“Which way you come from there?”
“Carpinche.”
“You know the road to Anselmo?”
“No; but I can find it.”
“How you know you can?”
“I have found you, Señora.”
She sat staring at him, fanning her face with her handkerchief; her face
was without more expression than a large uncut ham.
“What you going to do in Anselmo?”
“I’ve business with George Elena.”
“What business?”
“Horses.”
“Why you come this way, if you go on business? This ain’t the way. Why
you not go the proper road?”
Hi wavered at the question, but said:
“I thought it might be quicker to sail down the bay and come this way.”
“How long you been here?”
“Three or four days.”
“Horses,” she grunted in a tone of great disgust. She fanned herself,
looking over Hi’s head at the wall. There was no expression on her face,
but her big jaw worked a little: she was solving the problem of what
brought Hi there.
“I got no horse,” she said at last.
This, besides being ungracious, was false. Hi felt that she spoke thus
because she was cross from being wakened and did not want to be
bothered.
“I tell him, maybe you lend your colt,” the German said.
“I got no horse to lend.”
“No, of course, Señora,” Hi said. “I don’t ask you to lend him. I want
to hire him.”
“How much you pay?”
“How much do you want, for the two days?”
“What you pay?”
“What do you usually charge?”
“How much you pay? I can’t be buyer and seller, too.”
“I don’t know how much these things cost in this country,” Hi said.
“Well, what you give, see?”
Hi produced his peseta notes and small change, to which the woman made
an emphatic gesture that this was child’s play.
“Well, how much, then?” Hi asked.
A tall, lean man had come silently into the room behind Hi; he had taken
up his position facing Hi, with his back against the table. He was
picking his teeth with a sprig of macilente, which he chewed. Hi did not
like the fellow’s looks. He had almost no brow; his hair and eyebrows
merged into each other. Under this shag, the man’s eyes were very black;
his face was hungry-looking, with pale, sunken cheeks. The mouth was
greedy-looking or wolfish, although it split into a smile over the
toothpick. The teeth glittered; they looked evil, being pointed and
inclined inward, something like snakes’ fangs. His ear-rings glittered
at each bite upon the sprig. There was a glittering about the man’s
person, apart from ear-rings and teeth, because his waistcoat was
buttoned up to the throat with some thirty small globular silver
buttons.
“All is not gold that glitters,” Hi thought. “Mr. Bright Tooth, you look
like a wolf who would scratch up a grave.”
“Well, how much, do you think, would be fair for a horse for two days?”
Hi asked.
The woman fanned herself for a moment, then she said:
“You see, we not know you. You may be very fine gentleman, but we not
know you. My horse, all the horse I got. You want to go to Anselmo? That
fifty kilometre, forty kilometre from here through the forest; pumas in
the forest; eat horses; then you go over the fords; the fords all out
with rain. Very like you get my horse drowned. Then you not know how to
look out. You get the horse bitten by snakes, or else you lose your way.
Then suppose you reach Anselmo. You say, that old woman, pah, she not
want her horse. I got to Anselmo, what the hell, see? How I to know you
send the horse back?”
“I promise you I will.”
“Promise. Look. I’m a woman: see? I don’t believe any promise any man
ever make. When a man want a thing, he promise anything. Does he pay?
Nit, I don’t think; with the fore sheet, what? So don’t promise me
nothing, Albert; it’s pretty to hear you, but it don’t lead to nothing.”
Bright Tooth entered the conversation with the question:
“You got English sovereign?”
Hi had three English sovereigns; he offered one of them, which at that
time, in that country, would have bought two horses, with their harness,
outright. After some more haggling, backed by Bright Tooth, the old
woman agreed to lend a horse, saddled and bridled, for two days, for one
English sovereign and all the small change Hi had. It was, however,
agreed that this small change, amounting to seventeen Santa Barbara
pesetas, should be returned to the man who brought back the horse. Hi
thought that they drove a very hard bargain with him; but to have a
horse and to be away upon his journey were the desires of his heart at
the moment. Even so, he knew enough not to pay for a horse till he had a
little knowledge of it. He asked to see the horse.
Bright Tooth led him out to the yard at the back of the house, with the
remark that he was a very nice horse, a horse for a king or queen, being
tireless and good spirited, as well as so beautifully boned. Hi had
heard horses sold in England, by his father. He waited till they were in
the stable, where two horses were in stalls. The one nearer to the door
was a nice dark chestnut mare, which seemed somehow, even at a first
glance, a little too good for such a stall.
“Is this the horse?” Hi asked.
“No,” Bright Tooth said, “the other.”
The other was a sour-coloured pony engaged at that minute in gnawing off
the top of the partition between the stalls. He was doing this with an
ugly chucklehead screwed sideways, so that his yellow hooked teeth might
get a purchase on the splinter. He was rough-haired, having been out in
the rains (apparently in a hog wallow). The hair, stuck to patches of
mud, was scaling off him. He had not been shod nor had his feet been
pared. They stuck forward in long, splitting growths of horn almost like
slippers. A sort of gaiter of hard red mud coated his legs to his hocks.
He was straight-shouldered, and what old Bill always called “a bit
goosey in the rump.” His head, when he ceased from gnawing the barrier,
was loutish and ill set on. “Stunsail ears and a Roman nose,” Hi
thought. “Worth six bob a corner.”
“This is a horse,” Bright Tooth said.
“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for horse,” Hi quoted to himself, from the
Macbeth his form had “done” the term before. “Good Lord,” he said aloud,
“I can’t take a beast like that.”
“There, a lovely horse,” Bright Tooth said. “Never fail. He never, never
fail. There come soldiers here for horses, one time. They say, he too
small, not allowed to take so small a horse; but that the horse for a
soldier; he got the good guts.”
“Guts. Good Lord,” Hi said. “He’s got no more guts than a herring. I
never saw such a beast in all my born days. Let me have the other, the
mare.”
“No, not,” Bright Tooth said. “The other one not belong here. She not
our horse.”
“Whose is she? Perhaps I could hire her.”
“No, no,” Bright Tooth said, “she wait here till after the fiesta; then
the man come to ride her home. He be here in a few minutes now.”
“In a few minutes?” Hi said. “I could wait a few minutes.”
“He not be here in a few minutes. I make mistake, see. This yellow horse
the only horse. He go like the wind.”
“With those feet?”
“I tell you about those feet. The rains make it very slippy. With those
feet he never, never fail: any kind of mud, any kind of stick, he stand
fast.”
“I’ll bet he will stand fast,” Hi said. “Is there no other horse?”
“No other horse anywhere, except the mare. And the man who owns the
mare, he very proud man; he not let anyone ride the mare.”
“Well, all right, then,” Hi said, “I suppose I must take the pony. Let
me see the saddle and bridle.”
The old woman had hobbled to the stable, the German had gone back to his
work.
“I like to see the colour of your money,” the old woman said. “I not
know you, see, so you make me a little present.”
Hi paid over the money, which mother and son (if that was, as he
supposed, the relationship between the pair) watched with eyes that
burned with voracity. The old woman bit the sovereign, to test its
goodness, as though she were going to eat it.
“You go armed, in case of robbers?” the old woman asked.
“Yes.” Hi said. “Rather.”
He was feeling at the moment uneasy about this couple, lest they should
go back upon their bargain and deny the horse, after taking the money.
But the man Bright Tooth saddled and bridled the horse and led him out.
Hi noticed that the pony was an arm-snapper.
“I’ll borrow this stick of yours,” he said, picking up a crooked stick
which rested against the wall. “Your beast is too free with his
nippers.”
“Where you keep your gun?” the old woman asked.
“In my pocket, all ready,” Hi said. He noticed that she had a sharp eye
upon his pockets as he mounted. “Now, which way to Anselmo?” he asked.
She swung her hand round to the west, to point to the track leading past
the German’s house.
“Straight on,” she said, “past the ford and out of the wood.”
“Thank you, and how far is it?”
“Seventy kilometre: sixty kilometre.”
“Oh, rats, Señora,” Hi said, “it can’t be. You said it was twenty a
little while ago.”
“Quien sabe?”
Bright Tooth stepped down the yard from them to open the gate.
“Adios, Señora,” Hi said, moving off. It was twenty-seven minutes to
four; but he felt that he was now really started. A kind of gleam came
upon the Señora’s face: the horse with the slippered feet clacked slowly
down the slope to the track. Hi saw the German leaning on his hoe,
watching him as he drew near.
VIII
The German came slowly towards him, waving with his left arm towards the
left.
“Dot der way to Anselmo,” he said. “You mind out at der ford.”
“Thank you for your help,” Hi said.
“Very welcome.”
The German turned back to his hoeing and Hi set out upon his path. When
he was out of sight of that settlement, really on his way to Anselmo, he
thought of those warning words, “You mind out at the ford.”
“You meet highwaymen at the fords,” his father had said, “or did in my
day, but I expect it’s all altered since then.”
“I wonder what that German meant,” he thought. “Perhaps that devil
Bright Tooth may be playing some trick, but probably what he meant was
that the floods are out. It will be rotten if I can’t get across.”
Then the question rose in his mind how far Anselmo was. “Twelve or
fifteen miles,” he thought. “I can be there by 5 or 5.30 and I will be.”
He whacked up the horse into a solitude of rocky barren, densely grown
with small thorn and prickly pear. The strangeness of the landscape, the
blueness of the sky where the eagles were cruising for their prey and
the glory of the adventure on which he rode made his ride a dream of
delight for some miles, till the rocks on both sides of him grew in
towards him, so that he rode in a kind of gully, where the hooves made
more echo than he liked. The gloom of the place was made greater by the
prevalence of the pudding-cactus, which exuded over his path like
jellyfish flecked with blood or snakes which had been pressed to death.
Multitudes of flies feasting on the stickiness of the plant gave it the
appearance of corruption. In nearly all the puddles there were snakes.
The noise of the echoes of the horse’s hooves became louder and louder.
Hi, looking back, saw that a horse and man were coming after him.
The man was bent down in his seat with his sombrero jammed down over his
eyes. He had a look of Bright Tooth. His horse looked like the dark
chestnut mare which Hi had seen in the stable. She had seemed a beauty
then, if a little small. She showed like a beauty now in the grace of
her going.
“It’s Bright Tooth all right,” Hi thought. “I’ll bet he comes for no
good.”
Seeing that he was seen, the man sat up and called to Hi to stop. He was
certainly Bright Tooth.
“Why should I stop?” Hi thought. “I am not going to stop for a swine
like that. Let him jolly well catch me up and explain.”
As he saw that Bright Tooth was not carrying a gun, he rode on, though
Bright Tooth called repeatedly something about stopping or returning, to
which Hi answered, “Si,” or “Bueno” or “That’s the ticket.” Bright Tooth
pressed his horse up to Hi’s off quarter with the cry, “You Englishman
return.” He motioned back towards the cross roads.
“I am not going to return,” Hi said.
“Then you give back the horse, see?” Bright Tooth cried.
“I don’t see,” Hi said. “Why should I?”
They were now riding side by side at a good speed, because both horses
thought that it was a race.
“You turn back, see,” Bright Tooth cried. He motioned backwards, shaking
his head.
“All right, old sport,” Hi said. He did not turn, nor did he mean to
turn; he kept on, with an eye for the road and the next move. He shoved
his stick into his bridle hand, so as to have his right hand free.
“Give up the horse, see?” Bright Tooth cried again. “Your money bad. Bad
English money.” He gave a violent imitation of biting a coin and being
sick. “You come back,” he cried, “or pay good money.”
“Rats,” Hi said.
“Your money bad.”
“The money was good,” Hi said.
“You pay more money. Another sovereign, see?”
“I won’t pay a red cent more.”
Bright Tooth shot forward, stooped and made a clutch at Hi’s rein. The
yellow horse shied away from him, so that he missed his clutch and
nearly fell. Hi, too, was nearly off. He recovered first. He dropped his
right hand to the pocket where he kept his knife. He poked the end of
the knife from within the pocket towards Bright Tooth, as though it were
a revolver muzzle. He had read somewhere of men shooting through the
pocket. He called out, “All right, old sport, I’ve got you covered.
Cuidado.” He did not know what cuidado meant; but he had heard the third
officer in the _Recalde_ use the word as an alarm note. He saw Bright
Tooth whip out a knife with a blade a foot long, sharp on two edges and
spear-pointed.
They looked at each other a few feet apart. Hi enjoyed it, because
Bright Tooth did not attack.
“You pay another sovereign,” Bright Tooth said. There was about Bright
Tooth a sort of suggestion of a rush preparing.
“Clear out,” Hi said, “clear right out of it. Get back where you
belong.”
“You give the bad money,” Bright Tooth said; there was a whine in his
voice. Hi edged towards him; he edged away.
“Clear out.”
Bright Tooth cleared out. He turned, in an anxious manner, to a point
ten yards away. As Hi turned after him, he retreated hurriedly for fifty
or sixty yards; then, as Hi still slowly followed, he retreated further.
“You keep where you are. Don’t you try to follow me,” Hi called. He
tapped his pocket, and added, “This is what you’ll get, if you try any
monkey-tricks with me, my son.”
He watched Bright Tooth for half a minute; then, as he seemed not
disposed to try any monkey-tricks, he turned again upon his way through
the woodland across the puddings of the cactus. Whenever he looked back
he saw Bright Tooth following. If he paused, Bright Tooth paused. If he
turned back, Bright Tooth turned back. When he went on, Bright Tooth
followed.
“I haven’t done with him yet,” Hi thought. “He knows of some place ahead
where he can get me.”
After some time he passed a turning to the right. Looking back, he saw
Bright Tooth turn down this track at a quickened pace.
“He’s riding to head me off,” Hi thought. “I wish I had at least a
club.”
There was, however, no chance of getting a club in that wood. He rode on
into a meaner country and from this to a forest darker than the last,
where he could hear nothing except a murmur or steady beat like the
noise of water somewhere ahead. “That’s the ford,” Hi thought, “and the
river’s in spate. Well, the longer I think of it, the less I shall like
it.”
Almost at once the forest became sparser. He rode out on to a hill of
moist red soil, at the foot of which was a violent little river,
blood-red and bank high. Tracks led to what had been a ford there, but
the water was romping over the ford in a way terrible to see. Not far
below the ford the water went down a rapid. Near the ford, where the
tracks ceased to be boggy, Bright Tooth and a friend sat on horses
waiting for him. Bright Tooth had his knife, the friend had a revolver.
“Here we are,” Hi said.
They signed to him to come forward and moved towards him. Hi had not any
time for thought; he moved on the impulse of the moment. He banged his
horse forwards down the slope towards the water in such a way that he
could not stop, even had he wished. He yelled as he went. His horse went
scattering down the slope. The man struck at him and someone shot at
him. The water went up suddenly in a bright sheet over him and then he
was in the hands of the river. In the first rush of the fall he lost his
horse, and nearly choked with the filthy water in his mouth. Catching a
gulp of air, he saw his horse again as the banks of the stream ran away
from him. Then he saw Bright Tooth on a jibbing mare gathering the coils
of a lasso for a swing. Then he was tumbled headlong and endlong down
into a roaring pit that banged him and wouldn’t let him get his breath.
He felt that he had tumbled down all the stairs in Christendom. The
tumbling and banging seemed to last through this life into eternity. In
another few seconds, when he had leisure to open his eyes, he was in a
round, filthy, surging pool, where boughs, shrubs, trees and drowned
beasts were milling and churning amid enormous bubbles of red yeast.
Striking out to the side of this, he came to a steep bank covered with
trailers of bindweed dripping down upon him. Putting down his feet, he
touched rock and stood. He caught the trailing plants, waded to the bank
and then felt suddenly faint. Holding on to the trailers, he saw that
they were not the bank, but a screen to it. Behind them was a cave, into
which the sun shone. He clambered into this and lay down upon a
water-smoothed rock, closed his eyes and wished that the world would
stop spinning.
After he had lain there for some minutes he heard voices. Through the
creepers he could see Bright Tooth and his friend on the other bank of
the river, peering for his body. Presently he saw them lie down upon the
bank in an effort to see under the creepers which hid him. They went up
the stream for a little, then went down it, then came back to point,
jabber and explain their theories over the pool. He could see what was
in their minds. Bright Tooth thought that he had been washed underneath
the bank. His friend thought that he had been jammed under water in the
pool. They were there, watching the water, for a full quarter of an
hour. Suddenly he saw them exclaim and point at something. The body of
the sour colt, which had jammed in a snag in the rapids, came blindly
down. The current shot it over to Bright Tooth’s side on the way
down-stream. He saw them watch for the rider, but no rider followed.
After some more searching and consulting, the two seemed to be agreeing
to return later, when the water had fallen. They mounted and surveyed
the water from their saddles and then slowly rode away with many glances
back.
“They won’t be gone for long,” Hi said to himself. “They will come back
separately soon, each hoping to find me before the other has a chance.”
As soon as they were hidden from him by the forest, Hi ventured out of
his cover. By a little scrambling among slippery rocks he found a way
out of the river-bed to the dry land. He saw the sour colt’s body
drifting across a rock in mid-stream. The rage and rush of the filthy
falls down which he had come made him marvel that he was not jammed
there with the horse. He went on into the scrub away from the river till
he came to a pool in the hollow of a rock. Here he stripped, washed,
dried his clothes in the hot sun and took stock of his position. His
nose was swollen and uncomfortable; he had an after-football feeling
that he would be very stiff in the morning. “But that’s nothing,” he
thought, “I ought to be thankful to be still alive.” His horse and hat
were gone; his watch had stopped at seven minutes to five. His money was
safe; among the coins were two crumpled, soaked ten peseta notes, which
he had forgotten; he dried these carefully. He had a pocket-book, a
knife, two handkerchiefs, a box of matches, which he dried one by one, a
pair of pocket-scissors, some string, two pencils and a small
shield-shaped silver locket containing camphor. His sister Bell had
given this to him at Christmas; he had carried it with him ever since.
All his clothes looked as though they had been dipped in old blood, but
they soon dried in the sun on that hot rock. He made his second
handkerchief into a sunbonnet. His tie, which had been black with green
spots, had spread a greenish black tinge all over his collar; the tie
itself looked like a snake which had been run over. He judged that he
would look more like a tramp with these two things than without them, so
he left tie and collar under a bush, with a qualm, that he was leaving
bits of England there. “The Elenas,” he thought, “will fit me out with a
tie and collar when I reach Anselmo. After all, everybody has a collar.
“And now,” he added, “I will be off for Anselmo, as hard as I can put
foot to ground. It can’t be more than eight miles.”
Away from the river the ground was desert-like and hard, growing scrub,
mezquite, cactus and prickly pear in the spaces clear of rock. He picked
up the trail for Anselmo, and went on at a good pace till he came out
into the sage in the open country. He had often heard his father speak
of the Santa Barbara landscape, now he saw it in its sweep, with the
mountains near at his left, Gaspar thrusting out in front of them, above
a rolling plain over which the wind exulted. Santa Barbara made a smudge
against the paleness of the lower sky far behind him to his right. In
front was this infinity of swaying sage, which ran on into grass for
hours and hours of going. The forest lay dark to the left, all over the
foothills of the Sierras; but one could not look at the darkness with
all that light to choose. Straight in front of him, how far away he
could not tell, in that clear light, which had so often deceived him
already, was a round hill topped by a tower. It seemed to be not much
more than a mile away in that clearness. The tower was foursquare and
tall. One of its angles was topped by the figure of an angel clasping a
banner.
“That is it,” Hi said, “there it is. That is Anselmo tower; the village
must be beyond the hill; I shall be at the Elenas in half an hour. Oh,
cheers; come on, now, for the last lap.”
He was so much cheered by the sight of his landmark that he began to run
towards it. Soon he drew clear of a patch of scrub into sight of the
great south road from Santa Barbara to Meruel. It went straight from the
city across his path through a copse or woodland half a mile in front of
him. On the road, coming from the city towards this wood, were four
ox-waggons each with teams of eight oxen. He could see the slow, stately
lurch of each swaying ox and hear the songs and cries of the negro
teamsters. They were going with heavy loads. The whips cracked like
rifle shots; the soft tenor voices adjured the oxen to pull in the names
of countless saints. Hi saw a waggon enter the cover of the copse, then
a second, then a third, then the last, but as he went on he did not see
them emerge on the other side. “They can’t have stopped for siesta at
this time,” he thought. “I suppose they are taking a halt.”
He went on towards the copse or little wood, watching idly, as one will,
for the teams to emerge on the other side. They did not appear, so that
he thought suddenly, “I know what it is; there is a turning in the wood
towards Anselmo. They have turned off to Anselmo, and so of course the
wood hides them. Yet that can’t be, either; for they aren’t singing nor
cracking their whips. I suppose they have pulled up for maté or a
cigarette.”
It took him longer than he had expected to reach the copse. When he was
close to its edge, he heard from within it a sudden scream of pain
followed by the laughter of men.
“What on earth is that?” he thought.
He broke into the covert, past a water; he heard voices and horses, and
smelt woodsmoke and tobacco; soon he came out into the open upon a
curious scene.
For three hundred years, carters and horsemen using that road had turned
into that copse to camp or siesta. A wide space on both sides of the
road had been browsed and trampled clear; the cleared ground was black
with old camp-fire marks. In the road, in the midst of this cleared and
trampled space, the four teams of oxen stood with straying bent heads in
front of their waggons. All about them was a troop of Pituba lancers,
perhaps fifty strong, who had been halted there boiling maté at little
reed fires when the waggons had come in upon them. Now the lancers were
standing guard over the teamsters, who were being questioned by their
captain.
Hi recognised the captain at once. He was the little, short, fierce,
bullet-headed snappy man who had forbidden him to land at La Boca. His
yellow eyes were still bloodshot with rage. He was barking at one of the
teamsters, who had perhaps made some rash or unfortunate reply. After he
had sworn at this man, he gave an order to some of his men, who threw
the teamster to the ground and bent his head down to his knees. Two
Indians then pressed a piece of wood across the back of his neck and
lashed it there with strips of hide. Hi knew at once that they were
going to make the man what is called a broody hen; his father had told
him of this torture. But before the order could be given to complete the
trussing of the victim, the officer looked up, and recognised Hi.
“Ah,” he said, “the Inglays from La Boca; the Inglays with the too much
talk.”
“Si,” Hi said.
“Then you did not land at Carpinche as I bade?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yes,” the officer said. “But what does Mr. Inglays do here, on the
Meruel Road, after being told to stay in Carpinche?”
“I’m going to Anselmo.”
“To Anselmo? And where is your permit to go to Anselmo?”
“Surely I do not need a permit. I am English.”
“So? He does not need a permit: he is Inglays. To whom is the Inglays
going in Anselmo?”
“I’m not going to anybody. I want to see that angel on the tower.”
“Ah, to see the angel on the tower? A holy Inglays. You will come to
Ribote, where your angel of the tower shall be a little searched into.
You are under arrest.”
“I’m English,” Hi said. “I have not broken any of your laws. You had
better let me go.”
“It is for me to judge whether to let you go,” the officer said, “and
whether you have broken the laws. You are walking without a permit on a
forbidden road. You will come with me to Ribote.”
“But I can prove that I am doing no harm,” Hi said.
“If you can prove it, you can prove it at Ribote,” the officer answered.
“But to Ribote you will certainly come.”
He turned his back upon Hi. He left him in charge of two troopers, while
he strolled away to drink his maté. When he had finished his maté, he
gave orders that Hi should mount a spare horse. When the troop had
formed up, with Hi in the midst of them, they set off at a quick pace
along the great road to the south. It was half-past five, as Hi judged,
when they set out. The mountains were stretching their shadows like
fingers along the plain. Glancing back, he saw the angel of the tower of
Anselmo growing smaller and smaller. “We are miles from Anselmo now,” he
thought. “It will be midnight now before I can get there.” He had no
fears for himself. “They won’t really dare to harm me,” he thought, but
he did bother acutely about the delay of the message. “Here’s the whole
day gone,” he thought, “and I haven’t started yet and these beasts may
jail me for a week.”
He was going, as far as he could judge, south or south with a little
east in it. Presently they were riding in the dark, except for a flaring
lower sky behind them and the young moon westering over the plain. “This
is ten miles,” he thought, “or fifteen miles from Anselmo. I am no
nearer than I was in Santa Barbara.”
At about seven or later he saw lights in front of him running up a
slope. They came into a town of some size built on the side of a hill,
which was crowned with pine trees. “Here is Ribote,” he thought. The
town, though it was mainly a collection of wooden houses, was lit with
electric light. Near the entrance of the town there was a big enclosure
containing a mansion. The troop rode past this, up the hill to an
important stone building, which looked like a large public-house
partially converted into a Greek temple. As it had a flagstaff with two
small guns in front of it, Hi judged it to be the city hall. The troop
halted outside this hall. The officer with about a dozen men dismounted,
drew their revolvers and entered. Perhaps thirty seconds later there
came a cry from within and shots were fired. A few minutes later, three
men, the better sort of citizen, were brought out from the hall. As the
officer brought these men into the open, he caught sight of Hi, whom he
seemed to have forgotten.
“Here is this Inglays again,” he said. “You shall rest from your horse
ride.”
He said something to a native in a ragged blue uniform, who looked like
a sweeper or a porter of the building.
“Yes, it is so,” he said. “You shall rest awhile to consider the angel
on the tower and other matters. You shall have your hands free, so that
you can catch your lice. You will find some brother Inglays where you
are going.”
Hi realised that he was going to be jailed.
“Sir,” Hi said, “will you please let me go? I am not a subject of this
State.”
“Sir, we will please let him go,” the officer said. “He is not a subject
of this State.”
The man in the blue rags led the way into the house. The officer ordered
the Indians to take Hi in after him. Hi was thrust along a hall into a
corridor, then across a yard, paved with concrete, to a low building or
shed, where the ragged man unlocked a door. When the door was opened, Hi
was flung through it. He went staggering for a couple of steps, stumbled
over a body which grunted, staggered on and trod upon a second body,
which roused up, cursed in English and subsided.
The door clicked to and the lock turned. The key was withdrawn and the
footsteps of the jailer passed away across the yard. A door closed
behind them. It seemed to Hi to shut him into an “everlasting prison,
remediless.” He apologised to the two bodies, on which he had trodden,
but had no answer, except drunken muttering.
“I am jailed,” he thought, “locked up in a jail and can’t get out. And I
can’t tell when I shall get out. I may be here for days.”
After a little time the room seemed less dark. He began to have
glimmerings of its shape. There was a grated opening high up which let
in air. A little grating in the door let him peer into the yard. It was
a biggish, long prison room about twenty-four feet by eight. There were
three people in it, a dead drunk man, a less drunk man and himself. The
dead drunk man was out of all knowledge of the world. The second, from
words uttered when trodden on, Hi judged to be a deserter from the Navy.
Peering through the grating, he could see little beyond except the four
concreted sides of the yard sloping to a central drain. An evergreen
stood in a tub at each corner of the yard. The slopes of the pent-houses
surrounding the yard kept him from sight of the heavens, but a glimmer
in the water of the drain showed that the stars were shining. He shook
at the door, which rattled a little. It was an iron slab. He was a
prisoner. “And Carlotta is a prisoner,” he thought. “And how on earth is
Don Manuel to be warned?” He saw no way. “They’ve diddled us between
them,” he thought.
While he stood at the little grating, rattling at the door, a great
tumult broke out at the lower end of the town where Hi had seen the
mansion. After twenty minutes of this he noticed that the pent-house on
his right began to take colour. A glow came upon the tiles. The racket
continued for half an hour. “They’re having a good old racket of
destruction,” he thought. When he looked again through the grating, he
noticed that the glare upon the tiles of the pent-house had changed to a
glittering intermittence. “I believe they’re burning the town,” he
thought. “If they are, we shall be burned like rats in a trap.”
“What say?” a voice asked.
Hi looked round startled. He saw the second of the two drunkards sitting
up and looking at him. He was a littleish man with a flushed hatchet
face which shone in the light.
“The town’s on fire,” Hi said; “we may be burnt if they don’t let us
out.”
“What say?”
“The town’s on fire: we may be burnt.”
“’Ere, let me come on deck.”
He came on deck, a little unsteady on his legs and smelling very strong
of aniseed. “Damn to hell,” he said, when he had come on deck and looked
through the grating.
“A bit of fair old, rare old,” he said.
He turned on Hi suddenly to ask:
“What you in for, mate?”
“Nothing. They shoved me in.”
“That’s me, to rights,” he answered. “Nothing: same ’ere. Burning’s
pineful, too. Let’s ’ave a look at that door. Say, mate, got a bit of
wire?”
“No.” Hi said, “I haven’t.”
The man took hold of the door, struck a match and examined the lock. He
lit a cigarette before the match burned out. He had a packet of
cigarettes. Hi thought him rather scurvy not to offer him one.
“You’ve not got a bit of wire?” the man said.
Hi said he hadn’t.
“What are you doing here?” the man said.
“Come to learn sugar-planting,” Hi said. “What are you doing?”
“None of your damned business,” the man said. “If I’d got a bit of
wire,” he said, “I’d soon have this door open. But you haven’t got a bit
of wire?”
“No.”
“That’s a proper barracker. Coo lummy, she ain’t half caught fire. The
skylight’s no cop, neither. It’s a bit of all Sir Garnet, if you ask me.
You ain’t got a bit of wire?”
“No.”
Here the other drunkard gurgled in his sleep.
“Cor blimey,” the little man said, “what was that?”
“The other man.”
“What other man? I didn’t know there was another bloke; that’s straight.
Lummy, ’e’s been in luck. ’E’s enjoyed ’is lunch. I’ll ’ave a look, see,
if ’e’s got a bit of wire.”
He was down on his knees on the instant, rummaging in the drunkard’s
clothes; for more than wire, Hi thought. He sucked his cigarette to a
glow till his face shewed sharp as a wolf’s over the body.
“Not a bleeding bit,” he said at last. “The grating’s out of reach too,
unless I stood on your back.”
“Come on,” Hi said. “Stand on it, and try.”
“Right,” the man said. “Tuck in your tuppeny.”
Hi tucked in his tuppeny beneath the window, the little man made a run
and leap and fell over.
“Mizzled the bleeding dick,” he said. “I’ll do it next time.”
The next time he did do it; he leaped on to Hi’s back and poised there;
he was a horrid weight, but Hi was struck by the ease and certainty of
the jump, and also by the silence of his tread: he was wearing old white
deck shoes with rubber soles. He felt the man try the gratings by
heaving all his weight on them.
“Not a give in the whole bleeding barrow,” the man said, leaping lightly
down. “Now if old Alf was along, what got out of Princetown, it would be
all right, wouldn’t it? You ain’t got a bit of wire?”
“No.”
“’Alf a mo’; go easy,” the man said. “You ain’t seen my cap since you
come in?”
“No.”
“It ought to be somewheres, unless they pincht it. It’s a fair barracker
when they pinch kit as well as quod a bloke. You ain’t got a cap: did
they pinch yours?”
“No: I had none.”
“Cor blimey, I’d a sweet jag; coo. This sweet shumpine, the sime the
toffs; coo. But you feel it in the sweetbreads; that’s where it is; next
day’s the day; that’s straight. Say, mate, would you mind looking for me
cap. This grilling’s a steak’s game.”
They groped on the floor for the cap; the glare without increased so
that they could see a little.
“We’ll be as nice as mother makes it, no bleeding error,” the man said.
“If we don’t get out of here, we’ll be bleeding pancakes; that’s
straight. Cor blimey, I seen men burned. Coo, kid; it’s a barracker,
being burned; a fair barracker. You can always tell when a man’s dead,
when you see him being burned; yes, you can, because. . . . Cor blimey,
here’s me cap. Nar then.”
He struck another match, lit another cigarette, and rummaged swiftly at
his cap in the glow at the door grating.
“Got a bit ’a wire,” he said. “Nar then, to be or not to be.”
He had taken the piece of wire which made the frame for the top of his
cheese-cutter cap. With this, when he had bent it in a certain way, he
began to fish within the lock, using a niceness of touch which Hi had
not expected from a drunkard. He took some little time. The lock rattled
and clicked under his fishing: often he swore a little and readjusted
his wire. Once he stopped to look at the glare upon the tiles.
“It won’t ’alf be a bit of real life,” he said, “if the fire reaches
Matiro’s. ’E’s got seventy tons of blasting powder under where ’e keeps
’is chickens. Cor, mate, that’ll mike them think the bleeding post’s
come: seventy ton. Now, you bleeder, I’ve got you.”
Very delicately, he brought pressure to bear on the tough twisted wire:
the lock turned: the door opened.
“There’s the bleeding door,” the man said. “We’d best hop it, mate.
What’s the way out is the barracker for me.”
“Across the yard and then through the house,” Hi said.
They set out across the yard; some rats in the drain sat up to look at
them. Hi saw their eyes glisten. All was still in the municipio. The
door into the building was shut but not locked; Hi opened it and peered
into a dark passage droning with mosquitoes.
“It’s through here, then to the right,” Hi whispered.
“Lummy,” the man said, “I ain’t half got the sours in my sweetbreads.”
“We must get the other man out,” Hi whispered.
“What other man?”
“The drunk man.”
“Garn.”
“We can’t leave him to be burned.”
“Burned. Blimey, you can see the fire ain’t anyways near. Besides, ’e’s
bin lunching; ’e’s necked all what come in the waggon.”
“Well, I’ll get him out of the cell anyway. Will you give me a hand?”
“No bleeding fear.” The man passed into the passage and closed the door
noiselessly behind him. Hi stole back to the cell to rouse the drunkard.
It was strange how differently the glare of the fire seemed from the
yard. It was not near at hand, but at the far end of the town. All the
same, it was burning fiercely and perhaps drawing near to Matiro’s. Hi
shook the drunkard’s arm.
IX
“Come along,” Hi said, “wake up. Come on out of this.”
“What’s that?” the man said.
“Wake up, man,” Hi said, “we’ve got the door open; we can get away.”
The man sat up, pulled out a sheath-knife, spat, and said:
“I’ll cut your guts out.”
“Never mind my guts,” Hi said, “they’ll keep; but we may be spotted, if
we don’t hurry.”
“Garrrr,” the man screamed, “Garrrr and guts. See? Garrrr and guts.
Harrar.” He rose upon his feet, with a brandish of his knife. “Come on
the lot of you,” he yelled, “you don’t daunt me. I’m Henery Peach Kezia
and my blood’s vitriol. I’ll seal you for your tombstone. Harrar you
planets, I’ll put some of your lights out, once I get a hold of you.”
Here he lifted up his voice into a yell.
“Ayayayayay,” he yelled, “I’m the frog who would a-wooing go. See me
hop.”
“Hop out of the door,” Hi said. He held the door so that the frog might
hop. He was frightened not only of the madman, but of his noise, which
might bring the guards.
“Where’s the door?” the man asked.
“Here.”
“Where’s here?” the man asked. “How am I to know where _here_ is?”
“Are you blind?” Hi asked. “I didn’t know you were blind.”
“I been blind since I was a poor little orphan child,” the man said. “I
only smell things. There’s a smell of roses here, or maybe it’s
lavender. You guide me to the door, my dear young Bible friend. Just
reach me your hand and the blessings of the poor blind man will follow
you. Oh, Heaven bless you, my sweet young gentleman angel, Heaven will
bless you for this.”
Hi had taken the man by the left arm, while he kept the door open with
his body. The man came unsteadily through the opening into the yard.
“There,” he said, “there.” He drew a deep breath, suddenly wheeled upon
Hi, stabbed at him with his knife, and screamed:
“And now I’ll cut your guts out, like I said.”
Hi had half expected something of the kind. By a twist of his body he
shook himself clear, so that the door, at once swinging-to, struck
Henery Peach Kezia and made him miss his stab.
“Don’t you think to dodge me like that, when my blood’s up,” Kezia said,
“you young swine. I’ll cut you double for that. I’ll cut you crossways,
so’s your own mother will deny you.” He began to laugh with a deep down,
joyless chuckle, which made Hi’s blood run cold. He was not very steady
on his feet, but he had a horrid danger about him, because of his
sideways lurches. Hi dodged him in his rush, but not by much, for they
were on the concrete slopes of the yard and Hi wore English
walking-shoes, the man stockings. It was as bright as bright moonlight
from the fire.
“Now, then,” Kezia said. “Now we’ll see. Some would have took pity on
you; but not me. Do you see jouncer? This knife’s jouncer. And as soon
as I’ve breathed on the blade he’s going into you.”
He panted on to the blade like a hound getting breath, then he made a
sudden dart, missed by about a foot, and then followed with dreadful
speed and certainty round and round the yard. The fire, wherever it was,
burned up with a brighter blaze to light him. Hi aimed to reach the door
into the municipal building, but the man was too close behind him for
him to try to open it. He slipped on the concrete, caught one of the
pillars which held the pent-house roof, and swung round it with such
force that he struck Kezia from behind. The rush and excitement seemed
to steady Kezia.
“Ha,” he said, “ain’t this fun? Ain’t this nice hide and seek? And I’ll
bleed you into veal in the drain; white meat; eightpence a pound, prime
cuts.”
Here there came a crash. Perhaps the brightness of the fire had been fed
for the past twenty minutes by the timbers and rafters of the roof.
These now suddenly gave way and launched the blaze into the pit of the
wreck; the glare of the burning died at once from about them. Hi was in
the dark, poised behind a pillar, trying to see the drunkard, who was
near the desired door. There was silence for about thirty seconds, each
was trying to see the other; at last the drunkard spoke.
“Say, brother,” he said, “will you shake hands and let’s be friends?”
“I can’t shake hands,” Hi said, “when you’ve got a knife in your hand.”
“The knife’s nothing. I took the knife out to cut you a nice nosegay
from all these pretty little bloody roses.”
“That was kind of you,” Hi said.
“I love you,” the man said; “you are like a lovely little angel.”
“I am, rather,” Hi said. The darkness of the man seemed to edge a shade
nearer.
“I love angels,” the man said.
“That’s right,” Hi said.
“I always loved angels,” the man said, “since a boy.”
“Stick to them,” Hi said; “you can’t do better.”
“You blasted young swine,” the man screamed, making a rush. “I’ll cut
your gall and your milt and your pancridge.”
Hi had expected the rush; he slipped to the left as it surged out at
him. The man had expected this movement; he slashed out sideways with
his knife, but missed. He was after Hi on the instant, roaring, as he
rushed, his war cry of “Harrar.” Hi twisted sharp to his right; the man
followed, he seemed horribly near. Hi heard a splash, followed by an
oath, and a fall; the man had put a foot into the drain and fallen.
Hi fled to the door into the hall, where he paused; the man had not
risen; he was lying in a heap in the well or drain, muttering oaths. The
fall may have hurt him: it had certainly knocked the fight out of him.
“Will you come and give me a hand up?” he said.
“No.”
“Oh, Lord, my leg’s broke, man; I can’t hurt you.”
“Rats.”
“God, man; I’d not leave you, if you’d got a broken leg.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“The bone’s coming through the calf of me leg; I’m just bleeding away.”
Hi did not answer this; the man went on:
“It’s pretty poor goods,” he said, “when an Englishman will leave
another Englishman to rot in agony. Oh, the torment, it’s awful. I feel
it corrupting the blood.”
Hi was touched by the man’s moans, but did not answer. The man groaned
some more.
“Young fellow,” he said, “if I die, and I am dying, you’ll take my love
to my poor mother? Mrs. Jones, her name is. She lives at No. 27, Cowpop
Street, Sale, Cheshire. It’s the only house in the street with a brass
knocker. Say my last thought was of her. And I want you to sing “Rock of
Ages” over my tomb. It’s cruel to die in a foreign land, but I’d rest
better after “Rock of Ages”. Won’t you come and just hold my head up; I
can’t breathe; there’s darkness coming. Lift me; won’t you lift me?”
“No, I won’t,” Hi said.
“You young swine,” the man said; “it’s lucky for you you didn’t, for if
you had, I’d have settled you.”
Hi went through the door and bolted it behind him. He tiptoed swiftly
along the passage to the corridor down which the Indians had dragged
him. The corridor stretched right and left along the length of the
house. Hi could make out a staircase, the blackness of doors, and light
in one place from a half-opened door. Hi listened.
All was silent at first. Then from somewhere upstairs he heard the noise
of stealthy footsteps, moving slowly. To his right, from time to time,
there was a little light fluttering noise, as though the wind were
stirring an ill-fitting shutter or loosened jalousie. The man in the
prison yard was quiet. The smell of tobacco smoke shewed that the other
prisoner had passed that way.
Hi went quietly to the half-opened door, listened there, heard nothing
suspicious, and peeped in.
The room was lit by an oil-lamp which had been turned so low that it
stank. He could not see far into the room. From within there came again
the fluttering noise, which was now not quite that of a shutter, but
liker the yielding of paper under pressure, as though someone were
opening a book and pressing the pages down so that it should remain open
at the place. It gave Hi the sense that some industrious old man was
working there in the half darkness gumming papers together.
He pushed the door very gently till he could see that the room was a
kind of board-room, with shuttered windows. The table, from which the
chairs had been flung back, was littered with papers. A big picture,
partly out of its frame, was hanging askew on the wall to the right.
Nobody was to be seen; but the noise of the pressed papers came from
somewhere on the floor beyond the table.
Hi thought, “It is rats gnawing papers,” but on coming into the room he
saw that it was a dead man beset by myriads of cockroaches. The man’s
pockets had been turned inside out.
Hi suddenly whirled about in terror: someone was at his elbow.
He saw at once that he had no need to be terrified; it was the little
man who had opened the prison door. He had stolen up in his silent way.
He grinned at having scared Hi.
“Didn’t ’ear me, did yer, cocky?” he said. “Seen the stiff? They done
him in and gone through him; grizzled party; one of these Digos. We’d
better ’op it arter ’ere.”
Hi noticed that the man was carrying a long heavy ebony ruler which had
been a part of the office equipment. He had the feeling that this was
the man who had turned out the dead man’s pockets.
“Bleedin’ old beano goin’ on down the boulevard,” the man said; “kind of
a Brock’s benefit. If they come on ’ere agine, the goin’ won’t ’elp us;
we shan’t ’alf ’ave all right.”
He led the way out of the room and so away towards the front door, from
which fresh air was blowing into the house. On the top step a great
yellow pariah dog stood, longing to enter, but scared by their approach.
He snarled and slunk away from them as they came out into the open.
Moved by the thought that the dog might eat the body, Hi closed the door
behind him.
That part of the town was empty of life, except for the moths about the
globe of the electric light. The houses were shuttered and seemed to be
deserted; but Hi saw that a great disorder had raged there since he had
been thrust into the prison. Household gear of many kinds had been
dragged into the street and left. Far away down the hill was the glow of
the shell of the mansion, each window red as a furnace mouth. All the
inhabitants, as well as the lancers, seemed to be at the fire, except a
few who came thence quietly with sidelong glances, having pickings from
the wreck under their cloaks.
“I’m goin’ to ’op it arter ’ere,” the man said. “No ’ot potitoes in
mine. Coo lummy, what’s that?”
From the back of the city hall, from the direction of the prison yard,
there came a sound of song, mixed with the tolling of a cuckoo. Henery
Peach Kezia was lapping himself in soft Lydian airs:
O the cuckoo bird sings in the merry May morn.
Singing cuckoo, O cuckoo, how happy am I.
O cuckoo, O cuckoo, O cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
“It’s the drunkard,” Hi said.
“The stiff? You woke him?”
“Yes.”
Hi noticed that the man’s eyes were fixed upon him somewhat strangely.
“Which way you goin’, cocky?” he asked.
“Anselmo,” Hi said. “Do you know it?”
“I know it well,” the man said. “I don’t mind setting you there, or on
the way there.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Hi said. “But are you going that way?”
“Never you mind where I’m going,” the man said. “You’re a damn sight too
nosy.”
“No more nosy, as you call it, than you,” Hi answered. “I know the way
to Anselmo; if it’s out of your own way, I can find it myself. But we’d
better not go straight past the fire; we might be recognised.”
“Come along ’ere, cocky,” the man said. “If we go along this road a
piece, we can easy cut across later.”
They turned up a road which opened to the north not far from the city
hall. The houses near it were small adobe bungalows, with roofs of red
tiles. The stars in the heaven shone like lamps.
“I say, look at the stars,” Hi said.
“Are you being pleasant?” the man asked. “You’re doing ‘Oh, the
starlight’; but they’re cocky little bleeders, stars.”
They walked on together for a minute, till they were in the midst of a
grove, where a night singing bird was making a plaintive, exquisite
haunting call. The man paused.
“What was the nime of the plice you was goin’ to?” he asked.
“Anselmo.”
“Anselmo, that was it; Anselmo.” He seemed to think for an instant.
“Well, there’s no plice of that nime anywheres abaht ’ere.”
“But you said you knew it,” Hi said.
“What was the nime agine?”
“Anselmo.”
“Oh, Anselmo,” the man said, “the plice you see over there?”
“No; over there,” Hi said, turning to point. Some instinct told him to
look out, but it came a fraction of a second too late. He never knew
certainly what happened next, because he was knocked unconscious by a
blow on the point of his jaw, which ended the world for him for four
minutes.
When he came to himself, with a dizzy head full of confusion, he tried
to stand, but found that his feet hurt. Groping down to find out why, he
found that his shoes were gone. Instead of them, a pair of old white
deck shoes, with rubber soles, lay beside him in the track. Then a
certain slackness at his waist seemed unaccustomed. He put his hand to
his waist and found that his money belt was gone; then he found that his
pockets had been searched: he had been robbed. He called aloud at this.
Then he looked about for his companion, whom he at once judged to be the
thief. There was neither sight nor sound of him. He had vanished into
the night where he belonged. There was no sound of anyone running, no
noise of steps, nor of bushes being thrust aside. The bird was still
making a plaintive call in the tree.
“I can’t think what has happened,” Hi said. He sat down to try to
compose himself. When he began to know that he had been knocked out, he
wondered, “for how long?” The stars had not changed position much, so
far as he could see, and there was still some warmth or so he thought in
the toes of the shoes.
“He knocked me out and robbed me,” he thought. “I’d gladly have gone
halves with him. I don’t know what the deuce to do now. Well, I must get
to Anselmo, that’s the first thing. And it must be nearly midnight by
this time and I’m further from Anselmo than I was when I started.”
He put on the deck shoes. There was a meanness in the theft of his shoes
which hurt him more even than the loss of his precious pocket-book with
the sprig of hermosita. When he had put on the shoes and felt their
discomforts, as well as their kind, which was specially loathsome to
him, he walked back to the town, he could not afterwards tell why. He
had no very clear thought of what he was doing nor of what he ought to
do, for the brains were still shaky in his head from the knock upon his
jaw.
When he turned into the street in front of the city hall, he saw some of
the lancers, followed by a mob, riding uphill towards him. He turned
uphill away from them, till he was out of the town, in a rocky path near
a pine wood. The lancers paused at the city hall, as though to bivouac.
Hi felt a deadly weariness overcoming the need of reaching Anselmo.
“I am done,” he thought. “I have done nothing, but I have been through a
good deal to-day. I must rest for a bit before I go on.” He was cold as
well as weary, for the cold sea breeze was blowing. “It must be
midnight,” he thought. “I will rest for just an hour among those rocks.
If I had only not spoken to that officer at La Boca, I would have been
fifty miles on beyond Anselmo by this.”
He was so stupid from fatigue and the blow that he paid little heed to
his going, as he pushed through the scrub towards what looked like
shelter. Suddenly he caught a whiff of scent, a rustle of movement and a
gleam of something: he was aware that people were hiding there. A
startled somebody, speaking intensely, in a hiss of anxiety, said
“Padre? . . . padre mio?”
“I’m not the man,” Hi said.
Immediately somebody surged out of the darkness, flung him down and got
him by the throat. He realised at once that he was in the hands of
someone much stronger than himself, who could break his neck at will, if
he made a noise. Some years before, at the Old Berks Steeplechases, he
had seen a welsher caught by the crowd. When overtaken, the man had
fallen and lain perfectly still, as though dead; this came back to Hi on
the instant as wise.
The man who had grappled him got him well by the throat with one hand,
while he reached back for his knife with the other. Hi saw a darkness of
face staring into his, and beyond it pine boughs and stars. Other people
were there: he smelt the scent of verbena: a woman’s voice gave a
caution. A woman seemed to be trying to open a box of matches and to
take out a match: her fingers fumbled on the matches and people
whispered. A man who came hurriedly from among the rocks struck a match
upon his trouser leg, screened and held it down. Hi saw a lot of faces
staring with surprise at him. He counted four persons: an old woman with
white hair, a girl with great black eyes, a man with a somewhat finicky
pale face, like the Aztec in the waxworks (he was the one who held the
match), and a swarthy, fierce, very splendid-looking young man who had
him by the throat. Hi noticed the muscles in the clear brown flesh of
the arms which held him. “Golly,” he thought, “this man could tear a
pack of cards across.” At this instant the match went out.
“It’s all right,” Hi said. “I’m English.”
“Inglis,” they repeated. The younger of the two women asked him in
halting English: “What you doing here?”
Hi felt inclined to ask them what they were doing there, four civilised
people, with jewels and scents, in the wilderness at midnight,
garrotting strangers. He said that he was going to Anselmo and that he
had been robbed. They seemed to understand a part of what he said, but
they were puzzled by it.
The man, who was holding him, allowed him to sit up and said something
in apology for having been so rough.
“What are they doing in the city?” the young woman asked.
“They are plundering and robbing, Señorita,” Hi said.
At this instant some horses were heard trotting near to the pine clump.
The man, who had held Hi, signed to him to remain still, while he stole
away through the scrub to see who came. In a few minutes he returned
with the riders of the horses, one of whom carried a lantern. This man
was a swarthy, bearded, elderly don, more than sixty years of age, but
still lean and alert. His face was both hard and melancholy, with
something of watchfulness stamped on it by a life passed upon a
frontier. He held up the lantern to examine Hi, while the others
repeated to him Hi’s story of Anselmo, which he did not seem altogether
to accept. “Allan Winter said there was a feeling against us,” Hi
thought. “Now here it is.” He debated whether he should tell them that
he was a White, going on a White errand. “It might be all right,” he
thought. “But supposing it were all wrong. Supposing these people were
really Reds. Then I should be in a fine mess.”
The family drew aside to debate what should be done. Presently the
daughter left the group and explained to Hi that they had to ride to
safety, that they did not doubt his good faith, but that their lives
depended on leaving no witness of their going and that, in short, Hi
must come with them.
“We are most sad to ask it,” she said, “but it is for our mother and
sister. You see, this is war. They might kill us.”
“We not take you far,” the young man said. “We set you on your journey,
when we get to friends.”
There was something good-natured and well-bred about the young man which
won Hi, who was, in any case, too utterly weary to protest. He said he
understood and would gladly do as they asked. The girl and the young man
said that it was very nice of him to take it like that. They mounted him
on one of their spare horses, and set off together, through a woodland
track, which set, for a while, to the south, and then curved west. Hi
watched the direction as well as he could by the stars, so as to keep
his bearings clear. About north-north-west was his course, he judged.
“Now here I am going south,” he thought. “The Lord alone knows when I
shall get to Anselmo.” He fell asleep on his horse and knew nothing more
of his journey till he was wakened by the horses stopping.
He saw that they had reached a point in the hill from which, looking
down a ravine, they could see far below them the lights of the town and
the glowing of the burnt house. The night wind had roused up the flames
on the last of the wreck so that it made a beacon still. The riders were
staring at this, all strangely moved. The two women were sobbing: the
men were muttering curses, or prayers that were of the nature of curses.
“Ah, the accursed, the accursed.”
“For all this they shall pay sevenfold.”
“You saints that bear the sword grant me the sword that I may smite
these accursed ones.”
“It is their home,” Hi thought, “where all their past lies burnt. They
were chased out of it and then it was fired.”
The father interrupted the scene by saying, “It suffices. To-morrow is a
new day: let us get to-morrow.” He took his wife’s rein and led the way
on, the others followed him. Hi heard the nice young man say something
to him, but he was too heavy with sleep to know what it was or to
answer. He fell asleep again upon his horse. The high southern saddle
kept him in his seat; sometimes he joggled forwards, sometimes
backwards, while the horse went quietly on with the others.
At about two o’clock in the morning they came to a ranch which was
guarded by mounted men. Here they all dismounted and went indoors (Hi
with them) to what seemed to be a gathering of the clan.
There was a long room, lit by electric light, like all the houses in
those hills even at that early age. There was a fire at one end of the
room, for the night was cold enough. A maid of enormous strength, with a
fine, square, good-humoured face, was making or dispensing maté among
the gathering. There were perhaps forty men there, most of them talking
at once, yet the room was so big that they did not crowd it.
As the party entered the room, the girl with the verbena scent noticed
how weary Hi was.
“You are tired,” she said. “Enrique, this gentleman is weary. Anton, get
him a maté.” (Enrique was the Aztec; Anton the nice one.)
“Sit down,” she said, showing a seat which ran round the wall. “Anton
will bring you a maté.”
“You sit,” he said. “Let me bring you a maté.” Anton shoved him down on
to his seat.
“Our guests do not wait, they are waited on,” he said. “You are not a
Red, I am sure, to rob us of the last of all our pleasures.”
“I am a White,” Hi said.
“You are a White?” the girl said. “But we thought all you English were
Reds.”
“I’m a heretic, of course,” Hi said, “but a White.”
Anton brought him a maté, which revived him. He saw the Aztec step into
the midst of the gathering call for silence, and begin a long harangue,
with many gestures. The babble of his voice, the heat of the room and
more than twenty-four hours of strain together made him fall asleep with
the bombilla in his hand.
This falling asleep may be said to mark the end of the first day of Hi’s
going to warn Don Manuel. His going had not prospered, mainly because
one of Don Lopez’ chief supporters, the half-breed Don Livio, a man of
vengeful temper, had detached some lancers to burn the mansion of the
Ribotes, who had had the misfortune to be the lords in the village in
which he had passed his youth.
This act of private vengeance brought the lancers across Hi’s path at
the wrong time.
While Hi was being checked by event after event, on this first day,
Ezekiel Rust was riding to the west with his message. At the very
moment, when Hi was falling asleep, Ezekiel Rust was rousing from his
rest eighty miles away to begin his second day’s ride.
X
Hi may have slept for half an hour, when he was wakened by the tinkle of
his bombilla falling on the floor. He roused up as a big, elderly
rogue-bull of a man, with bloodshot eyes and a heavy ruminating mouth,
which seemed to be chewing the cud of fifty different plans, came in, to
take charge of the gathering. Plainly all there looked up to him as a
leader. A flock of talkers surged up to him with a gabble of explanation
and persuasion: some of it very hot, Hi thought.
Presently, Hi found this man staring at him, though as yet without
comprehension. His eyes were fixed on Hi while his lower lip moved in
and out under the strain of thought. After a time, his bull-like brain
began to notice that Hi was a stranger in the camp: he turned to a man,
indicated Hi by a jerk of the head, and asked, “Who is that?” Then,
turning to Hi, whom of course he knew to be English, he jerked with his
head, saying, “Come here, you. What are you?”
Anton explained as Hi came forward; Hi heard the words “caballero
ingles”: then Anton, after asking his name, introduced him to Don Pablo
something of Meruel. Hi was refreshed by his sleep and eager to be
doing. He made up his mind that as these were Whites he would tell his
tale, so he did. He said that he was going on urgent White business to
Don Manuel at Encinitas; he asked for a horse that he might proceed.
When he had said his say, he knew that he had said something wrong. “I
believe they are Reds, after all,” he thought. “Now I’ve put my foot in
it.” Anton drew him aside a moment and explained: “All the Whites here
are anti-clerical, they hate Don Manuel like poison. You have said, ‘I
take nice Luteran message to the Pope.’” Anton seemed to think it very
funny, but Hi was appalled. “I’ve done for myself now,” he thought,
“they’ll probably jail me for a week.”
“Business with Don Manuel at Encinitas?” Don Pablo repeated. “And what
business?”
“To tell him that the Reds have put Señorita de Leyva into prison.”
This was news to the assembly, but on the whole pleasant news: the de
Leyvas were blamed for most of the troubles which had fallen on the
Whites.
“At least,” Don Pablo said, “you cannot reach Don Manuel from here.”
“I don’t want to,” Hi said. “I want to reach Anselmo from here, and from
there go on to Don Manuel.”
“Very pretty,” Don Pablo said. “There are telegraphs in Anselmo. You
could warn Santa Barbara of all that has been said here.”
“No, sir,” Hi said, “unfortunately, I know no Spanish, and have not
understood what has been said here: besides, I am not a spy.”
“You are the first to mention the word,” Don Pablo answered. “You are
here, we are here, the trouble exists, the telegraph exists, Santa
Barbara exists. I consider the situation.”
“Yes, sir,” Hi said, “but I have been only four nights in this land, I
know nothing of your politics.”
“How comes it then,” Don Pablo interrupted, “that you go at all upon
this errand? Why are you sent? Who sent you?”
“I must not tell you that, sir,” Hi answered, “but I was sent because
the need was great, and because an Englishman will not be suspected by
the Reds.”
“Very true,” Don Pablo answered, “but he may be suspected by the Whites.
See you,” he added, turning to address the assembly in Spanish, “this
boy may justly be suspected by us, when he comes from we know not where
and says that he wishes to reach Anselmo.”
As most of those there were like water, ready to flow in any direction
opened to it, as long as it were downhill, this turned the company
against Hi. They agreed that he might justly be suspected. Why should he
be there, they asked, if he wished to reach Anselmo? This was now war;
Anselmo was a place of the Reds undoubtedly; this was an English boy;
that he should be sent on a message was a farce. Undoubtedly he was a
spy or might be used as a spy. Hi did not know their words, but their
meanings were plain.
“You may be this or you may be that,” Don Pablo said, in English, “but
you cannot go to Anselmo.”
“But, sir, I must go.”
“What say you?”
“Sir, I must go.”
Don Pablo pretended to be deaf, he held one of his ears with his hand,
so as to catch the sound: the company tittered.
“What say you?”
“Sir, I must go to Anselmo.”
“Ah,” Don Pablo said with a smile, turning to the men, “He says that he
must go to Anselmo. _Must go_; this very important English word. No,
sir,” he said, turning to Hi, “you may go to your Reds in Carpinteria,
or you may go home to your English in England; no one shall stop you; it
is a healthy walk, for you English are accustomed to walk; but you shall
not go to Anselmo. You shall not go to Anselmo, because it is a special
place, which I am determined that you shall not see.”
His face, as he spoke, became gorged with blood like the wattles of a
turkey cock. Having settled Hi, as he judged, he turned to the assembled
men and made them a long harangue in Spanish. Long afterwards Hi learned
that the purpose of the meeting was to keep the Pituba raiders out of
that part of Meruel. The men there were Whites, but anti-clerical and,
on the whole, in favour of Lopez, because he was a Meruel man. Pablo’s
purpose, at that moment, was to get the party to ride to a well-known
ranch to get from it the reinforcement of its company.
All there seemed pleased at his suggestion, except those whose mansion
had been burned in Ribote. These retired in a group in some indignation
when the others left the room. Hi was left alone in the great room, save
for the broad, good-humoured maid, who was gathering up the bombillas.
She was a friendly soul; she made remarks in Spanish to Hi, so that he
might feel at ease.
“Many bombillas.”
“Si,” Hi answered.
“Better many guests than many locusts.”
This was beyond Hi, who grinned. After a little time, she added, with a
sigh:
“There are more guests than lovers.”
Hi did not know what she said, but he answered, in English, “Such is
life.”
After some twenty minutes of talking outside the house the assembled men
mounted their horses, which had been kicking and snapping at each other,
from anger at the cold, through all the hours of the discussion. Even
when they had mounted they made no effort to start. They continued to
discuss till it was broad daylight, when they all set off together.
Anton entered with his sister. He came up to Hi to apologise for Don
Pablo.
“It is absurd,” he said, “that that man should have stopped your going
to Anselmo. There is no reason why you shouldn’t go to Anselmo. Of
course you may go there.”
“I have no horse,” Hi said. “Would you lend me a horse so that I could
go there?”
“Do you know the way?” the girl asked.
“No.”
“It must be forty kilometres and a difficult way except through Ribote.”
“I could find it,” Hi said.
The brother and sister looked at each other with some hesitation. Hi was
afraid that they were wondering whether to trust a tramp, who came at
midnight, with neither collar nor tie, from God knows where.
“I am sorry to say,” he said, “that I have got no money with me, but Mr.
Winter, of Quezon, beyond Santa Barbara, knows me, and Señora Piranha
and her daughter know me.”
“Rosa Piranha?” the girl said. “You know her?”
“Very well. Do you?”
“We were at the convent together,” the girl said. “Of course we will
lend you a horse. What is your name?”
“Ridden. Will you tell me yours?”
“We are Ribotes,” she said. “But what makes us consider is, the road to
Anselmo. It is no road, my brother says.”
“It is a bad road,” Anton said.
“I don’t mind how bad it is as long as it is a road,” he said. “And I’ll
not let your horse down or give him a sore back or anything; I swear I
won’t. And I don’t know how to thank you for saying you will lend me
one. The point is, getting him back to you. I’m going to the Elenas, the
horse-breeders, of Anselmo; I am sure they would send him back or I
would bring him back myself, if you would not mind waiting a few days.”
“Bring him back yourself,” Anton said.
“Yes, yes,” the girl said.
“The horse will be all right,” Anton said, “but how about the rider?
First you must have food.”
They gave him sausage, bread, coffee and figs. Then they filled
saddle-bags with these things and with corn for him to take with him.
Anton brought him a silk scarf.
“You will want this for your neck,” he said. “There will be ticks or
mosquitoes in the forest.”
No doubt they would have given him money, had they not feared to hurt
his feelings.
“I don’t know how to thank you two,” he said. “You have been most
frightfully kind.”
“The least we could do,” Anton said, “after nearly murdering you in the
dark, as I did.”
They brought him out to the stables, where they saddled a horse for him.
“He will take you to Anselmo all right,” Anton said. “The question is,
will you be able to find your way there?”
“I will try,” Hi said.
“Not so easy,” Anton said. “Look there.”
From where he stood Hi could see nothing but great swathes of rolling
forest, amid a mist that was lifting and falling as though it were
alive.
“You see that it is not easy,” Anton said, “even when you get out of the
forest.”
“I think I’ll find it all right,” Hi said. “I’m good at finding my way.”
Anton pursed up his lips and shook his head. “I hope,” he said, “I hope.
You got good remembrance?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then I tell you all the way.”
“Right. I’ll remember.”
“It is difficult,” Anton said. “You follow this track here for three
kilometres, through the scrub. Then you come to a place very big as a
saucer; big, big. Then north-west across it to a hole, snap, cut off,
like so, in the hills, a long way, fifteen kilometres. Out there you
will see peones who ride. One will show you. You must not go so, no; but
so, because, so, there is no ground; all is gone. But this not for
twenty kilometres. Till then, you look for the place big as a pan, very
big; and the hill that has like so; high, yet so, snap, see; no, more
like so.”
This was not clear as a course should be, but his gestures made it
clearer. Anton knew the dangers of losing a trail; he turned to his
sister for an English rendering of what he wished to explain.
Unfortunately she had not seen the place which he strove to describe,
nor was her English much better than his, but she added a few words.
“After this track,” she said, “there is a . . . very big.”
“A lake?” Hi suggested.
“A what?”
“A water?”
“No, no, no; very big dry.”
“I understand. A dry valley?”
“Si, si. Then you cross this; oh, it is long. Then you look a way out.
There is a hole in the hill, like so.”
“A pass?” Hi said. “A gap? A way to go through?”
“Si, si.”
“But,” Anton said, “you must not go to this side, right side, because no
ground; go to left side. Ask peones.”
“Will there be peones?”
“Always peones.”
“And if I cannot find a peon to ask?” Hi said.
“Bad, bad,” Anton said. “A difficult way. Not for some kilometres. But
keep north through the path through the forest; see?”
“Anselmo is north from the pass,” the girl said.
“I’ll find it,” Hi said.
“Si, si, you will find it. It is narrow road in the forest; but to the
left. Then you get out of the forest you will see.”
Hi was well used to finding his way on the downs; he had plenty of
confidence in himself. “I’ll find it,” he repeated. “But one thing more;
if any people stop me, may I say that I come from you?”
“They will see that you come from us.”
“How?”
“The brand,” Anton said, pointing to two wavy marks, one above the
other, on the horse’s quarter.
“Thank you again,” Hi said, “for all that you have done for me.”
“Good luck,” the girl said.
“Come tell us how you got on,” Anton said.
“I will, indeed, if I may. Thank you.”
His horse was one of the rather small, sturdy, savannah ranch horses,
bred in the uplands from the descendants of the conquerors’ mares by the
stallions imported from England. He was dark, wise and full of go.
“Will he buck?” Hi asked.
“If you meet a tiger.”
“If a pig, he kick; so you know,” the girl said.
“Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”
“Con Dios.”
The horse was as eager to be gone as Hi to go. He sailed sideways down
the avenue. Just as he turned into the thicket, Hi looked back to wave
to his friends; they waved back to him. In two seconds more they were
out of sight; he was riding through forest that was all dropping dew and
trailing mist.
“I am really off at last,” he thought. “Twenty-four hours late in
starting and twice as far from Anselmo as I was.”
The mist strayed itself out into clearness and the tops of the trees
began to glitter as the sun rose higher. Little birds came flying just
in front of him, as though to show their speed. Their cries, as they
flew, sounded as though each bird were calling to “go it.” “I’ll go it
fast enough,” he said.
For a long time he heard no other noise than the cries of these birds
and the drumming of the feet of the horse. As he went on, he caught
another noise, which at first he thought must be the wind in the
tree-tops. Then, as it grew louder, he recognised it as the noise of
water. He came round a curve upon a scene so beautiful that it made him
pull up.
He came unexpectedly upon a ravine or gash in the hill. Close to him, on
his left side, the hill, which had always been steep, changed suddenly
to crag, over which a brook was falling in white, delaying mists, for
some seven hundred feet. At the foot of the fall some long distant
collapse had made an undercliff, nearly flat, across which the water
loitered in a broad shallow rock basin, till it reached another fall.
What he had been hearing was the noise of the falls.
As the ravine and pool made a wide open space, all the hillside in front
of him was in such light that he could see, for the first time, what
colour can be. The timber grew to great heights beyond the pool, but all
the timber down the glade was heaped and piled with a pouring fire of
creeper in blossom. A white flowered creeper had piled itself like snow
even to the tops of the green-hearts, and fell thence in streamers and
banners.
All the crags, as well as the rocks of the pool, were of a pale blue
colour, like lapis lazuli. Mists from the falling water made rainbows
all down the cliff. White birds cruised among the rainbows and changed
colour in them.
He saw all this in a few seconds of admiration. Then he saw that the
broad shallow pool was peopled by a priesthood, in rosy mantles, moving
with an exquisite peace along the water. The leading priest rose into
the air silently and gracefully; the others followed, till all the
flight were moving away, more like flowers or thoughts or dreams than
birds. He watched them till their effortless wings drooped them to some
lower pool out of sight. “Those are the rosy ibises,” he thought.
“Damned pretty birds,” his father had said, “only you don’t often get a
shot at them.”
He rode through the pool to the rising trail beyond; soon he was in the
gloom again, winding up into the hills among forest. “I must be near the
big dry pan or valley,” he thought. “I hope I haven’t gone wrong.”
Almost as he uttered the thought the thickets thinned to an undergrowth
in blossom noisy with bees. A few yards more brought him out to the
“very big dry” of the savannah, which was unlike anything ever seen by
him.
His first thought was that it was the crater of a volcano or the bed of
a lake, perhaps twenty miles long by seven broad. It may well have been
both, in turn. Now it was an expanse of grass ringed by hills. Some
eagles were cruising over it; their majesty suited the vastness of the
expanse. The emptiness and the freedom of the vastness made Hi catch his
breath. He was the king of that space; there was nothing there but wind
and grass, with clumps of tussock-grass standing out here and there.
He did not take it all in at once; then he thought, “I was to meet
peones here, who will set me on my way. I see no peones.”
A searching of the distance showed him, far off, some specks, some
white, some dark. “Those are the herds,” he thought. “And the peones are
with them. How those white cattle shine in the sun. But they are all
miles away from here. There is none near me.
“But what was it that they said I was to look for? I was to go
‘north-west across it to a hole, snap, so,’ ten miles away. Well, let’s
have a look. That will be north-west, roughly. And there, by George, is
a sort of snap in the hills, as though they were cut or broken. That is
the pass he means; that is my way. So let us forward for there. But what
a place, what a land, what a life.”
It was a good enough life for a man, to ride that expanse on a horse
worthy of such going. The horse felt the stir of that freedom. Hi felt
him kindle beneath him into the tireless stride of the horse of the
savannah. As he went, his hoofs drummed up myriads of glittering green
beetles which whirled about them and flew with them, sometimes settling
on horse or man, then whirling on again, now with shrillness, now with
droning, till the noise they made was the ride itself set to music. “I
shall save her,” he sang to the music, “I shall save Carlotta. And she
will marry her man, of course, but all the same I shall have done that;
and we shall be friends of a special sort all our lives. It will be
something that nobody else will have.”
He kept headed for the pass, but his eyes roved the land for a peon.
Soon he was startled by the light on the distance to his left; he had
seen nothing like it. All the things in that southern distance became so
distinct that he felt that he was looking at them through a telescope.
At the same time, the calls of the peones, the beating of their horses’
hoofs, and the movings of the cattle came to him from across the miles
of the savannah. “It is odd that things should be so clear,” he thought.
“I should say it means rain.” The tops of the southern hills brightened
till they seemed to spout flames into the sky. These flames soon changed
into streamers of cirrus, less fiery than copper-coloured, with rose
half-way up the heavens. “It is just as though the sky were feeling
bilious,” he thought. With this change in the heavens, a change came
into the air and into the horse; all the delight of the going went; the
beetles gave up their play. Presently the copper-colour darkened along
the hilltops to something like the smoke of a burning.
“It’s going to be a storm,” Hi thought. “I’d be just as well in the
cover of the pass before it breaks. Come up, horse.”
The horse made it clear that he was uneasy about something, or was in
some way feeling Hi’s uneasiness. He had become nervy and on edge in a
way which Hi could not explain. He himself felt nervy, but the
restlessness of his horse frightened him. “I believe he smells some wild
beast or snakes,” Hi thought; but he could see neither; there seemed to
be no creatures on that llano save some beasts like tailless rats and a
few birds which piped and fled. The edge of the clouds tattered out into
rags which soon laid hold of the sun so that all the joy died from the
scene.
“We’re in for a storm and a half,” Hi thought, “one of those electrical
storms my father was always gassing about.” He took a look to his left,
where now the darkness had blotted out the line of the hills, then he
took a look to his right, where the hills stood in a glow which made
them look like hills in hell. Straight ahead was the gash or pass by
which he was to descend. He could see no cattle nor peones there.
“Perhaps they are in the pass,” he thought, “in some ranch or corral
there. But I hope they are, for then I may find some shelter.”
The air had long since lost its zest. It was flat yet heavy, though both
Hi and the horse were sweating, there was a feeling of death being
present, which suggested cold; all kinds of evil seemed about to happen.
Waifs and strays of thought came into Hi’s mind and went out of it; he
felt that he could not concentrate upon any one of them. A few drops of
rain splashed down, like florins and half-crowns, with a rattle on the
tough grass.
He had made an effort to be in the pass before the storm broke. He
reached it in time but, being there, he found it grim enough. It was a
gash, between two cliffs of rotten rock, which curved round into a
grimmer gash, all black with a grove of vast trees. “Better under the
trees than in the open,” he thought, so he turned towards the cover. The
noise of the hoofs upon the stones made echoes like the smacking of
nails into a coffin. “That’s got you, that’s got you,” the smacking
seemed to say, “that’s got you.” He stopped the horse, so that the
echoes might stop. Looking back at the crater over which he had ridden,
he found that he could see little save a greyness out of which came a
sighing. All the place seemed to moan at him with a moan of despair,
that sounded like, “Oh, it’s got us at last.” Out of the greyness a
coldness came suddenly from the icefields on the mountain. Then the
great grassy expanse disappeared from view. The storm, sweeping up, shut
out the world. “Very little more,” he thought, “and I should have been
caught in the open.” Suddenly streaks of greyness ran like men along the
ground and struck flashes with their feet. “By George, it’s rain,” he
said; “it’s all rain. This is rain indeed.”
On the instant, the greyness sighed into a hissing, hissed into a
rushing, and rushed into a roaring. It sucked up all the last of the
savannah, surged over the mouth of the pass, beat Hi breathless and
engulfed him, in a roaring of pouring, as though a river were falling.
Hi felt that he was freezing and that everything else had turned to
water: he was in water and under water, the air he breathed was water:
the earth his horse stood on was running water. Thunder sounded not far
off: he could not see the lightning, but remembered his father’s stories
of iron outcrops in the rocks near the Meruel border, which seemed to
“attract” any lightning there might be. He did not know whether iron
outcrops could “attract” lightning; probably it was one of his father’s
insane theories, but it might be the fact, in which case he was near the
Meruel border, and might be standing on the magazine waiting for the
spark. The thought of trying to push on, through the rain, did not enter
his head: he could not see twenty yards in any direction.
The violence of the rain lasted for some two hours, after which it
relented to a downpour not worse than that of steady rain in England.
When once it had relented thus, it steadied, as though it would never
cease: it was this steadiness which daunted Hi. “It’s raining like an
eight-day clock,” Hi thought. “It might keep on at this pace for days.”
He sought to the thickest cover that he could find and hoped for the
best. In another hour, the heavens descended on him, so that while water
streamed from heaven and forest, the air was a greyness of melting and
moving cloud. All the forest was alive with the rushings, the laughters
and the forebodings of rain falling or being shaken: sometimes it came
at him like the footsteps of enemies, sometimes like lamentings, anon
with a crackle as though a pack were afoot. “The horse would take me out
of this,” he thought, “but he would take me straight back to the
estancia, so that I should have to start again. I’d better wait here.
After all, if it rains like this it must rain itself out before long: no
clouds could stand it. I wonder where all the cloud can come from. As
soon as this mist or cloud or fog goes, I’ll push on.”
Having made his plan, he stuck to it: the cloud seemed to do the same;
it did not go: it even increased till the earth seemed melting and the
air liquid. “Golly,” Hi thought, “this cloud isn’t going to go. I may be
here for days.” He reckoned that he had been there already for some
hours. “I must find some browsing for the horse.”
This the horse found without going far from where they were: he led the
way to some shrubs, which he ate with relish. “I hope he knows what is
good for him,” Hi thought, “for I don’t.”
He secured the horse from straying: then he sought about for a shelter
from this never-ceasing drip: there was no shelter in sight. “Probably
there isn’t one anywhere,” he thought, shuddering. “I shall be here for
the day and night, and goodness knows how much longer besides.”
He had come back to his horse, partly from fear of losing him, partly
for his company, when the greyness dimmed to a greater density, so that
he could not see his outstretched hand. In this dimness an eternity
passed. The rain continued unabated. He contrived to tend the horse, and
to give him some of the corn which Anton had provided; later, when he
had watered him, he contrived to tether him securely near the bushes
where he could browse. After this he himself ate, very sparingly, of the
food which Anton had given. When he had supped, it was dark: the night
had fallen. Hi made himself a nest of unease in the edible bush, which
smelt like his mother’s tooth-powder. Lying on a mess of trampled
boughs, which kept him off the mud, he crouched himself into a ball till
something like warmth came into him; then he even slept a little, in
starts and nightmares, from which he would leap up, terrified that the
horse had gone.
This was his second night upon the road to fetch Don Manuel. At about
the time when he lay down upon his boughs Ezekiel Rust, dead beat,
pulled up somewhere in sight of the lights of San Jacinto city, at the
other end of the Central Province. Out there in the barrens, the old man
was comforting his horse, before lying down in the sage with a rope
round him to keep off the snakes. He had had such a ride as he had never
dreamed of; but being soft to the saddle, after some years in a town, he
could go no further without a rest.
XI
Some hours after midnight, Hi woke aching with cramps and dripping with
sweat: it was oppressively hot and still: all the forest was holding its
breath, as though about to do something dreadful. There was a
deliberation, even about the droppings from the trees. “Golly,” Hi
thought, “it feels as though the earth were going to open.” It was pitch
dark in the forest: the mist had gone from the trees, yet there was no
glimmer of any star: the moon, being young, was long since gone. The
stew of air gave Hi the feeling that a heaven of cast-iron was
descending bodily upon the tree-tops to squeeze the earth flat.
The suspense of waiting for the heaven to fall was broken suddenly by
thunder, rain and wind, all rising in violence until, at about an hour
after dawn, they reached a pitch such as Hi had not believed to be
possible. Then, while the forest was crashing with falling boughs and
trees, and the air all vehement water and flying fragments, the heart
suddenly went out of the storm; the darkness from above rolled away to
leeward, showing the sun. The wind, which had been a thing of death, at
once became a thing of healing: the storm was over: nature was freed
from prison: Hi could go on.
He could go on; but he had lost another complete day and the going was
changed. He was in a world of mud like the first chaos. All the wood was
littered with thousands of young leaves, twigs and caterpillars. The
millioned life, which had thrust at the first rains, had been washed to
a smalm by these last. The ground of the wood had been so worked by the
rain that it looked and trod like a ploughed field in a wet November. He
rode out of the wood, all streaming as he was, towards the gulley of the
pass. For one glorious minute, he saw all things glitter in the sun: the
warmth beat upon him like life itself; then the rain began again: not
heavy rain, but a steady trickle.
By this time, he was in the ravine of the pass into which every gulley,
meuse and cranny, as well as the gashes cut by the storm, had been
draining for many hours. A mess as of a dozen ploughed fields, of
different colours of clay, had been washed into the pass, plastered
there and sprinkled with boulders. Here and there boulders too big to
shift had stood as obstructions to the floods. Near these, small
boulders and ridges of rotten stone had been washed or flung so as to
form moraines or dams across the hollow of the valley. Sometimes these
dams held pools of water many feet in depth. All the pass rang with the
noise of falling water.
He went on, cold and soaked; on foot in the mud, leading a miserable
horse through pools, morasses and over stones. The rain fell steadily,
and there was no road nor signpost, nothing but the direction of the
gulley down the hill, the noise of water, sometimes birds, but never
beast nor man.
“And the worse of it is,” he thought, “that I must be coming to that
place where I was to turn off, if I was to turn off. That was what he
meant, I think: that I had to go to the left of a crossing. I only hope
that it will clear before I reach the place.”
It did not clear: it went on raining.
“This is what father meant,” he thought, “when he said, ‘You’ll thank me
before the year’s out for sending you to a land of the sun.’”
He wondered much into what kind of country he had come, for he could see
so little, except the faces of rocks all streaming, then mist, then
folds of hill, from which streamers of rain came out and passed.
Presently he came to trees which had hard leaves that clacked: his teeth
clacked in sympathy. Not long after this, he came to a bridge, not over
but in a torrent; and here he had to blindfold his horse to get him
across. On the other side of the bridge, at a little distance above the
waters, was a stone with an inscription in Latin:
Pray for the souls
Of Espinar, Gamarro, Velarde.
Drowned here.
He wondered as he looked back at the bridge, with the water swirling
across it between the balusters of the parapets, how he had ever
crossed. He patted his horse “for being such a sport.” He judged that
this river must be the upper waters of the river at La Boca; but any
sense of direction was long since gone from him: he did not know where
he was.
Memory of his friend’s direction, that there was no road to the right,
made him edge to his left, whenever there was an opening. He was not on
any track or trail now, but in mud or scrub among the clouds; sometimes
rocks loomed out at him, sometimes trees. When he halted, as he
sometimes did, to shout, in the hope of an answer, he had no answer,
save the noise of the rain that wept as though all hope were gone.
“Well, if I go on, I must reach somewhere,” he said. “I can’t go back,
even if I wanted to, because the river’s rising, and nothing would take
me over that bridge again, with the water worse than it was. One good
thing about this rain is, that there won’t be any forest fever yet,
since the rains aren’t at an end.”
It was consolation of a kind; but he was as sick and shaking from cold
and misery as most fevers could have made him. He noticed after a time
that he was going uphill again. After some hours of this he came into a
forest of giant trees. There was no undergrowth and little light in this
forest. He rode in a gloom full of sighing like voices and full of
dropping like footsteps. The rain seeped in films and streaks through
this wood: mists of it paused in places, like ghosts looking at him from
behind trees. Sudden gusts sent rushes of water to the ground with the
noise of the steps of beasts. It was in this wood that the rain began to
slacken.
At first, he thought that this was only a seeming, due to the shelter of
the trees; but soon the mists of the rain cleared from the boles, which
at once became like gods for bulk and silence. Soon the birds and
insects reappeared; ants came to forage among what the rain had brought
to earth; ticks fell from the trees; the big red and yellow fungi at the
tree roots unrolled themselves into enormous spiders which waved their
front legs at Hi in a terrifying rhythm, as though they were trying to
hypnotise him. They did it slowly, with their eyes fixed upon him. They
seemed to be repeating:
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Hi could see no tracks anywhere on that wet earth, but he realised that
his horse was leading him somewhere.
“Good old boy,” he said, “you know more about these parts than I do. If
you can bring me to any comfort I’ll be grateful.”
A long time passed before comfort appeared. It came with the brightening
of the light in the gaps among the tree-tops: the very sight of this was
warmth to him. “The sun,” he said, “I’ll do it yet, if I can only find
someone to direct me.” The horse went straight ahead till at about two
in the afternoon, as Hi guessed, he paused and whinnied, and horses
whinnied in reply.
There, at a little distance in front of him, on a level patch, where the
trees, being small, had been easily cleared, was a hut or shack with
smoke rising from the chimney. It was a white man’s, not an Indian’s
hut, because it was sided and ended with unbarked planks and roofed with
shingles. It was old and falling to pieces. It must have been deserted
for years, Hi thought, yet smoke was rising from it. Beside it was a
long, ruinous pent-house or shed, with a torn canvas crib or manger
running along its wall. “I suppose it is an outlying camp,” Hi thought,
“or some old winter house for the timber cutters; anyhow, thank Heaven,
there are people there.” He could see two pale faces peering round the
half-opened door at him. When he lifted his eyes from the house, he saw,
at a little distance, two tethered horses pausing from their grass to
stare at him. As he advanced from his halting place, the faces at the
door moved forward, so that he could make out a man and a woman. The man
advanced to a pace beyond the door. He was a short, fresh-coloured man,
with fair hair, and a small sandy moustache. What Hi noticed more
particularly was that the man looked guilty, as though he had been
caught in the act of something. “He’s scared at something,” Hi thought.
When the man saw that Hi was only a boy, a relief came over his face, a
relief so great that it made him laugh unpleasantly.
The woman had drawn back out of sight inside the shed, where (from the
sound) she seemed to be doing something with bedclothes, making a bed or
packing something in blankets. Hi thought: “There’s something fishy
here. I’ve caught them in the act at something. And it must be pretty
bad or he wouldn’t be in such a funk.”
“Is this the way to Anselmo?” Hi asked. The man looked blank. Hi
repeated the question, more than once; after a while the woman came to
the door.
“Anselmo?” she asked.
“Si, si, Anselmo.”
“Por aqui, Anselmo.”
She was a willowy woman, all slink and gleam, with a speck in one eye
and something swollen in lip and nose.
“This is, then, the way to Anselmo,” Hi said. “La via a Anselmo? The
calle or route a l’Anselmo?”
“Si, si,” the woman said, nodding.
The first wish of the couple, to get the stranger away from the hut,
without letting him peep inside, now changed to another wish: a strange
look passed between them, which made Hi uneasy. The man had enormous
fore-arm muscles: his right fore-arm had been bruised or scraped quite
recently. In his trousers he had a gun pocket which plainly had been
used for a gun, though no gun was there at the moment.
“Por aqui, Anselmo,” the man said, taking Hi’s bridle and turning the
horse away from the shack.
“He show you,” the woman said in English.
“Is it far to Anselmo?” Hi asked.
The man said he could not understand.
“I don’t understand, either,” Hi thought, “what you two have been up to,
here in the forest. You aren’t living here; you only came here an hour
ago; because there are no tracks to the door, except brand new ones. Why
do you two come here in the rains to pack something in blankets? What
were you packing in blankets?” What indeed?
The man led him past the two tethered horses into the forest on the
trail by which the horses had come there an hour or so before. Hi had
noticed horse tracks ever since he was a child: he noticed suddenly the
tracks of a third horse in the soft earth. Three horses had come towards
the shack that morning: the third had gone off suddenly into the forest.
Why?
The man led on, saying nothing, but thinking the more. Glancing back, Hi
saw the woman moving from the shack into the forest. “I wonder if I’m
going to be led round to meet her,” he thought. “And if so, why?”
Glancing forward, Hi saw that the man was looking at him with a strange
expression.
“I believe they’re up to no good,” he thought. “I’ll get out of it.”
For a moment, he did not know how to get out of it, nor how he could
manage without a guide if he did. Then the certainty that this couple
were wicked urged him to act. Something said in his brain, “Behind that
door they had a lad like you, whom they had murdered.” A picture formed
in his brain of the woman behind the door, rolling a body in a blanket.
Whenever she rolled the body face up, the face which showed was his own.
“It may be all imagination,” he thought, “but I’ll go on alone.”
He checked the horse, with a sign to the man: he did not know what on
earth he was to do next.
“Dis donc,” he said in a mixed speech. “Esta Anselmo loin d’ici? Anselmo
. . . sabe? Anselmo, est il bien loin? La ville d’Anselmo, est il far?”
The man nodded his head and grinned, as though to reassure him.
Something in the man’s face, the pouchy look under the eyes, reminded Hi
of one of the portraits of Henry VIII: it looked evil from evil done and
evil planning. The man turned to his path and seemed about to lead the
horse off the trail. “I daresay,” Hi thought, “the woman is the shot:
she has the revolver. He’ll lead me round to her and she’ll pot me from
behind a bush. Yet he’s as strong as an ox. I can’t hit him or break
from him without getting the worst of it. What can I do?”
The voice in his brain said, “Scare him”; but he did not seem to be an
easy man to scare. “I could make the horse shy,” he thought, “though if
I do that, I may be bucked off myself.”
“Dis donc,” he said again, “sont ils beaucoup de guardias civiles in
Anselmo? Moi, je ne veux pas le police. Sabe? Comprende Usted? Police?
Muchas guardias me muchas afraido.”
The man said something in his sullen way that all would be well, better
than well: again he turned to his task, leading the horse off the trail.
“Things are getting to be critical,” Hi thought. “I must try a scare.”
He was about to try some sudden startling of the horse, when the woman
called out something. The man stopped and shouted in reply: from the
woman’s answer Hi made out that she wanted the man for some reason, to
do something which she could not do. “Wants him to load the revolver,
probably,” he thought. The man seemed vexed at the request: he seemed to
ask if she could not manage as she was: she answered “No.”
The man growled in his throat. “Bah. Las mujeres.” He let go the rein,
with a look of threat and misgiving. He said something to Hi, which
seemed to mean: “You stay here a minute: I’ll be back directly.” He
strode off in the direction from which the woman had called. Hi let him
go about ten yards, then he turned his horse, and urged him up. The man
turned and called out to him to stop. Glancing back, as the horse got
into his stride, Hi saw the man running back to where the horses were
tethered.
“The brute’s going to chase me,” he thought. “And he’ll track me, even
if I dodge him. The worst of it is, that I don’t know whether I am
headed for Anselmo or the new Jerusalem; but I must come out somewhere
if I keep on. This forest can’t go on for ever.”
This was true; but he had a memory of his father saying, “The forest
goes all the way to Cualimaçu on the Matulingas, 1,500 miles if its an
inch.” If he happened to be heading for Cualimaçu, his journey to
Anselmo was likely to be protracted. For the moment, however, his
thought was to get away from these people.
Almost at once, his horse shied from a pool of blood where men had
trodden within the hour. It was surrounded by big blue butterflies as
greedy for salt as English butterflies for honey. “That’s where the
murder was,” he thought, “and those two will follow me because they know
that I know.”
After an hour, however, when he halted for the third time to listen for
the sound of pursuit, he felt sure that he was not pursued. He rode on
slowly through the forest, leaving the direction to the horse, who now
seemed to know where he was going. As far as he could tell, in the gloom
of under the trees, he went westwards but not directly, for the thorn
thickets forced him now in one direction, now in another.
Presently the horse cocked his ears at something and challenged. Hi
halted, expecting and fearing to see some wild beast, but in a few
seconds he saw that there was a horse in front of him, standing still
among the tree trunks, watching him, some fifty yards ahead. He was
almost invisible at first, for a horse will fade into any background or
dimness; as he became distinct, Hi saw that he was saddled and bridled,
though not mounted.
“That is it,” he thought, “the brute has headed me off. This is the
murderer. He has slipped off his horse there, and is somewhere among the
trees waiting to pot me. Even if I dodge him, there’ll still be Mrs. Now
my only chance is to dodge.”
He was about to dodge, knowing the futility of dodging, when the horse
strode out of his covert into view. He was a darker horse than the two
big sorrels tethered near the shack. He had a running cut on his side
and a saddle twisted underneath him. He came ramping from his place,
full of power and alarm. “By George, it’s the dead man’s horse,” Hi
cried, “and what a beauty. I’ll have him.” However, the horse had been
terrified once that day; Hi’s coming set him off again full tilt into
the wilderness, with his stirrups flying from flank to foreleg or
swinging back to clank under his belly. Presently, the girth buckle
broke, the saddle fell and made him stumble, but he recovered, shook it
clear and strode off into the woods.
Soon after his stridings had ceased to beat in the ears, the air above
began to sigh with the homings of countless birds which settled on the
trees with cryings and shriekings. Then suddenly there came a darkening
all over the forest, as though the light had been turned off at a tap.
Hi knew what this meant. His father had often told him that when the sun
went behind Mount Melchior the light went off, so that you couldn’t see
to shoot. “Now here I am with the day gone,” he thought. “It will soon
be dark, and I have not yet started for Anselmo. Buck up, old horse, and
get me out of the forest.”
The horse seemed to be bound for somewhere; but after another hour of
going, when it was beginning to be dark, he was still in the forest. He
could see no gleam of open country nor hear anywhere any noise of men.
When he halted to shout, he had no answer, except the sudden silence of
birds and beasts. He was there in the depths, out of the reach of his
kind, as alone as a man can be.
Perhaps in the past the horse had had some happiness in that part of the
forest, which led him thither now. When it was almost too dark to go
further, he bore his rider into a space where Indians had made a cassava
patch by burning off the trees. Indians and cassava shrubs were long
since gone, but the space was still clear of forest. In that patch of
ground, some eighty by fifty yards across, there was tall grass of a
bright yellow colour between two and three feet high. About this, the
trees grew to less than their usual size, being (as it seemed) bowed
down by the weight of the creepers. Over the patch was the dome or depth
of violet sky in which there were already stars.
The horse thrust into the patch and fell to eating greedily. Hi
dismounted to look about him; he found that there was water at one edge
of the patch.
“I’d better stay here for the night,” he thought, “because I’m lost. In
the morning perhaps I may be able to find a way out. If I could only see
the sun or Polaris I would be out in no time.”
He unsaddled his horse, rubbed him well down with grass, and having
haltered him, hitched him to a tree. He gathered him some armsfull of
the grass, and talked to him, as he ate, for comfort.
All through his ride he had not tasted food, because of something he had
said to himself at breakfast, “I hope my next meal may be at Anselmo.”
Now, when he saw plainly that he could not reach Anselmo for many hours
to come, he drew his food from his bags. The rain had made a paste of
the bread, but he scraped some of the paste together and ate it with
some sausage; he drank of the water of the pan, which smacked of the
marsh. He reckoned that he still had one tolerable meal of paste left in
his bag, and one good feed of oats for the horse. These things he
resolved to keep in reserve. Under the paste of the bread he found five
silver pesetas, which Anton or the girl had hidden for him.
He was much touched by this.
But his main feeling was one of overwhelming anxiety for his friends who
were depending on him. “Oh, they must feel that I have failed them,” he
thought. “They must have sent someone else. If this has happened to
’Zeke as well, God help Carlotta. God help her.”
A strange whiteness of light glimmered high up in the trees: in a few
moments it died, leaving all things strangely dark.
“Here is the night,” he thought. “Oh, it is lonely. This is my third
night away and I haven’t even started yet. But I’ll get my bearings and
start at dawn. I’ll get through somehow.”
The stars deepened overhead: the birds lapsed into silence: what noises
there had been in the wood became suddenly stealthier. Little bright
burnings came and went in the air as the fireflies began. Hi gathered
more grass for the horse, tried his tether, and then made himself a nest
of grass in which he could not sleep, because of the cold.
During the morning of this, the third day, of Hi’s journey, Ezekiel Rust
came at a gallop to the house at Encarnacion, where Don Manuel watched
beside the dead body of his mother. Being admitted to Don Manuel, he
delivered his message, with what news he could add from the underworld
of Medinas. Don Manuel waited for half an hour, while his mother’s body
was buried; then he rode to San Jacinto city, to intercept any other
messenger coming from the capital. By the early afternoon he was
summoning all his friends and adherents in the Western Provinces to come
with arms, fodder and horses to a rendezvous east of the river. At about
the time when Hi was settling to his nest, Don Manuel’s first supporter,
Pascual Mestas, came in to the rendezvous with twenty men from Santiago.
Ezekiel Rust was given a bed in the inn at San Jacinto, with the promise
that he should not want again in life.
XII
After some hours, by crouching knee to chin, covered by his saddle, a
kind of warmth crept over Hi, so that he slept an uneasy sleep, full of
cramps and nightmares.
Uneasy as it was, it was deep. Eternity seemed to go over him like a
sea. Down at the bottom of its pit, he became conscious that the
universe was vast, and that in the depth of it, one little ache, which
went from his back into his stomach, from the cold, was himself. All
kinds of vast things watched this ache with indifference; but the ache
was all-important to himself. It kept urging him to rise. “That is the
point,” he muttered, “I’ve got to rise. I’ve got to rise.”
Something from the heart of things was calling him to rise. With an
effort he shook himself out of the cramps and nightmares into the
coolness and stillness of reality. He thrust aside the saddle and sat
up, aching. There were the stars overhead, in all those odds and ends of
constellations of the southern heaven which have no easy guides for the
wanderer like King Charles’s Wain. The grass was all pale about him, the
trees were all black, tree-tops and grass-tops seemed to waver a little:
something near the water pan made a ticking noise, as though some mouse
were snouting there under fallen twigs.
From all these things, he came suddenly to focus on the thing which
mattered. His horse was staring intently, rigidly and silently at
something which Hi could not see. This was why he had been called upon
to rise. The sleeping partner in his horse had called him up to face the
enemy. A wave of fear passed from the horse into the master; Hi sat up
to stare as the horse stared; he rose to his knees and stared.
He could see nothing but the film of the grass against the black of the
forest, yet somewhere in that space was something at which the horse was
staring with all his nature. In that dimness and indistinctness before
the darkness something was abroad, not stirring, but staring at them.
What was it? Was it a snake waiting to strike, or a puma, or a ghost out
of the grave? There was nothing to show, nothing to see; but both knew
that there was something, deadly unspeakable. Hi felt the hair rise on
his brow: he heard the sweat drip from himself and his horse.
How long this lasted he never knew, but at last, from that
indistinctness in front, there came the faintest of sounds, that marked
the ending of the tension. Something dark seemed on the instant to merge
back into the darkness behind it. There was no noise of step or tread,
no motion in the grass, nothing that one could swear to seeing, only the
suggestion of a scent, like the ghost of the flavour of musk, and then
the knowledge that the thing was no longer there. He believed that his
horse sighed with relief, as he himself did.
He could see nothing, but the horse saw. Hi saw the horse’s eyes follow
the thing slowly round. What thing was it that could move so slowly?
What thing of precaution was moving, pausing and deliberating? When it
deliberated, its will hardened against them, the horse knew it, and Hi
knew it from the horse. The fear came again, that the thing might
strike, had almost made up its mind to strike: it had some kind of a
mind.
Yet again the tension snapped suddenly, with a sigh of relief from horse
and man: the evil seemed to withdraw, so that the horse felt free to
change his position. Then the night, which for some minutes had seemed
to hold her breath, began again to speak with her myriad voices out of
the darkness of her cruelty. The whisper and the droning of the forest
sharpened into the rustlings of snakes, the wails of victims, the cry of
the bats after the moths, and the moan of the million insects seeking
blood.
For some two hours Hi stayed by his horse, waiting and watching, till at
last he felt free to lie down to rest. The insects took toll of him, but
he contrived some shelter, and being young, as well as weary, he slept
again. He may perhaps have slept for as much as an hour.
He was wakened suddenly by that inner messenger who told him that the
danger, whatever it was, had returned. He heard the horse wheel round
with a little cry to face in a new direction. Hi faced it, but again
could see nothing but a blackness of trees, now like steel at the tops
from the false dawn. Hi stood beside the horse, with an arm on his neck,
staring. There was tenseness and silence, with fear passing from beast
to man and back again. What was there, Hi could not see, but the horse
saw. All that Hi thought that he could distinguish was a blotch of
blackness which wavered against the blackness that was steadfast. It
seemed to him to be some snake swollen to the size of an upright at
Stonehenge. When the waiting became unbearable he challenged.
“I see you,” he said. “What do you want?”
There came no answer, nor any sound from the thing; the only result of
the challenge seemed to be that the tenseness became more tense and the
silence more still. Staring forward more intently, Hi felt that the
blotch of blackness was not there, but that something was there, but
what thing? Ah, what thing could it be that was slow, silent as the
coming of a fever, and deadlier than pestilence? It was there making up
its mind for half an hour.
Then, as before, in one instant it was not: it was gone. Hi looked up at
the heaven suddenly, to find that the steel of the tree-tops was now
burnished with colour. Some birds in those tree-tops right over where
the danger had been now woke all together with ejaculations and the
clapping of wings, which spread from tree to tree, till all the forest
was awake. High, shrill cacklings and screamings, full of good spirits
and energy rang aloud all over the wood. With a clattering of the quills
of wing-feathers, some big birds shook themselves loose from sleep.
After a time, flocks of little birds passed overhead with thin, sweet
cries. The false dawn, which had made the sky warm with colour, died
away into dimness; then, almost at once, the darkness thinned and
dispersed: colour surged into mid-heaven in flames of scarlet, which
made the tree-tops glow. Within a few minutes it was dawn. Hi was cold,
miserable, swollen and itching from bites, but safe from the powers of
darkness; the night was gone; he had never understood what night was,
now he knew.
In the glow of the warmth with all things so full of colour he looked at
the place where the danger had threatened. The danger had now gone, the
horse was eating at peace. There was no trace nor track that Hi could
read, nor any mark that he could find, that might not have been made by
himself or the horse. Yet about the places where the danger had been a
flavour or sickliness of musk still lingered, so faintly that it could
hardly be noted. “It is not musk, either,” Hi said to himself. “It has a
sort of edge to it. It is the smell of some stuff that kills, it has to
do with death. This is a deadly place; we’ll be gone from it.”
Having groomed and fed his horse and himself, he set out from that
clearing. “I have got my bearings now,” he said. “I am facing north,
probably straight towards Anselmo. Any going to the right will bring me
out towards La Boca; any going to the left will put me too far to the
west. As I am headed now, I ought to be clear of the forest by noon. I
don’t know what Rosa will think of me, losing all this time, but I’ll
get there somehow, so that she shan’t be too much ashamed of me.”