A STRANGE MESSAGE.
As Buffalo Bill glanced round again, he began to look for tracks in the
soil. He saw only his own, and those of Periguez, which came from the
opposite direction.
“In following these I can perhaps find the men who were with him,” was
his thought. “They may be scattered now, but if he had followers, or
companions, he left them at some point, certainly; and by pursuing his
tracks the trail of the other men can be picked up. Yet I should not
care to go on without my horse; and if I rode while following these
tracks the risk of being seen would be great. I should like to know who
was with him, but it may not be worth my while.”
He was carrying the gold-handled dagger in his hand. It slipped from his
fingers, as he held it carelessly, and struck with a sharp click on a
stone at his feet. He stared down at it with a gasping cry.
Small wonder that he did so; what he saw was enough to make him gasp and
stare.
The fall on the stone had released some hidden spring in the dagger’s
handle, and it had opened. Within the cavity a twisted something was
seen resembling paper.
With a quick motion the scout caught up the dagger, looked at the heavy
handle, which had been so deceptive, and then began to untwist what at
first sight appeared to be a roll of paper. He saw that it really was
not paper, but the fine inner, fibrous bark of a tree. Letters were
traced on it with the leaden end of a bullet or cartridge. The writing
was in Spanish, but he was able to read it:
“My name is Leon Ruiz. I have been made suddenly a prisoner.
Where I am I do not know, but my prison is a large adobe
house, on a hill, and mountains are all around me. Whoever
finds this——”
The message broke off abruptly.
Buffalo Bill read it over and over again, as if he could not convince
himself that he read aright.
It was in the highest degree mystifying.
In the first place, it gave the name of the writer as Leon Ruiz, who was
the Moorishlike proprietor of the Porfiero Hacienda, and who, after
welcoming Buffalo Bill, had disappeared so strangely, instead of
returning to take supper with him.
In the second place, Ruiz had apparently returned to the hacienda in the
night, or certainly after the supper hour, for it was after supper that
Buffalo Bill had the second time seen the dagger of gold among the ore
specimens on the hanging shelves.
If Ruiz had so returned—and it seemed he must have done so, or he could
not have gained possession of the dagger—why had he not made his
presence known?
The answer to that might be, the scout suspected, that Ruiz and Periguez
were enemies. If that were true, Ruiz might have fled from the hacienda
to escape sudden vengeance, and might have returned in the darkness to
get certain articles, taking among other things this dagger, yet had
been afraid to try to see the scout.
According to the writing, he was now a prisoner in a big adobe building
located on a certain hill, with mountains surrounding it.
Buffalo Bill was fairly familiar with that portion of New Mexico, and he
remembered that the only large adobe building answering to that
description, of which he had knowledge, was the Perditas Hacienda, on a
high hill near the Perditas River.
That hacienda was mountain girt, but it was distant a number of miles
from the Porfiero Hacienda, so distant that hard riding would have been
required to convey Ruiz to it in the time that had elapsed. Yet it could
have been done.
“But if he is a prisoner where he says he is, how did the dagger get
here?” the scout asked, looking up as if questioning the air from which
apparently it had come. “And why did Ruiz not finish his letter?”
Though the letters scrawled on the back with the end of a bullet were
large, there was yet enough space remaining on the bark to have written
several words more. There was no apparent reason why the message should
have been left unfinished.
The more the scout thought of it, the more puzzled he grew. Finally he
replaced the letter in the handle of the dagger, for safe-keeping, and,
after an examination of the hidden spring, now to be seen, he closed the
handle.
It shut with a sharp click, and after it had been closed it seemed
perfectly solid, with nothing to show that it was hollow. And its weight
added to that appearance of solidity.
“Those old Spaniards, or Moors, or whoever made this dagger, were
experts at their trade,” was the scout’s thought, and then he turned to
the body of Ramon Periguez, which still lay just as it had fallen.
Wondering if there could be anything in the dead man’s pockets that
would throw any light on this mystery, or perhaps the singular
disappearance of Prince Mogador, Buffalo Bill put his hand into the
inner pocket of the man’s jacket.
Periguez had been his enemy—had sought his life and Periguez’s
scoundrelly companions, the scout believed, were somewhere near.
Therefore, Buffalo Bill felt justified in securing even in this way any
information he could.
As he thus stooped over the body of Periguez, a rifle cracked some
distance away, and the scout dropped downward with a limp motion,
falling across the body of the dead man.
Three men in Mexican costume sprang out of some bushes at the point from
which the rifle had been fired, and came running toward the fallen
scout.
One of them was the servant who, dressed in white, had waited at the
supper table the previous evening at the Porfiero Hacienda. This rascal
carried a rifle from which smoke still curled, and it was plain that he
had fired the murderous shot.
“He is dead!” said this man, as they reached the scout.
To all appearance he was right in his conjecture, for Buffalo Bill lay
in a limp heap upon Periguez’s body. Yet his right hand still clutched
the dagger.
“Shot him in the head! See? There flows the blood!”
Blood trickled down over the scout’s face, and there was a bullet hole
in his hat.
One of the other men saw the dagger of gold, and greeted the sight with
an exclamation of astonishment.
“See?” he fairly screeched. He held up the dagger. “See? The dagger of
Leon Ruiz!”
They looked at it, with many ejaculations.
“The very dagger, taken by this American robber from the hacienda. And
with it he killed Ramon Periguez.”
“Aye, it is so! He stole the dagger from the hacienda, and killed
Periguez with it!”
“Aye! But he is dead now. Señor Gomez, your eye was true and your bullet
a good one. You sent his cowardly soul to the pit in a quick way, and
may it burn there forever!”
But at this juncture Buffalo Bill began to stir.
Though it had hurled him into sudden and complete unconsciousness, the
bullet from the rifle of Gomez had merely scraped along his skull, cut
the skin open, and produced a free flow of blood, yet had made no more
than a superficial wound. It was the concussion which had dropped the
scout in a senseless heap across the body.
“The rascal still lives!” Gomez ejaculated, and, bending over to look,
he lifted the gold dagger as if he thought of driving it to the scout’s
heart in order to finish him.
Buffalo Bill’s eyes fluttered open, but closed again, for consciousness
was but returning.
“Ah, he is rousing!” said another of the three men. “We will question
him about this murder, if he comes back to life for a while.”
“He may not be mortally hurt,” said the third man.
“If he is not,” said the other, “I have here a medicine that will finish
him!”
He touched significantly the protruding handle of his knife.
Gomez was still bending above the scout, watching his struggling return
from the land of insensibility.
“Manuel,” he said, without looking round, “bring the lariat from my
horse, that we may bind this devil. He is not so badly hurt, mayhap. We
will tie him.”
Manuel started off at a run. When he came back he was riding one horse
and leading two others. He approached at a gallop, drew up with a
thunder of hoofs, and leaped down with a spectacular flourish, swinging
the lariat he had procured. Evidently Manuel was a rascal of theatrical
tendencies. He threw the lariat to Gomez, who, with deft loopings and
turns, together with some quickly made knots, soon had the scout bound
hand and foot.
“Help me to turn him,” he said, “and we will pass the lariat round his
body and arms.”
“He will think the foul fiend has him sure enough,” declared one of the
men with a laugh, as the rope was wrapped round and round the scout’s
body.
---------------------------------------------------------