"They are travelling rapidly, of course. We shan't overtake them."
"I dare say not," said Landor, his face growing black again; "they'll
cover fifty or seventy-five miles a day. We can't do that, by a good
deal. We couldn't even if those damned civilians would keep their
distance ahead."
But this the civilians were very plainly not minded to do. They dropped
back, now to cinch up, now to take a drink from the flasks, now to
argue, once for one of their number to recover from an attack of heart
disease.
Landor swore. He would keep them their proper distance ahead, if he had
to halt at all their halts from now to sunset.
They were high among the mountains, and here and there in the shadows of
the rocks and pines were patches of snow, left even yet from the winter.
By all the signs the trail was already more than half a day old.
Landor's fear of leaving the settlements unguarded grew. "We will get up
among these mountains and be delayed, and we are in no condition
whatever to travel, anyway," he told Brewster, as the advance guard
halted again, and Landor, with curses in his heart but a civil tongue
withal, trotted up to them.
They were fighting. "Captain, what do you say to following this trail?"
they clamored.
Landor explained to them that he was not doing the thinking, that it was
their campaign. "You are my guides. You know the country, and I don't."
He reminded them again that they had promised to lead him to Indians,
and that he was ready to be led. If they thought the hostiles were to be
reached by following the trail, he would follow it.
Some of them did think so. Some of them thought on the contrary, that it
would be surer to make a detour, leaving the trail. They knew the spot,
the bed of an ancient mountain lake, where the hostiles were sure to
camp.
Landor sat and heard them out, silence on his lips and wrath upon his
brow. "We will go wherever you say," he reiterated immovably.
The captain they had elected for themselves was for following; the seven
others agreed upon a detour. They had ideas of their own concerning
obedience to superiors. They left the trail in spite of the vehement
assurance of their captain that they would without doubt get all manner
of profanity knocked out of them, and hasten their inevitable journey to
Gehenna if they went into the timber.
The advance guard advanced less and less. Half drunk and ever drinking,
in quaking fear of the timber, it kept falling back.
"I'll be hanged," opined Landor, as his own horse bit at the croup of a
citizen's horse, eliciting a kick and a squeal, "I'll be hanged if you
shall demoralize my column like this. You'll keep ahead if I have to
halt here all night to make you. I've given you the post of honor. If I
put my men in the van, I'd choose the best ones, and they'd be
flattered, too. You wouldn't catch them skulking back on the command."
They spurred forward unwillingly, thus urged. At sundown they came to
the old lake bed and camped there. According to the citizens it was a
regular Indian camping-place for the hostiles, since the days of
Cochise.
The horses were tied to a ground line, to avoid the embarrassment of a
loose herd, in the event of an engagement. Pickets were sent out to give
warning at the approach of Indians. It was winter here in the mountains,
while it was hot summer in the alkali flats below, but the men were
forbidden fires. And it was a fierce grievance to the citizens, as was
also that they were not allowed to go out to shoot wild turkeys. They
remonstrated sulkily.
Landor's patience was worn out. "It's a confoundedly curious thing," he
told them, "for men who really want to find Indians, to go shooting and
building fires." And he sent them to rest upon their arms and upon the
cold, damp ground.
But there was no night alarm, and at daybreak it began to be apparent to
the troops that they had been led directly away from all chance of one.
They made fires, ate their breakfast, resaddled, and took their way
back to the settlements, doubling on their own trail. They came upon
signs of a yet larger band, and it was more probable than ever that the
valley had been in danger.
Landor cursed the malpais and the men who were leading him over it. "How
much more of this rough country is there going to be?" he demanded, as
they stopped to shoe two horses that had come unshod on the sharp rocks.
"Colonel," they made answer with much dignity, "we are more anxious than
you to get back to our defenceless women and children."
The defenceless women and children were safe, however: a captain,
ranking Landor, reported to that effect when he met them some dozen
miles outside San Tomaso. He reported further that he had a pack-train
for Landor and orders to absorb his troop. Landor protested at having to
retrace their trail at once. His men and his stock were in no state to
travel. The men were footsore and blistered. They had led their horses,
for the most part, up and down rough hills for two days. But the trail
was too hot and too large to be abandoned. They unsaddled, and partaking
together of coffee and bacon and biscuits, mounted and went off once
more. Their bones ached, and the feet of many of them bled; but the
citizens had gone their way to their homes in the valley, and they felt
that, on the whole, they had reason to be glad.
X
It was tea time at the Circle K Ranch. But no one was enjoying the hour
of rest. Kirby sat on the couch and abstractedly ate slice after slice
of thin bread and butter, without speaking. Mrs. Kirby made shift to
darn the bunch of stockings beside her, but her whole attention was
strained to listening. The children did not understand, though they felt
the general uneasiness, and whispered together as they looked at the
pictures in the illustrated paper, months old.
Kirby's assistants, the two young Englishmen, had not come back when
they were due. One had gone to the mail station in the valley, three
days before, and he should have returned at noon, at the furthest limit.
By three o'clock, the other had jumped on a horse and gone out to look
for him. And now, one was lying in the road five miles from the ranch,
with an arrow through his eye. The other, a mile nearer home, was
propped against a pine trunk, so that the ragged hole beneath his
shoulder blade, where a barb had been torn out, did not show. His wide
eyes, upon the lid of one of which the blood from a head wound had
clotted, looked up sightless through the branches, at a patch of blue
sky. Their end had been a common enough one, and had come to them both
without a moment of warning.
At noon that day a cow-boy had ridden from the hills with a rumor that
Victorio's people were about. But Kirby had kept it from his wife. It
might not be true. And even if it were, the danger was really small.
With the hands and the two Englishmen, the quadrangle of log cabins,
well stocked with food and ammunition, could withstand any attack. It
had been built and planned to that end.
The silence, cut by the nervous whispering of the children, became
unendurable. "Are you very uneasy about them?" Mrs. Kirby asked.
"It's not so much that," he evaded, getting up to put a lump of sugar he
did not need into his tea, "it's not so much that as it is the
everlasting strain of fighting the hands. It would be easier to meet an
open rebellion than it is to battle against their sullen ugliness."
Mrs. Kirby could understand that very well. She had the same thing to
oppose day after day with the woman, and of late it had been more
marked.
Out in the corral the cow-boy was holding forth. The men had stopped
work on the instant that Kirby had turned his back. If Kirby could loll
on soft cushions and drink tea, as free-born Americans and free-souled
Irishmen they might do the same. "It's all right," said the cow-boy,
with a running accompaniment of profanity, as he cleaned his brutal
Mexican bit. "Johnny Bull don't have to believe in it if he don't like.
But all the same, I seen a feller over here to the 3 C Range, and he
told me he seen the military camped over to San Tomaso a week ago, and
that there was a lot of stock, hundred head or so, run off from the
settlements. You see, them Apaches is making for the southern
Chiricahuas over in Sonora to join the Mexican Apaches, and they're
going to come this here way. You see!" and he rubbed at the rust
vigorously with a piece of soft rawhide.
The woman joined her voice. She had a meat cleaver in her hand, and
there was blood on her apron where she had wiped the roast she was now
leaving to burn in the stove. "Like as not we'll all be massacred. I
told Bill to get off this place two weeks ago, and he's such an infernal
loafer he couldn't make up his mind to move hisself." She flourished her
cleaver toward the big Texan, her husband, who balanced on the tongue of
a wagon, his hands in his pockets, smiling ruefully and apologetically,
and chewing with an ardor he never put to any other work. "We been here
four years now," she went on raspingly, "and if you all feel like
staying here to be treated like slaves by these John Bulls, you can do
it. But you bet I know when I've got enough. To-morrow I quits." Her
jaws snapped shut, and she stood glaring at them defiantly.
The words of a woman in a community where women are few carry almost the
weight of inspiration. Be she never so hideous or so vile, she is in
some measure a Deborah, and the more yet, if she be moved to the lust
and love of revenge of the prophetess who sang in the frenzy of blood
drunkenness, "Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber, the
Kenite, be. Blessed shall she be above women in the tent."
The Declaration of Independence roused the screeching eagle of freedom
in the breasts of all the white men. With the Mexicans it was a slightly
different sentiment. At best they could never be relied upon for steady
service. A couple of months' pay in their pockets, and they must rest
them for at least six. It is always to be taken into consideration when
they are hired. They had been paid only the day before. And, moreover,
the Greaser follows the Gringo's lead easily--to his undoing.
The murmurs in the corral rose louder. It was not that Kirby and his
partners underpaid, underfed, or overworked the American citizens. It
was that their language was decent and moderate; and the lash of the
slave driver would have stung less than the sight of the black coats and
the seven o'clock dinner. In the midst of white savages and red, the
four clung to the forms of civilization with that dogged persistence in
the unessential, that worship of the memory of a forsaken home, for
which the Englishman, time and again, lays down his life without
hesitation. That was the grievance.
While Kirby went through the oppressive rite of afternoon tea within the
slant-roofed log cabin, and tried to hide from his wife the fear which
grew as the shadows lengthened across the clearing out in the corral,
the men had reached open mutiny. The smouldering sullenness had at last
burst into flaming defiance, blown by the gale of the woman's wrath.
After he had had his tea Kirby got up, went out to the corral, and
called to one of the men, who hesitated for a moment, then slouched
over, kicking with his heavy booted toe as he passed at the hocks of a
horse in one of the stalls. Kirby saw him do it, but he checked his
wrath. He had learned to put up with many things. "Don't you think," he
suggested, "that it might be a good idea for you and some other man to
ride down the road a bit--"
The man interrupted, "I ain't going daown the road, nor anywheres else
before supper--nor after supper neither, if I don't feel like it." He
was bold enough in speech, but his eyes dropped before Kirby's indignant
ones.
It was a fatal want of tact perhaps, characteristic of the race, but
then the characteristic is so fine. "You will do whatever I tell you to
do," the voice was low and strained, but not wavering. It reached the
group by the harness-room door.
With one accord they strode forward to the support of their somewhat
browbeaten brother. What they would do was exactly as they pleased, they
told the tyrant. They shook their fists in his face. It was all in the
brutal speech of the frontier, mingled with the liquid ripple of argot
Spanish, and its vicious, musical oaths. The deep voice of the woman
carried above everything, less decent than the men. It was a storm of
injury.
Kirby was without fear, but he was also without redress. He turned from
them, his face contracted with the pain of his impotence, and walked
back to the house. "I could order them off the ranch to-night," he told
his wife, as he dropped on a chair, and taking up the hearth brush made
a feint of sweeping two or three cinders from the floor; "but it's ten
to one they wouldn't go and it would weaken my authority--not that I
have any, to be sure--and besides," he flung down the brush desperately
and turned to her, "I didn't want to tell you before, but there is a
pretty straight rumor that Victorio's band, or a part of it, is in these
hills. We may need the men at any time." Neither spoke of the two who
should have been back hours ago. The night closed slowly down.
The Texan woman went back to the kitchen and finished cooking the supper
for the hands--a charred sort of Saturnalian feast. "She can git her own
dinner if she wants to," she proclaimed, and was answered by a chorus of
approval.
While the men sat at the long table, shovelling in with knife and
three-pronged fork the food of the master their pride forbade them to
serve, a horse came at a run, up to the quadrangle, and a cow-boy rushed
into the open doorway. "Apaches!" he gasped, clutching at the lintel,
wild-eyed, "Apaches!"
They sprang up, with a clatter of dishes and overturning of benches and
a simultaneous cry of "Whereabouts?"
He had seen a large band heading for the ranch, and had found a dead
white man on the north road, he said, and he gesticulated madly, his
voice choked with terror.
Had it been all arranged, planned, and rehearsed for months beforehand,
the action could not have been more united. They crowded past him out of
the door and ran for the corrals, and each dragged a horse or a mule
from the stalls, flinging on a halter or rope or bridle, whatever came
to hand, from the walls of the harness room.
But there was more stock than was needed.
"Turn the rest loose," cried the woman, and set the example herself.
Kirby, hurrying from the house to learn the cause of the new uproar, was
all but knocked down and trodden under the hoofs of all his stock,
driven from the enclosure with cracking of whips and with stones. Then a
dozen ridden horses crowded over the dropped bars, the woman in the lead
astride, as were the men.
"What is this?" he shouted, grabbing at a halter-shank and clinging to
it until a knife slashed down on his wrist.
"Apaches on the north road," they called back; and the woman screamed
above it all a devilish farewell, "Better have 'em to dinner in
claw-hammer coats."
It was a sheer waste of good ammunition, and it might serve as a signal
to the Indians as well; Kirby knew it, and yet he emptied his
six-shooter into the deep shadows of the trees where they had vanished,
toward the south.
Then he ran into the corral, and, snatching up a lantern from the
harness room, looked around. It was empty. There was only a pack-burro
wandering loose and nosing at the grains in the mangers.
He turned and went back to the cabin, where his wife stood at the door,
with the children clinging to her. From down the north road there came a
blood-freezing yell, and a shot, reverberating, rattling from hill to
hill, muffling into silence among the crowding pines.
As he shut the door and bolted it with the great iron rods, there tore
into the clearing a score of vague, savage figures. It looked, when he
saw it for an instant, as he put up the wooden blinds, like some phantom
dance of the devils of the mountains, so silent they were, with their
unshod ponies, so quick moving. And then a short silence was broken by
cries and shots, the pinge of bullets, and the whizz of arrows.
There were two rooms to the cabin where they were, the big sitting room
and the small bedchamber beyond. Kirby went into the bedroom and came
out with two rifles and a revolver. He put the revolver into his wife's
hands. "I'll do my best, you know, dear. But if I'm done for, if there
is no hope for you and the children, use it," he said. And added, "You
understand?"
Of a truth she understood only too well, that death with a bullet
through the brain could be a tender mercy.
"Not until there is no hope," he impressed, as he put the barrel of his
rifle through a knot hole and fired at random.
She reloaded for him, and fired from time to time herself, and he moved
from the little round hole in the wall to one in the window blind, in
the feeble, the faithless hope that the Indians might perhaps be
deceived, might fancy that there was more than the one forsaken man
fighting with unavailing courage for the quiet woman who stayed close by
his side, and for the two children, huddled whimpering in one corner,
their little trembling arms clasped round each other's necks.
Twenty, yes ten, of those who, as the sound of the firing reached their
ears, were making off at a run down the south road for the settlement in
the valley, could have saved the fair-haired children and the young
mother, who helped in the fruitless fight without a plaint of fear. Ten
men could have done it, could have done it easily; but not one man. And
Kirby knew it now, as the light of flames began to show through the
chinks of the logs, and the weight of heavy bodies thudded against the
door.
It was a strong door, built of great thick boards and barred with iron,
but it must surely cede before fire and the blows. It wrenched on its
huge hinges.
Kirby set down his gun and turned to his wife, holding out his arms. She
went to him and he kissed her on the forehead and the lips, in farewell.
"Good-by," he said; "now take the children in there."
No need to tell her that her courage must not falter at that last
moment, which would soon come. He knew it, as he looked straight into
those steadfast, loving eyes. She clung to his hand and stooped and
kissed it, too; then she went to the children and took them, quivering
and crying, into the other room, and closed the dividing door.
Kirby, with a revolver in each hand, placed himself before it. It would
avail nothing. But a man must needs fight to the end. And the end was
now.
There was a stronger blow at the door, as of a log used by way of a ram.
It gave, swayed, and fell crashing in, and the big room swarmed with
screaming fiends, their eyes gleaming wildly in the light of the burning
hay and the branches piled against the cabin, as they waved their arms
over their feathered heads.
The one man at bay whirled round twice, with a bullet in his heart and
an arrow through his neck. "Now!" he made one fierce effort to cry, as
he staggered again and dropped on his face, to be trampled under forty
feet.
It was the signal to the woman in that other room behind the locked
door, and above all the demoniacal sounds it reached her. Only an
instant she hesitated, until that door, too, began to give. Then a cold
muzzle of steel found, in the darkness, two little struggling, dodging
faces--and left them marred. And once again the trigger was
unflinchingly pulled, as greedy arms reached out to catch the white,
woman's figure that staggered and fell.
* * * * * * * *
Cairness and Landor and a detachment of troops that had ridden hard all
through the night, following an appalling trail, but coming too late
after all, found them so in the early dawn.
There was a mutilated thing that had once been a man's body on the floor
in the half-burned log cabin. And in another room lay two children,
whose smooth, baby foreheads were marked, each with a round violet-edged
hole. Beside them was their mother, with her face turned to the rough
boards--mercifully. For there had been no time to choose the placing of
that last shot, and it had disfigured cruelly as it did its certain
work.