Читать книгу The Gentle Desperado - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

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Around the corner Robert caught sight of fat Pedrillo Oñate fleeing at full speed, but a shout stopped the Mexican, who turned and threw up his hands as though he expected a bullet the next moment.

Other people were hurrying from their houses, and some of them had caught up a shotgun or rifle as they came. There was no doubt that this little town could prove itself a hornets’ nest if it were roused! But the citizens paid no attention to Robert; they looked toward the saloon, from which the shot had been heard and in which the voices now were raging. And Robert felt it was safe enough for him to canter Pinto up to the Mexican.

“Ah, señor, señor!” cried Pedrillo, close to tears. “Did I not tell you that they would drive you out with bullets and with curses? God forgive me for the danger in which you have—”

He paused. Robert was extending to him a hand crammed with paper money.

“They gave me the two hundred dollars which they stole from you,” said Robert. “And, after all, it seemed that they were not very violent men.”

“San Miguel protect us!” breathed Pedrillo, his black eyes making perfect circles. “One of them is Charlie Bent! Violent men, señor! They will destroy us both! They gave you the money?”

Dust had gathered on Robert’s glasses. He took them off and wiped them clean, at the same time regarding the Mexican earnestly.

“The fact is,” said he, “that they seemed very unwilling to use their guns. After I had shot off the hat of this Charlie Bent, they became extremely reasonable. I think, Pedrillo, you will find that they are men of good hearts after all!”

“Shot off the hat of Charlie Bent!” said Pedrillo, turning pale. “Ah, señor!”

He took the money which was offered to him, and stuffed it into his pocket.

“You have a horse fleeter than the wind, little father,” said he. “But what will become of poor Pedrillo? They will shoot me by little bits! Ah, señor, think of me, guard me, protect me! What use is the bone you give a dog if the dog is to be kicked to death for taking it?”

“Come with me, then,” said Robert. “I’ll protect you if I may. But I don’t think there will be any need of protection. You see, they haven’t come after me as yet.”

“I know them as a man knows fire,” said Pedrillo in a voice which quivered with emotion. “Take me with you, kind señor, my master—”

Tears streamed down the brown cheeks of Pedrillo, and Robert was overwhelmed. Pedrillo, with a speed and endurance amazing in a man of his fat, ran from the town; and Robert rode behind him as a sort of rear guard, taking care that they were not followed by danger. There seemed not the slightest chance of this, however, until they topped a rise of ground, heaped up about some stone that broke through the flat face of the desert. Then, glancing back, they saw a cloud of dust sweeping toward them from the village.

“There are seven men!” cried the fat fugitive. “Mother of mercy, fly with me, señor!”

“Perhaps there are seven men,” said Robert, his heart beating fast while his eyes strained through the cloud of dust, “but it appears to me that we should not fly, Pedrillo.”

“Should not? That we should not? Those men speak with nothing but bullets and they listen to nothing but guns! But if you will ride down that draw, I can show you a way to cover your trail—”

“It begins to appear to me,” replied Robert, “that this is a matter which you don’t understand. However, if you are afraid because of your wretched life, Pedrillo, take to your heels and run for the draw. I forgive you for the desertion!”

Pedrillo, in fact, ran a little distance, but he turned back again almost at once to the spot where Robert sat his horse, dauntlessly facing the rolling dust cloud that sped across the desert with seven shadows in its midst.

And Pedrillo shouted: “How can I leave you? Señor, little father, are you mad? There are seven!”

“There are seven shots in my gun,” said Robert Fernald. “I never should fly except as a matter of strategy. Wild Bill would never—”

The suspicion that there was a little streak of unsoundness in the mind of his patron had no sooner entered the brain of Pedrillo Oñate than he felt that this was the solution of the entire mystery. It explained why the little man had given him fifty dollars, and then had entered a saloon and held up three fighting men at the point of a gun in order to take back the money which Pedrillo’s crooked play had won and lost for him most deservedly.

For two reasons Pedrillo hesitated to fly. In the first place, he had conceived a real affection for Robert; in the second, and controlling place, he was by no means sure that he could get away from the townsmen if he trusted merely to his speed of foot.

He decided to play a last card. He fell upon his knees in the dust and caught hold of Robert’s stirrup.

“Little father!” cried Pedrillo. “It is well for you to stand and fight against odds. If I were a lone man, a man free from responsibility, I should do the same thing gladly. But I have the burden of a mother and a father who could not keep body and soul together if it were not for me. Fly with me, for three people die in my one wretched body!”

When Robert heard this, he looked down to the shaken form of Pedrillo which stirred in all its fat folds, and then across the plain to the approaching danger. With all his heart he wished to be perfect in his duty; but Pedrillo’s argument seemed a weighty one. He turned his horse with a sigh, and presently was riding toward the draw, with Pedrillo holding to one stirrup leather to give wings to his feet.

It was easy to see why Pedrillo had taken the way to this course of a vanished river. The rocky bed would leave little or no trace of the hoof marks, and the sinuous draw was joined at intervals by shallow little steep-walled ravines. Into one of these blind canyons Pedrillo led the way and behind a rocky shoulder Robert dismounted and waited.

Almost at once, they heard the rattling of hoofs down the draw. The hoofs came near, and the noise of the pursuers went past them so close that they could hear a horse stumble in the loose rocks and the loud cursing of a startled rider recovering his seat.

The danger flowed past them, and the noise died away toward the north. At once Pedrillo was all gaiety and mockery.

“Let them sweat on that trail!” said he. “I am fat and I have only one arm, but it is easier to follow the way of a snake in its hole than the way of Pedrillo Oñate across the desert!” Now they left the draw and hurried across the desert to the west. Robert, unwilling that the fat man should wear himself out on foot, offered him his place in the saddle, and Pedrillo, panting, accepted. No sooner was he seated than Pinto pitched him on his head.

Robert lifted the beggar and was happy to find that he was not hurt. He would have had the fat man take the saddle again while he held the bridle and led Pinto, but Pedrillo resolutely refused.

“Better a sprained back than a broken neck!” said he. “A black cloud still floats before my eyes, señor; but it is a wise horse that knows his own master. Moreover, a fool, señor, knows more in his own house than a wise man in the saddle of a stranger.”

So he plodded across the desert, promising that before the dark they would reach a good water hole where there would be, moreover, excellent grass for the horse. In the meantime, they scanned the northern horizon but saw no sign of pursuers returning. In good time, as the hot sun rolled down to the rim of the desert, they reached the promised water hole. It was a little oasis of trees, a small area of grass, and a spring which came welling above the sands and running a little distance before it was drunk up by the desert from which it had issued.

“Such are the virtues of bad men,” said Pedrillo, turning up his eyes. “They themselves devour their own goodness. Let us camp here. If there is food in your pack, señor, I, Pedrillo, will cook it as food never was cooked before! Ha, look! If there were only a rifle to gather in the rabbit which God gives us for our supper!”

A huge jack rabbit which had been crouching in the roots of a tree near the spring, unable to stand the pressure of fear any longer, had leaped up and fled, dissolved into a gray streak by his speed.

“Rifles are surer, but pistols are quicker, Pedrillo,” said Robert, and fired.

A spray of dust stung the belly of the rabbit, which turned with a frightened squeak as though dodging the teeth of a hound. As it turned, the second bullet struck it and it rolled on the sand.

Pedrillo, momentarily turned to stone, regarded Robert with great, round eyes. Then, without a word, he struck his heel into the sand beside Robert and paced the distance to the rabbit. Here he paused, crossed himself once or twice, and returned thoughtfully.

Pedrillo’s meditations kept his voluble tongue silent during all the while he was arranging his fire and preparing the rabbit for cookery, which he did by splitting portions of rabbit meat on long splinters, with bits of smoked bacon interspersed. When he began to turn the spits above the fire, however, and delicious fragrance of roasting meat stole beneath the trees, Pedrillo lifted his earnest eyes to his little father.

“Now it is all revealed to me,” said he. “I thought that Señor Bent was a fool to let two hundred dollars go out of his hands, but I see that he was a wise man. I shall respect him more so long as he lives—may the devil take him quickly! Had the rabbit been a man, little father, at thirty paces—”

He stopped, his teeth chattering in his head. And the subject was closed. Still, a change had been wrought in the Mexican’s attitude to his companion, and now and again Robert found the dark, keen eyes of Oñate turned upon him as if searching for the solution of a mystery.

The promise of Pedrillo was made good, for never was tougher rabbit made tender; never was such coffee brewed, even in the tent of an Arab. Its perfume delighted no less than its taste, and its power kept joy in the heart long after the few dishes were cleansed and the two reclined in the cool of the evening. They heard the stirring of the wind through the trees; above the far stars shone.

Pedrillo smoked cigarettes of strong Mexican tobacco. Robert lay still and lost himself in a dream. That day he had come to the very brink of a battle to the death and that battle had been undertaken, he felt, in a just cause. Another day, still greater and more perfect, good fortune would come to him.