“You are just in time,” said Mead, “and I’m mighty glad. I’ll have to ask you to sit on this man’s chest and hold him down while I tie him fast to that mesquite.”
Marguerite sat down on the Mexican’s breast while Mead tied his wrists tightly together and then began fastening them to the stocky stem of the bush beside which he had fallen. Antone struggled and tried to throw her off, and Mead said:
“I think, Miss Delarue, you’d better put your thumbs on his windpipe and press a little, just to keep him from fighting too hard. We’ve got no time to waste on him.”
Marguerite gasped and hesitated, but her eye fell on little Paul’s unconscious figure, and she did as he asked her.
“There,” said Mead. “Now get up and jump quickly away.”
The prostrate Mexican struggled and rolled about, but he could not rise. Marguerite ran to the child and with her ear to his breast she called to Mead.
“His heart is beating! He is still alive!”
Mead caught Antone’s horse, and with Marguerite behind him and the child on one arm started off on the gallop. A long, straggling line of searchers stretched across the mesa, the nearest at least four miles away. As Mead came nearer he dropped the bridle on the horse’s neck and waved his hat and shouted again and again. At last he attracted the attention of the nearest ones, and two or three came running toward him. “Water! Water!” he called, at the top of his voice. They understood, and one ran back to the nearest horseman, who galloped off to a group of people still farther away.
Almost instantly the great throng, like a huge organism, animated by one thought, started off across the mesa toward the galloping horse, every atom in it moved by the single purpose to reach at once the new-found babe. Two horses in front of the hastening multitude ran at their topmost speed and distanced all the others. One carried Pierre Delarue and the other Doctor Long, and behind them came horsemen, carts, carriages and people on foot, all rushing to the one point.
The physician administered such restoratives as he had with him and brought the boy back to consciousness. Then, in the shade of a canopy phaeton, he carried the child home in his arms, while Marguerite and her father and Emerson Mead followed in another carriage, and all the crowd came pouring along after them.
But there were four men who stayed behind. Joe Davis and John Daniels and two others, all in perfect accord and friendliness, went back to find Antone Colorow. They had listened to Mead’s hastily told story of how Antone had attacked and delayed him. Daniels and Davis had looked at each other with a single significant glance and the one remark, “We’d better attend to him!” And then they had taken the other two men and started back.
They found Antone Colorow still struggling, rolling and kicking on the ground. His lips were stained with the blood his own teeth had drawn, and his red beard was flecked with foam. They untied him, and he sprang to his feet and would have darted away, intent on his one purpose to kill the enemy who had escaped his vengeance, had not quick hands seized him. They tied his arms behind him and set him astride his own horse, and then, surrounding him, with their revolvers drawn, they rode away to the southwest, leaving Las Plumas far to their right. On to the river bottom they went, and into a bosque where the cottonwoods and the sycamores grew thickly and the willow underbrush was dense.
Long afterward a river ranchman, hunting a lost cow, penetrated the bosque and started back in sudden fright from a dangling, decaying body that hung from a sycamore limb.
Pierre Delarue insisted that Emerson Mead should come into his house for some wine and wait until they should know the worst or the best concerning little Paul. He sat alone in the room where first he had seen Marguerite, his anxiety about the child driven quite out of his mind by the thought that the long hours alone with her, out on the hills, their hearts and minds united in a common purpose, had come to an end, that she was soon to be another man’s wife, and that he would never see her again. After a time the door opened and she came toward him, smiling gladly. The color had come back to her cheeks and her eyes were bright, though there were still dark rings around them, and her face told of the weariness her brain had not yet recognized. So absorbed had she been in giving the physician assistance and carrying out his directions that she had not thought of her appearance. Her white dress, which yesterday had been fresh and dainty, was in tatters and bedraggled strings, and her hair hung down her back in a disheveled mass. But she came shining down upon Mead’s dark thoughts, fresh and beautiful and glorious beyond compare. He did not remember rising, but presently he knew that he was on his feet and that she was standing in front of him. He did not even hear her say, “Doctor Long says my little Bye-Bye will live and that there will probably be no serious results.”
Then she saw that he was trembling from head to foot, shaking as do the leaves of a cottonwood tree in a west wind, and she drew back in alarm, looking at him anxiously.
“What is the—” she began, but the look in his eyes stopped her tongue and held her gaze, while she felt her breath come hard and her heart beat like a triphammer. For an instant there was silence. Then Marguerite heard in a whisper so soft that it barely reached her ears, “I love you! I love you!” It was the loosing of the floods, and at once their arms were about each other. But in a second he remembered that she was to be another man’s wife, and the thought came over him like the drawing down of the black cap over the head of a condemned man. With a fierce girding of his will he put both his hands upon her shoulders and drew back.
“I forgot! Forgive me!” The words came in a groan from his lips. “I forgot you’re going to be his wife!”
“Whose?” said Marguerite, stepping back. For the instant she had forgotten there was any other man in the world.
“Why, Wellesly’s!”
“Indeed, I am not!” That one second in Mead’s embrace had settled Marguerite’s long-vexed problem, and she felt her mind grow full of sudden wonder that it had ever troubled her. “He wanted me to marry him, but I’m not going to do it!”
Again their arms were about each other, their lips met, and her head was pillowed on his shoulder. Then he remembered the fate that was hanging over him, and he said bitterly:
“I’ve no right to ask you to be my wife, for in another week I’ll probably be convicted of murder and sentenced to be hung, or sent to the penitentiary for life.”
From the yard came the sound of Pierre Delarue’s voice speaking to the crowd. She took Mead’s hands in hers and swung a little away from him, looking into his face.
“I know that you didn’t kill Will Whittaker!”
“How do you know it?” he answered, looking at her in loving surprise.
“Because he was shot in the back!”
She felt herself swept into the sudden storm of a masterful embrace, and with soft laughter yielded to his rapturous caresses. “And all this time,” came to her ear in a whisper, “I’ve cared about it only because I thought you would believe me guilty even if I was cleared!
“But I’ve no proof of my innocence,” he added presently, “and I can’t ask your father’s consent, or allow your name to be mentioned with mine in the town’s gossip until my own is clear. I’ve no right even to ask you for another kiss until—”
She closed his lips with the kiss he would not ask for, and said:
“I would just as lief go out there now and say to all that crowd that I love you and know that you are innocent—”
“No, no!” he broke in upon her passionate protestation. “No one shall couple your name with mine and pity you while they are doing it! The penitentiary may be my fate, for the rest of my life, but its shadow shall not touch yours. If I can clear myself of this charge I will come and ask you to be my wife, and openly ask your father’s consent. If I can’t—” He turned and looked out of the window, but instead of the trees and flowers that were there, he saw a big, grim building with a high stone wall all around it and armed guards on the bastions. Outside they heard the crowd calling for
him. She understood his feeling, and taking his face between her palms she kissed his lips, whispering, “We will wait,” and hurried from the room.
The crowd massed itself around the house, squatting on the sidewalk, perching on the fence, and filling the waiting vehicles, until Pierre came out and announced that the physician said little Paul would recover and would probably be none the worse for his experience. Everybody shouted “hurrah!” and somebody yelled, “three cheers for Frenchy!” The cheers were given, and Pierre stepped out on the sidewalk and began thanking them all for the kindness and sympathy they had shown and for their willing efforts to help him in his trouble. Then he launched into rhetorical praises of the country, the climate and the community, and from these turned to enthusiastic commendation of the man who had restored to him his lost child. “Among all the brave and noble men of this favored region,” he exclaimed, “there is none braver, nobler, greater-hearted, more chivalrous, than he who has this day proved himself worthy of all our praises—Emerson Mead!” The crowd cheered loudly and called for Mead. Somebody shouted, “Three cheers for Emerson!” and the whole assemblage, Pierre leading, waved their hats and cheered again and again.
Then there arose a general cry for “Emerson Mead! Emerson Mead!” “Where is Emerson!” “Bring him out, Frenchy!” and Delarue rushed back into the house to find him. When Pierre entered the room which his daughter had just left it occurred to him, vaguely, that Mead looked unusually proud and happy, but as he himself, also, felt happy and proud, and filled with a genial glow over the success of his burst of oratory, it seemed quite proper that every one else should also be elated. So he thought nothing of it and hurried Mead out to the waiting crowd, where everybody, Democrats and Republicans alike, gathered about him and shook hands and made terse, complimentary remarks, until Jim Halliday presently took him away to his former quarters.
The crowd trailed off down Main street, and Judge Harlin and Colonel Whittaker stood treat together for the entire company, first at the White Horse and then at the Palmleaf saloon. The whistle of the train from the south, two hours late, broke in upon all this friendliness with a harsh reminder. Men suddenly recalled the fact that the mail from the north had come in long ago and had not brought the court order for which they had been waiting. The issues which had set the town at gun muzzles the day before again asserted themselves, and gradually the two factions began to mass, each on its own side of the street. In the midst of this the clerk of the court came out of the post-office with the missing order, which had gone astray in the mails and had just come in on the train from El Paso. Neither Joe Davis nor John Daniels could be found, and it was an hour later when they rode together into the town, coming back from the hanging of Antone Colorow.
Daniels read the official paper through and handed it to Davis. “Well, Joe,” he said, “the court says you are sheriff now, and I reckon there’s no goin’ back of that. I hope the office will bring you better luck than it has me. Let’s have a drink.”
* * *
CHAPTER XXIII
Darkness so dense lay over the Fernandez plain that not the faintest outline of the rimming mountains penetrated its blackness. Like some palpable, suffocating substance it filled the plain and mounted far up into the air, even to the blue-black sky, whence a million gemming stars pierced it with their diamond lances.
Perched alone among the foothills of the Fernandez range, Juan Garcia’s gray adobe house glimmered faintly through the darkness. Every sound about the house was hushed, and only the burro in the jacal down the hillside made known to the silent plain that he was still awake. The door into the portal opened softly, and with a quick, gliding, silent movement a dark figure came hastily out, closed the door, listened a moment, and then trod lightly across the portal and down to the road. There it paused, and Amada Garcia’s face, anxious and wistful, framed in the black folds of her mantilla, looked back at the silent house. A deep, dry sob shook all her frame and she half turned back, as if irresolute. Then she drew from her breast a folded bit of paper, pressed it to her heart and her cheek, and kissed it again and again. She cast another regretful, longing look at the gray adobe house, and started off in the direction of Muletown. The faintly glimmering track of the sandy road opened slowly before her in the darkness, and, drawing her mantilla closely around her shoulders, she walked briskly along the dusty highway.
She kept the folded paper in her hand, pressing it to her lips and cheek with little cooing sounds of love. Once, standing still in the darkness and silence of the wide, black plain, she unfolded the letter and kissed the open sheet. It was too dark for her to see a single word upon the page, but she knew just where were “mi esposa,” and “mi querida,” and “mi corazon.”
That afternoon, as she filled her olla at the spring, a young Mexican came riding by in brave attire of braided jacket and trousers and silver trimmed sombrero. She knew him well. Indeed, she had often bantered back his compliments and adroitly turned to merriment the sweet speeches he would rather have had her take in earnest. He stopped and gave her the letter, which he had brought all the way from the post-office at Muletown solely for excuse to see her. She poised the olla full of water upon her head and he walked up the hill to the house by her side, and while he talked to her mother she slipped stealthily out and hid in the jacal beside the burro for a chance to read the letter. When she returned she showed so plainly that his compliments and sweet speeches were distasteful to her that he sulkily left the house and galloped home again. Then her mother reproved her, telling her that she must not discourage the young man, because he was plainly in earnest in his attentions and would make the best and richest husband of all the young caballeros who came to the house, and that when next she saw him she must make amends for her unkind treatment. Amada listened with terror and rebellion in her heart; and in her brain there sprang into life the purpose which she set out to execute as soon as her father and mother were asleep.
In her pocket she had four dollars which she had saved from the sale of eggs and goat’s-milk cheeses at Muletown, and which she had been carefully keeping for the purpose of buying a new mantilla with a deep, deep silk fringe the next time they should go to Las Plumas to celebrate the fiesta of its patron saint. And under one arm she carried some enchiladas and tamales, left from that night’s supper.
She trudged on through the darkness and silence of the night, and, although she walked briskly, the frosty air now and again sent a shiver of cold through her body and made her draw her mantilla more closely across her chest. The staccato yelping of coyotes down in the plain was answered by short, sharp barks from the hills, and all night long the beasts kept up a running exchange of howls from one to the other side of the road. Sometimes Amada heard the stealthy rustle of the herbage as they neared the highway, or saw the gleaming of their eyes in the darkness. But she knew their cowardly nature too well to be afraid, and when they came too near, a pebble from her hand sent them scurrying away.
Hour after hour she followed the faint glimmer of the dusty road, over the low, rolling hills, across the sloping upland, and down into the edge of the Fernandez plain, steadily leaving behind her the slowly measured miles. At last the east began to glow above the Fernandez mountains and against the golden sky shone the thin, silver-white crescent of the old moon. The blackness of night gradually faded into the gray light of dawn, the sky blushed rosy red, the plain spread itself out before her, flooded with golden red sunlight, and still Amada held to the pace she had kept up all night long. Before her she saw columns of blue smoke rising from the chimneys of Muletown, and she thought longingly of the well in the plaza. But early though it was, she feared to be seen and questioned, for she knew many people in Muletown. So she turned from the main road, leaving the town far to her right, and struck across the trackless plain for the highway running toward the Hermosa mountains. When she reached it the sun was well up in the sky and she sat down on a hillock of sand to rest and eat her breakfast. She was very tired and it seemed go
od to lie still on the warm sand under the warm sun, so she rested there for a long time, thinking at first of the little gray adobe house far back in the foothills and wondering what the two old people would think and what they would do when they should find their one child gone and no trace left to tell them whither or why she had fled. These thoughts would bring the tears to her eyes, then she would open the letter and read it slowly over and over, and kiss the words of love, and, with soft little laughs and cooings, picture to herself her journey’s end.
At last she saw a cloud of dust coming toward her from the direction of Muletown and, reminded of the possibility of being seen and questioned by some one she knew, she got up and hurried on her way. She knew her father and mother would not at once be alarmed over her departure. They would think she had risen early and gone up into the foothills to gather sweet herbs. Even after they should find that she was gone she knew that, in the leisurely fashion of the land and people of mañana, it might be two or three days before they would hitch the horses to the wagon and drive to Muletown to ask if any one there had seen her. But she did not wish to be discovered in her flight by any one whom she knew, and so she hurried on, drawing her mantilla across her face until only her two great black eyes peeped from its folds.
The wagon behind her clattered up and its sole occupant, a middle-aged American, asked her in Spanish if she would like to ride. She hesitated, instinctively fearing speech with any one, and glanced shyly at the Americano, who was smiling down good-naturedly at her from the wagon. The man added that if she were going far she had better ride, for the road across the plain would soon be very hot. She considered that she did not know this man, that he would not know who she was, and thought how much more quickly she could cross that wide plain, so, with a grateful glance of her black eyes and a “muchas gracias, señor,” she climbed up and sat down in the seat beside him. He asked her how far she was going, and she answered, to the other side of the Hermosa mountains. He replied that he was going to his mining camp in the mountains, but that he would drive her to the top of the pass, as the road was rocky and steep up the mountain side. He had some water in a canteen, from which she drank gratefully, and as midday approached, he shared with her his luncheon of bread and cheese, while she divided with him what remained of her tamales and enchiladas.
With Hoops of Steel Page 22