Читать книгу The Treasure of Pearls - Gustave Aimard - Страница 7

The inhabitants of the wilderness, red or white, black or yellow, obliged often to "let go of all," as our sailor friend would word it, and "get" (as he would probably say if his foolhardy behaviour allowed him to live long enough in that region to acquire the cant language), and pretty suddenly too, to follow the chase or avoid an ambush, are necessitated to abandon their plunder and traps, using these words in their legitimate sense. As, at the same time, they have no inclination to renounce their property, they bank it, or, as the trappers say, cache it.

The model cache is thus constructed: the first thing is to spread blankets or buffalo robes around the chosen spot for the excavation, which is scooped out in any desirable shape with knives and flat stones; all the extracted ground, loam, sand, or whatever its nature, being carefully put on the spreads. When the pit is sufficiently capacious it is lined with buffalo hides to keep out damp, and the valuables are deposited within, even packed up in hide, if necessary. The earth is restored and trodden down, or rammed firmly with the rifle butts, water is sometimes sprinkled on the top to facilitate the settling, and upon the replaced sod to prevent it dying after the injury to its roots. All the earth left over is carried to a running water, or scattered to the four winds, so as to make the least evidences of the concealment vanish. The cache is generally so well hidden that only the eye of an uncommonly gifted man can discover it. Often, then, he only chances upon one that has been opened and emptied by the owners, who, after that, of course, were easy in their second operation. The contents of a well-constructed cache may keep half a dozen years without spoiling.

Benito Bustamente believed he had been led to die upon a cache.

To a man dropping of fatigue and famine such a find was of inestimable value. It might reasonably offer him the primary necessities of which he was denuded, and he would be revived, literally, on being furnished with the means to fight his way to civilisation, where otherwise he and Dolores, always hoping the young girl had not preceded him past the bourne, must perish.

For a few instants, propped up on both hands, in a wistful attitude, which I never saw in a pictorial representation of a human being, but which was recalled to me by the pose of the bloodhound in Landseer's picture of the trail of blood, in which floats a broken plume.

A moment of suspense!

He was swayed by indefinable sensations, fascinated, so as to be fearful of breaking the spell.

When, at length, he mastered his emotion, he did not forget the duty of an honest man constrained to invade the property of another, though that other might be his enemy!

Trapper law is explicit; wanton breaking into a cache is punishable by death.

So he shaped out a square of the sod with a sharp mussel shell which he spied glistening near him, and slowly removed that piece, anxiously quivering in the act. Other turf he removed in the same manner, more and more sure that it was a cache. This preliminary over, he paused to take breath, and to enjoy the luxury of discounting a pleasure which came as veritable life in the midst of death.

Then he resumed a task terrible for one exhausted by privations and loss of blood. Many times he was forced to stop, his energy giving out.

Slow went on the work; no indications of his being correct arose to corroborate his surmise. The shell broke, but then he used the two fragments, held in his hand with such tenacity that they seemed to be supplementary nails. Vain as was the toil, here lay, he still believed, the sole chance of safety; if heaven smiled on his efforts, his darling Dolores might yet be a happy woman. So he clung to this last chance offered by happy hazard with that energy of despair, the immense power of Archimedes, for which nothing is impossible.

The hole, of no contemptible size, yawned blankly before him. Nothing augured success, and, whatever the indomitable energy of the young man's character, he felt discouragement cast a new gloom over his soul. His eyelids, red with fever, licked up the tear that ventured to soothe them, and his lips cracked as he pressed them together.

"At least, here I dig a grave for don José, and my poor love," he said wildly. "It shall be deep enough to baffle the wolf!"

He renewed his tearing at the soil, when suddenly the shells snapped off, both pieces together, and his nails also scraping something of a different material to the earth, turned back at their jagged ends, but not at that supreme moment giving him the pain which at another time the same accident must have caused. Some hairs were mingled with the earth, and a scent different from that of the freshly bared ground intoxicated him with its musk.

Disdaining the shattered mussel shell, he used his hands as scoops, and presently unearthed a buffalo skin.

Instead of tugging at it with greedy relish to feast on the treasure it doubtlessly muffled, Benito drew back his hands and stared with worse tribulation than ever.

A cache—yes! A full one—who knew?

Long ago it might have been pillaged. With but one movement between him and the verification or annihilation of his hopes the Mexican hesitated. He was frightened.

His labour under difficulties had been so great, he had cherished so many dreams and nursed so many chimeras, that he instinctively dreaded the seeing them swiftly to flee, and leave him falling from his crumbling anticipations into the frightful reality that closed in upon him with inexorable jaws.

In the end, determined to do or die, for to that it had truly come, Benito's trembling hands buried themselves in the buffalo robe, clutched it irresistibly and hauled it up into his palpitating bosom. His haggard eyes swam with joyful gush of many tears, so that he could not see the sky to which he had raised them in gratitude.

Benito had fallen on a hunter's and trapper's store. Not only were there traps and springes of several sorts, weapons, powder horns, bullet bags, shot moulds, leaden bars, horse caparisons, hide for lassoes, but eatables in hermetically sealed tins of modern make, not then familiar to Mexicans, and liquor in bottles protected by homemade wicker and leather plaiting.

He was stretching out his hands ravenously to the bottles and a role of jerked beef, when it seemed to him that the voice of the Unseen prompted him with "God! Thank God!" and repeating the words in a voice unintelligible from stifling emotions, he fairly swooned across the pit as if to defend it with his poor, worn, hard-tried body.

His face was serene when he unclosed his eyes anew. Soberly, by a great control, he ate of some tinned meat and the crackers and swallowed as slowly some cognac. The latter filled him with fire, and he could have leaped into a treetop and crowed defiance to the vultures which were sailing overhead as if baulked of their prey.

In that momentary calmness, he felt so strong and so rejoiced in his self-command that his spirit seemed to spurn its casket. But instantly, with the blood careering anew, the wound in his shoulder smarted furiously, and all down that arm and up to his neck he felt a strange and novel sensation; it was as if molten lead was in the veins, scorching and making heavy the limb.

"The arrow! I am poisoned!" he muttered. "Oh, is this windfall come merely to embitter my death?"

That taste of liquor made his mouth water, and there was suggested to him by the sight of the brandy bottle that here was the remedy which the wisest frontiersman and medicine man would have prescribed. He put the cognac to his lips, and emptied the bottle.

Almost instantly he felt an aching in every pore away and beyond that of the wound; his brain appeared to swell to bursting its cell, and howling himself hoarse, he thought—though, in reality, his inarticulate cries were strangled in his throat—he rolled upon the ground, too weak to dance upon his feet, as he imagined he was doing.

This intoxication left him abruptly, and he fell insensible. But for his stertorous breathing, which finally became regular and gentle, he was as a corpse beside the greedy grave.

He woke up, lame in every bone, but clear-eyed, and the ringing in his head abated. Either the remedy had succeeded, or constitution, for he was able to set about his task with surprising vigour.

Thereupon, he chose out of the store a pair of revolvers, their cartridges in quantity, two powder horns and bullets to fit the finest rifle, a bowie knife and a cutlass, and a length of leather thong to make a lasso, and a spade for the grave of don José, filled a game bag with matches in metal boxes, sewing materials, and other odds and ends for the traveller. Tobacco, too, he took, and was looking for paper to make cigarettes, when a small book met his eyes.

It was stamped in gold, "London, Liverpool, and West State of Mexico Agnas Caparrosas Mining Company." It was an account book of the company —one of those enterprises to which, he had heard, his father had lent a favourable attention. A pencil was attached to the book; he wrote on a blank page the list of all the articles he took, signing:

"Require the payment of me.—I, BENITO VÁZQUEZ DE BUSTAMENTE."

As quickly as he could he replaced what he did not wish to be burdened with, made the concealment good, and swept the grass with two buffalo skins, which he had also taken for clothing. This duty of a thankful and honourable man being accomplished, he darted back to where he had left Dolores with a free and easy movement, of which he had not believed himself ever again to be capable only a short time before.