XXIVSHEATH-KNIFE
Infull darkness he left the two horses fastened among the alders of the stream bed and started for the dobe house. At least, there were no horses of rurales waiting at the gateway of El Relicario, nor any lights to be seen in front; but moving around to the side, he fancied a faint ashen shaft farther on from an unglazed window. He knocked. A pall seemed to have fallen upon the world—before the step, the moving candle—and the señorita’s face, finger pressed across her lips as she pointed to the little room. Then he was following her candle through the passage.
There was Bart—bloodless, startlingly altered, but asleep, not dead, as he had thought in the first flash. And presently, Elbert began to feel himself standing about like a stranger. Either he hadn’t seen straight at daybreak, or the señorita had become a woman since then; no face of a peon girl by a lonely roadway, this woman of El Relicario to whom he had offered coins, but of one risen to emergencies, as only quality and breeding can arise. She had led him out into a hallway and was speaking as one who had found her place and work in life.
‘He will be so glad to hear you have come. Ihave said you would return, but he could not be sure. There is food for you waiting—please come.’
He followed her through a firelit room, where the elderly man he had seen in the patio in the morning, arose and bowed with courtly grace, and from behind him the faded-faced woman smiled in the manner of far-off times. A wooden table, a pitcher of milk, corn-bread and rubbery cheese of goat’s milk—but Elbert hardly tasted what he put in his mouth.
Horsemen had ridden by in the early morning to Fonseca, the señorita told him, an unusual thing, but they had not stopped, and others had passed later, going the opposite way.
She left the room and returned, dragging a small sack of grain for the horses, which Bart had asked her to procure, and there was a package of food for Elbert’s need of to-morrow—all this spoken of with frequent gestures toward the wounded man in the little room; her every thought and sentence apparently blent with something Bart had said or wished. Yes, he would live, she repeated, but his recovery would take many days. Then Elbert heard his own words in careful Spanish of the book:
‘Tell him I shall be waiting—that I will come again to-morrow night or the next night—that I shall wait for him until he is ready to travel—’
‘You mean to leave now—at once?’
‘Yes, I see that he is being well taken care of. The horses might call to any horses traveling by—’
His words were getting slower and quieter, but there was in his body and brain an intolerable burden having to do with the thought of to-morrow—not only to-morrow, but ‘many days.’ It had been all he could do to live through to-day. Now he left her, knowing she would steal back to the little room at once. He crossed the inner garden, the room of the harp, nodding to the elders, crossed the yard, passed out through the dobe gate—in unbroken darkness, moving toward the alders of the creek-bed.
His feet dragged; the early night, so dark that he had to keep constant thought to the road, burdened by the sack of grain over his shoulder. Still distant from the alders, he began to listen for Mamie’s signal, but the sound of trotting hoofs came instead.
One horse only, coming his way, no accompaniment of wheels. He let down the grain-bag at the side of the road, instinctively aware that if either of his horses had pulled loose a hunch like this on his shoulder would make any effort at capture practically impossible in the dark.
‘Hoo-ooo, baby, easy, little one!’ he softly intoned. He could see no movement yet; the hoofswere still. Then like an explosion, a snorting blast of fright from the horse ahead—not Mamie. He well knew her protest of fear. ‘Come in, kid—easy, old-timer!’ from his lips, as he moved forward very slowly, his fingers closing at last upon the broken bridle-rein of the sorrel.
The big runner was standing almost rigidly in the dark, as Elbert made a quick tie of the two shortened leather ends, his ears still straining for a sound from the mare. He mounted, but had difficulty in turning back toward the alders. The gelding fought the bit, tossing his head. The man’s unspurred heel knocked his ribs, but the runner snorted like a crazed colt at this, standing straight up, and Bart’s warning about the spur flashed back. Elbert, getting control again, snatched off a small branch as he brushed the foliage at the road-side, and the sorrel started forward at a stiff-legged, unwilling trot, still unruly as he neared the alders.
The mare was gone. Holding to the shortened bridle-rein, Elbert was on his knees, lighting matches—an ashen smile on his lips. Yes, he actually smiled at himself now—so miserably hopeless a few minutes before, just at the thought of waiting days. Something to be dismal about now.
Countless horse-tracks among the alders, conveying nothing to his eyes. Passing rurales hadpossibly heard the horses, and tried to take them. Possibly one of the police had mounted the sorrel and attempted to force him with a spur. That might account for old Mallet-head breaking loose.
Elbert rode slowly on toward Fonseca, head bowed. Yes, they had given him something to be dismal about all right. What hope—if they had taken her into town.
He couldn’t brace into Fonseca and attack the town single-handed. Still he kept on, until—it was almost a sob that surged up in his throat—the sound of a nicker—far to the right! His hand darted forward to the muzzle of the sorrel to shut off possible answer. No need of that. The big gelding was unconcerned about that far-off sound.
Mamie—letting him know! He could tell that call of hers in the midst of a herd of horses; and the rurales or whoever had her, were not pushing on to Fonseca, but eastward toward the mountains. ‘I’m coming!’ he muttered. He flicked his branch on the sorrel’s flanks.
Minutes afterward, the call again; and presently from over the eastern mountains, appeared the moon, a shaving less full than last night.
Last night—that moon from the cell of Arecibo—far-off as childhood.
Two hours, at least, of fierce strain—following those whom he supposed were looking for him; finally a faint haze of firelight over the rim of a hill just ahead—the mysterious party having come to a halt. If they were rurales, why hadn’t they gone to Fonseca—why this halt in the open? He was close as he dared to be with the sorrel. Even now, the big stake-horse might undertake to announce his presence and need of forage. Elbert turned him back to a live-oak scrub, made him fast, and retraced his way up the slope again, struggling with weariness and many fears. The moon was now well clear of the eastern ridges.
On top, he gradually discerned two figures stretched out in the firelight below—in ordinary Mexican garb, not in uniform of rurales. Moving nearer, he presently made out Mamie, still saddled, a third Mexican sitting on the ground at her head. Seconds crawled by, as he waited breathlessly, with a vague hope that this third one might doze, but nothing of the kind. Instead, the Mexican now rose, leading his charge to a low tree clump, where other horses were faintly to be discerned.
Evidently the Mexican was about to fasten the mare. Once tied, there was less chance for her to break clear, than from the Mexican’s hand. Only a second or two to think in; in fact,Elbert didn’t think it out. His fingers reached for the handle of the sheath-knife, bringing the whistle to his lips. Its shrill scream cut forth. Mamie’s head lifted and yanked back, but the Mexican did not lose his grip upon the rein. Running forward Elbert whistled again; then stretched his lungs in a yell, as strange and startling to himself as to the sleepy Sonora hills.
The knife in his hand was not to kill; he had merely not put it back in its sheath. The two men by the fire were on their feet; the third stubbornly trying to gain the saddle, but Mamie slid from under, and kept pulling away. Then an instant of utter amazement—the face of Mamie’s tormentor near enough to be recognized—one of Bart’s bandits whom he had raced away from the night before.
Elbert changed the quality of his shouting, but the Mexican had let go the bridle-rein, and was speeding after his two companions, who had vanished from the circle of firelight. They were at their horses—mounting and spurring away. Elbert rubbed his dazed eyes—they were gone—Mamie trotting toward him, head extra high to keep from tripping on her bridle-reins.
The whistle had done it—and his shouts, which must have sounded like a platoon closing in, to the leaderless bandit party. The whistle for Mamie, the yell—Elbert did not know howhe had come to vent that, unless for his own courage.
Never before had he felt such a sense of belonging anywhere, as when he folded over the Pitcairn stock-saddle. Sitting straight did not suffice; he seemed fallen to clinging to the neck of his mare. Even a minute later, he would have forgotten Bart’s sorrel, tied securely in the bristling live-oak scrub, had not Mamie flirted her signal as she galloped by on the moon-drenched hill.
‘They sure thought I was the rurales,’ he laughed.
At this juncture he missed his saddle-bags.
‘I suppose Bart would go back and get them right now,’ he thought. ‘Not for me. Nothing in them I can’t do without. What silver there is—those three fellows I ditched last night—may need that!’
His eyes were craning about the sky to locate the north star.
‘I won’t have to tell Bart how I lost Mamie, nor about the other three,’ he communed later. ‘Now that I’ve got her back, I won’t have to speak of it at all.’
It was a different matter about that grain-sack, however. The horses would need that, and another drink from the creek to-night, before facing to-morrow in the brown and sultry hills. He made the big circle to the Fonseca road andthe alders, but was back in a star-rimmed mountain wilderness two hours before daybreak, the big gelding taking an occasional nip at the grain-bag as he trotted along.