dden treasures. The common folk of the
neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains,
tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a
basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of
shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony
levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time
had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men's memory
two wandering sailors--Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for
certain--talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three
stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin,
and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with
revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with
machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.

On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have
been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of
man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the
stony head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed three miles
off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark. A negro fisherman,
living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and
was on the lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the
sun was about to set. They had watched the strange portent with envy,
incredulity, and awe.

The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian,
and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco
man--his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast,
being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two
gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day
amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls
cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the
discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty--a strange
theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched
flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and
been released.

These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its
forbidden wealth; and the shadow on the sky on one side with the round
patch of blue haze blurring the bright skirt of the horizon on the
other, mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears the name of