Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy's hair stood on
end, and when, in the face of Seyd's shouts in Spanish to stop, the
burros still came on he felt his cap move.
"Billy!" Seyd's command rang out sharply. "Dismount and lie down. It's
our only chance."
In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and
metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required
many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay
there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against
the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust,
uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced
himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy's red
head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it
upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head
shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as
the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others
sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips
swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and
vanished.
In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd's
mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell,
a sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy's hysterical profanity
formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the
events of the day. The scraps of muleteers' talk the night before, the
runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers' refusal to camp on the
rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused
in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the
trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.
"It's a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us
off in the dark."
"But where are they now?" Billy gazed down into the dark void. "Surely
they didn't all go over."
"No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it
out of the way. Listen!" A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above.
"There they go, and it's up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up
and turn. If we don't give them the run of their lives we'll deserve all
they tried to give us."
And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down,
Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and
so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers.
Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a
breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match
they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a
tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the
hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on
without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.
"Now, then! Run them down!" Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out
to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined
his beast to one side of the trail.
"It is you, senor?"
Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and,
though the man's face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright,
graceful figure. "Come to see if the job is done." He thought it while
answering aloud, "As you perceive, senor."
"Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and
I have ridden hard--used up one horse and half killed this poor beast.
But no matter so long as I am in time."
"Hypocrite!" Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the
tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. "You would
not have been if these fellows had had their way."
"_Caramba_, senor! Why?"
If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done.
While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent
but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action.
Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing
horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn
knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders.
Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill
whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy
shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men
endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their
arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.
It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into
Billy's comment. "It looks, after all, as though they had done it
themselves."
Seyd shrugged. "Perhaps; in any case we have no proof."
"Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!" Sebastien's cold voice
broke in. "Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules."
Seyd's suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. "You
will have to stay here till morning, senors, for it is many miles along
the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that
went into the canon, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a
proverb, 'A warm fire helps the empty belly,' and to-morrow you will be
able to recover your goods."
Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer
evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was
vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more
inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him
to ask a sudden question.
"Did I not see you at the hotel last night?"
But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. "Perhaps. I
was there."
He did look up at Billy's vigorous comment on his answer as translated
by Seyd: "Then why didn't he show himself this morning? Goodness knows
we left late enough."
He even asked, "What does he say?" And the sense having been softened in
translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he
quietly replied, "I do not doubt that the senor's departure was fraught
with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being
informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep."
Though the smile which marked his appreciation of the blush that drowned
out Billy's freckles when Seyd translated was so slight as to be almost
imperceptible, it yet increased his anger. "The dago!" he growled. "I'd
punch his head for five cents Mex. The gall of him! Standing there
poking fun at us after we have just missed death at the hands of his
brigands. And you really think that he planned it all?"
"Looks like it. He chose the men, the trail. Was seen last night at the
hotel. Appears now at the psychological moment. Any jury would--"
"--Pronounce me guilty. They would be mistaken, sir."
Utterly confounded at the interruption which was delivered in fluent
English--so surprised, indeed, that Billy glanced around to make sure
that nobody else had spoken--they stared at him across the fire in red
confusion. When Seyd at last found his tongue he could only stammer the
obvious question, "You speak English?"
"As you perceive, sir." As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes
before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous
situation.
Nor was one needed to increase Billy's anger. "Then why don't you speak
it?" he roughly blurted.
Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. "In accordance
with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good
Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of
Manchester, England."
_Manchester, England!_ Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner
shrine of commerce! Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it
smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused
even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this
romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above
all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his
knowledge of "fags" and "bullies," "form rows," "cribs and crams," and
education by external application, gained by the perusal of _Tom Brown's
School Days_, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of
Kipling's _Stalky_.
And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung
Mexican youth. "Well!" he breathed at last. "I don't envy you the
experience. I'm told that the English schoolboy isn't particularly
sensitive or nice in his--his treatment of--"
"--Half-castes. Don't avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec
blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, senor, that their dislike
for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me
alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them--the conceited
lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like
fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my 'cowardice' in using
a knife--the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish
devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals.
Even then I could see through their sham morality, hypocritical
humanity, insufferable conceit.
"'England is the workshop of the world!' They dinned it into us. In
furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded
their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as
they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world--make
it one huge factory set in a slum." He had spoken all through with great
heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly,
"That is why I do not speak English--because I hate both them and their
tongue."
Now Billy's conception of John Bull and his island had been principally
formed on the perfervid "tail-twisting" of the common-school histories,
and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile
at his emphatic indorsement. "I'm with you. No English, please, in
mine."
Even Sebastien smiled. "No, you are American--from our viewpoint, much
worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted,
therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready
to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath
as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe
that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your
death."
"Then you do not speak for them?" Seyd glanced at the muleteers, now
crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.
"_Quien sabe?_" Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. "They would think
little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to
it that they play you no more tricks."
Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the
back. "Up, swine!" And while they stood shivering before them he gave
them their orders--first to recover the baggage, then to convey the
senors in safety to their mine. "Fail me in one thing," he concluded,
with a frightful threat, "and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you
out on the road."
Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted
before Seyd realized his intent. "You are not going?" he asked.
"Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own
horse."
"First let me thank you."
Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear
suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing
its plungings the other answered: "It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I
came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. _Adios!_" And swinging
the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off,
leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.
Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces,
looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion,
fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. "Our friend's football practice over
there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I've seen a few
walking-delegates in my time that I'd like to place under him. I'll bet
you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that
trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it
ideal."
"Yes." Seyd laughed. "I have so much respect for it that I propose to
keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If
you'll just settle down for a snooze I'll take the first trick."
His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by
the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his
glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their
scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated
thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the "conquest" and
the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the
temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of
waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night
that rose out of the valley's black void, his fancies grew and possessed
him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of
the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy's interruption came as a
surprise.
"I've slept four hours. Time for your snooze."