WHAT HAPPENED AT THE OAK
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE OAK
Jack sat looking after the crowd that shuffled through the doorway into the sunlight. He thought he had believed that he would receive the sentence which the juryman had spoken so baldly; yet, after the words had been actually spoken, he stared blankly after Bill and the others, and incredulously at the Captain, who seated himself upon a bunk opposite to watch his prisoner, his pistol resting suggestively upon his knee. The boy lingered to shake Jack's unresponsive hand and mutter a broken sentence or two of gratitude and sympathy. But Jack scarcely grasped his meaning, and his answer sounded chillingly calm; so that the boy, wincing under the cold stare of the Captain and the seeming indifference of the prisoner, turned away with downy chin a-tremble and in his eyes the look of horrified awe which sometimes comes to a youth who has seen death hesitate just over his head, pass him by, and choose another. In the doorway he stopped and looked back bewildered. Jack had said that he loved life and would hate to leave it; and yet he sat there calmly, scraping idly with his boot-toe a little furrow in the loose sand, his elbows resting on his knees, his face unlined by frown or bitterness, his eyes bent abstractedly upon the shallow trench he was desultorily digging. He did not look as the boy believed a man should look who has just been condemned to die the ignominious death of hanging. The boy shuddered and went out into the sunlight, dazed with this glimpse he had got of the inexorable hardness of life.
Jack did not even know when the boy left. He, also, was looking upon the hardness of life, but he was looking with the eyes of the fighter. So long as Jack Allen had breath in his body, he would fight to keep it there. His incredulity against the verdict swung to a tenacious disbelief that it would really come to the worst. So long as he was alive, so long as he could feel the weight of the dagger in his sleeve, it was temperamentally impossible for him to believe that he was going to die that day.
Plans he made and smoothed them in the dirt with his toe. If they did not bind his arms... They had not tied Sandy's arms, he remembered; and he wondered if a dagger concealed in Sandy's sleeve would have made any essential difference in the result of that particular crime of the Committee. He sickened at a vivid memory of how Sandy had ridden away, just a week or so before; and of the appealing glance which he had sent toward Bill's place when Shorty started to lead the buckskin from before the prison tent with six men walking upon either side and a curious crowd straggling after. Would a dagger in Sandy's sleeve have made any difference?
Then his thoughts swung to the Mexican who had told him of the trick, only the night before. It had amused Jack to experiment with his own knife; and the very novelty of the thing had impelled him to slip his dagger into the new hiding-place that morning when he dressed. The Captain had not discovered it there—but would it make any difference? It occurred to him that he need not die the death of dangling and strangling at the end of the rope, at any rate; if it came to dying... Jack became acutely conscious of the steady beat in his chest, and immediately afterward felt the same throb in his throat; he could stop that beating whenever he chose, if they did not bind his arms.
"Horse's ready, Captain," announced Shorty succinctly, thrusting his head through the closed flaps; and the Captain rose instantly and made a commanding gesture to his prisoner.
Jack swept the loose dirt back into the furrow with one swing of his foot and stood up. He went out quietly, two steps in advance of the Captain and the Captain's drawn pistol, and advanced unflinchingly towards the horse that stood saddled in the midst of the group of executioners, with the same curious crowd looking on greedily at the spectacle.
"Ever been on a horse?" asked the Captain, his deep voice little more than a growl.
"Once or twice," Jack answered indifferently.
"Climb on, then!"
Jack was young and he was very human. It might be his last hour on earth, but there rose up in him a prideful desire to show them whether he had ever been on a horse; he caught the saddle-horn with one hand and vaulted vaingloriously into the saddle without touching a toe to the stirrup. The buckskin ducked and danced sidewise at the end of the rope in Shorty's hand, and more than one gun flashed into sight at the unexpectedness of the move.
The Captain scowled at the exclamations of admiration from the crowd. "You needn't try any funny work, young man, or I'll tie you hand as well as foot!" he threatened sternly. "Give me that rope, Davis."
Then Jack paid in pain for his vanity, and paid in full. The Captain did not bind his arms—perhaps because of the crowd and a desire to seem merciful. But though he merely tied the prisoner's ankle after the usual manner, he knotted the small rope with a vicious yank, pulled it as tight as he could and passed the rope under the flinching belly of the buckskin to Davis, on the other side. Also he sent a glance of meaning which the other read unerringly and obeyed most willingly. Davis drew the rope taut under the cinch and tied Jack's other ankle as if he were putting the diamond hitch on a pack mule. The two stepped back and eyed him sharply for some sign of pain, when all was done.
"Thanks," drawled Jack. "Sorry I can't do as much for you." Whereupon he set his teeth against the growing agony of strained muscles and congesting arteries, and began to roll a cigarette with fingers which he held rigidly from trembling.
Bill Wilson, returning gloomily to the doorway of his place, grated an oath and turned away his head.
Some day, he promised himself vengefully, those two—yes, and the whole group of murderers moving briskly away from the tent—would pay for that outrage; and he prayed that the day might come soon.
He went heavily into the big room where men were already foregathering to gossip between drinks of the trial and of the man who was to die. Bill bethought him of the young stranger; made some inquiries of certain inoffensive individuals among the crowd, and sent Jim out with instructions to find the kid and bring him back with him.
Bill was standing in the door waiting for Jim to return, when, in a swirl of dust, came Dade galloping around a corner and to the very doorstep before he showed any desire to slow up. At the first tightening of the reins, the white horse stiffened his front legs, dug two foot-long furrows and stopped still. Bill had no enthusiasm for the perfect accomplishment of the trick. He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets and regarded the rider glumly.
"Well, you got here," he grunted, with the brevity of utter misery.
"You bet I did! I was away from the hacienda when the peon came, or I'd have got here sooner," Dade explained cheerfully, swinging to the ground with a jingle of his big, Mexican spurs that had little silver bells to swell the tinkly chimes when he moved. "Where's Jack?"
Big Bill Wilson's jaw trembled with an impulse towards tears which the long, harsh years behind him would not let him shed. "They've got him," he said in a choked tone, and waved a hand toward the west.
"Who's got him?" Dade clanked a step closer and peered sharply into Bill's face, with all the easy good humor wiped out of his own.
"The Committee. You're too late; they're taking him out to the oak. Been gone about ten minutes. They had it in for him, and—I couldn't do a thing! The men in this town—" Epithets rushed incoherently from Bill's lips, just as violent weeping marks the reaction from a woman's first silence in the face of tragedy.
Dade did not hear a word he was saying, after those first jerky sentences. He stood looking past Bill at a drunken Irishman who was making erratic progress up the street; and he was no more conscious of the Irishman than he was of Bill's scorching condemnation of the town which could permit such outrages.
"Watch Surry a minute!" he said abruptly, and hurried into the gambling hall. In a minute he was back again and lifting foot to the stirrup.
"How long did you say they've been gone?" he asked, without looking at Bill.
"Ten or fifteen minutes. Say, you can't do anything!"
Dade was already half-way up the block, a swirl of sand-dust marking his flight. Bill stared after him distressfully.
"He'll go and get his light put out—and he won't help Jack a damn bit," he told himself miserably, and went in. Life that day looked very hard to big-hearted Bill Wilson, and scarcely worth the trouble of living it.
It broke the heart of Dade Hunter to see how near the sinister procession was to the live oak that had come to be looked upon as the gallows of the Vigilance Committee; a gallows whose broad branches sheltered from rain and sun alike the unmarked graves of the men who had come there shuddering and looked upon it, and shuddering had looked no more upon anything in this world.
Until he was near enough to risk betraying his haste by the hoof-beats of his horse, Dade kept Surry at a run. Upon the crest of the slope which the procession was leisurely descending, he slowed to a lope; and so overtook the crowd that straggled always out to the hangings, came they ever so frequent. Reeling in the saddle, he came up with the stragglers, singing and marking time with a half-empty bottle of whisky.
The few who knew him looked at one another askance.
"Say, Hunter, ain't yuh got any feelin's? That there's your pardner on the hoss," one loose-jointed miner expostulated.
"Sure, I got feelin's! Have a d-drink?" Dade leered drunkenly at the speaker. "Jack's—no good anyway. Tol' 'im he'd get hung if he—have a d-drink?"
The loose-jointed one would, and so would his neighbors. The Captain glanced back at them, gave a contemptuous lift to his upper lip and faced again to the front.
Dade uncoiled his riata with aimless, fumbling fingers and swung the noose facetiously toward the bottle, uptilted over the eager mouth of a weazened little Irishman. He caught bottle and hand together, let them go with a quick flip of the rawhide and waggled his head in apology.
"Excuseme, Mike," he mumbled, while the Irishman stopped and glared. "Go awn! Have a drink. Mighta spilled it—shame!"
Jack looked back, his heart thumping heavily at sound of the voice, thick though it was and maudlin. Dade drunk and full of coarse foolery was a sight he had never before looked upon; but Dade's presence, drunk or sober, made his own plight seem a shade less hopeless. He did not dare a second glance, with Davis and the Captain walking at either stirrup; but he listened anxiously—listened and caught a drunken mumble from the rear, and a chorus of chuckling laughs coming after.
He looked ahead. The great oak was close, so close that he might have counted the narrow little ridges of red soil beneath; the ridges which he knew were the graves of those who had died before him. The great bough that reached out over the spot where the earth was trampled smooth in horrible significance—the branch from which a noosed rope dangled sinuously in the breeze that came straight off the ocean—swayed with majestic deliberation as if Fate herself were beckoning.
He clasped his hands upon the saddle-horn and, stealthily loosening the dagger-point from the hem of his sleeve, slid the weapon cautiously into his hand. When he felt the handle against his palm, he knew that he had been holding his breath, and that the sigh he gave was an involuntary relief that the others had not glimpsed the blade under his clasped fingers. He would not have to dangle from that swinging rope, at any rate.
"Hello, pard!" Dade's voice called thickly from close behind. "Looking for some rope?"
Jack turned his head just as the looped rawhide slithered past him and settled taut over the head of the startled buckskin. Like a lightning gleam slashing through the dark he saw Dade's plan, and played his own part unhesitatingly.
Two movements he made while the buckskin sat back upon his haunches and gathered his muscles for a forward spring. The first was to lean and send a downward sweep of the dagger across the rope by which Shorty was leading the horse, and the second was a backward lunge that drove the knife deep into the bared throat of the Captain, stunned into momentary inaction by the suddenness of Dade's assault.
The buckskin gave a mighty leap that caught Shorty unawares and sent him into a crumpled heap in the sand. Dade's riata, tight as a fiddle-string at first, slackened as the buckskin, his breath coming in snorts, surged alongside. Jack leaned again—this time to snatch the ivory-handled revolver from the holster on Dade's saddle. As well as he could with his legs held rigid by the rope that tied his ankles, he twisted in the saddle and sent leaden answer to the spiteful barking of the guns that called upon them to halt.
He Twisted in the Saddle and Sent Leaden Answer to The Spiteful Barking of the Guns.
He Twisted in the Saddle and Sent Leaden Answer to The Spiteful Barking of the Guns.
Davis he shot, and saw him sway and fall flat, with a smoking gun in his hand. Another crumpled forward; and Shorty, just getting painfully upon his feet, he sent into the sand again to stay; for his skill with small arms was something uncanny to witness, and his temper was up and turning him into a savage like the rest.
But the range was rapidly growing to rifle-length, and death fell short of his enemies after Shorty went down. When he saw his fourth bullet kick up a harmless little geyser of sand two rods in advance of the agitated crowd, he left off and turned to his friend.
"I thought you were drunk," he observed inanely, as is common to men who have just come through situations for which no words have been coined.
"You ain't the only one who made that mistake," Dade retorted grimly, and looked back. "Good thing those hombres are afoot. We'll get on a little farther and then we'll fix a hackamore so you can do your own riding,"
"I can't stand it to ride any farther—"
"Are you shot?" Dade pulled in a little and looked anxiously into his face.
"It's the rope. They tied it so tight it's torture. I'd never have believed it could hurt so—but they gave me an extra twist or two to show their friendship, I reckon."
Dade rode on beyond a little, wooded knoll before he stopped, lest the crowd, seeing them halt, might think it worth while to follow them afoot.
"They surely didn't intend you to fall off," he said whimsically, when his knife released the strain. But his lips tightened at the outrage; and his eyes, bent upon Jack's left ankle, wore the look of one who could kill without pity.
"They'll never do it to another man," declared Jack, with vindictive relish. "It was Davis and the Captain; I killed 'em both." He rolled stiffly from the saddle, found his feet like dead things and stumbled to a little hillock, where he sat down.
Dade, kneeling awkwardly in his heavy, bearskin chaparejos, picked at the bonds with the point of his knife. "Lucky you had on boots," he remarked. "Even as it is, you're likely to carry creases for a while. How the deuce did you manage to get into this particular scrape?—if I might ask!"
"I didn't get into it. This particular scrape got me. Say, it's lucky you happened along just when you did."
To this very obvious statement the other made no reply. He cut the last strand of the rope that bound Jack's ankles so mercilessly, and stood up. "You better take off your boots and rub some feeling into your feet while I make a hackamore for that horse. The sooner we get out of this, the better. What's left of the Committee will probably be pretty anxious to see you."
"Oh, damn the Committee!—as Bill remarked after the trial." Jack made an attempt to remove one of his boots, found the pain intolerable and desisted with a groan. "I wish they would show up," he declared. "I'd like to give them a taste of this foot-tying business!"
Dade went on tying the hackamore with a haste that might be called anxious. With just two bullets left in the pistol and with no powder upon his person for further reloading, he could not share Jack's eagerness to meet the Committee again. When Surry gave over rolling with his tongue the little wheel in his bit, and with lifted head and eyes alert perked his ears forward towards the hill they had just crossed, he slipped the hackamore hurriedly into place and turned to his friend.
"You climb on to Surry, and we'll pull out," he said shortly. "I wouldn't give two pesos for this buckskin, but we're going to add horse-stealing to our other crimes; and while it's all right to damn the Committee, it's just as well to do it at a distance, just now, old man."
The caution fell flat, for Jack was wholly absorbed by the pain in his feet and ankles, as the blood was being forced into the congested veins. Dade led the white horse close, to save him the discomfort of hobbling to it, and waited until Jack was in the saddle before he vaulted upon the tricky-eyed buckskin. He led the way down into a shallow depression which wound aimlessly towards the ocean; and later, when trees and bushes and precipitous bluffs threatened to bar their way, he swung abruptly to the east and south.
"Maybe you won't object so hard to Palo Alto now," he bantered at last, when at dusk he ventured out upon "El Camino Real" (which is pure Spanish for "The King's Highway"), that had linked Mission to Mission all down the fertile length of California when the land was wilderness. "Solitude ought to feel good, after to-day." When he got no answer, Dade looked around at the other.
Jack's face showed vaguely through the night fog creeping in from the clamorous ocean off to the west. His legs were hanging free of the stirrups, and his hands rested upon the high saddle-horn.
"Say, Dade," he asked irrelevantly and with a mystifying earnestness, "which do you think would kill a man quickest—a slash across the throat, or a stab in the heart?"
"I wouldn't call either one healthy. Why?"
"I was just wondering," Jack returned ambiguously. "If you hadn't happened along—say, how did you happen to come? Was that another sample of my fool's luck?" Since the coincidence had not struck him before, one might guess that he was accustomed to having Dade at his elbow when he was most needed.
"Bill Wilson sent word that you were making seven kinds of a fool of yourself—Bill named a few of them—and advised me to get you out of town. I've more respect for Bill's judgment than ever. I took his advice as it stood—and therefore, you're headed for safer territory than you were awhile ago. It ain't heaven," he added, "but it's next thing to it."
"I'm not hankering after heaven, right now," averred Jack. "Most any other place looks good to me; I'm not feeling a hit critical, Dade. And if I didn't say it before, old man, you're worth a whole regiment to a fellow in a fix."
HOSPITALITY
HOSPITALITY
If you would enjoy that fine hospitality which gives gladly to strangers and to friends alike of its poverty or plenty, and for the giving asks nothing in return, you should seek the far frontiers; but if you would see hospitality glorified into something more than a simple virtue, then you should find, if you can, one of the old-time haciendas that were the pride of early California.
Time was when the wild-eyed cattle which bore upon their fat-cushioned haunches the seared crescent that proclaimed them the property of old Don Andres Picardo (who owned, by grant of the king, all the upper half of the valley of Santa Clara) were free to any who hungered. Time was when a traveler might shoot a fat yearling and feast his fill, unquestioned by the don or the don's dark-eyed vaqueros.
Don Andres Picardo was a large-hearted gentleman; and to deny any man meat would bring to his cheeks a blush for his niggardliness. That was in the beginning, when he reigned in peace over the peninsula. When the vaqueros, jingling indignantly into the patio of his home, first told of carcasses slaughtered wantonly and left to rot upon the range with only the loin and perhaps a juicy haunch missing, their master smiled deprecatingly and waved them back whence they came. There were cattle in plenty. What mattered one steer, or even a fat cow, slain wastefully? Were not thousands left?
But when tales reached him of cattle butchered by the hundred, and of beef that was being sold for an atrocious price in San Francisco, the old Spaniard was shocked into laying aside the traditions and placing some check upon the unmannerly "gringos" who so abused his generosity.
He established a camp just within the northern boundary of his land; and there he stationed his most efficient watch-dog, Manuel Sepulveda, with two vaqueros whose business it was to stop the depredations.
Meat for all who asked for meat, paid they in gold or in gratitude—that was their "patron's" order. But they must ask. And the vaqueros rode diligently from bay to mountain slopes, and each day their hatred of the Americanos grew deeper, as they watched over the herds of their loved patron, that the gringos might not steal that which they might, if they were not wolves, have for the asking.
The firelight in the tule-thatched hut of Manuel Sepulveda winked facetiously at the black fog that peered in at the open door. A night wind from the north crept up, parted the fog like a black curtain and whispered something which set the flames a-dancing as they listened. The fog swung back jealously to hear what it was, and the wind went away to whisper its wonder-tale to the trees that rustled astonishment and nodded afterward to one another in approval, like the arrant gossips they were. The chill curtain fell straight and heavy again before the door, so that the firelight shone dimly through its folds; but not before Dade, riding at random save for the trust he put in the sure homing instinct of his horse, caught the brief gleam of light and sighed thankfully.
"We'll stop with old Manuel to-night," he announced cheerfully. "Here's his cabin, just ahead."
"And who's old Manuel?" asked Jack petulantly, because of the pain in his feet and his own unpleasant memories of that day.
"Don Andres Picardo's head vaquero. He camps here to keep an eye on the cattle. Some fellows from town have been butchering them right and left and doing a big business in beef, according to all accounts. Manuel hates gringos like centipedes, but I happened to get on the good side of him—partly because my Spanish is as good as his own. An Americano who has black hair and can talk Spanish like the don himself isn't an Americano, in Manuel's eyes."
While they were unsaddling under the oak tree, where the vaqueros kept their riding gear in front of the cabin, Manuel himself came to the door and stood squinting into the fog, while he flapped a tortilla dexterously between his brown palms.
"Is it you, Valencia??" he called out in Spanish, giving the tortilla a deft, whirling motion to even its edges.
Dade led the way into the zone of light, and Manuel stepped back with a series of welcoming nods. His black eyes darted curiously to the stranger, who, in Manuel's opinion, looked unpleasantly like a gringo, with his coppery hair waving crisply under his sombrero, and his eyes that were blue as the bay over there to the east. But when Dade introduced him, Jack greeted his squat host with a smile that was disarming in its boyish good humor, and with language as liquidly Spanish as Manuel's best Castilian, which he reserved for his talks with the patron on the porch when the señora and the young señorita were by.
The distrust left Manuel's eyes as he trotted across the hard-trodden dirt floor and laid the tortilla carefully upon a hot rock, where three others crisped and curled their edges in delectable promise of future toothsomeness.
He stood up and turned to Dade amiably, his knuckles pressing lightly upon his hips that his palms might be saved immaculate for the next little corn cake which he would presently slap into thin symmetry.
"Madre de Dios!" he cried suddenly, quite forgetting the hospitable thing he had meant to say about his supper. "You are hurt, Señor! The blood is on your sleeve and your hand."
Dade looked down at his hand and laughed. "I did get a scratch. I'll let you see what it's like."
"You never told me you got shot!" accused Jack sharply, from where he had thrown himself down on a bundle of blankets covered over with a bullock hide dressed soft as chamois.
"Never thought of it," retorted Dade in Spanish, out of regard for his host.
"We had some trouble with the gringos," he explained to Manuel. "There was a little shooting, and a bullet grazed my arm. It doesn't amount to much, but I'll let you look at it."
"Ah, the gringos!" Manuel spat after the hated name. "The patron is too good, too generous! They steal the cattle of the patron, though they might have all they need for the asking. Like the green worms upon the live oaks, they would strip the patron's herds to the last, lean old bull that is too tough even for their wolf teeth! Me, I should like to lasso and drag to the death every gringo who comes sneaking in the night for the meat which tastes sweeter when it is stolen. To-day Valencia rode down to the bayou—"
While he told indignantly the tale of the latest pillage, he bared the wounded arm. Jack got stiffly upon his swollen feet to look. It was not a serious wound, as wounds go; a deep gash in the bicep, where a bullet meant for Dade's heart had plowed under his upraised arm four inches wide of its mark. It must have been painful, though he had not once mentioned it; and a shamed flush stung Jack's cheeks when he remembered his own complaints because of his feet.
"You never told me!" he accused again, this time in the language of his host.
"The Señor Hunter has the brave heart of a Spaniard, though his blood is light," said Manuel rebukingly. "The Señor Hunter would not cry over a bigger hurt than this!"
Jack sat down again upon the bull-hide seat and dropped his face between his palms. Old Manuel spoke truer than he knew. Dade Hunter was made of the stuff that will suffer much for a friend and say nothing about it, and to-day was not the first time when Jack had all unwittingly given that friendship the test supreme.
Manuel carefully inspected the wound and murmured his sympathy. He pulled a bouquet of dry herbs from where it hung in a corner, under the low ceiling, and set a handful brewing in water, where the coals were golden-yellow with heat. He tore a strip of linen off Valencia's best shirt which he was saving for fiestas, and prepared a bandage, interrupting himself now and then to dart over and inspect the tortillas baking on the hot rock. For a fat man he moved with extraordinary briskness, and so managed to do three things at one time and do them all thoroughly; he washed and dressed the wound with the herbs squeezed into a poultice, rescued the tortillas from scorching, and spake his mind concerning the gringos who, he declared, were despoiling this his native land. Then he lifted certain pots and platters to the center of the hut and cheerfully announced supper; and squatted on the floor, facing his guests over the food.
"There's another thing that bothers me, Manuel," Dade announced humorously, when they three were seated around the pot of frijoles, the earthen pan of smoking carne-seco (which is meat flavored hotly after the Spanish style) and a stack of the tortillas Manuel's fat hands had created while he talked.
Manuel, bending a tortilla into a scoop wherewith to help himself to the brown beans, raised his black eyes anxiously. "But is there further hurt?" he asked, and glanced wistfully at the tortilla before laying it down that he might minister further to the señor.
"No—go on with your supper. There's a buckskin horse out there that the gringos may say I stole. I don't want the beast; he's about fourteen years old and he's got a Roman nose to beat Caesar himself, and a bad eye and a wicked heart."
"Dios!" murmured Manuel over the list of equine shortcomings and took a large, relieved bite of tortilla and beans. The señor was pleased to jest with a poor vaquero, but the señor would doubtless explain. He chewed luxuriously and waited, his black eyes darting from this face which he knew and liked, to that strange one of the blue eyes and the hair that was like the dullest of dull California gold.
"I don't like that caballo," went on Dade, helping himself to meat, "and so I'd hate like the deuce to be hung for stealing him; sabe?"
Manuel licked a finger before he spread his hands to show how completely he failed to understand. "But if the caballo does not please the señor, why then did the señor steal—"
"You see, I wanted to bring my partner—Señor Jack Allen—down here with me. And he was riding the caballo, and he couldn't get off—"
Manuel swore a Spanish oath politely, to please his guest who wished to amaze him.
"Because he was tied on." Dade failed just there to keep a betraying hardness out of his voice. "The Viligantes were—going to—hang him." The last two words were cut short off with the click of his jaws coming together.
Manuel thereupon swore more sincerely and spilled beans from his tortilla scoop. He knew the ways of the Committee. Four months ago—when the Committee was newer and more just—they had hanged the third cousin of his half-sister's husband. It is true, the man had killed a woman with a knife; yet Manuel's black beard bristled when he thought of the affront to his hypothetical kinship.
"I had to take the two together," Dade explained, trying with better success to speak lightly. "And now, if I turn the buckskin loose, he may go back—and he may not. I was wondering—"
Manuel cut him short. "To-morrow I ride to town," he said. "I will take the caballo back with me, if that pleases the señors. I will turn him loose near the Mission, and he will go to his stable.
"The señor," he added, "was very brave.Madre de Dios!To run away with a prisoner of the Vigilantes! But they will surely kill the señor for that; the taking of the horse, that is nothing." His teeth shone briefly under his black mustache. "One can die but once," he pointed out, and emphasized his meaning by a swift glance at Jack, moodily nibbling the edge of a corn cake. "But if the horse does not please the señor—"
Dade caught his meaning and laughed a little over it. "The horse," he said, "belongs to the Committee; my friend does not."
"Sí, Señor—but surely that is true. Only—" he stroked his crisp beard thoughtfully—"the señors would better go to-morrow to the patron. There the gringos dare not come. In this poor hut the señors may not be safe—for we are but three poor vaqueros when all are here. We will do our best—"
"Three vaqueros," declared Dade with fine diplomacy, "as brave as the three who live here, would equal twenty of the Committee. But we will not let it come to that."
Manuel took the flattery with a glimpse of white teeth and a deprecatory wave of the hand, and himself qualified it modestly afterward.
"With the knife—perhaps. But the gringos have guns which speak fast. Still, we would do our best—"
"Say, if he's going back to town to-morrow," spake Jack suddenly, from where he reclined in the shadow "why can't I write a note to Bill Wilson and have him send down my guns? The Captain took them away, you know; but he won't object to giving them back now!" His voice was bitter.
"The rest of them might. You seem to think that when you killed Perkins you wiped out the whole delegation—which you didn't. What was the row about; if you don't mind telling me?"
"I thought you knew," said Jack quite sincerely, which proved more than anything how absorbed he was in his own part in the affair. He shifted his head upon his clasped hands so that his eyes might rest upon the waning firelight, where the pot of frijoles, set back from supper, was still steaming languidly in the hot ashes.
"You started it yourself, two weeks ago," he announced whimsically, to lighten a little the somber tale. "If you hadn't bought that white horse from that drunken Spaniard, I'd be holding a handful of aces and kings to-night, most likely, in Bill Wilson's place. And my legs wouldn't be aching like the devil," he added, reminded anew of his troubles, when he shifted his position. "It's all your fault, bought the horse."
Dade grinned and bent to hold a twig in the coals, that he might light a cigarette. "All right, I'm the guilty party. Let's have the consequences of my evil deed," he advised, settling back on his heels and lowering an eyelid at Manuel in behalf of this humorous partner of his.
"You bought the horse and broke the Spaniard's heart and ruined his temper. And he and Sandy had a fight, and—So," he went on, after a two-minute break in the argument, "when I heard Swift sneering something about Sandy, last night, I rose up in meeting and told him and some others what I thought of 'em. I was not," he explained, "thinking nice thoughts at the time. You see, Perkins, since he got the lead, has gathered a mighty scaly bunch around him, and they've been running things to suit themselves.
"Then, Swift and two or three others held up a boy from the mines to-day, and I happened to see it. I interfered; fact is, I killed a couple of them. So they arrested both of us, went through a farce trial, and were trying to hurry me into Kingdom Come before Bill Wilson got a rescue party together, when you come along. That's all. They let the kid go—which was a good thing. I don't think they'll be down here after me. In fact, I've been thinking maybe I'd go back, in a day or so, and have it out with them."
"Yes, that's about what you'd be thinking, all right," retorted Dade unemotionally. "Sounds perfectly natural." The tone of him, being unsympathetic, precipitated an argument which flung crisp English sentences back and forth across the cabin. Manuel, when the words grew strange and took on a harsh tang which to his ear meant anger, diplomatically sought his blankets and merged into the shadow of the corner farthest from the fire and nearest the door. The señors were pleased to disagree; if they fought, he had but to dodge out into the night and neutrality. The duties of hospitality weighed hard upon Manuel during that half-hour or so.
Dade's cigarette stub, flung violently into the heart of the fire glow, seemed to Manuel a crucial point in the quarrel; he slipped back the blankets, ready to retreat at the first lunge of open warfare. He breathed relief, however, when Dade got up and stretched his arms to the dried tules overhead, and laughed a lazy surrender of the argument, if not of his opinion upon the subject.
"You're surely the most ambitious trouble-hunter I ever saw," he said, returning to his habitual humorous drawl, with the twinkle in his eyes that went with it. "Just the same, we'll not go back to the mine just yet. Till the dust settles, we're both better off down here with Don Andres Picardo. I don't want to be hung for the company I keep. Besides—"
"I'll bet ten ounces there's a señorita," hazarded. Jack maliciously. "You're like Bill Wilson; but you can preach caution till your jaws ache; you can't fool me into believing you're afraid to go back to the mine. Is there a señorita?"
"You shut up and go to sleep," snapped Dade, and afterward would not speak at all.
Manuel, in the shadow, frowned over the only words he understood—Don Andres Picardo and señorita. The señors were agreeable companions, and they were his guests. But they were gringos, after all. And if they should presume to lift desireful eyes to the little Señorita Teresa—Teresita, they called her fondly who knew her—Manuel's mustache lifted suddenly at one side at the bare possibility.
THE VALLEY
THE VALLEY
In the valley of Santa Clara, which lies cradled easily between mountains and smiles up at the sun nearly the whole year through, Spring has a winter home, wherein she dwells contentedly while the northern land is locked in the chill embrace of the Snow King. In February, unless the north wind sweeps down jealously and stays her hand, she flings a golden brocade of poppies over the green hillsides and the lower slopes which the forest has left her. Time was when she spread a deep-piled carpet of mustard over the floor of the valley as well, and watched smiling while it grew thicker and higher and the lemon-yellow blossoms vied with the orange of the poppies, until the two set all the valley aglow.
Now it was March, and the hillsides were ablaze with the poppies, and the valley floor was soft green and yellow to the knees; with the great live oaks standing grouped in stately calm, like a herd of gigantic, green elephants scattered over their feeding-ground and finding the peace of repletion with the coming of the sun.
The cabin of Manuel squatted upon a little rise of ground at the head of the valley. When Jack stood in the doorway and looked down upon the green sweep of grazing ground with the hills behind, and farther away another range facing him, he owned to himself that it was good to be there. The squalidness of the town he had left so tumultuously struck upon his memory nauseatingly.
Spring was here in the valley, even though the mountains shone white beyond. A wind had come out of the south and driven the fog back to the bay, and the sun shone warmly down upon the land. Two robins sang exultantly in the higher branches of the oak, where they had breakfasted satisfyingly upon the first of the little, green worms that gave early promise of being a pest until such time as they stiffened and clung inertly, waiting for the dainty, gray wings to grow and set them aflutter over the tree upon which they had fed. One of them dropped upon Jack's arm while he stood there and crawled aimlessly from the barren buckskin to his wrist. He flung it off mechanically. Spring was here of a truth; in the town he had not noticed her coming.
"You're right, Dade," he declared suddenly, over his shoulder. "This beats getting up at noon and going through the motions of living for twelve or fourteen hours in town. I believe I'll have Manuel get me a riding outfit, if he will. Maybe I'll take you up on that rodeo proposition. Reckon your old don will give me a job?"
"Won't cost a peso to find out," said Dade, coming out and standing beside him in the sun. "I've been talking to Manuel, and he thinks we'd better pull out right away. Valencia's got an extra saddle here, and Manuel says he'll catch a horse for you."
"I believe I'll send a letter to Bill," proposed Jack. "He'll give Manuel enough dust to buy what I need; and I ought to let him know how we made out, anyway."
A blank leaf from the little memorandum book he always carried, and a bullet for pencil—perforce, the note was brief; but it told what he wanted: gold to buy a riding outfit, his pistols which Perkins had taken from him, and news of Bill's well-being. When the paper would hold no more and hold it legibly, he folded it carefully so that it would not smudge, and gave it to his host.
"What if the Committee catches you with that buckskin, Manuel?" he asked abruptly. The risk Manuel would run had not before occurred to him. "Dade he's liable to get into trouble, if they catch him with that horse; let's turn the darned thing loose."
"Me, I shall not ride where the gringos will see me," broke in Manuel briskly. "The señors need not be alarmed. I shall keep away from El Camino Real. At the Mission I will buy what the señor desires, and I will bring it to him at the hacienda."
"Get the best they've got," Jack adjured him. "An outfit better than Dade's, if you can find one. Bill Wilson has got about twelve hundred dollars of mine; get the best if it cleans the sack." He grinned at Dade. "If you're going to bully me into turning vaquero again, I'm going to have the fun of riding in style, anyway. You've set the pace, you know. I never saw you so gaudy. Er—what did you say her name is?"
"I didn't say."
"Must be serious. Too bad." Jack shook his head dolefully. "Say, Manuel, do you know a good riata, when you see one lying around loose?"
"Sí, Señor. Me, I have braided the riatas and bridles since I was so high." From the height of his measuring hand from the beaten clay beneath the oak, he proclaimed himself an infant prodigy; but Jack did not happen to be looking at him and so remained unamazed.
"Well, you ought to know something about them. Get the best riata you can find. I leave it to your judgment."
"Sí, Señor. To-morrow I will bring them to you." He hesitated, his eyes dwelling curiously upon the coppery hair of this stranger, whose presence he was not quite sure that he did not resent vaguely. Dade he had come to accept as a man whose innate kindliness, which was as much a part of him as the blood in his veins, wiped out any stain of alien birth; but this blue-eyed one—"The señor himself is perhaps a judge of riatas?" he insinuated, politely veiling the quick jealousy of his nature.
"We-el-l—you bring me one ready to fall all to pieces, and I reckon I could tell it was poor, after it had stranded."
Dade laughed. "Judge of riatas? You wait till you see him with one in his hand!"
Manuel's teeth shone briefly, but the smile did not come from his heart. "Me, I shall surely bring the señor a riata worthy even of his skill," he declared sententiously, as he walked away with his bridle slung over his arm and his back very straight.
"That sounded sarcastic," commented Jack, looking after him. "What's the matter? Is the old fellow jealous?" Dade flicked his cigarette against the trunk of the oak to remove the white crown of ashes, and shook his head. "What of?" he asked bluntly. "Half your trouble, Jack, comes from looking for it. Manuel's a fine old fellow. I stayed a few days with him here when I first left town, and rode around with him. He's straight as the road to heaven, and I never heard him brag about anything, except the goodness of his 'patron,' and the things some of his friends can do. I'll have to ask you to saddle up for me, Jack; this arm of mine's pretty stiff and sore this morning. Watch how Surry's trained! You wouldn't believe some of the things he'll do."
He turned towards the horse, feeding knee-deep in grass and young mustard in the opening farther down the slope, and whistled a long, high note. The white head went up with a fling of the heavy mane, to perk ears forward at the sound. Then he turned and came towards them at a long, swinging walk that was a joy to behold.
"Do you know, I hate the way nature's trimmed down the life of a horse to a few measly years," said Dade. "A good horse you can love like a human—and fifteen years is about as long as he can expect to live and amount to anything. Surry's four now, by his teeth. In fifteen years I'll still be at my best; I'll want that horse like the very devil; and he'll be dead of old age, if he lasts that long. And a turtle," he added resentfully after a pause, "lives hundreds of years, just because the darned things aren't any good on earth!"
"Trade him for a camel," drawled Jack unsympathetically. "They're more durable."
"Watch him come, now!" Dade gave three short, shrill whistles, and with a toss of head by way of answer, Surry came tearing up the slope, straight for his master. The shadow of the oak was all about him when he planted his front feet stiffly and stopped; flared his nostrils in a snort and, because Dade waved his hand to the right, wheeled that way, circled the oak at a pace which set his body aslant and stopped again quite as suddenly as before. Dade held out his hand, and Surry came up and rubbed the palm playfully with his soft muzzle.
"For a camel, did you say?" Dade grinned triumphantly at the other over the sleek back of his pet.
"What'll you take for him?"
Dade pulled the heavy forelock straight with fingers that caressed with every touch. "José Pacheco asked me that, and I came pretty near hitting him. I don't reckon I'll ever be drunk enough to name a price. But I might—"
Jack glanced at him, and saw that his lips were half parted in a smile born of some fancy of his own, and that his eyes were seeing dreams. Jack stared for a full minute before Dade's thoughts jerked back to his surroundings. Dade was not a dreamer; or if he were, Jack had never had occasion to suspect him of it, and he wondered a little what it was that had sent Dade into dreams at that hour of the morning. But Manuel was returning, riding one pony and leading another; so Jack threw away his cigarette stub and picked up the saddle blanket.
Manuel came up and saddled his mount silently, his deft fingers working mechanically while his black eyes stole sidelong looks at Jack saddling Surry, as if he would measure the man anew. While he was anathematizing the buckskin in language for which he would need to do a penance later on, if he confessed the blasphemy to the padre, Jack threw Valencia's saddle upon the little sorrel pony Manuel had led up for him to ride.
"Truly one would not like to die for having stolen such a beast," stated Manuel earnestly, knotting a macarte around the neck of the buckskin. "He is only fit to carry men to hangings. Come, accursed one! The Vigilantes are weeping for one so like themselves. Adios, Señors!"
He rode away, still heaping opprobrium upon the reluctant buckskin, and speedily he disappeared behind a clump of willows clothed in the pale green of new leaves.
Dade dropped the bullock hide which served for a door, to signify that the master of the house was absent. Though the old don's cattle might be butchered under his very nose, Manuel's few belongings would not be molested, though only the dingy brown hide of a bull long since gone the way of all flesh barred the way; a week, one month or six the hut would stand inviolate from despoliation; for such was the unwritten law of a land where life was held cheaper than the things necessary to preserve life.
On such a morning, when the air was like summer and all the birds were rehearsing most industriously their parts in the opening chorus with which Spring meant to celebrate her return to the northern land, a ride down the valley was pure joy to any man whose soul was tuned in harmony with the great outdoors; and trouble lagged and could not keep pace with the riders.
Half-way down, they met Valencia, a slim young Spaniard with one of those amazing smiles that was like a flash of sunlight, what with his perfect teeth, his eyes that could almost laugh out loud, and a sunny soul behind them. Valencia, having an appetite for acquiring wisdom of various kinds and qualities, knew some English and was not averse to making strangers aware of the accomplishment.
Therefore, when the two greeted him in Spanish, he calmly replied: "Hello, pardner," and pulled up for a smoke.
"How you feel for my dam-close call to-morrow?" he wanted to know of Jack, when he learned his name.
"Pretty well. How did you know—?" began Jack, but the other cut him short.
"José, she heard on town. The patron, she's worry leetle. She's 'fraid for Señor Hunter be keel. Me, I ride to find for-sure." Valencia dropped his match, and leaned negligently from the saddle and picked it out of the grass, his eyes stealing a look at the stranger as he came up.
"Good work," commented Jack under his breath to Dade. But Valencia's ears were keen for praise; he heard, and from that moment he was Jack's friend.
"I borrowed your saddle, Valencia," Jack announced, meaning to promise a speedy return of it.
"Not my saddle; yours and mine, amigo," amended Valencia quite simply and sincerely. "Mine, she's yours also. You keep him." While he smoked the little, corn-husk cigarette, he eyed with admiration the copper-red hair upon which Manuel had looked with disfavor.
Before they rode on and left him, his friendliness had stamped an agreeable impression upon Jack's consciousness. He looked back approvingly at the sombreroed head bobbing along behind a clump of young manzanita just making ready to bloom daintily.
"I like that vaquero," he stated emphatically. "He's worth two of Manuel, to my notion."
"Valencia? He's not half the man old Manuel is. He gambles worse than an Injun, and never has anything more than his riding outfit and the clothes on his back, they tell me. And he fights like a catamount when the notion strikes him; and it doesn't seem to make much difference whether he's got an excuse or not. He's a good deal like you, in that respect," he added, with that perfect frankness which true friendship affects as a special privilege earned by its loyalty.
"Manuel's got tricky eyes," countered Jack. "He's the kind of Spaniard that will 'Sí, Señor,' while he's hitching his knife loose to get you in the back. I know the breed; I lived amongst 'em before I ever saw you. Valencia's the kind I'd tie to."
"And I was working with 'em when you were saying 'pitty horsey!' My first job was with a Spanish outfit. A Mexican majordomo licked me into shape when I was sweet sixteen. And," he clinched the argument mercilessly, "I was sixteen and drawing a man's pay on rodeo when you wore your pants buttoned on to your waist!"
"And you don't know anything yet!" Jack came back at him. Whereat they laughed and called a truce, which was the way of them.