Читать книгу Montana Rides Again - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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The strides of Brother Pascual were long and swift, but the day strode longer and swifter by far to its ending. Shadows as blue as water were flowing through the ravines, rising higher and higher, and the naked summits of the San Carlos range began to burn with rose and with golden flame against that Mexican sky; but the friar, taking a stronger hold on the staff which was his companion in the wilderness, gave little heed to the beauty around him. He had only one eye for it, after all; over the other he wore a big shield of black leather. A plaster patch made a big white cross on the opposite cheek and a bandage circled his head. To give his stride greater freedom he had pulled up his long grey robe so that a fold hung over the cord that girdled him and the edge of his garment kicked in and out around his knees. In the calf of each brown and hairy leg there was a mighty fist of muscle needed for the support of this towering bulk of a man, yet the only provision he carried with him on his journey was a pouch of dry corn meal. He was dark as an Indian, but his broad face was marked with the pain and the doubt of some high endeavour.

The sun bulged its cheeks in the west and blew radiant colour all across the sky; the heavens darkened to green and amber, then yellow-green and blue, with the green fading rapidly into night as Brother Pascual came to the narrow mouth of a gorge over which leaned pillars of lofty rock. A jack rabbit darted from behind a stone and fled, leaving the whisper of its speed in the air. And in the mouth of the ravine the friar paused and shouted:

“Oh-ho! Oh-ho! I am Brother Pascual! Hai! Do you hear! I am Brother Pascual!”

After a moment, while the echoes were still dimly flying, a voice almost at his elbow said:

“Well, brother, who’s hungry now? Whose bellyache are you to tell us about now?”

“Is it Luis?” asked the friar.

“Luis went spying once too often into the stockyards at Chihuahua. They killed him in the slaughterhouse. Maybe they made him into sausage. Damned stringy sausage he must have made, too!”

“What is your name? Ah, you are Carlos!”

“You’ve only seen me once; and it’s too dark for seeing now, unless you’re a cat. How do you remember people, Brother?”

“I remember them by their need of mercy,” said the friar. “Poor Luis! Is he gone? He had a need of mercy, also.”

“So has every man with Rubriz,” answered Carlos.

“So have I. So have all mortals,” declared Brother Pascual, humbly. “I am going on to the house.”

“There’s plenty of noise in the house,” said Carlos. “Yesterday we caught a mule train loaded with——”

“I don’t want to hear it,” broke in Pascual. “We are all sinners, Carlos. But good may come out of evil. Good may come out of evil. Saint Nicholas, be large in the eye of my mind!”

With that, he stalked on through the thick blackness of the ravine, which rapidly widened. Trees choked the way. With his long staff he fended his course through them until he came out on a level valley floor, with a stippling of lights nearby giving a vague outline of a house.

He heard singing and shouting and the beat of running feet while he was still in the distance, and, though he was one pledged to love good and hate evil, he could not help smiling a little. For Pascual was in many respects a true peon and therefore he had to forgive a true bandido like Mateo Rubriz. A thief steals from all alike; a bandido harries the rich only; and in Mexico there is a belief that grows out of the very soil that all rich men are evil.

When he came to the door of the house he beat on it three times with his staff. Then he threw the door open on the smoky light of the inner hall, and shouted:

“I, Brother Pascual, am coming! It is I, Brother Pascual!”

The thunder of his voice rumbled through the house, and then a door flung open to his right and let a rush of sound flow out about him.

“Bring in Pascual!” shouted the familiar, strident tones of Mateo Rubriz.

Half a dozen wild young fellows leaped through the doorway and seized on the burly friar and drew him into the room. It was the kitchen, dining-hall and reception-chamber of Mateo Rubriz. As a chorus of welcome rose to greet Brother Pascual, he snuffed up at the fragrance of roasting kid—most delicious of all meat in this world; and the savour of frijoles cooked with peppers, and the pungency of coffee, and the thin scent of beer and the sour of wine—all were in that air.

At the long table some of the men were still eating; others looked on with a careless interest as Mateo Rubriz, equipped with a small balance-scale, measured out lumps of shining white metal and small heaps of heavy yellow dust.

Brother Pascual refused to call it silver and gold because money is the root of all evil, and he loved these men in spite of himself. So he fastened his gaze only on the huge squat figure of Mateo Rubriz, who wore common cotton trousers, furled up to his knees, and cheap huaraches on his feet. The sleeves of his shirt were cut off near the armpit so as to leave unhampered that vast strength, which, men said, was unrivalled in all the San Carlos range, in all Mexico, perhaps, and therefore in the world!

So thought Pascual. And he rejoiced in the might of that fellow peon in his ragged, dirty clothes; he rejoiced in the red silk cap that Rubriz preferred to all the sombreros of cloth or of straw. And the heart of Pascual was touched with sympathy when he marked, diagonally across the flushed face of Mateo, the long white scar which the whiplash had left on the flesh. Men said that no single whip-stroke could have left such a broad and deep scar, but that Mateo Rubriz, in the passion of his shame and hate, had rubbed salt into his wound to freshen it and keep it burning on his face as rage burned in his heart. At any rate, there was the sign clearly visible whenever his face reddened—which was often.

“Come here, little old Pascual!” Rubriz was thundering. “What have you been doing to yourself? I’ve told you that if you keep taking your short cuts through the mountains, up the cliffs and down the Devil’s Slides, you’d have a fall one of these days. Well, if you’ve had a fall like that, thank God that your head was battered but not broken. Come here and dip your hands into that sack—all gold—and take out the fill of your big hands. You can weight down your pockets and spend it all on your poor. You can buy a new mule for your arriero, a new cow for your housewife, and a new gun for the hunter, a new trap for the trapper. You can give sheep to the shepherd and cattle to the poor charro. Dip in your hands as deep as the wrists and pull out what your fingers will hold. Come, Pascual! Hai, my children! We shall all be a thousand leagues nearer to heaven when Brother Pascual has prayed for us.”

Brother Pascual stood by the bandit and looked down at the buckskin sack which held such treasure. He was aware, too, of the gleam of white metal and of yellow up and down the table. He took a deep breath and looked up to the smoke-blackened rafters of the room.

“Father, forgive them!” he said from his heart. Then he added: “Not even for my poor, Mateo. Give me something to eat, as soon as I have washed. But stolen money poisons even the poor.”

Mateo caught him by the wrists and looked him up and down, half savage and half fond.

“Listen to me! Be silent, everyone. Mateo Rubriz is speaking. Do you hear? One day I shall give up this life and go into a desert with this good man. I shall scratch up roots with my bare hands and feed on them. I shall drink nothing but clear spring water—give me a cup of that wine, one of you!—and I shall spend the rest of my days praying and doing penance.”

He seized a great jewelled cup which was handed to him, brimming with sour red wine, and poured half the contents down his throat.

“When I do penance,” he roared, “it shall be the greatest penance that ever was done by a Mexican, and Mexicans are the only men.”

He made a gesture, and some of the wine slopped out of the cup and splashed from the floor on to the bare hairy calves of his legs.

“Do you hear me, Pascual? By God! I shall be such a saint, one day, that they’ll have to shift in their chairs and crowd their haloes closer together to make room for Mateo Rubriz. Give me some more wine, some one. I have not tasted a drink for a month of desert days. Pascual, go wash, if you please, and then come back and eat. San Juan of Capistrano! there is redder blood in me than this wine, and every drop of it sings when I see such a good man.”

Brother Pascual went to the well outside the room, in the little patio, and there, as he threw off his long robe and washed the sweat and the sand of the travel from his body, he could hear the voice of Rubriz, still, exclaiming:

“The rest of you—all swine at a trough. There is no other man in the world. There is only Brother Pascual!”

When Pascual came back into the room, he found a huge platter of kid hot from the turning of the spit and a mass of frijoles and thin, limber, damp tortillas. He used the tortillas as spoon and fork. A knife from his wallet was his carver.

As he ate, he sipped moderately from a big glass of the red wine. Pulque, as a matter of fact, would have been more to his truly Mexican taste. The division of the spoils had been completed and the treasure was cleared from the table, though still a bright yellow dust appeared here and there on the rough wood. The wages of ten labourers for a month were wasted out of the superfluity of these robbers. Mateo Rubriz himself was now eating again, walking up and down with his jewelled wine cup in one hand and in the other a fat joint from which he tore long shreds with those powerful teeth of his.

“Now is the time to speak, Lucio,” said Rubriz. “You have been sitting there with fire in your eyes, devouring José with glances. Tell me what was wrong.”

Lucio stood up. He lacked the rounded, blubbery face of a peon; his features were more the type of the aristocrat and his cheeks were so hollow that they pulled at the corners of his mouth and kept him with the semblance of a sneering smile. He said:

“José, stand up!”

“Ay, to you or to any man!” said a youth with very wide shoulders and very bowed legs. He was the true peon type. He swaggered out and stood well forward on the floor.

“When they came chasing after us,” said Lucio, “my horse went down under me. I ran as well as my legs would carry me. I heard hoof-beats. I looked back and saw that a friend was riding up. It was José. I held out my hand to let him help me up, but, by St. Christopher! he galloped right past me! He even tried to look the other way. And the Rurales and the soldiers were sure to get me, except that I found a crack among the rocks and ran and fell into it like a lizard. Mateo Rubriz, give me a judgment! Is that fellowship? A lame dog would be better treated by its fellows!”

A little murmur came out of the throats of the crowd. It was not loud, but it was high-pitched, and therefore the friar knew the strain of anger from which it proceeded.

“Now speak, José,” said Rubriz.

“This!” said José, loudly. “I saw Lucio running, of course. I wanted to help him. But I had a whole sack of the gold in the saddle bag. To throw away myself and my horse—that was nothing, though the Rurales were sure to catch us both if I tried to make the pinto carry double. But there was the gold. So I rode on. Speak up with a big voice, Lucio. Are you worth thirty pounds of gold?”

Lucio said nothing. He looked ready to leap at José, but he could not bring up words from his throat.

The whole room was hushed. Men leaned from their places, their eyes intent on the leader, who still walked calmly up and down. But now he paused and pointed the ragged joint of roast meat at José.

“Silver is a good thing and gold is better, but silver and gold and emeralds and diamonds are not worth one drop of blood. Blood is better than money. José, you have not been with me long. You have not learned. Otherwise, by San Juan of Capistrano! I would hang you from that rafter with my own hands! Ride by a dismounted comrade? Leave a friend behind for the Rurales? However, you have been with me only a short time. What I tell you now you will remember. No?”

“I will remember,” said José, suddenly abashed and staring at the floor.

“Are you satisfied, Lucio?” asked the master.

“No,” said Lucio.

“Take knives, then. Strip to the waist. Carve each other or kill each other. That is the law. But we’ll have no hatreds inside my band of charros.”

“Good!” said José, and began to tear off his jacket.

Lucio said nothing, but there was speech in the burning of his eyes and in his sneering lips.

That was when Brother Pascual stood up and went to Lucio.

“Lucio,” he said, “when your brother was sick in the mountains, I searched till I found him and carried him into the camp on my shoulders.”

“Therefore,” said Lucio, “ask me for my right hand and it is yours.”

“Give it to me, then,” said the gigantic friar. So he took the right hand of the astonished Lucio and half led and half dragged him across the floor to confront José. “Give your hand to me, José,” he commanded.

“My hand is my own,” said José, sullenly.

The huge grip of Pascual closed suddenly on the nape of José’s neck. He shook the young bandit violently. A knife flashed into the hand of José. It jerked back, but it was not driven home into the great, fearless breast of Brother Pascual. It was awe of the friar rather than the fierce yell that went up from the others that caused the knife to drop to the floor.

“Now give me your hand!” shouted Pascual, enraged, “or I’ll carry you out and throw you into the slime of the hog-wallow, where I’ve thrown bigger and stronger men than you!”

“Brother, forgive me!” said José, helplessly, and he gave his right hand. Pascual instantly clapped it into that of Lucio. He stood over the two men, who glared at one another.

“José is a fool, but he is a young fool and he can learn wisdom,” boomed Pascual. “Lucio, grip his hand. I, Brother Pascual, command you. José, tell him that you were wrong. A sulky man is worse than a sulky dog. But a confession washes the heart clean.”

There was a moment of pause, so tense that the breathing of the men in the room could be heard, and the ripping sounds as Mateo Rubriz tore at his joint of roast meat.

Then José said, suddenly, weakly:

“I was wrong. Lucio, I hated you because you got the black mare that I wanted. Will you forget?”

“Is it true?” said Lucio, stunned and gaping. “Do you confess this before them all? Then you are my brother!” And suddenly he had flung his arms around José.

“I am shamed—but I was wrong,” said José.

“Shamed?” cried Lucio. “I kill the man who smiles!”

But there was no smiling. Only Mateo Rubriz hurled towards the hearth the big bone which he had picked clean. It clanged loudly against an iron pot and spun into the ashes, knocking up a white cloud.

“By the blood of God!” cried Rubriz, “my men have turned into women. Well, let them go so long as I have you, Pascual. Have you only come here to make my poor fellows drop their knives on the floor?”

“I have come to speak seriously with you, Mateo,” answered the big friar.

“You hear that he wants to speak to me!” called Rubriz to the rest. “Then why do you wait? You have money in your wallets and food in your bellies. Go, drink yourselves to sleep and be damned. Away with you!”