Read Online Novel 1974 - The Californios (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour - Free Book Online

herself. It was Celtic, deep within them all, yet deeper and stronger in Sean perhaps than in any of them. Montero had mentioned it once when he was speaking of Sean as a boy. Old Juan had seen it, too.
    What were the things that made up a man? Was it only hard fists and a salty way? Was it a strain of gentleness, a love of the land? Or was it so much else?
    In these last hours of the night she looked again at the sky, growing faintly pale now along the eastern rim of the mountains. A few stars still hung in the sky like distant harbor lights, and the blackness in the deepest canyon remained.
    She crossed to where the old man sat, and he looked up as she approached. He started to rise, but she gestured for him to stay. “I will sit,” she said.
    Juan looked older, even quieter if that was possible. Yet something was different about him. “What is it, Juan?”
    “There will be blood,” he said quietly, “blood and death. You should not have come.”
    “Since when was a woman afraid of blood?” she asked. “The problem is not only Sean’s. It is mine also. If there is to be blood, I will share in the letting or the losing of it.”
    He shook his head. “There is no end. Man was born in travail, and in travail he lives.”
    “This place to which we go? Will there be safety there? Shelter?”
    “There is no safety upon this earth, and no shelter but for a time. There was once a time when my people had shelter, and in a night, it was gone, and in the days and weeks that followed there was not even a stone laying upon a stone that was not shaken down.
    “We lived in a world of our making. We had learned things beyond the ways of men, and we believed ourselves secure. We were not secure.
    “We had wisdom of a sort. We knew not the things you and your people know, but we knew much else that you do not know, perhaps cannot know, yet it was of no use. The earth trembled and cracked and dust arose, and there was fire, and my people fled, fled they knew not where. Some went to the sea and died there in great waves that followed the fifth week of trembling, and some went to the desert and died of thirst, and many lay dead in the ruins of all we had built.
    “A few of us went to the mountains. Some of us lived. Many died because they knew not how to live without all they had had about them. I was young. I was a priest among them, but I was also one who loved the wild lands and often went out to search for herbs for medicines, so I lived.”
    “I have never heard of this.” She looked at him, wondering. “Did you ever tell Jaime of this?”
    “A little. He found a wall once, in the desert, and beside the wall some broken bits of a pot. It was thin, fragile, beautiful. He wondered how a Chinese pot could come here and was surprised when I told him the piece was not of China, but a fragment of our own. We talked a little then.”
    “And Sean? Does he know of this?”
    The old man was silent for several minutes, and then he said, “He knows much by himself. He perceives. He feels. He knows where something has taken place, where things have been. It is something deep within him.”
    “You taught him something when he was much younger?”
    “Taught? Perhaps. All teaching is not instruction, sometimes it is only opening a door or lifting a veil. Lift the veil and one does not need to teach for the mind sees, realizes, understands.”
    “You spoke of blood? Will my son survive the bloodletting?”
    “I do not know, Señora. Once I was young, and I knew many things, but now the light burns low and what I perceive is but dimly as through a curtain.”
    “And your city? The place from which you came? Your people? Who were they?”
    “Another people…it does not matter now. I am the last of us, I believe, and I am old, so very old.”
    “But where did you come from?”
    “Elsewhere, but long, long ago. It does not matter, Señora, and I speak of this to no one.”
    “Not even to Sean?”
    “Not yet…soon, perhaps. But