patron, will give her to you, with the house by the pepper tree where Francisco, the what—you-call-him—zapatero—make-shoe, used to live. A little straw to the roof of it, a new goatskin in the window, and there is happiness for any man with a young wife on his knee."
"It's a comfortable picture you make of it, Don Felipe," Henderson said, as gratefully and as cheerfully as he could bring himself to speak. "But a man who is working out a debt isn't in much of a situation to marry."
"His capital doubles when he marries," Don Felipe declared, warm in his eagerness to bring about the establishment of another family to serve his patron in the working out of never-ending debt. "With a wife to help him, a man soon stands on his feet."
Henderson thought of Liseta, the proposed partner of his sacrificial years. She was about seventeen, a result of that peculiar cross-breeding of Spaniard, Mexican peon and native Indian, to the abasement of all involved. Her dark face was heavy and sullen; there was little promise in her but that of the capability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Liseta herded goats upon the scrabbled hills for her mighty patron, working out the debt that had been her inheritance, that would increase with her years and bind her in slavery all her life. Her mother, old Cecilia, was old indeed at little more than forty, sad in her peonage, a vessel worn out by the burdens of men.
"I will speak the word to Don Abrahan if you wish," Don Felipe offered.
"I think I can serve my patron better without a wife," Henderson replied, laughing the matter aside as if he considered it but a jest.
"Perhaps there is another in the land you left?" Don Felipe ventured.
He sighed, as if to let it be understood that he was a man who had known his romance, whatever tricks time might have played him since.
"Who knows?" Henderson returned, with as much sentimentality, softness, and longing as he could compress into his words on such short preparation for an excuse so splendid.
"I will say no more," said Don Felipe. "Do you go to your repose?"
"I'm going to the stable to see the black stallion; he cut his shoulder on a stake in the corral today. I must put sulphur on the wound to keep the gangrene down."
Don Felipe went into his office, where his dim candle seemed always burning, yet never burned out. It was never a full candle, never less than half, yet it was going at twilight, glimmering at dawn. How Don Felipe managed it, Henderson could not guess. It seemed to him that the fragmentary candle was emblematic of the little man in some mystical relation, a thing burning palely, not illuminating much of the world, yet doing more, perhaps, in its unremitting effort than many a greater light. It was as if Don Abrahan's dignity and consequence were borne upon the shoulders of this small, subservient man, who had known his own day of misfortune.
Simon, the teamster, lived close by the stable, his adobe hut being somewhat larger, altogether more comfortable and nearer the requirements of a human abode, than those of the other laborers in that feudal village of huts. Simon was a free and independent man, whose wages were twenty dollars a month, it was said, a sum named by the poor peones with distended eyes and low breath. Added to this was the privilege of taking his meals on work-days at the patron's expense, a privilege that Simon never had been known to forego.
Simon did not owe the patron. He was not obliged to pledge his services, and the services of his unborn, for the chunks of thick, age-yellow salt pork, the cuts of tenuous beef, the pounds of Yankee lard, issued from the great patron's store. Simon's lot was that of a man who could take his wife and children and depart on the day that suited his fancy to go.
Simon was loitering between his house and Don Felipe's office, where he had been dawdling in the aimless, lounging way that a Mexican can pass the time with his cigarette, as Henderson started on his merciful mission to the stable. He joined Henderson when he passed, continuing with him on his way after asking the object of his activities at that hour.
Lately Simon had installed himself as preceptor to Henderson in his struggle with the Spanish tongue. He insisted that the only way a man could learn a language was to use it, in the way that he must handle the lines for himself if he ever expected to drive eight mules. Henderson agreed with him in this contention, although it was a strain on his slender knowledge of the language to keep abreast with the fervid flow of the teamster's speech.
When a doubt rose in Simon's mind he made himself clear with an English word, if he had it; if not, with some expletive that was picturesque on his tongue where it would have been only coarse on another's. In that way Henderson had made progress amazing to himself, satisfactory to Simon, although the pupil had grave doubt of the elegance that the muleteer boasted as the strong point of his expression in his native tongue.
Simon seemed to have a tender interest in the black stallion's injury, although he was as cruel in his treatment of beasts as the officers of the ship that Henderson had deserted were brutal to their men. Even the mules, unimaginative, indifferent creatures of short memory that they are, cringed and squatted when Simon approached them in their stalls. Now, as Henderson treated the ugly wound in the magnificent stallion's shoulder, Simon stood solicitously by holding the lantern.
"So, that is done," said Simon, putting out the light. "Do you go to your repose?"
"I think not immediately. The moon is so bright it seems like a comrade tonight," Henderson replied in his slow, halting Spanish.
Simon stood a little while looking at the moon, his head thrown back, his long gaunt neck showing a sharp protuberance like a bent elbow.
"It is a good night to talk to the girls," he said, his head still back, the light of the moon in his face.
Simon was a tall and shambling man, long of limb, and thin. He was dressed, as always, in loose trousers and jumper, his inseparable hat with silver filagree work on its pointed crown fixed on his small head. There was not much to the upper works of Simon; he had little more head than a worm. The most impressive feature in his physiognomy was his mustache, which grew long, with a reddish tinge to its villainous blackness, distinctive mark in an otherwise indistinctive man.
"Yes," said Simon meditatively, "it is a fine night to talk to the girls."
He turned from the moon with that, having exhausted its possibilities in mundane affairs as far as he ever had discovered and applied them.
"Yes. And there was a peon who tried to run away from his debt to Don Abrahan about a year ago. I went after that man; I shot a hole in him that the bees could fly through."
Simon turned away to go to his repose with that word. It was sufficient; he had delivered his message.