by Max Brand
The moza uttered a frightened gasp, and then she nodded in comprehension. The tub was filled to the brim, the water turned off, and then I swayed Rosa bodily beneath the surface of the water. It cast out a great wave that drenched me to my knees, and Rosa came gasping and sputtering up to the surface.
Perhaps her lover had given her a smaller dose than that with which he had stunned the faculties of her father, Pedro, and me. However, there she was awake in a moment, shuddering with cold, her wet clothes clinging to her body, her teeth chattering, and her eyes wide and bright with wonder as she watched me.
The moza began to whisper explanations at her ear. She pushed the girl away. She said to me with a wonderful calmness and courage: “You are in my sleeping room, señor. Has my father sent you here?”
No reproaches, no screams, no exclamations, although her brain must have been reeling with the violence of the drug at that moment.
I said simply: “Señorita, your father could not have sent me to you, because he is lying on his bed at this moment, drugged as I found you drugged . . . but more thoroughly.”
“Drugged?” cried Rosa Caporno. “Drugged?”
But she laid both hands to her forehead. I suppose that there was a weight of stupefaction in it.
“Yes,” she said suddenly between her hands. “It is true!”
“Vidett,” I said.
“¿Señor?” she gasped at me.
“He tried with me, also. Luck saved me.”
She stumbled past me and ran across her room to the open window. And there she leaned out and drew in great, eager breaths of the cool night air.
I had followed. She caught at me, found me, and dragged me closer to her.
“What does it mean, señor?” said Rosa.
“I cannot tell. If I could tell, I should have stayed below to fight them.”
“Then?”
“There are twenty men in the house of your father.”
“And Don Luis is leading them!”
“Vidett met them in the woods. I followed him there. I came back to the house. I found the room of your father locked and there was no answer when I called for him. I broke down that door and went in to him.”
She had turned from the window and was staring at me, all unconscious of the water that dripped from her soaked clothes and body to the floor.
“I managed to bring him back to his senses for an instant. But then he was gone again. In that instant he said . . . ‘the cellar.’”
“Yes!”
“And as he closed his eyes again, he whispered your name . . . ‘Rosa.’ I thought he was sending me to you to help him when he could not help himself. For even old Pedro has been drugged.”
“God forgive my sins,” whispered the girl. “Did Señor Caporno send you to me for help?”
She was extremely silent, breathing hard.
“And he fumbled beneath his pillow . . . a key that he wanted was gone . . . stolen, he said.”
“Don Luis would not dare. . . .”
“Señorita, if there is anything to be done, act quickly. For I tell you that there is not much time. There is a very little time, only.”
“Hush.”
I listened.
“Do you hear?” said her whisper.
“Nothing.”
“At the door of the room.”
I heard it then, the gliding step of a man, and then a faint sound of steel upon steel—the unmistakable sound of a key fitted into a lock.
“But the door is bolted, also,” said Rosa Caporno. “Ah, I have no weapons, but I have you, señor. Will you fight for me?”
“For your father, señorita, and for you, if you will let me.”
“For him . . . yes, and I shall fight for him, also . . . and is Luis. . . ?”
She choked on this, and then raised a hand.
A soft voice was calling outside the door to her room—the voice of Lewis Vidett: “Conchita. Conchita.”
Very softly, and then the same call, more loudly.
The little maid ran to me instinctively for directions.
“Go,” I said, “and open the door.”
Rosa cast up a startled glance to me. But she did not countermand the order. The maid ran to the door.
XXVII
Rosa, with a sign, followed softly after—not a very romantically beautiful figure, I must admit, in her dripping clothes. But she was more than that to me. She was a girl in whom I was beginning to see an unsuspected honesty. And she in a position where I could enjoy her courage more, also.
“Conchita,” came from outside the door. “Do you hear me?”
From the little moza: “Yes, señor.”
“It is I . . . do you know me?”
“Señor Vidett.”
“I must see your lady.”
“She sleeps, señor.”
“Wake her! Wake her! Instantly! I must speak with her to. . . .”
“Señor, she is not well . . . she sleeps heavily.”
“Let me in, and I shall right that.”
“Admit you now? ¡Señor!”
“In the name of heaven . . . little Conchita . . . little fool. How can I harm her?”
“I dare not.”
“Let the door be unbolted, then, and let me pass you a restorative.”
“But, señor, can you guess in what manner she is ill?”
“I can.”
“This is wonderful, señor!”
“Little idiot. This will cost you your place if you keep tantalizing me in this fashion any longer.”
“You fill me with terror,” said Conchita, but the minx was fairly trembling with joy. It was apparent to me that she did not love the gentleman upon whom her mistress had been smiling so long. And, feeling the shadow of my bulk coming up behind her, little Conchita cast up her head and smiled at me in the dim light that filled the chamber, and she found my hand and pressed it. She was a dear—that child. Full of courage and fear mixed. I thought her enchanting. Although she was very much more Mexican and very much less perfectly lovely than her mistress, I thought her a great deal more intriguing.
“Will you open?” repeated Vidett. “I tell you, Conchita, it is a thing of the most vast importance. It is a thing that your lady. . . .”
“I shall open, then,” said the moza decidedly.
For I had made her a sign, and, when the señorita questioned me, I repeated my gesture of command most emphatically. For I felt about the thing in this manner: no matter what the course of events might be before this fatal night was ended, it could not be other than an excellent thing for us to gain possession of the person of Señor Vidett. No matter what his relations might be with the score of armed men who he had led so treacherously to the big house of Caporno, there was not a doubt that everyone in the house would be better off if that leadership were removed from the twenty strangers.
Here Conchita shrank away from the door with a stifled cry, for out of the great distance, from an upper portion of the house, there was a sudden shout, followed by a thunderous, but dim trampling of feet. That sound spread, as a column of smoke spreads when it strikes against the ceiling of a room. Gradually sound and confusion covered the building.
I could hear Vidett cursing heavily outside the door of the room. “The dolts . . . the clumsy fools! The murdering, thick-hoofed swine!” groaned Vidett. “Conchita, open the door, or I shall break it down.”
“Ah, no, señor! That would be a scandal, but as soon as I can turn the bolt. . . .”
It was done at that moment. I had brushed Rosa back against the wall. She said to me one thing only: “No weapon, señor!”
“My hands, only,” I had answered.
I felt her soft hands flutter as lightly as the wings of moths against mine. And then, as she touched their weight, I heard her sigh.
“Be gentle with him . . . señor.”
I reassured her with a murmur. But, in reality, my strange hatred of this handsome young man was turning my fingers into steel talons and my fi
st into the loaded head of a club. As the door opened, Vidett stepped in. Yet, in spite of all his haste, he did not step the full distance into the room. Had he done so, he would that instant have been lost, but, as it was, the hand with which I reached for him fell a little short.
For I had supposed, from his eagerness, that he would rush headlong into the room. Who could keep from thinking the same thing? Yet he came in as stealthily as a robber.
So the first pass of my reaching hand missed his neck and brushed heavily across his face, knocking him aside against the door. The next instant a pistol spoke and a slithering tongue of fire and pain like the pain of hell went through my left leg.
I reached for him again with the scream of Rosa tingling at my ear, but as the weight fell upon my left leg, it crumpled under the strain and I pitched to the floor upon my face.
“Ah, you have killed him!” I heard Rosa cry.
I heard the door slam—that was the hand of young Lewis Vidett, I knew. And then his voice.
“Who is it, in the name of the devil? No one but Mendez-Ames . . . or whatever the fool’s name may be. And what are you doing here in the dark with him . . . what are the pair of you doing? No matter . . . he’s done. When they fall on their face like this . . . the swine will suddenly. . . .”
And the toe of his boot found my ribs smartly.
It was a foolish move on the part of Señor Vidett. He should at the least have paid my size such a compliment as to put another slug or two into the bulk of me before he was sure that I was out of this world and in the next.
As he kicked me, I felt no fury—I was only filled with an immense satisfaction. The back sweep of my long, thick arm—like a weaver’s beam to one of the agile slightness of Vidett’s body—knocked both his feet from under him, and he dropped not to the floor, but into my arms.
Rather the arms of an octopus for Vidett than my arms at that moment. For the octopus reaches blindly, and I was using all the senses of triumph. Even so, with all the vast excess of my strength over his, it was not easy to master him. He whirled and twisted like a veritable eel. My first grip made the revolver fall out of his hand, but even in that swift, close mêlée he was able to get out a knife.
Before he could use it, however, I had him completely mastered, pressed close to my breast—and no lover ever held his mistress with a sweeter thrill of satisfaction than I now held the writhing body of Señor Vidett. I had one of his wrists tucked up in the small of his back, and a gesture of the hand that controlled that arm could fairly tear it out of its shoulder socket.
Vidett knew what had happened. He said without malice and without heat: “So . . . very well. You have me, señor.”
“It is Mendez,” I said.
“You are a spirit, not a man,” said Vidett, still with that uncanny coolness. “How did you manage to clear your head?”
“I cleared it with the emetic, dear Vidett. It was clear when you came to visit me in my room.”
“Ah, instinct, instinct!” Vidett cried softly to himself. “One touch of the knife then and you would have slept deeply and safely forever.”
I put all of this down as he said it, because I wish to have you understand the Satanic calm with which this man was able to conduct himself. And, even as I held him at my mercy, I assure you that his words and the manner of them made my flesh creep.
I dragged myself to a kneeling position.
“Do him no harm,” Rosa was breathing in my ear.
“I shall not . . . unless he forces me to. But if you make a foolish move . . . I shall break you open like an oyster, Señor Vidett.”
That devil actually laughed.
“You will find me more quiet than a very oyster,” he assured me.
“And you, Señor Mendez?” said the girl to me.
But I did not need to answer her. That little trump—that pearl among maids—that Conchita had already found the trouble. Without a question asked, she had gone deftly over me and she had been able to locate the wound quickly enough by the great outpouring of blood.
“I have found it. Through the leg. I pray heaven that the bone be not broken,” she said. “Is the pain a frightful thing?”
It was very bad, and ordinarily I suppose it might have almost overcome me. But one does not allow such a thing as pain to overcome one when there is a man like Lewis Vidett at hand. There was really a greater sense of pleasure than of pain at that moment.
“Rip off the leg of my trousers,” I told Conchita. “Here is my knife. Señorita Rosa, bring a light. Will you permit me to fasten the hands of Señor Vidett?”
She hesitated one instant.
“Yes,” she said.
“Rosa!” cried my captive. “Without an explanation?”
She merely turned her back on him, and, running across the room, she picked up the lamp whose flame I had raised a moment before. With this in her hand she ran back to us and stood over the little group to give light to Conchita.
Conchita had my knife by this time. And she made short work of that trouser leg. She peeled it off in no time, and I glanced down and saw the black blood bulging out of either side of my thigh.
Yet neither Conchita nor Rosa were much disturbed. Rosa shuddered a little, but she held the lamp closer while Conchita ripped off an underskirt and with that formed the bandages.
I knew that a tourniquet was what would be needed, however. There was too much to be done in that house on that night, and I could not afford to be handicapped by a scratch in the leg. To me, in my excitement, that wound seemed no more.
I turned to help them at their work, for I had long before this secured the wrists of the excellent Vidett behind his back by means of a piece of twine that I always carry with me in my pockets.
XXVIII
I turned my captive over to Conchita, first asking her if she felt able to control him. And I offered her a revolver. She tried that cumbersome weapon with her small hand, and then thrust it back at me.
“It’ll do for those that like it,” she said, “but I hate noise.”
With that, she picked from somewhere in her clothes a knife as delicate and as keen as the last fine-spun icicle that hangs from the eaves, tapered to a paper thinness by a spring sun.
“This will do for me,” said that odd girl, and took her place at the back of her mistress’ lover.
“You’ll watch him well?” I said.
“Sí.”
“And remember that he’s slippery?”
“I’ll remember that he’s a snake,” she said. “My brothers used to catch snakes, and take their heads off. I’ve seen ’em do it.”
Whatever it was that Lewis Vidett had done to this girl, I could not doubt the reality of her hatred for him. Her upper lip quivered as she looked down at him, where he lay crushed on the floor.
In the meantime, Rosa had put down the lamp and she helped me in the arrangement of the tourniquet that was soon prepared. She furnished me with a little, stout paper cutter, and, turning on this, with the bandage across the wound and above it, I put on such pressure that the blood soon stopped flowing.
There was plenty of cloth left. I made another bandage over the wound, in the hope of keeping some warmth in the wounded flesh, for I knew that there is a danger in catching cold in a wound. Then I used another part of the lengths of bandage for the purpose of making a stout sling. I tied my leg firmly at the ankle and again beneath the knee and fastened the ends of the strips of cloth to my belt. In this fashion, I was sure of keeping my leg above striking distance of the floor.
While I worked, I heard a muttered conversation between my prisoner and Conchita.
“Chita, one touch of that knife. . . .”
“Why should I?”
“Because it will be worth a great deal to you.”
“How should I be able to tell?”
“I give it to you beforehand.”
“I shall have a proof.”
“But will you cut the cord that ties my wrists?”
He
was so desperate that I suppose he dared to risk such loudness. Or was it that pain and fear had made my sense of hearing preternaturally alert on this night? At any rate, I heard him distinctly.
“Reach into the bag that is tied at my right hip.”
“Very well. What is there?”
“Take out a handful . . . softly . . . it is yours.”
Conchita apparently did as he directed her to do, and presently there was a shrill cry from her: “¡Señorita! ¡Señorita! You are robbed! Look what I have in my hand. He has robbed you of the three rubies and the only thing. . . .”
Señorita Rosa, however much concerned she might have been over my wound—not sentimentally, but because I was simply her last resort as a defender on this night—flew to the side of her maid and I heard a low-pitched exclamation of surprise and of anger.
“Lewis!” she cried.
“And now, Rosa?” said that iron-nerved villain.
“Take the bag from his side,” said Rosa Caporno.
“You need not look,” said Vidett. “It is as you suspect. Everything is there.”
“Ah, ah! The whole casket.”
“All of it, of course.”
“And the reason, Lewis?”
Even I, no expert in affairs of women, could tell that there was danger in her voice at this point.
“The reason, my most dear child, is that in spite of our argument this evening, I decided that the thing must be done.”
“That we should leave the house?”
“Yes!”
“Unmarried, Lewis?”
“Unmarried, of course. Because we could be married within ten miles.”
“Married within ten years . . . ten centuries!”
“Rosa, is there no love in you?”
“I almost wish that there were not, after tonight.”
“No trust, then?”
“No, no, Lewis. I may have shown myself to you as a great fool, but never as such a fool that I would ever dream you were a man to be trusted.”
A sweet conversation to be carried on between ardent young lovers.
“Rosa, you deeply wrong me, my dear. Or is it because you have taken a liking to my dear friend Mendez . . . or Ames . . . whatever his true name may be. Mendez I am sure he is not.”