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Page 2
Out on the desert a man might stop and listen, forming his surmise as
the sounds surged to meet him through the heat and silence. He might
smile, if he knew San Juan, as he caught the jubilant message tapped
swiftly out of the bronze bell which had come, men said, with Coronado;
he might sigh at the lugubrious, slow-swelling voice of the big bell
which had come hitherward long ago with the retinue of Marco de Niza,
wondering what old friend or enemy, perchance, had at last closed his
ears to all of Ignacio Chavez's music. Or, at a sudden fury of
clanging, the man far out on the desert might hurry on, goading his
burro impatiently, to know what great event had occurred in the old
adobe town of San Juan.
It is three hundred and fifty years and more since the six bells of San
Juan came into the new world to toll across that land of quiet mystery
which is the southwest. It is a hundred years since an
all-but-forgotten priest, Francisco Calder�n, found them in various
devastated mission churches, assembled them, and set them chiming in
the old garden. There, among the pear-trees and olives and yellow
roses, they still cast their shadows in sun and moonlight, in silence,
and in echoing chimes.
CHAPTER I
THE BELLS RING
Ignacio Chavez, Mexican that he styled himself, Indian that the
community deemed him, or "breed" of badly mixed blood that he probably
was, made his loitering way along the street toward the Mission. A
thin, yellowish-brown _cigarita_ dangling from his lips, his wide,
dilapidated conical hat tilted to the left side of his head in a
listless sort of concession to the westering sun, he was, as was
customary with him, utterly at peace. Ten minutes ago he had had
twenty cents; two minutes after the acquisition of his elusive wealth
he had exchanged the two dimes for whiskey at the Casa Blanca; the
remaining eight minutes of the ten he required to make his way, as he
naively put it, "between hell and heaven."
For from a corner of the peaceful old Mission garden at one end of the
long street one might catch a glimpse of the Casa Blanca at the other
end sprawling in the sun; between the two sturdy walled buildings had
the town strung itself as it grew. As old a relic as the church itself
was La Casa Blanca, and since San Juan could remember, in all matters
antipodal to the religious calm of the padres' monument. Deep-shaded
doorways let into the three-feet-thick earthen walls, waxed floors,
green tables, and bar and cool looking-glasses . . . a place which
invited, lured, held, and frequently enough finally damned.
San Juan, in the languid philosophy of Ignacio Chavez, was what you
will. It epitomized the universe. You had everything here which the
soul of man might covet. Never having dwelt elsewhere since his mother
bore him here upon the rim of the desert and with the San Juan
mountains so near that, Ignacio Chavez pridefully knew, a man standing
upon the Mesa Alta might hear the ringing of his bells, he experienced
a pitying contempt for all those other spots in the world which were so
plainly less favored. What do you wish, se�or? Fine warm days? You
have them here. Nice cool nights for sound slumber? Right here in San
Juan, _amigo m�o_. A desert across which the eye may run without
stopping until it be tired, a wonderful desert whereon at dawn and dusk
God weaves all of the alluring soft mists of mystery? Shaded ca�ons at
noonday with water and birds and flowers? Behold the mountains.
Everything desirable, in short. That there might be men who desired
the splash of waves, the sheen of wet beaches, the boom of surf, did
not suggest itself to one who had never seen the ocean. So, then, San
Juan was "what you will." A man may fix his eye upon the little
Mission cross which is always pointing to heaven and God; or he may
pass through the shaded doors of the Casa Blanca, which, men say, give
pathway into hell the shortest way.
Ignacio, having meditatively enjoyed his whiskey and listened smilingly
to the tinkle of a mandolin in the _patio_ under a grape-vine arbor,
had rolled his cigarette and turned his back square upon the
devil . . . of whom he had no longer anything to ask. As he went out
he stopped in the doorway long enough to rub his back against a corner
of the wall and to strike a match. Then, almost inaudibly humming the
mandolin air, he slouched out into the burning street.
For twenty years he had striven with the weeds in the Mission garden,
and no man during that time dared say which had had the best of it,
Ignacio Chavez or the interloping alfileria and purslane. In the
matters of a vast leisureliness and tumbling along the easiest way they
resembled each other, these two avowed enemies. For twenty years he
had looked upon the bells as his own, had filled his eye with them day
after day, had thought the first thing in the morning to see that they
were there, regarding them as solicitously in the rare rainy weather as
his old mother regarded her few mongrel chicks. Twenty full years, and
yet Ignacio Chavez was not more than thirty years old, or thirty-five,
perhaps. He did not know, no one cared.
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