Читать книгу The Comancheros - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 12

A wizened old Negro in a long-tailed coat of rusty green opened the door and grinned.

“Howdy, Marse Tom,” he said with easy familiarity.

“Howdy, Esau,” returned Gatling. “The gen’ral’s expectin’ us.”

The servant ushered them into what passed for the office of the rude abode, and disappeared. Regret looked about him. In a stone hearth a fire crackled. The puncheon floors were muddy and filthy, a table covered with papers and writing materials stood in the center, and about the room in epic disarray were stools, chairs, and trunks, with a whiskey barrel, complete with spigot and dipper, in one corner. Beside the table, the steady, measured drip of a leak from the roof created a round splash of wetness.

A door opened, and Sam Houston entered.

Heavens, what a man! Regret’s impression, from the glimpse of him outside, that he was big did not do him justice. He was gigantic.

Six feet, six inches tall he might have stood, with a great arching chest and immense shoulders. He was, at this time, in his fifty-second year, and the shaggy hair was thinning on top of his skull, but from his hard cheeks sprouted a tangle of reddish sideburns—roan or brindle, rather, for they were shot liberally with gray—which gave him the maned appearance of a lion. To this the flat glare of his pin-pupiled eyes added a touch of malevolence. A vest of puma skin, an untidy stock of black silk shot with gold threads, a coat of dark blue velveteen, and black-and-white-checkered trousers thrust into the tops of immense boots were the important items in his costume.

Houston halted behind his table, glancing at his visitors from under his prodigious eyebrows.

“Howdy, Tom,” he said to Gatling, in a deep rumble.

“Howdy, Gen’ral,” the Ranger said. “I brung your rooster.”

They both glanced at Regret.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” said Houston, taking a chair at the littered table. “Your name is Paul Regret?”

“It is.”

His cold glance roved over Regret, as if he regarded him not as a man, but as an item. With a glint of almost cruel satisfaction, he nodded at Gatling.

“Good catch, Tom.”

“I demand to know the meaning of this outrage!” Regret exclaimed angrily. “Why am I seized like a common criminal in the moment I arrive in this—this bivouac capital—and haled before you——”

His outburst, which began with such spirit, died off. He perceived that he might better have said nothing at all, for this man was without bowels.

The room was barren, but Houston needed no surroundings. His face, with its lines of force and intelligence, his herculean figure, his majestic presence were enough to awe the boldest. Regret remembered stories of his heroisms, his greatness of mind, and also his surprising pettinesses and how he was capable of almost irresponsible violence when in one of his leonine furies. Sam Houston was such a creature of tumbling passions and sublime achievements as comes not once in a generation, but perhaps once in a people’s history.

“Yes?” the president said, as if inviting his prisoner to go on.

His worst enemies would hardly have said that cowardice was a weakness of Paul Regret: yet now the man who had faced the pistols of a dozen antagonists on the dueling field without a tremor felt a qualm—a chill to the bone—under Houston’s strange opalescent glare.

When he could not reply, His Excellency laughed with cruel cynicism. “How should you be treated except as a common criminal?” From the table he lifted a paper. “This letter, which arrived by fast express ahead of your coach, is from the New Orleans authorities who learned from the stage company of the destination for which you bought your ticket. It requests your arrest and extradition. I am honoring the request. You start back to New Orleans tomorrow—under guard.”

Regret was stunned. Judge Beaubien’s arm was longer, his action prompter, than seemed possible. The implacable visage of that terrible old man came before his eyes. In imagination he saw the gallows, almost felt the rope about his neck. Drops of cold sweat stood on his forehead.

“But I’m not—a criminal—Your Excellency,” he gasped.

For answer Houston read from the paper. “ ‘Paul Regret. Gambler and professional duelist. Twelve duels. Four deaths——’ ”

“Only three, monsieur!”

Houston glanced up with a little frown. “Four. Named here are Rust, Littleton, and Brisseul. Besides which this letter states that you mortally wounded Emile Beaubien.”

“Does it say he’s dead?” Regret asked desperately.

“No, it was written before he died.”

“Emile Beaubien did not die! He is living!”

Houston’s look grew indescribably keen. “Your reason for that statement?”

“He has a ball high in the shoulder. He will recover.”

“How are you so sure?”

“I don’t make mistakes in such matters, Your Excellency! When I kill a man, I kill him. And when I go to pains—as I did with that young fool—not to kill a man, he lives!”

His assurance seemed to amaze the man whom almost nothing could amaze. For a moment Houston was silent, rubbing his craggy chin with his huge paw. Regret grew bolder.

“Your Excellency has himself handled a dueling pistol?” he ventured.

“And if I have?”

“Will not be too hard on another poor gentleman who has defended his honor?”

For a moment Houston brooded. Then he shook his head. “You’re described here as a gamester and a common bravo. Texas has too many of such already.”

Regret’s heart sank. “Excellency,” he cried hoarsely, “that letter—it is signed by Judge Beaubien?”

Houston nodded.

“Do you chance to know him?”

“For fifteen years,” said His Excellency. “A remarkable man, a most recondite jurist, a very high-toned gentleman.”

In spite of this tribute to Judge Beaubien, Regret pursued his appeal. “If you’re acquainted with him, monsieur, then you must be aware that of all men he is the most implacable——”

“Perhaps so. But Houston was never of so forgiving a disposition himself.” He loved to fall into the third person, like Caesar, when speaking of himself, a habit he derived, it was said, from the Indians among whom he once lived.

“It makes no difference to you that I should be hanged out of mere malice?” said Regret.

Houston glanced at him sharply, his scowl returning.

“Malice,” Regret repeated, gaining the courage of desperation. “Because an old man’s family pride in a weakling son is affronted, you’d see me hanged on a charge trumped up out of a former duel, long forgotten?”

“Explain that!”

“If I’m returned to New Orleans, Your Excellency, it won’t be to face charges connected with Emile Beaubien—who will recover—for such charges would involve him also. It will be for one of the old duels I must answer. Is there justice in that?”

“Hum,” Houston said, and pulled a side whisker. “Perhaps there’s a certain merit in what you urge.” Surprisingly, he spoke now in a tone of consideration. “Perhaps there is,” he repeated.

He rose, and Regret rose with him. As the president strode twice or thrice back and forth, with the puncheons of the floor creaking under his weight, Regret grasped the edge of the table to steady himself—so dark had the shadow of Judge Beaubien and the gallows fallen across him.

“Beaubien ... Beaubien,” Houston rumbled, as if to himself. “A notable gentleman, certainly, but he does busy himself too much in Texas affairs. I recollect now, New Orleans money—nay, Beaubien money—had a lot to do with making that afflorescent ass, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, president of Texas.” His lip curled over the flamboyant name. “I took Lamar as a high private in the rear rank, and made him a colonel just before San Jacinto. Upon that he erected his career—devoted to the destruction of my principles! Where treachery and dishonesty are requisites, Lamar can hold his own with Judas. And to these he can add a quality the Iscariot lacked—stupidity!”

He spat into a huge brass spittoon. “Two years of Lamar bankrupted the nation which Houston left solvent, strong and hopeful. Lamar ineptitude brought a new strain to our relations with Mexico, while his policies left us less able to defend ourselves. Lamar treachery intensified the enmity of the Comanche Indians and their attacks on our frontiers——”

He stopped his tramping to and fro, and gazed at Gatling as if a new thought had just come into his mind. “Tom,” he said, “do you know that I’ve just had word that the red scourge has struck again?”

“Where, Gen’ral?” The Ranger now rose also, in excitement and horror.

“The upper Trinity. Luke Silvers rode a good horse to death bringing the news. Hot ashes where a dozen homes had been. Fourteen unburied, mutilated bodies. And not a single Comanche carcass to show for it!”

“What was the Rangers doin’?”

“God forgive me, Tom! I’d transferred Cameron’s company two weeks before from the Novasota to the Neches. The raiders came through the gap as if they knew it. Last month it was the Rio Frio, six hundred miles southwest. And again just a fortnight after I’d shifted a company. You think that’s a coincidence? By the Eternal, it was no coincidence!”

Gatling gulped. “What—was it?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? I’m only human, God help me. And this—sometimes I think it’s inhuman. There’s something—out there—back of everything”—Houston waved his hand in an odd, vague gesture toward the west—“more terrible, more mysterious, than any savage tribe—or combination of savage tribes——”

“I—I jest don’t follow you—Gen’ral——”

“Something as baffling, evil, and hellishly intelligent as—as the vampires who live on the blood of human victims—the best blood of Texas, may the Almighty have mercy on us!”

Houston’s eyes were on the floor, his face lined as if by agony, his shoulders for the moment bowed under such a weight of despair that Regret forgot his own fate in the sudden thrill of horror at an unknown dread.