16 The Castle of Montevideo

The Castle of Montevideo, as its name indicates, commanded a magnificent view. Set in a niche of a mountain which towered far above, it looked down upon and commanded one of the great roads that led to the heart of Mexico, the city that stood in the vale of Tenochtitlan, the capital, in turn, of the Toltecs, the Aztecs, the Spaniards, and the Mexicans, and, for all that men yet knew, of races older than the Toltecs. But the Spaniards had built it, completing it nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, when their hold upon the greater part of the New World seemed secure, and the name of Spain was filled with the suggestion of power.

It was a gloomy and tremendous fortress, standing seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, and having about it, despite its latitude, no indication of the tropics.

Spain had lavished here enormous sums of money dug for her by the slaves of Mexico and Peru. It was built of volcanic pumice stone, very hard, and of the color of dark honey. Its main walls formed an equilateral triangle, eight hundred feet square on the inside, and sixty feet from the top of the wall to the bottom of the enclosing moat. There was a bastion at each corner of the main rampart, and the moat that enveloped the main walls and bastions was two hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep. Fifty feet beyond the outer wall of the moat rose a chevaux de frise built of squared cedar logs twelve feet long, set in the ground and fastened together by longitudinal timbers. Beyond the chevaux de frise was another ditch, fourteen feet wide, of which the outer bank was a high earthwork. The whole square enclosed by the outermost work was twenty-six acres, and on the principal rampart were mounted eighty cannon, commanding the road to the Valley of Tenochtitlan.

Few fortresses, even in the Old World, were more powerful or complete. It enclosed armories, magazines, workshops, and cells; cells in rows, all of which were duly numbered when Montevideo was completed in the eighteenth century. And, to give it the last and happiest touch, the picture of Ferdinand VII., King of Spain, Lord of the Indies and the New World, was painted over the doorway of every cell, and they were many.

Nor is this the full tale of Montevideo. On the inner side of each angle, broad wooden stairways ascended to the top, the stairways themselves being enclosed at intervals by wooden gates twelve feet high. The real fortifications enclosed a square of nearly five hundred feet, and inside this square were the buildings of the officers and the barracks of the soldiers. The floor of the square was paved with thick cement, and deep down under the cement were immense water tanks, holding millions of gallons, fed by subterranean springs of pure cold water. By means of underground tunnels the moats could be flooded with water from the tanks or springs.

It has been said that the Spaniards are massive builders, the most massive since the Romans, and they have left their mark with many a huge stone structure in the southern part of the New World. What Montevideo cost the kings of Spain no one has ever known, and, although they probably paid twice for every stick and stone in it, Peru and Mexico were still pouring forth their floods of treasure, and there was the fortress, honey colored, lofty, undeniably majestic and powerful.

When Mexico displaced Spain, she added to the defenses of Montevideo, and now, on this spring day in 1847, it lowered, dark and sinister, over the road. It was occupied by a strong garrison under that alert and valiant soldier, Captain Pedro de Armijo, raised recently to that rank, but still stinging with the memories of Buena Vista, he was anxious that the Americans should come and attack him in Montevideo. He stood on the rampart at a point where it was seventy feet wide, and he looked with pride and satisfaction at the row of eighty guns. Pedro de Armijo, swelling with pride, felt that he could hold the castle of Montevideo against twenty thousand men. Time had made no impression upon those massive walls, and the moat was filled with water. The castle, mediaeval, but grim and formidable, sat in its narrow mountain valley with the Cofre de Montevideo (Trunk of Montevideo) behind it on the north. This peak was frequently covered with snow and at all times was gloomy and forbidding. Even on bright days the sun reached it for only a few hours.

While Pedro de Armijo walked on the parapet, looking out at the range of mountain and valley and enjoying the sunlight, which would soon be gone, a young man stood at the window of cell No. 87, also looking out at the mountain, although no sunlight reached him there. He gazed through a slit four inches wide and twelve inches high, and the solid wall of masonry through which this slit was cut was twelve feet thick. The young man’s ankles were tied together with a chain which, although long enough to allow him to walk, weighed twenty-five pounds. Once he had been chained with another man. Formerly the prisoners who had been brought with him to the Castle of Montevideo had been chained in pairs, the chain in no case weighing less than twenty pounds, but, since only John Bedford was left, Pedro de Armijo concluded that it was his duty to carry the chain alone.

John Bedford was white with prison pallor. Although as tall, he weighed many pounds less than his younger brother, Philip. His cheeks were sunken, and his eyes were set in deep hollows. The careless observer would have taken him for ten years more than his real age. He had shuffled painfully to the slit in the wall, where he wished to see the last rays of the daylight falling on the mountainside. The depth of the slit made the section of the mountain that he could see very narrow, and he knew every inch of it. There was the big projection of volcanic rock, the tall, malformed cactus that put out a white flower, the little bunch of stunted cedars or pines—he could never tell which—in the shelter of the rock, and the yard or two of gully down which he had seen the water roaring after the big rains or at the melting of the snows on the Cofre de Montevideo.

How often he had looked upon these things! What a little slice of the world it was! Only a few yards long and fewer yards broad, but what a mighty thing it was to him! Even with the slit closed, he could have drawn all of it upon a map to the last twig and pebble. He would have suffered intensely had that little view been withdrawn, but it tantalized him, too, with the sight of the freedom that was denied him. Three years, they told him, he had been gazing out at that narrow slit at the mountainside, and he only at the beginning of life, strong of mind and body—or at least he was. Never in that time had he been outside the inner walls or even in the court yard. He knew nothing of what had happened in the world. Sometimes they told him that Texas had been overrun and retaken by the Mexicans, and he feared that it was true.

They did not always put the chains upon him, but lately he had been refractory. He was easily caught in an attempt to escape, and a new governor of the castle, lately come, a young man extremely arrogant, had demanded his promise that he make no other such attempt. He had refused, and so the chains were ordered. He had worn them many times before, and now they oppressed him far less than his loneliness. He alone of that expedition was left a prisoner in the castle. How all the others had gone he did not know, but he knew that some had escaped. Both he and his comrade of the chains were too ill to walk when the escape was made, and there was nothing to do but leave them behind. His comrade died, and he recovered after weeks, mainly through the efforts of old Catarina, the Indian woman who sometimes brought him his food.

John Bedford’s spirits were at the bottom of the depths that afternoon. How could human beings be so cruel as to shut up one of their kind in such a manner, one who was no criminal? It seemed to him that lately the watch in the castle had become more vigilant than ever. More soldiers were about, and he heard vaguely of comings and goings. His mind ran back for the thousandth time over the capture of himself and his comrades.

When taken by an overwhelming force they were one hundred and seventy in number, and there were great rejoicings in Mexico when they were brought southward. They had been blindfolded at some points, once when he walked for a long time on sharp volcanic rock, and once, when, as he was fainting from heat and thirst, a woman with a kind voice had given him a cup of water at a well. He remembered these things very vividly, and he remembered with equal vividness how, when they were not blindfolded, they were led in triumph through the Mexican towns, exactly as prisoners were led to celebrate the glory of a general through the streets of old Rome. They, the “Terrible Texans,” as they were called, had passed through triumphal arches decorated with the bright garments of women. Boys and girls, brilliant handkerchiefs bound around their heads, and shaking decorated gourds with pebbles in them, had danced before the captives to the great delight of the spectators. Sometimes women themselves in these triumphal processions had done the zopilote or buzzard dance. At night the prisoners had been forced to sleep in foul cattle sheds.

Then had come the Day of the Beans. One hundred and fifty-three white beans and seventeen black beans were placed in a bowl, and every prisoner, blindfolded, was forced to draw one. The seventeen who drew the black beans were promptly shot, and the others were compelled to march on. He remembered how lightly they had taken it, even when it was known who had drawn the black beans. These men, mostly young like himself, had jested about their bad luck, and had gone to their death smiling. He did not know how they could do it, but it was so, because he had seen it with his own eyes.

Then they had marched on until they came to the Castle of Montevideo. There the world ended. There was nothing but time, divided into alternations of night and day. He had seen nobody but soldiers, except the old woman Catarina, who seemed to be a sort of scullion. After he recovered from the prison fever of which his comrade of the chains died, the old woman had shown a sort of pity for him; perhaps she liked him as one often likes those upon whom one has conferred benefits. She yielded to his entreaties for a pencil for an hour or so, and some paper, just a sheet or two. She smuggled them to him, and she smuggled away the letter that he wrote. She did not know what would happen, but she would give it to her son Porfirio, who was a vaquero. Porfirio would give it to his friend Antonio Vaquez, who was leading a burro train north to Monterey. After that was the unknown, but who could tell? Antonio Vaquez was a kind man, and the Holy Virgin sometimes worked miracles for the good. As for the poor lad, the prisoner, he must rest now. He had been muy malo (very sick), and it was not good to worry.

John tried not to worry. It was such easy advice to give and so very hard for one to take who had been buried alive through a time that seemed eternity, and who had been forgotten by all the world, except his jailers. That letter had gone more than a year ago, and, of course, it had not reached its destination. He ought never to have thought such a thing possible. Very likely it had been destroyed by Porfirio, the vaquero, old Catarina’s son. He had not seen old Catarina herself in a long time. Doubtless they had sent her away because she had been kind to him, or they may have found out about the letter. He was very sorry. She was far from young, and she was far from beautiful, but her brief presence at intervals had been cheering.

He watched the last rays of the sun fade on the volcanic slope. A single beam, livid and splendid, lingered for a moment, and then was gone. After it came the dark, with all the chilling power of great elevation. The cold even penetrated the deep slit that led through twelve feet of solid masonry, and John Bedford shivered. It was partly the dark that made him shiver. He rose from the stool and made his way slowly and painfully to his cot against the wall, his chains rattling heavily over the floor.

He heard a key turning in the lock and the door opening, but he did not look around. They usually came with his food at this hour, and the food was always the same. There was no cause for curiosity. But when he heard the steps of two men instead of one he did look around. There was the same soldier bringing his supper of frijoles and tortillas on a tin plate, and a cup of very bad coffee, but he was accompanied by the new governor of the castle, Captain Pedro de Armijo, whom John did not like at all. The soldier drew up the stool, put the food on it, and also a candle that he carried.

John began to eat and drink, taking not the slightest notice of de Armijo. The man from the first had given him the impression, of cold, malignant cruelty. John Bedford had often thought that his own spirit was crushed, but it was far from being so. Pride was strong within him, and he resolved that de Armijo should speak first.

De Armijo stood in silence for some time, looking down at the prisoner. He was not in a good humor, he had seldom been so since that fatal day when the whole army of Santa Anna was hurled back by the little force from the North. He knew many things of which the prisoner did not dream, and he had no thought of giving him even the slightest hint of them. In him was the venomous disposition of the cat that likes to play with the rat it has caught. A curious piece of mockery, or perhaps it was not wholly mockery, had occurred to him.

“Bedford,” he said, speaking good English, “you have been a prisoner here a long time, and no one loves captivity.”

“I have not heard that any one does,” replied John, taking another drink of the bad coffee.

“You cannot escape. You see the impossibility of any such attempt.”

“It does not look probable, I admit. Still, few things are impossible.”

De Armijo smiled, showing even white teeth. He rather liked this game of playing with the rat in the trap. So much was in favor of the cat.

“It is not a possibility with which one can reckon.” he said, “and I should think that the desire to be free would be overpowering in one so young as you.”

“Have you come here to make sport of me?” said John, with ominous inflection. “Because if you have I shall not answer another question.”

“Not at all,” said de Armijo. “I come on business. You have been here, as I said, a long time, and in that time many changes have occurred in the world.”

“What changes?” asked John sharply.

“The most important of them is the growth in power of Mexico,” said de Armijo smoothly. “We triumph over all our enemies.”

“Do you mean that you have really retaken Texas?” asked John, with a sudden falling of the heart.

De Armijo smiled again, then lighted a cigarette and took a puff or two before he gave an answer which was really no answer at all, so far as the words themselves were concerned.

“I said that Mexico had triumphed over her enemies everywhere,” he replied, “and so she has, but I give you no details. It has been the order that you know nothing. You have been contumacious and obstinate, and, free, you would be dangerous. So the world was to be closed to you, and it has been done. You know nothing of it except these four walls and the little strip of a mountain that you can see from the window there. You are as one dead.”

John Bedford winced. What the Mexican said was true, and he had long known it to be true, but he did not like for de Armijo to say it to him now. His lonesome-ness in his long imprisonment had been awful, but not more so than his absolute ignorance of everything beyond his four walls. This policy with him had been pursued persistently. Old Catarina, before her departure, had not dared to tell him anything, and now the soldier who served him would not answer any question at all. He had felt at times that this would reduce him to mental incompetency, to childishness, but he had fought against it, and he had felt at other times that the isolation, instead of weakening his faculties, had sharpened them. But he replied without any show of emotion in his voice:

“What you say is true in the main, but why do you say it.”

“In order to lay before you both sides of a proposition. You are practically forgotten here. You can spend the rest of your life in this cell, perish, perhaps, on the very bed where you are now sitting, but you can also release yourself. Take the oath of fealty to Mexico, become a Mexican citizen, join her army and fight her enemies. You might have a career there, you might rise.”

It was a fiendish suggestion to one who knew nothing of what was passing, and de Armijo prided himself upon his finesse. To compel brother to fight against brother would indeed be a master stroke. He did not notice the rising blood in the face before him, that had so long borne the prison pallor.

“Have you reconquered Texas?” asked John sharply.

“What has that to do with it?”

“Do you think I would join you and fight against the Texans? Do you think I would join you anyhow, after I’ve been fighting against you? I’d rather rot here than do such a thing, and it seems strange that you, an officer and the governor of this castle, should make such an offer. It’s dishonest!”

Blood flashed through de Armijo’s dark face, and he raised his hand in menace. John Bedford instantly struck at him with all his might, which was not great, wasted as he was by prison confinement. De Armijo stepped back a little, drew his sword, and, with the flat of it, struck the prisoner a severe blow across the forehead. John had attempted to spring forward, but twenty-five pounds of iron chain confining his ankles held him. He could not ward off the blow, and he dropped back against the cot, bleeding and unconscious.

When John Bedford recovered his senses he was lying on the cot, and it was pitch dark, save for a slender shaft of moonlight that entered at the slit, and that lay like a sword-blade across the floor. His head throbbed, and when he put his hand to it he found that it was swathed in bandages. He remembered the blow perfectly, and he moved his feet, but the chains had been taken off. They had had the grace to do that much. He strove to rise, but he was very weak, and the throbbing in his head increased. Then he lay still for a long time, watching the moonbeam that fell across the floor. He was in a state of mind far from pleasant. To be shut up so long is inevitably to grow bitter, and to be struck down thus by de Armijo, while he was chained and helpless, was an injury to both body and mind that he could never forgive. He had nothing to do in his cell to distract his mind from grievous wrongs, and there was no chance for them to fade from his memory. His very soul rose in wrath against de Armijo.

He judged that it was far in the night, and, after lying perfectly still for about an hour, he rose from the bed. His strength had increased, and the throbbing in his head was not bo painful. He staggered across the floor and put his face to the slit in the wall. The cold air, as it rushed against his eyes and cheeks, felt very good. It was spring in the lowlands, but there was snow yet on the peak behind the Castle of Montevideo, and winter had not yet wholly left the valley in which the castle itself stood. But the air was not too cold for John, whose brain at this moment was hotter than his blood.

The night was uncommonly clear. One could see almost as well as by day, and he began to look over, one by one, the little objects that his view commanded on the mountainside. He looked at every intimate friend, the various rocks, the cactus, the gully, and the dwarfed shrubs—he still wished to know whether they were pines or cedars, the problem had long annoyed him greatly. He surveyed his little landscape with great care. It seemed to him that he saw touches of spring there, and then he was quite sure that he saw the figure of a man, dark and shadowy, but, nevertheless, a human figure, pass across the little space. It was followed in a moment by a second, and then by a third. It caused him surprise and interest. His tiny landscape was steep, and he had never before seen men cross it. Hunters, or perhaps goat herders, but it was strange that they should be traveling along such a steep mountainside at such an hour.

A person under ordinary conditions would have forgotten the incident in five minutes, but this was an event in the life of the lonely captive. Save his encounter with de Armijo, he could not recall another of so much importance in many months. He stayed at the loophole a long time, but he did not see the figures again nor anything else living. Once, about a month before, he had caught a glimpse of a deer there, and it had filled him with excitement, because to see even a deer was a great thing, but this was a greater. He remained at the loophole until the rocks began to redden with the morning sun, but his little landscape remained as it had ever been, the same rocks, the same pines or cedars—which, in Heaven’s name, were they?—and the same cactus.

Then he walked slowly back to his cot. The chains were lying on the floor beside it, and he knew that, in time, they would be put on him again, but he was resolved not to abate his independence a particle. Nor would he defer in any way to de Armijo. If he came again he would speak his opinion of him to his face, let him do what he would.

There was proud and stubborn blood in every vein of the Bedfords. John Bedford’s grandfather had been one of the most noted of Kentucky’s pioneers and Indian fighters, and on his mother’s side, too, there was a strain of tenacious New England. By some possible chance he might be able to return de Armijo’s blow. He drew the cover over his body and fell into a sleep from which he was awakened by the slovenly soldier with his breakfast. The man did not speak while John ate, and John was glad of it. He, too, had nothing to say, and he wished to be left to himself. When the man left he lay down on the cot again and slept until nearly noon. Then de Armijo came a second time. He had no apologies whatever for the manner in which he had struck down an unarmed prisoner, but was hard and sneering.

“I merely tell you,” he said, “that you lost your last chance yesterday. The offer will not be repeated.”

John said not a word, but gazed at him so steadily that the Mexican’s swarthy face flushed a little. He hesitated, as if he would say something, but evidently thought better of it, and went out. That night he had a fever from his wounded head and the exertion that he had made in standing so long at the loophole. He became delirious, and when he emerged from his delirium a little weazened old Indian woman was sitting by the side of his cot. She had kindly and pitying eyes, and John exclaimed, in a weak but joyous voice:

“Catarina!”

“Poor boy.” she said, “I have watched you one day and one night.”

“Where have you been all the time before?” he asked in the Mexican dialect that he had learned.

“I have been one of the cooks,” she said. “The officers, they eat so much, tortillas, frijoles, everything, and they drink so much, mescal, pulque, wine, everything. Many busy months for Catarina, and I ask for you, but I cannot see you. They say you bad, very bad. Then they say you try to kill the governor, Captain de Armijo, but he strike you on the head with the flat of his sword to save his own life. You have fever, and at last they send me to nurse you as I did that other time.”

“Do you believe, Catarina, that I tried to kill de Armijo?” asked John.

She looked about her fearfully, drew the reboso closely across her shrunken shoulders, and answered in a frightened tone as if the thick walls themselves could hear:

“How should I know? It is what they say. If I should say otherwise they would lash me with the whip, even me, old Catarina.”

The captive sighed. Nothing could break the awful wall of mystery that enveloped him. Catarina even did not dare to speak, although no one but himself could possibly hear.

“You mind I smoke?” said Catarina.

“No,” replied John with a wan smile. “Any lady can smoke in my presence.”

She whipped out a cigarrito, lighted it with a match, held it for a moment between the middle and fore finger, then inserted it between her aged lips. She took two or three long, easy whiffs, letting the smoke come out through her nose. John had never learned to smoke, but he said to her:

“Does it do you good, Catarina?”

“Whether it does me good, I know not,” replied the Indian woman, “but it gives me pleasure, so I do it. I have to tell you, Señor John, that my son, Porfirio, has returned from the north. He has been at Monterey and the country about it.”

John at once was all eagerness.

“And Antonio Vaquez, the leader of the burro train?” he exclaimed. “Has he heard from him? Does he know if the letter went on beyond the Rio Grande?”

“My son Porfirio has not seen Antonio Vaquez.” replied Catarina, “and so he does not know from Antonio Vaquez whether the letter has crossed the Rio Grande or not. But it is a time of change.”

“De Armijo told me that.”

The old woman looked at him very keenly, and drove more smoke of the cigarrito through her nose. Her next words made no reference to de Armijo, but they startled John:

“You look through the loophole to-night, about midnight,” she said. “You see something on the mountain side, fire, a torch, it may mean much. Who can tell?”

Excitement flamed up again in John’s veins.

“What do you mean, Catarina?” he exclaimed. “Last night I crawled to the loophole for air. It was bright moonlight, and while I was standing there I thought three human beings passed on the little patch of the mountainside that I can see.”

“It is all I know,” said Catarina. “I can tell you no more. Now I am concinero (cook) again. Now I go. But watch. There have been many changes. Diego, the soldier, will bring you your food as before. Watch that, too.”

“Poison!” exclaimed John aghast.

“No! No! No! Hai Dios (my God), no! But do as I say!”

She snuffed out the end of the cigarrito, picked up the dishes, and promptly left the cell. She also left the captive much excited and wondering. De Armijo had said there were changes! Truly there had been changes, said Catarina, but she had not told what they were. He made many surmises, and one was as good as another, even to himself. Let a man cut three years out of his life and see if he can span the gulf between. But he was sure, despite his ignorance of their nature, that Catarina’s words were full of meaning, and, perhaps among all the great changes that had come, one was coming for him, too.

He slept that afternoon in order that he might be sure to keep awake at night, and long before midnight he was on watch at the loophole. There was still soreness in his head, where the flat of the heavy steel blade had struck, but it was passing away, and his strength was returning. It is hard to crush youth. It was now easier for him, too, as the chains had not been put back upon his ankles.

He waited with great impatience, and, as his impatience increased, time became slower. He began to feel that he was foolish. But Catarina had been good to him. She would not make him keep an idle quest in the long cold hours of the night. And he had seen the three shadows pass the night before. He was sure now from what Catarina had said that they were the shadows of human beings, and their presence there had been significant.

The night was not so bright as the one before, but, by long looking, he could trace the details of his landscape, all the well known objects, every one in its proper place, the dusky moonlight falling upon them. He stared so long that his eyes ached. Surely Catarina had been talking foolish talk! No, she had not! His heart stopped beating for a few moments, because, as certainly as he was at that loophole, a light had appeared on his bit of landscape. It was but a spark. A spark only at first, but in a moment or two it blazed up like a torch. It showed a vivid red streak against the mountainside, and the heart of the captive, that had stood still for a few moments, now bounded rapidly. The words of Catarina had come true, and he had had a sign. But what did the sign mean? It must be connected in some way with him, and nothing could be worse than that which he now endured. It must mean good.

It was a veritable flame of hope to John Bedford, the prisoner of the Castle of Montevideo. New strength suffused his whole body. Courage came back to him in a full tide. A sign had been promised to him, and it had come.

The light burned for about half an hour, and then went out suddenly. John Bedford returned to his cot, a new hope in his heart.

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