The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California

The fog lay thick on the bay at dawn next morning.  The white waves hid the blue, muffled the roar of the surf.  Now and again a whale threw a volume of spray high in the air, a geyser from a phantom sea.  Above the white sands straggled the white town, ghostly, prophetic.

De la Vega, a dark sombrero pulled over his eyes, a dark serape enveloping his tall figure, rode, unattended and watchful, out of the town.  Not until he reached the narrow road through the brush forest beyond did he give his horse rein.  The indolence of the Californian was no longer in his carriage; it looked alert and muscular; recklessness accentuated the sternness of his face.

As he rode, the fog receded slowly.  He left the chaparral and rode by green marshes cut with sloughs and stained with vivid patches of orange.  The frogs in the tules chanted their hoarse matins.  Through brush-covered plains once more, with sparsely wooded hills in the distance, and again the tules, the marsh, the patches of orange.  He rode through a field of mustard; the pale yellow petals brushed his dark face, the delicate green leaves won his eyes from the hot glare of the ascending sun, the slender stalks, rebounding, smote his horse’s flanks.  He climbed hills to avoid the wide marshes, and descended into willow groves and fields of daisies.  Before noon he was in the San Juan Mountains, thick with sturdy oaks, bending their heads before the madroño, that belle of the forest, with her robes of scarlet and her crown of bronze.  The yellow lilies clung to her skirts, and the buckeye flung his flowers at her feet.  The last redwoods were there, piercing the blue air with their thin inflexible arms, gray as a dusty band of friars.  Out by the willows, whereunder crept the sluggish river, then between the hills curving about the valley of San Juan Bautista.

At no time is California so beautiful as in the month of June.  De la Vega’s wild spirit and savage purpose were dormant for the moment as he rode down the valley toward the mission.  The hills were like gold, like mammoth fawns veiled with violet mist, like rich tan velvet.  Afar, bare blue steeps were pink in their chasms, brown on their spurs.  The dark yellow fields were as if thick with gold-dust; the pale mustard was a waving yellow sea.  Not a tree marred the smooth hills.  The earth sent forth a perfume of its own.  Below the plateau from which rose the white walls of the mission was a wide field of bright green corn rising against the blue sky.

The padres in their brown hooded robes came out upon the long corridor of the mission and welcomed the traveller.  Their lands had gone from them, their mission was crumbling, but the spirit of hospitality lingered there still.  They laid meat and fruit and drink on a table beneath the arches, then sat about him and asked him eagerly for news of the day.  Was it true that the United States of America were at war with Mexico, or about to be?  True that their beloved flag might fall, and the stars and stripes of an insolent invader rise above the fort of Monterey?

De la Vega recounted the meagre and conflicting rumours which had reached California, but, not being a prophet, could not tell them that they would be the first to see the red-white-and-blue fluttering on the mountain before them.  He refused to rest more than an hour, but mounted the fresh horse the padres gave him and went his way, riding hard and relentlessly, like all Californians.

He sped onward, through the long hot day, leaving the hills for the marshes and a long stretch of ugly country, traversing the beautiful San Antonio Valley in the night, reaching the Mission of San Miguel at dawn, resting there for a few hours.  That night he slept at a hospitable ranch-house in the park-like valley of Paso des Robles, a grim silent figure amongst gay-hearted people who delighted to welcome him.  The early morning found him among the chrome hills; and at the Mission of San Luis Obispo the good padres gave him breakfast.  The little valley, round as a well, its bare hills red and brown, gray and pink, violet and black, from fire, sloping steeply from a dizzy height, impressed him with a sense of being prisoned in an enchanted vale where no message of the outer world could come, and he hastened on his way.

Absorbed as he was, he felt the beauty he fled past.  A line of golden hills lay against sharp blue peaks.  A towering mass of gray rocks had been cut and lashed by wind and water, earthquake and fire, into the semblance of a massive castle, still warlike in its ruin.  He slept for a few hours that night in the Mission of Santa Ynes, and was high in the Santa Barbara Mountains at the next noon.  For brief whiles he forgot his journey’s purpose as his horse climbed slowly up the steep trails, knocking the loose stones down a thousand feet and more upon a roof of tree-tops which looked like stunted brush.  Those gigantic masses of immense stones, each wearing a semblance to the face of man or beast; those awful chasms and stupendous heights, densely wooded, bare, and many-hued, rising above, beyond, peak upon peak, cutting through the visible atmosphere—­was there no end?  He turned in his saddle and looked over low peaks and cañons, rivers and abysms, black peaks smiting the fiery blue, far, far, to the dim azure mountains on the horizon.

“Mother of God!” he thought.  “No wonder California still shakes!  I would I could have stood upon a star and beheld the awful throes of this country’s birth.”  And then his horse reared between the sharp spurs and galloped on.

He avoided the Mission of Santa Barbara, resting at a rancho outside the town.  In the morning, supplied as usual with a fresh horse, he fled onward, with the ocean at his right, its splendid roar in his ears.  The cliffs towered high above him; he saw no man’s face for hours together; but his thoughts companioned him, savage and sinister shapes whirling about the figure of a woman.  On, on, sleeping at ranchos or missions, meeting hospitality everywhere, avoiding Los Angeles, keeping close to the ponderous ocean, he left civilization behind him at last, and with an Indian guide entered upon that desert of mountain-tops, Baja California.

Rapid travelling was not possible here.  There were no valleys worthy the name.  The sharp peaks, multiplying mile after mile, were like teeth of gigantic rakes, black and bare.  A wilderness of mountain-tops, desolate as eternity, arid, parched, baked by the awful heat, the silence never broken by the cry of a bird, a hut rarely breaking the barren monotony, only an infrequent spring to save from death.  It was almost impossible to get food or fresh horses.  Many a night De la Vega and his stoical guide slept beneath a cactus, or in the mocking bed of a creek.  The mustangs he managed to lasso were almost unridable, and would have bucked to death any but a Californian.  Sometimes he lived on cactus fruit and the dried meat he had brought with him; occasionally he shot a rabbit.  Again he had but the flesh of the rattlesnake roasted over coals.  But honey-dew was on the leaves.

He avoided the beaten trail, and cut his way through naked bushes spiked with thorns, and through groves of cacti miles in length.  When the thick fog rolled up from the ocean he had to sit inactive on the rocks, or lose his way.  A furious storm dashed him against a boulder, breaking his mustang’s leg; then a torrent, rising like a tidal wave, thundered down the gulch, and catching him on its crest, flung him upon a tree of thorns.  When dawn came he found his guide dead.  He cursed his luck, and went on.

Lassoing another mustang, he pushed on, having a general idea of the direction he should take.  It was a week before he reached Loreto, a week of loneliness, hunger, thirst, and torrid monotony.  A week, too, of thought and bitterness of spirit.  In spite of his love, which never cooled, and his courage, which never quailed, Nature, in her guise of foul and crooked hag, mocked at earthly happiness, at human hope, at youth and passion.

If he had not spent his life in the saddle, he would have been worn out when he finally reached Loreto, late one night.  As it was, he slept in a hut until the following afternoon.  Then he took a long swim in the bay, and, later, sauntered through the town.

The forlorn little city was hardly more than a collection of Indians’ huts about a church in a sandy waste.  No longer the capital, even the barracks were toppling.  When De la Vega entered the mission, not a white man but the padre and his assistant was in it; the building was thronged with Indian worshippers.  The mission, although the first built in California, was in a fair state of preservation.  The Stations in their battered frames were mellow and distinct.  The gold still gleamed in the vestments of the padre.

For a few moments De la Vega dared not raise his eyes to the Lady of Loreto, standing aloft in the dull blaze of adamantine candles.  When he did, he rose suddenly from his knees and left the mission.  The pearls were there.

It took him but a short time to gain the confidence of the priest and the little population.  He offered no explanation for his coming, beyond the curiosity of the traveller.  The padre gave him a room in the mission, and spent every hour he could spare with the brilliant stranger.  At night he thanked God for the sudden oasis in his life’s desolation.  The Indians soon grew accustomed to the lonely figure wandering about the sand plains, or kneeling for hours together before the altar in the church.  And whom their padre trusted was to them as sacred and impersonal as the wooden saints of their religion.