We were sitting in the hotel in San Antonio, and the conversation had taken that satisfactory turn and confidential coloring which it will take amongst congenial companions round an open wood fire.
We had been expressing our individual opinions about men and things, especially men, and had derived a sleepy satisfaction from our general criticisms. There were men among us who had seen a good deal of frontier life, and, as one man said, “he had seen so many men die with their boots on, it seemed the natural end.” My nearest neighbor in the circle was a young artist from New Orleans, known throughout the city as “Jim the Painter,” from the art he practiced to get his living. He turned and asked me if I knew Jack Dunton; and when I denied the honor, he said: “Well, you ought to; he is a map of the whole Indian country.”
This awakened my interest. I found that Dunton was living in San Antonio, that his life had been really wonderful in experiences and adventures, that he was very intelligent as well as recklessly brave, and finally, that his acquaintance was worth any man's time to cultivate. Later in the evening we walked over to Dunton's office, a long, pleasant room in the second story of a flat-roofed adobe building that covered nearly half an acre. Both its stories were crammed full of the goods he sold—wagons, harnesses, and all sorts of agricultural tools.
Dunton's own room was a mighty interesting place, principally in its decorations. The walls and doorways were hung with bright-colored and strange-figured Mojave and Navajoe blankets, skins and weapons were scattered around or arranged as trophies, while clumsy and rude implements of Aztec and Mexican fashioning, from Yucatan to Chihuahua, were suspended against the sides, or heaped in the corners. A large open fire, with blazing cedar logs, filled the room with the aromatic odor so pleasant and characteristic of that wood, and lighted it with fitful glares. There were many interesting stories connected with this collection, and every article in the room seemed to remind Dunton of an experience or incident in his varied career. After being introduced and comfortably seated in a chair, he passed us cigars, and while we were lighting these preliminaries to sociability he drew a square of corn husk from one side-pocket of his sack coat and a pinch of tobacco from the other side-pocket, and quietly rolled a cigarette, which gave out a pungent, penetrating odor. It was not disagreeable, but it struck me as being peculiar, even for Texas. Upon remarking that it seemed different from ordinary tobacco, Dunton replied, “It is, and I have good reason to like it, for once it saved my life.”
This aroused my curiosity, and with some little urging he told us the story. “This tobacco,” said Dunton, “comes from the town of Carcinto, quite a mining settlement of adobe houses and stockades, surrounding a Mexican convict station in the center of the state of Chihuahua. It is made by the convicts, who treat the ordinary tobacco with the juice of a native plant, which gives it the pungent flavor you notice and, I suspect, a slight narcotic power; be that as it may, now that I am used to it, other tobacco is flat and tasteless. I was down there some years ago, trying to sell the mine-owners some carts, harness, and things in my line, and I became well acquainted with the nature of these convicts, and I tell you, I would rather take my chances in a den of mountain lions than among those fellows when they revolt. At such times they are madly insane, and nothing is too hellish for them.
“I had made a good thing of my deal and was anxiously waiting for an escort,—for I had four thousand Mexican dollars, and a man of my shape takes no chances in toting money around in that country.
“The day that I remember particularly—and you will see I have reason to—was the day before I was to go out from the mine with the mule train. That afternoon I went in the levels with Senor Bustino, one of the owners, a gentleman, every inch of him—and I tell you, no finer gentleman walks the earth than a high-caste Mexican of Castilian blood.
“I had sold them a few dozen American pickaxes, and one of the convict gangs was to try them that day for the first time. It was the first lot of pickaxes ever used in that mine, and, as the sequel proved, the last. The men were doing with them twice the business they had formerly done with their clumsy heavy hoes. Two soldiers with escopetas were on guard, and two overseers with pistols and heavy canes were directing the work. To get a better and nearer view, Sefior Bustino and I crowded through until we came to the rotten ledge filled with the silver, upon which they worked. The convicts stopped and gazed upon us curiously, some of them pushing back their long black hair out of their eyes and staring with undisguised wonder at me, for I was a gringo, a heretico, and a strange object to them in those early days, with my paler skin and peculiar dress. Near me was a large black fellow, bare to the waist.. He was short-necked and broad-shouldered, and his cheeks were so high as to partly close his little fierce eyes; his nose was low and flat, while his chin was sharp and prominent, with a deep scowl; in fact, a bundle of animal appetites and passions done up in a hideous form. As we passed he drew from the folds of his drawers—the only clothing he wore—a pinch of tobacco and a com husk, and making a cigarette he stepped to one of the grease-wood torches and lighted it, blowing out a great cloud of pungent, aromatic smoke from his broad nostrils, that filled the space around us with the odor you noticed from my cigarette.
“That was my first experience with that tobacco, and, indeed, my first smell of its peculiar odor, and I have never forgotten it. I dined that evening with the old senor and was introduced to his family; his wife, a Mexican lady prematurely aged—as they all are, two daughters, handsome as angels, and was shown the picture of their son, a young man who was then being educated in Paris. They were delightful people, especially to one who had been trucking for weeks across the dusty plains of Chihuahua, with only peons and mules for company, and we had a fiery Mexican dinner, spiced with the jokes of the village priest, who was an honored guest. At ten, with the hearty wishes of the whole family, and after the elaborate Mexican custom of withdrawal, I left them. As I sauntered out in the moonlight I could not shut out of my mind the brutish face of the convict in the mine. Perhaps the round faces and handsome eyes of the senor's pretty daughters may have emphasized the memory of the convict's ugly head; otherwise I was in a happy mood.
“I turned the corner of the street and entered a short dark lane that led toward the prison stockade. There was an occasional adobe house, but the street was mostly lined with the miserable mud jacals of the poorer Mexicans. I had hardly gotten well into it when I sniffed the same pungent odor that the convict's cigarette had given out. It startled me a trifle, conjuring up, as it did, the hideous mental picture of the man. I had but just realized this association when I heard the clanging of the cathedral bells in that hurried, nervous manner which has alarm in its every note—for the tone of a bell always partakes of the state that its ringer is in. I heard the sound of approaching voices, loud and fierce, mixed with the alarming notes of the bells, and I stepped into the dark doorway of the nearest house. Next, there was the spatting of bare feet on the hard street, and a yelling crowd hurriedly rushed by my hiding-place, leaving a trailing smell of the same tobacco. I noticed the gleam of white handles in the moon-lighted street that I had seen in the yellow light of the mine, and then I knew that the convicts had revolted, and that they were armed with the pick-axes I had sold the mining company.
“The bells continued to clang out their terror, and the distant shouting became blended into the continuous murmur that you hear from a distant crowd of excited people. Once in a while the roar of an escopeta would be heard, and soon I saw a magenta glow in the sky, and I knew the town had been fired. Then followed the rapid snapping of pistols, and soon the bellow of the old brass escopetas denoted that the guards had mustered, and that there was an organized resistance to the revolt. All this occurred quicker than I can tell it. I concluded to get back into the broad street I had just come out of, for if there is to be shooting, I want a clear space and as much light as I can get.
“Just as I turned the corner, on a run, with both of my colts on a shooting level—for, by the way, it is always best to come upon your enemy suddenly and surprise him before he knows you are there I saw several bodies in the street, and in the distance some dozen men retreating. I stopped near by the first body I came to; and to my horror I saw it was the still warm corpse of Senor Bustino. As I paused and stooped to more closely examine, I thought I could detect the lingering smell of that hellish convict's tobacco. Had the fiends attacked my host's home and dragged him insensate through the streets, or had he been slain whilst hurrying to the post of duty, at the sound of the alarm he knew well the meaning of? If the former, good God! what had been the fate of his wife and lovely daughters? The very thought momentarily unnerved me; and if the convicts had not yet wreaked their vengeance, could I reach them in time to be of effective service? Louder and louder roared the tumult, nearer and nearer came the flashing, glinting lights of torch and pistol, and as I swept round into the street in which Senor Bustino's house stood I could see, pouring down the hill toward it, a demoniac gang led by the bare-breasted convict whose baleful face had haunted me.
“I found the senora and her daughters alone and, thank God! unharmed; but not a moment too soon, for even as I hurried them through into the darkness of the night the convicts, with curses on their tongues, lust in their heart, and red ruin in their hands, swarmed into the house. A momentary check came as their leader and another fell in the narrow door, beneath the fire of my two revolvers, and the flames which leaped up from that erewhile home lent their last protection in the shadow they cast, which enabled us, by availing ourselves of it, to escape. By the time we arrived at my hotel the convicts had flown to the mountains and we heard the story of the revolt. If I had not smelled that tobacco I should not have concealed myself in the doorway, my life would not have been worth a picayune, and you may imagine what would have been the fate of my hostess and her household. Senor Bustino, it appeared, had fallen a victim to the high chivalry which prompted him, hearing the bell and knowing its meaning, to hastily summon his servants, and with five or six armed peons hasten out to overtake me and bid me return to his house until all danger was over. He had met the convicts, who had attacked him and struck him down, while most of his servants fled.”
Dunton paused, made and lighted another cigarette, and continued: “I could not get away for a month, for it was not safe for a small party to leave the town. I brought out some of that tobacco as a curiosity and learned to like it. I send for more every year where it is still prepared, in the prison-pens.”
“It is sometimes said, 'Follow your nose and it will take you out of danger,' and in my case the proverb proved true. Sometimes, when I sit here alone, half sleepily watching the curling smoke wreaths, I can almost see the place again, and the rings of smoke shape themselves into a horde of convict demons killing the poor old noble senor, whose elder daughter I have married. And now you know what I owe to the pungent aroma of a cigarette from Carcinto.”
