XI
Somehours after midnight, Hi woke aching with cramps and dripping with sweat: it was oppressively hot and still: all the forest was holding its breath, as though about to do something dreadful. There was a deliberation, even about the droppings from the trees. “Golly,” Hi thought, “it feels as though the earth were going to open.” It was pitch dark in the forest: the mist had gone from the trees, yet there was no glimmer of any star: the moon, being young, was long since gone. The stew of air gave Hi the feeling that a heaven of cast-iron was descending bodily upon the tree-tops to squeeze the earth flat.
The suspense of waiting for the heaven to fall was broken suddenly by thunder, rain and wind, all rising in violence until, at about an hour after dawn, they reached a pitch such as Hi had not believed to be possible. Then, while the forest was crashing with falling boughs and trees, and the air all vehement water and flying fragments, the heart suddenly went out of the storm; the darkness from above rolled away to leeward, showing the sun. The wind, which had been a thing of death, at once became a thing of healing: the storm was over: nature was freed from prison: Hi could go on.
He could go on; but he had lost another complete day and the going was changed. He was in a world of mud like the first chaos. All the wood was littered with thousands of young leaves, twigs and caterpillars. The millioned life, which had thrust at the first rains, had been washed to a smalm by these last. The ground of the wood had been so worked by the rain that it looked and trod like a ploughed field in a wet November. He rode out of the wood, all streaming as he was, towards the gulley of the pass. For one glorious minute, he saw all things glitter in the sun: the warmth beat upon him like life itself; then the rain began again: not heavy rain, but a steady trickle.
By this time, he was in the ravine of the pass into which every gulley, meuse and cranny, as well as the gashes cut by the storm, had been draining for many hours. A mess as of a dozen ploughed fields, of different colours of clay, had been washed into the pass, plastered there and sprinkled with boulders. Here and there boulders too big to shift had stood as obstructions to the floods. Near these, small boulders and ridges of rotten stone had been washed or flung so as to form moraines or dams across the hollow of the valley. Sometimes these dams held pools of water many feet in depth. All the pass rang with the noise of falling water.
He went on, cold and soaked; on foot in the mud, leading a miserable horse through pools, morasses and over stones. The rain fell steadily, and there was no road nor signpost, nothing but the direction of the gulley down the hill, the noise of water, sometimes birds, but never beast nor man.
“And the worse of it is,” he thought, “that I must be coming to that place where I was to turn off, if I was to turn off. That was what he meant, I think: that I had to go to the left of a crossing. I only hope that it will clear before I reach the place.”
It did not clear: it went on raining.
“This is what father meant,” he thought, “when he said, ‘You’ll thank me before the year’s out for sending you to a land of the sun.’ ”
He wondered much into what kind of country he had come, for he could see so little, except the faces of rocks all streaming, then mist, then folds of hill, from which streamers of rain came out and passed. Presently he came to trees which had hard leaves that clacked: his teeth clacked in sympathy. Not long after this, he came to a bridge, not over but in a torrent; and here he had to blindfold his horse to get him across. On the other side of the bridge, at a little distance above the waters, was a stone with an inscription in Latin:
Pray for the soulsOf Espinar, Gamarro, Velarde.Drowned here.
Pray for the souls
Of Espinar, Gamarro, Velarde.
Drowned here.
He wondered as he looked back at the bridge, with the water swirling across it between the balusters of the parapets, how he had ever crossed. He patted his horse “for being such a sport.” He judged that this river must be the upper waters of the river at La Boca; but any sense of direction was long since gone from him: he did not know where he was.
Memory of his friend’s direction, that there was no road to the right, made him edge to his left, whenever there was an opening. He was not on any track or trail now, but in mud or scrub among the clouds; sometimes rocks loomed out at him, sometimes trees. When he halted, as he sometimes did, to shout, in the hope of an answer, he had no answer, save the noise of the rain that wept as though all hope were gone. “Well, if I go on, I must reach somewhere,” he said. “I can’t go back, even if I wanted to, because the river’s rising, and nothing would take me over that bridge again, with the water worse than it was. One good thing about this rain is, that there won’t be any forest fever yet, since the rains aren’t at an end.”
It was consolation of a kind; but he was as sick and shaking from cold and misery as most fevers could have made him. He noticed after a time that he was going uphill again. After some hours of this he came into a forest of giant trees. There was no undergrowth and little light in this forest. He rode in a gloom full of sighing like voices and full of dropping like footsteps. The rain seeped in films and streaks through this wood: mists of it paused in places, like ghosts looking at him from behind trees. Sudden gusts sent rushes of water to the ground with the noise of the steps of beasts. It was in this wood that the rain began to slacken.
At first, he thought that this was only a seeming, due to the shelter of the trees; but soon the mists of the rain cleared from the boles, which at once became like gods for bulk and silence. Soon the birds and insects reappeared; ants came to forage among what the rain had brought to earth; ticks fell from the trees; the big red and yellow fungi at the tree roots unrolled themselves into enormous spiders which waved their front legs at Hi in a terrifying rhythm, as though they were trying to hypnotise him. They did it slowly, with their eyes fixed upon him. They seemed to be repeating:
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Hi could see no tracks anywhere on that wet earth, but he realised that his horse was leading him somewhere.
“Good old boy,” he said, “you know more about these parts than I do. If you can bring me to any comfort I’ll be grateful.”
A long time passed before comfort appeared. It came with the brightening of the light in the gaps among the tree-tops: the very sight of this was warmth to him. “The sun,” he said, “I’ll do it yet, if I can only find someone to direct me.” The horse went straight ahead till at about two in the afternoon, as Hi guessed, he paused and whinnied, and horses whinnied in reply.
There, at a little distance in front of him, on a level patch, where the trees, being small, had been easily cleared, was a hut or shack with smoke rising from the chimney. It was a white man’s, not an Indian’s hut, because it was sided and ended with unbarked planks and roofed with shingles. It was old and falling to pieces. It must have been deserted for years, Hi thought, yet smoke was rising from it. Beside it was a long, ruinous pent-house or shed, with a torn canvas crib or manger running along its wall. “I suppose it is an outlying camp,” Hi thought, “or some old winter house for the timber cutters; anyhow, thank Heaven, there are people there.” He could see two pale faces peering round the half-opened door at him. When he lifted his eyes from the house, he saw, at a little distance, two tethered horses pausing from their grass to stare at him. As he advanced from his halting place, the faces at the door moved forward, so that he could make out a man and a woman. The man advanced to a pace beyond the door. He was a short, fresh-coloured man, with fair hair, and a small sandy moustache. What Hi noticed more particularly was that the man looked guilty, as though he had been caught in the act of something. “He’s scared at something,” Hi thought. When the man saw that Hi was only a boy, a relief came over his face, a relief so great that it made him laugh unpleasantly.
The woman had drawn back out of sight inside the shed, where (from the sound) she seemed to be doing something with bedclothes, making a bed or packing something in blankets. Hi thought: “There’s something fishy here. I’ve caught them in the act at something. And it must be pretty bad or he wouldn’t be in such a funk.”
“Is this the way to Anselmo?” Hi asked. The man looked blank. Hi repeated the question, more than once; after a while the woman came to the door.
“Anselmo?” she asked.
“Si, si, Anselmo.”
“Por aqui, Anselmo.”
She was a willowy woman, all slink and gleam, with a speck in one eye and something swollen in lip and nose.
“This is, then, the way to Anselmo,” Hi said. “La via a Anselmo? The calle or route a l’Anselmo?”
“Si, si,” the woman said, nodding.
The first wish of the couple, to get the stranger away from the hut, without letting him peep inside, now changed to another wish: a strange look passed between them, which made Hi uneasy. The man had enormous fore-arm muscles: his right fore-arm had been bruised or scraped quite recently. In his trousers he had a gun pocket which plainly had been used for a gun, though no gun was there at the moment.
“Por aqui, Anselmo,” the man said, taking Hi’s bridle and turning the horse away from the shack.
“He show you,” the woman said in English.
“Is it far to Anselmo?” Hi asked.
The man said he could not understand.
“I don’t understand, either,” Hi thought, “what you two have been up to, here in the forest. You aren’t living here; you only came here an hour ago; because there are no tracks to the door, except brand new ones. Why do you two come here in the rains to pack something in blankets? What were you packing in blankets?” What indeed?
The man led him past the two tethered horses into the forest on the trail by which the horses had come there an hour or so before. Hi had noticed horse tracks ever since he was a child: he noticed suddenly the tracks of a third horse in the soft earth. Three horses had come towards the shack that morning: the third had gone off suddenly into the forest. Why?
The man led on, saying nothing, but thinking the more. Glancing back, Hi saw the woman moving from the shack into the forest. “I wonder if I’m going to be led round to meet her,” he thought. “And if so, why?” Glancing forward, Hi saw that the man was looking at him with a strange expression.
“I believe they’re up to no good,” he thought. “I’ll get out of it.”
For a moment, he did not know how to get out of it, nor how he could manage without a guide if he did. Then the certainty that this couple were wicked urged him to act. Something said in his brain, “Behind that door they had a lad like you, whom they had murdered.” A picture formed in his brain of the woman behind the door, rolling a body in a blanket. Whenever she rolled the body face up, the face which showed was his own. “It may be all imagination,” he thought, “but I’ll go on alone.”
He checked the horse, with a sign to the man: he did not know what on earth he was to do next.
“Dis donc,” he said in a mixed speech. “Esta Anselmo loin d’ici? Anselmo . . . sabe? Anselmo, est il bien loin? La ville d’Anselmo, est il far?”
The man nodded his head and grinned, as though to reassure him. Something in the man’s face, the pouchy look under the eyes, reminded Hi of one of the portraits of Henry VIII: it looked evil from evil done and evil planning. The man turned to his path and seemed about to lead the horse off the trail. “I daresay,” Hi thought, “the woman is the shot: she has the revolver. He’ll lead me round to her and she’ll pot me from behind a bush. Yet he’s as strong as an ox. I can’t hit him or break from him without getting the worst of it. What can I do?”
The voice in his brain said, “Scare him”; but he did not seem to be an easy man to scare. “I could make the horse shy,” he thought, “though if I do that, I may be bucked off myself.”
“Dis donc,” he said again, “sont ils beaucoup de guardias civiles in Anselmo? Moi, je ne veux pas le police. Sabe? Comprende Usted? Police? Muchas guardias me muchas afraido.”
The man said something in his sullen way that all would be well, better than well: again he turned to his task, leading the horse off the trail.
“Things are getting to be critical,” Hi thought. “I must try a scare.”
He was about to try some sudden startling of the horse, when the woman called out something. The man stopped and shouted in reply: from the woman’s answer Hi made out that she wanted the man for some reason, to do something which she could not do. “Wants him to load the revolver, probably,” he thought. The man seemed vexed at the request: he seemed to ask if she could not manage as she was: she answered “No.”
The man growled in his throat. “Bah. Las mujeres.” He let go the rein, with a look of threat and misgiving. He said something to Hi, which seemed to mean: “You stay here a minute: I’ll be back directly.” He strode off in the direction from which the woman had called. Hi let him go about ten yards, then he turned his horse, and urged him up. The man turned and called out to him to stop. Glancing back, as the horse got into his stride, Hi saw the man running back to where the horses were tethered.
“The brute’s going to chase me,” he thought. “And he’ll track me, even if I dodge him. The worst of it is, that I don’t know whether I am headed for Anselmo or the new Jerusalem; but I must come out somewhere if I keep on. This forest can’t go on for ever.”
This was true; but he had a memory of his father saying, “The forest goes all the way to Cualimaçu on the Matulingas, 1,500 miles if its an inch.” If he happened to be heading for Cualimaçu, his journey to Anselmo was likely to be protracted. For the moment, however, his thought was to get away from these people.
Almost at once, his horse shied from a pool of blood where men had trodden within the hour. It was surrounded by big blue butterflies as greedy for salt as English butterflies for honey. “That’s where the murder was,” he thought, “and those two will follow me because they know that I know.”
After an hour, however, when he halted for the third time to listen for the sound of pursuit, he felt sure that he was not pursued. He rode on slowly through the forest, leaving the direction to the horse, who now seemed to know where he was going. As far as he could tell, in the gloom of under the trees, he went westwards but not directly, for the thorn thickets forced him now in one direction, now in another.
Presently the horse cocked his ears at something and challenged. Hi halted, expecting and fearing to see some wild beast, but in a few seconds he saw that there was a horse in front of him, standing still among the tree trunks, watching him, some fifty yards ahead. He was almost invisible at first, for a horse will fade into any background or dimness; as he became distinct, Hi saw that he was saddled and bridled, though not mounted.
“That is it,” he thought, “the brute has headed me off. This is the murderer. He has slipped off his horse there, and is somewhere among the trees waiting to pot me. Even if I dodge him, there’ll still be Mrs. Now my only chance is to dodge.”
He was about to dodge, knowing the futility of dodging, when the horse strode out of his covert into view. He was a darker horse than the two big sorrels tethered near the shack. He had a running cut on his side and a saddle twisted underneath him. He came ramping from his place, full of power and alarm. “By George, it’s the dead man’s horse,” Hi cried, “and what a beauty. I’ll have him.” However, the horse had been terrified once that day; Hi’s coming set him off again full tilt into the wilderness, with his stirrups flying from flank to foreleg or swinging back to clank under his belly. Presently, the girth buckle broke, the saddle fell and made him stumble, but he recovered, shook it clear and strode off into the woods.
Soon after his stridings had ceased to beat in the ears, the air above began to sigh with the homings of countless birds which settled on the trees with cryings and shriekings. Then suddenly there came a darkening all over the forest, as though the light had been turned off at a tap. Hi knew what this meant. His father had often told him that when the sun went behind Mount Melchior the light went off, so that you couldn’t see to shoot. “Now here I am with the day gone,” he thought. “It will soon be dark, and I have not yet started for Anselmo. Buck up, old horse, and get me out of the forest.”
The horse seemed to be bound for somewhere; but after another hour of going, when it was beginning to be dark, he was still in the forest. He could see no gleam of open country nor hear anywhere any noise of men. When he halted to shout, he had no answer, except the sudden silence of birds and beasts. He was there in the depths, out of the reach of his kind, as alone as a man can be.
Perhaps in the past the horse had had some happiness in that part of the forest, which led him thither now. When it was almost too dark to go further, he bore his rider into a space where Indians had made a cassava patch by burning off the trees. Indians and cassava shrubs were long since gone, but the space was still clear of forest. In that patch of ground, some eighty by fifty yards across, there was tall grass of a bright yellow colour between two and three feet high. About this, the trees grew to less than their usual size, being (as it seemed) bowed down by the weight of the creepers. Over the patch was the dome or depth of violet sky in which there were already stars.
The horse thrust into the patch and fell to eating greedily. Hi dismounted to look about him; he found that there was water at one edge of the patch.
“I’d better stay here for the night,” he thought, “because I’m lost. In the morning perhaps I may be able to find a way out. If I could only see the sun or Polaris I would be out in no time.”
He unsaddled his horse, rubbed him well down with grass, and having haltered him, hitched him to a tree. He gathered him some armsfull of the grass, and talked to him, as he ate, for comfort.
All through his ride he had not tasted food, because of something he had said to himself at breakfast, “I hope my next meal may be at Anselmo.” Now, when he saw plainly that he could not reach Anselmo for many hours to come, he drew his food from his bags. The rain had made a paste of the bread, but he scraped some of the paste together and ate it with some sausage; he drank of the water of the pan, which smacked of the marsh. He reckoned that he still had one tolerable meal of paste left in his bag, and one good feed of oats for the horse. These things he resolved to keep in reserve. Under the paste of the bread he found five silver pesetas, which Anton or the girl had hidden for him.
He was much touched by this.
But his main feeling was one of overwhelming anxiety for his friends who were depending on him. “Oh, they must feel that I have failed them,” he thought. “They must have sent someone else. If this has happened to ’Zeke as well, God help Carlotta. God help her.”
A strange whiteness of light glimmered high up in the trees: in a few moments it died, leaving all things strangely dark.
“Here is the night,” he thought. “Oh, it is lonely. This is my third night away and I haven’t even started yet. But I’ll get my bearings and start at dawn. I’ll get through somehow.”
The stars deepened overhead: the birds lapsed into silence: what noises there had been in the wood became suddenly stealthier. Little bright burnings came and went in the air as the fireflies began. Hi gathered more grass for the horse, tried his tether, and then made himself a nest of grass in which he could not sleep, because of the cold.
During the morning of this, the third day, of Hi’s journey, Ezekiel Rust came at a gallop to the house at Encarnacion, where Don Manuel watched beside the dead body of his mother. Being admitted to Don Manuel, he delivered his message, with what news he could add from the underworld of Medinas. Don Manuel waited for half an hour, while his mother’s body was buried; then he rode to San Jacinto city, to intercept any other messenger coming from the capital. By the early afternoon he was summoning all his friends and adherents in the Western Provinces to come with arms, fodder and horses to a rendezvous east of the river. At about the time when Hi was settling to his nest, Don Manuel’s first supporter, Pascual Mestas, came in to the rendezvous with twenty men from Santiago. Ezekiel Rust was given a bed in the inn at San Jacinto, with the promise that he should not want again in life.
XII
Aftersome hours, by crouching knee to chin, covered by his saddle, a kind of warmth crept over Hi, so that he slept an uneasy sleep, full of cramps and nightmares.
Uneasy as it was, it was deep. Eternity seemed to go over him like a sea. Down at the bottom of its pit, he became conscious that the universe was vast, and that in the depth of it, one little ache, which went from his back into his stomach, from the cold, was himself. All kinds of vast things watched this ache with indifference; but the ache was all-important to himself. It kept urging him to rise. “That is the point,” he muttered, “I’ve got to rise. I’ve got to rise.”
Something from the heart of things was calling him to rise. With an effort he shook himself out of the cramps and nightmares into the coolness and stillness of reality. He thrust aside the saddle and sat up, aching. There were the stars overhead, in all those odds and ends of constellations of the southern heaven which have no easy guides for the wanderer like King Charles’s Wain. The grass was all pale about him, the trees were all black, tree-tops and grass-tops seemed to waver a little: something near the water pan made a ticking noise, as though some mouse were snouting there under fallen twigs.
From all these things, he came suddenly to focus on the thing which mattered. His horse was staring intently, rigidly and silently at something which Hi could not see. This was why he had been called upon to rise. The sleeping partner in his horse had called him up to face the enemy. A wave of fear passed from the horse into the master; Hi sat up to stare as the horse stared; he rose to his knees and stared.
He could see nothing but the film of the grass against the black of the forest, yet somewhere in that space was something at which the horse was staring with all his nature. In that dimness and indistinctness before the darkness something was abroad, not stirring, but staring at them. What was it? Was it a snake waiting to strike, or a puma, or a ghost out of the grave? There was nothing to show, nothing to see; but both knew that there was something, deadly unspeakable. Hi felt the hair rise on his brow: he heard the sweat drip from himself and his horse.
How long this lasted he never knew, but at last, from that indistinctness in front, there came the faintest of sounds, that marked the ending of the tension. Something dark seemed on the instant to merge back into the darkness behind it. There was no noise of step or tread, no motion in the grass, nothing that one could swear to seeing, only the suggestion of a scent, like the ghost of the flavour of musk, and then the knowledge that the thing was no longer there. He believed that his horse sighed with relief, as he himself did.
He could see nothing, but the horse saw. Hi saw the horse’s eyes follow the thing slowly round. What thing was it that could move so slowly? What thing of precaution was moving, pausing and deliberating? When it deliberated, its will hardened against them, the horse knew it, and Hi knew it from the horse. The fear came again, that the thing might strike, had almost made up its mind to strike: it had some kind of a mind.
Yet again the tension snapped suddenly, with a sigh of relief from horse and man: the evil seemed to withdraw, so that the horse felt free to change his position. Then the night, which for some minutes had seemed to hold her breath, began again to speak with her myriad voices out of the darkness of her cruelty. The whisper and the droning of the forest sharpened into the rustlings of snakes, the wails of victims, the cry of the bats after the moths, and the moan of the million insects seeking blood.
For some two hours Hi stayed by his horse, waiting and watching, till at last he felt free to lie down to rest. The insects took toll of him, but he contrived some shelter, and being young, as well as weary, he slept again. He may perhaps have slept for as much as an hour.
He was wakened suddenly by that inner messenger who told him that the danger, whatever it was, had returned. He heard the horse wheel round with a little cry to face in a new direction. Hi faced it, but again could see nothing but a blackness of trees, now like steel at the tops from the false dawn. Hi stood beside the horse, with an arm on his neck, staring. There was tenseness and silence, with fear passing from beast to man and back again. What was there, Hi could not see, but the horse saw. All that Hi thought that he could distinguish was a blotch of blackness which wavered against the blackness that was steadfast. It seemed to him to be some snake swollen to the size of an upright at Stonehenge. When the waiting became unbearable he challenged.
“I see you,” he said. “What do you want?”
There came no answer, nor any sound from the thing; the only result of the challenge seemed to be that the tenseness became more tense and the silence more still. Staring forward more intently, Hi felt that the blotch of blackness was not there, but that something was there, but what thing? Ah, what thing could it be that was slow, silent as the coming of a fever, and deadlier than pestilence? It was there making up its mind for half an hour.
Then, as before, in one instant it was not: it was gone. Hi looked up at the heaven suddenly, to find that the steel of the tree-tops was now burnished with colour. Some birds in those tree-tops right over where the danger had been now woke all together with ejaculations and the clapping of wings, which spread from tree to tree, till all the forest was awake. High, shrill cacklings and screamings, full of good spirits and energy rang aloud all over the wood. With a clattering of the quills of wing-feathers, some big birds shook themselves loose from sleep. After a time, flocks of little birds passed overhead with thin, sweet cries. The false dawn, which had made the sky warm with colour, died away into dimness; then, almost at once, the darkness thinned and dispersed: colour surged into mid-heaven in flames of scarlet, which made the tree-tops glow. Within a few minutes it was dawn. Hi was cold, miserable, swollen and itching from bites, but safe from the powers of darkness; the night was gone; he had never understood what night was, now he knew.
In the glow of the warmth with all things so full of colour he looked at the place where the danger had threatened. The danger had now gone, the horse was eating at peace. There was no trace nor track that Hi could read, nor any mark that he could find, that might not have been made by himself or the horse. Yet about the places where the danger had been a flavour or sickliness of musk still lingered, so faintly that it could hardly be noted. “It is not musk, either,” Hi said to himself. “It has a sort of edge to it. It is the smell of some stuff that kills, it has to do with death. This is a deadly place; we’ll be gone from it.”
Having groomed and fed his horse and himself, he set out from that clearing. “I have got my bearings now,” he said. “I am facing north, probably straight towards Anselmo. Any going to the right will bring me out towards La Boca; any going to the left will put me too far to the west. As I am headed now, I ought to be clear of the forest by noon. I don’t know what Rosa will think of me, losing all this time, but I’ll get there somehow, so that she shan’t be too much ashamed of me.”
He had not ridden for two minutes before he felt a change in his horse; all the gallantry was gone from his going, there was no spark nor stir passing from horse to rider. “Poor old boy,” he thought, “he has been awake all night, from that thing in the clearing, he is feeling a bit tucked up.” He went gently through the forest for rather more than an hour. It was good going, more open than it had been the day before, with patches of savannah where the trend of the shadows gave him his directions. He was thankful for these savannahs, because of their warmth and colour, which restored him like draughts of wine. But his horse went on like a log beneath him, with no life nor spirit, and his own heart was troubled enough at all the delays. “At least, I am started now,” he thought.
He came to a green expanse, broken up with pools of water, where reeds of delicate stems, topped by pale blue tufts of flowers, attracted multitudes of golden-throats, which poised at each tuft and glittered as they fluttered. The patch was perhaps three hundred yards across and of an intense glittering greenness. “Soft going,” Hi muttered; “this is bog.”
The horse knew something about earth of that greenness. He would have none of it. Hi dismounted to look at it; it looked like bottomless bog leading to deep water, with bog on the further side. In the midst of the green expanse there was a sort of bubbling wriggle of small snakes. Sometimes a red turtle crawled out of a pool, wallowed along the mud and sank into another. “Here’s a lively place,” Hi thought. “I’ll have to get round it. I’ll work round here to the right and go round the end of it.”
He set off in good spirits, but after two miles or more of exploration he found no end of it. Instead of an end, the bog seemed to have a growth in that direction into a lake or pool edged with bottomless mud. Something in the water, whether tincture or germ, had killed the trees which it had touched. Three or four hundred dead trees stood in a pool the colour of stagnant blood, each tree was leafless and barkless: they stood as bones, silent save for the beetles clicking on them. “Here’s a nice place,” Hi thought. “It would be first rate as a shrubbery to a morgue.”
There was no sign of any way across or round that bog. The blood-pool stretched on to what looked like an oil-pool, black and rancid, with prismatic gleams oozing outwards from it. Beyond this, there was swamp, with enormous plants with branches like water-lily roots, or like knots of snakes intertwisted, rising from the pools. The bark of these twigless branches had been gashed, perhaps in some act of growth, so that it hung in weepers, showing the red or yellow flesh beneath; “beggars with sores,” Hi called them.
“Since I can’t get round here,” he said, “I must go back and try the other end.” The mosquitoes were eating him alive here, so that when he clapped his neck suddenly his hand was covered with blood. As he had heard that oil will drive away mosquitoes, he smeared his hands, face and neck with the skimmings of one of the pools; this relieved him for a time.
At the other end, he found a tongue of dry land which seemed to thrust right across the bog. “Here is a way,” he thought, “this will take me over.” He set out upon it with good hope.
After a mile of open going, the reeds closed in on both sides of him, so that he rode in a narrow space between ranks of stems, grey-green and golden, topped by plumes of blue. The horse needed continual urging forward, until he came to a patch of a plant like rest-harrow, which attracted him; he seemed eager to crop it.
“Well, if it’s going to do you good, old boy,” Hi said, “you’d better eat some.” He slipped the bit from his mouth to let him eat, but it proved to be a sick beast’s fancy; he would not eat. He plucked two or three croppings, but dropped them from his mouth. Hi didn’t like the look of his eyes nor the feel of his skin. “What is it, old son?” he asked. “What is turning you up? Was it the rain yesterday, or what?”
The horse drooped his head and trembled a little. “This is bad,” Hi thought, “but I must get on, cruelty or no. He may be better presently.”
He led the horse forward till he reached a place where the reeds grew across the causeway. He thrust into the reeds for a minute, when he found that he was treading in water over his shoes. Four or five inches down, the roots of the reeds, the surface of the earth, or both things together, made a hard bed on which he could walk. “I think it will be all right,” he said; “it seems fairly safe: anyway, this is my direction; this bog can’t last much longer: I must be almost across, and I simply won’t waste time by trying for another way.”
He slopped on slowly for another hundred yards, leading the horse. The reeds grew thicker as he proceeded. They were hard in the leaf like cactus and tough in the stem like bamboo. He had to back into them, dragging the horse, who came unwillingly; sometimes he could not break through, but had to edge round a clump. It was hot work paddling backward thus. After the first hundred yards the water began to deepen. Birds which had never before seen a man moved away at his coming; a deep, intense droning of insects sounded about him: insects got into his eyes and seemed to like being there. Many midges, with tiny black spots upon their wings, thrust under the wrist-bands of his shirt and below his collar, where they bit like sparks of fire. Suddenly the reeds let in a great deal more light: he had backed through into the open. He found himself standing almost knee deep in a lake of water two or three miles long by a mile broad. There was no way across from there: he had come the wrong way.
Perhaps, in his disappointment, had his horse been fit, he might have tried to swim across, holding to his horse’s tail. The temptation to try was strong in him; the water, though deep, looked so beautiful, and the distance, in that light, so small. What made him hesitate was a patch of weed near the further shore. “I might get snarled up in that,” he thought, “or come to a mud patch and not be able to land.”
At the instant, something gave a sharp and savage pluck at his leg; he kicked the thing from him and at once splashed back among the reeds. “One of those snappers that father was always gassing about,” he thought, as he recovered from his start; “he always said that the fresh-water fish would eat a man. I must give up swimming it, that’s all.”
He turned back in depression through the reeds. “Just as I thought I’d crossed it,” he muttered. His horse seemed to share his depression. He came back through the reeds in a way which seemed to say, “I could have told you that you couldn’t cross here. Now you’ll have to fag all the way back again, and you know that I have not any strength to waste.” Going back made him realise how much further he had come than he had supposed. It seemed to be miles to the starting place, but he reached it at last.
“Dash it all,” he said, while he halted to consider, “I believe that this is the place which Anton mentioned: the place he meant when he said I couldn’t go so, because there was no ground. Well, if I’d only thought of that sooner, I might have spared myself some pain. Now he said that there was some sort of a track hereabouts, which would take me clean out of the forest. Puzzle, find the track. I see no trace of any track. I’ll take a cast, to see if I can hit it off.”
He took two casts, one in each direction, but could see nothing like a track. “If there was one,” he thought, “it was very likely washed out by the rain yesterday. Anyhow, I have tried the east and the middle: they are both wrong. If there’s any way at all to the north from here, it must be to the west. Here it is mid-day pretty nearly, and I have not started yet.”
He set out to the west, through a forest of vast trees, which stood over him like gods watching a beetle. When he had ridden for an hour, he turned into a valley, down which suddenly a mist of rain came sweeping. It came less violently than the rain of the day before, but settled in as though it would last for ever. In a few minutes the forest had changed to a dimness full of footsteps and sighings, across which shapes of cloud faded and formed and faded.
“I must keep on, and then bear to the right,” Hi said. “This won’t last as long as it did yesterday.”
He kept on for some hours at a walk, till he was stopped by a bog. A river or large stream which perhaps ran into the lake at its western end here had silted up its mouth over some acres of forest. A rotting mush barred the way; there was no passing. As moving to the right brought him to reeds growing in water, he moved to the left, uphill, until his horse stopped.
He had saved a feed of corn against an emergency: the horse nosed at it, but would not eat. “Poor beast,” Hi thought, “he’s in a pretty bad way. I’ll rub him down and give him a rest. If we both rest for a little it will do no harm.” After grooming the horse, he contrived what shelter he could, and fell asleep. He woke once, to find the rain streaming on his face, woke a second time, to find that the rain had stopped; then sleep took hold of him body and soul and held him as one dead.
He slept all through the afternoon and would have slept longer far into the night, but that he was suddenly startled by the shattering of a volley of shots from some place far away. “There it is,” he cried, starting up, “that is Don Manuel coming to the rescue.” Other shots followed, some, at first, close together in volleys, the later ones singly. After the shots, listening intently as he was, he thought that he heard the sound of many horses going together at a fast trot. Some such noise there was, it rang out, died down, clopped and clinked and then clattered. “Of course, it can’t be Don Manuel,” he said, coming to himself. “But it may be the Whites driving away the Reds. Anyhow, people are there: the forest ends. It may even be Anselmo. Come on, horse, here’s the world again. ‘They must be men, because they’re fighting, and they must be civilised because they’re doing it with guns.’ ”
The horse seemed the better either for the rest or the sound of his fellows; when Hi mounted, he set off with some kind of spirit. In a quarter of an hour he came to something which made the horse whinny; it was a trail.
“Here it is,” Hi cried, “the very little trail which Anton spoke of. Now I shall be out of it in no time. Just as well, too, because I’ve slept a lot longer than I thought: it is almost night.”
The sun was indeed behind Melchior; the birds had homed and were now screaming before falling silent. The patches of sky over the forest turned slowly scarlet, paled yellow, then changed to a green in which stars were bright. The sparks of the fireflies began to pass upon the air: cold silence and darkness came with them into the forest, so that Hi shivered. His heart, none the less, was beating with hope, because the horse was going with confidence. Then from somewhere ahead came the distant lowing of cattle, which brought tears to Hi’s eyes. It was the noise made by the cows of home coming into the barton at Tencombe: now here, in this strange place, it told of the homes of men, where life was lived wisely, away from towns, and far from the madness of rulers like Don Lopez.
Suddenly, from somewhere ahead, a single shot rang out: it may have been far away, but in that still air it sounded near by. It was followed almost at once by the sound of the gallop of a horse, which was either running away or being ridden by a man in fear for his life. It stretched at a full gallop across his front and so away into the west: one horse only, mad with fear, or with his rider’s fear, going at his utmost: from what?
“I wish I knew from what,” Hi thought. “Listen.”
He listened: many men were talking and shouting. Then there came the noise of many horses together: seventy or a hundred; “as many as in a hunt at home,” moving along a paven place at a walk, then rising to a fast trot together. “And they are within two miles of me,” Hi thought, “going from me.” He shouted, but had no answer save the sound of the horses dying away into the west. The cattle lowed again. “There must be a ranch there,” Hi said. “I’ll go to where those cows are.” He hailed again and was answered by little white owls which followed him on both sides, perhaps for grubs or beetles kicked up by the horse in his going.
Presently he came out of the forest into a little plantation of trees made as a wind-screen, possibly for cocoa. Beyond this, he saw a cleared space in which, less than half a mile away, were the long, low white buildings of a ranch lit up as for a festival. To his right, there seemed to be ordered plantations of fruit trees in blossom: he saw long streaks of paleness which he judged to be peach trees. To the left, rather further from him, were high corrales, where pale cattle moved and lowed; he heard them stamp and push: often they rattled their horns upon the bars.
He rode nearer to the buildings, then paused to hail, crying out that he was English, and that they were not to shoot. He had no answer to any of his hails. The place was still, save for the cattle: there was not even a dog. “The men must be all at supper,” he thought, “or milking, if they milk in these parts. But it is odd that they have no dog.”
The moon, now some three or four nights old, was low down over the house, near the tops of Sierras, which glittered. “I don’t know what sort of a course I’ve been riding,” he thought, “I seem to have been going due west: or is the moon different down here? It seems to slop about all over the place.”
Leaving the moon for the moment, he rode on towards the house, calling out that he was a friend. Some shrubs, newly planted, on both sides of his track, gave out a strong sweet scent: beetles and fireflies were swarming over them with a droning of wings which made the silence the more apparent.
“Is anybody there?” he cried. “Hullo there. Don’t shoot: I am a friend. House ahoy, I’m a friend.”
By this time he was at a long white gate which had been thrust and propped open far back to its supporting posts and rails. He entered the gate, riding cautiously, still calling that he was a friend, but having no answer, and hearing no sound, save the moving of the cattle in the corrales and the buzz of insects in the shrubs.
“Not even a dog,” he repeated, “and there must be fifty men in a ranch like this. What if they are all in ambush, waiting for me to come on?”
“It’s not likely,” he thought, after a moment, “but it is possible. They may be waiting at those windows to plug me like a nutmeg grater. But if they are, they’ll wait to see who is coming with me. It feels to me as if the house were deserted.”
Beyond the gate, the way had been paven, the horse’s hoofs struck on a road; the house cast back the echoes, clink, clink, at each step. As he advanced, the young moon bobbed lower down towards the house-roof: no sound came from the house.
“Hey,” Hi called, “I am a friend, an amigo; un ami. Je suis Anglais. Ingles.”
Something in the ominousness of the silence brought his calling to an end. There was something dreadful at work here. Something had stricken the heart of that house so that its life had ceased. Yet not quite ceased, for as Hi dismounted he saw a breath of smoke blow from one of the chimneys across the curve of the moon. “What in the wide earth is happening here?” he asked himself.
At a little distance from the house, to the left of the entrance, were tethering posts from which iron rings hung. He had thought at first that they were the posts at which the slaves were flogged; but he now knew better. He hitched his horse to one of the rings, and then went slowly towards the door. The house seemed to grow bigger as he approached it: he felt himself shrink. He wished that his footsteps did not make such a noise upon the road. “It is deserted,” he told himself, “it is all deserted. But it is all lit up, so that it can only have been deserted within the hour, after that shot was fired here.”
Six steps from the door a thought came to him which made his heart leap for joy. “Of course, this is Anselmo,” he said. “I’ve come to Anselmo. This is the Elena’s ranch, and the Elenas and all their men have either gone to Don Manuel or joined the other Whites. That is it of course. Well, here I am. And they’ve moved all their horses with them; those were the horses which I heard. I’m late enough, but word has reached them. ’Zeke must have got through.”
Thinking thus he crossed the two broad stone steps of the perron to the estancia door.
An electric light burned over the door: some moths were butting at it. The door itself was of black maruca, bound with steel. A big bronze pipkin, such as the country people all over Meruel use for milking, hung beside the door. “I suppose this is the bell,” he thought. “It’s just like a castle in the Morte d’Arthur. Here goes for a bang.”
He struck the bronze, which clanged aloud, spinning round upon its cord and thrilling: then he struck again more loudly, twice. The clang died down into a trembling of the air, but all within the house was silent, there was neither voice nor footstep. There came a rustling of wind from the madre de cacao trees; nobody came, nobody spoke. “Is anyone inside there?” Hi cried. There was no answer.
“I don’t believe that there is anybody here,” he said. Then the thought came: “Suppose the people have all been rounded up or killed by the Reds?”
“But, no,” he thought, “the Reds would have sacked and burned the place. It is not that. I don’t know what it is: it must be something queer.” He struck the bronze for a last time.