The Golden Fleece: A Romance

The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle finger. The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery; but nothing could abate the energy of this bony sage.

"They talk about their Atlantises,-their submerged continents!" he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils. "Why, Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a Mesozoic-at any rate, Cenozoic-sea?"

The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic responsibility. He was a man of about the professor's age,-say, sixty years,-but not like him in appearance. His figure was stately and massive,-that of one who in his youth must have possessed vast physical strength, rigidly developed and disciplined. Well set upon his broad shoulders was a noble head, crowned with gray, wavy hair; the eyes and eyebrows were black and powerful, but the expression was kindly and humorous. His moustache and the Roman convexity of his chin would have confirmed your conviction that he was a retired warrior; in which you would have been correct, for General Trednoke always appeared what he was, both outwardly and inwardly. His great frame, clad in white linen, was comfortably disposed in a Japanese straw arm-chair; yet there was a soldierly poise in his attitude. He was smoking a large and excellent cigar; and a cup of coffee, with a tiny glass of cognac beside it, stood on a mahogany stand at his elbow.

"Do you remember, Meschines, the time I licked you at school?" he inquired, in a tone of pleasant reminiscence.

"I can't say I do. What's more, I venture to challenge your statement. And though you are a hundred pounds the better of me in weight, and a West Point graduate, I will wager my pipe (which is worth its weight in diamonds) against that old woollen shirt of Montezuma's that you showed me yesterday, that I can lick you to-day, and forget all about it before bedtime!"

"Well, I guess you could," returned the general, with a little chuckle, "even if I hadn't that Mexican bullet in my leg. But you couldn't, forty-five years ago, though you tried, and though I was a year younger than you, and weighed five pounds less. Come, now: you don't mean to say you've forgotten Susan Brown!"

"Oh-ah-hah! Susan Brown! Well, I declare! And what brought her into your head, I should like to know?"

"Why, after breaking your heart first, and then mine, I lost sight of her, and I don't think I have seen her since. But it appears she was married to a fellow named Parsloe."

"Don't fancy that name!" observed the professor, wagging his head and frowning. "Has a mean sound to it. But what of it?"

"Well, she died,-rest her soul!-and Parsloe too. But they had a daughter, and she survives them."

"And resembles her mother, eh?-No, Trednoke, the time for that sort of thing has gone by with me. Susan might have had me, five-and-forty years ago; but I can't undertake to revive my passion for the benefit of Mrs. Parsloe's daughter. Besides, I'm too busy to think of marriage, and not-not old enough!"

At this tour de force, the general laughed softly, and finished his coffee. An old Indian, somewhat remarkable in appearance, with shaggy white hair hanging down on his shoulders, stepped forward from the room where he had been waiting, and removed the cup.

"No letters yet, Kamaiakan?" asked the general, in Spanish.

"In a few minutes, general," the other replied. "Pablo has just come in sight over the hill. There were several errands."

"Muy buen!-I was going to say, Meschines, her father and mother left the girl poor, and she, being, apparently, clever and energetic, took to--"

"I know!" the professor interrupted. "They all do it, when they are clever and energetic, and that's the end of them!-School-teaching!"

"Not at all," returned General Trednoke. "She entered a dry-goods store."

"Entered a dry-goods store! Well, there's nothing so extraordinary in that. I've seen quantities of women do it, of all ages, colors, and degrees. What did she buy there?"

"Oh, a fiddlestick!" exclaimed the general. "Why don't you keep quiet and listen to my story? I say, she went into a great dry-goods store in New York, as sales-woman."

"Bless my soul! You don't mean a shop-girl?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? And why not?"

"Oh, well!-but, shade of Susan Brown! Ichabod!-what is the feminine of Ichabod, by the way, Trednoke? But, seriously, it's too bad. Susan may have been fickle, but she was always aristocratic. And now her daughter is a shop-girl. You and I are avenged!"

"You are just as ridiculous, Meschines, as you were thirty or fifty years ago," said the general, tranquilly. "You declaim for the sake of hearing your own voice. Besides, what you say is un-American. Grace Parsloe, as I was saying, got a place as shop-girl in one of the great New York stores. I don't say she mightn't have done worse: what I say is, I doubt whether she could have done better. That house-I know one of its founders, and I know what I'm talking about-is like an enormous family, where children are born, year after year, grow up, and take their places in life according to their quality and merit. What I mean is, that the boy who drives a wagon for them to-day, at three dollars a week, may control one of their chief departments, or even become a partner, before they're done with him; and, mutatis mutandis, the same with the girls. When these girls marry, it's apt to be into a higher rank of life than they were born in; and that fact, I take it, is a good indication that their shop-girl experience has been an education and an improvement. They are given work to do, suited to their capacity, be it small or great; they are in the way of learning something of the great economic laws; they learn self-restraint, courtesy, and--"

"And human nature! Yes, poor things: they see the American buying-woman, and that is a discipline more trying than any you West Pointers know about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family ARE fathers, and the children ARE children to them... All the same, I fancy the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as you say they do, don't, as a rule, make their shop girl days a topic of conversation at five-o'clock teas, or put 'Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so' at the bottom of their visiting-cards."

"I believe, after all, you're a snob, Meschines," said the general, pensively. "But, as I was about to say, when you interrupted me ten minutes ago, Grace Parsloe is coming on here to make us a visit. She fell ill, and her employers, after doing what could be done for her in the way of medical attendance, made up their minds to give her a change of climate. Now, you know, as she had originally gone to them with a letter from me, and as I live out here, on the borders of the Southern desert, in a climate that has no equal, they naturally thought of writing to me about it. And of course I said I'd be delighted to have her here, for a month, or a year, or whatever time it may be. She will be a pleasure to me, and a friend for Miriam, and she may find a husband somewhere up or down the coast, who will give her a fortune, and think all the better of her because she, like him, had the ability and the pluck to make her own way in the world."

"Humph! When do you expect her?"

"She may turn up any day. She is coming round by way of the Isthmus. From what I hear, she is really a very fine, clever girl. She held a responsible position in the shop, and--"

"Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and instructive conversation that we-or, to be more accurate, that I was engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all the indications are lacustrine?"

Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face, with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,-

"What is lacustrine, papa?"

"Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?"

"I haven't been asleep. What is lacustrine?"

"Ask the professor."

"Lacus, you know, my dear," said the latter, "means fresh-water indications as against salt."

"Then how does Great Salt Lake--"

"Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture, evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!"

"Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?" rejoined the hammock.

"There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of-- Why," cried the professor, interrupting himself, "when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,-cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,-I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch."

"People's bones?" asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.

"Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!" returned the sage. "No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,-lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house."

"How did they get there?"

"Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry."

"But where did the water go to?"

The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. "She knows more questions than you do the answers to them," quoth he. "But I wouldn't mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to see some of it back again."

"Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There's a hundred and thirty degrees of heat in some of these valleys,-abysses, rather, three or four hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this region, too, and whatever water wasn't evaporated from above would be likely to come to grief underneath."

"But, professor," said the musical voice, "I thought there was a law that water always seeks its own level. So how can there be empty places below sea-level?"

"It's the fault of the aneroid barometer, my dear. We were very comfortable and commonplace until that came along and revealed anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata, which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all through the desert; and there's a good deal of lava oozing over them, too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the west, or the Colorado leaking in from the east."

"In that case," remarked the general, "a little more seismic disturbance might produce a change."

"It would have to be more than a little, I suspect," returned Meschines.

"Kamaiakan told me that the Indians have a prophecy that a great lake will come back and make the desert fruitful, and that there are some who know the very place where the water will begin to flow." And here the hammock, with a final convulsion, gave birth to a beautiful young woman, in a diaphanous silk dress and a white lace mantilla. She crossed the veranda, and seated herself on the broad arm of her father's chair.

"Why, that's important!" said the general, arching his brows. "I wonder if Kamaiakan is one of those who know the place? If so, it might be worth his while to let me into the secret."

"Oh, you couldn't go there! It's enchanted, and people who go near it die. There are bones all about there, now."

"This Kamaiakan appears to be a remarkable personage: where did you pick him up?" inquired the professor.

"It was rather the other way," Trednoke replied, taking one of his daughter's hands in his, and caressing it. "We are appendages to Kamaiakan. You look so natural, sitting there, Meschines, that I forget it's thirty years since we met, and that all the significant events of my life have happened in that time,-the Mexican war, my marriage, and the rest of it! I have been a widower ten years."

"And I've been a bachelor for over sixty!" said Meschines, with a queer expression. "Your wife was Spanish, was she not?"

"Her father was a Mexican of Andalusian descent. But her mother was descended from the race of Azatlan: there are records and relics indicating that her ancestors were princes in Tenochtitlan before Cortez made trouble there."

"And I've been losing my heart to a princess, and never realized my audacity!" exclaimed the professor, laying his hand on his waistcoat and making an obeisance to Miriam.

She tossed her free foot, and played with the fringe of her reboso.

"I will tell my maid to look for it," she said; "but I think you must have left it in papa's curiosity-room."

"No: I'm an Aztec sacrifice!" cried the professor; and they all laughed. "One would hardly have anticipated," he resumed after a pause, addressing Trednoke, "that you would have made a double conquest,-first of the men, and then of the woman!"

"The woman conquered me, without trying or wishing to, and then, because she was a woman, took compassion on me. Whether my country has benefited much by the Mexican annexation, I can't say; but I know Inez-made a heaven on earth for me," concluded the general, in a low voice. His countenance, at this moment, wore a solemn and humble expression, beautiful to see; and Miriam bent and laid her cheek against his. Meschines knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and sighed.

"No woman ever took compassion on me," he remarked, "and you see the result,-ashes!"

"Ashes,-with their wonted fires living in them," said Trednoke.

"We were talking about this Indian of yours," said Meschines.

"Ay, to be sure. Well, he was attached to Inez's family when I first knew them. It was a peculiar relation; not like that of a servant. One finds such things in Mexico. The conquered race were of as good strain as their conquerors; the blood of Montezuma was as blue as the best of the Castilian. There were many intermarriages; and there are many instances of the survival of traditions and records; though the records are often symbolic, and would have no meaning to persons not initiated. But they have been sufficient to perpetuate ties of a personal nature through generation after generation; and the alliance between Kamaiakan and Inez was of this kind. His forefathers, I imagine, were priests, and priests were a mighty power in Tenochtitlan. For aught I know, indeed Kamaiakan may be an original priest of Montezuma's; no one knows his age, but he does not look an hour older, to-day, than when I first saw him, over twenty years ago."

"He must be!" said Miriam, with some positiveness. "He has told me of seeing and doing things hundreds of years ago. And he says--" She paused.

"What does he say, Nina adorada?" asked her father.

"It was about the treasure, you know."

"Let us hear. The professor is one of us."

"It's one of our traditions that my mother's ancestors, at the time of Cortez, were very rich people," continued Miriam, glancing at Meschines, and then letting her eyes wander across the garden, blooming with roses and fragrant with orange-trees, and so across the trellised vines towards the soft outline of the mountains eastward. "A great part of their wealth was in the form of jewels and precious stones. When Cortez took the city, one of the priests, who was a relative of our family, put the jewels in a box, and hid them in a certain place in the desert."

"And does Kamaiakan know where the place is?" asked the general.

"He can know, when the time comes."

"Which will be, perhaps, when you are ready for your dowry," observed the professor, genially.

"A spell was put upon the spot," Miriam went on, with a certain imaginative seriousness; for she loved romance and mystery so well, and was of a temperament so poetical, that the wildest fairy-tales had a sort of reality for her. "No one can find the treasure while the spell remains. But Kamaiakan understands the spell, and the conjuration which dissolves it; and when he dissolves it, the treasure will be found."

"And, between ourselves," added the general, "Kamaiakan is himself the priestly relative by whom the spell was wrought. He bears an enchanted life, which cannot cease until he has restored the jewels to Miriam's hands."

"There might be something in it, you know," said Meschines, after a pause. "The treasures of Montezuma have never been found. Is there no old chart or writing, in your collection of curiosities and relics, that might throw light on it?"

"The scriptures of Anahuac were of the hieroglyphic type,-picture-writing," replied the other. "No, I fear there is nothing to the purpose; and if there were, I shouldn't know how to decipher it."

"But, papa, the tunic!" exclaimed Miriam.

"Oh! has the tunic anything to do with it?"

"Is that the queer woollen garment with the gold embroidery?" inquired the professor, becoming more interested. "I took a fancy to that, you remember. Has it a story?"

"Well, it is a kind of an anomaly, I believe," the general answered, looking up at his daughter with a smile. "The Aztecs, you are aware, dressed chiefly in cotton. Even their defensive armor was of cotton, thickly quilted. Their ornaments were feathers, and embroidery of gold and precious stones. But wool, for some reason, they didn't wear; and yet this garment, as you can see for yourself, is pure wool; and that it is also pure Aztecan is beyond question."

"Admitting that, what clue does it give to the treasure?"

"You must ask Kamaiakan," said Miriam: "only, he wouldn't tell you."

"Possibly," the professor suggested, "the place where the treasure is hidden is the place whence the water is to flow out; and the water is the treasure."

"Seriously, do you suppose that such a phenomenon as the return of an inland sea is physically practicable?" asked Trednoke.

"No phenomenon, in this part of the world, would surprise me," returned Meschines. "The Colorado might break its barriers; or it is conceivable that some huge stream, taking its rise in the heights hundreds of miles north and east of us, may be flowing through subterranean passages into the sea, emerging from the sea-bottom hundreds of miles to the westward. Now, if a rattling good earthquake were to happen along, you might awake in the morning to find yourself on an island, or even under water."

"A moderate Mediterranean would satisfy me," the general said. "I wouldn't exchange the certainty of it for the treasures of Montezuma."

"The thirst for gold and for water are synonymous in your case?"

"Give this section a moist climate, and I needn't tell you that the Great American Desert would literally blossom as the rose. Even as it is, I expect a great deal of it will be redeemed by scientific irrigation. The soil only needs water to become inexhaustibly productive. Our desert, as you know, is not sand, like parts of the Sahara; it has all the ingredients that go to nourish plants, only their present powdery condition makes them unavailable. Now, I can, to-day, buy a hundred square miles of desert for a few dollars. You see the point, don't you?"

"And all you want is expert opinion as to the likelihood of finding water?"

"The man who solves that question for me in the affirmative is welcome to half my share of the results that would ensue from it."

"Why don't you engage some expert to investigate?"

"One can't always trust an expert. I don't mean as to his expertness only, but as to his good faith. He might prefer to sell the idea to somebody who could pay cash,-which I cannot."

"Why, you seem to have given this thing a good deal of thought, Trednoke."

"Well, yes: it has been my hobby for a year past; and I have made some investigations myself. But this is the first time I have spoken of it to any one."

"I understand. And what of the investigations?"

"I can say that I found enough to interest me. I'll tell you about it some time. I should be glad to leave Miriam something to make her independent."

"I should say that her Creator had already done that!" said Meschines. "By the way, I know a young fellow-if he were only here-who is just the man you want, and can be trusted. He's a civil engineer,-Harvey Freeman: the Lord only knows in what part of the world he is at this speaking. He has made a special study of these subterranean matters."

"Don't you remember, papa, Coleridge's poem of Kubla Khan?-

"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea!"

"Our sacred river, when we find it, shall be named Miriam."

"It ought to be Kamaiakan," she rejoined; "for, if anybody finds it, it will be he."

"I think I hear the wings of the angel of whom we have been speaking," said the general. "Yes, here he is; and he has got the letters. Let us see! One for you Meschines. And this, I see, is from our friend Miss Parsloe, postmarked Santa Barbara. Why, she'll be here to-morrow, at that rate."

"Here's a queer coincidence!" exclaimed the professor, who had meanwhile opened his envelope and glanced through the contents. "The very man I was speaking of,-Harvey Freeman! Says he is in this neighborhood, has heard I'm here, and is coming down to pay me a visit. Methinks I hear the rolling of the sacred river!"

"But you won't mention it to him, until--"

"Bless me! Of course not. I'll bring him over here, in the course of human events, and you can take a look at him, and act on your own intuitions. I won't say on Princess Miriam's, for Harvey is a very fine-looking fellow, and her intuitions might get confused."

"A civil engineer!" said Miriam, with an intonation worthy of the daughter of a West-Pointer and the descendant of an Aztec prince.

Kamaiakan (who spoke only Spanish) had been gathering up some cushions that had fallen out of the hammock. Having replaced them, and cast a quick glance at Meschines, he withdrew.