“TOMMIE’S GONE!”
“Rouse up, Hank!”
Hank, snoring on his back, flung out his arms, opened his eyes, yawned
and stared at the beautiful blazing morning visible through the tent
opening.
“Lord! it’s good to be alive!” said Hank. He dressed and came out.
Candon was tinkering at the fire. The mule, on its feet now, was
standing, whilst Tommie was feeding it with dried grass taken from
the provender bag, the Mexicans, sitting like tired men, were smoking
cigarettes, whilst the four mile beach sang to the crystal waves and
the white gulls laughed.
It was a pretty picture.
Tommie came running to the heap of stores by the middle tent, chose
a couple of tins, wrapped up some biscuits in a bit of newspaper and
presented the lot to the Mexicans.
“They look so tired,” said she, as they sat down to breakfast.
“Well they ought to be,” said Hank, “seeing the way they’ve been
digging. Boys, I reckon they ought to have a bonus.”
“They’ve had fifteen dollars,” said the practical George, “and their
grub.”
“Maybe,” said Hank, “but they’ve done fifty dollars’ worth of work,
seeing how we’re placed. I vote we give them five dollars extra.”
“I’m with you,” said Candon.
“Ten,” said Tommie.
“I’ve only a ten dollar bill left on me,” said George. “Don’t matter,
give it to them.”
Tommie took the note and, leaving her breakfast, tripped over to the
Mexicans. Then she came back.
Half an hour later, armed only with the spades and Hank’s improvised
shovel, they set to work.
“Let’s borrow the greasers’ shovels,” said George.
“I’d rather not,” said Candon, “they’ll be going off the beach soon,
and I’d rather they weren’t here when we strike the stuff, we’ll be
soon on it now.”
“What’s the matter with the sand?” asked Hank as he contemplated the
floor of the hole. “Looks as if it had been beaten down with a shovel.”
“Shovel—nothing—” said George, “it’s their flat feet, come on!”
By half past eleven o’clock, Candon reckoned that the depth required
had been reached if not passed.
“We’ll get it this evening,” said he, “as sure’s my name’s Bob Candon.”
“Hope so,” said George.
As they turned to the tents for dinner and siesta, they found that the
Mexicans were still on the beach a bit to the southward, strolling
along by the sea edge. Then they came back northwards.
“I wish those greasers would go,” said George.
When they turned in for the mid-day siesta, the beach-combers seemed to
have made a little camp for the purpose of rest and cigarette smoking
half-way between the sea edge and the southern defile in the cliffs.
George slept, at first the sleep of the just, then began the sleep of
canned kippered herrings and 80° in the shade. Tyrebuck was buried
alive somewhere on the beach and they were trying to locate him without
treading on him; then, having seemingly given up this quest, they were
seated playing cards with Hank’s late partner, the lady who could put a
whole potato in her mouth. They were playing a new sort of game which
the ingenious Hank had invented and which he called Back to Front. That
is to say they were holding their cards so that each player could only
see the backs of his own hand and the fronts of his partner’s hand. It
was bridge, moreover, and they were playing for potato points. How long
this extremely intellectual game lasted, it is impossible to say. It
was suddenly interrupted.
Hank outside the tent had seized his foot and seemed trying to pull his
leg off.
“Come out!” cried Hank. “She’s gone!”
“Gone! Who’s gone?”
“Tommie. They’ve stolen her.”
Candon, already awakened and out, was running around looking at the
sand as if hunting her foot steps.
The raving Hank explained that, unable to sleep, he had come out and
found the Mexicans gone. Some premonition of evil had made him glance
at Tommie’s tent opening. Not being able to see her, he looked closer.
She was gone. They had stolen her.
“After them!” cried George.
Aroused from a fantastic dream he found himself faced with something
almost equally fantastic. The size of Tommie made a lot of things
possible. Visions of her, captured and strangled and stuffed into one
of the bags on the mule’s back, rose before him, though why or for what
purpose the greasers should commit such an act was not clear.
The going was hard over the sand till they reached the defile in the
cliffs towards which the mule tracks seemed to lead. Here the way led
gently uphill over broken rocky ground till they reached a low plateau
where, under the unchanging sunlight, the landscape lay spread in humps
and hollows to the hills away to the east. Rock, sagebrush and sand,
cactus, sand, sagebrush, it lay before them; but of Tommie, the mule
or her captors, there was no trace or sign. The sand here was no use
for tracking purposes, it was beach sand blown up by west winds and lay
only in places, rock was the true floor, rock rising sometimes six feet
in camel humps obstructing the view.
Candon climbed one of these kopjes, shaded his eyes and looked. Then he
gave a shout.
“Got ’em,” cried Candon, “right ahead. After me, boys!”
He came tumbling down and started at full speed, taking a track that
led due east between the hillocks, till, rounding a boulder, away ahead
of them, they saw the mule and its companions slowly winding their way
in a south-easterly direction—but not a trace of Tommie.
They closed up rapidly, the Mexicans turned at the shout of Hank, then,
as if a bomb shell had burst amongst them, they scattered, leaving the
mule to its fate and running south, sou’east and east.
“Mule first,” cried Hank.
Through the canvas of the great bulging sack of sea-weed on the mule’s
back, he could see the small corpse of Tommie, strangled, maybe,
doubled up, done for.
The mule, left to itself, had begun to feed on a patch of grass as
tough looking as bow-string hemp. It cocked an eye at the oncomers and
continued feeding till they got close up to it.
“Look out!” yelled Hank.
The heels of the brute had missed him by inches.
They scattered, picking up rocks by instinct and instinctively planning
and carrying out their attack without word of common counsel. It was
the primitive man, no doubt, aroused by rage; at all events the mule,
mechanically grazing, got, next moment, a whack on its rump with a rock
that made it squeal and wheel only to get another on its flank. It
flung its heels up as if trying to kick heaven.
“Stand clear,” cried Hank. The sack, provender and shovels had fallen
to the ground and the mule, seeing an open course and impelled by
another rock, was off.
Hank flung himself on the sack. There was no Tommie in it, only
seaweed. Candon, recognising this, made off, running after the
Mexicans, but something was protruding from the provender bag that was
not provender. Hank pulled it out. It was a parcel done up in oil cloth
and tied clumsily with tarred string.
“Lord!” cried George. “The boodle!”
The shock of the discovery almost made them forget Tommie for a moment.
“Hounds,” said Hank. “They must have been digging last night after we
turned in.”
“And they’ve opened it,” said George. “Look at the way it’s tied up
again—and that knot’s a granny. Oh, damn! What’s the use of bothering?
We haven’t got her. Hank, clutch a hold of the damned thing and hide
it somewhere and come on. Scatter and hunt.”
Candon had made off due east. They heard his voice shouting, “Hi,
there, hi there! Tommie! Ahoy there!” Then Hank, throwing the parcel at
the foot of a prominent upstanding rock, made off south and Bud north.
The eagle of the Simaloa hills, having fed its young that morning, had
returned to its watch tower and from there she saw the hunt. She saw
Hank overtaking and kicking a Mexican, Bud chasing another Mexican,
Candon pursuing a third. Philosophising, perhaps, on the craziness of
human beings, she saw the chase of the Mexicans relinquished and the
pursuers each now seemingly in pursuit of something else.
An hour later Hank, returning to the rock where he had flung the
bundle, found Bud.
“She’s not here,” said Hank, “but she can’t be anywhere else—I’m
done—there’s nothing for it but to hike back and get all the Chinks and
comb this place. It’s not the Mexicans. She’s maybe wandered out here
alone and fallen off a rock or into a hole or got sunstroke. Come on
and fetch the Chinks.”
“Where’s B. C.?”
“I dunno. Chasing away there somewhere—come on.”
He caught up the bundle and they started, the most dejected pair of
human beings in Mexico at that moment. They couldn’t speak. They came
through the defile in the cliffs and there on the sands lay the new
beached boat, and on the sands the tents, and half in and out of her
tent, sitting with her head in the shade and her feet in the sun,
Tommie reading a book.
Hank dropped the bundle and ran towards her, shouting as he ran and
waving his arms.