Читать книгу Stampede - Stewart Edward White - Страница 7

Table of Contents

It had been decided, as most expedient, that Leslie should go by the regular stagecoaches to San Jose, then to San Juan Bautista. At the latter place he must buy a suitable horse through the offices of a man to whom he would be accredited; after which he would proceed in due course over the mountains to the valley of the Salinas, and so to the scene of his proposed investigations. For this purpose Braidwood supplied him with a small sum of money, which he carried next to his skin in a soft leather belt with pockets, but more liberally with letters of recommendation to various people, like the man at San Juan, with whom Braidwood’s wide business interests had relation. These letters, together with the commission with the red seal and maps and papers, Leslie carried wrapped in oiled silk in a pair of aggressively new saddlebags along with a change of clothing. This made rather a clumsy and heavy parcel. Braidwood tentatively suggested so and pointed out that a pack horse would make possible a less meager equipment, but desisted instantly he perceived that the boy saw this expedition as a kind of lone sortie, on his own resources, into a wilderness. That was part of the excitement and went with the little two-barreled derringer and the huge Colt’s revolving pistol that Leslie brought home from his first shopping. Braidwood looked on these more than doubtfully.

“Those things are just likely to make trouble for you,” he objected. “I’ve never carried a pistol, and I’ve never had difficulty, even when things were pretty rough; before we squelched the Hounds. If you’re known to be unarmed, they’re likely to leave you alone.” However, he did not press the point. He refrained carefully from issuing too much advice or warning. Leslie must cut his teeth on life in his own way. So he clambered aboard the stage with the two-barreled derringer up his sleeve, the way Danny Randall carried it, the Colt’s revolving pistol strapped about his waist, the overstuffed saddlebags at his feet.

The stage was a high, open affair with five seats, each capable of accommodating three. That occupied by the driver, of course, faced forward. The remaining four faced one the other, in pairs. This day there were, including Leslie, only a half-dozen passengers. One, on invitation, sat with the driver. This was a young man, tall and well knit, who climbed to his place with a swing of grace that attested great power in control. He wore a long linen duster, well buttoned, and a flat, low-crowned Spanish hat. The darkness of his complexion and hair and the handsome regularity of his features might, indeed, have indicated a Spanish origin, but his eyes were of the uncompromising steel gray found in none but the northern races. The expression of his countenance was grave and self-contained. His glance crossed Leslie’s briefly, without expression. Nevertheless Leslie felt somehow appraised and young, though he realized resentfully that this youth’s years were no more than his own. He flushed and climbed to his own place. For the moment he rather regretted having buckled on the Colt’s revolving pistol quite so prominently. But the next passenger was similarly armed, so he felt better.

This man was a rough-looking customer, long and angular, his lean, sallow face covered with stubble of a length that left one in doubt as to whether he was merely unshaven or was starting a beard. His eyes were heavy-lidded, but here again one must remain in doubt whether this expression was of insolence or a physical characteristic. He wore rough garments, a queer mixture of frontier and city, the trousers tucked in fancy-stitched boots, and with it a scattering of Spanish ornamentation—silver conchas studding belt and holster, a plaited horsehair band to his hat, soft leather cuffs to his shirt. Leslie could not make him out. He looked formidable. He settled himself in the seat opposite, spat copiously overside, looked the boy over from head to foot.

Two other travelers, in no way remarkable, took places in the seats back of Leslie. At the last moment, as the driver gathered his reins, a small rotund man appeared, climbed nimbly up the two iron steps, and plumped down opposite Leslie. He was slightly out of breath, but he smiled inclusively and uttered a greeting. At first glance he seemed a simple friendly soul, for his face was round, his clear china-blue eyes as round as his face, and set so wide apart that his whole expression was of radiating candor. He wore a folded linen coat.

Hardly had he seated himself when the hostlers at the leaders’ heads sprang aside; the driver released the brake with a thrust of his foot; the long-lashed whip cracked like a pistol.

The route led out of town by way of the Mission Dolores, over a plank road on which the horses’ hoofs clattered resoundingly. This was a new part of town to Leslie, and he hung out the side of the stage. Beyond the mission were two race tracks and a bull ring, and as this was a holiday, the plank road was acrowd with interest. The stage plowed through regardless, scattering the pedestrians and horsemen right and left, forcing the other wheeled vehicles perilously near the edge of the planking, beyond which was deep sand or mud and almost the certainty of an overturn. Nevertheless, no one seemed to take this in bad part. They scrambled hastily out of the way, but once in safety they waved their hats at the stage and grinned and shouted after it. The driver, the numerous reins held delicately high, the whip slanted across, looked straight ahead, paying them no attention. It was as if, to him, the road was empty. The stage rolled grandly in the hollow reverberations from the planks, and unconsciously Leslie partook of its immense superiority, and himself became a superior being looking down from the immunities of privilege.

Then suddenly the ear-filling roar of the wheels ceased, so abruptly that it was like the casting aside of a garment. The stage moved more quietly, less swiftly, over the soft earth of the county road. And to it solitude had come as swiftly as quiet, for the rabble of miners, hoodlums, Chinese and Mexicans afoot, the stream of buggies, carts, coaches, and the elegant calèches of the beautiful ladies had turned off at right angles to the race tracks and the bull ring. The occasion was off parade. The horses moderated their pace to a purposeful swift trot. The driver flipped deftly the long trailing lash of his whip into a loop about its stock and thrust it in its socket. He turned to talk to his neighbor. The passengers sat back relaxed. The landscape, which had been thrust aside for smaller pomposities, moved in close to take its rightful preponderance, so that the misty Visitación hills and the sleepily glinting wide waters of the Bay and the blue distances of the Contra Costa shores reasserted their quietude, across which the tiny stagecoach crawled in a proper insignificance.

This was all new and strange to Leslie, immensely exciting. There was nothing like any of it in his former Pennsylvania home. Except perhaps the meadowlarks that perched atop things and sang golden liquid notes. They looked the same, but the things they sang were different. Leslie’s eyes roved avidly the wayside, eager for each fresh surprise. And the surprises were many—a movement of plumed quail over the gracious shoulder of a hill, hundreds of them, thousands of them, so that it was as though the whole ground shifted; an immense rabbit with ears that seemed to Leslie as long as a mule’s; wild fowl rising suddenly from a little near-by pond which their close-packed bodies had obscured so that Leslie had not suspected any pond at all, and the whistling of their wings like the keening of a heavy wind; an iridescent red-and-gold jewel of a hummingbird that came straight at the stage like a bullet and poised on misty wings for several seconds not two feet from Leslie’s face and was gone. The road wound in and out the flanks of the hills, each bend a disclosure and a surprise, and each rise to a crest an anticipation. And in the sky great birds circling stately, which Leslie thought might be eagles, but was not sure.

So vibrantly absorbed was he by these and many other things that he was aware of little else until a chance phrase caught him from the conversation of the two men opposite him.

“No right to the land!” the rough-looking customer was saying incredulously. “Haven’t we taken the country?”

“That fact hardly gives title over those who already owned it,” suggested the other, but lazily, without conviction.

“Own it, hell! Who are they? A passel of greasers too lazy to make any use of it. What right has ary one man to own fifty thousand acres? I ask you that.”

“Don’t ask me.” The smaller man waved a hand in disclaimer.

“Well, I’ll tell you!” returned the other. “They got it by cheating and false swearing and just plain bribing. Micheltorena issued land grants after he was kicked out from being governor. Pico sold ’em fast as he could as soon as he seen the country was going to be American. Way I look at it that all these old grants just plain lapsed when the country was took over. You mean to tell me different?” He thrust his face forward truculently. The little man seemed unalarmed.

“Not at all,” he said amusedly. “But I still am inclined to speculate on what the law is going to say finally to these squatters—for that is exactly what they are. And how they expect to get title.”

“Law! title!” The other spat contemptuously overside. “The boys across the Bay’s got the right idea. They’ve took up their hundred and sixty acres apiece, like they got a right to anywhere——”

“On public land, not private land,” murmured the small man.

The other paused to glare but made no direct answer.

“And they’re raising crops. Danged good crops, too! I tell you, there’s a heap of land in Californy, and there’s a passel of folks coming across the plains looking for it. And when anyone asks them where’s their title, they got a cannon, and they point to that and tell ’em there’s their title, and it’s good enough.”

“Let’s see, what’s the name of the man the land belongs to—is supposed to belong to?” the small man corrected himself.

“Oh, an old greaser named Peralta. He claimed to own the whole shore and way back into the hills. We showed him better.”

“We? You claim land there?”

“I sort of got the boys settled.”

“Peralta; that’s it. I remember. Put him in jail, didn’t you, and fined him—for attempting to put off trespassers—what he called trespassers, that is? Isn’t that pretty rough?”

“I’d like to know why. He’s got to be l’arned. Don’t waste no tears on that old son of a bitch. He’d steal you blind. He’s a greaser, I tell you, and I never seen one yet that wasn’t a dirty liar and a thief.”

The young man on the front seat turned his head, gravely surveyed the speaker for a moment, and turned back again.

The stage rounded the last of Visitación’s shoulders and came out upon a wide plain between the Santa Cruz mountains and the Bay. Here were spaced live oaks and ripening grasses that bent in the breeze, and bands of cattle here and there, and watercourses with sycamores voiced with the soft mourning of doves. The coolness of the upper end of the peninsula gave way to the power of the sun, so that the dust of the road awakened from its damp sleep and enveloped the vehicle in a cloud. The stage driver and the other passengers produced wide bandannas of cotton or silk, which they tied loosely across the lower parts of their faces. The small man buttoned his long linen coat to his chin. Leslie, inexperienced in this sort of travel, had provided no such protection. The dust was powder fine. The slightest wind current lifted it. A ground squirrel, scampering across, raised a cloud of it that hung in the air and resettled slowly and reluctantly.

“I suppose,” the bigger man continued the conversation in muffled tones, “that you figger good American citizens are agoing to pack up and git off’n their own property just because a lot of lawyers tell ’em to!”

“I wouldn’t dare guess.”

“Wouldn’t you fight ef’n somebody tried to put you off yore farm that you’d t’iled and sweat over to make yourself a home in the wilderness?” insisted the other oratorically.

“Probably! Probably!” conceded the small man. “And,” he added, “I’d probably do a little fighting if a gang of cutthroats came and sat down on land I’d always owned and declined to get off.”

“Hell!” said the other man contemptuously. “That kind ain’t got no fight in ’em!”

The small man burst out laughing.

“That’s the spirit!” he cried. He fumbled beneath the folds of his duster and produced a silver-mounted flask. “Wet your whistle,” he invited. “This is the driest dust I ever saw. Drink hearty!” he urged. “Here’s hoping you find what you want.”

The other accepted the flask readily enough but eyed its donor suspiciously.

“Now what do you mean by that?”

“Why, you’re looking for land yourself, aren’t you?” The other continued to eye him in silence. “No offense. It’s nothing to me.” He retrieved the flask and offered it to Leslie, who touched it to his lips. “If you find anything real good you might let me know. I might turn farmer myself. How much could you use, stranger? How many in your gang?” He turned his wide blue eyes on the other, a certain insolence beneath their blank, candid surfaces. Leslie looked from one to the other, perplexed.

Shortly the stage drew up at a tiny shack carrying a huge sign—Ten Mile House—and behind it a series of corrals with horses. Here the team was to be changed. The passengers descended to walk about, climbing a little stiffly down the series of small iron steps. The young man in the front seat with the driver, however, vaulted over the high front wheel to the ground as lightly as a cat. He turned at once to address Leslie’s neighbor who had so freely aired his views. His head was back; his gray eyes were cold and level; the curves of the lower part of his handsome face had hardened.

“I have overheard what you have been saying,” he said clearly and loudly. “I wish to state that Don Luis Peralta is an honorable man and a gentleman who has been most foully treated by a parcel of blackguards and cutthroats, and anyone who says different lies.”

The man stared, struck motionless and speechless for a moment by sheer astonishment. The bystanders took advantage of this pause to move with considerable celerity to right and left. Leslie looked from one to the other of the principals, himself a trifle bewildered. Then slowly the man’s chest heaved in a deep breath. His lips drew back.

“Are you calling me a liar?” he asked softly at length.

“You’ve called yourself that a dozen times,” said the young man. His hands hung loosely at his sides; his eyes held the other steadily. Leslie was suddenly invaded by a panic of haste. He alone, beside these two, seemed alive. The others were like a group of wax figures, so still and impartially attentive were they. Good God, did none of them intend to interfere? Could not they see the man’s hand stealing backward to his holster? Were they going to stand aside while murder was committed, murder of an unarmed man? Belatedly Leslie remembered the Colt’s revolving pistol at his own belt, for the man’s hand was already on the butt of his own weapon. He snatched for it and tugged at it, but it stuck in the new stiff leather; and at any rate, his swifter thoughts realized, it would be too late.

“By God!” cried someone.

The half-drawn pistol had clattered to the ground. Its owner was holding his right wrist with his left hand and staring incredulously at a knife transfixing his forearm.

Leslie managed at length to wrench his own weapon free. He rushed forward and thrust it into the young man’s hand. The latter nodded without looking at him.

“Thanks,” said he briefly. “There’s no need.”

Nevertheless he accepted the weapon.

As though his movement had released the occasion, the bystanders now crowded about.

“By God!” cried one. “That was the slickest thing I ever saw!”

“Your hand, sir! I’m free to confess I never saw faster work!”

“He deserved what he got!” cried a third effusively.

“Like a snake, by gad! Like a snake striking!”

The young man, however, shook them off impatiently. He addressed the stage driver, who still stood apart, chewing a nonchalant quid.

“Better take a look at him, Jim,” said he, “and get me back my knife.”

The driver nodded and stepped forward to comply.

“I’m a doctor,” spoke up the small rotund man. He took charge of the cursing victim.

“Let go your arm,” he commanded. “How can I do anything?” He drew out the knife with a sudden deft motion and applied his thumbs to the lips of the wound. “Water,” he commanded the stage driver, “and bring me my bag.”

Most of the bystanders, including Leslie, crowded close to watch his operations. Some talked apart. No one, for the moment, approached the young man who stood leaning idly against the front wheel of the stage. The hostlers resumed the changing of the team.

The doctor worked busily and skillfully, talking the while, partly to himself, partly to his patient, partly to his assistant.

“Clean incision—skipped the artery. Hold still. Of course it hurts; it may hurt more. You’re lucky, no artery punctured, no tendons cut; good as ever soon.... Fresh water.... Anybody got a larger handkerchief? ... If that starts to bleed through let me know.... Pour the rest of that over my hands.” He straightened his back. He seemed abruptly to have forgotten the existence of the man he had been treating, to be unaware of the crowding spectators, so that miraculously he and the stage driver seemed to be alone together. “That was like lightning, Jim,” he observed, drying his hands reflectively on a bandanna. “Like a rattlesnake. I suppose it was no lucky accident? The only man I ever heard of who was said to be able to handle a knife like that was a man named Burnett, an old-timer. They told some steep yarns of what he could do.”

“Yon lad’s name is Djo Burnett,” said the stage driver.

The doctor looked across at the young man.

“So!” He picked up the knife and wiped it on the bandanna, which he threw away. He also possessed himself of the desperado’s pistol from the dust where it had fallen. Briskly he stepped across to the youth.

“Here’s your snickersnee,” said he, “and you’d better take charge of this thing for a while.”

“How is he?” The young man nodded his thanks. He thrust the knife into a sheath beneath the linen duster and handed the revolver to Jim.

“Clean incision. No major blood vessels cut, nor tendons. He’ll be all right in a fortnight.”

“That’s good,” said Djo Burnett.

“Could you do that again?” asked the doctor curiously.

“Why, he wasn’t three yards away!” Djo appeared faintly astonished.

“Yes, I reckon you could,” concluded the doctor with satisfaction. “But I don’t see yet how you did it! I didn’t see you move. How the devil could you get at the thing so fast?”

“The knife? Oh, I had that in my hand. I’d be a fool to talk trouble without being ready for trouble.” He looked about at the ring of interested observers, obviously embarrassed at so much publicity. But the little doctor was like a terrier on a root. His was the scientific mind: he wanted always to get at the bottom of things.

“Why didn’t you kill him?” he persisted. “You could have.”

“Too much trouble.” Djo was recovering his self-possession and about to take control. He turned to the stage driver. “About ready, Jim?”

“Oh yes, I see; to be sure.” The doctor glanced at the late victim, his arm in a sling, glowering in the background.

“Git aboard,” summoned the driver. “We better be gitting on. Here, you,” he called to the wounded man, “you git up here with me. No, I mean it. We ain’t going to have any more trouble while I’m in charge. Climb up where I can keep an eye on you.”

The man grunted contemptuously, but he obeyed.

“You’ll hear from me again,” he promised Djo; and to Leslie, “As for you, greenhorn, you better l’arn to keep out of what ain’t your business.”

“Come on! Climb!” said Jim, unimpressed.