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Herman Whitaker

The Mystery of the Barranca

Herman Whitaker

Chapter 1

 

"Oh Bob, just look at them!”

Leaning down from his perch on the sacked mining tools which formed the apex of their baggage, Billy Thornton punched his companion in the back to call his attention to a scene which had spread a blaze of humor over his own rich crop of freckles.

As a matter of fact, the spectacle of two men fondly embracing can always be depended on to stir the crude Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. In this case it was rendered still more ridiculous by age and portliness, but two years’ wandering through interior Mexico had accustomed Thornton’s comrade, Robert Seyd, to the sight. After a careless glance he resumed his contemplation of the crowd that thronged the little station. Exhibiting every variety of Mexican costume, from the plain white blanket of the peons to the leather suits of the rancheros and the hacendados, or owners of estates, it was as picturesque and brilliant in color and movement as anything in a musical extravaganza. The European clothing of a young girl who presently stepped out of the ticket office emphasized the theatrical flavor by its vivid contrast. She might easily have been the captive heroine among bandits, and the thought actually occurred to Billy. While she paused to call her dog, a huge Siberian wolf hound, she was hidden from Seyd’s view by the stout embracers. Therefore it was to the dog that he applied Billy’s remark at first.

“Isn’t she a peach?”

She seemed the finest of her race that he had ever seen, and Seyd was just about to say that she carried herself like a “perfect lady” when the dissolution of the aforesaid embrace brought the girl into view. He stopped—with a small gasp that testified to his astonishment at her unusual type.

Although slender for her years—about two and twenty—her throat and bust were rounded in perfect development. The clear olive complexion was undoubtedly Spanish, yet her face lacked the firm line that hardens with the years. Perhaps some strain of Aztec blood—from which the Spanish-Mexican is never free—had helped to soften her features, but this would not account for their pleasing irregularity. A bit rétrousée, the small nose with its well-defined nostrils patterned after the Celtic. Had Seyd known it, the face in its entirety—colors and soft contours—is to be found to this day among the descendants of the sailors who escaped from the wreck of the Spanish Armada on the west coast of Ireland. Pretty and unusual as she was, her greatest charm centered in the large black eyes that shone amid her clear pallor, conveying in broad day the tantalizing mystery of a face seen for an instant through a warm gloaming. In the moment that he caught their velvet glance Seyd received an impression of vivacious intelligence altogether foreign in his experience of Mexican women.

As she was standing only a few feet away, he knew that she must have heard Billy’s remark; but, counting on her probable ignorance of English, he did not hesitate to answer. “Pretty? Well, I should say—pretty enough to marry. The trouble is that in this country the ugliness of the grown woman seems to be in inverse ratio to her girlish beauty. Bet you the fattest hacendado is her father. And she’ll give him pounds at half his age.”

“Maybe,” Billy answered. “Yet I’d be almost willing to take the chance.”

As the girl had turned just then to look at the approaching train neither of them caught the sudden dark flash, supreme disdain, that drew an otherwise quite tender red mouth into a scarlet line. But for the dog they would never have een a whit the wiser. For as the engine came hissing along the platform the brute sprang and crouched on the tracks, furiously snarling, ready for a spring at the headlight, which it evidently took for the Adam’s apple of the strange monster. The train still being under way, the poor beast’s faith would have cost it its life but for Seyd’s quickness. In the moment that the girl’s cry rang out, and in less time than it took Billy to slide from his perch, Seyd leaped down, threw the dog aside, and saved himself by a spring to the cow-catcher.

“Oh, you fool! You crazy idiot!” While thumping him soundly, Billy ran on, “To risk your life for a dog—a Mexican’s, at that!”

But he stopped dead, blushed till his freckles were extinguished, as the girl’s voice broke in from behind.

“And the Mexican thanks you, sir. It was foolhardy, yes, and dearly as I love the dog I would not have had you take such a risk. But now that it is done—accept my thanks.” As the stouter of the embracers now came bustling up, she added in Spanish, “My uncle, señor.”

At close range she was even prettier; but, though gratitude had wiped out the flash of disdain, a vivid memory of his late remarks caused Seyd to turn with relief to the hacendado. During the delivery of effusive thanks he had time to cancel a first impression—gained from a rear view of a gaudy jacket—of a fat tenor in Spanish opera, for the man’s head and features were cast in a massive mold. His big fleshy nose jutted out from under heavy brows that overshadowed wide, sagacious eyes, Indian-brown in color. If the wind and weather of sixty years had tanned him dark as a peon, it went excellently with his grizzled mustache. Despite his stoutness and the costume, every fat inch of him expressed the soldier.

“My cousin, señor.”

Having been placed, metaphorically, in possession of all the hacendado’s earthly possessions, Seyd turned to exchange bows with a young man who had just emerged from the baggage-room—at least he seemed young at the first glance. A second look showed that the impression was largely due to a certain trimness of figure which was accentuated by the perfect fit of a suit of soft-dressed leather. When he raised his felt sombrero the hair showed thin on his temples. Neither were his poise and imperturbable manner attributes of youth.

“It was very clever of you, señor.”

A slight peculiarity of intonation made Seyd look up. “Jealous,” he thought, yet he was conscious of something else—some feeling too elusively subtle to be analyzed on the spur of the moment. Suggesting, as it did, that he had made a “gallery play,” the remark roused in him quick irritation. But had it been possible to frame an answer there was no time, for just then the familiar cry, “Vaminos!” rang out, and the American conductor hustled uncle, niece, and her dog into the nearest car.

The entire incident had occupied little more than a moment, and as, a little bewildered by its rush, Seyd stood looking after the train he found himself automatically raising his cap in reply to a fluttering handkerchief.

“You Yankees are certainly very enterprising.”

Turning quickly, Seyd met again the glance of subtle hostility. But, though he felt certain that the remark had been called forth by his salute, he had no option but to apply it to the mining kit toward which the other was pointing.

“You are for the mines, señor? In return for your service to my cousin it is, perhaps, that I can be of assistance—in the hiring of men and mules?”

While equally quiet and subtle, the patronage in his manner was easier to meet. Undisturbed, however, when Seyd declined his offer, he sauntered quietly away.

“Bueno! As you wish.”

Chapter 2

 

“I’ll be with you in a minute, folks.”

To appreciate the accent which the American station agent laid on “folks” it is necessary that one should have been marooned for a couple of years in a ramshackle Mexican station with only a chocolate-skinned henchman, or mozo, for companion. It asserted at once welcome and patriotic feeling.

“You know this isn’t the old United States,” he added, hurrying by. “These greasers are the limit. Close one eye for half a minute and when you open it again it’s a cinch you’ll find the other gone. If they’d just swipe each other’s baggage it wouldn’t be so bad. But they steal their own, then sue the company for the loss. Here, you sons of burros, drop that!” with which he dived headlong into the midst of the free fight that a crowd of cargadores, or porters, were waging over the up train baggage.

Taking warning, the two returned to their own baggage. As they waited, talking, these two closest of friends offered a fairly startling contrast. In the case of Seyd, a graduate in mining of California University, years of study and strain had tooled his face till his aggressive nose stood boldly out above hollowed cheeks and black-gray eyes. A trifle over medium height, the hundred and sixty pounds he ought to have carried had been reduced a good ten pounds by years of prospecting in Mexico and Arizona. This loss of flesh, however, had been more than made up by a corresponding gain in muscle. Moving a few paces around the baggage, he exhibited the easy, steady movement that comes from the perfect co-ordination of nerve and muscle. His feet seemed first to feel, then to take hold of the ground. In fact, his entire appearance conveyed the impression of force under perfect control, ready to be turned loose in any direction.

Shorter than Seyd by nearly half a foot, Billy Thornton, on the other hand, was red where the other was dark, loquacious instead of thoughtful. From his fiery shock of red hair and undergrowths of red stubble to his slangy college utterance he proved the theory of the attraction of opposites. Bosom friends at college, it had always been understood between them that when either got his “hunch” the other should be called in to share it. And as the luck—in the shape of a rich copper mine—had come first to Seyd, he had immediately wired for Billy. They were talking it over, as they so often before had done, when the agent returned.

“Why—you’re the fellow that was down here last fall, ain’t you?” he asked, offering his hand. “Didn’t recognize you at first. You don’t mean to say that you have denounced—”

“—The Santa Gertrudis prospect?” Seyd nodded. “He means the opposition I told you we might expect.” He answered Billy’s look of inquiry.

“Opposition!” The agent spluttered. “That’s one word for it. But since you’re so consarnedly cool about it, mister, let me tell you that this makes the eleventh time that mine has been denounced, and so far nobody has succeeded in holding it.” Looking at Billy, probably as being the more impressionable, he ran on: “The first five were Mex and as there were no pesky foreign consuls to complicate the case with bothersome inquiries, they simply vanished. One by one they came, hit the trail out there in a cloud of dust, and were never seen again.

“After them came the Dutchman, a big fat fellow, obstinate as one of his own mules, and a scrapper. For a while it looked as though he’d make good—might have, perhaps, if he hadn’t taken to using his dynamite box for a pillow. You see, his peons used to steal the sticks to fish, and so many of them blew themselves into kingdom come that he was always running shy on labor. So, as I say, he used the box for a pillow till it went off one night and distributed him all over the Barranca de Guerrero. Just how it came about of course nobody knew, nor cared, and they never did find a piece big enough to warrant an inquest. It just went as accidental, and he’d scarcely, so to say, stopped raining before a Frenchman jumped the claim. But he only lasted for a couple of days, landed back here within a week, and jumped the up train without a word.

“Last came the English Johnnies, two of ’em, the real ‘haw, haw’ boys; no end of style to them and their outfit. As they had hosts of friends up Mexico City, it would never have done to use harsh measures. But if the Johnnies had influence of one sort, Don Luis—he’s the landowner, you know—had it to burn of another. Not only did he gain a general’s commission during the revolutionary wars, but he’s also a member of the Mexican Congress, so close to the government that he needs only to wink to get what he wants. So just about the time the Johnnies had finished development work and begun to deliver ore out here at the railroad—presto! freights went up, prices went down, till they’d wiped out the last cent of profit. Out go the Johnnies—enter you.” With real earnestness he concluded: “Of course, there’s nothing I’d like better than to have you for neighbors. It ain’t so damn lively here. But I’d hate to see you killed. Take my advice, and quit.”

He had addressed himself principally to Billy. But instead of discouragement, impish delight illumined the latter’s freckles.

 

“A full-sized general with the whole Mexican government behind him? Bully! I never expected anything half so good. But, say! If the mine is so rich why don’t the old cock work it himself instead of leaving it to be denounced by any old tramp?”

“Because he don’t have to. He has more money now than he ever can use. He is worth half a million in cattle alone. And he’s your old-fashioned sort that hate the very thought of change. By the way, he just left on the up train, him and his niece.”

“What, the girl with the dog?” Billy yelled it. “Didn’t you see—no, you were in the baggage-room. Well, he’s our dearest friend—presented Seyd here with all of his horses, cattle, lands, and friends. A bit of a mining claim ought not to cut much ice in an order like that.”

“You met them?” The agent shook his head, however, after he had heard the particulars. “Don’t count much on Spanish courtesies. They go no deeper than the skin. Nice girl, the niece, more like us than Mex, and she ain’t full-blood, for matter of that. Her grandfather was Irish, a free lance that fought with Diaz during the French war. His son by a Mexican wife married Don Luis’s sister, and when he died she and her daughter came to keep the old fellow’s house, for he’s been a widower these twenty years. Like most of the sprigs of the best Mexican families, she was educated in Europe, so she speaks three languages—English, French, and Spanish. Yes, they’re nice people from the old Don down, but lordy! how he hates us gringos. He’ll repay you for the life of the dog—perhaps by saving you alive for a month? But after that—take my advice, and git.”

While he was talking, Seyd had listened with quiet interest. Now he put in, “We will—just as quickly as we can hire men and burros to pack our stuff out to the mine.”

“Well, if you will—you will.” Having thus divested himself of responsibility, the agent continued: “And here’s where your troubles begin. Though donkey-drivers are as thick as fleas in this town, I doubt whether you can hire one to go to Santa Gertrudis.”

“But the Englishmen?” Seyd questioned. “They must have had help.”

“Brought their entire outfit down with them from Mexico City.”

After Seyd’s rejection of his offer the hacendado had entered into conversation with a ranchero at the other end of the platform, and, glancing a little regretfully in his direction, Seyd asked, “Do you know him?”

The agent nodded. “Sebastien Rocha? Yes, he’s a nephew to the General.”

“He offered to get me mules.”

“He did! Why, man alive! he hates gringos worse than—worse than I hate Mexicans. He offered you help? I doubt he’ll do it when he knows where you’re going.” In a last attempt at dissuasion he added, “But if he doesn’t I can’t see how you can win out with rates and prices at the same mark that wiped out the Johnnies.”

“That’s our business.” Seyd laughed. Then, warmed by the honest fellow’s undoubted anxiety, he said, “Do you remember any consignment of brick that ever came to this station?”

“Sure, three car loads, billed to the Dutchman. But what has that to do—”

“Just this—that the man had the right idea. Though the mine is the richest copper proposition I have ever seen—besides carrying gold values sufficient to cover smelting expenses—it would never pay, as you say, to ship it out at present prices. But once smelted down into copper matte there’s a fortune in it, as the Dutchman knew. He had already laid out the foundation of an old-style Welsh smelter, and, though it isn’t very big, we propose to make it stake us to a modern plant.”

“So that’s your game!” The agent whistled.

“That’s our game,” Billy confirmed. “If dear cousin over there can only be persuaded to furnish the mules we will do the rest. Go ask him, Bob.”

Seyd hesitated. “I’m afraid that I turned him down rather roughly. Let’s try first ourselves.”

For the last half hour their baggage had formed a center of interest for the porters, mule-drivers, and hackmen who formed the bulk of the crowd, and the snap of the agent’s fingers brought a score of them running. Each tried to make his calling and election sure by seizing a piece of baggage. In ten seconds the pile was dissolved and was flowing off in as many different directions when Seyd’s answer to a question brought all to a sudden halt.

“To the mina Santa Gertrudis.”

Crash! the kit of mining tools dropped from the shoulder of the muleteer who had asked the question, and it had no more than touched earth before it was buried under the other pieces.

“I told you so,” the agent commented, and was going on when a voice spoke in from their rear.

“What is the trouble, señors?”

The hacendado had approached unnoticed, and, turning quickly, Seyd met for the third time the equivocal look, now lightened by a touch of amusement. Suppressing a recurrence of irritation he answered, quietly: “We wish to go to the hacienda San Nicolas, señor, upon which we have denounced the mining claim known as the Santa Gertrudis. For some reason no one of these men will hire. Perhaps you can tell why?”

“Now your fat’s in the fire,” the agent muttered.

Whether or no he had overheard Seyd’s answer to the muleteer, the man’s dark face gave no sign. “Quien sabe? Ask their blood brother, the burro. One would have little to do and time to waste if he attempted to plumb a mule-driver’s superstitions. Ola, Carlos.”

While he was talking the crowd had continued to back away, but it stopped now and stood staring, for all the world like a herd of frightened cattle. The big muleteer who had led the retreat returned on a shuffling run, and as he stood before the hacendado, sombrero in hand, Seyd saw the fear in his face.

“This fellow sometimes works for me. You will need”—he paused, overlooking the baggage—“three burros and two riding-mules. He has only two. Ola, Mattias!” When a second muleteer had come with the same breathless haste he gave the quiet order, “You will take these señors to Santa Gertrudis.”

Bowing slightly, he had walked away before Seyd could lay hands on enough Spanish to state his obligation, and as, pausing, he then looked back his face once more changed, expressing knowledge and sarcastic amusement at the mixed feelings behind Seyd’s halting thanks. His bow, returning the customary answer, was more than half shrug.

“It is nothing.”

Chapter 3

 

“If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early in the afternoon,” Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day’s hot travel, they did not awaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window bars and laid a golden finger across Billy’s eyes.

“We shall have to hustle now.” Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican mozo in general while they were dressing. “For you must see the Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand as the Colorado Cañon. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a proposition as the one I went by on the last trip, I’d rather not tackle it after dark.”

It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, for after breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Paz and Luz, the mules the señors were riding! And having roundly cursed the memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocent colthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon such misbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them:

 

“Never were there such ungrateful brutes, señors. Not content with the good barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out of Padre Celso’s arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle and Book. And the curse sticks, señors, working itself out by means of this devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the jefe of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year’s earnings that trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that ever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas and the Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But this shall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the end of this trip.” In the mean time would the señors be pleased to wait for an hour?

There being no other choice, the señors would, and, returning to their last night’s perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorge its dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, the sunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on the opposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illumined silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads—to which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch—a comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing travelers, for only after an altercation which always required the witness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were the gates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oaths they went out, one by one, cargadores and peons, beggars and pilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and not until the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at his watch.

“Nine o’clock. What has become of those—”

Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned and foredoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkled pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail up a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corn grew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between the stones.

Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all over the land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light wind in the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been riding an hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging the mules grew fainter in Seyd’s ears, and, though he was conscious in a dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling, falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into the copal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him to a grisly sight—the dozen and odd mummies whose withered limbs clicked in the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of a banyan.

“Bandidos, señor, thieves and cutthroats.” The bigger of the two muleteers answered Seyd’s question. “They were hanged by Don Sebastien.”

“Why, that’s our friend back at the station.” Billy commented on Seyd’s translation. “I’m sure that was the name the agent gave him.”

“Si, señor,” the mule-driver confirmed the impression. “And these are but the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of this country was overrun with bandidos who took advantage of the absence of the principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They were levying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastien returned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, he began by hanging the bandits’ messenger in the gates of his hacienda, an act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer, into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there, everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hanged them by twos and threes and left them to swing in the wind, and it speaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father, mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail in this country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came to pass that you, señors, might now leave your purses on the open highway where a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No man would dare touch—”

“—Except Don Sebastien,” Seyd put in, laughing.

But the man returned only a stare. “What use would he have of purses, señor, that has so many of his own?”

“Perhaps to give to the Church.” But he stopped laughing, surprised by the sudden cloud that spread on the man’s face.

“Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien never crosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk he gives to the priest.”

“Si! si!” In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almost shook off his head. “It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule load of charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires the priest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery above the courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise—was there ever such irreverence!—that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who stands before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the steward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal. ‘I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel, myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet. Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come and go at will through the hacienda—all but one place. If after this hour I find that your foot has touched my threshold I’ll hang you in its gates.’ Thus he spoke, señor, and he would have done it—to a priest quicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which he hates the most.”

“Hum!” Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at the grisly witnesses to the tale’s truth, he commented: “I now begin to understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pump guns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loader I’m darned if I’d have tackled your hunch.”

In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the small farmers began to give place to the jacals of the country, flimsy huts with sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed out from the eternal succession of corn and maguey fields into wastes of volcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for no apparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which were sparsely timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley they came upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more than half buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they would have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into an intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted faces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat, long and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out tongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a painful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed the quintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Through anger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion to its death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed the corner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, were such as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scale their mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absolute force. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd’s imagination with pictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy was moved to remark:

“Those old chaps couldn’t have been very nice neighbors.”

 

“No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall have presently.” Later the thought was to recur under conditions that would lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying, as he glanced at his watch: “We have been doing pretty well. At this rate we’ll make the Barranca quite early.”

He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually content with the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into the burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering on one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by the time they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.

“We’ll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp at the top.”

Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes from both muleteers. Carlos made answer. “No, señor, at this time of the year one would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca with the finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for every time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho—and Paz and Luz, devils as they are, could travel it blindfold.” And whether, as Billy suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the fleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the mules with oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. They kept after them so hard that the train trotted out of a forest of upland piñon upon the rim of a great valley a full half hour before sundown.

Though prepared by Seyd’s descriptions for something unusually fine, Billy’s blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule, staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet the land broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hills uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca was so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his eye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue haze through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed like microscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountains tossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterile and desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised them out of the sea.

“Drunk! drunk!” Billy breathed, at last. “Nature gone on a jag. Drunken mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge. Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of a hole?”

“About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand and more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with the old Pacific. Can’t be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea.”

 

“The dear old pond. Isn’t that pine on the other side?”

“Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred or so miles farther up. That’s a great old tree, and quite particular about the company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along the slope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane—two thousand acres of it on the General’s hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over there, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from the top—that is us, señor, the mina Santa Gertrudis. And that reminds me—we’ll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight. Vaminos, Carlos.”

But the muleteer shook his head. “After you, señor, for if these devils should take to running again, not in six months should we fish your baggage out of the cañons.”

Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shaped wall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, for at the first turn a stone from his mule’s foot dropped five hundred feet plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs. Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail dropped down to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billy objected:

 

“Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one.”

“Less than that—if your mule should happen to slip and take it sideways. Let me see—allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteen seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if you elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail you cannot see, it will take the full three hours.”

Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills were suddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side lifted like yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out, and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensified rather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precarious balance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed down and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the cañon, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a real trial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd—to wit, the senseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on his heels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way in between him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when an easier grade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.

Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with a loose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thus it was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trot which had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, he almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it. With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instincts almost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop. Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heard the burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot, his voice came back.

“Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!”

Chapter 4

 

Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy’s hair stood on end, and when, in the face of Seyd’s shouts in Spanish to stop, the burros still came on he felt his cap move.

“Billy!” Seyd’s command rang out sharply. “Dismount and lie down. It’s our only chance.”

In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust, uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy’s red head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and vanished.

In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd’s mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell, a sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy’s hysterical profanity formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the events of the day. The scraps of muleteers’ talk the night before, the runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers’ refusal to camp on the rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.

“It’s a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us off in the dark.”

“But where are they now?” Billy gazed down into the dark void. “Surely they didn’t all go over.”

“No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it out of the way. Listen!” A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above. “There they go, and it’s up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up and turn. If we don’t give them the run of their lives we’ll deserve all they tried to give us.”

And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down, Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers. Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.

“Now, then! Run them down!” Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined his beast to one side of the trail.

“It is you, señor?”

Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and, though the man’s face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright, graceful figure. “Come to see if the job is done.” He thought it while answering aloud, “As you perceive, señor.”

“Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and I have ridden hard—used up one horse and half killed this poor beast. But no matter so long as I am in time.”

“Hypocrite!” Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. “You would not have been if these fellows had had their way.”

“Caramba, señor! Why?”

If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done. While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action. Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders. Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.

It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into Billy’s comment. “It looks, after all, as though they had done it themselves.”

Seyd shrugged. “Perhaps; in any case we have no proof.”

“Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!” Sebastien’s cold voice broke in. “Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules.” Seyd’s suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. “You will have to stay here till morning, señors, for it is many miles along the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that went into the cañon, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a proverb, ‘A warm fire helps the empty belly,’ and to-morrow you will be able to recover your goods.”

Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him to ask a sudden question.

“Did I not see you at the hotel last night?”

But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. “Perhaps. I was there.”

He did look up at Billy’s vigorous comment on his answer as translated by Seyd: “Then why didn’t he show himself this morning? Goodness knows we left late enough.”

He even asked, “What does he say?” And the sense having been softened in translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he quietly replied, “I do not doubt that the señor’s departure was fraught with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep.”

Though the smile which marked his appreciation of the blush that drowned out Billy’s freckles when Seyd translated was so slight as to be almost imperceptible, it yet increased his anger. “The dago!” he growled. “I’d punch his head for five cents Mex. The gall of him! Standing there poking fun at us after we have just missed death at the hands of his brigands. And you really think that he planned it all?”

“Looks like it. He chose the men, the trail. Was seen last night at the hotel. Appears now at the psychological moment. Any jury would—”

“—Pronounce me guilty. They would be mistaken, sir.”

Utterly confounded at the interruption which was delivered in fluent English—so surprised, indeed, that Billy glanced around to make sure that nobody else had spoken—they stared at him across the fire in red confusion. When Seyd at last found his tongue he could only stammer the obvious question, “You speak English?”

“As you perceive, sir.” As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous situation.

Nor was one needed to increase Billy’s anger. “Then why don’t you speak it?” he roughly blurted.

Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. “In accordance with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of Manchester, England.”

Manchester, England! Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner shrine of commerce! Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his knowledge of “fags” and “bullies,” “form rows,” “cribs and crams,” and education by external application, gained by the perusal of Tom Brown’s School Days, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of Kipling’s Stalky.

And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung Mexican youth. “Well!” he breathed at last. “I don’t envy you the experience. I’m told that the English schoolboy isn’t particularly sensitive or nice in his—his treatment of—”

“—Half-castes. Don’t avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, señor, that their dislike for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them—the conceited lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my ‘cowardice’ in using a knife—the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals. Even then I could see through their sham morality, hypocritical humanity, insufferable conceit.

“‘England is the workshop of the world!’ They dinned it into us. In furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world—make it one huge factory set in a slum.” He had spoken all through with great heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly, “That is why I do not speak English—because I hate both them and their tongue.”

Now Billy’s conception of John Bull and his island had been principally formed on the perfervid “tail-twisting” of the common-school histories, and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile at his emphatic indorsement. “I’m with you. No English, please, in mine.”

Even Sebastien smiled. “No, you are American—from our viewpoint, much worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted, therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your death.”

“Then you do not speak for them?” Seyd glanced at the muleteers, now crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.

“Quien sabe?” Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. “They would think little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to it that they play you no more tricks.”

Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the back. “Up, swine!” And while they stood shivering before them he gave them their orders—first to recover the baggage, then to convey the señors in safety to their mine. “Fail me in one thing,” he concluded, with a frightful threat, “and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you out on the road.”

Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted before Seyd realized his intent. “You are not going?” he asked.

“Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own horse.”

“First let me thank you.”

Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing its plungings the other answered: “It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. Adios!” And swinging the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off, leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.

Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces, looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion, fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. “Our friend’s football practice over there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I’ve seen a few walking-delegates in my time that I’d like to place under him. I’ll bet you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it ideal.”

“Yes.” Seyd laughed. “I have so much respect for it that I propose to keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If you’ll just settle down for a snooze I’ll take the first trick.”

His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the “conquest” and the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night that rose out of the valley’s black void, his fancies grew and possessed him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy’s interruption came as a surprise.

“I’ve slept four hours. Time for your snooze.”

Chapter 5

 

“Phe-ew!” Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to the building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn from a kiln of their own burning. “I’d always imagined bricklaying to be a mere matter of plumb and trowel, but this darned craft has more crinkles to it than the differential calculus. This fellow makes me dizzy with his talk of ties and courses, flues, draughts, cornering, slopes, and arches.”

Leaning on his hoe, Seyd wiped his wet brow. “I’m finding out a few things myself. I’d always sort of envied a hod-carrier. But now I know that the humble ‘mort’ puts more foot-pounds of energy into his work than the average horse. As a remedy for dizziness caused by overstudy, mixing mortar has no equal. Come and spell me with this hoe.”

“‘And the last state of that man was worse than the first,’” Billy groaned. “Can’t we hire a single solitary peon, Seyd?”

More eloquently than words, Seyd’s shrug testified to the sullen boycott which had been maintained against them for the past three weeks. On the morning of their arrival at the mine, while the fear of Sebastien Rocha still lay heavy upon him, Carlos had been half bullied, half persuaded into the sale of Paz and Luz at a price which raised him almost to the status of a ranchero. But that single transaction summed up their dealings with the natives. No man had answered their call for laborers at wages which must have appeared as wealth to a peon. The charcoal-burners who drove their burros past the mine every day returned to their greetings either muttered curses or black stares. They were as stubborn in their cold obstinacy as the face of the temple god. Indeed, in these days the stony face of the image had become inseparably associated in Seyd’s mind with the determined opposition that had routed his predecessors and now aimed to oust him. He saw it even in the soft, round faces of the children who peeped at him from the doorways of cane huts, a somber look, centuries old in its stubborn dullness.

Not that he and Billy were in the least discouraged. Once convinced that labor was not to be obtained, they had stripped and pitched in. In one month they rebuilt the adobe dwelling which had been somewhat shattered by the Dutchman’s hurried exit, dug a lime kiln, and hauled the wood and stone for the first burning. They had completed the laying out of the smelter foundation, filling in odd moments by picking for the first charge the choicest ore from the hundreds of tons that the Englishmen had unwisely mined before they ran head-on into the hostile combination of freights and prices.

This last had been an inspiriting labor, for so rich were the values which the ore carried that after a trial assay Billy had danced all over the place beating an old pan. It is doubtful whether young men ever had better prospects; and so, knowing that Billy’s present pessimism arose from a strong disinclination for physical labor in the hot sun, Seyd merely grinned. Sitting down on a pile of brick, he mopped his face and stared out over the valley.

Situated, as the mine was, on a wide bench which gave pause to the earth’s dizzy plunge from the rim three thousand feet above, Seyd sat at the meeting-place of temperate and tropic zones. A hundred feet below—just where they had climbed the stiff trail out of the jungle that flooded the valley with its fecund life—a group of cocoanut palms stood disputing the downward rush of the pine, and all along the bench piñon and copal, upland growths, shouldered cedars and ceibas, the tropical giants. While these battled above for light and room there came, writhing snake-like up from the tropics, creepers and climbers, vines and twining plants, to engage the ferns and bracken, the pine’s green allies. A plague of orchids here attacked the copal, wreathing trunk and limb in sickly flame. The bracken there overswept the riotous tropical life. All along the borderland the battle raged, here following a charge of the pine down a cool ravine, there mounting with the tropic growths to a sunlit slope. But in the valley below the tropics ruled clear down to the brilliant green of the San Nicolas cane fields.

“By the way”—Seyd spoke as his eye fell on these—“Don Luis is back from Mexico City. The hunchbacked charcoal-burner told me as he went past this morning.”

“The deuce he did!” Of all the black looks that came their way that of the cripple was the most vindictive. “You must have him hypnotized.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you had heard his accent. ‘El General is again at San Nicolas,’ just as though he were sentencing me to hang. Nevertheless, the news comes pat. I think it would be good policy for me to run down and pay the denunciation taxes before we begin work on the smelter. No, I don’t apprehend any trouble. Your Mexican hasn’t much stomach for litigation, and no doubt the old fellow feels quite safe in his pull with the metals companies and railroads. But while he is still in the mind we had better pay the money and complete title. If he once gets wind of the smelter—”

“Just so.” Billy threw down the hoe. “While you dress I’ll saddle up a mule—if you will please say to which demon you prefer to intrust your precious neck. Light began the day by kicking me through the side of the stable. She needs chastening. But then Peace dined on my arm yesterday. It’s Peace for yours, and I only hope you get it.”

“Hum!” he coughed when, half an hour later, Seyd emerged shaved, bathed, and clad in immaculate white. “Is this magnificence altogether for el General, or did Caliban drop some word of our niece? Really, old chap, you look fine. If I were the señorita I’d go for you myself.”

Though Seyd laughed, yet the instant he passed out of sight he fell into frowning thought which was evidently related to the letter he pulled out and reread while he rode down the steep grades. Written in a characterless round hand, it covered so many pages that he was halfway down before, after tearing it in shreds, he tossed it to the winds. Its destruction, however, did not seem to change his mood. He let Peace take her own way until, having slipped, slid, and tobogganed on tense haunches down the last grade, she felt able to assert her individuality by attempting to rub him off against a tree. Next she attempted the immolation of a fat brown baby that was rolling with a nest of young pigs in the dust outside a hut; and thereafter her performances were so varied that he was simply compelled to take some notice of the sights and sounds of the trail.

Not the least remarkable were the frequent and familiar scowls of the people he met. Various in expression, they ranged between the copious curses of the fat señora whose pacing-mule was driven by Peace off the trail, and the snarling malice of occasional muleteers; but, undisturbed, he pursued his inquiries for laborers at every chance.

“No, señor, we do not desire work.”

The stereotyped answer merely stimulated the quiet persistence which formed the basis of his character, and he continued to ask at the village which raised graceful palm roofs out of a jungle clearing, at the ranchos which now began to cover the valley with a green checker of maize fields, and at scattered huts, half hidden by the rich foliage of palms and bananas. It was while he was questioning a peon who was hulling rice with a wooden pole and churn arrangement that the subdued hostility broke out in open demonstration.

The trail here ran between a fence of split poles, which inclosed the peon’s corn and frijoles, and the steep bank of a dry creek bed, so that only a few feet leeway was left for the train of burros which came trotting out of the jungle behind him. In single file they could have passed, but looking around he saw they were coming three abreast.

Had he chosen, there was time to make the end of the fence. But he had seen behind the train the sparkling, beady eyes of Caliban, the hunchback, and the dark grins of two of his fellows. Flushing with quick anger, he backed Peace against the fence, leaned forward over her neck, and slashed with his whip at the leading beasts. Checked by this, they would have fallen back to single file but for the whips behind that bit out hair and hide and drove them on in a huddled mass.

It seemed for a few seconds that he would be crushed. That he escaped injury was simply due to the hereditary hate between the mule and the ass which suddenly turned Peace into a raging fiend. While her chisel teeth slit ragged hides her other and busier end beat a devil’s tattoo on resounding ribs and filled the air with flying charcoal. Yet even her demoniac energies had their limitations. If she held the ground for herself and master she could not preserve the inviolability of his white trousers, which emerged sadly smudged from the fray. It is a pity she could not. Little things always cause the greatest trouble, and but for the smudges the incident would probably have closed with Seyd’s challenge:

“Can’t you be content with half the road?”

His patience even survived their insolent grins. Not until the hunchback in passing emitted a hoarse chuckle as he surveyed the smudges did Seyd’s temper burst its bonds. Swinging his whip then with all his might, he laid it across the crooked shoulders once, twice, thrice, before the fellow sprang, snarling, out of reach. The others, who had already passed, came leaping back at his cry, knives flashing as they ran, and though they stopped under the sudden frown of a Colt’s automatic, they did not retire, but stood, fingering their knives, muttering curses.

A little sorry on his part for the anger which had turned the sullen hostility into open feud, Seyd faced them, puzzled just what to do. It was too late to give way, for that would expose him to future insult. Yet if, taking the initiative, he should happen to kill a man, he knew enough of the quality of justice as dealt out by the Mexican courts to realize the danger.

While he debated, the puzzle was almost solved by the peon rice-huller, who came stealing up from behind the fence. Not until the man had swung his heavy pestle and was tiptoeing to his blow did Seyd divine the reason for the glances that were passing behind him. Looking quickly, he caught the glint of polished hardwood in the tail of his eye; then, without a pause for thought, he dropped flat on the rump of the mule, and not a second too soon, for, raising the hair on his brow as it passed, the club smashed down through the top rail of the fence. In falling backward his weight on the bridle brought Peace scurrying a few paces to the rear. When he snapped upright again the fourth enemy was also under his gun.

But what to do? The puzzle still remained—to be solved by another, for just then came a sudden beat of hoofs, and from behind a bamboo thicket galloped first the Siberian wolf hound, then the girl he had met at the train.

Chapter 6

 

So silently did the girl come that the charcoal-burners were forced to jump aside, and, springing in the wrong direction, the hunchback was bowled over by the beast of the mozo who rode at her back.

“Why, señor!” she exclaimed, reining in. Then taking in the knives, pistol, broken club, she asked, “They attacked you? Tomas!”

Her Spanish was too rapid for Seyd’s ear, but it was easy to gather its tenor from the results. With a certain complaisance Seyd looked on while his enemies scattered on a run that was diversified by uncouth leaps as the mozo’s whip bit on tender places.

“He struck at you?” She broke in on the rice-huller’s voluble plea that never, never would he have raised a finger against the señor had he known him for a friend of hers! “Then he, too, shall be flogged.”

“I would not wish—” Seyd began.

But she interrupted him: “You were going toward San Nicolas? Then I shall turn and ride with you.” Anticipating his protest, she added, “I had already ridden beyond my usual distance.”

Very willingly he fell in at her side, and they rode on till they met the mozo returning, hot and flushed, from the pursuit. He was keen as a blooded hound; it required only her backward nod to send him darting along the trail, and just about the time they overtook the charcoal-burners a sudden yelling in their rear told that the account of the rice-huller was in course of settlement.

Passing his late enemies, Seyd could not but wonder at their transformation. With the exception of the hunchback, in whose beady eyes still lurked subdued ferocity, all were sobbing, and even he broke into deprecatory whinings. Having read his Prescott, Seyd knew something of the rigid Aztec caste systems from which Mexican peonage was derived. Now, viewing their abjectness, he was able to apprehend, almost with the vividness of experience, the ages of unspeakable cruelty that had given birth to their fear. But that which astonished him still more was the indifference with which the girl had ordered the flogging.

Such glimpses of her face as he was able to steal while they rode did not aid him much. It was impossible to imagine anything more typically modern than the delicately chiseled features lit with a vivid intelligence which seemed to pulse and glow in the soft shadow beneath her hat. And when from her face his glance fell to her smart riding-suit of tan linen he was completely at sea.

Curiosity dictated his comment: “Your justice is certainly swift. Really I am afraid that I was the aggressor. At least I struck first.”

“But not without cause.” She glanced at his smudged clothes. “Tell me about it.” And when he had finished she commented: “Just as I thought. And these are dangerous men. They would have killed you without a qualm. In the days that Don Sebastien was clearing the country of bandits he counted that hunchback one of his best men.”

“Yet he whined like a puppy under your man’s whip.”

Smiling at his wonder, she went on to state the very terms of his puzzle. “You do not know them—the combination of ferocity and subservience that goes with their blood. In the old days he who raised his hand against the superior caste was put to death by torture, and, though, thank God, those wicked days are past, the effect remains. They are obedient, usually, as trained hounds, but just as dangerous to a stranger. If I had not ordered them flogged they would have taken it as license to kill you at their leisure.”

“Now I realize the depth of my obligation.”

He spoke a little dryly, and she leaped to his meaning with a quickness that greatly advanced her in his secret classification. “I have hurt your pride. You will pardon me. I had forgotten the unconquerable valor of the gringos.”

“Oh, come!” he pleaded.

She stopped laughing. “Really, I did not doubt your courage. But do not imagine for one moment that they would attack you again in the open. A knife in the dark, a shot from a bush, that is their method, and if you should happen to kill one, even in self defense, gringos are not so well beloved in Guerrero but that some one would be found to swear it a murder. Be advised, and go carefully.”

“I surely will.” He was going on to thank her when she cut him off with the usual “It is nothing.” Whereupon, respect for her intuition was added to the classification which was beginning to bewilder him by its scope and variety.

In fact, he could not look her way nor could she speak without some physical trait or mental quality being added to the catalogue. Now it was the quivering sensitiveness of her mouth, an unsuspected archness, the astonishing range of feeling revealed by her large dark eyes. Looking down upon the charcoal-burners, they had gleamed like black diamonds; in talking, their soft glow waxed and waned. Sometimes—but this was omitted from the classification because it only occurred when his head was turned—a merry twinkle illumined a furtive smile. Taken in all its play and sparkle, her face expressed a lively sensibility altogether foreign to his experience of women.

After a short silence she took up the subject again. “But I am giving you a terrible impression of our people. It is only in moments of passion that the old Aztec crops out. At other times they are kind, pleasant, generous. Neither are we the cruel taskmasters that some foreign books and papers portray us. You would not believe how angry they make me—the angrier because I have a strain of your blood in my own veins. My grandfather, you know, was Irish. It was from him I learned your speech.”

The last bit of information was almost superfluous, for from no other source could she have obtained the pure lilting quality that makes the Dublin speech the finest English in the world. To it she had added an individual charm, the measured cadence and soft accent of her native Spanish, delivered in a low contralto that had in it a little break. Her laugh punctuated its flow as she came to her conclusion.

“But you will soon be able to see for yourself what terrible people we are.”

He obtained one glimpse within the next mile. He had already noted the passing of the last wild jungle. From fields of maize which alternated with sunburned fields of maguey they now rode into an avenue that led on through green cane. Rising far above their heads, the cane marched with them for a half mile, then suddenly opened out around a primitive wooden sugar mill. Under the thatched roof of an open hut half-nude women were stirring boiling syrup in open pans, and at the sight of Francesca one of them came running out to the trail.

“Her baby is to be christened next Sunday,” the girl told him as they rode on. “She was breaking her heart because she had no robe. But now she is happy, for I have promised to ask the good mama to lend her mine, which she has treasured all these years.”

Soon afterward as they turned out of the cane into a new planting they almost ran down her uncle, who had come out to inspect the work. Only his quick use of the spur averted a collision, and as his own spirited roan sprang sideways Seyd noted with admiration that despite his bulk and age horse and man moved as one. If surprised at the sight of his niece in such company, the old man did not reveal it by so much as the lift of a brow. It was difficult even to perceive the twinkle in his eyes that lightened his chiding.

“Ola, Francesca! If there be no respect for thy own pretty neck, at least have pity on my old bones. It is you, señor? Welcome to San Nicolas.”

Neither did Seyd’s explanation of his business abate his brown impassivity. If assumed, his ponderous effort at recollection was wonderfully realistic. “Ah, si! Santa Gertrudis? If I remember aright, it was denounced before. Yes, yes, by several—but they had no good fortune. Still, you may fare better. Paulo, the administrador, will attend to the business.”

With a wave of the hand, courteous in its very indifference, he put the matter out of his province and displayed no further interest until the girl told of the attack on Seyd. Then he glanced up quickly from under frowning brows.

“You had them whipped? Bueno! The rascals must be taught not to molest travelers. And now we shall ride on that the señor may break his fast. And thou, too, wicked one, will be late. As thou knowest, it is the only fault the good mother sees in thee.”

“Would that it totaled my sins,” she laughed. “To escape another black mark I shall have to gallop. Ola! for a race!”

As from a light touch of the spur her beast launched out and away, the roan reared and tried to follow, and while he curbed it back to a walk the old man’s heavy face lit up with pleasure. “She rides well. I have not a vaquero with a better seat. But go thou, Tomas, lest she come to a harm. And you, señor, will follow?”

With a vivid picture of the figure Peace would cut in a race occupying the forefront of his mind it did not take Seyd long to choose. After the girl had passed from sight behind a clump of tamarinds he took note, as they rode along, of the peons who were laying the field out in shallow ditches wherein others were planting long shoots of seed cane. To his practical engineer’s eye the hand-digging seemed so slow and laborious that he could not refrain from a comment.

“It seems to me that a good steel plow would do the work much cheaper.”

“Cheaper? Perhaps.” After a heavy pause, during which he took secret note of Seyd out of the corner of his eye, the old man went on: “To do a thing at less cost in labor and time seems to be the only thing that you Yankees consider. But cheapness is sometimes dearly purchased. Come! Suppose that I put myself under the seven devils of haste that continually drive you. What would become of these, my people? Who would employ them? It is true that theirs is not a great wage—perhaps, after all, totals less than the cost of your steel plow and a capable man to run it. We pay only three and a half cents for each ditch, in our currency, and a man must dig twelve a day. If he digs less he gets nothing.

“That does not seem just to you?” He read Seyd’s surprise. “It would if you knew them. Grown children without responsibility or sense of duty are they. If left free to come and go, they would dig one, two, three ditches, enough and no more than would supply them with cigarros and aguardiente, and our work would never be done. As it is, they dig the full twelve, and have money for other necessities.

“The wage seems small?” Again he read Seyd’s mind. “Yet it is all that we can afford, nor does it have to cover the cost of living. Each man has his patch of maize and frijoles, and a run for his chickens and pigs. Then the river teems with fish, the jungle with small game. His wage goes only for drink and cigarros, or, if there be sufficient left over, to buy a dress for his woman. They are perfectly content.” Slightly lifting his heavy brows, he finished, looking straight at Seyd: “I am an old Mexican hacendado, yet I have traveled in your country and Europe. Tell me, señor, can as much be said of your poor?”

Now, in preparing a thesis for one of his social-science courses, Seyd had studied the wage scale of the cotton industry, and so knew that, ridiculously small as this peon wage appeared at the first glance, it actually exceeded that paid to women and children in Southern cotton factories. In their case, moreover, the pittance had to meet every expense.

He did not hesitate to answer. “I should say that your peons were better off, providing the conditions, as you state them, are general.”

“And they are, señor, except in the south tropics, where any kind of labor is murder. But here? It is as you see; and why disturb it by the introduction of Yankee methods?”

Pausing, he looked again at Seyd, and whether through secret pleasure at his concession or because he merely enjoyed the pleasure of speaking out that which would have been dangerous if let fall in the presence of a countryman, he presently went on: “Therefore it is that I do not stand with Porfirio Diaz in his commercial policies. He is a great man. Who should know it better than I that fought with or against him in a dozen campaigns. And he has given us peace—thirty years of slow, warm peace. Yet sometimes I question its value. In the old time, to be sure, we cut each other’s throats on occasion. In the mean time we were warmer friends. And war prevented the land from being swamped by the millions that overrun your older countries, the teeming millions that will presently swarm like the locusts over your own United States. As I say, señor, I am only an old Mexican hacendado, but I have looked upon it all and seen that where war breeds men, civilization produces only mice. If I be allowed my choice give me the bright sword of war in preference to the starvation and pestilence that thins out your poor.”

Concluding, he looked down, interrogatively, as though expecting a contradiction. But though, after all, his argument was merely a restatement of the time-worn Malthusianism, coming out of the mouth of one who had strenuously applied it during forty years of internecine war, it carried force. Maintaining silence, Seyd stole occasional glances at the massive brown face and the heavy figure moving in stately rhythm with the slow trot of his horse, while his memory flashed over tale after tale that Peters, the station agent, had told him when he was out the other day to the railroad—tales of bravery, hardy adventures, all performed amidst the inconceivable cruelties of the revolutionary wars. Even had he been certain that the eventual peopling of the earth’s vacant places would not force a return to at least a revised Malthusianism, it was not for his youth to match theories with age. When he did speak it was on another subject.

“I have been riding all morning on your land. I suppose it extends as far in the other direction?”

“A trifle.” A deprecatory wave of the strong brown hand lent emphasis to the phrase. “A trifle, señor, by comparison with the original grant to our ancestor from Cortes. ‘From the rim of the Barranca de Guerrero on both sides, and as far up and down from a given point as a man may ride in a day,’ so the deed ran. Being shrewd as he was valiant, my forefather had his Indians blaze a trail in both directions before he essayed the running. A hundred and fifty miles he made of it when he started—not bad riding without a trail. But it is mostly gone by family division, or it has been forfeited by those who threw in their luck on the wrong side of a revolution. Now is there left only a paltry hundred or so thousands of acres—and this!”

For the first time pronounced feeling made itself felt through his massive reserve, and looking over the view that had suddenly opened, Seyd did not wonder at the note of pride. After leaving the cane they had plunged through green skirts of willow to the river that split the wide valley in equal halves, and from the shallow ford they now rode out on a grassy plateau that ran for miles along low lateral hills. Dotted with tamarinds, banyans, and the tall ceibas which held huge leafy umbrellas over panting cattle, it formed a perfect foreground for the hacienda, whose chrome-yellow buildings lay like a band of sunlight along the foot of the hill. The thick adobe walls that bound stables, cottages, and outbuildings into a great square gave the impression of a fortified town, castled by the house, which rose tier on tier up the face of the hill.

When they rode through the great gateway of the lower courtyard the interior view proved equally arresting. Mounting after Don Luis up successive flights of stone steps, they came to the upper courtyard, wherein was concentrated every element of tropical beauty—wide corridors, massive chrome pillars, time-stained arches, luxurious foliage. From the tiled roof above a vine poured in cataracts of living green so dense that only vigorous pruning had kept it from shutting off all light from the rooms behind. Left alone, it would quickly have smothered out the palms, orchids, rare tropical plants that made of the courtyard a vivid garden.

“They call it the sin verguenza.” While he was admiring the creeper Francesca had joined them from behind. “Shameless, you know, for it climbs ‘upstairs, downstairs,’ nor respects even the privacy of ‘my lady’s chamber.’ Thanks to the good legs of my beast, I escaped a scolding. Sit here where the vines do not obstruct the view.”

If Seyd had been told a few minutes before that anything could have become her more than the tan riding-suit he would have refused to believe. But now by the evidence of his own eyes he was forced to admit the added charm of a simple batiste, whose fluffy whiteness accentuated her girlishness. The mad gallop had toned her usual clear pallor with a touch of color, and as she looked down, pinning a flower on her breast, he noted the perfect curve of her head.

“Room for a good brain there,” he thought, while answering her observation. “It is beautiful. But don’t you find it a little dull here—after Mexico City?”

“No.” She shook her head with vigor. “Of course, I like the balls and parties, yet I am always glad to return to my horses and dogs and—though it is wicked to put them in the same category—my babies. There are always at least three mothers impatiently awaiting my return to consult me upon names. I am godmother to no less than seven small Francescas.”

“I never should have thought it. You must have begun—”

“—Very young? Yes, I was only fifteen, so my first godchild is now seven. That reminds me—she is waiting below to repeat her catechism. There is just time—if you would like it.”

“I would be delighted. So the position is not without its duties?”

“I should think not.” Her eyes lit with a touch of indignation. “I hold the baby at the christening after helping to make the robe. When they are big enough I teach them their catechism. You could not imagine the weight of my responsibilities, and I believe that I am much more concerned for their behavior than their mothers. If any of them were to do anything really wicked”—her little shudder was genuine—“I should feel dreadfully ashamed. But they are really very good—as you shall judge for yourself. Francesca!” As, with a soft patter of chubby feet, a small girl emerged from a far corner, she added with archness that was chastened by real concern, “Now you must not dare to say that she isn’t perfect.”

In one sense the caution was needed. After a brave answer to the question “Who is thy Creator, Francesca?” the child displayed a slight uncertainty as to the origin of light, added a week or two to the “days of creation,” and became hopelessly mixed as to the specific quantities of the “Trinity”—wherein, after all, she was no worse than the theologians who have burned each other up, in both senses, in furious disputes over the same question. But better, far better than letter perfection, was the simple awe of the small brown face and the devotion of the lisping voice which followed the tutor’s gentle prompting.

“Fine! fine!” Seyd applauded a last valorous attack on the Ten Commandments, and the small scholar ran off clutching a silver coin, just so much the richer for his heretical presence. As he rose to follow his hostess inside he added, “If all the Francescas are equal to sample, the next generation of San Nicolas husbands will undoubtedly rise up and call you blessed.”

“Now you are laughing at me,” she protested. “Though that might be truly said of my mother. She is a saint for good works. But come, or I shall yet earn my scolding. And let me warn you to take care of your heart. All of the caballeros fall in love with mother.”

It was quite believable. While seated in the dining-room, a vaulted chamber cool as a crypt in spite of the sunblaze outside, a room which would have seated an army of retainers, he observed the señora with the satisfaction that even a stranger may feel in the promise a handsome mother holds out to her girls. In addition to the sweetness of her eyes and her tenderly tranquil expression she had retained her youthful contour. She exhibited the miracle of middle age achieved without fat or stiffness. In her scarf and black lace she was maturely beautiful. Waving away his apologies for the intrusion, she was anxiously solicitous for his wants through the meal. Yet he noticed that in taking his leave an hour later she did not ask him to call again.

Up to that moment there had been no further mention of his business. But as he stood hesitating, loath to introduce it, Don Luis relieved his embarrassment. “Now you would see the administrador? I am sorry, señor, but it seems that he is away at Chilpancin about the sale of cattle. But if you will intrust your moneys to Francesca she will see to the business and have the papers sent out to the mine.”

Neither did Francesca, when saying good-by, ask him to return. But, conscious that with all their kind hospitality they still regarded him as an intruder, Seyd was neither offended nor surprised. He was even a little astonished when Don Luis stated his intention of riding with him as far as the cane.

Until they came to the ford they rode in silence. Though only a few inches deep at this season, the river’s wide bed proclaimed it one of those torrential streams which rise from a trickle to a flood in very few hours, and when he remarked upon it Don Luis assented with his heavy nod.

“Si, it is very treacherous. One night during the last rains it rose fifty feet and swept down the valley miles wide, bearing on its yellow bosom cattle, houses, sheep, and pigs, and it drowned not a few of our people. And each year the floods go higher. Why? Because of the cursed lust that would mint the whole world into dollars. Year by year your Yankee companies are stripping the pine from the upper valley, and, though I have spoken with Porfirio Diaz about it, he is mad for commerce. He would see the whole state of Guerrero submerged before he revoked one charter. And they even try to make me a party to it. ‘General, if you will grant us a concession to do this, that, the other? If you will only allow us to run a branch line into your pine we can make big money—guarantee you half a million pesos.’ When I am in Mexico your Yankee promoters swarm round me like hungry dogs. But never have I listened, nor ever will!”

He struck the pommel of his saddle a heavy blow, then looked his surprise as Seyd spoke. “I should not think that you would. I understand your feelings.”

“You do? Caramba! Then you are the first Yankee that ever did. In return for your sympathy let me offer you advice. You are not the first man to denounce on my land, nor is Santa Gertrudis the only location. Yankees, English, French, Germans, they have come, denounced claims here and there, but no man has ever held one. No man ever will. Already you have tasted the bitter hostility of my people, and were I to nod not even the American Ambassador could save you alive. And this is only the beginning. Let me return your money? Mexico is one great mine. Anywhere you can kick the soil and uncover a fortune.”

“But none like the Santa Gertrudis.” Seyd smiled. “Of course, I feel it’s pretty raw for me to force in on your land; but, knowing that if I don’t some other will, I shall have to refuse. As for the opposition—that is all in the day’s work.” He finished, offering his hand. “But I hope this won’t prevent us from being good neighbors?”

Shaking his massive head, Don Luis reined in his horse. “No, señor, we can never be that. But next to a good friend I count a hearty enemy, and you may depend upon me for that.”

With a courteous wave of the hand he rode off; and, watching him go at a stately canter, Seyd muttered, “Enemy or friend, you are a fine old chap.”

“You are surely a fine old chap.”

Retracing his path through the long succession of farm, jungle, and fields, Seyd repeated it, and as he rode along he saw things in a new light. As he passed through one village at sundown the entire population was filing into church, the peons in clean blankets, their women in decent black. The next hamlet was in the throes of a fiesta. Girls in white, garlanded with flaming flowers, were dancing the eternal jig of the country with their brown swains. And these two functions, church and baile, marked the bounds of their simple life. A plenty of rice and frijoles, a peso or two for clothing, were all that they asked or needed.

While prospecting in the Sierra Madres Seyd had drawn many a comparison between the happy indolence of the peon and the worry, strain, strife to live up to a standard just beyond income that obtains in American life. Because the peon had time to think his simple thoughts, listen to bird song and the music of babbling streams, to watch the splendors of sunrise and sunset over purple valleys, Seyd’s suffrage had often gone to him. Observing this pastoral life in its tropical setting of palms and jungle, the opinion grew into a strong conviction.

“The old fellow’s right!” he ejaculated, riding out of the last village into the jungle proper. “We have nothing to give his people, and we’d surely kill all they have.”

Though the profusion of foliage which made of the trail one long green tunnel prevented him from seeing it, he was now riding along at the foot of the Barranca wall. Its deep shadow already filled the jungle with a twilight that thickened into night as he rode. But, knowing that whatever her faults of temperament Peace could be trusted to fetch her own stable, he left her to take her own way while he pursued his thoughts. While the siren whistle of beetles, chatter of chickicuillotes—wild hens of the jungle—deafened his ears, he tried to bring the crowding impressions of the day into some kind of order—no easy task when a fire-eating old general and a typical Mexican mother had to be reconciled in thought with a young girl who possessed the face of a Celt, eyes of a Spaniard, vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and American intelligence.

Next he fell to speculating upon the causes which had kept her single at an age that, according to Mexican standards, placed her hopelessly upon the shelf, and he found the answer in the gossip of the American station agent on his last trip out to the railroad. “She could have had her cousin Sebastien any time, and there were others around these parts. But once let a high-strung girl like her get a glimpse of the outside world and no common hacendado can ever hope to tie her shoestring. They say she has had other chances—attachés of foreign legations in Mexico City. But she turned ’em down—I don’t know why, unless it’s ideals.” With a humorous twinkle the agent had added: “Bad things, ideals—always in the way. If you happen to have any in stock give ’em to the first beggar you meet along the road. Hers are keeping San Nicolas and El Quiss from reuniting, but she don’t seem to care.”

“A fine girl—the man will be lucky that gets her.” Seyd now re-expressed the agent’s homely verdict. “If it wasn’t—” He stopped short, with a savage laugh. “You darned fool! mooning over a girl who would turn up her pretty nose at any gringo, much more one that has forced himself in on her uncle’s land. Your business is to get a fortune out of the mine, and do it quick. And even if it wasn’t—”

The thought was never finished, for the last few minutes had brought him out into the starlight at the foot of the Barranca wall, and as Peace gathered herself for the scramble upward the jungle lit up with a sudden flash. Before Seyd’s ears caught the report he felt his left shoulder clutched, as it were, by a red-hot hand. The next second he was almost thrown by the mule’s sudden plunge—fortunately, for otherwise the bullet that came out of a second flash would have smashed through his brain.

“Muzzle-loaders!” In the moment he lay on the mule’s neck he divined it from the thick explosion. Then the thought, “It will take them a minute to reload,” followed a quick calculation, “They’ll catch me again on the first turn.”

With him action always sprang of subconscious processes which were quicker than thought, and while he crouched on her neck and Peace took the turn on a scrambling gallop he turned loose with both of his Colts, aiming at the spot from which the flashes had come. And the sequel proved his judgment. This time a single flash announced the bullet which grazed the mule’s rump just as she shot into a patch of woodland.

“Reckon I made one of you sick,” he interpreted the single shot.

The burning smart of his wound and the treachery of the attack had loosed within him a fury of anger. Reining in, he felt his shoulder. The bullet had plowed a furrow in the flesh of the upper arm, but, muttering “I guess it’s bled about all it’s going to,” he first tied the mule to a tree, then slid the “reloads” into his guns.

It would have been foolish to expose himself in the open trail under the clear starlight. Resisting the savage impulse which urged him to close quarters, he crawled back to the edge of the timber and again turned loose his guns, searching the jungle below with a swinging muzzle. Time and again he did it, thanking his stars whenever he reloaded for the forethought which had caused Billy to slip an extra box of cartridges into the holsters, and not until only one charge was left did he pause to listen.

Whether or no it was the firing that had frightened even the night birds into temporary quiet, not even a twig stirred in the darkness below. He caught only the distant whooping which told that Billy had heard, and as this drew nearer with astonishing quickness Seyd rose and went back to his mule.

“Coming downhill hell for leather!” he muttered. “If I don’t hurry he’ll break his neck.”



Chapter 7

 

One afternoon about a week later Mr. William Thornton was to be seen mixing mortar for the bricks he was laying on the smelter foundation. Rising almost sheer from the edge of the bench behind him, the Barranca wall shut off the western breeze, and from its face the fierce sunblaze was reflected in quivering waves of heat. Coming out from an early lunch he had noted that the thermometer registered ninety in the shade, and he was now ready to swear that with one more degree he himself would be able to supply all the moisture required for the operation.

While working he cast occasional glances toward the house; and when, the mortar being mixed, he began to lay brick he used the trowel with care lest its clink should awaken Seyd. For though the blood loss from a severed artery had left him quite weak, he had obstinately refused to stop work. To-day he had even balked at the suggestion of a siesta until Billy had lain down himself. As soon as Seyd fell asleep Billy had slipped out, and when he now paused to listen the concern in his look passed into sudden attention as the clink of a shod hoof rose up from the trail below.

Five minutes passed before he heard it again, and in the mean time his actions bespoke an intelligent appreciation of the needs of the case. Picking up a Winchester which leaned against a tree, he crouched behind his bricks, and while training it on the point where the trail emerged on the bench a ferocious scowl overshadowed his sunburn.

“If we played it your way I’d brown you the second your nose shows,” he muttered as the hoofbeats grew louder. “Thank your musty old saints that we don’t. Ah! Eh? Well!”

The interjections respectively fitted the wolf hound, her young mistress, and the mozo, as they appeared in the order named. As only Billy’s head showed over the bricks, and both were on the same color scheme, he was practically invisible; and, reining up her beast, the girl allowed her curious gaze to wander around the bench from the gaping hole where the drift ran into the vein over the adobe hut and foundation—just missing Billy’s head—to the blue-green piles of copper ore.

“So this is the mina!” Her tone denoted disappointment. “Good heavens! Tomas, is this the wealth the gringos seek? What an ado over a pile of stones! I should think Don Luis would be thankful to have them carted away.”

She had spoken in Spanish, but when, having shed his arsenal under cover of the bricks, Billy rose and came forward, she addressed him in English. “Mr. Thornton, is it not? We have brought the papers from the administrador—at least, Tomas has. I am playing truant. Though it is only fifteen miles from here to San Nicolas, this is the first time that I have seen the place. Where is Mr. Seyd?”

Now than Billy, was there never a young man more naturally chivalrous. Usually a locomotive could not have dragged from him a single word calculated to shock or offend a girl. But in his confusion at finding an expected enemy changed into a charming friend he let slip the naked truth. “He was shot—returning from your place.”

“Señor! He—he is not—dead?”

There was no mistaking her concern. Sorry for his abruptness, Billy plunged to reassure her. “No! no! Only wounded.”

“Is he—much hurt?”

It occurred to Billy that a flesh wound was, after all, rather a small price for such solicitude. But where a touch of jealousy might have caused another to make light of Seyd’s wound, his natural unselfishness made him paint it in darker colors. “The bullet cut an artery, and he’s pretty weak from loss of blood. Yet he won’t lay off. I had to trick him into a siesta to-day. I’ll go call him.”

But she raised a protesting hand. “No! no! Let him sleep. You can give him the papers. Tell him when he awakes that he will hear from us again.”

With a smile which caused Billy additional regret for his lack of wounds she rode off at a pace which filled him with anxiety for her neck. Until he caught a glimpse of her, foreshortened to a dot on the trail far below, he stood watching. Then, muttering “I’ll bet Seyd will raise Cain when he awakes,” he went back to his work.

Nor was he mistaken, for when Seyd came out, yawning and stretching, an hour or so later, the last vestige of sleep was burned up by the sudden flash of his eyes. “You darned chump! Do we have visitors so often that you let me sleep on like a rotten log?”

Neither was he appeased by Billy’s answer, delivered with an irritating grin: “Why should she wish to see you when I was around? A pallid wretch who has to make three tries to cast a shadow!”

“He has, has he?” Seyd growled. “Well, I’m solid enough to punch your fat head.”

The atmosphere having thus been cleared, he commented: “Went off to tell the General, eh? I wonder how he’ll take it?”

“Shouldn’t imagine he’d shed any tears—unless at their poor shooting. Well, we’ll see!”

And see they did, for as they sat at lunch on the second day thereafter a yell followed by the crack of a whip brought them out just in time to see Caliban, the charcoal-burner, and the peon rice-huller coming on a shuffling run ahead of Tomas. The bloody bandages which bound the head of one and the leg of the other testified to Seyd’s shooting, just as their glazed eyes and painful pantings told of the merciless run ahead of the mozo. It required only the hempen halter which each wore around his neck to complete the picture of misery.

“These be they that attacked you, señor?” While the rice-huller squirmed under a sudden cut of his whip the mozo went on: “This son of a devil was found nursing a wound in his hut, and he told on the other. Don Luis sends them with his compliments to be hanged at your leisure. If it please you to have it done now—there is an excellent tree.”

Too surprised to answer, Seyd and Billy stood staring at each other until, taking silence for consent, the mozo began to herd his charges toward the said tree. “Here!” Seyd called him back. “This is kind of Don Luis, and you will please convey to him our thanks. It is very thoughtful of you to pick out such a fine tree, but, while we are sure that they would look very nice upon it, it is not the habit with our people to hang save for a killing, and I, as you see, am alive.”

The mozo’s dark brows rose to the eaves of his hair. “But of what use, señor, to hang after the killing? Will the death of the murderer bring the murdered to life? But hang him in good season and you will have no murder. And this is a good tree, low, with strong, wide branches ordained for the purpose. See you! One throw of the rope, a pull, a knot—’tis done, easily as drinking, and they are out of your way.”

It was good logic; but, while admitting it, Seyd still pleaded his foolish national custom.

Though his bent brows still protested against such squeamishness, the mozo politely submitted. ”Bueno! it is for you to say. I leave them at your will to cure or kill.”

“Now, what shall we do?” Seyd consulted Billy. “If we send them back the old Don will surely hang them.”

“Well, what if he does? I’m sure that I don’t care a whoop—” He paused, then suddenly exclaimed: “Are we crazy? Here we have been chasing labor all over the valley, and now that it is offered us free we turn up noses. Keep them, you bet! Put it into Spanish as quickly as you can.”

Smiling, the mozo nodded comprehension. “As you say, señor, a live slave is better than a dead thief. They are at your orders to kill by rope or work.”

Though it was scarcely his thought, Seyd allowed it to go at that. Throwing the ends of the halters to Billy, the mozo concluded his mission. “It remains only to say that Don Luis will have you come to San Nicolas till your wound is cured.”

“Fine!” Billy enthusiastically commented, when the invitation was translated. “I’ve said all along that you ought to lay off. Go down for a week. By the time you come back I’ll have these chaps beautifully broken.”

“And you unable to speak a word of Spanish—not to mention the risk to your throat?” Seyd shook his head. “Besides, the old fellow made no bones of his feelings the other day. The invitation is merely in reparation for what he considers a violation of his hospitality. If it wasn’t—My place is here.”

Accordingly, the mozo carried back to San Nicolas a note which, if not penned in the best Spanish, yet caught its grave courtesy so cleverly that its perusal at the dinner table caused Francesca to pause and listen, drew an approving smile from the señora, and produced from Don Luis his heavy nod.

“The young man is a fine caballero. Your ordinary gringo would have saddled himself upon us for three months, and we should have been worn to skeletons by his parrot chatter. As he lets us off so easily, I must ride up to the mine and warn those rascals to play him no tricks.”

Meanwhile Seyd and Billy had been giving the disposition of the said rascals considerable thought. After the mozo left, Billy cut the halters from around their necks and brought them food and drink from the house. But whether or no they considered this fair front as being assumed to emphasize future tortures the two kept their sullen silence.

“If we have to stand guard all the time we’d be better without them,” Billy doubted.

“Yes,” Seyd acquiesced. “Unless we can find some incentive. I wonder if they have families.” When the two returned nods to his questions he continued, hopefully: “There we have it. Your Mexican peon takes homesickness worse than a Swiss. If we offer them a fair wage while the smelter is building I think they’ll prove faithful. At least we can try.”

To an experienced eye—the mozo’s, for instance—the sudden brightening of the dark faces might have meant something else than relief. At first Caliban seemed to find the good news impossible. But presently, setting it down as another idiocy of the foolish gringos, his incredulity vanished. In one hour he and the rice-huller were transformed from sullen foes to eager servants. Indeed, what with their willing work that afternoon and next morning, the smelter foundation had risen a full yard by the time that Don Luis came riding up to the bench.

Looking up from a blue print of the foundation, Seyd saw him coming at the heavy trot which combined military stiffness with vaquero ease, and noting the keen glance with which he swept the bench the thought flashed upon him, “Now the cat’s out of the bag!” He did not, however, try to smuggle the animal in again. When, greetings over, Don Luis turned a curious eye on the foundation he answered the unspoken question. “A smelter, señor.”

“A smelter?” For once the old fellow’s massive self possession showed slight disturbance. “I thought—”

“That it took a fortune to build one.” Seyd filled in his pause. “It does—to put in a modern plant.” While he went on explaining that this was merely an old-style Welch furnace of small capacity he felt the constraint under the old man’s quiet, and was thereby stimulated to a mischievous addition. “You see, the freight rates on crude ore from this point are prohibitive, but one can make good money by smelting it down into copper matte.”

“A good plan, señor.” Like a tremor on a brown pool, his disquiet passed. “And how long will it be in the building?”

“We had calculated on four months. But with the help you so kindly sent us we can do it now in two.”

He could not altogether repress a mischievous twinkle. But Don Luis gave no sign. “Bueno! It was for this that I came—to read these rascals their lesson.” Menacing the peons with a weighty forefinger, he went on: “Now, listen, hombres! Since it has pleased the señor to save you alive, see that you repay his mercy with faithful labor. If there be any failure, tricks, or night flittings, remember that there is never a rabbit hole in all Mexico but where Luis Garcia can find you.”

Emphasizing the threat with another shake of his finger, he turned and went on with quiet indifference to comment upon the scenery. “A beautiful spot. Once I had thought to build here, but one cannot live on the edge of a cliff, and San Nicolas has its charm. Is it true that we cannot tempt you to come down? The señora begs that you reconsider.”

But he nodded his appreciation of Seyd’s reasons. “Si, si, a man’s place is with his work—and I have stayed too long. There is business forward at Chilpancin, and even now I should be miles on the way.”

“Will you not stay for lunch?” Seyd protested.

But replying that he had already lunched at a ranch in the valley, the old man rode away on his usual heavy lope. “You see,” Seyd commented, watching him go, “it is all right for me to accept his invitation, but he will not eat of our bread.”

“Well, I don’t blame him,” Billy answered. “I’d feel sore myself if I were he. But, say, we’re getting quite gay up here. Regular social whirl. I wonder who’s next? We only need mamma to complete the family.”

The remark was prophetic, for, while the señora did not herself brave the Barranca steeps, only two days thereafter Francesca and the mozo reappeared driving before them a mule whose panniers were crammed with eggs and cheese, butter and honey, fruit, both fresh and preserved, also a full stock of bandages, liniments, curative simples, and home-made cordials. While unpacking them on the table in their house the girl laughingly explained that if Seyd would not come to be cured the cures must needs come to him.

“This is a wash for the wound.” She patted a large fat jug. “This other is to be taken every hour. Of this liquor you must take a glass at bed-time. Those pills must be swallowed when you rise. This”—noting Billy’s furtive grin, she finished with a laugh—“you will not have room for more. Give the rest to Mr. Thornton. But under pain of the good mamma’s severest displeasure I am to see you drink at least two cups of this soup.”

“You shall if you stay to lunch,” Seyd said. “Billy makes gorgeous biscuit, and they’ll go finely with the honey.”

“If you can eat bacon—we have only that and a few canned things,” Billy added, a little dubiously, and would have extended the list of shortcomings only that she broke in:

“Just what I like. I’m tired of Mexican cooking, and I am dreadfully hungry.”

That this was no idle assertion she presently proved, and while she ate of their rough food with the appetite of perfect health their acquaintance progressed with the leaps and bounds natural to youth. Before the end of the meal she had drawn Billy completely out of his painful bashfulness, and he was telling her with great pride of his beautiful sister while she contemplated her photograph with head held delicately askew.

“Yes, she’s fair,” he told her, adding with great pride, “but not a bit like me.”

“The most wonderful hair!” Seyd volunteered. “Darkest Titian above a skin of milk.”

“Oh, you make me envious!” she cried, with real feeling. “I love red hair. Luisa Zuluaga, my schoolmate in Brussels, had it combined with great black Spanish eyes. She got her colors from an Irish great grandfather who came over a century ago to coin pesos for the Mexican mint. Now, why couldn’t I have had them?”

Observing the fine-spun cloud that flew like a dark mist around the ivory face, Seyd could not find it in his heart to blame her grandfather, and, if good taste debarred him from saying it, the belief was nevertheless expressed through the permitted language of the eyes. Perhaps this accounted for the suddenness with which her long dark lashes swept down over certain mischievous lights.

Any but an expert in feminine psychology might indeed have found himself puzzled by certain phases of her manner. Its sympathy, addressing Billy, would give place to a slight reserve with Seyd, then this would melt and give place to unaffected friendliness. Occasionally, too, she offered all the witchery of her smiles, yet the hypothetical expert would never have suspected her of coquetry. The feeling was far too mischievous for the fencing of sex. Its key was to be found in the thought that passed in her mind. “‘Almost pretty enough to marry,’ you said. The trouble is that my girlish beauty is in inverse ratio to my future fatness. What a pity!”

Yet this little touch of pique was never sufficiently pronounced to interfere with her real enjoyment. As for them—it was a golden occasion. If they ate little, they still feasted their eyes on the face that bloomed like a rich flower in the soft shadows of the adobe hut, their ears on her low laughter and soft woman’s speech. They found it hard to believe when she sprang up with a little cry: “I have been here two hours! Now I have earned my scolding. The madre only let me come under a solemn promise to be back before sunset.”

Had they been unaware of the principal concomitant in the charm of the hour, knowledge would have been forced upon them when she rode away, for, though the birds still sang and the hot sun poured a flood of light and heat down on the bench, somehow things looked and felt cold and gray.

And she? Going downgrade an afterglow of smiles lent force to her murmur: “Gringos or no, they are very nice.”

Chapter 8

 

A hard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she had traveled no more than a hundred yards beyond before she was roused from renewed musings by the thud of hoofs. Turning in her saddle, she saw Sebastien coming along the valley trail at a gallop. Passing the mozo, whose beast had lagged, the hacendado pulled his beast down to a trot, and as Tomas, answering a question, nodded backward toward the hills, vexation swept the girl’s face.

It cleared, however, as quickly, and while waiting for Sebastien she measured him with a narrow glance. The straight, lithe figure, easy carriage, dark, quiet face could stand inspection, and she paid unconscious tribute. “If I hadn’t gone to Europe I suppose—” A decided shake of the head completed while dismissing the thought. In the next breath she murmured, “Now for a fight.” Yet her expression, saluting him, displayed no apprehension.

“Yes, I was at Santa Gertrudis.” She quietly answered his question. “Two of our people shot one of the gringos as he was leaving our place, and the good mama would have it that it was our duty to cure him.”

“Ah! the good mother?” He raised his brows. “And she chose you for her doctor?”

“As you see.”

“Yes, I see. ‘No, Francesca, thou canst not go. It would not be right for a young girl—well, if you must—’ I hear it as though I had been there, and wonder that the señora, who was brought up in the letter of our conventions, should send her daughter to a gringo camp with only a mozo for escort. But Don Luis? Is he also mad?”

“No, only wise.” She answered with irritating simplicity. “Take care that you do not put heavier strains on a slight kinship. Third, fifth, tenth, just what is the degree of our cousinship?”

“God knows!” He shrugged. “The slighter the better. ’Twill serve till replaced by a closer.”

“Which will be never.”

“Only the gods say ‘never.’” He quoted the proverb. “But returning to your amigos, the gringos—”

“My amigos?”

“You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that I would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have, on a street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists pass comments on our women—Dios! I choke at the thought! If you but realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us—”

She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: “It is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own and American women. If the gringos can teach them any lessons—”

“Apes!” he burst angrily in. “Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the vices of civilization with its collars!”

“Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point—there are gringos and gringos just as we have Mexicans and Mexicans.”

“And these, of course, are the other sort?”

“Exactly!” She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. “If one judges, as one must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my opinion.”

“Of your opinion?” He regarded her with sudden sternness. “That is, to be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands? I had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he be the last?” His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: “I had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools before them. But since they are working on a surer plan—”

“What do you mean?” She searched his face.

“So anxious?” he laughed bitterly. “What is it to you?”

“Only that I would not have them murdered.”

“And would they be the first? Is there a foot of Mexican soil which has not been soaked with good Mexican blood that you should be so careful for a gringo?” Slanting through an opening in the trees overhead the sun shone on his face, transforming it into a red mask of hate. “As yet no one of them has secured himself in the Barranca de Guerrero! So long as a Rocha is left to do the duty that belongs to the Garcias no one of them ever will.”

But now he had touched another string, and, straightening in her saddle, she gave him look for look. “When the Garcias need the Rochas to settle their quarrels it will be time for you to interfere. I should not advise you to speak thus to my uncle.”

Nevertheless she flinched a little at his answer. “That is my intention—this very night.”

With that they rode on, in silence for a while, then speaking of other things. But when he left her in the upper courtyard an hour later she stood at her door, listening apprehensively to the jingle of his spurs along the gallery. When he took a chair beside Don Luis, who sat there smoking, she listened for a while. Then, flushing suddenly, she hastily went in.

If she had remained there was nothing to hear, for during many minutes the conversation ran altogether on the herds as they came winding in from distant pastures to the corrals in the square. Night had reduced everything to a dark blur before Sebastien commented on a yellow twinkle high up on the Barranca wall.

“That will be the gringos’ light at Santa Gertrudis.” After a long pause, “It is now a month past since they came, and—they are still here.”

Don Luis flicked the ash from his cigar. “What hurry?”

“But this new business? The smelter you spoke of the other day.”

“Si, the smelter?”

Sebastien gave his own interpretation to the other’s slow tone. “Then there is something forward?”

“What need? The gringo at the station tells me they have no money. A single mistake and they are done.” After a sententious pause he added, “It is the part of youth to make mistakes.”

The dusk did not conceal the other’s impatience. “But why this tender care? Are they so different from the others? A word from thee and—”

“Yes, yes, a nod and it would have been done long ago. There speaks young blood—the hot blood that lost us Texas and Alta California. These lads are of good family, Sebastien, and there can be no disappearance without inquiry. Their death would be but one more thorn in the side of the rabid beast that requires small urging to devour us. No, let them make their own end.”

“And Francesca? Is she to have the run of their camp?”

Don Luis’s deep laugh rumbled through the courtyard. “At last from a long cast we come to the quarry. Francesca? She is a wild filly, the despair of every staid tabby in the countryside. Long ago I discovered that the one way to manage her was to let her have her head. Nor will it be the part of wisdom for thee to interfere.”

“Neither would I try—yet. Commands are for husbands; lovers must wait. That which I propose she will never know. It is—” Answering the other’s interrogative look, he leaned over, whispering in rapid Spanish.

Don Luis emitted an amused chuckle. “Sebastien, thou art truly a devil. Had thy father possessed but the half of thy wit, some things had gone different in the last war. Yes, feet that are still spoiling good sod would now be rotten bones.” After a pause he went on: “It seems a scurvy trick, yet it depends on the men themselves. But—if they rise not at the bait?”

“If?” Sebastien repeated it with bitter scorn. “Was there ever a gringo that would not bite at such? They are kind as goats. I ask only that you go there with Francesca at the close of the week.”

“And thou?”

“I shall go there to-morrow.”



Chapter 9

 

Living in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca wall. Early as it was, however, others were already abroad. The sudden increase in his family had obliged Seyd to make a journey out to the railroad for more provisions, and when Sebastien paused to breathe his beast halfway up the grade to the bench, a good glass would have shown him Light and Peace gingerly picking their way along the trail that had been built by Don Luis’s orders around the slide on the opposite wall.

As usual, Sebastien’s approach was announced by the ring of hoofs, but, imagining it to be some charcoal-burner, Billy, who was already at his bricks, did not look up till warned by Caliban’s stealthy hiss. In his surprise he forgot to reply to Sebastien’s greeting, and simply answered the other’s question.

“Don Roberto? He is not here?”

“No, gone out to the railroad. Won’t be back for three days.”

“Caramba! After I had climbed these heights to see him!” Though his eyebrows and hands both testified to Sebastien’s disappointment, a sharper eye than Billy’s might have discerned the underlying satisfaction. Moreover, if he appeared merely inquisitively friendly during the hour he stayed to chat, not one minute was wasted. From the first question to his final comment on Billy’s work, “You gringos are certainly a wonderful people,” all was directed to one end.

“Yes, we usually get there,” Billy modestly admitted, and his next words paved a lovely road for Sebastien to come to his purpose. “The building would go faster if I hadn’t so many things to do. After laying bricks all day I have to turn in and cook, and, though it’s pretty tough, there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it. We tried both of the peons at the cooking and nearly died of the hash they served up.”

“Tut! tut!” Sebastien was there with ready sympathy. “This is too bad. Soon you will be completely worn out.” After a pause, during which he may be imagined as taking Billy’s mental temperature, he said: “Bueno! I have it! I shall send you a cook—one than whom there is no finer in all this country.”

If he had harbored any suspicions, Billy’s beaming smile now wiped them out. “That’s awfully good of you. Seyd will be ever so glad. When can we expect your cook?”

“To-morrow afternoon.” Scenting hospitality in Billy’s glance toward the hut, Sebastien hastily added, “That is, if I reach home to-night—to do which I shall have to be going.” And refusing the offer of lunch which justified his premonition, he rode away, leaving Billy puffed up with pride.

“I rather think I turned that trick well,” he congratulated himself. “Seyd couldn’t have done it a bit better.” Occasional fat chuckles emitted during the afternoon testified to his increasing opinion of his own diplomacy. But his rising pride did not attain its meridian until, midway of the following afternoon, a pretty brown girl came driving a burro up the trail.

Having anticipated a man cook, it required five minutes of vehement Spanish, helped out by a wealth of gesticulation, to convince Billy that the girl was not an estray from a neighboring hamlet, and while her dark eyes, white teeth, and shapely brown arms were engaged in explanation they wrought other work. By the time Billy was finally able to understand the fact he was hardly in condition to pass upon it.

It is only right to state that he had little time for reflection, for from the very beginning the girl took the direction of affairs into her own hands. Driving her burro over to the stable she unpacked a stone metate, or grinding-stone, a pestle, and a quantity of soaked corn. She turned the beast out to graze, then dropped at once on her knees and began grinding paste for the supper tortillas, or cakes. When, toward evening, Billy dropped in for a drink he found her mantle spread on his bed and certain articles of feminine wear depending from the nails which had hitherto been sacred to his own clothing.

Blushing furiously, he went out—without the drink. But, though his colors would have done credit to a girl, they were not to be weighed in the same balance with the green peppers stuffed with minced beef that she served at supper with the tortillas. While eating with an appetite born of a protracted canned diet it is to be feared that he fed just as ravenously on the atmosphere shed by her luxurious presence. When, after supper, he sat in the doorway and watched the blood-reds of the sunset flow through the valley he might, with his fiery stubble, have passed for some ancient Celt at the mouth of his cave. Not until he caught a second glimpse of the mantle while stealing a look at the girl washing up dishes did he return to his usual bashful self. Slipping quietly inside, he gathered up the blankets off Seyd’s bed and carried them out to make his own couch under a tree.

This procedure on his part the girl watched with a certain astonishment which she vented on Caliban while giving him his breakfast next day. “I had thought differently of the gringos. Be they all like this one—”

“Give time, give time!” the hunchback advised. “Big fish are ever slow at the hook, but when they once rise—” The tortilla he used for illustration vanished at one gulp. “Wait till thou seest Don Roberto. There’s a man! Of his own strength he threw a burro off the trail into the Barranca and so turned the train that would otherwise have driven him and the ‘Red Head’ into the cañon. ’Tis so. The history of it was written by Don Sebastien’s whip on the shoulders of Mattias and Carlos. And what of the magic that turned my bullet fired at twenty yards, then found me and Calixto in black jungle and shot us down from the high cliff? Si, chief of the other is he, so waste not thy freshness.”

“Bah! am I a fool?” She elevated her nose.

This conversation undoubtedly explains the staidness of her demeanor that day. Not that it was necessary to keep Billy at his distance. Leaving his painful modesty out of the question, in his ignorance of the Mexican peon folk he placed her in his imagination on the same plane as a white girl, and as the color of a skin cuts no figure in the calculations of the little god, providing that it be fitted smoothly over a pretty body, she found favor in his sight. At work both the next and the following days he kept always an eye open for the flash of her white garments in the doorway. When, with the earthen jar on her head, she went to draw water from the spring his glance followed the swaying rhythms of her figure. If not actually in love by the time Don Luis and Francesca put in their appearance next morning, Billy was at least living a tropical idyl, one not a whit less beautiful because its object departed far from his ideal in all but her physical perfection.

The visit had been skilfully timed to miss lunch, and Billy was already back at his work. Crossing the bench, Don Luis’s eye went instantly to the girl who had been drawn to the door by the sound of hoofbeats. But his expression gave no hint of his grim amusement. The keenest ear would have found it difficult to detect sarcasm in his remark.

“I see, señor, that you have added to your family.”

Also it need not be said that Francesca’s woman’s eye had summed at a glance the smooth oval face, rounded arms, shapely figure; yet their undeniable comeliness brought no pleasure to her expression. If Billy had overlooked Don Luis’s sarcasm it was impossible to miss her scorn.

“A capable housekeeper—if one may judge from her looks—and quite at home. You are to be congratulated, Mr. Thornton.”

Looking up in quick surprise, Billy noticed the absence of the sympathy that she had shown him during her last visit. Feeling the cold anger behind, and sadly puzzled, he was not sorry when, after a few minutes of strained talk, Don Luis asked to be shown the vein. Judging by his backward glance from the mouth of the tunnel, it would appear that he had coined the request to pave the way for that which happened the instant they disappeared. For, walking her beast over to the house, Francesca spoke to the girl.

“Thy name?”

“Carmelita, señorita.”

“Of what village?”

“Chilpancin—I am the daughter to Candelario, the maker of hair ropes.”

Though she answered with the glib obsequiousness of her class, the appraising glance which swept Francesca from head to heel carried a mute challenge and conveyed her full knowledge that a battle was pitched such as women fight all the world over. Neither could Francesca’s patrician feeling smother equal recognition. It was revealed in her next question.

“How long hast thou been in this employment?”

The girl paused. Then, whether it was due to Sebastien’s tutoring or her own malice, she gave answer. “Eight days, señorita.”

“Who hired thee?”

Downcast lashes hid the sudden sparkle of cunning. “Don Roberto.” But they lifted in time for her to catch the sudden hardening of Francesca’s face.

“Then see that thou renderest good service, for these be friends of ours.”

As beforesaid, neither the cold patronage of the one nor the sullen obsequiousness of the other could hide the issue from either. Francesca’s calm, as she turned her beast, did not deceive. Malicious understanding flashed out as the girl called after, “Si, he shall have the best of service.”

Returning to the smelter, Francesca began to talk to Caliban, yet while questioning him concerning his new employment she could not be unconscious of Carmelita lolling in the doorway, hands on shapely hips, an attitude gracefully indolent and powerfully suggestive of possession. Perhaps it was her acute consciousness of it which injected an extra chill a few minutes later into her refusal of Billy’s invitation to dismount and rest. His suggestion that Seyd was likely to arrive any moment drew a still more decided shake of the head. Moreover meeting Seyd as they rode downgrade she passed with the slightest nods, nor even looked back to see if her uncle were following.

Doubtless because he felt that he could well afford it, Don Luis did stop, and before riding on he once more threatened Calixto, the rice-huller, who was with Seyd. “This fellow—he still gives good service?” His courtesy, however, did not remove the chill of Francesca’s snub. Hurt and wondering, Seyd passed on up to the bench—to have his eyes opened the instant that he saw the girl in the doorway. When, after dismounting, he walked across to where Billy was at work on the foundation, her big dark eyes took him in from tip to toe in a flashing embrace. She studied him while he stood there talking.

“What is she doing here?”

He cut off Billy’s welcome with the sharp question, and while listening to explanations his gray eyes drew into points of black. In the middle of it he burst out, “You don’t mean to say that you fell for it as easily as that?”

“Fell for what?”

Billy’s round eyes merely added to his irritation. “You chump! didn’t you see the trap?”

“The trap?”

“Yes, trap! T-r-a-p, trap! Got it into your fat head? Don’t you see that you have catalogued us with the San Nicolas people as a pair of blackguards forever? Oh, you fat head!”

That was not all. While he stormed on, saying things that he would willingly have taken back a minute later, every bit of its usual mercurial humor drained out of Billy’s face. Over Seyd’s shoulder he could see the girl in the doorway. A certain dark expectancy in her glance told that she knew herself to be the bone of contention. As a doe might watch the conflict of two bucks in the forest, she looked on, and, meeting Billy’s eye, her glance touched off his anger.

“Stop that!” he suddenly yelled. “Stop it or I’ll hand you one! I will, for sure! What do I care for your San Nicolas people? I didn’t come down here to do a social stunt, and why should the opinions of a lot of greasers cut any ice? Let ’em go hang. The girl looks all right to me.”

“All right! You innocent!” Shaking with anger, Seyd turned and spoke to Caliban, who was mixing mortar close by. “As I thought! If half he says is true her reputation would hang a cat.”

But Billy’s jaw only set the harder. While he might easily have been persuaded out of his idyl, he was not to be driven. Out of pure obstinacy he growled: “What of it? I reckon her morals won’t spoil the food. She’s proved she can cook, and that is all I want. She’s going to stay.”

“She’s not.”

“She is.”

For a pause they eyed each other. Though their friendship had survived, nay, had been cemented by many a quarrel, never before had a disagreement gone such lengths.

“Look here, Billy.” Seyd spoke more mildly. “This won’t do. She’s got to go.”

“Not till you’ve shown me—not now,” he hastily added, as Seyd began to strip. “I’d hate to hit a cripple, and—”

“Come on.”

But, ducking a swing, Billy gave ground, genuine concern on his face. “No, no, old man! You are still weak. Let it go for another week. That left fin of yours—”

Landing at that precise moment on his ear, however, the member in question proved its convalescence and ended the argument by toppling him sideways. Up in a second, he closed, and for the next ten minutes they went at it, clinching and breaking, jabbing and hooking, with an energy and science that would have filled the respective souls of a moralist and a prize-fighter with disgust and delight. Avoiding both of these extreme viewpoints, the account may very well be given in the terms used by Caliban in describing the affair next day to one of his compañeros, a charcoal-burner.

“Like mad bulls they go at it, grappling and tearing, each striking the other so that the thud of their blows raise the echoes. It is in the very beginning that the Red Cabeza fells Don Roberto, but instead of splitting his head with the spade that stands close by—was ever such folly!—he helps him up from the ground. I then think it the finish, but no, they go at it again, hailing blows in the face hard as the kick of a mule, and so it continues for a time with only pauses to catch their breath. I am beginning to wonder will it ever come to an end when—crack! sharp as the snap of thy whip and so swift that I do not see the blow, it comes. The Red Cabeza lies there quietly on the ground. Believe it or not, Pedro, he is knocked senseless by a blow of the hand.”

The immediate consequences may also be left to Caliban. “Their quarrel, as I have said, is over Carmelita, the dove of Chilpancin, and I now expect to see Don Roberto take her for his own. That she is of the same mind is proven when she comes running with her knife for him to finish up the Red Cabeza. But again, no! who shall understand these gringos?—he gives her the sharpest of looks.

“‘Vamos!’ He shouts it with such anger that she stumbles and falls, running back to the house. Also she makes such a quick packing that she is driving her burro out to the trail before the Red Cabeza comes to his senses.”

Billy’s eyes, indeed, opened on the departing flash of her garments. “You didn’t lose much time,” he commented, with a quizzical glance upward. “Well, to the victor the spoils—or the rejection thereof. That was a peach of a punch—the bum left, too, wasn’t it?” The old merry look flashing out again from the blood and bruises, he asked: “How’ll you trade? In exchange for one admission from you I’m willing to grant you’re right.”

“Shoot!” Seyd grinned.

“Would you have been as careful of the proprieties if the señorita were out of the case?”

Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. “Quien sabe, señor?”

“Ahem!” Billy coughed. “Now you justify the continuance of my wretched existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned morality is mighty uncomfortable practice. That girl could cook. The next time you fall in love please—”

”Now, what are you talking about?”

“What have I done?”

Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd’s anger faded. “I beg your pardon. Of course you didn’t know, but—I’m already married.”

“You?”

“Me.” With grim sarcasm he added, “And you know that it is against the law of both God and man for a married man to fall in love.”

Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from congratulations by the other’s irony, Billy floundered, bringing several attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. “When—when did it—happen?”

“Happen? That’s it.” Seyd jumped at the word. “It happened in New Mexico three years ago when I was down there ‘experting’ the Calumet group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don’t have to describe her. You’ve seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst of giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious attention if several of her admirers hadn’t done me the honor of getting jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after that I went deeper—so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw. At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty skin, that she hadn’t a thought above the money and position she expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small vanities and frivolities developed into appetites and passions, and I awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal—a beautiful animal, prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.

“If that had been all—one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish—loved only herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown to itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the scraps of knowledge she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She was bound to remold me on her own crude model. Actual wickedness would have been easier to bear, and I can assure you that the third month of our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received a commission just then to ‘expert’ a group of Mexican mines, and, as she preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her since.”

All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy’s hand, he finished, walking away: “Read that—I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours.”

And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends. Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a “shame and a disgrace.” But he needn’t think that she would stand such treatment forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn’t tried to “better herself.” But it wasn’t for lack of the chance! There was a gentleman—no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man, eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He (Seyd) had better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages, and, while Billy’s eye followed, his expression gradually settled in complete disgust.

“Hopelessly common! You poor chap,” he muttered, looking after Seyd, who was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the mules into the adobe. “To think that you have had this on your mind all this time!” After a moment’s reflection he added, “But—married or unmarried, you are still in love.”

Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding, and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival at some conclusion.

“I’ve got it!” he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped the package he was carrying in, he asked, “Hast thou any acquaintance at San Nicolas?”

Reassured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him, the hunchback nodded. “One of the kitchen women is daughter to my sister.”

He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece could convey certain information to the señorita Francesca’s ear?

“Si, there is always gossip moving among the women. It could be passed through Rosa, her maid.”

For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was in love Seyd’s face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A little sheepishly he now went on: “It must be that thou wouldst care to see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San Nicolas.”

To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect, at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. “This is to buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can whisper—”

His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in, “That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, señor—also from whose hand she came hither.”

The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he brazened it out. “But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me.”

“Si, señor.” The man’s quick grin indicated an unearthly comprehension. “It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a muleteer.”

It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside. When, an hour later, he went in to help with supper he found Seyd his usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas, bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.

“The señorita Francesca has gone to visit her mother’s people at Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return.”

“Very well; thou hast done thy share,” Seyd answered.

His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. “Did I not say these gringos were a mad people?” he demanded of Calixto, showing two pesos by the light of the stable lantern. “He pays me a peso to bring him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad—and to think that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to have them! ’Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos.”