The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales: With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier PapersHarte, Bret
General
The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales: With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers
Harte, Bret
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction; Western stories
Nothing could exceed the quiet gravity and unpretentiousness of the
little cavalcade. First rode a stout muleteer, leading a pack-mule laden
with the provisions of the party, together with a few cheap crucifixes
and hawks’ bells. After him came the devout Padre Jose, bearing his
breviary and cross, with a black serapa thrown around his shoulders;
while on either side trotted a dusky convert, anxious to show a proper
sense of his regeneration by acting as guide into the wilds of his
heathen brethren. Their new condition was agreeably shown by the absence
of the usual mud-plaster, which in their unconverted state they assumed
to keep away vermin and cold. The morning was bright and propitious.
Before their departure, mass had been said in the chapel, and the
protection of St. Ignatius invoked against all contingent evils, but
especially against bears, which, like the fiery dragons of old, seemed
to cherish unconquerable hostility to the Holy Church.
As they wound through the canon, charming birds disported upon boughs
and sprays, and sober quails piped from the alders; the willowy
watercourses gave a musical utterance, and the long grass whispered on
the hillside. On entering the deeper defiles, above them towered dark
green masses of pine, and occasionally the madrono shook its bright
scarlet berries. As they toiled up many a steep ascent, Father Jose
sometimes picked up fragments of scoria, which spake to his imagination
of direful volcanoes and impending earthquakes. To the less scientific
mind of the muleteer Ignacio they had even a more terrifying
significance; and he once or twice snuffed the air suspiciously, and
declared that it smelt of sulphur. So the first day of their journey
wore away, and at night they encamped without having met a single
heathen face. It was on this night that the Enemy of Souls appeared to
Ignacio in an appalling form. He had retired to a secluded part of the
camp and had sunk upon his knees in prayerful meditation, when he looked
up and perceived the Arch-Fiend in the likeness of a monstrous bear. The
Evil One was seated on his hind legs immediately before him, with his
fore paws joined together just below his black muzzle. Wisely conceiving
this remarkable attitude to be in mockery and derision of his devotions,
the worthy muleteer was transported with fury. Seizing an arquebus,
he instantly closed his eyes and fired. When he had recovered from
the effects of the terrific discharge, the apparition had disappeared.
Father Jose, awakened by the report, reached the spot only in time to
chide the muleteer for wasting powder and ball in a contest with one
whom a single ave would, have been sufficient to utterly discomfit.
What further reliance he placed on Ignacio’s story is not known; but, in
commemoration of a worthy Californian custom, the place was called “La
Canada de la Tentacion del Pio Muletero,” or “The Glen of the Temptation
of the Pious Muleteer,” a name which it retains to this day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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