XXI

The urgent invitation of the mountaineers induced me to stay with them till four in the afternoon, and then, after prolonged goodbyes, I started home in company with Braulio, who insisted upon going with me. He had relieved me of the weight of my rifle, and also carried a bag on his shoulder.

We had crossed the river, and were beginning to descend the broken flank of the mountain, when Juan Ángel, rising up in a clump of mulberry-trees, stretched out his hands to me in a supplicating attitude, and said, “I came, my master⁠—I was going⁠—but don’t punish me, your honor⁠—and I won’t be afraid again.”

“What have you done⁠—what is it?” I broke in. “Have they sent you from the house?”

“Yes, master, yes, the young lady; and as your honor said that I was to go back⁠ ⁠…”

I did not remember giving him any such command.

“So you didn’t return because you were scared?” asked Braulio, laughingly.

“That was it, that was the reason. But when Mayo ran by me in a great fright, and then Lucas met me as I was crossing the river, and said that the jaguar had killed Braulio⁠ ⁠…”

The young man gave a great burst of laughter, and then said to the frightened darky, “And you have been crouching like a rabbit in those briers all day?”

“Well, José shouted to me to get back quickly, because it wasn’t safe to go alone up there, and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠…”

Juan Ángel stood looking at his fingernails.

“Come, I’ll stand up for you,” said Braulio, “but only on condition that in the next hunt you are to go with me, step by step.”

The darky boy looked at him distrustfully, uncertain whether to accept a pardon on those terms.

“Do you agree?” asked I, indifferently.

“Yes, my master.”

“Well, let’s go on. Don’t take the trouble, Braulio, to go any farther with me; go back now.”

“But I wanted⁠ ⁠…”

“No; you know that Tránsito has been much frightened today. Remember me to her.”

“And this bag which I have⁠—ah, you take it, Juan Ángel. Now, don’t you break your master’s rifle going down there; I owe my life to that. Well, that will be better,” he said, as I took the weapon myself.

I shook the bold hunter’s hand and we parted. When he was already quite a distance away, he shouted, “That in the bag is the sample of ore which your father asked my uncle to send him.”

Seeing that I heard him, he disappeared in the forest. I stopped at twice the distance of a gunshot from the house, on the bank of the brook, which rushed noisily down to lose itself in the garden. I looked about for Juan Ángel, but he had disappeared; I guessed that he was afraid I would be angry with him for his cowardice, and had resolved to seek a better defender than Braulio.

I was especially fond of the boy; he was then twelve years old, and was good looking⁠—one might almost say, handsome. Though intelligent, he was rather intractable. Feliciana, his mother, who had been a nurse in the family, and enjoyed all the consideration attached to that position, always hoped he would turn out a good valet for me. But aside from service at the table and in the bedroom, and a certain skill in making coffee, he was clumsy and awkward.

When near the house I perceived that the family was still in the dining-room, and I inferred that Carlos and his father had come. I turned to the right, leaped over the garden wall, and gained my room without being seen. I was hanging up my hunting-bag and rifle when I noticed an unwonted loudness of conversation. At that very moment my mother came to my room and told me the cause.

“The M⁠⸺⁠s have come,” she said, “and you know that Don Jerónimo always talks as if he were trying to make himself heard across a river.”

Carlos in the house! I thought; this is the trying time of which my father spoke. Carlos must have had a whole day in which to admire the object of his love. How can I keep him from knowing that I love her? And I cannot tell her, either, that I will be her husband. This is a worse trial than I had imagined.

My mother, perhaps seeing that I was preoccupied, said to me, “So you’re come back unhappy?”

“No, Señora, only tired.”

“Did you have a good hunt?”

“Excellent.”

“Can I tell your father that you’ve got the bearskin for him?”

“Not that, but a lovely jaguar-skin.”

“A jaguar!”

“Yes, Señora, the one that did so much damage up here.”

“Why, this must have been dreadful.”

“My companions were very brave and skillful.”

She had arranged everything I needed for a bath and a change of clothes; just as she was closing the door I asked her not to say that I had returned.

She came back, and in that sweet and affectionate voice which always made her irresistible with me, said, “You remember, don’t you, what we were saying the other day about the visit of these people?”

Satisfied with my reply, she added, “Very well; I believe that you will come out successfully.”

She made sure that I lacked nothing, and then went out.

What Braulio had called “ore” was in reality nothing less than the jaguar’s head; and in that tricky way he had got the trophy of our exploit brought into the house. What happened in the dining-room, I learned afterwards. They were just serving the coffee when Juan Ángel came in, and saying that I was coming, told my father what was in the bag. The latter was desirous of getting Don Jerónimo’s opinion on the quartz, and told the boy to take it out; Juan was going to do it when he gave a cry of terror, and leaped like a startled deer. It was at once seen what had frightened him. Leaning back against the wall, with staring eyes, he stretched out both hands towards the bag, and cried, “The jaguar!”

“Where?” shouted Don Jerónimo, spilling part of his coffee, and leaping up with more agility than would have been expected in a man of such a girth. Carlos and my father also rose. Emma and María drew close to each other.

“In the bag!” replied the questioned Juan.

All breathed again. My father carefully opened the bag, and seeing the head roll out upon the tiles, stepped back. So did Don Jerónimo, and leaning his hands on his knees, he exclaimed, “The monster!”

Carlos went up to examine the head, and said, “What a fearful fellow!”

“Who killed him?” he asked Juan Ángel, who had become calm again.

“Little master’s rifle.”

“Did little master’s rifle do it all by itself?” asked Don Jerónimo, laughing, and sitting down again.

“No, master, only Braulio told me just now up on the hill that he owed his life to it⁠ ⁠…”

“Why, where is Efraín, then?” asked my father, in some perturbation, and glancing at María.

“He stayed up by the rocks.”

At that point my mother came in. Forgetting that she had just seen me, she cried out, “Oh, my boy!”

“He’ll be here immediately,” my father said to her.

“Yes, yes, I know it,” she replied; “but how did they kill this beast?”

“The ball went here,” said Carlos, leaning down and pointing out the hole in the forehead.

“But is it possible?” asked Don Jerónimo, addressing my father, and going up to the brazier to light his cigar⁠—“is it possible that you let Efraín do such things?”

My father smiled, and answered him complacently, “I told him today to get me a bearskin for the foot of my bed, and it seems he has found it easier to bring me a jaguar-skin.”

María had already seen in my mother’s eyes enough to reassure her. She started towards the parlor, leading Juan by the hand; the little fellow, still frightened and grasping her skirt, was hindering her in walking. She had to take him up and carry him, and said to him as she went but: “Crying? Oh, shame! A man afraid like that?”

Don Jerónimo heard her, and turning in his chair and puffing out a cloud of smoke, remarked, “The other one will be killing jaguars, too.”

“Well, if Efraín has not become a hunter of wild beasts!” said Carlos to Emma, seating himself at her side. “Why, in college he would not so much as fire a popgun at a sparrow. But no, I remember now one holiday when I saw him do some good shooting at Fontibón Lake. Does he hunt often now?”

“He has been several times with José and Braulio,” answered my sister, “and has killed some young bears and some fine wolves.”

“I was thinking of proposing a deer-hunt for tomorrow, and for that reason I brought my English rifle along.”

“He will be much pleased to gratify you; if you had come yesterday, you could both have gone to the hunt today.”

“Oh yes, if I had only known.”

Just then Mayo, who had been disposing of some savory morsels in the kitchen, came in. He stopped at sight of the head, elevated his neck and back, and cautiously went around in a circle to smell at it; then he rushed out and bounded about the house, afterwards coming back into the dining-room and beginning to howl. It was because he could not find me, and he seemed to feel instinctively that I had been exposed to danger.

My father was much affected by the howling: he was a man who believed in certain prognostics and auguries.

“Mayo, Mayo, what is it?” said he, petting the dog with ill-concealed impatience; “isn’t this boy ever coming?”

At that moment I went into the parlor, dressed in a way that would have made it difficult for Lucía and Tránsito to recognize me, unless very near. María was there. We had scarcely time to exchange greetings and smiles. Juan, who was seated on María’s lap, said to me as I went on, pointing to the door, “The ugly thing is in there.”

I passed in smiling, for I thought the child meant Don Jerónimo. I embraced Carlos warmly, as he sprang up to meet me; and for the moment I forgot almost entirely what I had suffered, on his account, in these last days. Señor M⁠⸺ cordially grasped my hand, saying, “Come, come, how old we must be getting if all these boys are men already.”

We soon went into the parlor; María was no longer there. The conversation turned upon the hunt, and I was almost given the lie by Don Jerónimo when I said that our success was due to Braulio: he confronted me with what Juan Ángel had said.

Emma told me how Carlos had come prepared for a deer-hunt; and he was delighted when I promised him a fine one near the house. As soon as my sister withdrew, Carlos wanted to show me his English rifle, and for that purpose we went to my room. It was precisely like the one my father had given me on my return from Bogotá, although before I had seen it Carlos assured me that it was the first of its kind ever brought to the country.

“It’s a good one,” I said; “you could kill animals like that with this.”

“Certainly you could; at sixty yards it doesn’t shoot under by a hair.”

“Would you make shots of this kind at sixty yards?”

“It would be dangerous to depend on the full range of the gun in such cases; at forty yards it would be a long shot. How far off were you when you shot the jaguar?”

“Thirty feet.”

“The deuce you were! I shall have to do something fine in this hunt we’re going to have, or else I will not unstrap my gun, and will swear that I have not hunted so much as a hummingbird in all my life.”

“Oh, you will see. I will give you a chance to shine, for I will run the deer right down to the garden.”

Carlos asked me a thousand things about our fellow-students, friends, and neighbors at Bogotá; he talked to me of Emigdio, and his new relations with him, and he laughed good-humoredly as he recalled the love of our friend for Micaelina.

Carlos had returned to Cauca eight months before me; during that time his whiskers had grown, and their black contrasted finely with his smiling cheeks. His mouth was as frank as ever, and his abundant and slightly curling hair shaded a smooth brow. Decidedly he was a good-looking fellow.

“But, old man,” he said, standing before my table, “here are a great many books. You have brought the whole bookstore. I, also, study⁠—that is, I read; it is all I have time for. I have a fair cousin-graduate who insists that I engulf myself in a flood of words. You know that serious studies are not my forte; for that reason I did not care to graduate, though I might have done so. I cannot conceal the disgust which politics causes me, and how wearisome to me is all this going to law⁠—although my father laments night and day that I do not put myself at the front in his suits. He has a perfect passion for litigation, and the most serious questions arise about twenty square yards of marsh or the change in the course of a ditch which has had the good taste to throw a fringe of our land upon the side of a neighbor’s. Come,” said he, reading the titles of the books⁠—“Frayssinous, Christ in the Presence of the Age, the Bible⁠—much religious matter here. Don Quixote⁠—of course; I have never been able to read two chapters.”

“Haven’t you? Is that so?”

“Blair,” he went on, “Chateaubriand. My cousin Hortensia has a perfect passion for him. English Grammar⁠—what a hard language! I never could get on with it.”

“But you spoke it a little.”

“Only the ‘how do you do’ like the ‘comment ça va‑t‑il’ of French.”

“But you have a fine pronunciation.”

“So they told me for encouragement.”

He went on with his examination: “Shakespeare, Calderón⁠—poetry? No? Spanish Drama⁠—more poetry! Confess to me, do you write poetry still? I remember that you wrote some once that saddened me by reminding me of Cauca. Well, do you?”

“No.”

“I’m glad of that, for you would end by dying of hunger. Cortez,” he went on, “The Conquest of Mexico?”

“No, it is something else.”

“De Tocqueville, Democracy in America⁠—botheration! Segur⁠—what a lot!”

At this point the bell sounded for supper. Carlos left off the inventory of my books, hurried to the mirror, combed his whiskers and hair with a pocket-comb, tied his blue cravat with the skill of a modiste; and we went out.