The gold-buttoned stranger addressed the folks who, being curious, had crowded around him.
“I have come, amigos,” he explained, “because your wonderful town of Manzano is a pearl among cities, full of history, a town of holy martyrs. Yes, my good people, I have come to admire and venerate your sacred church with its cloister and mission, where so many poor indios were instructed in the faith and brought to Christ, and so many holy padres were slain by savage idolators, martyrs to the only true religion.”
They showed him the tiny humble morada put up by the Brothers of Light, also known as Penitentes. “No, no, compadres,” the stranger protested. “I mean the big church, built of stone, erected by the padres in the days of King Philip.”
“There is no such church here, señor,” the people informed him. “Maybe you mean the missions of Quarai and Abó, not far from here, but they are in ruins.”
“I assure you, caballeros, that there was such a church here, in Manzano,” and with that he drew from his ample pockets an ancient parchment brittle and yellowed with age, displaying a map of Manzano, showing the location of a large mission church with cloisters, a cemetery, outbuildings, and orchards.
“Maybe the godless savages destroyed this church when they murdered the poor friars. Maybe its ruins lie buried somewhere around here. For the glory of God, compadres, we must find it! Follow me!”
With map in hand, the man from Chihuahua paced off a hundred steps toward the east, starting at the stump of a centuries-old tree. He stopped at the weed-covered remains of an ancient well and measured some seventy steps to the south, arriving at the remnants of a round stone tower which long ago had served the early settlers as a refuge from Apache raiders. From there, consulting his map again, he took some two dozen steps to the east, coming to a mound of ancient potsherds, among them a piece of glass from a Spanish drinking vessel that bore the date of its manufacture—1703.
“Dig here, amigos,” he cried, “dig here, por la gloria de la Virgen! You will find the church underneath all this dirt and rubble. It will become a center of worship. Pilgrims will come from everywhere to worship here. It will make all of you rich, compadres of mine. When we find it, I will give the biggest fiesta ever held in Nueva México, I promise. I will bear all expenses, for the glory of God and of the Holy Church. Get your picks and shovels, my friends, and dig!”
The good people of Manzano went at it with a vengeance, spurred on by the gold-button man, fired with visions of fame, riches, and the prospect of a great fiesta. The map turned out to be truly excellent, for, after digging for only one hour, the men discovered the corner of a large building, surely a church, and a short while later laid bare much of its flagstone floor. In the late afternoon they uncovered a finely carved altar and, amid the surrounding rubble, the only slightly damaged statue of San Francisco.
The stranger was weeping for joy. “We found it, amigos, just as I told you!” he cried. “On your knees, my friends! Let us pray!”
After they all had done so, the mysterious visitor made a solemn speech: “Compadres, look here, at the dark red spots on these stones—blood of your own ancestors who helped the padres building this mission. Think of it. Here is the very ground upon which they died for their faith at the hands of idol-worshiping brujos, of pitiless sorcerers. Now, at last, we can honor them by rebuilding this church! Glory to God and all the saints! Glory to Christ and the Virgin. Glory to you, amigos, as the descendants of holy martyrs! I shall bear all the costs. And, as I promised, tomorrow we celebrate by having a great fiesta with music and dance. I will purchase from some of you the four fattest sheep and two fattest pigs, and a whole ox, if someone among you should have such a one for sale. And there will be enough aguardiente to drink for everybody. Now go and rest from your labors!”
The fiesta was a truly great event. The ox was turning on a gigantic spit. Everywhere bubbling kettles of chili stew, full of succulent chunks of mutton, and equally large bowls of carne adobada, overflowing with delicious morsels of tender pork, were waiting for customers. After the feast came the baile, the dance. The overgenerous stranger had hired musicians from the surrounding countryside—fiddlers, harpists, guitarists, even a trumpeter, all making a glorious noise that made the feet of even the oldest folks dance. And there was, as promised, liquid refreshment enough to float a battleship. The stranger’s carriage contained, a wonderful, sheer inexhaustible supply of kegs and bottles of aguardiente, tequila, and original mescal de Oaxaca con su propio gusano, and the caballero from Chihuahua ladled it out by the gourdful.
“Drink, my friends, and be happy,” he encouraged the revelers, “don’t be shy. Señoras y señoritas, this mescal is so smooth, so mild, so innocent that even you can imbibe it without fear or hesitation.”
All night long the charming stranger saw to it that everybody’s glass, cup, or gourd remained always filled to the brim. And so the good people of Manzano got muy borracho, muy ebrio, until they all passed out. It was high noon when they finally came to. They rubbed their eyes, cleared their throats, got up on unsteady legs, yawned, stretched, and looked around. Someone noticed that the open-handed stranger was nowhere to be seen.
“His team of mules and his wagon are gone too,” one of the campesinos observed.
An old lady added, “Surely, he went to the ruin of the church to pray at the altar.”
The whole village went to see whether she was right, but the rico hombre and his wagon were not there either. What they found was a big hole, or rather a rectangular opening, very much like a freshly dug grave, that had not been there when they finished excavating the day before. Whoever had made the big hole had left a shovel lying next to it, also the stub of a cigarillo, the kind they had seen the kindly stranger smoke incessantly. They peered into the hole. It was empty, except for some decaying fragments of wood, the largest of them showing signs of having been carved.
The good people of Manzano scratched their heads and looked at each other. They cried out in unison: “Un tesoro! It was a treasure chest. That is what he came for. By right it belonged to us. It was our treasure! He has robbed us!”
Some men mounted their horses to go after him. They rode to the great Socorro Road leading down to El Paso and Chihuahua. Some rode south and others rode north, toward Albuquerque. The tracks of his team and wagon were lost among many other tracks and, in any case, he had too much of a head start on them. The whole affair had, however, whetted their appetites for treasure. Many Manzano folks hurried to all the church ruins in the area, to Quarai, to Abó, to Gran Quivira, to every spot showing the merest traces of ancient habitation, tearing up the earth in a frenzied, futile search for treasures. They never found anything worth a single centavo.
The mystery of the stranger with the gold buttons was never solved. Had there really been a chest? And, if so, what had it contained? No one will ever know. That is the Great Lost Treasure of Manzano Mystery, the mystery of the chest that was not there.
CHAPTER 8
Git Along, Little Dogies
Only in America could a cowherd be made into a romantic hero, celebrated in film and literature, subject of innumerable novels, songs, and poems, finding his apotheosis as a gaudily dressed, guitar-picking yodeler. Translate “cowboy” into any other language—garçon de vache or Kuhjunge—and you go immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous. Actually, even in America “cowboy” was originally a term of derision. During the War of Independence, a band of Tory marauders were known as cowboys, not because they were cattle herders, but because they stole cows. Some historians say that this was the first time the word “cowboy” appeared in our language.
The real-life cowboy, a vanishing species, was a bowlegged, hardworking saddlestiff, sometimes up to his ankles in manure, branding and castrating the little dogies—not a very romantic occupation. A Casanova our cowboy was decidedly not. It has been said that the only two things the typical cowhand feared was being afoot or finding himself in the presence of a decent woman. Cowboys wer
e not the stuff of which husbands are made. A fellow who, on the average, made thirty dollars a month and spent 90 percent of his time out on the range was not what most girls were looking for. The formula for a good “oater” has always been “plenty of action, plenty of close-ups of a pet pony, and only one minute of kissing at the very end.” And indeed, cowboys were most often depicted as being in love with their favorite cayuse rather than with their lady friend. This is supported by headstones such as these, which can be found in the cow country:
HERE LIES “I’M HERE”
The Very Best of Cow Ponies, A Gallant Little Gentleman.
HERE LIES “WHAT NEXT”
He had the Body of a Horse,
The Spirit of a Knight, and
The Devotion of the Man
Who Erected this stone.
Few monuments exist extolling in such lyrical terms the virtues of cowhands’ wives or sweethearts who had “gone over the range.” One nasty fellow said that the cowboy realized himself with a pistol rather than with his pecker, but the pistol bit has also been overdone. Many cowboys did not pack guns, many who did never fired a shot in anger, and those few who used them on another human often missed. In the words of William Savage; “For the matter of a week, or per chance two—it depends on how fast his money melts—in these fashions will our gentleman of cows engage his hours and expand himself: He will make a deal of noise, drink a deal of whiskey, acquire a deal of what he calls ’action’; but he harms nobody, and, in a town toughened to his racket and which needs and gets his money, disturbs nobody.”
The way in which romance has transformed the hardworking buckaroo into the Sir Galahad of the Open Range can be best seen in the typical John Wayne–style Western in which our hero is busy drilling holes into Injuns and bad hombres, smashing up saloons, and rescuing damsels in distress, but never, never, never doing what he is supposed to—working the cattle.
And yet the gallant, carefree cowboy makes a dashing figure as, tall in the saddle and silhouetted against the western sunset, he rides forth to endless new adventures.
The Saga of Pecos Bill
Pecos Bill wasn’t a man of flesh and blood. He was an idea, a vision, a cowboy demigod. His voice broke while still in his mammy’s womb and his first words upon emergin’ were “Gimme a drink.” He was born with a full set of teeth, a full head of red hair, and seven bristly hairs on his chest. Three days after he was born, he started chawin’ ’baccer. He was weaned on panther piss, made in his pappy’s portable still from a gallon of Pecos River water (hence his nickname), a gallon of pure, double-twisted and distilled white lightnin’, a cupful of gunpowder for seasonin’, and three rattlesnake heads for taste. At the age of three he was already a hell of a poker player.
It was precisely on his third birthday that Bill’s pappy went to stake out a claim in the Texas Panhandle. He’d hitched up a team of oxen to their prairie schooner, tied a milch cow and a horse to the rear end, and stowed a cage with a dozen chickens and a barrel of his own brand of popskull someplace in the wagon. He put his children, all nineteen of ’em, among them a set of quintuplets, in the rear where they couldn’t interfere with the drivin’. Bill was the youngest and he sat farthest back. Now, after crossin’ the Pecos River, jest havin’ reached the far bank, the left front wheel hit a big rock and the jolt chucked li’l Bill clear out of the wagon and into the river. (That’s still another reason for Pecos Bill’s moniker.) Well, with so many younguns an’ all the squallin’ and noise they made, Bill wasn’t missed. In the evenin’, when the whole gang of them made camp, their pappy rounded them up to count heads. He found out that they were one head short.
“Bill’s jest a wee nipper,” said his mammy, “nary six feet tall. We shorely had him around yestiddy. Mebbe we oughta go back and look for him?”
“Naw, he’s all of three years old,” said Bill’s daddy, “old ’nuff to fend for hisself. He’ll play his hand as it’s been dealt to him. I ain’t worryin’ none.”
“Waal, iff’n you say so,” answered his wife.
Now, what happened to Bill was this: He crawled out of the river, spat out a dozen or so fingerlin’s, and crawled off into the chaparral, where he found himself face-to-face with an ancient gray-haired grandpappy coyote by the name of Methuselah, on account of his age and wisdom.
“Here, little doggie, nice little doggie,” said Bill.
“Doggie, hell!” said Methuselah. “I ain’t no goddam dog. I’m a coyote, boy! Waal, you’re like a lost calf a-lookin’ for his mammy’s teats. I reckon I’ve been dealt the hand to take care of you. Come along.”
So that granddaddy coyote took Bill to where the whole pack of ’em was scratchin’ themselves and chawin’ on bones and introduced him all around. Methuselah took Bill to a lady coyote sucklin’ two pups. “Thar’s your chuckwagon,” he told Bill. “Thar’s nipples enough for one more.”
“Heck,” said Bill, “I never tech the stuff. I’d rather have whiskey.”
Well, Bill settled in with the coyotes and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail plumb forgot that he was human, being convinced that he was a coyote too.
In this new family of his Bill was known as “No Tail” for obvious reasons. Old Methuselah taught him everything a self-respecting coyote ought to know—how to catch a rabbit, how to lift his right leg to pee, how to howl at the moon. In no time at all Bill became the best moon howler in the pack. Methuselah also showed him how to run down a deer and told him to avoid skunks for the sake of his nose. The only varmint givin’ Bill any trouble at all was the Wowser, a fearful critter sired by the Great Oligocene Saber-toothed Tiger of the West upon the Giant Fur-covered Catfish of the Big Muddy. This oversized monster had a tail like a fish, the body of a lion, and teeth like a chain saw. Its voice was thunder, its breath fire. Its glance could strike an ordinary feller dumb. Waal, li’l Bill fought the Wowser for a full day. In the end Bill whupped the varmint and knocked him down for the count. As the Wowser was lyin’ senseless on the ground, Bill disdainfully lifted his leg over him and let him have it while the delighted coyotes whooped it up. Bill was now the champeen and top dog among the pack. A winsome young blondish coyote lass was makin’ eyes at Bill, shakin’ her rump at him, sayin’, “It so happens that I’m in heat and willin’. How about it?”
Nobody knows what would’ve happened if fate hadn’t interfered. It would’ve been a prime case of this here miscegenation, and god knows how the pups would’ve turned out, if a cowboy named Slim hadn’t come gallopin’ in at a dead run, a-shoutin’ and a-shootin’ his six-gun scatterin’ the coyotes before him like chaff in the wind. Young Bill didn’t run away like the others. He was busy with his freshly killed grizzly, tearin’ off its legs and gnawin’ on the paws.
“What in hell are you doin’ mother-nakkid among those varmints and eatin’ yer meat raw?” Slim wanted to know.
Bill had never seen human bein’s since he fell off his pappy’s wagon. He had plumb forgot what they looked like. He stood his ground, growlin’ and barin’ his teeth.
“Stop that tomfoolery,” said Slim. “It ain’t human.”
“I ain’t human,” answered Bill. “I’m a coyote. My name’s No Tail.”
“You’re ramsquaddled with loco weed. You ain’t a coyote. You’re human like me.”
“You’re a damn liar! Am I not the champeen moon howler? Don’t I lift my right leg to pee? Hain’t I got fleas?
“Ev’rybody’s got fleas. I got fleas. If you’re a coyote, whar’s your tail? Coyotes got tails.”
“It was bitten off by a painter when I was a baby, Granddaddy Methuselah told me.”
“You’re a feather-headed fool. Come along. I’ll show you somepin.”
Slim took Bill to the nearest creek: “Look in the water. Whaddaya see?”
Bill looked at their reflections in the water. He was stupefied. “I’ll be danged!” he exclaimed. “Leapin’ lizards! I’m a friggin’ human. I reckon I’ve got no choice but to jine up with your kind.”
Bill mounted up behind Slim and they rode off in the gen’ral direction of civilization. Thus Bill rejoined the human race.
Pecos Bill got along well among the two-leggeds. Folks took to him, though they sometimes wondered about him when he took off all his clothes and hunkered down on his haunches, howling at the moon like a coyote. He turned out to be a born cowboy, better than the best. Fust thing he did was get himself a hoss. As he warn’t an ordinary fellow, so his hoss warn’t an ordinary pony. He raised him from a colt on a diet of strychnine juice, baked tarantulas, and bob wire. That made him grow fast, but it also made him ornery. He grew into a boomerang stallion, a can’t-be-rode hoss, a one-man bronco. Bill was the only one who could ride him. His name was Widow-Maker ’cause nobody who ever tried to ride him survived the experience, except Bill’s friend Slim. Slim was a one-A bronc buster and Bill let him try. Slim got on and Widow-Maker boiled over, his ears back, sidewindin’, jackknifin’, sunfishin’, and chinnin’ the moon. It was a real whing-ding. Widow-Maker bucked Slim off, cat-backed him all the way from the Panhandle to the top of Pike’s Peak. He would’ve froze and starved to death up there if Bill hadn’t fetched him back with his five-hundred-mile-long lasso. “Your hoss has a bellyful of bedsprings,” was all Slim had to say.
Bill was always mounted, never afoot ‘xcept when he was haulin’ supplies in his buckboard. On those occasions he hitched a grizzly bear and a saber-toothed tiger to his wagon, usin’ a live twelve-foot diamondback rattler for a whip. Talkin’ of snakes, one day Pecos was ridin’ through Raton Pass when he came up against the Nueva Mexico Cascabela Grande, an outsized rattler, half a mile long, with yard-long fangs, which amused itself by scarin’ travelers out of tryin’ to use the pass.
“Git out of my way,” Pecos told the sarpent. He had learned to talk rattlesnake language from the coyotes.
Legends and Tales of the American West Page 23