Part 8

ELBERT arose, but before he caught himself, his fascinated glance had darted to the gloved right hand that had put the closing touch to Monte Vallejo this very day. Not a bristling murderer of outlaws, Ramon appeared, but a youth of cultured turn of thought--brown eyes and boyish lips, a face whiter than his own ... uninterested apparently in soldiers, rurales, even in bandits, but asking many questions regarding America, the States and cities, the night life, and how long it took to go from Chicago to San Francisco--

‘Not three days, Señor!’

‘Yes,’ said Elbert.

‘Not three days, at fifty miles an hour, night and day?’

Like a child--or, at least, a younger brother, was this aristocrat who had taken the job of slaying out of the hands of the despised soldiers of Cordano. How many others had this small gloved hand put to death? Elbert certainly felt under a painful pull, as they chatted and complimented. Secret stiffness was still upon him, as leisurely together, they walked out of the fonda into the starlight.

‘Si a tu ventana llega una paloma--’ from the guitars, and by this time the girls of Arecibo were moving softly by. It was their brief hour of night, and they were abroad, eyes shining, under their mantillas; all from seven to the great age of twenty-seven, passing by the beloved captain and his friend, the American who came on the magnificent horse. What did these soft-eyed girls think of the killing manner of life of their men? Doubtless that it was all that life should be.

With his absorbing interest in America, the elegant Captain Ramon would certainly have mentioned the detail--had there been an American among the seven executed this day. Was Bart more Mexican than American? Was he regarded as a native, pure and simple, by his fellow-bandits and the rurales, or had he left Sonora altogether? These questions continually hammered through Elbert’s consciousness. Meanwhile, since compliments were the order in all conversation, he was with difficulty trying to convey to Ramon Bistula how enthusiastic the trooper he had ridden with in the afternoon, had expressed himself toward his captain.

‘Do all your men feel the same toward you?’ he inquired.

‘They are pleased with small things,’ lightly said Ramon. ‘To-morrow, perhaps, you will see the rest of my troop.’

‘They are not all here in Arecibo then?’

‘Ah, no--a third party is due to report at this time. We look for further captives with them. Six more of Vallejo’s men were brought in to-day by a second squad.’

‘Six more prisoners here alive in Arecibo now?’

‘Yes, Señor, waiting death now in the patio of el cuartel yonder--a mere formality--the paper from General Cordano--any moment.’

Elbert turned his head away. ‘Great night for guitars,’ he said.

‘Ah, to hear the bands of countless pieces in the great plazas of America!’

Elbert heard his own voice reach out plaintively in the hush. ‘When do these further executions--?’

‘To-morrow--next day--who can tell? We wait the order only. You care for these things?’

‘I could hardly say that, Captain. I was only wondering at the manner in which the prisoners face the end--if an American would act the same?’

‘Ah, doubtless Americans would accept with perfect composure--it is the least a man can do--’

‘Are all these men calm?’

‘Again, please?’

‘Are they all calm?’

‘Calm. I had not thought of that! They are so-so. Why not come with me now, and let us see if they are calm.’

The Captain explained that he was due to report at el cuartel at this time, but that his personal quarters were in the fonda, the picket-line of his own men being at the other side of town. El cuartel, it was to be noted, was spoken of with faint scorn, as the home of Cordano’s soldiers--a poor-house and prison combined.

The two strolled across the plaza and the heavy wooden gate of the quarters swung wide. Only the front of the building had a second floor. It was like a tunnel of clay they entered, wide and high enough for a horseman to ride in, with a narrow door leading to the barracks on one side and to an office on the other. Elbert smelled the earthiness of the dried clay walls, as he passed through at the spurred heels of Ramon Bistula. The suggestions of underground began to haunt him--the presence of condemned men--this very day--the blank wall!

The passage opened to a large patio with low cells on all sides. The cells were open, the prisoners and Cordano’s soldiers moving freely together. Captain Ramon informed him that for a time in the cool of the day like this the cells were unlocked, but the prisoners were returned to their quarters at nine promptly. Small fires were here and there; perhaps fifteen men in all, lounging about the fires, the guards mixed freely among them, ponies feeding in far corners. Some of the men gambled. All smoked; one sang with guitar. No sign of a face that might be an American. At least, not for Elbert’s first fierce look. He noted the inner blank wall of the barracks, but dusk covered what stains might have been on the ground.

To-morrow, the next day--six more of these men to die--and they played cards to-night. Tobacco was as good to them as ever; peace was abroad ... one boyish voice sang, but Elbert remembered the underground smell of the long clay arch.

No American save himself in the prison court--no troubled thoughts save his own apparently. He moved from knot to knot among the fires, Ramon Bistula having excused himself to enter the office. The faces turned up to him from the cards, from the interminable little match boxes and papers of tobacco. The one with his guitar looked up with a gray thin smile as he hummed, but did not lose a beat of his song....

Scarred, pocked, peaceful faces--they did not seem to know any more of what was coming than the ponies in the farther shadow. There was one with the luminous welt of a knife-wound, running down the side of his throat and vanishing like the head of a worm under his collar ... boys and men.

All smoked, and one sang with guitar.

Ramon Bistula approached, but only to excuse himself again. Round and round among the little fires, Elbert moved. No, he was not as they were. It was as if in passing the clay tunnel to the little court, something had fallen from them--ghastly responsibility of self-preservation--the very thing that choked his throat now.

He had paused a second time, before the feet of the boyish figure with the guitar. The words of the song were of some curious provincial Spanish, and slowly uttered. It was this that the youth sang:

_A girl once stood in a doorway and there was dust of corn upon her elbow, upon her cheek, and pale gold corn in a pile upon the mortar-stone at her side ... a girl with corn like sun-dust, shining on her skin ... with a golden bud springing like young corn in her breast._

Something like that, chaste as the light of that endless summertime. And the youth strumming the guitar seemed not to feel the great wounding of separation--but to take a vague sweetness from repeating the words--as of approach to that far doorway.

Elbert could stand the tension no longer. Through his mind flicked memories of the supper in the old barefooted woman’s house in Nacimiento, of the ride afterward, of the strange, still, flowered room in Tucson. He longed to be alone, his thoughts turned yearningly toward the fonda of Arecibo; he longed to stand alone with Mamie in the clean corral behind it. A sentry, one of the soldiers of Cordano stopped him, as he started to enter the portal from the patio.

‘I am leaving,’ he said. ‘I am with the captain of the rurales--’

Ramon Bistula now came forward from the low side door in the wall, and at the same instant, the heavy wooden gate opened from the street, and Mamie veered in under the arch, led by a soldier. Another soldier followed, bearing the big stock-saddle and blankets--Mamie entering this portal of clay! He called her name; she nickered back. Now Captain Ramon was saying:

‘I trust it will not be of great inconvenience--your things being brought from the fonda for this one night--you to pass this one night here, instead of at the fonda--more air, more room--a room being prepared, in fact, for yourself quite alone.’

XIX

A CORNER OF THE WALL

A ROOM of his own. It was a cell with wooden bars, looking out upon the court where the prisoners and soldiers still played and lounged. A huge moon, almost full, came up over the opposite roof of low cells, and in the distant shadow there, Mamie squealed and let fly--a plebeian pony venturing too close, no doubt.

A sickish smile he was not aware of hung around Elbert’s mouth. The floor of the cell was of stone. The wooden bars very thick, the ceiling low. There was a wide wooden bench for him to lie upon--blanket roll, saddle, and saddle-bags had been brought.... So the voluble rurale had had but one idea all the time in the afternoon; and crafty little Ramon Bistula with amiable guile--so pleasantly impersonal in leading one astray and putting men to death--Ramon, keeping him in the plaza while his men doubtless went through saddle-bags and roll. But they could have found nothing to implicate him--some silver and canned stuff. His papers of identification were in order. Then he remembered his mention of San Isidro; he would have to prove that Mamie was not one of the stolen horses. Perhaps they would think his papers were stolen, too!

The sickish smile remained--the smile of one who has seen his quest ending in failure. He thought of Mr. Leadley’s affection and care for Mamie, and he had known no better than to let her show her speed on a highroad, and mention the name of San Isidro to the rurale.

His hand came up to his mouth--an ache of muscles that didn’t seem to know enough to relax by themselves. The moonlight felt cold, a creeping cold on the stone floor.... The same song from the patio--guitar and corn-dust maiden--but so different, coming to him through the bars. El capitan was at the door, the sentry unlocking the cell.

‘I have brought blankets of my own for you, Señor. Very soft and warm blankets. I am grieved; but it is only for the present--this interesting mare of yours--a puzzle to the soldiers of Cordano.... A very good night, Señor--’

* * * * *

He had actually dozed, for the plaza was empty. Elbert had heard of people going to sleep as usual, with death hanging over, but he wouldn’t have believed it of himself. All was still, the moon very white upon the turf. The blank wall of the main building within forty feet from where he lay.... This very morning ... word from Cordano all that was necessary for more executions ... ‘mere formality.’ Now gradually, he entered one of the deep and memorable hours of his life, lying propped up against the saddle, looking out through the bars, moonlight flooding down outside, everything so still that he could hear the drops of water from the pail into the cistern in the center of the prison patio. He waited for the isolated drops, but his mind often wandered before the sound came--back to his own house in the East, to his own room, where he had dreamed so much, but nothing like this--slowly through the days at Heaslep’s and the leather-store; the noon-hour in the latter place, when the door was pushed open and a certain whimsical voice started the whole works going:

‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do--’

And that very saddle was under his head! Heaslep’s again, Nacimiento. His Spanish book said that word ‘Nacimiento’ meant Birth ... the old Señora with her castanets, and her house in the town called Birth.... Then the part he never remembered clearly, not even now--the ride to San Pasquali, the ride back; Nogales, its smell of drugs, and the Letter; Tucson and that still room where so many flowers were, still as the patio out yonder.

Until just now, he had never let himself go, in thinking about that room. Too much of a magnet about it all; it drew all the strength of mind and feeling back to it, taking the force from the work at hand here in Sonora. But this was a sort of show-down--locked up here in Arecibo. He dared now to remember that Tucson hour, moment by moment.

... And what did she mean--that she could see the car below--see right through it, and their own bodies, sort of little and broken? He knew what she meant. More than that, he knew her meaning when she said, ‘And I could feel _our_ pain, but we were really together outside and above.’ And ‘You were like one dead, yet you still drove.’... ‘Your face was like stone, eyes open, but no life, the skin pulled back over the bones from behind.’... ‘It was when the dawn came--the time we were in the awful cold--’

Such a stillness around her as she spoke, the stillness of the mountains. He didn’t remember that dawn part after reaching Nogales, but she remembered it all. There was another thing now that he dared to ponder a moment, because he was locked up in this place of birth--no, death. ‘We will know all about everything when the time comes.’ How much did she mean by that?

It would likely be a lot harder to keep on looking for Bart, after letting these memories have their way, but was there to be any more mission? Was this not the end--a cell in Arecibo? His eyes focalized again on the moonlit patio. Deserted and ashen white now, but he was seeing once more the figures of the condemned men--that face of the youth with the guitar and song of the corn-dust maiden--one of the boys who had ridden with Monte Vallejo, ridden with Bart, perhaps.

Elbert had fallen asleep and awakened again to find the silvery sheen gone from the patio. Gray light was there, but no moonlight. A calling of Mexican names:

‘Revas--Marcè--Trastorno--Sarpullir--’

There were one or two more, but he missed hearing the names, curiously struck by the meaning of the last ‘Sarpullir’--‘to be covered with flea-bites,’ as he recalled from his Spanish book. Now the clanging of an iron door broke in upon him, and a thudding on the turf, which he recognized without having heard it before--the dropping of rifle-butts as the pieces were stacked. The Mexican voice was still carrying on. It made him think of the voice of the phonograph record back home, announcing the singer of ‘La Paloma.’

Straight across the patio, one of the sentries was unlocking a cell door. The sentry stood back, as the prisoner emerged. Neither hurried. The prisoner made the sign of the cross, and then held forth his hand. The sentry gave him a cigarette and struck the match on his own box. Then they moved forward--out of sight.

Elbert was on his feet now, rubbing his eyes. It had all been mixed with his dream so far, but now he knew that it was really dawn and the Mexican voice was telling off the deaths of ‘Sarpullir’ and the others. The one across the patio had moved forward to the wall.

It was altogether incredible. The rurale’s story of yesterday, all the stories of death he had ever heard, did not make the present moment believable. It could not be so, here and now.... Men fell off horses, off cliffs, out of parachutes; men were run over by cars, blown to pieces in mines, broken by many labors and inventions, but men could not be put to death--a’ sangre fria--at daybreak by other men!

Now he was standing at the bars of his own cell. Something was pulling him back to the bench, but another force more rigidly held his right cheek-bone pressed between two wooden bars. Only the far corner of the wall could be seen, even so--just one man standing at the blank wall--face of a youth, looking away, head uncovered and looking away.... And now from the left, where Elbert’s eye could not reach, came an old man’s voice raised in wailing. It was like the voice of an old beggar at some city gate--crying out softly against what he saw, not desperately, a low mourning; and all the time the phonograph-voice gave commands--until a shock of volley-fire and a few ragged shots.

The hands of the youth lifted, as if he were treading water, as if he were pushing something from him, as if he were trying not to fall--an altogether different, divided look--the face of one being stoned, yet exalted, too--all this in the succession of shots, and Elbert had drawn back by this time, rubbing his cheek which was bruised from the wood, and there was something in him older, far older and quieter, than he had ever known before; something in him that could not laugh yet, but would sometime, something that knew that the corn-dust maiden would be waiting in that far doorway.

XX

THE TWO WHO HAD NOT HEARD

DAY was actually breaking clearer. Mamie was dancing at her tether across the patio. The recent sound of guns had not been to her liking, nor certain odors which now moved in the air. The firing squad had gathered at the cistern. The men were drinking water and lighting cigarettes, talking jerkily with laughter. The sudden surge of pity which Elbert knew was for them, not for the others.... That was his day of quiet waiting. The sun rose and steadily shone; such was a fact of continual amazement. The hours didn’t drag, because his thoughts were out of himself so much of the time. He would finally feel an ache in his body and rouse from the deeps of contemplation to find that he had sat in one position for an hour or more. Queerly enough, he couldn’t take his own predicament so seriously as last night.

Of course, he wouldn’t give up. He would see his Sonora job through, but for the time, practically all sense of personal danger had eased away. Cordano’s little infantry garrison was merely holding him until his case was straightened out. Perhaps the officer in charge had telegraphed North to verify his papers. Sooner or later he would be out of this, and if they sent him back to the States, he would return when possible and start in all over again.

Noon, afternoon. Captain Ramon appeared, commiserated with him, but announced that four more of Monte Vallejo’s men were being brought in. Elbert saw the prisoners enter at nightfall, and once more, for an hour or two in the evening, the prison cells were unlocked, and after that the silence again, the lone American’s last thought that there would be another death party at dawn....

He was ripped out of sleep by a full-powered neigh from Mamie. He sat up--moonlight whiter than ever upon the empty patio. Faintly he could see the mare standing in the thin shadows--that high-held listening head--the arch of her crest. He heard a horse answer from a distance, probably from the picket-line of the rurales across the town. A sentry walking past, back and forth across the entrance to the arch, paused, but resumed his pacing again.

Now, slowly, on the low roof of the cells opposite, a human figure lifted--then another. Mamie nickered; the figures flattened again. This time horses answered from both sides of the town. The sentry was slower to resume his pacing.

Elbert rubbed his eyes. The two figures on hands and knees were now moving cautiously forward on the roof of the cells toward the arch. They came to halt, as the sentry approached below. Slow seconds, Mamie dancing nervously back and forth on her tether. From one of the cells came a low grumbling at the disturbance she made--then the launching of the nearer and shorter figure from the roof, to the shoulders of the sentry, as the latter reached the turning-point of his post below.

Hardly a scream. The sentry was stretched upon the turf; the other rising from it. The second and taller stranger, meanwhile, had dropped down from the roof and vanished under the arch. Sleepy voices from the cells; a hissing command to silence; the name of Monte Vallejo spoken--another demand for silence in a tone of suppressed fury.

And now the taller of the two strangers reappeared from under the arch, leading by the hand a second sentry, who proved to have in his hands the keys of the cells. The name of Monte Vallejo seemed on every lip. Some of the prisoners in the cells appeared to know the two who had come, but kept repeating that Monte Vallejo was dead. Could it be possible that these two strangers had not heard? With this question in his brain, Elbert began to realize that the two who had come over the roof were of Vallejo’s band--on a long chance to rescue their chief.

The soldier with the keys was now being forced to unlock the cells, and the way of this forcing by the tall bandit, began to fascinate Elbert in spite of his own suffocating tension. No savagery about it; the voice was cool, hasteless. Lilt and leisure in his words, as he forced the sentry from cell to cell, twirling a gun on his first finger. ‘He could fan it, too--’ an old sentence of Bob Leadley’s flashed through Elbert’s brain. The shorter bandit now hurried up, breathlessly reiterating the fact of Monte Vallejo’s death.

‘So I hear,’ said the tall one, ‘but we can turn loose the boys still alive, can’t we?’

‘But the soldiers are awaking, Señor--’

‘I locked the door to the barracks,’ coolly answered the other. ‘Cordano’s men will have to get down into the street from the upper windows.... We can’t leave these men while we’re at it. Tell everybody to be quiet.... Pronto, hombre,’ he added lightly to the soldier with the keys.

Sounds of the soldiers’ arousing was heard from the upper floor of el cuartel facing the street.

‘Pronto, hombre--’ the tall bandit repeated. ‘We’ll fight our way to the horses--’

Elbert in the dark of the cell was folding his blankets in a distracted way, fascinated at the same time by that easy flowing voice of the tall one. He was drawing on his boots--the keys sounding nearer. Another of Mamie’s nasal protests reached his ears. Would they take her? The thought actually weakened him--hardly a chance for men of Monte Vallejo to miss one of her kind in the moonlight. And now, standing at the bars of his own cell door--the tall one--that voice, the sentry beside him with the keys, wailing:

‘No bantit aqui, Señor,--esta ’Mericano. Caballero ’Mericano--’

‘American?’ queried the bandit in English. ‘Oh, I say, in there--is that right?’

Elbert cleared his voice: ‘That you, Bart?’

‘What the hell--?’ same genial tone.

‘Yes, I am American. I come from your father--’

‘Open, hombre!’ the command now, and, ‘I don’t know you. You’re a lot safer where you are, but I’m letting you out.’

‘I came down for you. I’ve got a horse--’

Banging was now heard at the lower door to the barracks.

‘You’ll have to saddle fast. The soldiers are sure coming-to, but they can only get out the upper windows.’

For just a second, as the cell door swung, Elbert saw the lift of a dark face--a glitter to the laugh, that low, easy flowing tone; then he was running across the moonlit patio--saddle-blankets over his left arm, saddle itself trailing from his right hand, a call on his lips for the mare to stand round. The blankets fell in place; cinches came to hand. Mamie’s clean warm mouth closed over the bit, her ears wiggled straight in the head stall. Still, Elbert was the last man out of the patio, Bart standing in the street, covering the flight of his men. Shots rained down from the windows of the second floor of the barracks. A few of Cordano’s soldiers had already dropped down to the street; others were crashing at the lower door which Bart had locked.

‘The horses are in the hollow back of the quarters!’ he yelled in Mexican.

The hand of one soldier reached up to Mamie’s bridle-rein, but Bart’s pistol-butt thudded upon the bone. Even in the tumult, Elbert saw that nothing escaped Bart--that he was marvelously on the job, but cool.

‘Follow the others, stranger!’ he called now. ‘I didn’t catch your name!’

‘Get up here behind me, don’t you want to?’ Elbert answered above the din.

‘Thanks, no. It’s only a little ways to the horses.’

The dark laughing face was upturned again for an instant, and at this moment, from beyond the plaza across the town, came the first trumpet call of the rurales.