by Max Brand
But what I saw was only the meager silhouette of one man leaving the house of Caporno.
One man, but by his springing, active step I knew him. It was Lewis Vidett. I went after him at once. No, not exactly after him. My experience has taught me that a fellow has better chances of remaining undetected if he pursues a little to the side. For a suspicious man will nearly always, when he hears a sound, whirl about and look first straight behind him. And Lewis Vidett was indeed a most suspicious man.
Every one of his nerves—on this occasion at the least—seemed to be mounted upon a hair-trigger. A dozen times he paused abruptly. And a dozen times I melted into the ground behind some shrub or tree trunk. A dozen times he went on again.
He went straight on, at length, into the woods, and there I was forced to work at full speed, cursing the boots that were on my feet, and cursing even the breath that I had to draw. The flutter of a very shadow was all that was needed to warn the cat who stalked ahead of me.
However, I managed to keep softly behind him. And as I was beginning to perspire and despair, I had my reward. Vidett, stepping from behind a big tree into a little moon-dimmed clearing among the trees, suddenly tilted up his head and whistled three times, softly.
For answer, a round score of men started out from the trees. Twenty men! And each man with weapons belted around his hips, and each man with a mask thrown over his face. I had never seen it before. It thickened my blood, I can tell you, to see those black faces under the dull moon.
They gathered hastily around young Lewis Vidett, and I could see that they were heartily glad to have met with him. There was a great shaking of hands, in the first place, so that it set up a jingling of guns—a faint, stern, humming noise, as you might call it.
After that, they put their heads together and there was a conference. It lasted for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, and I wriggled as close as I dared. I got close enough to find that these fellows were all so thoroughly masked and hooded that there was not the slightest chance that I could make out any features. I got close enough to make out an occasional exclamation, always in Spanish, and an occasional “señor!” Once I heard a man say: “For the republic. . . .”
Well, it was enough for me, at the moment. I mean to say that it was enough to fix in my mind that there was trouble brewing and that it probably had to do with the business dealings between Caporno and his deserted republic—which he had made good by the very excess of his personal wickedness, according to him. That was the matter on account of which they should be grateful to him.
More than one fist and more than one weapon was brandished toward the house of Caporno. I felt that it was the merest folly to wait any longer. My place was back in the house. The twenty were surely enough protection for Señor Vidett!
So I cut for the house, and I cut fast. I tore off my boots with a force that almost broke my ankles, and I slid along at full speed as soon as I was out of what you might call whispering distance of them. I tore for the edge of the woods, first, and then I doubled back across the open and traveled by way of the shrubs and the hedges, looking back fifty times to make sure that I was not being followed.
It is a wonderful thing how terror leaps into your heart the moment you turn your back and run. I’ve often wondered how a whole army of brave men could be routed. But that night I understood. I ran so wildly and so fast that I felt like charging straight past the house of Caporno. Twenty murderers were somewhere in the night behind me. And I felt as though each of them was gliding straight after me, now, fleet as the wing of a skimming owl.
I got to the side door. It was locked, of course. I plunged, panting, around the side of the building, and then clambered up through the window into my own room. Even there the fear did not abate. I crouched against the floor with my heart thundering. In every corner of the room I seemed to see quivering outlines of approaching assassins.
XXV
I tell you how I lay shuddering in a corner of my room, too much unmanned to stand up and give the warning that should be given, so that you may understand how much the devilish nature of Vidett had worked upon me.
I rallied myself after a moment, and I hurried out of my room into the hallway. I ran to the end of it and looked across the field beyond the house. The trees made a background against which it was hard to distinguish anything. But, after a moment, I thought that I saw dim forms beneath the moon stealing out from the verge of the copse.
That determined me. I ran for the door of Caporno’s room and rapped at it.
There was no answer.
I called softly, and then more loudly: “It is I! Mendez! Very urgent news, Caporno.”
The second time I repeated this so loudly that I thought I heard an empty echo mocking me from within the room of the lord of the house, and that alarmed me. I knocked heavily once more, and then, as there was not a stir in answer from within, I gave the door my shoulder.
It was like pressing my hand against a wall. There was no response. I ran back the width of the hall and turned myself into a battering ram, using the thick cushion of muscle at the point of my shoulder as the point for impact. 220 pounds of driving bone and muscle crunched the wood of the door through the iron of the lock and with a great tearing and ripping sound, almost like that of parting cloth, the door came wide and I stumbled into the chamber and tripped over a form lying just across the passage from the threshold.
There was a lamp standing on a table in a corner of the room, but it was turned down so low that it gave me no light to aid me in my work. I looked wildly around me. What I had to show me my way was the shaft of the moonlight that spilled dreamily through the two great, tall casements at that side of the master’s room.
First of all, here was the form on the floor over which I had lurched. I scooped up a light, thin body, and carried it into the light. It was Pedro. His old, sagging mouth had fallen ajar; his eyes were lost in black hollows beneath his brows. His ancient skin was waxy white, a horrible sight, and from his lips I scented the familiar and detestable fragrance of the spiced wine with which I myself had been so nearly drugged on that night.
Pedro lived, indeed, but he was as good as dead.
I tossed him lightly onto a deep couch where he usually slept, for he never left the room of Caporno. Then I hurried on to the great four-posted bed. As I leaned inside the drapery, I had my answer readily supplied to me. It was the same hateful perfume of that half-poisoned wine with which Vidett had apparently been dosing the entire household on this night.
However, I was now desperate. And I could not help remembering that I had fought off the effects of the potion for myself. I picked up the great, loose body of Caporno and dragged him to the edge of the bed. I turned up the flame in the throat of the lamp.
He had been so heavily drugged that his face was ghastly to behold and his entire body was quivering—lightly and steadily. I remembered now what José had told me—that Vidett hated Caporno and Caporno hated Vidett. I could believe that story. And yet it seemed madness that Vidett should have struck such a blow at the father of the girl he was to marry. No matter for what purpose, Vidett was not the sort of a man to let love lead him into financial losses, and, if he offended the excellent Caporno, the vast fortune of which Caporno was said to be the master was lost to him.
I took Caporno’s head between my hands and I ground the knuckles into his forehead until I felt the bone fairly sag beneath the force of my grip. Then I dragged those knuckles slowly across his head.
There was a groan and a convulsive stir almost at once in answer to this torment. I continued. There was a gasping voice.
“Who . . . oh, Lord!” And a fat, cold hand caught at my wrist.
I saw that the troubled, misted eyes of Caporno were opened and staring up to me.
“Caporno!” I snarled in his ear. “Vidett is coming . . . with twenty men!”
There was no slightest sense of my meaning in his features. I struck him brutally across the face. At that, he made a feeble at
tempt to strike me, and his fat hand rebounded from my shoulder.
“Vidett . . . coming for the house . . . with twenty men . . . speaking of a republic . . . Vidett . . . twenty men . . . coming for you!”
Gradually, with brutal violence and with words like knife stabs, I had roused him. No, he was not altogether out of the haze, but one flash of semi-consciousness came back to him. He moved his lips as though to say that he understood what treacherous artifice had been used to incapacitate him for the night.
“The cellars,” said Caporno. “The keys.” And he strove to reach under the pillow of his bed.
I slid my own hand under it and brought it out and showed him my empty palm.
What a convulsion of the face rewarded me as he saw. Still the drug was fighting heavily to overcome him once more. He battled like a dying man to regain his senses. But the battle was lost before it was well begun.
“Vidett,” he murmured at my ear. “He has drugged . . . taken the keys . . . the cellars . . . for heaven’s sake.”
I shook him violently, holding him by handfuls of his soft flesh and bruising it to a miserable pulp beneath my fingers.
“Caporno . . . what in the cellars?”
He tried to speak. His flabby, empurpled lips moved violently, but they gave forth only an unintelligible jargon. I saw the light beginning to fade from him once more.
He was sinking back in the coma once again, but now, as I leaned over him, I heard him whisper: “Rosa.”
It was only the faintest murmur, and, spoken at such a time, I suppose that I might as well have considered it an instinctive appeal to her to come to his help. But I would as soon have turned for help to an ogress, so perfectly did I distrust and detest that cold-faced girl.
I said to myself that I was beaten, now. For, already they would be advancing close to the house. Rosa? Beyond a doubt she was merely waiting for the coming of her lover. What was her father to her? I looked upon her as simply a she-devil.
And yet it seemed more than odd that she should have been named by Caporno. He was not a fool. And even as he was sinking back into a poisoned dream, it seemed most likely that he would not guide me into wrong hands so long as I was working in his interests.
I stood for a moment with my hands gripped hard, and my breath coming fast, and my thoughts spinning dizzily. I remember that a great artery in the side of my throat was flurrying with an irregular beat, sending stabs of pain into my brain.
So I turned with a sudden clearing of doubts. It might not be the wise thing to do, but it was all that remained. And I knew that I could not stand idly.
I whipped out of the chamber of Señor Caporno and I raced for the upstairs, where I knew that I could find the chamber of Rosa. I knew that because it had been pointed out to me—by the little balcony that extended beneath her three windows—windows and balcony all covered with trailing vines, and the vines starred over with the tiniest white blossoms.
From the main hall I came to a French door that opened upon that balcony. It was not locked, by lucky chance. I opened that door and stepped onto the balcony. Below me lay the patio, its pavement painted white by the moon, and the still-tossing spray casting a delicate and wavering tracery of shadow across the flags, near the fountain pool.
That was not all I saw. For I marked four men, running on padded feet that sounded like a dim trampling through the soft, lush grass of spring. They were leaning far forward with their furtive speed as they darted across the patio, leaping into the emblossoming shade on the nearer side just beneath me.
What was their goal? My room? The room of Caporno? The cellars for which Caporno trembled so much?
Or were they at that moment racing up to the bedchamber of their confederate’s lover, to take her away with them, or to ask for her final help in the directions for the plundering of the house. For that, I decided, was what the guilty pair must have had in mind. They did not dare to trust that Caporno would live up to his word and would allow them to marry freely at the end of the week. They had decided to end him on the spot and scoop up the money that was in his house.
And here was I, his hired guard—his body servant—standing with idle hands. I have rarely passed through such a vital instant of agony.
But then I ran out onto the balcony and reached the three windows of the chamber of Rosa, wondering, always, what eyes of skulkers from the patio beneath me might mark me there. I called through the open window: “Señorita Caporno!”
There was no answer.
I pried the window open to its full height. “Señorita Caporno!”
There was a frightened gasp: “Ah! Who is it? Señor Vidett?”
It was not the voice of Rosa. And I would wait no longer. From the patio beneath me at that very instant a gun might be training on me. I dragged myself through the window and stood within the room.
There I saw the bed—tall and old-fashioned and four-posted, like the bed of Caporno—and a dark-haired face on the pillow. And beside the bed, clutching at her mistress and shaking her to wake her, and with a terrified head turned toward me, I saw by the dim moon the little frightened maid of Rosa Caporno. I did not need to stir from where I stood. For, by the eternal heavens, a stir of wind wrought me what I had breathed too often before on that night—the heady fragrance of the spiced wine.
XXVI
I reached that bed in a leap that frightened the servant almost into a swoon, and, leaning over the face of her mistress, I knew by the parted lips and the pallor that my first surmise had been the perfectly correct one.
Then I turned back to the maid. She was on the verge of a collapse—half courageous and ready to save her mistress from me—half a coward and wanting to flee, but too weak with fear to do either.
I picked her up with one arm, planted her on a couch, and turned up the flame of a lamp on a little table beside it. There is nothing like a bit of light to knock fear into a cocked hat.
“Now,” I said to her, “what has happened to you?”
She had a fist pressed against each cheek, gaping at me as though I were apt to eat her the next instant.
I decided to give her the spur as hard as I could.
“There are twenty armed men rummaging through this house,” I said. “Is that door locked?”
“And with a bolt,” said the girl very quickly.
She reacted as Mexicans very often do—wilting at the first sign of trouble, and then growing stronger when they see that there is a real crisis ahead. Now she sat up straighter and watched me with less dread and enmity.
“I am your friend . . . the friend of the señorita . . . tell me who gave her that drug? That poison?”
At the last word she uttered a faint little cry. “Poison!”
“It is a drugged wine that was given to her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Do you know it, too?”
“God have mercy . . . is my beautiful lady to die?”
“She will live. But what happened? Who gave her the wine?”
“I cannot tell.”
“Was it Vidett?”
At this her eyes popped wider, as though I were reading this stuff out of her mind.
“¡Señor!” she gasped.
“I know it must have been Vidett,” I said. “But what happened first? Was there a quarrel?”
“Yes.”
The word broke from her, and then she clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Listen, little fool,” I said, and I put on her wrist a grip that was 100 pounds too heavy. “I am the friend of the señorita. What happened?”
Then speech tumbled out of the girl in a flood. She told me everything she knew. It was so confused that I had to pick my way among the fragments and the ruins and the suggestions and the exaggerations of facts.
Lewis Vidett had come to see the lady of his heart on the little balcony outside her windows. He on the balcony, she within the windows, they had chattered with one another for some time, and the little moza, in the obscurity
of the room, knew that her mistress was being persuaded by Vidett—persuaded toward what, she could not tell. At length, Señor Vidett rose up with a furious exclamation and flung away from Rosa Caporno.
As for Rosa, she herself was in a tantrum, but her anger melted almost at once. She began by scolding her poor moza, and then by weeping upon her shoulder, and finally she had thrown herself on the bed, face down, and had sobbed heavily.
A moment later, the step of a man on the balcony and the familiar figure of Vidett leaning at the window—for the French doors were locked. He called to Rosa, who refused to come, at first, but then he persuaded her and told her that he had brought up a glass of spiced wine so that they could drink a happy good night to one another—a sort of sleeping cup.
Rosa had stood up and gone to him, at this. He had kissed her, and given her the cup and pledged her, and, after she had drunk, she went back to her bed and lay down and was instantly asleep—without pausing to take off her clothes.
The moza watched her eagerly. Finally, as the time wore on, she ventured to disturb her mistress, but she could not rouse her to more than a moan. After that, she became frightened. She noticed the heavy scent of the wine that still filled the chamber. She herself had thought of poison, and yet it had seemed too impossible, for the quarrel between the pair had been neither long nor violent.
In the end, after listening to the heart of her mistress and finding that its heat was steady and fairly strong, she had made up her mind to wait until she slept off the effects of the drugged potion, for she had wit and experience enough to guess that this was the cause of the heavy slumber.
I had learned enough from the maid by this time. I told her instantly to draw a tubful of water, and she did not disobey or ask questions. I presume that the young tyrant, her mistress, had schooled her in ready obedience.
I heard the grand rushing of the water in the bathroom and I knew that such a tap would fill the tub in a moment. I went straight to the bed of Rosa Caporno and lifted her in my arms. She was so perfectly limp with sleep that it was difficult to keep hold on her. She seemed to be melting through my arms. But, at length, she was against my breast, legs and arms and head dangling, and I carried her into the adjoining bathroom.