The Fugitive

by Max Brand

  Stephen Macdona listened and smiled. He bought a flagon of dreadful pulque, downed it at a draft, and then he continued his quest.

  Christy was not in the railroad village. She had been shipped on toward the mountains, and the rumor went that she had been heavily guarded. So, that night, when the freight pulled pantingly out of the yard and up the first severe grade, Macdona lay upon the beams and closed his eyes to keep out the flying cinders. They had not yet shaken him from the trail.

  He made half the distance to the mountains, on that first stage. When the freight stopped in the cool of the morning, he went out to forage for food. It was a very rash thing to attempt, and he paid the penalty of his rashness. For a fat policeman saw him and, without asking questions, emptied a revolver at him as Macdona zigzagged down the street and around the corner. He heard the route of the pursuit behind him, and therefore he simply dived through the back window of a hovel and into the midst of a humble family circle, sitting around the breakfast pot.

  So Macdona squatted in a corner of the room with a gun resting on his knee.

  “Eat,” said Stephen.

  And they ate, while he helped himself to a remnant of roast kid that remained from a feast of the night before. When the pursuit poured past that door, a voice shouted a query.

  “You have seen nothing except your breakfast,” Stephen whispered.

  “We have seen nothing except our breakfast,” said the man of the house in a trembling but loud voice.

  And the crowd rushed on.

  An hour later—“Here is one peso for my breakfast and four for this lodging,” said Macdona. “I am the man who attacked the party of Señor Alvarez, and, if you help to catch me, you will have some thousands more to reward you for your work over me.” And he left by the window through which he had entered. It would be pleasant to state that his frankness disarmed the host. But truth is that he had not gone fifty yards before the wild clamor was raised.

  He found a saddled horse in the next street with a stalwart youth climbing into the stirrups. Macdona plucked him out again and tossed him over his shoulders. Then he rode for the hills.

  They hunted him, hot and close, all that day, and just as he was safely distancing them, on the third horse he had borrowed for the day’s riding, a random party of vaqueros came down and blocked his way. They had not placed themselves across that trail on purpose. But they smelled mischief while it was still a long distance off, and their guns were out. Most willingly would Stephen have given them the road, but the rocks climbed upward on either hand into the heart of the sky. Even a mountain goat would have turned dizzy with one glance along their polished sides.

  He bent over the pommel of the saddle and spurred straight ahead, his guns flashing from either hand. Three went down, and one, perhaps, would never rise again. But they had had enough. There were five of them left, but it seemed to them that the light was very dim—and yonder stranger must have the eyes of a cat to shoot so straight at such an hour. They paused to recruit their forces with the posse that followed after.

  In the meantime, Macdona was deep in the heart of the mountains. He came out through a narrow gorge the next day and looked down on the loveliest valley of creation. In a mighty ring against the sky stood white-headed mountains, and beneath them lordly forests marched down over the hills to the plains beneath. All those plains were green as emerald and streaked with the winding silver of many a stream, that paused here and again in flashing lakes, and passed in their leisurely journeyings villages and towns that were white blurs upon the landscape. There stood the central ring of cities. In the midst of all was Venduras with its clustered lakes around.

  The heart of Macdona swelled as he looked on all this beauty. But he could give it only a casual glance, for yonder was Christy. Somewhere among those green plains or in those white cities, men were wondering at the beauty of the mare, and that was more to him than all the rest of the world beside.

  Down the valley, he met a girl, pacing up the road with a jar of water poised on her head, climbing patiently toward her father’s little whitewashed hovel on the hillside. Perhaps Venduras was backward in many respects, but at least the country possessed telegraphs enough to spread such news far and wide. She knew him the instant that her eyes fell on him, and turned with a scream. The jar fell to the roadway and cracked in a hundred pieces on a rock.

  Stephen, with a shout, spurred his horse ahead. He jumped the hedge and caught the girl beyond it. The strong sweep of his arm lifted her onto the horse before him, and, still laughing, he placed his hand over her mouth and watched her terrified eyes widening at him as she strove to scream again.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am Valentin Guadalvo, but I shall not cut your throat, sweetheart. See, here is a peso to mend the jar. And here is another to make you happy, and here is another for the news which you are going to give me.”

  Now, when Mother Nature made Stephen Macdona with such loving care, she placed her master touches in the creation of his eyes, making them just that shade of brown that no woman, north or south or east or west, can look into without a leaping of the heart.

  This maiden of the mountains was standing presently close to Stephen by the roadside and telling him all that was locked in her little head. Afterward she waited until the dust he raked had wound out of sight down the trail, and she was left again to the lonely brightness of the morning sun, and cold, shaggy mountains, and the empty sky.

  But Stephen had found out where the ranch of Don Rudolfo was situated, and he made toward it as straight as the needle of the compass points. They sighted him by chance near San Gabriel and hounded him down the valley until he twisted out of their traces among the lowest hills. Another night march carried him toward his goal by a long distance. Then a keen-eyed goatherd saw him in the distance and sent in the warning. They picked up his trail with hunting hounds and pressed him so hard that he had to turn back toward the hills again. And only the skillful use of his rifle kept them at a safe distance.

  He lurked in the foothills and tried again, three days later. And again he was marked and ridden until his horse staggered. That might well have been his last day on earth, but he saw the white walls of a little town and rode straight for it. He found there what he expected—more than one gun blazing at him as he passed. But he also found what he had hoped—a fresh, strong horse standing at a tethering post in the plaza.

  He made the change in an instant and rode safely out into the plains beyond, with only a bullet hole through the crown of his hat to tell of the encounter. But although he shook off the pursuit on this day, also, he felt that he had already more than half failed in his quest. For by this time the whole of Venduras knew that he was desperately bent on regaining the black chestnut mare, and, of course, Don Rudolfo knew a little better than the rest. So, even if he could gain the ranch, would he not find the mare guarded heavily, day and night, with chosen men close to her?

  Now, resting in the hills, and drifting restlessly here and there while he strove to make new plans, on a day, he saw a solitary horseman on a nearby hill, stationary, with something held glittering before his face. Some lookout had evidently spotted him with field glasses, and Macdona with a groan resigned himself to another hunt.

  He got down first and looked to his cinches, which were somewhat loose. When he climbed into the saddle again, he saw a strange thing—the single rider was coming toward him with both hands raised above his head. Macdona paused with his rifle at the ready and let the other come into close half pistol shot—and then nearer. He began to see that he had nothing to fear from the stranger, who was an unshaven rascal with two pistols in the saddle holsters and two more at his belt, to say nothing of a rifle thrust into the long gun bag beneath his knee. The clothes of this man would have shamed a beggar, but his horse was fit for a prince to bestride. It seemed to Macdona that there was only one sort of man in the world who would be thus accoutered.

  The other stopped ten paces away, with both his hands still should
er high. “Consider, Señor Guadalvo,” he said, “that two are stronger than one, and that three are stronger than two.”

  “You speak”—Macdona smiled—“like a school-book. But where is the third?”

  The other pursed his lips and raised a whistle that blew screaming down the wind. At once a dozen riders started to the crest of the nearest hill.

  “Señor,” said Stephen, “I see that there is more to you than meets the eye. Are we to be friends?”

  “Ah,” said the brigand, “it is for that purpose that God made us.”

  Chapter 9

  To be a bandit, in other countries, was to be a cutthroat, a thief, a vagabond, and a general scoundrel. But to be a bandit in Venduras was something else. Guido de los Pazos, that same roughly dressed and splendidly mounted thief who had encountered Stephen Macdona, was decidedly something else. He had been, at one time, a rich landholder, a man of education, and a senator who sat in the tobacco-flavored senatorial chamber in the capital city. The crosscurrents of two or three revolutions had altered his manner of living and his ambitions. He had risen, you might say, from the comparative obscurity of a politician and ranch owner to the bright fame of a bandit. From the western to the eastern sea he was known and well considered.

  Now he sat in his village, and, reclining in his favorite chair, he comforted himself with cool drafts of scented smoke, drawn from a water pipe. He looked through the window upon the rough rocks of the mountainside, pleasantly crossed with a cedar bracken, here and there, up to the point where the goatherd drowsed on a stump and watched his flock that was scattered higher up, beyond the view of Don Guido’s window. He smoked with the calm content of a philosopher, and like a philosopher he received the news that was presently brought to him.

  There had been a rattling of horses’ hoofs outside, and a stir of voices. Now his daughter Lila came running in to him.

  “Andres Castellar is dead!” was the first thing that she wailed to him.

  Then she shrank away and waited, for Andres Castellar was one of the bravest and most trusted men of her father’s band. That morning, he and a few others had gone up into the mountains for a day’s hunting, taking with them the new man, that richly famous Valentin Guadalvo, who had recently filled the country with his deeds, flashing here and there across Venduras.

  Don Guido removed the mouthpiece from his lips and emitted fragrant smoke. “Valentin Guadalvo killed him, then?”

  His daughter looked at him in utter wonder. “Is it true, señor?” she said. “Do you know things when they happen? Do you see everything?”

  He waved a magisterial hand without answering, for Don Guido made it a rule never to commit himself as to his own weaknesses and limitations. “Why did not the others bring me word of it?”

  “They were afraid. And now Gualterio has rushed into the mountains with more men to avenge Andres. Ah, is it not dreadful?”

  She turned up her face in a pious horror, and her father watched the sun turn her hair to flaming gold.

  “This is very well,” he said.

  She stared at him again. She had never been able to understand this father of hers. Even in his talkative humors, he was strange enough. In his silences, he was more mysterious to her than an oracle.

  “When Don Valentin returns . . . ,” he began.

  “Alas, señor, will his ghost come to haunt us?”

  “Who spoke of ghosts?”

  “But even though he has been able to kill Andres, how can he stand against that terrible Gualterio? Oh, no, he must be dead even now.”

  “When Don Valentin returns,” he went on, not regarding her, “you may see him before I do. And then you must be sure to smile at him. Because, my child, that will be a sign that I am not angry, and I do not wish him to doubt me.”

  She left him and stole back to the grave circle of waiting men. “Even Gualterio will not be able to kill Don Valentin,” she whispered to them. “My father has said so.”

  Perhaps other men in other countries would have smiled, hearing such powers of prophecy attributed to anyone. But these fellows did not smile. They knew their leader far too well to question his wisdom. But an air of tense expectancy settled over the village, and all eyes scanned the hillsides anxiously.

  Presently they saw the return of the hunters. First came the mules, driven along with shrill-voiced, brown-footed boys, and carrying the quartered bodies of five deer, the fruit of the hunt. Behind these came a group of three: Andres Castellar in the middle, and upon one side his brother Gualterio, on the other Valentin Guadalvo himself.

  Who could say, after this, that Guido de los Pazos did not possess the gift of second sight?

  It was no dead Andres, then, who came back to the village. But there was a bandage around his shoulder and the first swift rumor, as the riders came in, was that there had been a fight, indeed. When Gualterio reached the hunters, there had been another battle, but bloodless, this time. In both Don Valentin had conquered. But who could think that there had ever been strife among them to see Andres smiling faintly, and Gualterio laughing? No, they came in like the three best comrades in the world.

  Someone ventured to question the fierce and battle-scarred Gualterio. He merely shrugged his shoulders. “Is it any shame,” he said, “to be beaten by a mountain lion? Besides, I have now two brothers, instead of one.”

  Stephen Macdona had gone into the house of the chieftain, and at the door he met the blue eyes and the golden hair of Lila.

  “My father knew that you would come back safely,” she said. “I, also, am glad, señor.” This she said, obeying the very letter of her father’s command, for she smiled up into the brown eyes of Stephen.

  He went in to de los Pazos, leaving the girl behind him with a slender hand still pressed against her lips.

  “And it was a pleasant hunt?” Don Guido asked, when he had placed a box of long, brown-coated, oily Havanas before his guest. “A hot day, but a happy one, señor?”

  “We found some deer and brought them back with us,” said Stephen. “It was a fine day and . . . you have a glorious lot of fighting men, Don Guido!”

  “I selected them with care,” admitted de los Pazos.

  “However, I am curious about one thing.”

  “Ask whatever you choose.”

  “You are known in this country, Don Guido. You have done enough to fill the lives of half a dozen men.And yet you can settle down here peacefully in the mountains . . . for how long? How is that managed? Why have they not sent men up here to take you?”

  “In part,” said the bandit, “you have answered yourself. I am known in this country.” He made a slight pause as he drew on the water pipe and crossed his legs. Then he continued: “Besides, they have sent men for me, once or twice. The men found me, but only part of them went back to tell what they had seen.”

  He waved toward the white-headed mountains. “Consider, my friend, that in the throat of one of those passes, half a dozen men could make hot work for a hundred. They would need a little army to take me. And a little army is an expensive thing. And while the little army was away catching me, might not some clever politician make a revolution? You see how this thing is.”

  “I begin to see.” Stephen smiled. “So you might go on here forever?”

  “One never can tell,” answered the leader. “I live each day for its own sake.”

  “If President Smith sends an army out to catch you, Senator Jones takes the lucky chance to raise a revolution and the good work of bandit-catching will have been done by Smith for Jones. That is very neat.”

  “Venduras is Venduras,” said Don Guido. “We have our own little ways in the world. Besides, I am moderate. I take what I need and not what I want. My own goatherds on the mountains, you see, furnish milk and cheese and flesh enough for my men, and for me. If we need more, why, you have seen the deer that run in our valleys. The streams are crowded with trout. Watercress grows in the pools. We have our patches of maize here and there, enough to make our torti
llas. What more do we want? A little money, to be sure. I must have enough of that to satisfy my brave men. But that is soon done. When the silver is brought down on the backs of the mules from the higher mountains, if I stop a train here and there and take a few loads, is that a great crime? No, because what I take in moderation, others might take in gross. And no other bandit dares to show his head in these mountains except my men. Some call me a thief, to be sure, but then there are others who call me a chief of police. Or again, if some owner of a ranch grows too fat and proud and like a tyrant in the lowlands, I slip down on him in the night, and, when I come back, he finds that he has become thin between dark and dawn.”

  He settled back in his chair and smiled at the young man, who watched him with smiling lips and fiery eyes.

  “Don Guido,” he said, “I begin to understand you very well.”

  “Now the first thing,” said the leader, “is that mare of yours. We will start at once to . . .”

  “De los Pazos,” broke in Stephen, “it seems to me that everything is for me, in this arrangement. Suppose, then, that I take the mare and ride away?”

  “We are gamblers,” answered Don Guido. “And this is a risk which I must take.”

  “This is very fine, frank, generous talk. I have to answer it in the same tone. This is a jolly life that you lead up here . . . a free and cheerful life, Don Guido, but I shall not stay with you long. Enough to make some return for Christy . . . and then we say good-bye.”

  “Tomorrow”—the brigand smiled—“takes care of itself.”

  Chapter 10

  In the cool of the evening Señor Don Rudolfo Alvarez always sat on his balcony. He retired there shortly after the last meal of the day and remained there to think in peace. For he could look from this balcony across the flower-starred gloom of the patio gardens beneath, and beyond the walls of the patio to the level thousands of his acres, patched with lights here and there, where his villages stood. Beyond these nearer beauties arose the hills where the great forests that he owned were slumbering, and beyond these still stood the mighty mountains, unseen, except where their outlines blotted out the stars.