A minute later its frantic hoofs were beating a muffled, mad roar on the road. Raking its sides were the cruel claws of diamond-studded spurs. On its back was a growling fiend in a purple sombrero—a fiend with a boy’s sulky face.
The sputtering Englishman darted from the verandah. He took several leaps in pursuit before he realized their futility. His face was apoplectic when he turned again to the verandah and sputtered:
“My horse!”
Fierro might have been pleased at the hysterical laugh that greeted the Englishman’s outraged announcement.
The horse, its sides quivering under stripes of oozing blood, tottered when Fierro lurched out of the saddle back at the cuartel militar. The sentry remembered the smile that had etched the mustachios against Fierro’s teeth. He did not pause to wonder at the black mask of passions on his capitan’s face now. Nor did he challenge him or salute as a sentry should. He took cover behind a plant called Spanish dagger.
Inside the building, Fierro’s voice rumbled orders. He was calling for his favorites among the fire-tested golden ones—Don Pancho’s own bodyguard of dorados.
Cursed foreigners! A savage flow of epithets, swift and yet fiercely musical as rapid waters coursing over rocks. Offspring of long-barren mothers! And notoriously emasculated fathers! They would learn a lesson. An insult to Fierro the Butcher!
The dorados were hugely pleased. In the cobbled courtyard they tightened cinches on saddles always kept on the sore backs of their despondent mounts. They dared to smile as Fierro shouted commands. His own black beast was biting at the arm of the soldier cinching Fierro’s great saddle of brown and cream leather. The saddle with shining silver conchos—and the mirrored pommel. Fierro smashed the horse across the muzzle with his open palm.
Coyote-hearted foreigners! Hungry vultures dipping bloody beaks into the quivering body of Mexico. They called themselves brave because they stayed in the bandit country. They were not brave. They only valued gold more than their lives—their thievings more than the honor of their wives. The world would soon see how brave they were——
Twenty of the wildest dorados were in the saddle. Grinning dare-devils whose character was written in the fact that they were trusted by Don Pancho.
Fierro mounted and spun his black horse to the head of the waiting riders. The saddle sparkled like a gypsy’s shawl in which bits of looking-glass have been set. Fierro’s spurs rolled along the ribs of his horse. It sprang into a frantic run. With a shout the dorados followed. They pivoted wildly into the street.
A street sweeper with a huge broom of branches scampered for cover. An old man in a lavender and yellow sarape lost his sombrero flattening against the blue plaster of a cantina wall. Three young men cried “Viva Fierro!” in apprehensive enthusiasm. Chickens made scissor-legged jumps over the dusty road at the market place.
The famous band of the rebel chief, giving its afternoon concert, continued to play—it was the cavalier song from “The Merry Widow”—as Fierro and his riders clattered by the modern federal building. The musicians were not especially surprised. Mexican troops always maneuver at a gallop.
Fierro looked straight ahead. Half-consciously he gazed into the pommel mirror. Still he cursed. Unbelievable swine of foreigners! They were the ones who made slaves of the peons. They made all the trouble. They pretended to be friendly to Fierro’s chief. Before he took the town they were friendly with the whipped federalistas. The chances were that they were friendly now——
The dorados passed the salmon pink mission. The hoofs brought a terror along rows of adobe houses plastered with blue and pink and green. Women watched from behind the slim bars of long windows.
The dorados followed Fierro without curiosity. Good soldiers. All they wanted was action. They were heartily content with Fierro’s mood.
Out of the city, Fierro drew his horse down to a walk. The dorados followed his example. They smiled at Fierro’s mutterings. They made broad jokes to each other. Fierro frowned at their levity. But he spoke no rebuke. Each dorado was a potential Fierro himself. Other traditions were in the saddle behind Don Pancho’s executioner. Their pistol repartee was known.
It was half an hour before sundown when another gallop took them to the edge of a little lake. Beyond the horizon of hills were mines owned by a foreign syndicate. The dorados began to sense the object of their ride. A swift raid. Rich loot. A little shooting. They were eager.
Fierro’s horse shied at the edge of the water.
“It’s better to go around, my capitan,” called one of the first rank. “There is a spring. It is said that it has no bottom.”
“Fierro never goes around,” said the Butcher, darkly. “Is Fierro a wet child to be told what to do? Is Fierro afraid of a jar of water spilled on the ground? Fierro will ride through the lake.”
Fierro sank his spurs. The horse reared and floundered into the water. It moved forward.
It wasn’t really a lake at all. Not more than a good-sized pond. Its edge could be followed with the eye. The dorados ran their horses around this edge. They were waiting as Fierro neared the shore.
As Fierro crossed, his horse never was off its feet. The water at its deepest was a full hand’s-span from the withers. Fierro stubbornly refused to draw up his legs and rode with them in the water.
His head was up proudly as he approached the waiting dorados. They would know now that Fierro never went around.
The black horse slipped. He fought for his footing. Fierro instinctively slung himself from the saddle. As he struck the water he felt the strong tug of the gold in his money belt. He clutched wildly and caught the black horse’s tail. The horse scrambled to shore, dragging Fierro with him.
The joke distinctly was on Fierro. The dorados rocked with laughter. Fierro’s teeth were chattering as the sundown scout of the hill breeze felt of his wet leather clothes.
He was mad with his emotions. The second insult in a day. The second affront to Fierro the Butcher! Fierro’s aggrieved tradition climbed into the saddle of brown and cream leather.
“Fierro never goes around,” jeered one of the dorados.
“No, Fierro is very brave,” took up another. “He goes straight in and comes straight out—holding on the tail of his horse.”
There was another pleasantry having to do with the horse’s hindquarters.
Fierro’s wet leathers rubbed into the saddle. The money belt was a dead, heavy weight inside his striped silk shirt. In the water it had dragged at him with the grip of drowning hands. The memory of the murderous tug was not lost in the fog of his fury.
Fierro tried to steady himself. One hand felt for the diamond in his neckerchief. The other polished the drops from the mirror set in the pommel. He dragged his horse’s head around and started to circle back around the lake.
“Wait here for me!” he ordered. The dorados, realizing that he was going to make a second stubborn crossing, had no desire to delay further the promised action.
“It is a poor jest, my capitan!” cried one of the jokers. “There is no use tempting the buen Dios!”
“Or the devil who owns the bottomless spring,” another called.
“You will see,” shouted Fierro. “If Fierro finds the spring he will bring the devil up to see his sons.”
He made the soggy ride around the lake’s edge. The money belt was very heavy in the water. So were his revolver and the ammunition belts criss-crossed at his waist and over his chest. He must not leave the horse’s back again.
At the very spot where he had entered before, he sent his tuckered mount into the water. From the far shore the dorados watched.
Fierro’s purple sombrero was set at its jauntiest angle. He rode with the elaborate unconcern of a man riding in a parade. He reached the center of the lake. His hand lifted to curl the fierce mustachios that his rare smile had etched against his teeth. His eye sought the mirror in the pommel.
With the gesture he was gone.
The watchers on shore stared. They turned to
each other in unbelief.
“Where did he go——?”
“The spring——!”
“It has no bottom——!”
“There is a devil there——!”
“With that gold weighing him down——!”
“And his cartridge belts——!”
Fierro never came up. Neither did the tired black horse who carried the mirrored saddle.
Everybody who knew Fierro the Butcher was sorry to learn that he had died that way. Most of them had hoped, somehow, for an end more fitting the Fierro career.
If it is true that drowning men’s lives are reviewed by their memories as they die, Fierro should have had a tortured time of it, at that. Or perhaps he enjoyed the spectacle his memory brought. Fierro the Butcher was that way.
But even in the final review it is almost certain that Fierro did not appreciate the reason for the failure of his delightful joke about the goat.
Young McLaughlin of the American legion remembered Fierro’s belt of gold that anchored the executioner. And the diamonds. Fierro would be rich salvage. McLaughlin spent three days diving for the body. He took pneumonia as a result and came close to dying.
JUDAS AND THE FIRING SQUAD
Word came from Mexico City that young Coronel Orñelas was spending his Judas gold there. In the gayest, gilded places of the capital the youthful traitor was slaking the thirst that had come in the long desert campaigning. It was the thirst for wild comfort and mad rest—the thirst for wine and women and living.
Orñelas, with ten thousand pesos gold, had reached the city after flight from the camp of his chief. He had bought a new sombrero. It was of white felt with a chaste border of gold along its brim. It had cost 250 pesos. He had bought expensive boots of patent leather. And a suit of clothes, such as men wear in cities, had replaced his brave leather garments. A silk shirt with wide blue and white stripes. A diamond and ruby ring on his brown hand.
Different women every night. Orchestras playing pieces ordered by the wealthy young coronel. Dancers flinging themselves into stirring temptations for the fancy of Orñelas. Sleek companions drinking his health—a million healths, as they say in Mexico—in his wine——
On the March Near Parral
Word of all this came out of Mexico City. And it went, swift and shadowy as the flight of a coyote, to the camp in Santa Clara cañon. There Don Pancho, and all that remained alive and faithful of his whipped army, were licking their wounds and sharpening their claws.
It is like that in Mexico. Such word travels fast. And surely reaches the ears of those most eager to hear. The spy gives himself to his work with a keen relish for its melodrama. He is an actor in plottings that a scenario writer might hesitate to scribble——
There was a night when Ciudad Chihuahua was considered firmly under federalista control. The city was guarded by soldier patrols. Cavalry and infantry. Everybody off the streets by ten o’clock or shot without the formality of a sentry’s challenge. And yet the sun, in its brilliant morning robe, found the outside of houses and cantinas and the federal building itself decorated with posters demanding death for the federalista president and all his tribe.
There was the killing of a handful of gringos near San Elizabeta. When Don Pancho was supposed to be fifty miles away. That was an international sensation. In the republic to the north it was held up as horrible proof of Mexican treachery. No one recorded—though they knew it well enough in El Paso—how the leader of the gringos had boasted what he would do to Don Pancho if he ever faced him. Friends had advised him not to go into Mexico after his liquorish threats. He laughed in the unafraid way of the gringo hero in books. The bullet struck his back and he fell forward because he was running when it struck.
The regrettable habit of many gringos is to refuse to play the game according to the rules of the country they are in. They insist stubbornly that things be done as they are done in the home precinct.
There was the elaborate kidnapping of Señorita Inéz, after her wealthy father had hired a small army of his own to guard his household
Excellent deeds done in the dark. Pearls of espionage and assassination. Justice and outrage tumbling out of the dice box. What would the throw be? Quien sabe? Who knows?
Back of them all were the spies. Some of them looked like spies and could be spotted as far away as one can see a city detective. Or the secret service guards of a president. With a difference in manner, though. And some of them, the real ones, remained always in the shadow——
The best of these spies were in the service of Don Pancho. They told him, in his mountain camp, of Coronel Orñelas. The white sombrero that cost 250 pesos. The striped silk shirt and the ring of rubies and diamonds. The women and the wine—
Don Pancho listened. He nodded. There was no show of emotion. Only into his little, wrinkled, bloodshot eyes came a film of yellow. There were greater events than the defection of Coronel Orñelas. Don Pancho fought for his life. All of his cunning was needed to outwit the slower but more powerful foe.
But Orñelas would not escape. The white and gold sombrero would cost him something more than 250 pesos.
The dorados understood. They wondered when the fate of Orñelas, clearly written, would catch up with him. The Mexican does not forget an injury any more than he forgets an act of friendship.
The dorados sorrowed for Coronel Orñelas. He had been through hard campaigns without complaint. He had ridden into bloody raids knee to knee with the best of them.
His service had won the confidence of Don Pancho. Into his hands the rebel chief had given ten thousand pesos gold. It was to be guarded for an emergency. The emergency came. One of Don Pancho’s spectacular attacks had galloped into an improper climax. He gave battle after a long ride. His army was beaten. It had no legs on which to retreat.
The famed dorados, shot to pieces, retired around their chief. They led the survivors back into Santa Clara cañon. There, Don Pancho had often boasted, he could hide an army from pursuit. He made good his boast now. But it wasn’t so hard to hide what was left of Don Pancho’s army.
There was a council of war. Don Pancho sent for Coronel Orñelas. Orñelas did not appear. Nor was there any trace of the ten thousand pesos gold.
“I trusted Orñelas,” said Don Pancho. And turned to the affairs of the war council.
The days that followed were desperate. Never had Don Pancho been so close to extermination——
Word came from Mexico City——
Young Coronel Orñelas must have forgotten the stubborn will of the chief he had betrayed. In the glaring lights of the city he must have forgotten lessons he learned in the glaring light of the desert. Some said it was a girl in El Paso; a girl with yellow hair.
Whatever it was, Orñelas decided to go back to the border. Which meant a railroad trip. The railroad went through Don Pancho’s own territory, the Laguna district on which Santa Clara cañon opens its stone jaws.
Orñelas had spies, too. One of them was a German with the air of an unter-offizier. Along his throat and behind his ear swelled a sinister vein. This German also served Don Pancho.
Orñelas forgot to be suspicious. He had been toasted too often. The world had been running exclusively for him too many weeks. Besides, he was told that Don Pancho was bottled up in Santa Clara cañon and ninety miles away, by horse, from Laguna station.
Orñelas started. With him went the German. Orñelas wore the white sombrero and the patent leather boots. Orñelas with his youthful, smiling face, became popular among the passengers. He made the train laugh with his light-hearted jokes. He bought sweets for the children. He spoke gallantries to the señoritas. He drank with the men.
He was especially gay the morning the train left Chihuahua Ciudad for the run to Juarez and the border. Before the train started the German with the unter-offizier’s manner had told him that Don Pancho was still besieged in Santa Clara. One report, indeed, was that he had been captured and was being brought to Chihuahua for execution. At any rate
, he would not dare, even if he could evade the army surrounding him, to appear at the Laguna station. There was a heavy federalista guard there.
Orñelas was making some especially worthy jokes when the train pulled up suddenly at Laguna. He knew at once what it was. Orñelas disappeared.
The passengers twisted curious heads from the windows. Piled across the tracks was a breastwork of ties. Beside it, two silent men sat their horses with ready rifles. On a little rise of ground to the west were a dozen other horsemen.
“Don Pancho!” cried the passengers.
All but one of the horsemen on the rise brought their horses on the run to the train. They dismounted and boarded the cars. They found Orñelas hidden in a lavatory. Two of them marched him off the train.
The solitary horseman on the rise rode slowly to the train. The past few weeks had left their mark on Don Pancho. He was thin. Under his screwed-up eyes were mournful hollows such as come on the face of a man ridden by fever. He was unshaven. The brim of his sombrero flopped dejectedly. Dust powdered his shoulders and the creases of his coat. His collarless shirt was ripped from belt to neck band. One of his leggings had been mended with rawhide. He reeked of a camp that is far from water.
Very deliberately he dismounted and walked to where Orñelas was. Orñelas tried to hold his chin up. Don Pancho looked at him steadily; as if in contemplative sympathy.
“Orñelas, the man I trusted,” he said, loudly enough for the passengers to hear him. They repeated the words from window to window.
“You know what must happen, Orñelas?” said Don Pancho.
“Yes, my general,” responded Orñelas. His face looked very boyish and troubled.
“I am sorry it must be so,” said Don Pancho. “I loved you like a brother. I made a man of you. On long marches you were at my side and you had a place of honor when fortune was good to me.”
Orñelas’ chin started to quiver under the deliberate oratorical effort of his old chief. For all the world like the nose of a rabbit sniffling a cabbage leaf. He swayed a little.
“Is it not strange how fortune plays?” Don Pancho went on. “Here are you, who betrayed me. In a sombrero that costs 250 pesos. In stylish clothes. Patent leather boots. And a silk shirt. With diamonds on your hands. And here am I, Don Pancho, your general, sick and in rags. Is it not sad, Orñelas?”
The Little Tigress: Tales out of the Dust of Old Mexico Page 3