Yes, it was a life and death race between the emigrants and the Apaches for the San Juan. Positions of defence were all along the road, but not one of them could be held for a day, all being destitute of grass and water.
"There is no need of telling the ladies at once," said Thurstane to Coronado, as they rode side by side in rear of the caravan. "Let them be quiet as long as they can be. Their trouble will come soon enough."
"How many were there, do you think?" was the reply of a man who was much occupied with his own chances. "Were there a hundred?"
"It's hard to estimate a mere black line like that. Yes, there must be a hundred, besides stragglers. Their beasts have suffered, of course, as well as ours. They have come fast, and there must be a lot in the rear. Probably both bands are along."
"The devils!" muttered Coronado. "I hope to God they will all perish of thirst and hunger. The stubborn, stupid devils! Why should they follow ushere?" he demanded, looking furiously around upon the accursed landscape.
"Indian revenge. We killed too many of them."
"Yes," said Coronado, remembering anew the son of the chief. "Damn them! I wish we could have killed them all."
"That is just what we must try to do," returned Thurstane deliberately.
"The question is," he resumed after a moment of business-like calculation of chances—"the question is mainly this, whether we can go twenty-five miles quicker than they can go thirty-five. We must be the first to reach the river."
"We can spare a few beasts," said Coronado. "We must leave the weakest behind."
"We must not give up provisions."
"We can eat mules."
"Not till the last moment. We shall need them to take us back."
Coronado inwardly cursed himself for venturing into this inferno, the haunting place of devils in human shape. Then his mind wandered to Saratoga, New York, Newport, and the other earthly heavens that were known to him. He hummed an air; it was thebrindisiof Lucrezia Borgia; it reminded him of pleasures which now seemed lost forever; he stopped in the middle of it. Between the associations which it excited—the images of gayety and splendor, real or feigned—a commingling of kid gloves, bouquets, velvet cloaks, and noble names—between these glories which so attracted his hungry soul and the present environment of hideous deserts and savage pursuers, what a contrast there was! There, far away, was the success for which he longed; here, close at hand, was the peril which must purchase it. At that moment he was willing to deny his bargain with Garcia and the devil. His boldest desire was, "Oh that I were in Santa Fé!"
By Coronado's side rode a man who had not a thought for himself. A person who has not passed years in the army can hardly imagine the sense ofresponsibilitywhich is ground into the character of an officer. He is a despot, but a despot who is constantly accountable for the welfare of his subjects, and who never passes a day without many grave thoughts of the despots above him. Superior officers are in a manner his deities, and the Army Regulations have for him the weight of Scripture. He never forgets by what solemn rules of duty and honor he will be judged if he falls short of his obligations. This professional conscience becomes a destiny to him, and guides his life to an extent inconceivable by most civilians. He acquires a habit of watching and caring for others; he cannot help assuming a charge which falls in his way. When he is not governed by the rule of obedience, he is governed by the rule of responsibility. The two make up his duty, and to do his duty is his existence.
At this moment our young West Pointer, only twenty-three or four years old, was gravely and grimly anxious for his four soldiers, for all these people whom circumstance had placed under his protection, and even for his army mules, provisions, and ammunition. His only other sentiment was a passionate desire to prevent harm or even fear from approaching Clara Van Diemen. These two sentiments might be said to make up for the present his entire character. As we have already observed, he had not a thought for himself.
Presently it occurred to the youngster that he ought to cheer on his fellow-travellers.
Trotting up with a smile to Mrs. Stanley and Clara, he asked, "How do you bear it?"
"Oh, I am almost dead," groaned Aunt Maria. "I shall have to be tied on before long."
The poor woman, no longer youthful, it must be remembered, was indeed badly jaded. Her face was haggard; her general get-up was in something like scarecrow disorder; she didn't even care how she looked. So fagged was she that she had once or twice dozed in the saddle and come near falling.
"It was outrageous to bring us here," she went on pettishly. "Ladies shouldn't be dragged into such hardships."
Thurstane wanted to say that he was not responsible for the journey; but he would not, because it did not seem manly to shift all the blame upon Coronado.
"I am very, very sorry," was his reply. "It is a frightful journey."
"Oh, frightful, frightful!" sighed Aunt Maria, twisting her aching back.
"But it will soon be over," added the officer. "Only twenty miles more to the river."
"The river! It seems to me that I could live if I could see a river. Oh, this desert! These perpetual rocks! Not a green thing to cool one's eyes. Not a drop of water. I seem to be drying up, like a worm in the sunshine."
"Is there no water in the flasks?" asked Thurstane.
"Yes," said Clara. "But my aunt is feverish with fatigue."
"What I want is the sight of it—and rest," almost whimpered the elder lady.
"Will our horses last?" asked Clara. "Mine seems to suffer a great deal."
"Theymustlast," replied Thurstane, grinding his teeth quite privately. "Oh, yes, they will last," he immediately added. "Even if they don't, we have mules enough."
"But how they moan! It makes me cringe to hear them."
"Twenty miles more," said Thurstane. "Only six hours at the longest. Only half a day."
"It takes less than half a day for a woman to die," muttered the nearly desperate Aunt Maria.
"Yes, when she sets about it," returned the officer. "But we haven't set about it, Mrs. Stanley. And we are not going to."
The weary lady had no response ready for words of cheer; she leaned heavily over the pommel of her saddle and rode on in silence.
"Ain't the same man she was," slyly observed Phineas Glover with a twist of his queer physiognomy.
Thurstane, though not fond of Mrs. Stanley, would not now laugh at her expense, and took no notice of the sarcasm. Glover, fearful lest he had offended, doubled the gravity of his expression and tacked over to a fresh subject.
"Shouldn't know whether to feel proud 'f myself or not, 'f I'd made this country, Capm. Depends on what 'twas meant for. If 'twas meant to live in, it's the poorest outfit I ever did see. If 'twas meant to scare folks, it's jest up to the mark. 'Nuff to frighten a crow into fits. Capm, it fairly seems more than airthly; puts me in mind 'f things in the Pilgrim's Progress—only worse. Sh'd say it was like five thousin' Valleys 'f the Shadow 'f Death tangled together. Tell ye, believe Christian 'd 'a' backed out 'f he'd had to travel through here. Think Mr. Coronado 's all right in his top hamper, Capm? Do, hey? Wal, then I'm all wrong; guess I'm 's crazy's a bedbug. Wouldn't 'a'ketched me steerin' this course of my own free will 'n' foreknowledge. Jest look at the land now. Don't it look like the bottomless pit blowed up 'n' gone to smash? Tell ye, 'f the Old Boy himself sh'd ride up alongside, shouldn't be a mite s'prised to see him. Sh'd reckon he had a much bigger right to be s'prised to ketch me here."
After some further riding, shaking his sandy head, staring about him and whistling, he broke out again.
"Tell ye, Capm, this beats my imagination. Used to think I c'd yarn it pooty consid'able. But never can tell this. Never can do no manner 'f jestice to it. Look a there now. There's a nateral bridge, or 'n unnateral one. There's a hole blowed through a forty foot rock 's clean 's though 'twas done with Satan's own field-piece, sech 's Milton tells about. An' there's a steeple higher 'n our big one in Fair Haven. An' there's a church, 'n' a haystack. If the devil hain't done his biggest celebratin' 'n' carpenterin' 'n' farmin' round here, d'no 's I know where he has done it. Beatsme, Capm; cleans me out. Can't do no jestice to it. Can't talk about it. Seems to me 's though I was a fool."
Yes, even Phineas Glover's small and sinewy soul (a psyche of the size, muscular force, and agility of a flea) had been seized, oppressed, and in a manner smashed by the hideous sublimity of this wilderness of sandstone, basalt, and granite.
Two hours passed, during which, from the nature of the ground, the travellers could neither see nor be seen by their pursuers. Then came a breathless ascent up another of the monstrous sandstone terraces. Thurstane ordered every man to dismount, so as to spare the beasts as much as possible. He walked by the side of Clara, patting, coaxing, and cheering her suffering horse, and occasionally giving a heave of his solid shoulder against the trembling haunches.
"Let me walk," the girl presently said. "I can't bear to see the poor beast so worried."
"It would be better, if you can do it," he replied, remembering that she might soon have to call upon the animal for speed.
She dismounted, clasped her hands over his arm, and clambered thus. From time to time, when some rocky step was to be surmounted, he lifted her bodily up it.
"How can you be so strong?" she said, looking at him wonderingly and gratefully.
"Miss Van Diemen, you give me strength," he could not help responding.
At last they were at the summit of the rugged slope. The animals were trembling and covered with sweat; some of them uttered piteous whinnyings, or rather bleatings, like distressed sheep; five or six lay down with hollow moans and rumblings. It was absolutely necessary to take a short rest.
Looking ahead, Thurstane saw that they had reached the top of the tableland which lies south of the San Juan, and that nothing was before them for the rest of the day but a rolling plateau seamed with meandering fissures of undiscoverable depth. Traversable as the country was, however, there was one reason for extreme anxiety. If they should lose the trail, if they should get on the wrong side of one of those profound and endless chasms, they might reach the river at a point where descent to it would be impossible, and might die of thirst within sight of water. For undoubtedly the San Juan flowed at the bottom of one of those amazing cañons which gully this Mer de Glace in stone.
An error of direction once committed, the enemy would not give them time to retrieve it, and they would be slaughtered like mad dogs with the foam on their mouths.
Thurstane remembered that it would be his terrible duty in the last extremity to send a bullet through the heart of the woman he worshipped, rather than let her fall into the hands of brutes who would only grant her a death of torture and dishonor. Even his steady soul failed for a moment, and tears of desperation gathered in his eyes. For the first time in years he looked up to heaven and prayed fervently.
From the unknown destiny ahead he turned to look for the fate which pursued. Walking with Coronado to the brink of the colossal terrace, and sheltering himself from the view of the rest of the party, he scanned the trail with his glass. The dark line had now become a series of dark specks, more than a hundred and fifty in number, creeping along the arid floor of the lower plateau, and reminding him of venomous insects.
"They are not five miles from us," shuddered the Mexican. "Cursed beasts! Devils of hell!"
"They have this hill to climb," said Thurstane, "and, if I am not mistaken, they will have to halt here, as we have done. Their ponies must be pretty well fagged by this time."
"They will get a last canter out of them," murmured Coronado. His soul was giving way under his hardships, and it would have been a solace to him to weep aloud. As it was, he relieved himself with a storm of blasphemies. Oaths often serve to a man as tears do to a woman.
"We must trot now," he said presently.
"Not yet. Not till they are within half a mile of us. We must spare our wind up to the last minute."
They were interrupted by a cry of surprise and alarm. Several of the muleteers had strayed to the edge of the declivity, and had discovered with their unaided eyesight the little cloud of death in the distance. Texas Smith approached, looked from under his shading hand, muttered a single curse, walked back to his horse, inspected his girths, and recapped his rifle. In a minute it was known throughout the train that Apaches were in the rear. Without a word of direction, and in a gloomy silence which showed the general despair, the march was resumed. There was a disposition to force a trot, which was promptly and sternly checked by Thurstane. His voice was loud and firm; he had instinctively assumed responsibility and command; no one disputed him or thought of it.
Three mules which could not rise were left where they lay, feebly struggling to regain their feet and follow their comrades, but falling back with hollow groanings and a kind of human despair in their faces. Mile after mile the retreat continued, always at a walk, but without halting. It was long before the Apaches were seen again, for the ascent of the plateau lost them a considerable space, and after that they were hidden for a time by its undulations. But about four in the afternoon, while the emigrants were still at least five miles from the river, a group of savage horsemen rose on a knoll not more than three miles behind, and uttered a yell of triumph. There was a brief panic, and another attempt to push the animals, which Thurstane checked with levelled pistol.
The train had already entered a gully. As this gully advanced it rapidly broadened and deepened into a cañon. It was the track of an extinct river which had once flowed into the San Juan on its way to the distant Pacific. Its windings hid the desired goal; the fugitives must plunge into it blindfold; whatever fate it brought them, they must accept it. They were like men who should enter the cavern of unknown goblins to escape from demons who were following visibly on their footsteps.
From time to time they heard ferocious yells in their rear, and beheld their fiendish pursuers, now also in the cañon. It was like Christian tracking the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and listening to the screams and curses of devils. At every reappearance of the Apaches they had diminished the distance between themselves and their expected prey, and at last they were evidently not more than a mile behind. But there in sight was the river; there, enclosed in one of its bends, was an alluvial plain; rising from the extreme verge of the plain, and overhanging the stream, was a bluff; and on this bluff was what seemed to be a fortress.
Thurstane sent all the horsemen to the rear of the train, took post himself as the rearmost man, measured once more with his eye the space between his charge and the enemy, cast an anxious glance at the reeling beast which bore Clara, and in a firm ringing voice commanded a trot.
The order and the movement which followed it were answered by the Indians with a yell. The monstrous and precipitous walls of the cañon clamored back a fiendish mockery of echoes which seemed to call for the prowlers of the air to arrive quickly and devour their carrion.
The scene was like one of Doré's most extravagant designs of abysses and shadows. The gorge through which swept this silent flight and screaming chase was not more than two hundred feet wide, while it was at least fifteen hundred feet deep, with walls that were mainly sheer precipices.
As the fugitives broke into a trot, the pursuers quickened their pace to a slow canter. No faster; they were too wise to rush within range of riflemen who could neither be headed off nor flanked; and their hardy mustangs were nearly at the last gasp with thirst and with the fatigue of this tremendous journey. Four hundred yards apart the two parties emerged from the sublime portal of the cañon and entered upon the little alluvial plain.
To the left glittered the river; but the trail did not turn in that direction; it led straight at the bluff in the elbow of the current. The mules and horses followed it in a pack, guided by their acute scent toward the nearest water, a still invisible brooklet which ran at the base of the butte. Presently, while yet a mile from the stream, they were seized by a mania. With a loud beastly cry they broke simultaneously into a run, nostrils distended and quivering, eyes bloodshot and protruding, heads thrust forward with fierce eagerness, ungovernably mad after water. There was no checking the frantic stampede which from this moment thundered with constantly increasing speed across the plain. No order; the stronger jostled the weaker; loads were flung to the ground and scattered; the riders could scarcely keep their seats. Spun out over a line of twenty rods, the cavalcade was the image of senseless rout.
Of course Thurstane was furious at this seemingly fatal dispersion; and he trumpeted forth angry shouts of "Steady there in front! Close up in the rear!"
But before long he guessed the truth—water! "They will rally at the drinking place," he thought. "Forward the mules!" he yelled. "Steady, you men here! Hold in your horses. Keep in rear of the women. I'll shoot the man who takes the lead."
But even Spanish bits could do no more than detain the horses a rod or two behind the beasts of burden, and the whole panting, snorting mob continued to rush over the loamy level with astonishing swiftness.
Meanwhile the leading Apaches, not now more than fifty in number, were swept along by the same whirlwind of brute instinct. They diverged a little from the trail; their object apparently was to overlap the train and either head it off or divide it; but their beasts were too frantic to be governed fully. Before long there were two lines of straggling flight, running parallel with each other at a distance of perhaps one hundred yards, and both storming toward the still unseen rivulet. A few arrows were thrown; four or five unavailing shots were fired in return; the hiss of shaft andpingof ball crossed each other in air; but no serious and effective fight commenced or could commence. Both parties, guided and mastered by their lolling beasts, almost without conflict and almost without looking at each other, converged helplessly toward a verdant, shallow depression, through the centre of which loitered a clear streamlet scarcely less calm than the heaven above. Next they were all together, panting, plunging, splashing, drinking, mules and horses, white men and red men, all with no other thought than to quench their thirst.
The Apaches, who had probably made their cruel journey without flasks, seemed for the moment insatiable and utterly reckless. Many of them rolled off their tottering ponies into the rivulet, and plunging down their heads drank like beasts. There were a few minutes of the strangest peace that ever was seen. It was in vain that two or three of the hardier or fiercer Chiefs and braves shouted and gestured to their comrades, as if urging them to commence the attack. Manga Colorada, absorbed by a thirst which was more burning than revenge, did not at first see the slayer of his boy, and when he did could not move toward him because of fevered mustangs, who would not budge from their drinking, or who were staggering blind with hunger. Thurstane, keeping his horse beside Clara's, watched the lean figure and restless, irritable face of Delgadito, not ten yards distant. Mrs. Stanley had halted helplessly so near an Apache boy that he might have thrust her through with his lance had he not been solely intent upon water.
It was fortunate for the emigrants that they had reached the stream a few seconds the sooner. Their thirst was first satiated; and then men and animals began to draw away from their enemies; for even the mules of white men instinctively dread and detest the red warriors. This movement was accelerated by Thurstane, Coronado, Texas Smith, and Sergeant Meyer calling to one and another in English and Spanish, "This way! this way!" There seemed to be a chance of massing the party and getting it to some distance before the Indians could turn their thoughts to blood.
But the manoeuvre was only in part accomplished when battle commenced. Little Sweeny, finding that his mule was being crowded by an Apache's horse, uttered some indignant yelps. "Och, ye bloody naygur! Get away wid yerself. Get over there where ye b'long."
This request not being heeded, he made a clumsy punch with his bayonet and brought the blood. The warrior uttered a grunt of pain, cast a surprised angry stare at the shaveling of a Paddy, and thrust with his lance. But he was probably weak and faint; the weapon merely tore the uniform. Sweeny instantly fired, and brought down another Apache, quite accidentally. Then, banging his mule with his heels, he splashed up to Thurstane with the explanation, "Liftinant, they're the same bloody naygurs. Wan av um made a poke at me, Liftinant."
"Load your beece!" ordered Sergeant Meyer sternly, "und face the enemy."
By this time there was a fierce confusion of plungings and outcries. Then came a hiss of arrows, followed instantaneously by the scream of a wounded man, the report of several muskets, a pinging of balls, more yells of wounded, and the splash of an Apache in the water. The little streamlet, lately all crystal and sunshine, was now turbid and bloody. The giant portals of the cañon, although more than a mile distant, sent back echoes of the musketry. Another battle rendered more horrible the stark, eternal horror of the desert.
"This way!" Thurstane continued to shout. "Forward, you women; up the hill with you. Steady, men. Face the enemy. Don't throw away a shot. Steady with the firing. Steady!"
The hostile parties were already thirty or forty yards apart; and the emigrants, drawing loosely up the slope, were increasing the distance. Manga Colorada spurred to the front of his people, shaking his lance and yelling for a charge. Only half a dozen followed him; his horse fell almost immediately under a rifle ball; one of the braves picked up the chief and bore him away; the rest dispersed, prancing and curveting. The opportunity for mingling with the emigrants and destroying them in a series of single combats was lost.
Evidently the Apaches, and their mustangs still more, were unfit for fight. The forty-eight hours of hunger and thirst, and the prodigious burst of one hundred and twenty miles up and down rugged terraces, had nearly exhausted their spirits as well as their strength, and left them incapable of the furious activity necessary in a cavalry battle. The most remarkable proof of their physical and moral debilitation was that in all this mêlée not more than a dozen of them had discharged an arrow.
If they would not attack they must retreat, and that speedily. At fifty yards' range, armed only with bows and spears, they were at the mercy of riflemen and could stand only to be slaughtered. There was a hasty flight, scurrying zigzag, right and left, rearing and plunging, spurring the last caper out of their mustangs, the whole troop spreading widely, a hundred marks and no good one. Nevertheless Texas Smith's miraculous aim brought down first a warrior and then a horse.
By the time the Apaches were out of range the emigrants were well up the slope of the hill which occupied the extreme elbow of the bend in the river. It was a bluff or butte of limestone which innumerable years had converted into marl, and for the most part into earth. A thin turf covered it; here and there were thickets; more rarely trees. Presently some one remarked that the sides were terraced. It was true; there were the narrow flats of soil which had once been gardens; there too were the supporting walls, more or less ruinous. Curious eyes now turned toward the seeming mound on the summit, querying whether it might not be the remains of an antique pueblo.
At this instant Clara uttered a cry of anxiety, "Where is Pepita?"
The girl was gone; a hasty looking about showed that; but whither? Alas! the only solution to this enigma must be the horrible word, "Apaches." It seemed the strangest thing conceivable; one moment with the party, and the next vanished; one moment safe, and the next dead or doomed. Of course the kidnapping must have been accomplished during the frenzied riot in the stream, when the two bands were disentangling amid an uproar of plungings, yells, and musket shots. The girl had probably been stunned by a blow, and then either left to float down the brook or dragged off by some muscular warrior.
There was a halt, an eager and prolonged lookout over the plain, a scanning of the now distant Indians through field glasses. Then slowly and sadly the train resumed its march and mounted to the summit of the butte.
Here, in this land of marvels, there was a new marvel. Incredible as the thing seemed, so incredible that they had not at first believed their eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused, general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de Montezuma!"
The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins of the Gila, was of adobes. Large cakes of mud, four or five feet long and two feet thick, had been moulded in cases, dried in the sun, and laid in regular courses to the height of twenty feet. Centuries (perhaps) of exposure to weather had so cracked, guttered, and gnawed this destructible material, that at a distance the pile looked not unlike the natural monuments which fire and water have builded in this enchanted land, and had therefore not been recognized by the travellers as human handiwork.
What they now saw was a rampart which ran along the brow of the bluff for several hundred yards. Originally twenty feet high, it had been so fissured by the rains and crumbled by the winds, that it resembled a series of peaks united here and there in a plane surface. Some of the gaps reached nearly to the ground, and through these it could be seen that the wall was five feet across, a single adobe forming the entire thickness. All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall.
Filing to the left a few yards, the emigrants found a deep fissure through which the animals stumbled one by one over mounds of crumbled adobes. Thurstane, entering last, looked around him in wonder. He was inside a quadrilateral enclosure, apparently four hundred yards in length by two hundred and fifty in breadth, the walls throughout being the same mass of adobe work, fissured, jagged, gray, solemn, and in their utter solitariness sublime.
But this was not the whole ruin; the fortress had a citadel. In one corner of the enclosure stood a tower-like structure, forty-five or fifty feet square and thirty in altitude, surmounted on its outer angle by a smaller tower, also four-sided, which rose some twelve or fourteen feet higher. It was not isolated, but built into an angle of the outer rampart, so as to form with it one solid mass of fortification. The material was adobe; but, unlike the other ruins, it was in good condition; some species of roofing had preserved the walls from guttering; not a crevice deformed their gray, blank, dreary faces.
Instinctively and without need of command the emigrants had pushed on toward this edifice. It was to be their fortress; in it and around it they must fight for life against the Apaches; here, where a nameless people had perished, they must conquer or perish also. Thurstane posted Kelly and one of the Mexicans on the exterior wall to watch the movements of the savage horde in the plain below. Then he followed the others to the deserted citadel.
Two doorways, one on each of the faces which looked into the enclosure, offered ingress. They were similar in size and shape, seven feet and a half in height by four in breadth, and tapering toward the summit like the portals of the temple-builders of Central America. Inside were solid mud floors, strewn with gray dust and showing here and there a gleam of broken pottery, the whole brooded over by obscurity. It was discoverable, however, that the room within was of considerable height and size.
There was a hesitation about entering. It seemed as if the ghosts of the nameless people forbade it. This had been the abode of men who perhaps inhabited America before the coming of Columbus. Here possibly the ancestors of Montezuma had stayed their migrations from the mounds of the Ohio to the pyramids of Cholula and Tenochtitlan. Or here had lived the Moquis, or the Zunians, or the Lagunas, before they sought refuge from the red tribes of the north upon the buttes south of the Sierra del Carrizo. Here at all events had once palpitated a civilization which was now a ghost.
"This is to be our home for a little while," said Thurstane to Clara. "Will you dismount? I will run in and turn out the snakes, if there are any. Sergeant, keep your men and a few others ready to repel an attack. Now, fellows, off with the packs."
Producing a couple of wax tapers, he lighted them, handed one to Coronado, and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma. They were in a hall about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which evidently ran across the whole front of the building. The walls were hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals, geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design and disposed without regard to order. A doorway led into a small central room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, one on each side.
The ceilings of all the rooms were supported by unhewn beams, five or six inches thick, deeply inserted into the adobe walls. In the ceiling of the rearmost hall (the one which had no direct outlet upon the enclosure) was a trapdoor which offered the only access to the stories above. A rude but solid ladder, consisting of two beams with steps chopped into them, was still standing here. With a vague sense of intrusion, half expecting that the old inhabitants would appear and order them away, Thurstane and Coronado ascended. The second story resembled the first, and above was another of the same pattern. Then came a nearly flat roof; and here they found something remarkable. It was a solid sheathing or tiling, made of slates of baked and glazed pottery, laid with great exactness, admirably cemented and projecting well over the eaves. This it was which had enabled the adobes beneath to endure for years, and perhaps for centuries, in spite of the lapping of rains and the gnawing of winds.
On the outermost corner of the structure, overlooking the eddying, foaming bend of the San Juan, rose the isolated tower. It contained a single room, walled with hard-finish and profusely etched with figures in vermilion. No furniture anywhere, nor utensils, nor relics, excepting bits of pottery, precisely such as is made now by the Moquis, various in color, red, white, grayish, and black, much of it painted inside as well as out, and all adorned with diamond patterns and other geometrical outlines.
"I have seen Casas Grandes in other places," said Coronado, "but nothing like this. This is the only one that I ever found entire. The others are in ruins, the roofs fallen in, the beams charred, etc."
"This was not taken," decided the Lieutenant, after a tactical meditation. "This must have been abandoned by its inhabitants. Pestilence, or starvation, or migration."
"We can beat off all the Apaches in New Mexico," observed Coronado, with something like cheerfulness.
"We can whip everything but our own stomachs," replied Thurstane.
"We have as much food as those devils."
"But water?" suggested the forethoughted West Pointer.
It was a horrible doubt, for if there was no water in the enclosure, they were doomed to speedy and cruel death, unless they could beat the Indians in the field and drive them away from the rivulet.
When Thurstane came out of the Casa Grande he would have given some years of his life to know that there was water in the enclosure.
Yet so well disciplined was the soul of this veteran of twenty-three, and so thoroughly had he acquired the wise soldierly habit of wearing a mask of cheer over trouble, that he met Clara and Mrs. Stanley with a smile and a bit of small talk.
"Ladies, can you keep house?" he said. "There are sixteen rooms ready for you. The people who moved out haven't left any trumpery. Nothing wanted but a little sweeping and dusting and a stair carpet."
"We will keep house," replied Clara with a laugh, the girlish gayety of which delighted him.
Assuming a woman's rightful empire over household matters, she began to direct concerning storage, lodgment, cooking, etc. Sharp as the climbing was, she went through all the stories and inspected every room, selecting the chamber in the tower for herself and Mrs. Stanley.
"I never can get up in this world," declared Aunt Maria, staring in dismay at the rude ladder. "So this is what Mr. Thurstane meant by talking about a stair carpet! It was just like him to joke on such a matter. I tell you I never can go up."
"Av coorse ye can get up," broke in little Sweeny impatiently. "All ye've got to do is to put wan fut above another an' howld on wid yer ten fingers."
"I should like to seeyoudo it," returned Aunt Maria, looking indignantly at the interfering Paddy.
Sweeny immediately shinned up the stepped beam, uttered a neigh of triumphant laughter from the top, and then skylarked down again.
"Well,youare a man," observed the strong-minded lady, somewhat discomfited. "Av coorse I'm a man," yelped Sweeny. "Who said I wasn't? He's a lying informer. Ha ha, hoo hoo, ho ho!"
Thus incited, pulled at moreover from above and boosted from below, Aunt Maria mounted ladder after ladder until she stood on the roof of the Casa Grande.
"If I ever go down again, I shall have to drop," she gasped. "I never expected when I came on this journey to be a sailor and climb maintops."
"Lieutenant Thurstane is waving his hand to us," said Clara, with a smile like sunlight.
"Let him wave," returned Mrs. Stanley, weary, disconsolate, and out of patience with everything. "I must say it's a poor place to be waving hands."
Meantime Thurstane had beckoned a couple of muleteers to follow him, and set off to beat the enclosure for a spring, or for a spot where it would be possible to sink a well with good result. Although the search seemed absurd on such an isolated hill, he had some hopes; for in the first place, the old inhabitants must have had a large supply of water, and they could not have brought it up a steep slope of two hundred feet without great difficulty; in the second place, the butte was of limestone, and in a limestone region water makes for itself strange reservoirs and outlets.
His trust was well-grounded. In a sharply indented hollow, twenty feet below the general surface of the enclosure, and not more than thirty yards from the Casa Grande, he found a copious spring. About it were traces of stone work, forming a sort of ruinous semicircle, as though a well had been dug, the neighboring earth scooped out, and the sides of the opening fenced up with masonry. By the way, he was not the first to discover the treasure, for the acute senses of the mules had been beforehand with him, and a number of them were already there drinking.
Calling Meyer, he said, "Sergeant, get a fatigue party to work here. I want a transverse trench cut below the spring for the animals, and a guard at the spring itself to keep it clear for the people."
Next he hurried away to the spot where he had posted Kelly to watch the Apaches.
Climbing the wall, he looked about for the Apaches, and discovered them about half a mile distant, bivouacked on the bank of the rivulet.
"They have been reinforced, sir," said Kelly. "Stragglers are coming up every few minutes."
"So I perceive. Have you seen anything of the girl Pepita?"
"There's a figure there, sir, against that sapling, that hasn't moved for half an hour. I've an idea it's the girl, sir, tied to the sapling."
Thurstane adjusted his glass, took a long steady look, and said sombrely, "It's the girl. Keep an eye on her. If they start to do anything with her, let me know. Signal with your cap."
As he hurried back to the Casa Grande he tried to devise some method of saving this unfortunate. A rescue was impossible, for the savages were numerous, watchful, and merciless, and in case they were likely to lose her they would brain her. But she might be ransomed: blankets, clothing, and perhaps a beast or two could be spared for that purpose; the gold pieces that he had in his waist-belt should all go of course. The great fear was lest the brutes should find all bribes poor compared with the joys of a torture dance. Querying how he could hide this horrible affair from Clara, and shuddering at the thought that but for favoring chances she might have shared the fate of Pepita he ran on toward the Casa, waving his hand cheerfully to the two women on the roof Meantime Clara had been attending to her housekeeping and Mrs. Stanley had been attending to her feelings. The elder lady (we dare not yet call her an old lady) was in the lowest spirits. She tried to brace herself; she crossed her hands behind her back, man-fashion; she marched up and down the roof man-fashion. All useless; the transformation didn't work; or, if she was a man, she was a scared one.
She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she glanced at the awful solitude around her. Notwithstanding the river, there still was the desert. The little plain was but an oasis. Two miles to the east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the west it disappeared in a similar chasm. The walls of these gorges rose abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters. All around were the monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau. No outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then came towering precipices. The travellers were like ants gathered on an inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry. The horizon was elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were at once near the spectator and far above him. The overhanging plateaux strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven.
What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were horrible to the weary and sorrowful. On the other side of the San Juan towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them was at least four hundred feet high. To a lost wanderer, and especially to a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying. It seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were full of malevolence. Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could scale. It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their pandemonium.
The whole landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair might not have been out of place.
There was no comfort in the river. It came out of unknown and inhospitable mystery, and went into a mystery equally unknown and inhospitable. To what fate it might lead was as uncertain as whence it arrived. A sombre flood, reddish brown in certain lights, studded with rocks which raised ghosts of unmoving foam, flowing with a speed which perpetually boiled and eddied, promising nothing to the voyager but thousand-fold shipwreck, a breathless messenger from the mountains to the ocean, it wheeled incessantly from stony portal to stony portal, a brief gleam of power and cruelty. The impression which it produced was in unison with the sublime malignity and horror of the landscape.
Depressed by fatigue, the desperate situation of the party, and the menace of the frightful scene around her, Mrs. Stanley could not and would not speak to Thurstane when he mounted the roof, and turned away to hide the tears in her eyes.
"You see I am housekeeping," said Clara with a smile. "Look how clean the room in the tower has been swept. I had some brooms made of tufted grass. There are our beds in the corners. These hard-finished walls are really handsome."
She stopped, hesitated a moment, looked at him anxiously, and then added, "Have you seen Pepita?"
"Yes," he replied, deciding to be frank. "I think I have discovered her tied to a tree."
"Oh! to be tortured!" exclaimed Clara, wringing her hands and beginning to cry.
"We will ransom her," he hurried on. "I am going down to hold a parley with the Apaches."
"You!" exclaimed the girl, catching his arm. "Oh no! Oh, why did we come here!"
Fearing lest he should be persuaded to evade what he considered his duty, he pressed her hand fervently and hurried away. Yes, he repeated, it washisduty; to parley with the Apaches was a most dangerous enterprise; he did not feel at liberty to order any other to undertake it.
Finding Coronado, he said to him, "I am going down to ransom Pepita. You know the Indians better than I do. How many people shall I take?"
A gleam of satisfaction shot across the dark face of the Mexican as he replied, "Go alone."
"Certainly," he insisted, in response to the officer's stare of surprise. "If you take a party, they'll doubt you. If you go alone, they'll parley. But, my dear Lieutenant, you are magnificent. This is the finest moment of your life. Ah! only you Americans are capable of such impulses. We Spaniards haven't the nerve."
"I don't know their scoundrelly language."
"Manga Colorada speaks Spanish. I dare say you'll easily come to an understanding with him. As for ransom, anything that we have, of course, excepting food, arms, and ammunition. I can furnish a hundred dollars or so. Go, my dear Lieutenant; go on your noble mission. God be with you."
"You will see that I am covered, if I have to run for it."
"I'll see to everything. I'll line the wall with sharpshooters."
"Post your men. Good-by."
"Good-by, my dear Lieutenant."
Coronado did post his men, and among them was Texas Smith. Into the ear of this brute, whom he placed quite apart from the other watchers, he whispered a few significant words.
"I told ye, to begin with, I didn't want to shute at brass buttons," growled Texas. "The army's a big thing. I never wanted to draw a bead on that man, and I don't want to now more 'n ever. Them army fellers hunt together. You hit one, an' you've got the rest after ye; an' four to one's a mighty slim chance."
"Five hundred dollars down," was Coronado's only reply.
After a moment of sullen reflection the desperado said, "Five hundred dollars! Wal, stranger, I'll take yer bet."
Coronado turned away trembling and walked to another part of the wall. His emotions were disordered and disagreeable; his heart throbbed, his head was a little light, and he felt that he was pale; he could not well bear any more excitement, and he did not want to see the deed done. Rifle in hand, he was pretending to keep watch through a fissure, when he observed Clara following the line of the wall with the obvious purpose of finding a spot whence she could see the plain. It seemed to him that he ought to stop her, and then it seemed to him that he had better not. With such a horrible drumming in his ears how could he think clearly and decide wisely?
Clara disappeared; he did not notice where she went; did not think of looking. Once he thrust his head through his crevice to watch the course of Thurstane, but drew it back again on discovering that the brave lad had not yet reached the Apaches, and after that looked no more. His whole strength seemed to be absorbed in merely listening and waiting. We must remember that, although Coronado had almost no conscience, he had nerves.
Let us see what happened on the plain through the anxious eyes of Clara.