The Treasure of Pearls 18 – Wraxall · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
The Treasure of Pearls 18Out and Away
18
Literature · Romance
The Treasure of Pearls 18
Out and Away
WraxallEnglish
At this same instant a bang on the oak from a large pistol butt--so high up that it revealed it was held in the hand of a giant or a man on horseback, who had his reasons for not dismounting--fairly shook the massive door.
"Landlord, go challenge the newcomer," said Oliver.
Tío Camote, however reluctant, was forced to obey. A second blow quickened his step, and he even smiled as if the peculiarity of its stroke were a well-known signal. He, therefore, opened the trap pretty trustfully.
A long hooknose, scarred in the middle, and a pair of gleaming eyes in a rather bloated face appeared at the little square hole.
"It is I, the captain," said a harsh voice with a shrill twang, testily. "We have brushed the brown skins afar, and we want refreshment."
"The captain," cried Sweet Potato, falling back.
"Well," said Oliver, "who's the captain?"
"Pedrillo! El Manco!" breathed the innkeeper, in awe.
"Speak up, you ass!"
"Captain Pedrillo el Manco," repeated the bar tender.
"Oh, One-leg Pete," said the hunter, with as much scorn as they displayed apprehension and respect. "Don't let me see e'en a one of ye touch that door."
He turned to Gladsden and the young Mexican, who was pale again, but courageous.
"You hev seen that the 'Paches even kin spare a young woman of beauty when their greed is keen. But, I tell 'ee, sir, I would rather all was back where we began to play the game, and yon helpless redskin up in arms afore us, than have this poor lady in the power of that villain who waits without, and is likely to wait till doomsday before I let him in. He's cruel, merciless, wuss than a Digger Injin, and words can paint no blacker! But he is a fool! He thinks he and his herd have driven away the Poison Hatchets when their first chief is here! If the Injin will forgive this humiliation, which I doubt, hang me but I'll cut his thongs, set him on his feet agen, and we'll charge this scum of the brimstone pot between us and the Apaches."
"First, let those greasers know that if they breathe a signal to their kindred thieves, you will silence the spokesman forever."
"One moment," said Gladsden. "This captain with the seared hooknose? Tell me more of him. In the same way that this young lady's face called up the figures of the past most sweet in my memory, that peculiar phiz reminded me of the most disagreeable scoundrel I ever came athwart the foot of. What's he like?"
"A hardened man-devil. He lost a leg, so that he always sticks in the saddle."
"A leg gone! How, how?"
"Chawed off by an alligator in some Texan bieyoo (bayou), so they give out."
"I have it! It is an old acquaintance! Only, he lost his leg by a shark bite, I presume."
"All's one. Well, if you ever knew him, then you knew the biggest scamp unhung! And now keep those cowards silent. If we do not answer the bandit, he will think Camote was pushed forward as a decoy by some Apaches within hyar, and will be dumfounded."
After a pause the knocking at the door of the ranch was resumed, but as in one of the pauses, the angry solicitor of admission heard the "hee, hee, ha, yah," of an Indian song, due to the imitative skill of Oregon Oliver, he withdrew.
Taking advantage of this lull in the attack on the portals, the hunter went back to the prostrate Indian chief, who had been chewing a bitter cud, and squatted down on his hams in the Indian mode, at his head.
"Now, then, Cat, what have you got on your notched stick (record) to tell off?"
The Apache looked up out of his indifferent and impassible demeanour.
"The white ranger is a great chief," said he. "Not many would have snatched the pearl from among the head chiefs of the Poison Hatchets, whose slightest blow is death. I say, he is a warrior. He has come to hear me sing my death song; not to gabble to him like an old squaw. I am ready to begin."
"Partly you're correct, chief. I am not come to chatter like the mockingbird. But I prefer hearing your song of triumph to that of death and mourning. Have you heard the voice of the wolf-with-the-leg-off at the door of this mud lodge? Do you not know the voice of that dog, the captain of Salteadores?"
"Yes, the Tiger Cat has killed many of the foxes that follow that ladrón (thief), by walking upon them!" answered the Apache disdainfully.
"To the point, then. If I free you hand and foot, will you lend us your hand to help us shake the ground clear of these varmint? I'll give you a revolver to boot! And, more, you shall have one of these broken guns (the repeating rifles which bend at the barrel end) which speaks all one's fingers times hand-running, with ammunition to feed her up as long as you run buffalo on the plains."
It was an enormous bribe. But the Apache was true to his wounded pride, and his inveterate hatred of the whites.
"The warriors that swing the poison hatchets," he replied, "lie wait in all the thickets around about the forest. In a little while they will fall on the Spanish, and then they will hear their chief singing his death song, mingled with their whoop of triumph."
"All right," said the other, rising. "I thought it neighbourly to give you a chance. Sing away to your own pitch pipe."
He went over to Gladsden, who leant on the counter, whilst doña Perla, on the other side of the room, contemplated the scene curiously. The discovery that one of the strangers was the hero of her childhood's romance, had filled her with complete confidence, and she thought no more of prayer.
"Tiger Cat is a stubborn knot," said Oliver. "I can't squeeze anything out'n him. He's never spared anyone, and when we quit this house I propose to set fire to it over his head. He has burned many a Christian alive, and it's sauce for the goose to roast him, too."
He said this so naturally that Gladsden knew he was not threatening wantonly, and so firmly that he forbore to argue with him.
"I am quite right in saying that the Apaches will never leave this place till they know the fate of their chief. They will soon attack the robbers. When they close we will sally out, trust to luck to seize three hosses for ourselves and the little doña, or to reach cover. At the last moment, since Tío Camote has been false and useless to me, I shall broach a cask or two, which will make a glorious bonfire, and the Apaches will only have their chief in a puchero (stew), with mezcal sauce!"
Nature now clamoured for sleep and food. Oliver seemed able to do without the former, but he never refused solid sustenance when available, like all the wanderers whose life is an irregular alternation of feasts and fasts.
Camote produced some sausage and corn cakes, as well as deer meat, of which doña Perla partook. Gladsden and she dozed off, neither of them heeding the continual popping of shots at long range between the Apaches and the robbers. At about eleven o'clock, when the heat was perceptible in the closed-in room without large windows or other proper vent than the narrow smoke hole aloft, Oliver made a sign for attention. The landlord was eating and drinking noisily near the Apache prisoner, tantalising him with all a coward's cruelty. His two aids had disappeared under the counter, asleep deeply, if their mellifluous nasal breathing afforded a sure indication.
At the back of the ranch there was audible a scratching at the ground. Some living thing was trying to burrow into the house. At the same time the fusillade of the Indians assumed a more regular form. Under cover of the guns the bowmen had advanced, and the twang of the string once or twice came to the ear to prove that they had pushed on near the dwelling.
It was provoking to see nothing of the skirmish, protracted vexatiously, like all such warfare.
Suddenly Oliver took up a large empty cask and placed it on the counter.
"Keep watch thar, whar the critter is boring, and blow out the brains of any head that presents itself, for we have none but enemies hyar."
He jumped on the counter, clambered upon the barrels, and with his hunting knife proceeded to make a gap in the roof. When the sky appeared there, he enlarged the hole and venturesomely pulled himself up through it, crawling down on the flat roof. It was composed of sods, among which stray seeds had sprouted.
All the field, hitherto one of conjecture, was exposed to his experienced view. After one sweep of his vision, he came down to the floor, and relieved Gladsden's anxiety which had sprung up the moment he was left entirely alone for the first time since they quitted El Paso.
"They are all at hide-and-seek," he said, with a chuckle. "They do not make the bark fly (cut the skin) once in a twenty shoots! It's tie and tie in such shooting--why did their pap trust them with firearms? Ne'erless, the 'Pach air working to get into the ranch, and they will rush the greasers back. One-leg has ridden off and hidden, I guess. I can't see his hoss nowhar. As for the cattle of the Ingins, they are in two caballadoes--one yonder a good piece, and t'other nearer at hand. We kin strike for them with some chance. There's on'y young men guarding them--and we're good for six a piece sich! Wrap the little señorita up thick, mind, so she may not be hurted by a flying bullet, and we'll shine out galorious when we make our break out. When I say 'Out!' out we git!"
While the Englishman arranged the blankets and buffalo hides of the fallen Apaches as bucklers about doña Perla, the hunter went to the back of the room where the scratching had changed to the scooping out of earth; a piece of stone had been substituted for the scalp knife.
Oliver, though time was so precious, waited patiently at the edge of the floor and walls. At last, the earth of the former moved as if a mole was making its tunnel, and then a brown hand emerged from the crumbling clods of packed mud. On that hand the hunter's knife descended and severed two fingers as it was instantly withdrawn. The savage had the immense self-control not to utter a sound of pain, in shame at having put his hand so incautiously into the trap.
"He will trouble no more," said Oliver, wiping the knife on the leg of Uncle Potato's breeches as the nearest rag. "At least not before we will git out of the way to receive him."
He went across the room, and, this time, removing the barricade, boldly applied his eye to the wicket.
"Now's the time," said he, instantly.
In fact a volley and the hustling of darts and arrows passed the very door, followed by a rush of softly shod feet as the Apaches at last charged the Mexicans.
"Out!" shouted Oliver, flinging the door open. "And you come, too, unless you like to be boiled in your own spirits."
For with one kick beating in a full cask, he fired the pouring alcohol with the nearest lamp, and pushed Gladsden and the daughter of don Benito out of the door. A vast sheet of flame rose in their rear, and while Camote leaped through it, a fearful explosion in that circumscribed apartment denoted that another cask had burst, and was contributing to the flames. The innkeeper's assistants were unable to pass the burning fluid, and their appeals for help made the pinioned warrior smile with fiendish glee.
He began his death song in a strong voice, though the blazing liquor, red, violet, and blue, gradually rolled towards him in his helpless state, with little or no smoke to muffle the rays.
Through half a dozen stragglers the three fugitives made their way, the hunter literally bearing them down before his rush, whilst the Englishman was as little impeded by half carrying the Mexican maiden on his left arm. However, the cluster of horses was reached, held in the usual manner by all the bridles being passed over one, which two youthful warriors, who had probably never fleshed the scalping knife, were chafing at being detained there to hold. Besides them a stalwart Indian, whose flattened features hinted at the admixture of African blood, was on guard. Luckily he had fired all but his last shot in the skirmishing, and he had only one arrow left in hand. With that he sprang forward to meet the flying trio, using it as a stabbing weapon.
Generously renouncing the use of his firearms, with that sometimes imprudent pride of the Caucasian who loves to win at fair play, the hunter flew at him with merely his own steel blade.
Whilst Gladsden smote the two striplings to the right and left, and was choosing two of the startled and frightened horses for the girl and himself, Oliver was engaged in a terrible, deadly, and pitiless combat with his sworn enemy. They had grappled one another with veritable hooks of steel, and sought mutually to overthrow and stab. Their eyes flashed fire, they wasted their breath in taunts and revelations of the many deeds of mischief and death which they had respectively wrought among their opposing people, till their bated breath came but feebly through their grinding teeth. But for their speech in broken accents, they were scarcely human--mere wild beasts bent on rending and tearing one another till "the heart was bare."
"Oh, you air Mr. Rough-on-the-Herdsman, you air?" hissed Oregon Oliver, tightening a hug which the grizzly would not have disdained to borrow. "Well, Mr. Death-to-the-Cowboys, how like you that? You've 'rubbed out' three solitary trappers, ha' you? How's that for a rub?--And that, and, still again, that!" And hurling the wretch to the earth under the curveting mustangs' unshod hoofs, he nearly beat the last breath out of his wretched and bleeding body. In a moment he rose, this time not ashamed to tear away the reeking scalp of the Indian who had in his boasts touched on a painful chord.
"I bet my life," muttered he, seizing a horse by the nostrils, and dragging his head down irresistibly, "that señor Murder-the-Vaqueros will wipe out no more lone trappers, durn his carcass--would he were roasting alongside his chief! Innyhow, he can't fall, scalpless, in among his brethren in the happy hunting grounds!"
All three were mounted now, a task which would have been far more difficult only for the horses which Mr. Gladsden had selected being by chance stolen from the Mexicans, and, hence, rather pleased than alarmed at instinctively recognising hands more familiar than their last masters'.
The two Apache boys were crawling away for refuge in the corral cactus; thence to recover from the blows, and hurl insults and stones.
In a glance, Oliver saw their only chance was to run the gauntlet between the burning house and those of the Apache's rearguard, who had already stopped, ceased to pepper the hidden bandits, and looked back towards the horses in such wild agitation.
"Hep-la!" cried Oliver to the herd, applying his heavy hand to the rump of the two or three that were within reach, "And away! 'Vantay! (advance) Git!"
The horses preceded the three, but the latter's mounts participated in the fever of escape, all the more as the heat, the smell, and the flames of the Green Ranch had struck their olfactory and visual organs with that terrifying influence of fire upon the equine race.
"Let 'em rip!" cried the hunter; "They'll not shoot in the midst, lest they hurt a hoss. They're outrageous fond of horses, these 'Pach!"
As the furious cavalcade trampled by the Ranch door, the Englishman fired a hurried shot within. Immediately, the chant of the Apache, which was audible above the crackling and hissing of the flames, ceased short.
"You are a good old hoss!" ejaculated Oliver, who divined the humanity which prompted the merciful bullet, though incapable of such foolish leniency, or, at least, inexcusable waste of ammunition himself. "He desarved all he was gitting; but, na'theless, it's better you had it off your conscience. He's a green gilly," he added, under his breath, eyeing his pupil approvingly; "but for sand--you bet thar's a heap of sand, thar. If it war writing paper from hyar to his sprouting ground, jest take him up by the heel and sprinkle him out over the hull spread, and there'd be enough to cover an old bull on the last squar' foot! He's made of grit, he is that!"
On the roof of the building they had perceived the blanched faces of the two bartenders. There they lay, after having been pursued up the gap in the ceiling by the fiery tongues, afraid to move, and so attract the Apache's view.
As for Camote, he had vanished into a nook no doubt planned for some such eventuality, deep enough to require digging out.
As soon as the fugitives were surely out of range, first of the Apaches and, then, of the bandits, sufficiently engaged by the latter to bestow no more than a couple of random shots on the adventurers, they began to pull rein hard. While actually looking back, there was nothing to see but the column of flame and blue smoke from the Green Ranch. But after having resumed their course, they heard a dull boom, like a cannon report, of which the muzzle was in a cave.
"The heavy mud roof has fallen in," remarked Oliver; "the chiefs scalp is safe, and the spreeing den of the Sonora bandoleros will never house them no more."
When the horses they rode were cured of their panic by kindly "horse-talk" of which the hunter was profuse, and when the rattle of the stampeded troop had died away utterly, the commonly dense stillness of the wilderness fell upon all around.
"Those niggers will go on yelling and pelting one another till their powder gives out," remarked Oliver. "There'll be scarcely half a dozen strokes to count, but, however, blood has been spilt, and so while they are scrimmaging we can canter on."
Thus reassured, doña Perla smiled again. In a few words she acquainted the hunter with such landmarks around her father's estate as to enable him to direct their course as straight as the mottes or "islands" of woodland in the prairie permitted. But if the Mexican lady and the Englishman argued well of the profound solitude, the Oregonian did not lay aside his watchfulness. Leading the van, three horse lengths, his rifle across the saddlebow, bent forward so that the animal's head shielded his bosom, and his eyes peered over the ears, he retained all that wariness demanded in Northern Mexico, where the axiom reigns: Homo homine lupus, not to be translated as it was done by an excellent trapper friend of the author's, a squawman who had wedded an Indian woman and so became an ally of the tribe:--"Don't feed loups (wolves) with hominy," but, "Man is a devouring wolf to his brother."
