Here is another story in Library Lady’s Christmas Stories series.
THE PATRONCITO’S CHRISTMAS
By F. L. Stealey
Edited by Jane Mouttet
Driven downwards by the storm which had raged incessantly for two days about the lofty red ramparts of the Sierra Roja, the black-tail deer, in broken bands, sought refuge in the lower foothills. A light “tracking snow” had fallen here, and their trails lay fresh for hunters’ following.
Cherokee Sam had been out early with a long rifle on his shoulder and a deerhound at his heels. Not only pleasure made the gaunt Indian slip like a shadow in his hunting moccasins through the canyons clad in pine. The meat was needed in the dirt-roofed cabin in the gulch. And for that matter, bread also, and this, even though the stubble sticking up through the snow in the bottom, marked the site of a harvested corn patch. The swarthy hunter had planted it there, but other hands had gathered the harvest.
His occupations were mixed, like his blood, and his sinewy hands as often swung the pick and shook the pan as pointed the rifle. When his company of gold hunters from the Nacoochee had struck the Sierra, they had scattered through it to prospect for pleasure. He had then first come upon the gulch. Though it had never panned out even “a color,” the charm of its virgin solitude had smitten the heart of this wanderer after the will-o-wisp of fortune. Too tangled for trail lay the storm-felled trees, and no man’s foot but his own ever trod the grass or brushed the wild cypress bending by the stream. By this, Cherokee Sam had pitched his cabin where the beavers had built their dam. Standing by the margin of the silent pool, near the uncouth beaver huts, at first glance, its mud-daubed exterior might have been taken for the mud palace of the king beaver himself, but for the thin smoke that slowly melting into air marked the abode of fire-making man. In the rich “bottom” near, Cherokee Sam, with a careful mind for “ash cakes” and “fatty bread,” had planted a corn patch, and at evening, as he came over the hill above, returning from his day’s hunting, and saw the cabin. The corn greenly waving, he hailed the spot as home.
But one day, as he sat idly before his open door, a little gray burro came ambling agilely through the fallen trees, his rider, a dwarfish man of haughty aspect, whose cheeks were wrinkled, and beard grizzled, but whose eyes were as piercing and elf-locks as black as the Cherokee Sam’s own. Seated on his little long-eared palfrey, he accosted Cherokee Sam. He gravely inquired, in tolerable English, if he knew that he was trespassing on the lands of the patron, who lived at the plaza on the plain below.
“No; I don’t know nothing about no patron,” said Cherokee Sam shortly as he arose and stood towering in giant height above the dwarfish rider of the burro.
Bien, then he was sorry to have to tell him, said the Spanish stranger in a confident reply. He was the majordomo, and this was the patron’s land, and the coyote who killed all the deer must seek some other spot. He must go far away, for the patron’s land was far-reaching, and he pointed with his willow wand to the Sierra rising above and the plain rolling far away below. On all sides, far as the eye could see, was the patron’s land. It was the patron’s because of a Spanish grant.
The giant man giant laughed in scorn. “I’ve heard of those grants. What good are they? Squatters’ rights and squatters’ rifles rules in this here free country, I reckon. Go back, little Mr. Mexican, to your patron, and tell him that here I’ve taken up my homestead, and here I’ll stay, and you may do your do!”
As he spoke, he threw his rifle on his hollowed arm and looked black thunder from his beetling brow upon the burro-rider. Perhaps had he been less haughty in his defiance, he would have fared better at the majordomo’s hands. When the corn was yellow, and he returned from one of his periodical prospects to gather it, he found only the bare stubble field awaiting him.
Thus it was that Cherokee Sam, hunter, prospector, and squatter, despite his triad of trades, was now at Christmas without a “corn-pone,” and this state was likely to continue through the winter.
Returning home at sunset with the legs of a doe tied across his chest and her slender head, with its big ears trailing behind against the muzzle of the eager hound, the hunter strode from the timber on the slope and struck the snow from his frozen leggings and moccasins as he paused on the Shut-in. A lofty upheaved red sandstone ledge arose from the slopes on either hand. It shut in the gulch from the plain below, leaving only a narrow portal for the passage of the stream.
As he stood, the foothills and his wild home were above him, all snow-covered and cold in the shadow of the Sierra. But below, the snow had not fallen, and the plain shone brown and warm in the lingering light of the setting sun. There, softened by the distance, with a saffron shimmer about its dark outlines, lay the gray adobe plaza, sleeping by the silver stream.
There were gathered corn and oil, the fat of the land, and he would have nothing but the deer on his shoulders for Christmas cheer. An evil gleam came in the Indian’s eyes as he thought of his harried corn patch and gazed at the abode of his enemy.
As if in sympathy with his master, the deerhound put up its bristles and growled savagely. Looking down, the hunter was astonished to see a small figure standing motionless at the foot of the Shut-in and gazing up at him.
The stranger was a young boy. He was richly and somewhat fantastically dressed in a silken jacket and silk pants, with many buttons on the outer seams and a silken sash around his waist. On his feet were buckskin shoes, soled with rawhide and tied with ribbon drawstrings, and a white sombrero with silk tassels over his long and flowing hair.
This he reverentially removed as the hunter descended, and resting on him his soft black eyes, said:
“Good evening, Señor don Saint Nicolas. Tonight is Noche Buena (Christmas Eve), and Padre Luis told me you would pass through the Shut-in on your way to the plaza. So I’ve come to meet you.”
His manner was eager and full of trustful confidence. The Indian was taken aback.
“I don’t go by such name as that,” he replied gruffly. “I’m Cherokee Sam, and I live down there,” and he pointed to the dirt-roofed cabin in the gulch.
“I wanted badly to see the saint,” said the stranger, as his face fell, “and I never could when he comes to the plaza because I’m asleep. I’m the patroncito, señor.”
He had replaced his sombrero and his air as he declared himself princely.
Cherokee Sam’s face darkened. The young patron—the son of his enemy—the one who ruined the corn patch. Even now, they must be seeking him, and he was in his hands. And there was no snow below, and they could not follow any trail.
“What did you do that for?” asked the patroncito, in a tone of authority, as he laid his hand on the ragged bullet hole behind the doe’s shoulder.
“I had to have meat for my Christmas dinner,” said Sam. “Come with me, and I will show you the Spanish Santa Claus you’re hunting for,” he added and held out his hand.
The patroncito placed his own in it promptly. The giant man adjusted his stride to the other’s tiny steps for a moment. Then the patroncito stopped and said commandingly: “The snow is deep; take me up!”
Never had the wild hunter known a master, but now, without a word, he stooped and, like another giant St. Christopher, set the child upon his shoulder and plunged through the drifts for the cabin.
In a moment, he had the doe hung on a pine in front of the cabin. Then he pushed open the slab door and, entering, blew up the covered embers in the rough fireplace and piled them on the pitch pine. As it blazed up, he pulled a few deerskins from his bed in the corner, threw them down on the floor in front of the fire, and told the patroncito to be seated.
He obeyed, and the Indian looked at him with stern satisfaction. It would be many days before the patron saw his son and heir again. But these reflections were disturbed. His guest pointed to his bright shoes.
“Will you please take them off, Don Cherokee Sam?” he said. “My feet are wet, and my fingers are numb.”
The Indian knelt and untied the ribbons and took them off, as well as his long silk stockings.
“Muchas gracias, Don,” said the patroncito as he reclined at ease and toasted his bare toes before the fire.
His fearlessness pleased his hunter host well. Although his manner was patronizing, the Indian entered the jest with savage humor. “If you’ll excuse me, Mister Patroncito, I’ll get supper.”
He spoke as if this were an operation requiring great culinary skill and much previous preparation. It consisted of cutting three steaks from the deer’s ham with his sheath knife and placing them with a lump of fat in the frying pan over the fire. These turned and browned, and two tin cups filled with water, and the supper was ready.
The guest took kindly enough to the venison. He tasted the water and paused. “I’ll thank you for a cup of hot coffee, Don Cherokee Sam, with plenty of sugar in it, if you please.”
Don Cherokee Sam was embarrassed at this polite but luxurious request.
“Coffee’s bad,” he said, shaking his head. “It spoils my nerves, so I can’t draw a steady bead. Water’s best, patroncito.”
The guest was genuinely polite. He emptied his cup with the best of grace. But presently, he paused again in his consumption of venison.
“Pardon me, but you have forgotten the bread.”
The host arose. What could he set before this youthful pleasure seeker from the plaza?
“Bread’s been mighty scarce with me this winter,” he muttered. “And I planted plenty of good corn out there, too.”
The recollection roused his rankling resentment, and he paused.
“Why didn’t you gather it, then, like the laborers do?” asked the patroncito quietly.
“It was stolen,” muttered the host, but he checked himself and added in a softer tone, “by bears and other varmints, I reckon.”
And with this compromise between anger and truth, Cherokee Sam reached up and took down a small sack hanging from the center roof log. It contained a few nubbins found on the harried field, his seed for next spring.
“Patroncito,” he remarked in a tone of pacifying confidence as he shelled an ear in the frying pan, “there’s nothing like deer meat, running water, and the free air of heaven, and maybe parched corn once in a while, to make a man a man.”
Under this tribute, the parched corn was eaten with gravity. After supper, the host cleaned up, a simple process performed by dashing cold water in the red-hot frying pan and hanging it on a nail.
“Saint Nicolas, you said you’d show him to me,” politely hinted the patroncito.
“It’s early yet for him,” said Cherokee Sam. “He’s just about taking the trail in the Sierra, and the drifts are mighty deep, too. But he’ll be here.”
“My stockings, Don—they’re still wet. Will you oblige me by holding them to the fire?” said the princely patroncito.
Cherokee Sam held the damp stockings to the blaze. The patroncito watched him sleepily. “He’s a long time coming, Don Cherokee Sam,” he murmured as he nodded—nodded again and slipped down upon the deerskin, fast asleep.
The Indian lifted him like a feather, laid him on his bed, and pulled the covering softly over him. Noiselessly, he replenished the fire and squatted before it, resuming the stocking-drying process.
The resinous boughs burst into flame, and a strong perfume and a red glow filled the smoke-blackened cabin. The light fell on the patroncito as he lay on the couch of skins, caressed the slender foot he had thrust from out the covering, and danced on the silver buttons strung on his pants. Over him, like an ogre, hovered the wavering shadow of the giant’s head, rendered more grotesque by his towering cap of badger skin, plumed with a flaunting tail.
As he sat on his heels in the brilliant light, this head covering gave additional fierceness to the Indian’s hatchet face. Wild-eyed, too, was he as any inhabitant of his chosen haunts. But calm in its composure as his somber countenance was, it was free from all trace of the petty passions that cramp the souls of others. And as he looked at the soft stockings, now dry in his hands, a smile parted his thin lips.
Just then, the firelight flared up and went suddenly out, and the threatening shadow on the wall was lost. And though the door never opened, and even the hunter’s vigilant ears caught no sound, he felt a presence in the cabin. Looking up, he dreamily beheld, shadowed forth dimly in the gloom, the form of Saint Nicolas, long belated by the drifts. But how that Spanish Christmas saint looked, or what he said to remind the Indian of that hallowed time when all should be peace on earth and goodwill towards men, must ever remain a secret between him and his lawless host.
The patroncito awoke and saw the snow sparkling in the sun of Christmas morning through the open doorway. Over the fire, Cherokee Sam was frying venison, and on either side hung the long silk stockings, filled.
“And I never saw him!” said the patroncito reproachfully as he looked at them. “Why didn’t you wake me, Don Cherokee Sam?”
“I didn’t dare to do it, patroncito,” explained Sam. “It wasn’t safe when he told me not to.”
He watched the patroncito anxiously as he took the stockings down. But he didn’t have to fear. As their contents rolled out on the deerskin, the patroncito cried out in delight.
A handful of garnets, bits of broken agate, a shivered topaz, shining cubes of iron pyrites, picked up on otherwise fruitless prospects by Saint Nicolas; a tanned white weasel-skin purse, and ornaments of young bucks’ prongs, patiently carved by that good saint on winter evenings. Indeed, never before, with all his silk and silver, had the favored patroncito received gifts so prized as these.
“Never mind about breakfast,” he said arrogantly as he gathered them up. “Take me to the plaza right away.”
The Indian humbly complied. But they had yet to emerge from the granite gateway of the Shut-in when they were met by a party from the plaza, headed by the patron himself, searching, in great trouble, for the wanderer. They had been abroad all night. Happily, Cherokee Sam remembered the admonitions of Saint Nicolas overnight.
“Patron,” he said haughtily as he led the patroncito forward, “I bring you a Christmas gift.”
Then, as Cherokee Sam afterward described it, “There was a jabbering and a waving of hands by those Mexicans.” And he, turning, strode back to his cabin and his unfinished breakfast. Still, his resentment rankled. But it vanished later on that day.
Once more, the gray burro ambled up the gulch bearing the dwarfish majordomo, but this time on a peace mission. After him came a burrada (pack train) well laden and drew up before the door of the astonished Cherokee Sam. With uncovered head and courtesy profound, the majordomo stood before him and asked if Don Cherokee Sam would indicate where he would store the Christmas gifts the patroncito sent.
“In the cabin,” replied Sam, glancing at the loaded burros in dismay, “if it will hold them. I don’t have anywhere else.”
The majordomo waved his wand to the attendant packers, and in a moment, the cabin was filled with closely piled boxes, bags, and bales. Assuredly, Don Cherokee Sam had the luxuries of life to last until Christmas came again.
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