He shouldered and loaded on his horses all the stores and water that he and they could still carry, and strode down the line. Within the limits set by the risks of his undertaking he should have been content. He knew he should have been content. But he was not. A vague sense of disloyalty assailed him. When he had warned Lara that the pursuit would be hot and efficient he had told the truth. He had given an entirely false reason for his warning, but it was in actual fact important for Lara’s safety that the telegraph should be destroyed, and Lara had counted on him to do it.
His sensation once analysed—for the point of ethics was so complex that it had to be analysed—Manuel did not hesitate. The loss of time was infuriating, but he could not disobey the laws of his own peculiar puritanism. He halted his march above the wreck of the flatcar and caboose, and surveyed the silent black threads, faintly humming in the light breeze of the afternoon, which even then would be carrying the incoherent curses of Torreón and Durango. One pole had been cracked by a graze from the flying flatcar, and leant drunkenly out over the sharp slope supported only by its wires. Manuel swarmed up the preceding pole and cut them. One by one they leapt under his pliers and sang through the air. The last three broke of their own accord, and for an instant the air around him was alive with flying wire. The cracked pole dropped over the edge, and its neighbour beyond leaned over as it took the weight of the wreckage. If the caboose and flatcar were now encouraged to blow themselves up, the pole would be right in the upward path of the explosion and the resulting chaos would nobly fulfil his promise to Lara.
He descended the slope and tamped his two sticks of dynamite well down into the angle between the ground and the floor of the caboose, giving them a fuse which he hoped would be good for six minutes. Two of these he spent climbing back on to the railway; the remaining four—which turned out to be rather less—in racing along the track with his startled horses. The explosives went up in three acts. At the first concussion Manuel turned his head, and was just in time to see the results of the second and almost instantaneous explosion. A fountain of metallic débris, among which the shield of the mountain gun was distinguishable, shot into sight and fell back, thereupon starting a third explosion which seemed to expend itself sideways, for the slope farther down the line—he himself was standing in dead ground—was peppered with flying metal. The telegraph, for three posts from the one he had climbed, had ceased to exist and its resurrection would be complicated.
The blasts were still echoing solidly through the hills when they were answered from the direction of Durango by the faint and repeated whistling of a train, borne down wind on the clear and sensitive mountain air. Manuel reckoned that it was still some ten or twelve miles distant. He lit a cigarette and hurried on down the line with the pleasant sense of freedom due to the fulfilment of a moral obligation.
The puffing of the train was just audible when he reached the culvert and turned off the line into the arroyo. Travelling slowly for fear of Lara’s ingenious means of destruction, it had covered but a dozen miles while Manuel had covered two. All he could do was to press on up the valley at the trotting pace of his own legs, and trust to his luck. If it held, the troops about to detrain would first waste time and then ride down the railway to the culvert; if it did not, they would climb the ridge. He would ordinarily have been ashamed to depend on chance; he would not admit that a man with better brains than his pursuers should accept impotence in country that he knew. But the mental and physical excitement of the day had exhausted even his power to revolt. He made no useless attempt to influence his fate, and stumbled blindly on up the arroyo, head sunk between shoulders, hand gripping the bouncing pack of his strongest horse.
He reached the deserted camping ground without seeing or hearing a sign of pursuit. Once past this spot his chances improved, for he could no longer be spotted from the top of the ridge and his tracks mingled with those of Lara’s caudilla. There was no reason for the federal troops to suspect his existence. He knew, however, that they must already be at the culvert, and that he would be overtaken and caught with his gold if he did not find a temporary hiding place. But there were no hiding places. The steep, bare slopes of the valley, one yellow in the sun, the other matt bronze in the shade, offered no cover but low scrub and small boulders. A man, if he lay down, might disappear into this background, but three horses could not be hidden.
The only solution was not to hide them. He drove his animals fifty feet up the sunless slope of the valley to a cluster of three largish stones, slipped off the packs and harness and spread the lot behind and between the stones. His gear was almost invisible from the bed of the arroyo, though hardly to be missed if any rider should leave the track. Manuel turned his horses loose and chased them with stones and curses up the ravine. He himself, panting and soaked with sweat, took refuge behind a maguey plant where he was unlikely to be seen so long as no one looked for him.
He had not long to wait. Some fifty mounted men of the Durango garrison swept up the bed of the arroyo at the best pace the ground would allow, following hard on Lara’s tracks. To Manuel it seemed impossible that they should miss his packs and harness spread out on the hillside, but the troops passed the stones, as they passed a thousand other stones, without question. The loose horses cantered away in front of the column. The existence of three well-fed beasts at a considerable distance from water or any truly green plant clearly puzzled the officer in command. He had the horses roped and cursorily examined; then led them on up the valley with his troop. Remounts would be needed after any serious engagement with Lara’s caudilla.
Manuel was safe but isolated. Without horses and with no more water than he could carry on his back, the only habitation of man that he could reach was Durango, and the only way to get there was by the railway or along a track that ran roughly parallel to it. The gold had to be left where it was. He parted from it philosophically. He had had no time to build extravagant hopes upon its possession; indeed up to the present he had been more vividly aware of its weight than of its value. It was a damned encumbrance that would probably bring him to a firing squad, but no man in his normal senses could let it go. With knife and a bar of gold he scraped a long, shallow trough behind the three boulders and emptied into it the precious contents of Claudio Cavira Martínez’s baggage, covering them with earth and pebbles. About his person he secreted three hundred dollars in United States coin. He dared carry no more, for it was likely that at some time in the next twenty-four hours hands would be run over the outside of his clothes in a hasty search for arms.
Tying the harness and packs into a bundle, he rolled the lot down the slope into the arroyo and buried it in a bed of loose gravel. The next task was to take a bearing that the gold might be easily recovered. Some two hundred yards down the valley one bank of the streambed was faced by a little cliff of hard rock as high as a man. It could not be mistaken, since there was no similar formation lower down the arroyo. Standing on the cliff, Manuel looked up between the hills for a distant point on which to take a line. In that barren landscape, irregular but featureless as a colossal range of sand-hills, there were few definite marks. The best was a V like the back sight of a rifle where the skylines of two ridges, descending from opposite sides into the valley, crossed one another. Climbing fourteen paces up the slope to the right, Manuel brought the three stones into line with the V. It was a good enough aid to memory.
The sun had already left the valley, and the hard golden ground, cruelly reflecting but never holding the heat of the day, was tinted by the grey-green of the scanty brush. Manuel wrapped himself in his serape, and cautiously picked his way down the arroyo. The culvert was held in force on the chance that Lara might return, but nothing moved on either brow of the valley. He crawled back out of sight and then up the ridge overlooking the railway. Immediately below him was all that his dynamite and the exploded shells had left of the flatcar; an acre of torn ground oddly sown with steel plates and still smouldering woodwork. H
e was glad of the illogical impulse that had led him to have Captain López buried. The other bodies would have no burial but a shovelling of formless animal matter into a common grave; and so far as he could see the newly arrived troops had no intention of taking that much trouble.
A relief train had come up from Torreón as well as one from Durango. Away to his left the two locomotives faced one another across the gap in the permanent way that Lara’s mine had torn. They had steam up, and sighed at each other like two great beasts chance-met in the infinite spaces of the Sierra Madre. Between them a gang was hard at work repairing the line. Another gang, just below him, was busy with the telegraph. A company of infantry lounged by the side of the railway.
The troops were preparing to sleep on the spot, which suggested that the Durango train would return without them. The train from Torreón which had brought up spare rails, telegraph cable, a crane and the breakdown gangs must remain while they worked through the night. When dusk fell, Manuel crept along the ridge and down to the cover of the rocks where he and Lara had squatted to wait for their prey. There he was within seventy yards of the line of hastily assembled wagons in which the troops and horses had been transported. The sliding doors had not been shut, and towards the tail of the train was a patch of darkness all the blacker for the flares and headlights that illumined the stretch of track under repair. In an hour the train began to back slowly towards Durango. Manuel jumped into the darkness, dived through an open door and settled down on a pile of sacks with his back against the wall.
In this new comfort his thoughts began to play with wealth. The great and happy hours of his life had been in the caudilla and in the Viña Vallejos. He knew it, knew that the pleasures he most valued could not be bought with money. It was thus objectless to dissipate his gold on luxurious living or even to re-enter commerce and exist, as he inevitably would, driving himself and his employees simply in order to make more money. Well, if he could not buy pleasure, perhaps he could buy peace. He was surprised to find that he could dream of the Viña Vallejos without pain. That then would be the life to choose. He would buy a little estancia, preferably in temperate Chile,—for even to hear Argentine Spanish made him melancholy,—and create a sure and comfortable livelihood for himself and a few honest families.
The train clattered slowly into the goods sidings of Durango. When the wagons had jarred and bumped themselves to a standstill, Manuel peeped stealthily out of the door. A group of men was rapidly gathering round the locomotive to get the latest news from the driver. At his end of the yard there was nobody. He dropped to the tracks and hid in a corner of the station fence until the street beyond was clear of passers-by. The instant it emptied, he was over the fence and strolling towards the centre of the town with the assurance of a poor but law-abiding citizen.
Apart from his ten-dollar pieces, he had only a few pesos in paper and small change; enough for a week’s food and lodging if he were careful. The caudilla had been short of ready money; they were fairly rich in portable loot, but the remote villages where they bought their food were no markets for the sale of valuables. He turned into a cheap posada that had come down in the world since the coaches of the viceroy and his suite drove under its massive archway, and took a room for the night. The bed was hard and there was a nest of fleas in the wainscoting beneath it; but by this time he was as impervious to fleas as a mongrel dog. The tickling of their progress from one patch of his tasteless hide to another mildly annoyed him, but the bites did not affect him at all. The bed, however, kept him awake for an hour. He had lost the habit of sleeping in beds.
He lay low for four days, picking up the rumours of the town in pulquerías and eating houses. The stories varied daily. It was said that Lara had got over into Coahuila and set up an independent republic with the governor. It was also said that the whole band had been captured, and executed at Torreón. A commercial traveller had seen with his own eyes—these very eyes that are looking at you, señores! —the blood upon the adobe wall where they were shot. There was no definite news. It seemed certain that Lara had vanished into the maze of hills and that all was quiet in the immediate vicinity of Durango. It was a favourable moment to recover the gold.
He spent the fifth day haggling with the dealers for four stout pack horses and their saddles, representing himself to be the servant of a gringo miner in the sierra who had sent him down to arrange transport for his tools and stores. He paid in gold coin, leaving himself, when the purchase and his hotel bill had been settled, with twenty dollars and a few pesos. He arranged to call for the horses at seven the next morning and went to bed with a good conscience.
The first thing Manuel saw when he emerged at sunrise from the great arch of the posada was his own face wrapped around the lamppost on the opposite side of the street. A hundred yards away the bill poster was tastefully sticking another copy to the wall of a public lavatory. The photograph was very good. It had been taken for the army records shortly after he arrived in Campeche. A legend above it in large capitals offered 2000 pesos reward for the arrest of Manuel Vargas, otherwise known as El Camarero; a paragraph below explained that he had stolen a valuable consignment of gold, swindling both the government and his own general, and that the people ought now to understand the true character of those who claimed to be their protectors. A second paragraph added naïvely that, in view of the circumstances, nobody need have the least doubt that the reward would really be paid.
Manuel realised that he was free only because he had got up rather earlier than anyone else in Durango who could read. The horse dealers would instantly recognise his photograph and they knew where he was staying. He pulled his hat over his eyes and sunk his chin well into the folds of his serape; so long as he mingled with the Indian labourers now coming in and out of Durango he could pass as one of them. He slunk out of the houses on the western side of the town and took to a track across open country, cursing the place with illogical rage for not being Durango in Spain where a man could take cover among the green hills and steep forests that formed a kindly amphitheatre around it. Here there was little cover for a hunted man until he reached the sparsely wooded slopes of the coastal range. The mountains were invitingly close, near enough at any rate for Durango to have a faint resemblance to the Spanish town after which it had been christened, but it would be midday before they could truly swallow him up. He plodded towards them with the patient gait of the Mexican Indian—he might have been visiting the next field or emigrating into infinity—and passed unchallenged, a solitary figure following a track that led from one solitary hut to another.
Beyond the mountains—if he ever got beyond them—was the port of Mazatlan. It was a journey of at least a hundred and fifty miles, and he knew little of the high sierra except that the River Presidio flowed through it; there must be water and food. The country on his side of the mountains was a wilderness, but by no means an uninhabited desert. On the Pacific side he expected to find sugarcane and plantations of fruit.
For the first five days he slept in the open but took a daily meal with other human beings, asking for hospitality, which was never refused, at the huts of Indian cultivators. He said that he was bound for El Salto to find work. Nobody questioned him; it was obvious that he was poor and that a man who had to walk was unfortunate. Three times his money was waved aside. Twice he was permitted to pay a few centavos only after long argument and exchange of many compliments.
El Salto was a little town midway between Durango and Mazatlan. He dared not enter it, but after nightfall ventured into the outskirts in search of a newspaper. He found enough scraps, wrapped around refuse and blowing in the dust away from the tiny railway terminus, to piece out what had happened. Crossing the main line from Zacatecas to the north, Lara had come in contact with a strong force of federal cavalry sent out from Torreón to cut him off. Their gallant and intrepid colonel, wrote the reporter, spreading his wings, had come out to hold a parley with General Lara under that eternal sym
bol of peace and amity, the White Flag, never in the history of the Republic associated with the surrender of cowards but only with the sudden realisation of brave men that at long last they were brothers. Lara had convinced him that he knew nothing whatever of the 300,000 gold pesos—he could be very convincing when he was angry—and it was obvious that one Manuel Vargas, a miserable and effete gachupín, had got away with the lot. The general, said the paper, was so grieved at this immoral looting that he had offered to swear allegiance to the government and to re-join the regular army on condition that he was permitted to organise the hunt for the fugitive.
It was not pleasant reading. No doubt Lara had arranged for a substantial slice of the treasure, if recovered, to be handed over to him, and thus had the double motive of gain and revenge. He would guess that El Camarero was making for Mazatlan. On the other hand it was unlikely that he had heard anything about the three horses picked up by the Durango troop, who, by now, would have returned to their base, sold the horses and said nothing. He would not therefore be looking for a man on foot and alone. It would be unthinkable to him that a fugitive could separate himself from his horses. Even if he heard of El Camarero’s attempt to buy horses in Durango, he would not guess that he had been without any. Seven horses were better than three.
Manuel no longer dared to call at any house for food nor to be seen by any human eye. Walking steadily through the night along a mule track that led up into the hills, he had put fifteen miles between himself and El Salto by dawn. He slept through the forenoon in the long grass at the bottom of a canyon and then set forth on the last and hardest stage of his journey. His only possessions were his passport, his two gold pieces, a petrol tin of water slung on his back, and some silver. The latter he distributed at rare intervals along the route when he found something to steal, leaving the price of a chicken, eggs, a kid or a pile of tortillas where it would easily be found. He knew that hospitality would be freely offered if he were to ask for it, and thus it was a point of honour to pay for what he took.
The Third Hour Page 6