Читать книгу On the Trail of Four - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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I described a circle about twenty miles in diameter, that day, and I came upon not a sign of a human being! I did not even reach a well-worn trail. In the evening with Spike tired beneath me and with myself very tired from the ride and from the sleepless night, I turned back toward the place where I had left José.

I half expected that the other pair would be hidden there, waiting for me. I half hoped that José would be dead from despair, because I had not told him that I was coming back. I had left him my canteen of water and gone off without a word. A good many high-strung people, helpless and deserted in this fashion, would have blown their brains out—and he had a gun, loaded and ready at his hand. That was another provision which I had made without any misgivings or shame.

By this you can imagine the black frame of my mind when I left him in the morning. But when I came back, there was José, his body still stretched upon the bed of branches. He was smoking a cigarette, and his greeting was characteristic.

“You are late, sir.”

“Curse your eyes,” said I. “What made you think that I should come back at all?”

“What? Well, one must guess.”

“You are a gambler, José,” said I. “This time you won. Perhaps tomorrow will be a new day, though.”

“Perhaps,” said this brazen murderer.

I let him go hungry and thirsty—I saw that the canteen was empty—I even watched him eloquently trying to drain the last drops from it. In the meantime, he had watched my eyes with a look askance. But I refused to understand. I told myself that I should wait until he begged before I gave him any help—if then!

In the meantime, I got out the little trenching shovel which I always carried in my pack. For there is hardly anything—except an ax—so convenient as a shovel when one has to camp out in the mountains in all manner of weather. With that shovel, but even more with my hands, rolling out big rocks, I made a sufficiently deep grave and into it I lowered the body of Miguel. There was the pale shining of a new moon to help me at this grisly work.

When I had finished that necessary task, my head ached and I was thoroughly exhausted. For some of the rocks I had tugged at had been whoppers, and I had put into the labor some of the spite which I felt toward José.

In the meantime, the two who were my quarry were streaking their trail far away from me! Well, it was a desperately trying situation.

I went back and cooked a supper. I had shot a brace of rabbits on my ride, and I roasted them, but when I carried the food to José he took it with a smile and began to maul it in a vague, uninterested way. I noticed closely and saw that he did not swallow a morsel.

“What the devil!” said I. “Have you had a full meal of sunshine?”

“Today,” said my murderer, “José has a religious feeling, and therefore he fasts!”

I cursed him again, with much satisfaction. But on afterthought I remembered the water, and I brought him the filled canteen. The poor rascal drained it to the last drop, hardly lowering it from his lips while he did so.

“It is good,” he whispered, and lay with closed eyes In the firelight, still grasping the emptied can.

After that he ate. Literally his throat had been closed with thirst. He ate, and he ate like a wolf. Then I examined the side. It was much swollen and fiery hot to the touch. So I bathed it for a long time with cold water.

How much torture he had endured from it during the day and while he ate I cannot say, but I know that as the water began to soothe it and take the inflammation away, he groaned loudly with the great relief.

While I was still bathing it, he slept.

As for me, I was too weary to more than half eat my food, and then, regardless of the perils which might lie in the night for me, I stretched out—heedless of the cold, too, and I slept like a dead man until the direct rays of the sun awakened me. Then I looked about me and considered my work which lay ahead.

It was definite in my mind, now. I could not abandon this injured fellow—even if he were a murderer. He was a human being, and that was all that counted. Strange how much more vital the life in itself becomes when one is in the mountains. One grows to love even the eagle in the air.

That day I made more ample provision for the comfort of José. I made him a fresh bed in a new place—beneath a thicket of small trees about a hundred yards from my first camp—a trebly better place, because a little musical rivulet flowed out from the spring here. Next, I carried José to the new spot and bedded him down even more thickly than before. There I left him, with plenty of water, and with tobacco, and plenty of cold roast rabbit if he grew hungry in the middle of the day.

I left him looking contentedly up through the branches of the tree at the sky above him, and I started off upon another round to see what I might discover. I struck off due east, traveled a full thirty miles, straight away. But to my consternation, when I came to the end of that distance, I had not found a single sign of a house. Somewhere much nearer than this there must, of course, be the habitation of some men. But I was strange in those mountains, and as I turned Spike back, at noon, I decided that I must give up the attempt.

For, in the meantime, there was no reason for hurrying on. With a two-day start, mounted as they were and now with spare horses to ride from time to time, the companions of José were sure to be vastly beyond my reach. I would need a race of another thousand miles at least to make up for such a handicap.

But it was a bitter sacrifice to make. I reached the camp and found, long before I got to it, a light but husky tenor voice wailing a song before me. It was José, stretched under his tree and whiling away the time with the most perfect good cheer.

He smiled upon me and nodded silently as I appeared.

I, hot from the journey under the sun and hotter still at his sangfroid, could not help breaking out: “Do you know where you are to be taken as soon as your ribs are healed enough to endure traveling?”

“Ah?” said José.

“To the nearest town, where I’ll turn you over as the murderer of Truck Janvers.”

He considered this for a moment, with the smile still upon his lips.

“You will stay, then, to keep me company in the jail, sir?”

“I’ll leave you tied hand and foot in the street at night and with a description of what you’ve done tied on your neck.”

“Ah, sir, will they hang me, then, because of the word of a man who dares not stand before me in the courtroom?”

“Well,” said I in a new rage, “I warn you, José, that even if I heal you and turn you loose this time, I’ll find a way to get at you later on. I’ll find you and the other two, and I’ll tie you back to back and burn you over a slow fire—as cowardly assassins like you deserve to die.”

“My mother,” said he, “once saw a witch burned.”

I merely glared at him.

“What do you think that she did when the flames were round her?”

“How should I know, and why should I care?”

He waved my discourtesy aside. “She sang a song—a long song, from the beginning to the end. Then she leaned and breathed deeply of the flames, and she died. Well, sir, it must have been an excellent thing to see. Do you not think so?”

I left him without a word and strode off into the darkness, where I sat down and thanked heaven that I was alone.

Not quite alone. The thought of that black demon pursued me. Yet I did not altogether hate him. He was a camping companion through two days and two nights. Companionship would give certain virtues to Satan himself, I suppose. At least, it does in the mountains.

There is not the slightest use in dwelling over the long and weary days when I remained impatiently with José in the mountains. When he grew better, and reached the time when he could sit up, I had to watch him like a hawk all the time. For I had given him a gun, and I felt that I should be ashamed to take it back from him—as though I could possibly fear a little man whom I had crushed with one stroke of my hand!

A time came when I wished that I had crushed him utterly the first time I encountered him; or else, that I had ridden off on the first morning and left him behind me to die like a fish out of water, or from thirst and the pain of his wound.

I had taken Spike with me every day until, on the sixteenth day of my wait, I took a short hunting trip in the early morning to get a bit of fresh meat for breakfast. I was not gone half an hour before I came back with squirrels. I found that the fire was out and José was not in sight. I called for him, and there was no answer.

Then I yelled for Spike.

And out of the far distance I heard a faintly echoing bray. The infernal scoundrel had stolen the mule and made his getaway!