Adventure Magazine Cover — page 127: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

thing. She was dressed in the black silk of urning from slippered foot to lacy mantilla. ure Carrara marble. She was strangely quiet, apathetic, like one walking in a void; benumbed __with sorrow and desolate despair. Father Pio Abogado watched her from the __ corners of eyes that were like living pools of dark cold light. He was an old Spanish priest 2 ‘of the secular clergy who still hung on to his little parish of Guadalupe y Calvo, though -_ most of his male communicants were gone, his ye church burned to the ground and only brown _ sobbing women remained to seek his advice = and share with him the burden of their woes. _ He had a tall leant Spanish frame, a thin somber = 3 ech face and a long absolute Spanish jaw, _ blue from much shaving. He was a brave man, ~ dominant over sin and sinners. 3 E The two walked for a space in sympathetic _ Silence. Febrile gusts of wind were stirring Js = Be the muggy stagnancy, swirling dust and twigs along the footpath, shivering the lithe young - pines with chilly rustle and flapping the black skirts of the priest’s cassock. _ Overhead a tremendous. movement was sweeping the sky. The laden rain clouds were ‘streaming across the oval of mountain rim like _ the black plumes of some monstrous whirligig set suddenly and mightily into racing rotary _ action. Below, between the gusts, there was ever a down-bearing hush and immobility. ___ “This marriage your father desired,” spoke _ the priest at last; “is it also the wish of the senorita?” _ She turned to him then, her hands at once out and appealing, her eyes livening with un- containable alarm. “Oh, Father, I fear it is hasty and ill-advised. But what would you? It was the dying wish of the pobre padre of me! I must not weaken; I must go through with it. It was a command, Father, sent up from purgatory!” “At his death,” said the priest gently, “‘your - father, the noble Don Jorge, was not the man of iron you knew so well. From the time he was taken down from his living cross, he was weak and feverish, given to delirium, thankful, of so thankful for the little we could do for im. “Fle was thankful in the same way. to Dicenta. Serafin was the only young man about; your father had been a veritable conguistador him- self, strong with a youthful ardor even after he was no longer young; and he recognized and respected the quiet strength of the stripling. He longed to lean upon that strength, he was so wracked with wrongs and buffetings.” “Tt was all fear for me, Father,” she quavered breathlessly. ‘‘Fear for my safety, unchaperon- ed and unmarried, on this journey of tomorrow. ‘Mexico is a terrible place for a young girl,’ he an ’ oe. ee oye ag ys a = © ey ; VAG IND efi VAT ORS OR GAG Be She thanked him with her mae eyes abut said r face, in startling contrast, was white as 117 said over and over again. And it was his — wish, the command he sent up—” “Child, ” the priest spoke slowly, thickly, as if each word were causing him some inward effort, ‘Mexico is a terrible place, true; but more terrible still would it be for you to dis- cover that the man you swore before God’s high altar to love, honor and cherish, was one whom a very snake would fear to bite lest it be poisoned by a virus more deadly than its own.” “Padrel”’ : “My little one,” he took her arm heartening- ly, “Serafin Dicenta was not at the tomb today. As I came out of the hut that I now call my © church and my rectory, since the others were burned, I saw Dicenta entering the store of the yellow man. Ah, it is strange,” he apos- trophized, “the power these yellow men have in our land today, where they can plow and sell and build unmolested, while we of the Cristinos Viejos are hounded from pillar to post!”’ Mariquita remembered then the surprize she had experienced when riding through Guadalupe that morning on her way to the hacienda, she had noted a new general store rising, freshly painted and unscathed, among the ruins every- where about. The incongruity of its prosperous appearance amid all the charred débris of deso- lation would have been sufficient of itself to grave the picture ineradicably into her mind; but the unparalleled oddity of the sign-board, swinging above its lintel, had added a searing impression that she was to recollect only with virulent»hatred later on when she should arrive among the Guiacuras. On the sign-board was depicted the image of a white mouse, dormant, head between? forefeet, long bald tail curled underneath. “This yellow man you speak of, Padre Pio,” she replied. “He is the Japanese comerciante who had opened that Botiga of the Mouse down in Guadajupe? But yes, it is most strange. In my astonishment at what business he could do here among all the terror-stricken and wretchedly poor, I questioned Serafin about him as we made through the village. “Serafin told me that the Japanese merchant has letters to Carranza, to Villa and to Zapata, gold-sealed| bulky official letters, and that he comes of a nation that will not allow one little finger of its people to be harmed, unlike those long-suffering Americanos across the Line. He has much, much gold, Serafin said: he has cast slant eyes of longing on the Hacienda del Cazadero; and as we have to leave the estancia, it was Serafin’s suggestion that mayhap we could sell the place to him. That is why the teniente went down there this afternoon, Padre —to see if he might negotiate a sale.” “He has the deeds then?” “Si; every last one of them and, besides, the other key to the vault. I thought perhaps he might meet you, Father, and give you the key COnmmicloooks ? en ee a wf vot Sy bese =