They craned and sidled with their bald heads. “Get out of this,” he
said, smiting at one. It went sidelong off the ledge, and the others
with it. They beat with their wings, recovered their poise, and sailed
out into the air. An instant before, they had been squalid, stinking,
huddled creatures; now they were floating in the majesty of beauty. Two
hovered at a little distance from the ledge, the third rose above it in
a short spire. He had never seen any bird of prey circling at such close
quarters. He watched the great pinions soar up above him, while the
others hovered away and mewed and cried. Suddenly the bird above him
launched itself down upon him and beat him with its great wings, so that
he was almost over the ledge. Instantly it was up in the air and
repeated its swoop. It came down sighing and struck and hissed at Sard,
and immediately the two birds who had been waiting, swooped and struck
at him. “So you’re going to get me down into the valley and pick my
bones,” Sard said. He lay flat down upon the ledge, face upwards, and
drew his other revolver. The bird came down on him again, crying and
smiting. He fired; the bird went up, poised, went up a few feet further,
beat with its wings, mounted yet a little further like a towering
partridge, then crumpled up and dropped. Sard saw it strike and roll and
lie still. Its companions swayed away to look at it and then descended
to the body.
Sard looked down and wondered how he could ever have climbed that crag
at night without falling. He knew that he could not go down it by
daylight. He looked at the crag which rose up above him from the ledge,
and felt that he could not climb it. He had reached a point from which
he could neither go nor come. He ate and drank and then thought,
“Perhaps when I’m rested I will be able to try this rock. If not, I
shall end here.”
He slept on the rock until the beating of the midday sun became
unbearable. He twisted to an angle where his head could lie in some
shade, and slept again. He was aware in his sleep that someone stood
upon that ledge and told him to come on. He sat up, looked at this
figure and knew that it was only partly human. In his dream, or fever,
it seemed like the spirit of the _Pathfinder_, fierce, hard, and of
great beauty. He told himself, “This is all nonsense. The _Pathfinder_
is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a
woman.”
But the figure said, “I am the _Pathfinder_. I can find a path for you.”
She lead on up the rock and Sard followed. He could see her in front of
him; he followed where she trod. There was a great star above the crags.
The crags were thick with greenish ice, the star shone upon the ice,
till it glittered like a crown. Sard said, “I’ll put my hand on the
crown of the mountain.”
At daybreak he came out on a wild place near a brook.
There was grass there whistling in the wind. There was a little bird
somewhere, not far away, crying a double note that sounded like a curse,
continually repeated. Sard drank of the brook, sheltered from the wind
and slept; nor did he know when the woman had passed from there.
Afterwards, he was puzzled about that part of his march; sometimes it
was in his mind all blurred, like the events of a fever, sometimes it
seemed the only reality among things dreamed.
When he woke he was out in the snowfields. He thought that he had
reached the summit, but he found that he was only on the top of a small
shoulder. Beyond and above him were crags, sprinkled, heaped or
overwhelmed with snow, some of it dirty from fallings of rock, some of
it violet from shadow, the rest of it glittering. There was no sign of
any living thing. If he looked up, there were peaks glittering against
the sky; if he looked down, there were glittering snowfields, crags and
chasms.
He could not see the country from which he had come, because greyness
was hiding it from him. Grey shapes, like the leaders of a herd, were
moving into it. A herd of mists followed their leaders, so like oxen
that he expected them to bellow. They jostled on in myriads till all the
lower slopes of the mountains were blotted out. Soon a sea of mist
washed all about those miles of Sierras; the peaks stood out of this sea
like islands. “If that sea rises,” Sard thought, “I shall be drowned up
here. I must move while I have light.”
He had his direction from the sun. He pushed on, now up, now down, over
snow of every degree of rottenness. He had a little food left in his
wallet. He guarded this, but slaked his thirst with snow and chewed upon
a piece of his belt.
In the evening it began to blow bitterly cold with a small snow. In one
of the whirls of the gale he found himself upon a piece of a made road.
He could hardly believe his eyes; but there was no doubt: it had been
made by men. It had been cut out of the side of the crag; the crag at
its side had been carven with the figures of the gods. A tall god with
his tongue transfixed by a bramble was pouring libation on an altar;
beyond the altar was a door leading into the crag. As he stood there,
the sun shone out through a rift to light the eyrie he was perched upon.
Used as he was to heights, it made him sick to think of the will that
had spent men, like water, to hew that rock at that height. The sun
shone into the doorway. Looking within, he saw two figures upon a
throne. They sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. They were
staring straight at him.
“Yes,” he said, “what are you? Who are you there?”
Peering in, he saw that they were the bodies of a king and queen who had
been buried there in that mountain tomb, perhaps centuries before the
Spaniards came. He crept into the tomb to look at them. Once the door of
a slab of stone had been mortared flush with the face of the crag, but
it had fallen like most of the road that led to it. The mummies sat side
by side, holding each other’s hands. Masks of gold still covered their
faces. The masks had, no doubt, been modelled on the dead faces and
preserved likenesses of that king and queen. Both were tiny; they looked
like children to Sard. They were the rulers who had driven men up the
mountain to make that road. All about the walls were paintings of the
lives of those two.
“Ah,” Sard thought, “he was a king and when he died the kingdom fell to
pieces. She knew that it would be so, so when he died she killed
herself.”
The sun, which had been shining, was now suddenly blotted out again. A
cloud of intense blackness seemed to rush out of the heaven to engulf
the crag. The air was filled with crying and small snow. Sard sat there
in the darkness and fell asleep at the feet of the king and queen.
He woke often, because it was so cold. Whenever he woke, he heard the
gale full of bells tolling, or voices crying to him: often he answered
them. Once or twice he went to the door to answer voices; but no one was
there except the gale, full of small snow. He wondered if he were alive,
or if this were death; not final death, but the leaving of the body
which is the prelude to it.
In the morning the wind dropped: the snow ceased: the storm went bodily
off across heaven like an army that had been beaten, in a sullen mass,
with rearguards of sulphurous smoke followed fast by the angels of
heaven with light. The sun followed hot upon it with fire, till
presently it was far, far away, engaged upon the southern horizon.
As Sard came out into the sun, he saw a name cut or scratched upon the
lintel of the door of the tomb. The letters were lastingly but rudely
graven by a strong illiterate.
Gonzalez Medina.
1795.
“Gonzalez Medina,” he said. “That woman’s grandfather. The only man who
ever crossed these mountains. Here I am upon his track. If he blazed his
trail thus, I may still find my way out.”
The finding of that blaze was companionship to him all that day, which
was a hard day, one of his hardest.
* * * * *
One of the worst of the hardships was the knowledge that all was not
well with the _Pathfinder_. He had put so much of his virtue into that
ship, that she was almost part of him. He felt that things were going
wrong on board her. Sometimes, as he struggled on, he knew that someone
was in his place, making evil, and that Captain Cary wanted him. He kept
thinking that Father Garsinton had brought the evil.
He could not remember Father Garsinton clearly, yet he stayed in his
mind, like a blur of evil.
* * * * *
Long afterwards, in thinking over his climbing of the Sierra, some
things came back into his mind as pictures or dreams or happenings; he
never knew really which they were. Often it seemed to him that at this
point in his journey he heard a beating of pans and the murmuring of
bees: he saw bees swarming and a big Spanish woman beating pans to make
them settle. He asked to be allowed to beat pans; afterwards he hived
the bees into a straw basket.
Then the woman suggested that he should drink some honey drink, and took
him to a house where she and her husband, a much older and much yellower
person, gave him drink in a strange cup and asked him what he saw after
he had drunk.
He said, “I see a path leading upwards.”
They said, “Go along the path. Now what do you see?”
He said, “I see a little house at the end of the path, shining as though
it was made of some white metal.”
They said, “Is the door open?”
He said, “No, the door is locked.”
They said, “Go and put your hand on the sill of the door and see if the
key is there.”
He said, “It is there.”
They said, “Open the door and go in.”
He opened the door, but inside all was darkness with a smell of carib
leaf which choked his throat and made his head stupid.
They said to him, “What do you see?”
He said, “Nothing but a brazier burning carib leaf, which throws out a
thick smoke which chokes me.”
They said, “No; but to right and left of the brazier what do you see?”
He said, “Two pillars and a person bound to each pillar.”
They said, “Look well; who are the people bound to the pillars?”
He looked with all his strength into the thickness of the smoke. It was
agony to him not to be able to see clearly, but he said, “One is Juanita
de la Torre and the other is myself, and we are being choked by the
smoke.”
They said, “It is not the smoke, it is something coming from the
brazier.”
Then from the brazier the little tongues of flame, writhing among the
carib leaves, changed to red snakes which were arms and hands that came
twining about the throats of the two bound figures. The fire in the
brazier glowed into the likeness of a human soul with the face of Father
Garsinton, who laughed and said, “I crush you lesser spirits as a
sacrifice to my master.”
Then all became dim with carib smoke choking and stupefying, but the
words, “I crush you lesser spirits” were repeated many times, while the
house, the honey-cup, and the Spanish man and woman faded and
disappeared.
* * * * *
Soon after this he climbed a spine of rock, expecting to find on the
further side a dip of snow with a higher spine beyond it. To his
amazement, there was no such dip nor spine; but the slope of the
mountain falling below him into a different world. On this ocean side of
the Sierra there was no desert. Instead of a chaos of rock blasted by
the sun to rottenness, there were heaves of hill flinging their waters
to the forests. Forests covered the valleys like a fleece. In places
where there was no forest Sard could see little white houses. The smoke
of a train ran like a caterpillar along the valley beneath the
foothills. Beyond the foothills was a dark mass, like a bar of metal,
yet not like a bar of metal, because it seemed to be alive, it gave Sard
the thought that it trembled: it was the sea.
Far away, on the brink of this darkness, was a smudge or cloud in which
some chimneys stood like stalks. The smoke merged into the air so that a
tiny golden dome glittered: it was the cathedral in San Agostino. Almost
at once, quite clearly, though faintly, in some chance channel of upper
air or freak of sound, the chimes from the dome reached Sard. It was a
familiar Spanish chime to which Sard always put the words of the poet:
“Gloria in las alturas,
Cantad in vuestra jaula, criaturas.”
Worn, footsore, more than half-starved as he was, he could not see his
goal nor hear that chime without “singing in his cage.” There was his
desired haven, within how many hours of march? He could not tell how
many hours; perhaps very many hours; but no matter what his pains were,
he felt sure that having seen his goal, he could reach it.
Going down was like soul’s delivery after the toils of the last days. In
a few miles he was in the timber, going down a glen of great trees
towards a smell of honey which came thickly upon the air to him.
Sometimes he missed it for a few yards, but it always returned on the
next gust. Sometimes it brought to him memories of tea in England, but
more often the intense memory of a picnic at Yapavai, where he had sat
near a field of the yellow melilotis hovered over by countless blue
butterflies.
At the end of the glen he came out on to a heave of the hill, where he
found the cause of the honey scent: eleven great trees lay broken on the
ground.
Nine of the eleven were hollow from the ground to the upper branches. In
all these, for perhaps centuries, the wild bees had nested, till now
many hundreds weight of honey lay broken or spilt upon the ground. Over
this, in some places, the bees were still flying confusedly, but by this
time most of them had gone with their queens to new shelters. Gorged
bee-eaters sat on neighbouring boughs. Some small mountain bears boldly
foraged in the tree-boles. They clawed out great paws-full of comb which
they plastered into their muzzles in spite of the stings. Sard found a
piece of broken yellow comb the size of a bathsponge. On this he fed
with thoughts of the prophets fed miraculously in the wilderness. After
this, the miseries of the wilderness fell from him as though they had
never been. Perhaps the honey had in it some drug of excitement or of
comfort. He wandered on happily, feeling sure that all his troubles were
at an end. He bathed in the pool of a mountain stream on the banks of
which wild strawberries grew so thickly that the ground looked like the
foot of a red hawthorn tree after a storm in June. After this he went on
through a forest of big timber which grew on easy slopes with little
undergrowth.
The moon had risen before he came to any trace of men. He came to a
clearing and followed wheel-tracks downhill till he saw the lights of
huts. Men in the huts were beating tin pans and singing:
“Is that Mr. Riley
Who sets such a styley?
Is that Mr. Riley who keeps the hotel?
Is that Mr. Riley they speak of so highly?
How d’ye do, Mr. Riley, are you doing quite well?”
As he came to the door of the first hut, a man who was tapping out his
pipe there, hailed him:
“Hello, sport! where in hell do you come from?”
“Over the mountain.”
“Mountain, hell! Are you looking for a job?”
“No.”
“Doing it for a bet, then?”
“No. Trying to rejoin my ship.”
“Hell!” the man said. “Here, boys, here’s a son of a gun come across the
mountain, trying to rejoin his ship. Come in, son, and have one on the
house.”
* * * * *
At noon the next day Sard was in San Agostino, washed, shaven, fed,
reclad, and with money in his pocket. He walked in the crowded street,
listening to speech, hearing the bells. Shops were full of food, drink,
shoes and clothes; women were looking into shops; work was going on; men
with places in life were filling them.
He had no place. He knew now how little a thing will put a man out of a
place, into the wilderness beyond, where to be at all is to be an
outlaw.
He stopped on the steps of the Consulate to look at the ships in port:
among them was the big English steam yacht, the _Yuba_, which he had
seen in Las Palomas, as it seemed in another life. A man hailed him by
name.
“Hullo, Harker!”
It was Billy Binge, his old captain of the main.
“I say, Harker,” he said, “are you ashore here? Yes? What topping luck!
Could you take the _Yuba_ to Santa Barbara?”
“Yes.”
“Sir James has sacked his old man for crooking his little finger: going
on the jag, in other words. He wants a new old man, muy pronto, and the
worst of it is all the masters on the beach here are out at elbows.”
“So am I,” Sard said.
“Only in your gear,” Billy said. “These other fellows are in their
souls. I can vouch for you personally. So if you really can take her,
come along, I’ll fit you out a bit and then I’ll take you to Sir James.”
“One minute,” said Sard. “Have you heard anything of an abduction case
at Las Palomas?”
“Abduction of Miss Kingsborough?” Billy said. “We’ve heard nothing else.
She’s been carried clean away.”
“Where to?” Sard asked.
“Search me,” Billy said. “Some damned trader in Eve’s flesh; but there’s
a fine old breeze about it. Now come along.”
“What brings you to San Agostino?”
Sard told him in few words.
* * * * *
Billy Binge’s recommendation was sufficient; Sir James engaged Sard to
command the _Yuba_. She sailed late that night, up the coast to the
Recalde reef to take some dredgings. After a few days at the reef, she
sailed for Santa Barbara, where she arrived at noon just nineteen days
from Sard’s going ashore at Las Palomas.
Sir James stood at his side as he brought the _Yuba_ into Santa Barbara
harbour.
“You’ve not been here recently, Captain Harker,” he said. “You’ll not
know the place; it’s a different place: almost a different city. They’re
making this place the Athens of the West: I say _they_, but it’s really
_he_, the Dictator, Don Manuel. Look at the cathedral; there’ll be
nothing so beautiful in the New World when it’s finished. Do you see
your ship, the _Pathfinder_?”
“No, Sir James, she isn’t in the sailing ship berths.”
“That is unfortunate for you,” Sir James said, “as I suppose it means
that she has both come and gone; but it is fortunate for me, for I hope
it will mean that you will come home with us in the _Yuba_.”
* * * * *
PART FOUR
As soon as Sard was free, he went ashore to see Messrs. Wrattson &
Willis’s agents. He was puzzled by the _Pathfinder’s_ not being in the
port. She could not be overdue, he thought, in just dropping down to
leeward. She might have come and gone: in which case he would have
missed her by a few hours. “More probably,” he thought, “she has gone
down the coast to Otorin to complete her cargo. I’ll find her there.”
At the agents, as he asked for his letters, one of the managers of the
firm, a tall, alert inscrutable man of about thirty-five, a Mr. Waycock,
heard his name.
“Are you Mr. Harker of the _Pathfinder_,” he said, “come into my office,
will you? I want to speak to you. Sit down here: the cigars are at your
elbow. You don’t smoke? You’re the first sailor I’ve ever known who
could say that. You know, Mr. Harker,” he said, “I heard that we might
expect you apart from the _Pathfinder_. I had news of you from a man
with whom I have business dealings, a man called Douglas Castleton.”
“Has he been here?” Sard asked. “Where is he?”
“Isn’t that a little like asking where is the curlew?” Mr. Waycock said.
“It is best, perhaps, not to ask where Mr. Castleton is. I understand
that he is not here at the moment, but away again on . . . well . . . on
a business journey.”
“What news of the _Pathfinder_, sir?” Sard asked.
“The _Pathfinder_!” said Mr. Waycock. “Haven’t you heard? She was
wrecked last week on the Snappers. She’s a total loss.”
“On the Snappers!” Sard said. “How on earth did she get there? Are all
hands saved? Is Captain Cary safe?”
“You’ve not heard then,” Mr. Waycock said. “Of course you couldn’t have
heard. No, all hands are not safe. They had pestilence on board. Captain
Cary is dead. He died some days before the ship went ashore.”
“Dead!” Sard said. “But he was well when I saw him. How did you hear
this?”
“We had a cable from Port Matoche where the crew were landed,” Mr.
Waycock said. “Here it is. It gives just the bare facts, but if you come
here to-morrow morning at nine o’clock, the crew will be here with Mr.
Dorney. Mr. Hopkins is still in hospital. The rest will be coming in
this evening by the mail. You can see them here in the morning. Here’s
Dorney’s cable as far as it goes.”
Sard looked at the flimsy.
“I’m glad Captain Cary didn’t lose her,” he said. “But how did they put
her on the Snappers?”
“Well, she came down on both knees like a riderless horse,” Mr. Waycock
said. “They had a fever on board. I don’t know more than that.”
“Yes,” Sard thought to himself. “I know the kind of fever they’ve had on
board, Captain Cary dead and myself not there, Hopkins ill and Dorney
who can’t navigate, a man who doesn’t hold with sights but can foodge a
day’s work, as he calls it.”
“Are they bringing Captain Cary’s body, sir?” he asked.
“No, he was buried at sea,” Mr. Waycock said. “A fine seaman, Captain
Cary—of the old school, that is. Of course his day was over. He
couldn’t have held his own much longer. It’s just as well as it is.”
“Yes,” Sard said bitterly. “He didn’t lose her and he hadn’t got the
sack. But he wasn’t wanted and they let him know it. You must excuse me,
Mr. Waycock. I have been with Captain Cary for ten years. I must go out
and think of it. I will come in the morning.”
At the door as he was going out, he said, “One other thing, Mr. Waycock.
Douglas Castleton is mixed up with a very queer company of men. I
suspect that some of those men were concerned with abducting a woman, a
Miss Kingsborough, from a house in Las Palomas. I have reason to believe
that the men in that abduction came from Santa Barbara here and were
going to bring Miss Kingsborough here to some Mr. B. or Sagrado B. who
runs a rum-running business and is plotting revolution against the
Dictator here.”
“Oh, but I think you’re quite mistaken about that,” Mr. Waycock said.
“Our friend moves in very queer company, but not in company of that sort
at all. Besides, Miss Kingsborough has been found. The case was reported
in the press a week or ten days ago. She was taken by bandits, not by
rum-runners. She was held to ransom. I think I could find you the
account in the paper. I have got it somewhere here. She was in a mining
town quite close to Las Palomas, a place called Tlotoatin.”
“Tlotoatin!” said Sard.
“Yes, do you know it?” said Mr. Waycock.
“I have been there,” Sard said.
“Oh, here’s the ‘Humanidad,’” Mr. Waycock said. “Here’s the account,
‘Miss Kingsborough found.’ Cost her £400.” He pointed the paragraph to
Sard, who read:
“_Miss Kingsborough Found._
“A cable from Las Palomas confirms the rumour, which we quoted
in our columns yesterday, that Miss Kingsborough has been
restored to her friends and relatives. Yesterday the agents of
the British Consul visited the place appointed by the bandits
with the sum demanded for the lady’s ransom: £400. Great
reticence veils what took place at the meeting, but the bandits
were men of their word and Miss Kingsborough was set free. A
press agent who interviewed her late last night declares that
she is looking none the worse for her adventure, and that the
bandits treated her with courtesy. Thus ends a nine days’
wonder, and thus, as we hope, will end the campaign of calumny
which the Occidental press has waged against the police of Santa
Barbara ever since Miss Kingsborough’s disappearance. The
criminals of this atrocity were not natives of this State, but
Occidentales, living on the scene of their crime. Let the doves
of Las Palomas change their ways before they accuse others of
being wolves.”
“I’m relieved to find that she has been found,” Sard said. “So that ends
that.”
“You see,” Mr. Waycock said, “this is five or six days ago.”
“Did you ever hear the nickname B. or Mr. Sagrado B.?” Sard asked, “in
connection with rum-running or plotting against the Dictator?”
Mr. Waycock had a broad, smooth, pale face, tranquil like the face of an
image of Buddha.
“I know no one with such a nickname,” he said, “and there is no
rum-running from Santa Barbara. There may be rum-running from the coast
far to the west, six hundred miles from here, where the rum is made, but
none from here. This fiction of the rum coming from Santa Barbara is
made by the Las Palomas police, Mr. Harker. And as for plotting against
the Dictator, you meant, I suppose, the Don José faction. Who would
shoot the Dictator to put Don José in his place?”
“Don José would, for one,” Sard said.
Mr. Waycock laughed. “He hasn’t that reputation in Santa Barbara,” he
said.
Sard suddenly felt that he was in the presence of one of Don José’s
backers.
“One thing, Mr. Waycock,” he said, “if Douglas Castleton isn’t plotting
or fetching rum, what brings him to Santa Barbara?”
“He comes for letters, Mr. Harker; twice a year he comes to Santa
Barbara for letters.”