Part 10

IN full 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. I have 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 hoofs were 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 had possibly 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 how he 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 and the 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.

XXV

ELBERT LEARNS TO WAIT

NEXT day Elbert climbed the foothills and explored the mountains eastward. He found many tracks of water, stream-beds of the rainy season, but it was now autumn, the dryest time of the year, and hours passed before he followed a trickle up a dim ravine to its first pool. He had to grant that it was the horses that helped him locate the water in the first place, but there was queer satisfaction about the experience, as if he had been marooned on an island and his life depended. No water ever tasted just like that. He watched the horses drink and graze, and made them stand for a half hour at a time in the sludgy grass at the side of the stream, while he stared up from the shadowed cañon to where the sunlight burned on the ridges. ‘Only one thing better than water for a horse’s hoofs,’ old Bob Leadley had said, ‘and that’s more water.’

No further need to cross the Fonseca road night and morning to reach the creek. He would risk a night-call at El Relicario once in a while--grub for himself and forage for the horses, but the old ruin was now fifteen, possibly eighteen miles, and Bart was in good hands.... One by one, Elbert beat back the days, though he actually lost count, even before it became apparent that Bart Leadley was going to live. During his first two or three calls at the ranch house, there was a good deal of doubt on this main point. From the very beginning, the big fellow weakly pressed him not to stay.

‘No use of you hangin’ up all these days in the mountains, Doc,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow north across the Border, as soon as I can make a break.’

‘But I’m getting to like it out there,’ Elbert would tell him. ‘Only lonesome a little at first. Why, there’s no place I could leave the sorrel for you, if I went. The rurales would know that horse anywhere.’

‘Take him along. I’ll get a cayuse, somewhere--’

‘No, Bart, I came down here for you. That’s what your father wanted--for me to bring you back--’

The other’s eyes held the low ceiling. ‘I’d hate to have you _after_ me,’ he laughed. ‘I mean like a sheriff--’

Elbert conned this all next day in his high solitude. He couldn’t get it quite clear. Surely, no sheriff would ever suffer from hopeless spells of faint-heartedness such as he was given to.... They were oddly embarrassed with each other in those first talks, but when silence became oppressive, Bart would enquire regarding some detail concerning the horses. On this one subject alone, Elbert expatiated.

‘A little grain from here is keeping them fit,’ he would report in effect. ‘And say, your Mallet-head sure has an appetite,’ he once observed. ‘Mountains agree with him. He flavors up his forage with all sorts of new leaves--even pine needles. Mamie’s more particular.’

Elbert caught a gleam from the cot. Bart’s black eyes were holding him. ‘You like ’em, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Horses.’

‘Sure,’ said Elbert.

‘I knew--the minute you climbed on that mare in front of the quarters in Arecibo. We were a bit in a hurry right then, but you didn’t jerk her round. I got to know pretty well before daylight that you were a real hand with a horse, Mister.’

So Bart was really fooled. He had said something of this kind before, that first daybreak here in El Relicario, but Elbert had feared then that his mind was wandering. He didn’t answer now.

‘I like these people,’ Bart was saying, about the Mexicans. ‘I get along with ’em pretty well, but they don’t savvy the horse. It doesn’t seem to run in the blood. Monte Vallejo who had all Sonora thinking he was a caballero--even to Monte, a horse was something to ride to death. All these people saw and hack and ride on the bit. That’s what got us into trouble with those race-horses, and that’s what got to me from you, the first minute in front of el cuartel--to see a white man sitting a horse and knowing what he was doing and what her mouth was made of.’

‘Your father told me all about Mamie,’ Elbert said.

‘All the telling in the world wouldn’t do it, if a man didn’t have the feel of a bridle-rein on his own hook.’

It was like being called to the carpet to be presented with a diploma or a medal--no time for Elbert to trust his voice to relate that Mamie was practically his first experience, and that only a few months ago.

‘How was it that the race-horses got you into trouble?’ he asked.

‘We couldn’t manage ’em. They were used to being babied for the track--used to the sprint; didn’t know anything about saving themselves for distance-running. There was a lot of young stuff among them, and all our old cayuses were done for. We tried hammering the bang-tails to the road, and they went crazy.... I drew the prize of the lot. All old Mallet-head knows is to eat and run--so long as you keep the spur off him!’

‘He keeps his feelings to himself, so they can’t be hurt. He’s sure rugged,’ said Elbert.

Sometimes Bart seemed to be listening for a step as they talked; and when the señorita appeared in the doorway, Bart’s eyes and hers would meet and cling for a second.

There began to be a secret heaviness connected with this for Elbert. What would happen to her when Bart left the little room of the cross and the white flower?... So much taller she seemed, than in that first moment in the dobe gateway. Had he seen her then as now, he might not have asked her help. Perhaps, even if he had not heard the song of the corn-dust maiden, he could never have thought of imposing as he did that morning upon Valencia Vidaña, the daughter of El Relicario, now a dobe ruin of many rooms, but in its day one of the famous ranch-houses of Sonora.

‘Great name in these parts in the old days,’ Bart once whispered. ‘Valencia’s father was one of the big men of Sonora under Diaz, but everything’s broken down since. Loot and confiscation’s the trick here--worst of all from Juan Cordano. We happened in the right house. The old don told me the other morning, he had hoped to see Monte Vallejo in Cordano’s place here in Sonora.’

Long talks concerning all that led to Elbert’s coming to Sonora. Bart’s deep laugh once sounded in the little room.

‘I’m used to Mexicans,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much about the States. I s’pose there are a lot of people up there you can trust offhand, like Dad trusted you.’

‘You see, he had to have somebody interested in Sonora, and willing to do a lot of riding,’ Elbert answered. ‘You know, he wanted you to have Mamie, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find you--a chance even, that I might not. He didn’t want her to change hands another time. He always thought about her feelings--’

Elbert found himself staring at the little crucifix as he talked. Bart didn’t seem to be troubled as much as he was--about the feelings of the one in this house.... One night after about ten days in El Relicario, Bart turned over and drew his right shoulder clear from its covering to show how the wound was healing.

Elbert cleared his throat. ‘I don’t see how you stayed in the saddle from that bridge until daybreak when we got here,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Why, that bullet would have knocked me out of the saddle like--like--’

He had quite forgotten--‘clear through to Nogales.’

A low laugh again. ‘Say, amigo mio--say, Mister, you’re sure nervous as a filly, about being caught makin’ a move like a gamester!’

Elbert conned that all the next day in the hills.

XXVI

SILENCE

MEANWHILE he was learning undreamed-of-matters about himself. No amount of riding such as he had done down in the valleys could have shown him what he was getting now, in the stillness and sunlight and starlight of high country. A hundred times a day, the flick of a lizard over leaf or pebble or twig called his eye; that was the only continual distraction. The days were mainly silent, though the nights were full of sound; the coyotes sometimes a maddening chorus that stirred up unheard-of deeps in the listener, and once as he lay awake at night a muffle-winged owl swept past so close as to fan his face. That shook him like the sounds during his first night out in White Stone Flats. In the stillness, thoughts rose up in him with a power he hadn’t known before; one could get so accustomed to this sort of life, he reflected, that he would be entirely unfit in a little while for the towns again.

Here’s where a man reverted to type. What he was at bottom came out. One might sink into being just an animal--eating and drinking and sleeping--or get more fiery alive with the days, more quick and sensitive with strange inner activity. There were times when Elbert’s thoughts carried him along with a clear cool strength that was almost frightening. He knew now that he had never been alone before; that a man isn’t quite alone, even if locked in his own room--that he is only really alone with the sky above and the earth beneath.

He had told Bart that he was getting to like it, but that didn’t become wholly true until quite a number of days had passed. Again and again he felt his jaw hardening, his lips pressed together; gradually his fears fell away and the silence bit into the very center of his being. He became a part of the outer silence of the days, a part of the fierce still sunlight that slowly blackened his hands and face. He looked back upon his dreams in the room at home, remembering the things he had treasured there--Indian blankets, pictures, leather work--all had meant something.

Out of these kid treasures and symbols, Cal and Slim had come to life, Heaslep’s, Nacimiento, San Pasquali; Bob Leadley, Bismo on the Rio Brava, Red Ante, the Dry Cache mine; Sonora, the cells, the corner of the wall, flight from the rurales, El Relicario. He could shut his eyes and think way back to the very beginning--hear the swish of motor cars from his bedroom window, the sound of the piano below, the sounds of his phonograph, and that last swung him swiftly across the continent to the Plaza at Los Angeles--‘Cuando sali--’ and the leather-store.

All these a part of him now, but in the beginning there had only been a little room of books and pictures and yearnings--yearnings that finally drove him out to find his Crimson Foam. Something else he had found--that still room in Tucson. Not a symbol of that in his father’s house--oh, yes, of course, the alabaster bowl in the dining-room!

His thin lips stretched into the beginnings of a smile. He had heard it said that each day brings to a man nine parts review and one part advance work. Everything seemed like review to him now--the whole circle rounded (at least, it would be when Bart and he were safely over the Border into the States) everything review, except that still room in Tucson. Very much advance work, that. His heart pumped so that he could actually hear its beat.

Sometimes he felt, if he could get a little deeper into the silence, he would know all about--even that. Anyway, it began to dawn on him that everything would have been spoiled if he had rushed north alone, leaving Bart--that the greatest adventure of all lay right in the core of these days of solitude and silence. One night he felt like a different man altogether, as he started down toward El Relicario in the dusk.

XXVII

WORDS

‘YOU see, I was lazy--no two ways about it--lazy, from the very beginning,’ Bart said during one of the night-talks. ‘I can see how Dad felt now. I didn’t know any better than to think he was against me in those days. I got the feeling I was wronged, and that’s bad. It’s bad to let that wronged feeling pile up in a kid’s chest, until there is no seeing it any other way. The thing that hurt me most was about that horse--old Rat-tail from the Cup Q.’

Elbert kept still with effort. He knew the story of the rat-tail from Bob Leadley’s telling, almost as well as Bart did, but the latter got to talking too rarely to be interrupted.

‘A bad name, that horse had, but he wasn’t really bad. A horse isn’t like a man; he isn’t like a dog. A horse is more like a woman--he goes by feeling, not by his head. A dog will dope a thing out; a mule will, but a horse feels his way. Why, that mare of yours--I’ll bet she doesn’t miss much that’s goin’ on, even if her back’s turned. You’re not foolin’ her a lot, even if you think you are. She’s cute as a woman--

‘The more a man knows about a horse, the more he respects him, the more careful he is,’ Bart went on. ‘You never see a real hand yank his horse around or flourish none. You’re apt not to know a real ridin’ gent unless you’re one yourself. He works easy, and doesn’t attract the eye. You never see him starting a horse into a run as soon as he leaves the corral--unless there’s mighty pressin’ business, like that night we first got together. You don’t see him rowel or quirt, because a real hand doesn’t bring up a horse to need stimulants that way. And he isn’t botherin’ with one that does--not for long. Nine times out of ten a bad horse is man-spoiled, and a real hand doesn’t care to mix with other men’s botched jobs.’

Elbert couldn’t help but see Cal Monroid in all this--Cal, and the way he handled and sat old Chester. Bart and Cal were curiously alike in the one utterly cool and nerveless quality. Evidently it was in this quality, first of all, that their mastery over horses lay--no nerves to confuse the feelings of a mount.

‘That old gray had been raked and hooked so long that all he knew was to fight back. Everybody over at the rancho was afraid of him. Of course, the fellows didn’t say they were; they’re more afraid of each other finding out that they’re afraid, than they are of what they’re afraid of--’

‘I can see that,’ said Elbert.