In full view of the men he took a careful sample from the mud omelet
here and there, scrutinized it critically, and carried it off to the
assay-room. In ten minutes he was out again; and walking up among the
laborers, he said: “A holiday for all, this afternoon. For to me the
torta looks to be cooked, and Don Ygnacio should be here to-night, who
will know. Go, then; but at dawn again.”
That was an end of lunch, of course. The men sprang up with “Infinite
thanks, sir!” and were already making for the gate, except Narigudo and
four others, who mumbled over their last enchilada, instead of throwing
it away, and looked first at their mates and then at one another.
“Señor, I do not think it done,” broke out “Big Nose,” sullenly.
“Who gave thee a candle in this funeral?” Alberto retorted, coolly.
“Answerest thou to the owner whether there be loss or gain?”
Narigudo said no more, but rose to follow his comrades as Alberto
disappeared in the office. When the boy emerged, five minutes later, the
place was deserted.
Rather simple, after all! Only five traitors, apparently; and for the
present _they_ were gone. Now, just to lock and bar the big gate, and
think what next.
In much more comfortable mind after bolting the only entrance to the
walled hacienda, Alberto strolled up to the great shed, and halted a
moment by the big trundle-mill, pondering. So far, so good; and now
what? Leave the place locked, and ride up to the city to warn the
authorities?
A sound that you might hardly call a sound, so faint was it, startled his
tense nerves; and as he wheeled the blood went from his face. Fifteen
feet away, barefoot, Narigudo stood in the door of the ore-shed, with an
ugly smile.
“Young Excellency,” he drawled, insolently, “you have locked me in. Give
me the keys to go!”
At this Alberto found his voice. “In this hacienda,” said he, steadily,
“it is accustomed to obey the _administrador_, and not to command him. I
will let you out when I go to the gate.”
“Ah, it’s the _administrador_, is it? Then give me the keys before I eat
an _administrador_!” The tone had changed from insolence to rage, and the
angry fellow sprang forward.
Alberto wavered in his tracks, and then straightened with a snap. The key
of the bullion-room? Never!
He plucked the heavy keys from his belt and flung them fiercely, just
as that big hand clutched his shoulder. Narigudo hurled him against the
wheel-post with a curse, and sprawled forward in a desperate effort. But
the keys, just eluding his fingers, clanked down into the deep drain.
“Only wait!” he roared. “I shall have it just the same, and you shall pay
the trouble!”
He plunged into the opening with a backward glare that made Alberto’s
heart stand still. It was no use to run—he was locked in, too. Just to
wait to be murdered!
But then the boy leaped forward with a new light in his eyes. A big
wooden trough stood there—uptilted upon one face. There was a muffled
bellow; but he hunched his shoulder to the mass, and inched it forward,
and sank upon it with a queer, sobbing laugh. A fine trap for the big rat!
But he had forgotten the difference between a strong boy’s strength and
a powerful man’s. His seat heaved under him; clearly, if his weight were
removed, Narigudo could lift it. The fellow had all his mighty back in
play, and seemed like to overturn his prison door, jailer and all.
Alberto could not even groan. It was impossible to stay here, as great
dangers were to be guarded against elsewhere. But he saw plainly that
he could not get far before Narigudo would be out, and——! There was no
weight nearer than the ore-sacks, and he dared not desert the trough long
enough to go half-way to them. In a nightmare of terror he crouched on
the trough, trying to make himself heavy, and praying to all the saints.
Suddenly he gave a wild shout. The whim! There stood the great vertical
wheel; its pole, ten feet away, was two feet from the ground. _If—!_
Thank God, there was no ore in its path!
Alberto leaped up, dancing noisily on the trough. He sprang to the floor
and back, ran off two strides, and rushed upon the trough again. _Now_
his head was clear as a bell.
In another dash he seized the ponderous pole and wrenched at it with all
his force. The mill creaked and gave an inch or two. Back he pounced
noisily upon the trough, and back again to the pole for another mighty
tug; and again, and a dozen times again. Each time the reluctant wheel
groaned a few inches forward upon its circle, and now the end of the pole
barely overlapped the end of the trough.
All was quiet below. The prisoner, puzzled by these crazy antics
overhead, was waiting for a clew to what it all meant. Now, indeed, he
began to heave again; but Alberto, braced backward on the trough, was
slowly, surely dragging the pole in. Another fierce jerk, and his task
was done. The great horizontal stick overhung the very middle of the
trough.
The boy rose with an effort and leaned against the wheel. A wan smile
came on his lips as the trough rose with a jerk—just three inches. Then
it thumped against the pole and went down with a bang. The trap was
locked, and Alberto never stopped till he sank breathless on the office
steps.
It was already turning dusk; there was no time to lose. Muskets plenty
were in the armory, but Narigudo had the key. However, there was one
gun in the office, and Alberto loaded it with nervous fingers. Then he
climbed into the loop-holed turret which overhung the gate, and crouched,
waiting. But another thought seemed to come, for he chuckled and ran down
the court. When he came back to the tower, twenty minutes later, the
stables were empty, and so was the office drawer from which Don Ygnacio
distributed _cohetes_ on the eve of a feast-day. On the other hand, a
hundred sleepy mules were huddled in the entrance, with a rope stretched
taut behind them, and back of the rope a great many little heaps of
small, red cylinders.
At nine o’clock there was a faint tap at the gate. “Narigudo!” someone
whispered; and in a moment, louder and impatiently, “Narigudo! Art thou
asleep? Open!”
Alberto almost laughed. Then he drew back his shoulders and said,
sharply: “Not a shot till I say the word! As for you, stupids, you see
the gate! And your Narigudo—he is well boxed up!”
There was a quick scuffling below. Evidently the bandits had run back
under the bottom of the tower, puzzled by this turn of affairs. For half
an hour there was a trying silence; then a sudden rush, and something
smote the gate with a tremendous crash.
“Not yet!” cried Alberto. “Wait for the word!”
But the robbers were not to be fooled. If there were really defenders,
they would have fired before now; and again the battering-ram made the
great gate tremble.
Alberto’s finger itched on the trigger. Should he shoot? Before he could
reload, they might have the gate down. And then——?
He leaned the long musket against the wall and crept down into the
courtyard just as the thunderous crash came again. Evidently the gate was
beginning to give.
Another smash, and a leaf of the gate began to creak with that ominous,
growing creak that goes before a fall. Just then there was a little
flash in the courtyard, and a queer _s-s-sizz-sizz_, pop! bang! _Bang!_
_B-b-b-b-ang!_ The gate reeled and fell outward, and with the roar of a
landslide a hundred terrified mules burst through the gap, trampling and
scattering like chaff the knot of bandits gathered to burst in.
And then from far up the cobble-paved highway came a stentorian yell,
and pistol shots, and a new clamor of iron hoofs. Two minutes later Don
Ygnacio and his men swept into the courtyard, where a collapsed young
hero lay beside a vast litter of bursted firecrackers.
A Duel in the Desert.
A Duel in the Desert.
Of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of
life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden
as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every
hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and
every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. The wonder
is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a
million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to
us dull-eyed observers. For the law of conflict is inexorable. Outside
of man and his protected servitors, only a tiny fraction of a per cent.
of the animals die “a natural death”—that is, without violence. Of
teeming sea and teeming forest, a vast majority of the denizens perish
“with their boots on”—overwhelmingly a prey to that insatiate “hollow
feeling” which Nature has put for warder of the feral population, lest
it overwhelm the earth. The “defensive” animals fall, as a rule, to the
appetite of their predatory neighbors; the predatory beasts, in turn,
have a reasonable expectation of death at the “hands” of their rivals in
the tribe, their foes outside, or the only unnatural killer, Man. Every
acre of field and forest has had its myriad tragedies of the humble
wild-folk—though we are too unobservant to note the fact. A few bleaching
bones, a wisp of fur or feathers, a dim scurry in the dust—this and no
more is the chronicle of the snuffing out of a life as gladly lived,
as hardly parted with as our own. Many authors have become famous by
their skillful dissection of the Beastliness of Man; but we too seldom
remember (unless while reading the Jungle Stories or Wahb) the Humanity
of the Beasts, which is quite as true a part of natural history. This is
mostly because in our civilized cushioning we know nothing real about the
beasts. They are very little more to us than so many forms of speech, raw
material for perfunctory literature or for “hunting,” whose only serious
penetration is put up in brass cylinders by the U.M.C. Co. It is nothing
short of astounding how little the average “hunter” knows of the game
he kills, except so much of its habit as shall enable him to kill it.
Indeed, the very name “Game” is perhaps significant of this blindness.
It _is_ a game, and a great game, if shrewdly played; but pity the man
who can see in it nothing but the killing! He is as far from being what
I would soberly call a hunter as the fellow whose only notion of whist
is to play trumps at every lead is far from being a whist player. One
who knows as well as anyone, and as well loves, the wild thrill of the
chase, who has hunted and been hunted, and found the keenest “sport”
when the “game” turned the tables and he had to fight hand-to-hand for
his own life, is not apt to be foolishly sentimental. But he is very
apt to pity those who have never learned the higher side of hunting.
To watch a beaver colony at work; or a vixen with her pups; or a bear
family at play; or the wild stallion herding his flirtatious _manada_ and
falling like a thunderbolt upon some mustang Lothario; or partridge or
wild turkey at mating time—_experto credite_, it is quite as much “fun”
and rather more woodcraft than trapping or killing or “creasing.” Which
is saying a great deal. And to such as mix the game with brains, these
things become more and more the refinement and expertness of it. As a
matter of fact, a fox is a much smarter hunter than any man who hunts
only to kill. His eyes and ears are far better, his nose is a genius of
which no human has so much as an inkling, his foot-fall is infinitely
softer, his strategy far more competent. For that matter, more foxes
escape the allied force and wit of a score of men and a half-score of
hounds than partridges or quail escape the unaided campaign of one fox.
As to that, in the average foxhunt, at least (and leaving out of the
count the trapper and real wilderness hunter), one hound is worth in
effectiveness half a hundred people. Without a single dog to lead them,
the whole chase could as soon stay at home.
More picturesque, perhaps, than the every-day sacrifice of a life to an
appetite is the animal duel to the death; and particularly when both
parties fall. Feral combats—mostly deriving from sexual jealousy, for it
is comparatively rare that predatory beasts shall fight outside their
kind—are innumerable, though in a small minority of cases fatal to either
combatant; perhaps fifty times as rarely to both. Even in the extreme
event, there is generally little visible record left, and that of a sort
that shamefully few of our hunters can identify. The best known—because
the most unmistakable—is the entanglement of buck deer by their horns in
such inextricable fashion that the duellists starve to death. This is not
so extremely rare. I have found such grappled skulls thrice—in Maine, in
the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and in Colorado so noble a duo of elk heads
locked in this Chinese puzzle of death that the inaccessibility of the
range and the impossibility of bringing out these ponderous relics have
given me a standing grievance these seventeen years. The swordfish pinned
by his beak to starve beside the pierced hull; the rat in the fatal nip
of a big clam; the buffalo and the cinnamon bear fallen together dead—all
these I believe to be authentic; and of the mutual Pyrrhic victory of two
rattlesnakes I have seen the proof.
But beyond reasonable comparison, the most extraordinary “document” I
have ever seen or heard of in this sort is the absolutely unique relic
found in 1900 by Edwin R. Graham in the desert county of Inyo, Cal., near
Coalingo, and now in the museum of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.
There is no possible question of its authenticity. All the ingenuity of
man could not make a tolerable counterfeit of it. Nor do I believe there
is any reasonable doubt that it is the most remarkable record ever found
of a fight to the death.
It is unflattering but typical of our civilized observation that
thousands of people—including a great many “hunters”—identified
these mummied protagonists as “a coyote and an eagle.” Even the
photograph shows what they are, as well as the vindictiveness of their
death-struggle.
A prowling wildcat (evidently too hungry to be fanciful) finds a great
horned owl blinking upon the brink of a cliff, and pounces upon it,
catching a wing hold. The owl, somewhat armored, even against those
terrible teeth and claws, by its quilting of feathers, flings itself
upon its back; pounding fiercely with its free wing, tearing with its
hooked beak, and clenching its talons into the flesh with that peculiar
mechanical lock-grip of its kind—a grip which death does not loosen,
as more than one hunter who picked an owl up unripe has learned to his
sorrow. That even this large owl could not kill a full-grown wildcat in
any ordinary combat, probably every hunter knows. But this owl chanced to
get a clutch on the wildcat’s open fore paw, one of his claws clinched
behind a tendon—and there it still is, traceable even in the photograph.
Perhaps he could not have withdrawn it himself, had he been the survivor
of the struggle. The cat’s jaws are still locked upon the broken bone
of the owl’s left wing. Neither is otherwise very badly mangled; and
doubtless the cat would have torn to shreds “the body of this death” and
gone about his business with no more handicap than that ineradicable
talon in his paw.
[Illustration: WILDCAT AND OWL IN DEATH-STRUGGLE]
But in their wild and blind mêlée they overstepped the verge of the
cliff, and down they went together. The 40-foot fall does not seem to
have broken their clinch at all. If it did, they renewed it. But, though
no fractures were sustained, the stumble doubtless stunned the cat; and
there, irretrievably grappled in immortal hate, they died together of
thirst and loss of blood. There at the foot of the cliff they were found;
desiccated by the furnace airs of the desert, light as mummies, but
unbroken; their very eyeballs dried in their sockets; the plumage of the
owl practically complete, and enough fur of the wildcat’s muzzle and paws
left by the moths to identify it even to those who could not recognize
its unequivocal anatomy.
A ’Rastle with a Wildcat.
A ’Rastle with a Wildcat.
One of my very first experiences in the West was a midnight tussle with
a fifty-four pound wildcat in a lonely cabin in the Greenhorn Mountains
of Colorado. I shall never forget my horror at the sight of that huge
puss on a beam over my head; for I had had a serious experience with the
wildcat of the Northeast, and supposed that this fellow, who was twice as
big, was likewise twice as much to be dreaded.
I did not know that the Rocky Mountain wildcat is not nearly so fierce,
and that he never attacks man as does sometimes his cousin of the Maine
and New Hampshire forests; and I had very slight hopes for the outcome
of a struggle twice as severe as that which a furry freebooter in the
Pemigewassett wilderness gave me a good many years ago. I need not have
worried. The Colorado Cat was easy game; and when the last charge in my
six-shooter had brought him to the floor, his life was soon ended.
That first encounter, in New Hampshire, was more than thirty years
ago—years filled with roving adventure and many other things which are
apt to crowd the past back into forgetfulness. But I remember it as
though it had been yesterday. Small, white “exclamation-points” on my
chest, with several other scars, occasionally call it to mind.
I had grown from a consumptive boy to a small but thoroughly athletic
young man. Wrestling, boxing, canoeing, hunting and fishing had brought
me into good condition, and every muscle was hard as wire. But for that
fact, I should not be writing this; for the fight took my utmost ounce of
strength. Had it come a year earlier, my grave would be in the wilderness
to-day.
Of the yearly thousands who visit the great summer hotels of the White
and Franconia Mountains, extremely few ever penetrate the Pemigewassett
wilderness. The wild ranges wall its sides, and between them is a huge
and virgin forest, full of game, dotted and seamed by lakes and brooks
that swarm with trout. In this almost untrodden wild rises the east
branch of the Pemigewassett, the beautiful little river which later
becomes the Merrimac.
I was hunting and fishing that spring on the head waters of the east
branch. My canoe swam a lovely but nameless lakelet, and my camp, roofed
with birch-bark, was near the shore. There were three brooks running into
the lake noisily; and at the south end the clear young river slipped
silently out through the dark trees.
It was the last day of May, and still cold in that mountain bowl. I had
a fat deer hung high beside my shelter; so there was meat for some time.
In a little while the fishing would be very tame, for there the trout
have not fully learned what a deceiver man is, and there is little sport
in standing almost astride a rill, and with a five-foot willow pulling a
dozen or twenty fish out of one pool. But now I knew the big fish were
around, and I determined to spend the day with my rod.
By ten o’clock I was well over toward Mount Lafayette, on the largest of
the brooks which came into my lake from the west; and, descending the
steep banks to the bed of the stream, prepared to fish down toward camp.
The brook fell very rapidly here, in a series of short falls, at the
bottom of each of which was a deep, lovely pool of water, so clear that
it seemed only air with a light tinge of green. I could see pebbles ten
feet below the surface, and the brown flashes of the sportive trout.
In five minutes I was landing my first fish, a game half-pounder, and
others bit as fast as I could attend to them.
There was no need of covering much ground. I could have caught in fifty
yards all I could eat in a week. But I kept moving homeward, taking
only one or two of the largest fish from a pool and throwing back any
accidental small ones.
In this way I had gone down, perhaps, half a mile, when I came to the
largest pool I had found on that brook. Here it seemed likely that there
might be some particularly large trout. In fact, the first one I struck
seemed to be much larger than any on my string; but he snapped the hook
and was gone with a splash.
I had drawn an extra hook from my box and was “ganging” it upon the line,
when some impulse caused me to look up. As I did so, the tin box fell
clattering upon the rocks and my rod at my feet.
The brook here had cut a narrow gorge through a ridge, and the pool at
whose head I stood touched on each side the very foot of a rocky wall
nearly forty feet high. I was standing on a ledge whence the brook
dropped, perhaps, ten feet into the pool, and the banks were not nearly
so high there. Still, I presume the tops were fifteen feet above my head.
A giant pine had fallen across the gorge from bank to bank, making a
knotty bridge, which was almost over me, but a little in front; and upon
that great log was the Something which had brought my heart up into my
mouth with such a bump.
On the dark side of the tree, behind the stump of a huge limb, flat and
motionless as you could press your hand upon the table, lay almost the
last thing in the world that I desired to see there—a wildcat.
Whether it was crouching there when I came, or, as is more likely, had
crawled out from the bank to surprise me, I never knew; but there it was
confronting me.
I could just see the fierce glints in its eyes; and when its gaze met
mine, the tip of the ears, outlined on a patch of sky, seemed to flatten.
My rifle was in camp, for it was too long a walk to bring it when I
wished to fish. I had not even a revolver—nothing but a keen-edged,
clip-point hunting-knife, which hung in its sheath on my left hip.
I hardly dared move, but that knife I must have. Slipping my right hand
cautiously behind my back, I reached far around, till at last it touched
the welcome hilt, and I began to slip the sheath slowly around my belt to
the right side, where the knife could be drawn less ostentatiously.
All this time I had never taken my eyes from those of the unwelcome
intruder, and I kept scowling at him with a savage expression which was
meant to alarm him, but which sadly flattered my real feelings.
How long we stood eyeing each other thus, I do not know. It seemed an age
and must have been several minutes. Neither of us moved. He lay crouched
and menacing; I stood outwardly defiant, with my hand on that precious
buckhorn handle. And then my wet feet, chilled with the icy water of the
brook, betrayed me. I felt a sneeze working toward the surface.
Now, when _I_ sneeze, it is no gentle _tschoo!_ but half a dozen or more
wild and uncontrollable explosions, which never fail to bring tears to
my own eyes, if they are lucky enough not to scare some unsuspecting
stranger.
I struggled to choke that sneeze, to hold it back; but I might as well
have tried to hold the foaming brook.
_Ker-cheooo! Ker-cheooo! Ker-cheooo-oo!_ With each eruption my head flew
down and my body shook; and as I straightened up after the fifth burst,
I saw—through the mist that filled my eyes—something dark descending upon
me like a great, hazy bird.
I had not once changed my position since first seeing the wildcat. He
was a trifle to my left, and my left foot and shoulder were pointed
up-stream. Our lives hang on such trifles as that! Now, with the trained
instinct of the boxer—who has first to learn to act without stopping to
think how to act—I threw my left hand up and out! Half-way to arms-length
it met that furry avalanche, and broke its force. The cat landed full
against my side.
Its sharp hind claws sank into my thigh, and the sharper fore
claws clutched me in the pectoral muscles in front and between the
shoulder-blades behind. The pain was cruel, but I had no time even to cry
out. At the instant I expected to feel those merciless jaws on my neck,
and that would be the last.
The wildcat knows where the jugular vein is as well as the best surgeon
of them all; and it is for that that he invariably jumps. Animals killed
by these cruel ambuscaders are sometimes left whole and unmangled, save
for that wicked little gap at the side of the throat.
But my boxing lessons had saved me. As my left hand went out in that
“straight counter,” it struck full in the throat of the cat; and with the
swift inspiration of desperate men, I clutched the folds of fur there
with all my might.
The cat strained hard to pull-in to me—and that was a cruel leverage it
had in my own flesh. But my arm, never a weak one, was doubly strong now;
and, though I could not force him from his hold, I kept his head well
away from mine, which I “ducked” to increase the still unsatisfactory
distance.