"Mebbe you'll be interested in knowin' what I think right now," he said. "It's this: you've got a bad case of swelled head. You're one of them kind of female critters which want to run things their own way. You're—"
Her laugh interrupted him. "We won't argue that again, if you please. If you remember, you had something to say on that subject last night, and I want you to know that I haven't the slightest desire to hear your opinion of me. Won't you sit down?" She invited again, motioning to a chair beside the table, opposite hers. "If you absolutely refuse to eat, I presume there is no help for it, though even if you had dinner in Lazette you must be hungry now, for a ride of twenty miles is a strict guarantee of appetite. Please sit down. There is something I want to give you, something your father left for you. He told me to have you read it as soon as you came."
She stood motionless until Calumet left the door and seated himself in the chair beside the table, and then she went out of the room; he could hear her steps on the stairs. She returned quickly and laid a bulky envelope on the table beside him.
"Here it is," she said.
As Calumet took up the envelope and tore it open she dropped into the other chair, took up her book, opened it, and settled herself to read. Calumet watched her covertly for a moment, and then gave his attention to the contents of the envelope.
There were a number of sheets of paper on which Calumet recognized his father's handwriting.
"MY SON:—Feeling that I am about to die, it is my desire to do what I can toward setting things right between us. Betty Clayton will tell you that I have repented of my treatment of you, but she cannot tell you how deep is the realization of the injury I have done you through my inhuman attitude toward you. I fear that I have ruined your character and that it may be too late to save you from those passions which, if not checked, will spoil your life.
"I know that children sometimes inherit the evil that has abided with their parents, and I am certain that you have inherited mine, because while you stayed at home I saw many evidences of it, aye, I used to delight in its manifestation. Toward the end of your stay at home I grew to hate you. But it was because of that woman. If ever there was an evil spirit in the guise of a human being, it was she. She—well, you will learn more of her later.
"I am going to try at this late day to repair the damage I did you. I have come to the conclusion that the surest way to do this is to force you to give me in death that respect and veneration which you refused me while I lived. You see that, in spite of my boasted repentance, I still have left a spark of satanic irony, and I do not expect you to believe me when I tell you that I have planned this for your own good. But it seems to me that if you can exhibit respect for the one who is directly responsible for your cursed passions you will be able to govern them on all occasions. That is my conviction, and if you do not agree with me there is no hope for you.
"Betty Clayton will tell you the conditions, and she will be your judge. I believe in Betty, and if you do not see that she is a true-blue girl you are more of a fool than I think you are."
At this point Calumet glanced sidelong at Betty, but she seemed engrossed in her book, and he resumed reading.
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"That is all I have to say on that subject. You will have to look to Betty for additions. By this time, if she has carried out my wishes, she has told you what you may expect. I have told her the story which I am going to tell you, and I am certain that when you have finished it you will see that I am not entirely to blame. You will see, too, what havoc Tom Taggart has wrought in my life; why he has tried many times to kill me. Calumet, beware of the Taggarts! For the last five years they have been a constant menace to me; I have been forced to be on my guard against them day and night. They have hounded me, induced my men to betray me. In five years I have not slept soundly because of them. But I have foiled them. I am dying now, and that which they seek will be hidden until you fulfill the conditions which I impose on you. I know you are coming home—I can feel it—and I know that when you read what is to follow you will be eager to square my account with Tom Taggart.
"Before going any further, before you read my story, I want you to know that the cursed virago whom you saw buried in the cottonwood was not your real mother. Your mother died giving you birth, and her body lies in a quiet spot beside the Rio Pecos, at Twin Pine crossing, about ten miles north of the Texas border. God rest her."
Again Calumet glanced at Betty. She was reading, apparently unconscious of him, and without disturbing her Calumet laid down the finished page and took up another.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TOLTEC IDOL
"I was twenty-five when your mother died," this page began. "I had a little ranch in the Pecos valley near Twin Pine crossing, and I had just begun to taste prosperity. After your mother died things began to go wrong. It didn't take me long to conclude that she had been responsible for what success I had had, and that without her I couldn't hope to keep things together. I didn't try very hard; I'll admit that. I just gradually let go all holds and began to slip—began to drift back into the sort of company I'd kept before I met your mother. They were not bad fellows, you understand—just the rakehelly, reckless sort that keep hanging on to the edge of things and making a living by their wits. I'd come West without any definite idea of what I wanted to do, and I fell in with these men naturally and easily, because they were of my type.
"I had three intimates among them—a tall, clean-limbed fellow with the bluest and steadiest eyes I ever saw in a man, who called himself 'Nebraska'; a rangy Texan named Quint Taylor, who maintained that manual labor was a curse and quoted the Scriptures to prove it; and Tom Taggart. Tom and I were thick. I liked him, and he'd done things for me that seemed to prove that he thought a lot of me. He didn't like it a little bit when I married your mother—her name was Mary Lannon, and I'd got acquainted with her while riding for a few months for her father, who owned a ranch near Eagle Pass, close to the Rio Grande. She was white, boy, and so were her folks, and you can be proud of her. And if she had lived you could be proud of me—she'd have kept on making me a man.
"Taggart didn't like the idea of me getting hooked up. He didn't want to break up the old associations. He and the others hung around for a year, waiting for something to turn up, and when your mother died it wasn't long before I was back with them. I left you in care of Jane Connor—her husband, Dave, owned the Diamond Dot ranch, which adjoined mine.
"During the year the boys had been knocking around without me they'd fallen in with an Indian from Yucatan, from the tribe called the Toltecs. This Indian called himself Queza—he'd been exiled because he was too lazy to work. The boys got him drunk one night, and he blabbed everything he knew about his tribe—how rich it was; how they'd discovered a diamond mine, and that gold was so common that they used it to make household ornaments. His story got the boys excited and they pumped him dry. They found out where his tribe lived, how to get there, and all that.
"Queza told them that the diamonds wouldn't be hard to get, that there were altar idols and ornaments in a big cave which was hollowed out of the face of a rock cliff, and that there was a bridge over to it, and that the cave wasn't guarded because the tribe had a superstitious fear of the priests who had charge of the idols and things, and that the people didn't care for gold and diamonds, anyway, because they were so common.
"The boys had got all this out of Queza about a month before I sold out and joined them, and they'd rustled some money somewhere, and had everything fixed up to go to Yucatan to bring home some of that gold and diamonds. They wanted me to go along. I was in that frame of mind in which I didn't care much about what happened to me, and they didn't have to argue long. We dropped down the Rio Grande to a little place on the Gulf coast near where Brownsville is now. We bought a little boat from a fisherman—she wasn't more than thirty feet long and didn't look like she could stand much weather; but Nebraska, who'd told us that he'd done a little sailing on the California coast when he was a lot you
nger than he was then, said she'd stand anything we was likely to get in the Gulf. So we stocked her with provisions and water to last a month or so, and Nebraska pointed her nose toward Yucatan.
"I didn't think then what a rank job it was that we were going to do, but it won't do me any harm in your eyes to say that after we'd got started and I began to realize what it all meant, I was ashamed. I felt like a sneak and a coward all through the deal, but I couldn't back out after I'd started, and so I went through with it.
"We run into a spell of bad weather and had to hug the coast mighty close, and it was two weeks before we pulled into Campeche Bay, on the northwest coast of Yucatan. We worked the boat about half a mile up a little creek four or five miles south of Campeche, and worked half a day hiding her, so that she'd be there when we got back. Then, taking what grub was left, we struck out for the interior. It won't be any use telling you about that journey—you couldn't imagine, and I couldn't begin to tell you, what a miserable, slow, tortuous affair it was. It gets hot in New Mexico, but we got a taste of hell in that Yucatan jungle. That country wasn't built for a white man.
"So I'm not going to try to tell you about the trip. We were tough and eager, and we stuck it out, traveling mostly by night, setting our course by the stars, about which I knew something. But we were a week going a hundred miles, and we were beginning to get into that frame of mind where we were noticing one another's faults and getting not a bit backward in talking about them, when one night at dusk we got a glimpse of the place we were looking for.
"Queza had called the place a town, and maybe that name fits it as well as another. It made me dizzy to look at it. We'd been climbing the slope of a mountain all afternoon—traveling in the daytime now, because we were getting near the end of our journey—Nebraska in the lead, the rest trailing him. We saw Nebraska stop and duck back into some brush. Then we all sneaked up to him and got our first look at the town.
"It looked to me as though the place had been made to hide in. The mountain dropped away below us, straight down about a hundred feet, a smooth rock wall. Another wall of rock joined it on the right, making a big L. There was a level that began at the two walls and extended both ways for probably half a mile, until it met the slope of the other side of the mountain. It was nothing but two shoulders, joined, on the top of the mountain.
"Just below us there was a break in the level—a wide gash about fifty feet across, so deep that we couldn't see the bottom. There was a ledge on our side about three or four feet wide, and a bridge stretched from it across the canyon. We decided that the bridge was the one Queza had told the boys about—it led to the cave where the treasure was kept. We laid there for an hour, watching. The buildings were all huddled together—a lot of flat, brown adobe houses. We could see the natives moving down among them, but none of us noticed anything unusual going on until Taggart calls our attention.
"'Did you notice?' he said.
"'Notice what?' we all answered.
"'That they're all women down there—I ain't seen a man!'
"That was a fact. There didn't seem to be a man anywhere about. We talked it over and concluded that we'd got there at a most advantageous time. We decided that the men were away, on a hunt, most probably, and after we'd watched a while longer we decided that we'd sneak down some way and go after the treasure about midnight. We figured they'd all be sleeping about that time. After dark they lit fires and sat around them.
"We watched until about eleven—until we saw that nearly all the fires had gone out—and then we sneaked down the slope of the mountain. We didn't make any noise; we were silent and slippery as ghosts as we made our way through the timber on the slope. It was slow work, though; the woods were full of tangled vines and prickly bushes, and we got clawed up considerable and had all we could do to keep from cussing out loud when a thorn or something would rip a cheek open. It was blacker than any night I've ever seen before or since; we couldn't see a foot ahead, and the sounds we heard in the woods didn't make us feel any too comfortable, for all we'd got used to living in the open. We knew, of course, that the sounds came from birds and bats and moths and such, but when a man is out on a job like that his nerves are not what they are at other times—every sound seems unusual and magnified. I didn't like so much silence from the village down below us—it seemed too quiet; and it appeared to me that the noises we heard in the woods were most too continuous to be caused by only us four. We went in single file, one man almost touching the other, to be sure we'd all stay together. I'd hear a bird go whizzing away at a distance, and it appeared to me that there was no call for it to light out with us two or three hundred feet away from it; and then there were queer noises which I couldn't just place as coming from birds. I don't know why I noticed these things, but I did, just the same, though I didn't say anything to the other boys, because they'd probably thought I was losing my nerve. And, besides, there wasn't time to talk.
"It took us more than an hour to reach the level where the village was, and it was long after midnight when we, keeping in the shadow of the cliff, started toward the bridge over the canyon, which led to the cave where we thought we'd find the treasure.
"We'd got pretty near the bridge, Taggart and me in the lead, Nebraska and Taylor stringing along behind, when I heard a sudden scuffling and looked around. It wasn't so dark on the level as it had been in the woods, and I saw a dozen dark figures grouped around Nebraska and Taylor. The dark figures were all about us, and more were coming from the huts, all yelling like devils. And they were men, too; they'd been hiding in the huts; they'd discovered us the day before and suspected what we came for. I found that out later.
"Well, for a few minutes there was plenty of excitement. Taylor and Nebraska had got pretty well behind us, and the Toltecs had cut them off. Taggart showed yellow. I started back to help Nebraska and Taylor, who had their knives out—I could see them shining—when Taggart grabbed me.
"'Let's run for the bridge, you fool!' he said. 'It's every man for himself now!'
"While I was scuffling with Taggart, trying to get away from him and get back to the boys, a figure detached itself from the bunch around them and came flying toward us. It was a woman, I could see that in an instant. Taggart saw her coming, too; he must have known it was a woman, but he pulled out his knife, and when she came close enough to us he drove at her with it. He missed her because I shoved him away. He fell, and, while he was on the ground, the woman—or girl, because she wasn't more than eighteen or nineteen—grabbed me by the arm and jabbered to me in Spanish, of which I'd learned a little.
"'They're going to kill all of you!' she said. 'They've been watching you for two days. They left me to watch you yesterday. I don't want them to kill you—I like you! Come!'
"She pulled at me, trying to drag me toward the bridge. I didn't have any objections to her liking me as much as she pleased, for she was a beauty—I found that out afterward, of course; but though I couldn't see her face very well just them, I liked her voice and knew she must be good to look at. But I didn't like the idea of leaving the other boys, and told her so.
"'You'll all be killed, anyway,' she said, all excited. 'They might as well die now as later. They'll kill you, too, if you go back!'
"That was logic, all right, but I'd have gone back anyway if I hadn't heard Nebraska and Taylor working their guns just then. The Toltecs broke and scattered—some of them. Three or four of them couldn't after the boys began to shoot. Soon as the Toltecs broke away a little, Nebraska and Taylor made for where we stood. I saw them coming and told the girl to lead us. The three of us—the girl, Taggart, and me—got to the bridge, which was a light, flimsy, narrow affair made of two long, straight saplings lashed together with vines, with a couple of strips of bark for a bottom—and crossed it. Then we stood on the ledge in front of the mouth of the cave, watching Nebraska and Taylor. They were coming for all they were worth, shooting as they ran and keeping the bunch of Toltecs at a respectable distance, though the Toltecs were running
parallel with them, trying to bring them down with arrows.
"Nebraska and Taylor made the bridge. They had got about half way over when a dozen or so of the Toltecs threw themselves at the end of the bridge which rested on the village side of the canyon, grabbed hold of it, and pulled it off the ledge on our side. I yelled to the boys and jumped for the end of the bridge. But I was too late. The bridge balanced for an instant, and then the end on which the boys were standing started to sink. Nebraska saw what was coming, off and jumped for the ledge on which we were standing. He missed it by five feet. There wasn't a sound from his lips as he shot down into the awful blackness of the canyon. I got sick and dizzy, but not so sick that I couldn't see what was happening to Taylor. Taylor didn't jump for the ledge. He turned like a cat and grabbed a rail of the bridge, trying to climb back to the level. He'd have made it, too, but the Toltecs wouldn't let him. They jabbed at him with their spears and arrows and threw knives at him. One of the knives struck him in the shoulder, and when I heard him scream I pulled my guns and began to shoot across the canyon. I hadn't thought of it before; there are times when a man's brain refuses to work like he'd like to have it. But the Toltecs didn't mind the shooting a little bit.
"Three or four of them got hit and backed away from the edge of the canyon, but there were enough others to do what they were trying to do, and they did it. I stood there, helpless, and saw them shove Taylor off the bridge with their spears. When he finally let go and went turning over and over down into the black hole, my whole insides fanned up into my throat. That sensation has never left me; I wake up nights seeing Taylor as he let go of the bridge, watching him sink, tumbling over and over into that black gash, and I get sick and dizzy just as I did that night.
The Boss of the Lazy Y Page 6