her elbow, upon her cheek, and pale gold corn in a pile upon the
mortar-stone at her side ... a girl with corn like sun-dust, shining
on her skin ... with a golden bud springing like young corn in her
breast._
Something like that, chaste as the light of that endless summertime.
And the youth strumming the guitar seemed not to feel the great
wounding of separation--but to take a vague sweetness from repeating
the words--as of approach to that far doorway.
Elbert could stand the tension no longer. Through his mind flicked
memories of the supper in the old barefooted woman’s house in
Nacimiento, of the ride afterward, of the strange, still, flowered room
in Tucson. He longed to be alone, his thoughts turned yearningly toward
the fonda of Arecibo; he longed to stand alone with Mamie in the clean
corral behind it. A sentry, one of the soldiers of Cordano stopped him,
as he started to enter the portal from the patio.
‘I am leaving,’ he said. ‘I am with the captain of the rurales--’
Ramon Bistula now came forward from the low side door in the wall, and
at the same instant, the heavy wooden gate opened from the street,
and Mamie veered in under the arch, led by a soldier. Another soldier
followed, bearing the big stock-saddle and blankets--Mamie entering
this portal of clay! He called her name; she nickered back. Now Captain
Ramon was saying:
‘I trust it will not be of great inconvenience--your things being
brought from the fonda for this one night--you to pass this one night
here, instead of at the fonda--more air, more room--a room being
prepared, in fact, for yourself quite alone.’
XIX
A CORNER OF THE WALL
A ROOM of his own. It was a cell with wooden bars, looking out upon the
court where the prisoners and soldiers still played and lounged. A huge
moon, almost full, came up over the opposite roof of low cells, and in
the distant shadow there, Mamie squealed and let fly--a plebeian pony
venturing too close, no doubt.
A sickish smile he was not aware of hung around Elbert’s mouth. The
floor of the cell was of stone. The wooden bars very thick, the ceiling
low. There was a wide wooden bench for him to lie upon--blanket roll,
saddle, and saddle-bags had been brought.... So the voluble rurale had
had but one idea all the time in the afternoon; and crafty little Ramon
Bistula with amiable guile--so pleasantly impersonal in leading one
astray and putting men to death--Ramon, keeping him in the plaza while
his men doubtless went through saddle-bags and roll. But they could
have found nothing to implicate him--some silver and canned stuff. His
papers of identification were in order. Then he remembered his mention
of San Isidro; he would have to prove that Mamie was not one of the
stolen horses. Perhaps they would think his papers were stolen, too!
The sickish smile remained--the smile of one who has seen his quest
ending in failure. He thought of Mr. Leadley’s affection and care for
Mamie, and he had known no better than to let her show her speed on a
highroad, and mention the name of San Isidro to the rurale.
His hand came up to his mouth--an ache of muscles that didn’t seem to
know enough to relax by themselves. The moonlight felt cold, a creeping
cold on the stone floor.... The same song from the patio--guitar and
corn-dust maiden--but so different, coming to him through the bars. El
capitan was at the door, the sentry unlocking the cell.
‘I have brought blankets of my own for you, Señor. Very soft and
warm blankets. I am grieved; but it is only for the present--this
interesting mare of yours--a puzzle to the soldiers of Cordano.... A
very good night, Señor--’
* * * * *
He had actually dozed, for the plaza was empty. Elbert had heard
of people going to sleep as usual, with death hanging over, but he
wouldn’t have believed it of himself. All was still, the moon very
white upon the turf. The blank wall of the main building within forty
feet from where he lay.... This very morning ... word from Cordano
all that was necessary for more executions ... ‘mere formality.’ Now
gradually, he entered one of the deep and memorable hours of his life,
lying propped up against the saddle, looking out through the bars,
moonlight flooding down outside, everything so still that he could
hear the drops of water from the pail into the cistern in the center
of the prison patio. He waited for the isolated drops, but his mind
often wandered before the sound came--back to his own house in the
East, to his own room, where he had dreamed so much, but nothing like
this--slowly through the days at Heaslep’s and the leather-store; the
noon-hour in the latter place, when the door was pushed open and a
certain whimsical voice started the whole works going:
‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do--’
And that very saddle was under his head! Heaslep’s again, Nacimiento.
His Spanish book said that word ‘Nacimiento’ meant Birth ... the old
Señora with her castanets, and her house in the town called Birth....
Then the part he never remembered clearly, not even now--the ride to
San Pasquali, the ride back; Nogales, its smell of drugs, and the
Letter; Tucson and that still room where so many flowers were, still as
the patio out yonder.
Until just now, he had never let himself go, in thinking about that
room. Too much of a magnet about it all; it drew all the strength of
mind and feeling back to it, taking the force from the work at hand
here in Sonora. But this was a sort of show-down--locked up here in
Arecibo. He dared now to remember that Tucson hour, moment by moment.
... And what did she mean--that she could see the car below--see right
through it, and their own bodies, sort of little and broken? He knew
what she meant. More than that, he knew her meaning when she said,
‘And I could feel _our_ pain, but we were really together outside and
above.’ And ‘You were like one dead, yet you still drove.’... ‘Your
face was like stone, eyes open, but no life, the skin pulled back over
the bones from behind.’... ‘It was when the dawn came--the time we were
in the awful cold--’
Such a stillness around her as she spoke, the stillness of the
mountains. He didn’t remember that dawn part after reaching Nogales,
but she remembered it all. There was another thing now that he dared to
ponder a moment, because he was locked up in this place of birth--no,
death. ‘We will know all about everything when the time comes.’ How
much did she mean by that?
It would likely be a lot harder to keep on looking for Bart, after
letting these memories have their way, but was there to be any more
mission? Was this not the end--a cell in Arecibo? His eyes focalized
again on the moonlit patio. Deserted and ashen white now, but he was
seeing once more the figures of the condemned men--that face of the
youth with the guitar and song of the corn-dust maiden--one of the boys
who had ridden with Monte Vallejo, ridden with Bart, perhaps.
Elbert had fallen asleep and awakened again to find the silvery sheen
gone from the patio. Gray light was there, but no moonlight. A calling
of Mexican names:
‘Revas--Marcè--Trastorno--Sarpullir--’
There were one or two more, but he missed hearing the names, curiously
struck by the meaning of the last ‘Sarpullir’--‘to be covered with
flea-bites,’ as he recalled from his Spanish book. Now the clanging of
an iron door broke in upon him, and a thudding on the turf, which he
recognized without having heard it before--the dropping of rifle-butts
as the pieces were stacked. The Mexican voice was still carrying on.
It made him think of the voice of the phonograph record back home,
announcing the singer of ‘La Paloma.’
Straight across the patio, one of the sentries was unlocking a cell
door. The sentry stood back, as the prisoner emerged. Neither hurried.
The prisoner made the sign of the cross, and then held forth his hand.
The sentry gave him a cigarette and struck the match on his own box.
Then they moved forward--out of sight.
Elbert was on his feet now, rubbing his eyes. It had all been mixed
with his dream so far, but now he knew that it was really dawn and the
Mexican voice was telling off the deaths of ‘Sarpullir’ and the others.
The one across the patio had moved forward to the wall.
It was altogether incredible. The rurale’s story of yesterday, all the
stories of death he had ever heard, did not make the present moment
believable. It could not be so, here and now.... Men fell off horses,
off cliffs, out of parachutes; men were run over by cars, blown to
pieces in mines, broken by many labors and inventions, but men could
not be put to death--a’ sangre fria--at daybreak by other men!
Now he was standing at the bars of his own cell. Something was pulling
him back to the bench, but another force more rigidly held his right
cheek-bone pressed between two wooden bars. Only the far corner of
the wall could be seen, even so--just one man standing at the blank
wall--face of a youth, looking away, head uncovered and looking
away.... And now from the left, where Elbert’s eye could not reach,
came an old man’s voice raised in wailing. It was like the voice of an
old beggar at some city gate--crying out softly against what he saw,
not desperately, a low mourning; and all the time the phonograph-voice
gave commands--until a shock of volley-fire and a few ragged shots.
The hands of the youth lifted, as if he were treading water, as if he
were pushing something from him, as if he were trying not to fall--an
altogether different, divided look--the face of one being stoned, yet
exalted, too--all this in the succession of shots, and Elbert had drawn
back by this time, rubbing his cheek which was bruised from the wood,
and there was something in him older, far older and quieter, than he
had ever known before; something in him that could not laugh yet, but
would sometime, something that knew that the corn-dust maiden would be
waiting in that far doorway.
XX
THE TWO WHO HAD NOT HEARD
DAY was actually breaking clearer. Mamie was dancing at her tether
across the patio. The recent sound of guns had not been to her liking,
nor certain odors which now moved in the air. The firing squad had
gathered at the cistern. The men were drinking water and lighting
cigarettes, talking jerkily with laughter. The sudden surge of pity
which Elbert knew was for them, not for the others.... That was his day
of quiet waiting. The sun rose and steadily shone; such was a fact of
continual amazement. The hours didn’t drag, because his thoughts were
out of himself so much of the time. He would finally feel an ache in
his body and rouse from the deeps of contemplation to find that he had
sat in one position for an hour or more. Queerly enough, he couldn’t
take his own predicament so seriously as last night.
Of course, he wouldn’t give up. He would see his Sonora job through,
but for the time, practically all sense of personal danger had eased
away. Cordano’s little infantry garrison was merely holding him until
his case was straightened out. Perhaps the officer in charge had
telegraphed North to verify his papers. Sooner or later he would be out
of this, and if they sent him back to the States, he would return when
possible and start in all over again.
Noon, afternoon. Captain Ramon appeared, commiserated with him, but
announced that four more of Monte Vallejo’s men were being brought in.
Elbert saw the prisoners enter at nightfall, and once more, for an hour
or two in the evening, the prison cells were unlocked, and after that
the silence again, the lone American’s last thought that there would be
another death party at dawn....
He was ripped out of sleep by a full-powered neigh from Mamie. He sat
up--moonlight whiter than ever upon the empty patio. Faintly he could
see the mare standing in the thin shadows--that high-held listening
head--the arch of her crest. He heard a horse answer from a distance,
probably from the picket-line of the rurales across the town. A sentry
walking past, back and forth across the entrance to the arch, paused,
but resumed his pacing again.
Now, slowly, on the low roof of the cells opposite, a human figure
lifted--then another. Mamie nickered; the figures flattened again. This
time horses answered from both sides of the town. The sentry was slower
to resume his pacing.
Elbert rubbed his eyes. The two figures on hands and knees were now
moving cautiously forward on the roof of the cells toward the arch.
They came to halt, as the sentry approached below. Slow seconds, Mamie
dancing nervously back and forth on her tether. From one of the cells
came a low grumbling at the disturbance she made--then the launching of
the nearer and shorter figure from the roof, to the shoulders of the
sentry, as the latter reached the turning-point of his post below.
Hardly a scream. The sentry was stretched upon the turf; the other
rising from it. The second and taller stranger, meanwhile, had dropped
down from the roof and vanished under the arch. Sleepy voices from
the cells; a hissing command to silence; the name of Monte Vallejo
spoken--another demand for silence in a tone of suppressed fury.
And now the taller of the two strangers reappeared from under the
arch, leading by the hand a second sentry, who proved to have in his
hands the keys of the cells. The name of Monte Vallejo seemed on every
lip. Some of the prisoners in the cells appeared to know the two who
had come, but kept repeating that Monte Vallejo was dead. Could it be
possible that these two strangers had not heard? With this question in
his brain, Elbert began to realize that the two who had come over the
roof were of Vallejo’s band--on a long chance to rescue their chief.
The soldier with the keys was now being forced to unlock the cells,
and the way of this forcing by the tall bandit, began to fascinate
Elbert in spite of his own suffocating tension. No savagery about
it; the voice was cool, hasteless. Lilt and leisure in his words, as
he forced the sentry from cell to cell, twirling a gun on his first
finger. ‘He could fan it, too--’ an old sentence of Bob Leadley’s
flashed through Elbert’s brain. The shorter bandit now hurried up,
breathlessly reiterating the fact of Monte Vallejo’s death.
‘So I hear,’ said the tall one, ‘but we can turn loose the boys still
alive, can’t we?’
‘But the soldiers are awaking, Señor--’
‘I locked the door to the barracks,’ coolly answered the other.
‘Cordano’s men will have to get down into the street from the upper
windows.... We can’t leave these men while we’re at it. Tell everybody
to be quiet.... Pronto, hombre,’ he added lightly to the soldier with
the keys.
Sounds of the soldiers’ arousing was heard from the upper floor of el
cuartel facing the street.
‘Pronto, hombre--’ the tall bandit repeated. ‘We’ll fight our way to
the horses--’
Elbert in the dark of the cell was folding his blankets in a distracted
way, fascinated at the same time by that easy flowing voice of the tall
one. He was drawing on his boots--the keys sounding nearer. Another
of Mamie’s nasal protests reached his ears. Would they take her? The
thought actually weakened him--hardly a chance for men of Monte Vallejo
to miss one of her kind in the moonlight. And now, standing at the bars
of his own cell door--the tall one--that voice, the sentry beside him
with the keys, wailing:
‘No bantit aqui, Señor,--esta ’Mericano. Caballero ’Mericano--’
‘American?’ queried the bandit in English. ‘Oh, I say, in there--is
that right?’
Elbert cleared his voice: ‘That you, Bart?’
‘What the hell--?’ same genial tone.
‘Yes, I am American. I come from your father--’
‘Open, hombre!’ the command now, and, ‘I don’t know you. You’re a lot
safer where you are, but I’m letting you out.’
‘I came down for you. I’ve got a horse--’
Banging was now heard at the lower door to the barracks.
‘You’ll have to saddle fast. The soldiers are sure coming-to, but they
can only get out the upper windows.’
For just a second, as the cell door swung, Elbert saw the lift of a
dark face--a glitter to the laugh, that low, easy flowing tone; then
he was running across the moonlit patio--saddle-blankets over his left
arm, saddle itself trailing from his right hand, a call on his lips for
the mare to stand round. The blankets fell in place; cinches came to
hand. Mamie’s clean warm mouth closed over the bit, her ears wiggled
straight in the head stall. Still, Elbert was the last man out of the
patio, Bart standing in the street, covering the flight of his men.
Shots rained down from the windows of the second floor of the barracks.
A few of Cordano’s soldiers had already dropped down to the street;
others were crashing at the lower door which Bart had locked.
‘The horses are in the hollow back of the quarters!’ he yelled in
Mexican.
The hand of one soldier reached up to Mamie’s bridle-rein, but Bart’s
pistol-butt thudded upon the bone. Even in the tumult, Elbert saw that
nothing escaped Bart--that he was marvelously on the job, but cool.
‘Follow the others, stranger!’ he called now. ‘I didn’t catch your
name!’
‘Get up here behind me, don’t you want to?’ Elbert answered above the
din.
‘Thanks, no. It’s only a little ways to the horses.’
The dark laughing face was upturned again for an instant, and at this
moment, from beyond the plaza across the town, came the first trumpet
call of the rurales.
A rush past the small closed huts of Arecibo, women’s voices uttering
prayers--guttural tones of frightened men--the signal from the hollow,
where other horses were waiting. Elbert saw their pricked ears in the
whitish light--nine or ten horses apparently, three men in charge. The
released prisoners mounted at random, but Bart cleared from the tangle
on a leaping wheeling mount that looked ashen-colored in the moonlight.
A cracking of rifles from behind, the soldiers now having broken out
the lower door. The rurales quartered across the town, couldn’t have
gained the road so soon. Mamie had forged to the lead; at least, she
was now abreast with the hound-bodied runner Bart sat.
‘That’s some horse you’re sittin’, Mister!’ the big fellow called.
‘Some more to her, too--she just can’t help it, can she? And handles
with a light hand!’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Elbert.
He felt the strangest lift in his chest--Mamie beneath, Bart and
the ashen runner at his side--a sorrel, to show that color in the
moonlight--scatter of shots from behind, the deep whimsical voice again
from his side:
‘I say, amigo mio--did you hold up a race-track special, too? They tell
me I’m riding a stake-horse--old Mallet-head, here--but your mare isn’t
asking any odds!’
‘She belonged to your father,’ Elbert answered throatily.
XXI
THE RIO MORENO BRIDGE
THEY were out of the town, riding west through open country--ten men,
including himself, Elbert counted, one led-horse trailing. Bart had
fixed the pace of the sorrel at a full run, but still Mamie had to be
held in, not to forge ahead. Finally the words from Bart:
‘I don’t hear much American--but that didn’t sound so
cheerful--“belonged,” you said?’
Elbert had to stop to recall his last words. He had said the mare he
rode ‘belonged’ to Bart’s father.
‘Yes, that’s what I meant,’ he called back. ‘I came down from him--at
the last--’
For a full minute, only the drum of hoofs; then from Bart, as steadily
as before:
‘Some night for news--Monte Vallejo and this about Dad--same night.’
‘But I’ve got a lot to say to you from him!’ Elbert answered above the
roar. ‘In case anything happens to separate us--I want you to know he
has left you some money--quite a lot of money.’
‘Struck gold at the last?’
‘Yes, the mine’s rich, too--a gold tooth, he calls it,’ Elbert went
on, absurdly. ‘Only filed the top off her so far. If I don’t get a
chance to tell you all about it--you go to Mort Cotton, the cattleman
at San Forenso--’
‘Say, amigo mio, aren’t you expecting to live?’
‘Yes, but I’ve been carrying this message all summer. Been down here
looking for you--long time. Remember--Mort Cotton at San Forenso--he’ll
fix you up, and I want to tell you, your father never forgot--but kept
thinkin’ about you--ever since Red Ante--’
His relief was inexpressible for a minute. He had made good, if there
was not another word spoken. ‘One of the finest men I ever knew!’ he
added.
No answer from Bart.
Now gradually Elbert began to realize he was running with what was left
of Monte Vallejo’s band. There hadn’t been any time to think or choose
back in el cuartel. He had jumped at the chance to ride out with Bart;
that meant he had cast his lot with the bandits; identified once and
for all with a fragment of the outlaws, now hunted from all quarters of
Sonora. Still, a kind of freedom throbbed in him, his nostrils dilated
to the smell of dust in the night--a man beside, a horse beneath.
Finally above the thud of hoofs, Bart’s voice again:
‘What did they lock you up for?’
‘My mare, Mamie here, I guess. They thought she was one of the
race-horses--’
‘Thought you were one of us,’ Bart chuckled. ‘How long have you been
locked up?’
‘Last night--or night before last--if it’s getting on toward morning.’
‘Two hours to daybreak yet.’
In the silence after that, Elbert became queerly aware that Bart wanted
to ask more about his father, but couldn’t get his voice to working.
The words reached him:
‘So they kicked off Monte yesterday morning?’
‘Day before yesterday--’
‘You weren’t there then?’
‘No, but they told me he had the nerve--that Bistula of the rurales,
himself, finished the job. The soldiers wouldn’t shoot straight!’
‘I sure wanted to get to Monte in time,’ Bart said, queerly. ‘The
game’s up, with him gone--’
Did he mean he regarded their own capture as inevitable? After another
pause, Bart asked: ‘And what do you get, Mister, for coming down here
and mixing up in this?’
‘Your father arranged all that. We were friends, you know--’
‘Don’t you know you’re in bad, ridin’ with this outfit?’
‘I took the job--’
‘Better if I’d left you locked up in that cell. You’re along with
what’s left of a losing game--’ Bart’s laugh sounded forlorn as he
added: ‘Why, they’re after us from every town--’
Elbert cleared his throat ‘You see, I took the job--’
His eye had fastened on the north star as he spoke. It was over his
right shoulder, so they were riding west. He could see the mountains
lying northward there in the moonlight. A sudden passion mounted in him
to turn north right now; to ride straight north, crossing the Border
with Bart, yonder in the mountains where there were no roads; to find
himself in the States with Bart, asking the way to San Forenso; after
that, the trail west to the cabin, his mind finishing the picture in a
flash--with Mamie and the sorrel safe in the corral. The deep laughing
voice at his left:
‘I guess when you take a job, you try to see it through, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Elbert in fainter tone. He was deeply drawn to the man he
had come for. Sometimes it was as if Cal Monroid were riding at his
side; sometimes a feeling of Mr. Leadley’s presence.
‘I’d like to get you out of this, Mister, but it’s a sort of tight
web--’
Silence and hard riding after that; finally Bart called a halt for a
few seconds to listen or get his bearings. There was a scratching of
matches in the outfit as he pressed on again--the interminable little
boxes and sheaves of tobacco.
‘Don’t hear ’em behind. The town of Alphonso is about five miles ahead,
I figure. Another squad of rurales stationed there--’
‘Telegraph in between?’ Elbert asked.
‘I’m not sure; not along this road, anyway. May be a roundabout wire.
I’m taking the chance to reach the bridge of Rio Moreno. Two miles yet.’
They galloped on. The moon was tilting over toward the west. It must
have been after three. He saw the lather on Mamie’s neck, yet he was
still holding her in. A wooden bridge loomed ahead. Bart pulled up,
and turned off the main road to a parallel sandy track at the right,
leading down to the water. He didn’t mean to cross the bridge, Elbert
perceived. The arroyo was broad and filled with stones, but the horses
smelled water ahead. Mamie was whipping her head up and down, trying to
take the bit. Now Elbert saw the mare’s ears cock suddenly, and knew
she had caught something in the wind. His hand shot down to shut off
her breath, but the nicker broke out in spite of him.