When Thurstane came out of the Casa Grande he would have given some years
of his life to know that there was water in the enclosure.
Yet so well disciplined was the soul of this veteran of twenty-three, and
so thoroughly had he acquired the wise soldierly habit of wearing a mask
of cheer over trouble, that he met Clara and Mrs. Stanley with a smile and
a bit of small talk.
"Ladies, can you keep house?" he said. "There are sixteen rooms ready for
you. The people who moved out haven't left any trumpery. Nothing wanted
but a little sweeping and dusting and a stair carpet."
"We will keep house," replied Clara with a laugh, the girlish gayety of
which delighted him.
Assuming a woman's rightful empire over household matters, she began to
direct concerning storage, lodgment, cooking, etc. Sharp as the climbing
was, she went through all the stories and inspected every room, selecting
the chamber in the tower for herself and Mrs. Stanley.
"I never can get up in this world," declared Aunt Maria, staring in dismay
at the rude ladder. "So this is what Mr. Thurstane meant by talking about
a stair carpet! It was just like him to joke on such a matter. I tell you
I never can go up."
"Av coorse ye can get up," broke in little Sweeny impatiently. "All ye've
got to do is to put wan fut above another an' howld on wid yer ten
fingers."
"I should like to see _you_ do it," returned Aunt Maria, looking
indignantly at the interfering Paddy.
Sweeny immediately shinned up the stepped beam, uttered a neigh of
triumphant laughter from the top, and then skylarked down again.
"Well, _you_ are a man," observed the strong-minded lady, somewhat
discomfited. "Av coorse I'm a man," yelped Sweeny. "Who said I wasn't?
He's a lying informer. Ha ha, hoo hoo, ho ho!"
Thus incited, pulled at moreover from above and boosted from below, Aunt
Maria mounted ladder after ladder until she stood on the roof of the Casa
Grande.
"If I ever go down again, I shall have to drop," she gasped. "I never
expected when I came on this journey to be a sailor and climb maintops."
"Lieutenant Thurstane is waving his hand to us," said Clara, with a smile
like sunlight.
"Let him wave," returned Mrs. Stanley, weary, disconsolate, and out of
patience with everything. "I must say it's a poor place to be waving
hands."
Meantime Thurstane had beckoned a couple of muleteers to follow him, and
set off to beat the enclosure for a spring, or for a spot where it would
be possible to sink a well with good result. Although the search seemed
absurd on such an isolated hill, he had some hopes; for in the first
place, the old inhabitants must have had a large supply of water, and they
could not have brought it up a steep slope of two hundred feet without
great difficulty; in the second place, the butte was of limestone, and in
a limestone region water makes for itself strange reservoirs and outlets.
His trust was well-grounded. In a sharply indented hollow, twenty feet
below the general surface of the enclosure, and not more than thirty yards
from the Casa Grande, he found a copious spring. About it were traces of
stone work, forming a sort of ruinous semicircle, as though a well had
been dug, the neighboring earth scooped out, and the sides of the opening
fenced up with masonry. By the way, he was not the first to discover the
treasure, for the acute senses of the mules had been beforehand with him,
and a number of them were already there drinking.
Calling Meyer, he said, "Sergeant, get a fatigue party to work here. I
want a transverse trench cut below the spring for the animals, and a guard
at the spring itself to keep it clear for the people."
Next he hurried away to the spot where he had posted Kelly to watch the
Apaches.
Climbing the wall, he looked about for the Apaches, and discovered them
about half a mile distant, bivouacked on the bank of the rivulet.
"They have been reinforced, sir," said Kelly. "Stragglers are coming up
every few minutes."
"So I perceive. Have you seen anything of the girl Pepita?"
"There's a figure there, sir, against that sapling, that hasn't moved for
half an hour. I've an idea it's the girl, sir, tied to the sapling."
Thurstane adjusted his glass, took a long steady look, and said sombrely,
"It's the girl. Keep an eye on her. If they start to do anything with her,
let me know. Signal with your cap."
As he hurried back to the Casa Grande he tried to devise some method of
saving this unfortunate. A rescue was impossible, for the savages were
numerous, watchful, and merciless, and in case they were likely to lose
her they would brain her. But she might be ransomed: blankets, clothing,
and perhaps a beast or two could be spared for that purpose; the gold
pieces that he had in his waist-belt should all go of course. The great
fear was lest the brutes should find all bribes poor compared with the
joys of a torture dance. Querying how he could hide this horrible affair
from Clara, and shuddering at the thought that but for favoring chances
she might have shared the fate of Pepita he ran on toward the Casa, waving
his hand cheerfully to the two women on the roof Meantime Clara had been
attending to her housekeeping and Mrs. Stanley had been attending to her
feelings. The elder lady (we dare not yet call her an old lady) was in the
lowest spirits. She tried to brace herself; she crossed her hands behind
her back, man-fashion; she marched up and down the roof man-fashion. All
useless; the transformation didn't work; or, if she was a man, she was a
scared one.
She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she
glanced at the awful solitude around her. Notwithstanding the river, there
still was the desert. The little plain was but an oasis. Two miles to the
east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the
west it disappeared in a similar chasm. The walls of these gorges rose
abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters. All around were the
monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau. No
outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then
came towering precipices. The travellers were like ants gathered on an
inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry. The horizon was
elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were
at once near the spectator and far above him. The overhanging plateaux
strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven.
What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were
horrible to the weary and sorrowful. On the other side of the San Juan
towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these
statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them
was at least four hundred feet high. To a lost wanderer, and especially to
a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying. It
seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were
full of malevolence. Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the
black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with
ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could
scale. It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their
pandemonium.
The whole landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage
giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at
home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The
Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in
such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been
a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal
agony and boundless despair might not have been out of place.
There was no comfort in the river. It came out of unknown and inhospitable
mystery, and went into a mystery equally unknown and inhospitable. To what
fate it might lead was as uncertain as whence it arrived. A sombre flood,
reddish brown in certain lights, studded with rocks which raised ghosts of
unmoving foam, flowing with a speed which perpetually boiled and eddied,
promising nothing to the voyager but thousand-fold shipwreck, a breathless
messenger from the mountains to the ocean, it wheeled incessantly from
stony portal to stony portal, a brief gleam of power and cruelty. The
impression which it produced was in unison with the sublime malignity and
horror of the landscape.
Depressed by fatigue, the desperate situation of the party, and the menace
of the frightful scene around her, Mrs. Stanley could not and would not
speak to Thurstane when he mounted the roof, and turned away to hide the
tears in her eyes.
"You see I am housekeeping," said Clara with a smile. "Look how clean the
room in the tower has been swept. I had some brooms made of tufted grass.
There are our beds in the corners. These hard-finished walls are really
handsome."
She stopped, hesitated a moment, looked at him anxiously, and then added,
"Have you seen Pepita?"
"Yes," he replied, deciding to be frank. "I think I have discovered her
tied to a tree."
"Oh! to be tortured!" exclaimed Clara, wringing her hands and beginning to
cry.
"We will ransom her," he hurried on. "I am going down to hold a parley
with the Apaches."
"_You_!" exclaimed the girl, catching his arm. "Oh no! Oh, why did we come
here!"
Fearing lest he should be persuaded to evade what he considered his duty,
he pressed her hand fervently and hurried away. Yes, he repeated, it was
_his_ duty; to parley with the Apaches was a most dangerous enterprise; he
did not feel at liberty to order any other to undertake it.
Finding Coronado, he said to him, "I am going down to ransom Pepita. You
know the Indians better than I do. How many people shall I take?"
A gleam of satisfaction shot across the dark face of the Mexican as he
replied, "Go alone."
"Certainly," he insisted, in response to the officer's stare of surprise.
"If you take a party, they'll doubt you. If you go alone, they'll parley.
But, my dear Lieutenant, you are magnificent. This is the finest moment of
your life. Ah! only you Americans are capable of such impulses. We
Spaniards haven't the nerve."
"I don't know their scoundrelly language."
"Manga Colorada speaks Spanish. I dare say you'll easily come to an
understanding with him. As for ransom, anything that we have, of course,
excepting food, arms, and ammunition. I can furnish a hundred dollars or
so. Go, my dear Lieutenant; go on your noble mission. God be with you."
"You will see that I am covered, if I have to run for it."
"I'll see to everything. I'll line the wall with sharpshooters."
"Post your men. Good-by."
"Good-by, my dear Lieutenant."
Coronado did post his men, and among them was Texas Smith. Into the ear of
this brute, whom he placed quite apart from the other watchers, he
whispered a few significant words.
"I told ye, to begin with, I didn't want to shute at brass buttons,"
growled Texas. "The army's a big thing. I never wanted to draw a bead on
that man, and I don't want to now more 'n ever. Them army fellers hunt
together. You hit one, an' you've got the rest after ye; an' four to one's
a mighty slim chance."
"Five hundred dollars down," was Coronado's only reply.
After a moment of sullen reflection the desperado said, "Five hundred
dollars! Wal, stranger, I'll take yer bet."
Coronado turned away trembling and walked to another part of the wall. His
emotions were disordered and disagreeable; his heart throbbed, his head
was a little light, and he felt that he was pale; he could not well bear
any more excitement, and he did not want to see the deed done. Rifle in
hand, he was pretending to keep watch through a fissure, when he observed
Clara following the line of the wall with the obvious purpose of finding a
spot whence she could see the plain. It seemed to him that he ought to
stop her, and then it seemed to him that he had better not. With such a
horrible drumming in his ears how could he think clearly and decide
wisely?
Clara disappeared; he did not notice where she went; did not think of
looking. Once he thrust his head through his crevice to watch the course
of Thurstane, but drew it back again on discovering that the brave lad had
not yet reached the Apaches, and after that looked no more. His whole
strength seemed to be absorbed in merely listening and waiting. We must
remember that, although Coronado had almost no conscience, he had nerves.
Let us see what happened on the plain through the anxious eyes of Clara.