The hacienda on the hill : a novel

Front matter

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RICHARD HENRY SAVAG

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BOOK I For Her Inheritance contents CHAPTER PAGE

I. Love a la mode de Havana 7

II. Captain Jose" Gomez's secret mission 25

III. The intercepted letters. "We must have

arms ! " 42

IV. The old priest's story: "You bear a Cu-

ban heart! " " He is my son! ". . . . 60

V. " Off with the old love! " 77

VI. In the confessional 95

VII. Weyler takes a trick no

VIII. Down in Cabanas prison. "Who are you?" 123

IX. At the Lissa Bridge. The tables turned.. 142

BOOK II Hearts are Trumps

CHAPTER PACK

X. In Hacienda La Sevilla. The face at the

window 159

XI. At Santiago. " Brothers after all ! " The true story of the " Maine " from dying lips 177

XII. The surrender of Havana. Sefiorita Isabel makes a proposition. The rose of dawn 199

Introduction

The theatric war with Spain brought about no more difficult problem than the occupation of maddened Havana, with its 28,000 still undefeated Spanish troops and its fringing cloud of Cuban irregulars, whose futile bushwacking efforts were supplemented by the men who died at El Caney and served Schley's guns ! The peace protocol, useless until availed of, enabled the United States to send " a military organization " to at once take charge of Havana Provinces. This organization of 9 officers and 233 men — the so-called " Butcher Battalion," was commanded by Major Richard Henry Savage, Second U. S. Volunteer Engineers, who just thirty years before had been the confidential aide-de-camp and staff engineer officer of the heroic General Geo. H. Thomas.

On November 21, 1898, one month and nine days before the date of the legal surrender of Havana, this " color " battalion of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois Volunteer Engineers was sent by the President, the Secretary of War, General Miles, and General Corbin under orders " to report to Major-General F. V Greene at Havana for duty." This battalion laid under the shotted guns of Morro Castle on November 26, 1898, and occupied the Marianao hill on the evening of the same day (alone)

11 INTRODUCTION.

until, some weeks later, the Seventh Corps came to reenforce it.

The arrival of the first armed landing party was dramatic ! At three a.m., November 26, the steamer " Florida " ceased under the walls of Morro Castle its bee-line course from Port Tampa and Dry Tortugas. The battalion commander, roused by the steamer captain, gave orders that the steamer should lie off and on until daybreak. There was the grim red eye of the Morro light, still glaring defiance, as on the day when the castle sent a huge shell ripping through the " Wilmington," six miles out at sea.

The laconic orders of the War Department specified no details as to the landing. Havana was excited to a frenzy, and no one knew how long Castellanos's feeble hand could restrain any mob. The lonely commander roused his officers and men, breakfast was hastily dispatched, the men took arms, filled their belts with the ugly Krag-Jorgensen cartridges, and, as the day broke grandly in red and gold behind Cabanas and Morro, a little pilot boat, No. 1, was seen stealing out. Hundreds of soldiers lined the castle ramparts, while the flag of Spain flapped defiantly.

In the dreaming city, whose blinking lights now went slowly out, no one was aware of the coming of the hated Yankees. Major Savage and Lieut. Fitzgerald personally unfurled the War Department colors, the United States flag and the crimson banner of the Engineers with its silver castle.

Slowly the royal ensign came down on old Morro,

INTRODUCTION. lil

being dipped three times, which salute was returned by the " Florida's " ensign. A few whispered words, and, with the pilot in charge, the " Florida " turned west, racing on by the great Santa Lucia water batteries. Now dozens of horsemen could be seen scurrying along the varied shores. In an hour the " Florida " dropped her anchor off La Playa, the only landing for the triune city of Marianao, Quemados and Lissa.

A great ferryboat swung out eight hundred yards from the shore. The men, in heavy marching order (four companies), with the major at their head, sword in hand, poured off the boat at the rickety landing where two thousand riff-raff had gathered. Major Savage grasped the hand of the gallant and accomplished Major- General Francis Vinton Greene, the first man in waiting at the strand. Then, with colors proudly displayed and bayonets fixed, the little column of fours swiftly covered the league between the shore and Marianao Hill.

On, in the sweltering sun, past graveyards and grim redoubts, through lines of blockhouses, the Western boys marched with their long, swinging stride. To the west, in the rolling country the saucy outpost flags of eight thousand Cubans mocked the banners of the twenty-one thousand intrenched Spaniards, within whose lines the pioneer battalion passed, while the hills rang with warning bugles. Before noon the crest of Marianao hill was held by forty sentinels with loaded guns. And by night the first white city in Havana Province gleamed out ! The unerring sagacity of General Greene had provided a little train of flat cars. By night the reserve

IV INTRODUCTION.

ammunition and ration boxes, well disposed, made a place of refuge in case of any sudden attack ! On the summit of the hill, where our infantry fire would reach the redoubts and barracks of the Spaniards, in reverse, floated the first United States flag raised by American troops in Havana or Havana Province. An abandoned yacht mast had been quickly called into requisition. How torturing were the perils of that first night ! Shoals of slatternly Cuban irregulars were sternly kept out of the lines, hundreds of the people of Havana had driven out to see the huge " Americanos " of the Mississippi valley ! Dozens of Spanish officers of high rank were singly escorted across the lines by sentinels to interview the Yankee Commandante. The evening fell in the hush of suspense. Before the major's tent a single brass battle lantern was a signal to the guard that all was well. The four companies slept on their arms that night. To the lonely officer, facing alone the color line, it was a time of honorable trial. With bated breath, a Spanish officer of the highest rank had stolen in to say that he " feared he could not restrain his men from coming up the hill ! "

" I can," said the commander, " for we will pile up a wall of your Spanish dead around us ! And my country will send a hundred thousand men to find our bodies ! "

The long night wore away in a vague unrest. Day broke to find thousands of the curious pressing around the Yankee lines, while the tired-out commander, who had watched, sword in hand, in the night, snatched a few winks of welcome sleep. The situation was a

INTRODUCTION. V

thrilling one. A single accidental shot, a drunken man's babble, or the petulant frenzy of some fiery Cuban or undefeated Spaniard, would have brought on a massacre. The sternest martial law was proclaimed by General Greene, not an officer or man being allowed to leave the lines. In a week the tension was relaxed. The battalion quartermaster, pistol in hand, arriving on a direct freight steamer four days later, piloted the train of forty wagons through the excited Havana mob to the beautiful suburb where the color battalion of the Second Engineers represented all the majesty of the United States. The cable had flashed news to Washington which made officials breathe freer, and the thirty regiments of the Seventh Corps began their onward journey.

The men and officers of the Second Engineers for twenty-nine days repressed the absurd pretensions of the bombastic and untrustworthy Cubans, as well as the natural ire of the starving and undefeated Spaniards. Gallant and unrewarded Western boys of the color battalion ! They shared their rations and pocket money with the sorrowing Spaniards, who began to melt away, homeward, in the silence of defeat. Not a breach of duty marred the lonely occupation by the First Battalion. They kept their country's honor unstained! And when, twelve days after their arrival the Spanish commander surrendered the triune city to a guard of forty men, who held the Lissa bridge — the gateway to Havana — the work was easy for those who came later. For, following on after this little band, within

VI INTRODUCTION.

three weeks, the colors of a dozen Yankee regiments shone in the Cuban sun, and thousands of brave men uncovered as the evening strains of the " Star-spangled Banner " sounded on the air of Cuba libre. The work was easy now, and the color battalion had made the way smooth for the whole Seventh Corps.

The first armed march of United States troops in Havana was the march of this command. They hoisted the first United States flag after 402 years of Spanish supremacy. The battalion received, on December 10,

1898, the surrender of the city of Marianao from Don Manuel de Ciria, Marquis de Cervera, and it also carried the only United States engineer flag taken to Cuba which ever flew before the Spanish soldiers in arms. The still unexplained " Story of the Maine " is told in these brilliant pages by the officer who, sword in hand, led his men, at the surrender of Havana, on January 1,

1899, where twenty thousand men had comfortably arrived later to make good the difficult and perilous work of the pioneer organization in the dangerous occupation of Cuba !

The Hacienda on the Hill.

BOOK I.

For Her Inheritance.

chapter I. LOVE A LA MODE DE HAVANA

The sheeted rain which had hidden the stony mesas and the palm-fringed savannah, ceased at last. Golden sun lances pierced the overhanging leaden mist, and as Sehora Juana Agramonte moved sulkily to the window, the full glory of a Cuban sunset gilded the far blue mountains fencing off the narrow bight beyond Guanajay.

The still beautiful Gulnare, who ruled over Hacienda la Sevilla, cast an anxious glance westward to where the grim trocha divided the insurgents of Pinar del Rio from the starving " reconcentrados " hovering near her, under the shadows of grim Butcher Weyler's blockhouses.

"Sfa por Dios ! He comes not ! May the blessed Virgin guard him if they have sent him to the front ! "

the anxious woman panted, with a frightened glance at the rolling tablelands stretched out to the blue sea.

In these feverish days of May, 'ninety-seven, the baffled Spaniards were huddled within their fortified lines, while that black Marshal Ney, the defiant Maceo, romped victoriously over the hills of Pinar del Rio.

As the Angelus solemnly sounded from the tower of the old church at Marianao, the impatient woman seized a mantilla, and, quickly throwing it over her graceful head, passed out upon the broad piazza.

Shading her eyes with her blue-veined hand, the mistress of the handsomest estate in Havana province gazed eagerly down the road to the northward. She never looked westwardly to where the last rays of the sun shone out on the raw red lines of the redoubts, gleamed upon the sides of the glaring white blockhouses, and sparkled upon the thin blue metallic network of the cruel barbed wire abattis.

The rattle of an armored train speeding along westward shook her breast with new alarms for her absent lover. " They will not dare to send Weyler's aide-de-camp out there, to face the merciless Cuban machetes ! " she murmured.

With swift strides she measured the length of the grand old mansion !

Crowning a superb hill, with its half-mile avenue of royal palms, La Sevilla grandly overlooked forty thousand acres of the richest land on earth, sweeping far away in an emerald sheen of growing cane to the dim, serrated peaks of the south.

" Fair as the garden of the Lord," she murmured, " it shall, it must, be mine ! Oh ! God, if Max would only come. If there is another," she mused, sadly, " some slim-vvaisted young patrician of the Cercle de Havana," and then her face darkened as when the black tornado breaks upon the shadowed seas.

She turned and sprang forward as the crouching tigress leaps, for a martial-looking horseman was now cantering smartly along toward her under the royal palms, planted when her dead husband was a babe.

" He must not see me," she muttered, " waiting for him here, like a peasant girl for her lover," and she fled away in a fond woman's deceit.

In the great drawing-rooms she paused before the nearest mirror. The face which met her gaze was still strangely beautiful.

" No ! I am not too old yet," she whispered, speaking softly to herself.

Despite her thirty-five years, there was still the glow of that fatal beauty which had brought proud old Don Romero Agramonte to the twinkling feet of Juana Garcia, the star of Seville, Spain's dancing siren, the idol of the casinos.

Major Max Lowenstein, A. D. C. to His Excellency, Don Valeriano Weyler, Governor-General of Cuba, was in a practical mood as he cast the eye of a connoisseur over the splendid sugar estate unrolled below him. His military coup d'oeil swept from the crested villages of Marianao, Quemados, and Lissa far out to the debatable lands where the poor starving villagers were now herded under the Spanish rifles.

IO THE HACIENDA ON THE HILL.

" This is worth my while, even with Sehora Juana as a fair incumbrance," resolved the German military adventurer, as he tossed the reins to the waiting mozo. " Donnerwetter ! There's the child though — I must make sure," the avaricious Teuton grumbled, for in his frugally-inclined German heart, Love and Lucre were now face to face with bayonets fixed.

But he squared his shoulders and marched with stately tread into the great drawing-rooms, where the old majordomo had just brought in the wax candles in the quaint silver-branched sconces.

Juana Agramonte stood there, smiling, with a warning finger on her lip, until the old servidor had glided out. And then, with a glad cry, she threw herself in the soldier's arms. " Dios mio, Max ! " she sobbed. " I feared that you were out there — with the troops."

" No such luck, mi querida ! " answered Lowenstein, shortly. " You know that I am tied to the old man's side by this cursed gun-selling business. If it were not for you, I would throw it all up and go home! " He was now keenly watching the effect of his words.

" You would leave me, Max," the ex-dancer cried, her eager arms encircling him in a passionate grasp.

" That all depends on you, Juana," coldly answered the staff officer, leading her to a divan. " Let us dine ! I have been in the saddle for hours, inspecting these Catalan cattle. I have something serious to tell you, by and by."

Senora Juana Agramonte essayed, in the hour and a half of the long-drawnout dinner, all the sly arts which

THE HACIENDA ON THE HILL. II

had, in the old days, brought courtly Marshal, haughty Don, and glittering diplomat to their knees before her. The presence of a half-blind old duenna restrained none of her Castilian ardor, and her French of the coulisses was as perfect a safeguard as the officer's guttural imitation of the Parisian accent.

Juana Agramonte felt, in her heart, a chill which she could not explain. All men had heretofore yielded to her while in the flush of her peerless spring loveliness ; but, alas ! the hot midsummer days were on now ! This cold, blue-eyed German, with the heavy martial features, was as stolid and insensible as the leaden statue of Carlos V in the Prado.

Madame Agramonte was not of a literary turn of mind, and was ignorant of Byron's satirical remarks about woman first loving the lover, and then love itself, when custom had given it a property of easiness.

Sole mistress of her own actions, she had always faced, without a blush, the memories of Lowenstein's almost unopposed conquest. Here, in La Sevilla, she was queen of the realm, and when she had liberally paid Butcher Weyler for a due measure of military protection, she was reasonably safe.

Juana Garcia had indulged in no illusions when, fifteen years before she had given her bejeweled hand to the snowy-haired old planter who showered diamonds upon her.

Love! A thing for the sport of callow boys and brain-sick girls ! The heart — an organ of purely mechanical value in her own sleek anatomy. This was her cold creed. And she had lived up to it, until trapped by her own passions.

The young gallants of Seville had laughed derisively at the fiery wooing of the millionaire Cuban widower, whose visit to Spain was ostensibly to place his only child, a prattling girl of three, in the experienced hands of his sister in Madrid.

But Don Enrique de Guzman, who dared to try to revive some old-time recollections in the fair Juana's mobile heart, even during the honeymoon, pitched forward, falling stone dead after five minutes' feeble sword play. The fierce Cuban planter had been the deadliest sword in Havana in his younger days.

Stern old Agramonte quickly bore the beauteous ballerina far away from the scene of her maddest triumphs. Though her daily life was a dream of luxury, Juana Garcia, the saucy queen of beauty, soon paled into the white-faced Juana Agramonte, a virtual prisoner in her gilded cage at La Sevilla.

Her lord and master was draconian in his severity, and often, in the long years of her marriage, she had gazed out over this same smiling paradise of La Sevilla through eyes blinded with hopeless tears.

Every one of the two thousand dwellers on the broad domain feared Don Romero, and yet served him with the dumb fidelity of the whipped spaniel.

The passive, inert, housewomen, with lurking coalblack eyes, watched her every movement. The village priest was stricken in years, and the ex-dancer knew but too well why none of the great families ever called at the splendid white marble mansion crowning the lordly hill.

They were all blue-blooded aristocrats, these haughty " peninsulares," allied to proud old historic families ; and all Havana province sternly resented the introduction of a light o' love ballerina into their stately functions.

One essay sufficed the embittered Don Romero. When his ravishingly beautiful second wife sat through a whole evening at the governor-general's annual ball to the " gente fina," he ceased to battle with the Cuban Mrs. Grundy.

Only from her opera box at the Tacon, did Juana Agramonte, with a princess's ransom in jewels as a setting, shine out as a baleful Venus upon the wildhearted young gallants below her.

Husband and wife soon led separate existences, and yet the cold-hearted old intellectual voluptuary asked nothing more than his bare rights of possession.

These he enforced with a relentless cruelty, on guard against all mankind.

When death had at last claimed her aged spouse, Juana Agramonte's fiery heart leaped up in a mad, secret joy. She saw him carried away to the Campo Santo without one tear of sorrow, a single sigh of regret.

A fierce delight filled her — place, power, pleasure, and a golden future loomed up. Shrouded at home in black, she secretly joyed to see the long cavalcade of men bear away forever the cold form of the man who had been a remorseless tyrant from the first.

A child of the gutters — left a manorial princess alone

B in the world — she had now neither friend nor adviser 3 and so she nursed alone her bright illusions, until the Senor Abogado, the family lawyer, called, a month after her husband's demise, to enlighten her upon the peculiarities of the Spanish laws of succession.

At bay, like a baffled tigress, she held her peace until a man of affairs from Madrid arrived later, armed with powers from a new tyrant — the aged sister of the dead man.

But, with feline adroitness, she held her peace and bided her time. The five years between her husband's death and the coming of this high-born German Prince Charming had been filled up with hidden leaves in the book of her life which, she fancied, were all now turned down forever. Her past amourettes were all forgotten in the wild sweep of the passion which made her the adventurer's secret slave.

When the great white stars trembled far above in the liquid blue, Juana Agramonte led her sullen lover out into the inclosed garden. The huge mansion inclosed a veritable Eve's paradise. On this silent night the splash of the fountain mingled with the shrill chirp of the cicada.

The orange trees mingled their waxen leaves with the broad fronds of the banana ; the fragrant tropic vines clung to acacia and rose shrub, and the perfumed spicy breath of the garden stirred her slumbering passions to madness.

In the summer-house they faced each other in silence, the lady of the hacienda and her lover.

" Tell me now — tell me all, Max ! " whispered Juana.

Her mind reverted to that unforgotten day, only a twelve-month past, when, leaning from the balcony of her town home, she had first showered roses down upon General Weyler's handsome young aide-de-camp.

The mute messages of these eyes had been the signal for the lighting of love's still unextinguished torch, and, on this night, a passionate woman, whose life had been but one living lie, yearned for the truth. False herself, in every fibre of her nature, she panted to know her guilty lover true.

" I may have to leave Havana soon," slowly said the handsome adventurer. " There are ominous rumors of Weyler's recall. He is the only strong man in the army. I must then go to Germany, and if I go, I may not return," the woman at his side convulsively grasped his arms, " unless — unless," he sullenly added, " you tell me the whole truth."

Then he shivered as her voice rang out, thrilling with vibrant jealousy

" Your business — your trumped-up business — some flaxen-haired, flat- faced German girl ; some hochwohlgeboren fraiilein. Go! You are lying to me! Tell me the truth ! You have sworn to marry me ! You, the man whose faith has been the whole world to me ! "

The phlegmatic German stolidly lit a papelito, while his accuser raged in all the fierceness of her wrath.

" You ask me for the whole truth," he bluntly replied. " I ask you for the same. Why did you not tell me that there was a child; that you are but a tenant here; that l6 THE HACIENDA ON THE HILL.

these broad acres are not your own; that you are but here on sufferance."

The ignoble lover fairly trembled as the maddened woman sprang to his side.

" And this is your faith, your loyalty, your honor ; you, who have humbled yourself at my feet. Beware ! By the God above us! There is death in the air to-night ! I am still mistress here, lies or no lies ! Where got you this story? Speak, coward, or I will kill myself before you! "

There was the flash of a poniard in the pale moonlight, and the alert athlete struggled long till he had wrenched it from the hands of the woman who felt that the truth was hers at last ; that love itself was a lie.

Shamed into unwilling caresses, the adventurer essayed every art to calm the storm which was of his own conjuring. The meanness of his sudden accusation smote him heavily. And, yet, skilled of old in deceit, he wove his own tissue of lies to further enmesh the woman whose head had so often lain upon his breast.

" Listen," he said. " You know that we live here upon a volcano. Two hundred thousand Spaniards have filled yawning graves here since these Cuban madmen first left the canefields and rode out to war, their pathway marked by blazing haciendas. Weyler, himself, is desperate. He is betrayed by his underlings. Spain is bankrupt. Yellow Jack has slain his tens of thousands. One adverse wave of battle may at last roll over our trocha lines. The fleet is but half furnished. The treasury is empty. Intrigue and baseness tie the hands of the queen regent, the baby king may never wear his crown. Our army is a fever-stricken mob. I can not protect you. I fall with Weyler's fortunes. If he is recalled, then I am a marked man. The assassin's knife, the dungeons of Cabanas, the betrayal to the Cuban bandits, all these are Spanish methods.

" I have a sacred trust to others to discharge — to my chief. If I go, I may not return. My sole fortune is my sword — my noble name — and if you are not mistress here, how could you share my fate ?

" You know that I am poor; your daily life is the golden luxury of a queen. If Weyler falls, I can not linger safely here, and, if you are not the rightful lady of La Sevilla,why join me in a double misery — a poverty which, leaving us helplessly fettered, is only a disgrace before the world. Will you go out into the world with me — over the seas? I swear to you that the whole rotten fabric here may crumble any day."

The sobbing woman raised her head.

" Who poisoned your mind against me? " she faltered.

" It was at the club," the adventurer rejoined. " I overheard two men talking of La Sevilla, of the past, of your dead husband. And old banker Menoz then broke in, ' Rich," he babbled, ' not an acre is her own. There was an heir. Sehora Agramonte has life possession, for residence only. Don Romero left a young daughter somewhere in Spain to whom the whole vast estate will descend on her becoming of age.' One of the speakers demanded, ' What becomes of the orphan's revenues ? ' and then old Menoz laughed, ' You all know what Cuba is ? ' I left them in disgust. Now, what can you say to this ? "

The woman at his side pressed her hand upon her heart.

"And this is all?" she gasped. "No more? No slanders ; no foul abuse of the woman whom you have sworn to marry. There is no such girl ! Let them bring her forward. I am the sole mistress here. Would you have me bear the secrets of my life to the rabble? You find me here — on my throne — and here I will live and die. And, now I ask you, whom do you trust? Your plighted wife, the woman who has given you more than her life, or do you herd with these jackals of the Havana clubs. Your fate is in your own hands. When you leave me to-night, Max, let it be forever, unless you are a man, a soldier, a caballero."

Behind the mask of each nature lurked the naked truth, which was veiled, even when the soldier, three hours later, flung himself on his horse and rode slowly down under the long line of palms.

There had been pledges whispered anew ; burning words ; oaths of fidelity, and vows renewed under the silent midnight stars. Lying eyes and lying lips had answered each other's challenges.

As Max Lowenstein dropped the reins on his horse's neck, he saw himself in the pale moonlight — his real self — the paltry patchwork of lies and shams.

A disgraced offshoot of a German guard regiment, banished for swindling at cards; the secret agent of a low cabal, now busy in peddling the rejected rifles and obsolete ammunition of a meanly avaricious Kaiser to cruel Spain, loitering on the verge of bankruptcy, ruin, and defeat.

Partner in the robbing of Cuban revenues with the swarm of cormorants hovering around the brutal Weyler, the renegade adventurer knew that he was only a figurehead staff officer; in truth, only the secret collecting agent of that arms-peddling syndicate whose sweep is from Corea to the Philippines, and from Formosa to Buenas Ayres.

A human hyena, following for profit the red flag of rapine, wherever blood flows or the standard of revolt is raised. An active agent in enlarging Germany's sphere. A huckster of surplus instruments of scientific human butchery.

" Can I trust her," he growled, as a rustling in the bushes caused him to jerk out his revolver and spur his horse along. He gloomily growled : " I must find out the truth. With the money, yes ; without it, she may go to the devil. I will speak to Weyler. Who would know if not he ? And yet can I trust him ? Yes ! " he almost shouted. " If I give him a share of the plunder. He shall be my guide. There is but one true friend in the whole world — gold, good yellow gold."

The stalwart Teuton laughed, wise in his own conceit, as he cantered into Marianao, where a warm welcome awaited him in the cafe of the Headquarters Hotel.

It was thronged with the Spanish officers, in whose purses jingled the yellow gold which represented twothirds of the monthly rations of their half-starved companies. The dim streets were crowded with the gaunt peasant lads dragged away from old Spain to die under the machete, in the loathsome grip of yellow jack, or the burning grasp of the calentura.