by Max Brand
Her father watched her leave, while Dick crawled to his feet and lay down there, looking humbly up to his new master, thanking him with melting eyes for this kind intervention.
When Catalina got to the door into the house, Señor Mirandos called: “I think you had better stay here, my dear! I have news in this letter that will interest you.”
“I don’t want to hear your news,” Catalina said. “I only know that you hate me.” Her voice choked with self-pity.
“It is about Elena Blanca.”
At that, she whirled about and came running back. “Oh,” cried Catalina, “what has happened? Has my horse been seen again?”
“The mare is caught,” Mirandos said, “and the man who caught her is bringing her here to claim his reward.”
“His reward?” Catalina said. “You will reward him, Father, I know. My beautiful Elena!”
“You forget,” Señor Mirandos said, “you promised a reward yourself. You promised the greatest reward you could give, to any man who could bring back the mare to you.”
Catalina leaned a hand against a pillar and blinked her eyes as though a flash of light had dazzled them.
“You promised to marry the lucky fellow,” Mirandos said sternly.
“It was a joke!” Catalina gasped out. “It was only a joke, as you know. Who would dare to keep me to such a promise?”
“It is a joke,” Señor Mirandos said gravely, “that has kept men hunting for your mare for months. It is a joke that has appeared in the newspapers. It is a joke that has caused poor devils to squander thousands of dollars and their time and hope and labor to catch the horse. No, no, Catalina, it is not a joke at all, but a sad reality.”
“Ah, ah!” the girl cried. “But you do not mean it! You would not give me to some nameless stranger!”
Her father unfolded a letter. “Listen to this,” he said. “It is from Peter Dunstan. You know Peter Dunstan, Catalina?”
“He is the rich rancher,” Catalina said eagerly. “It is he, Father?”
“It is not he who caught the mare,” her father said dryly. “It is quite another man, my dear. It is Peter Dunstan who writes the letter, however, and here it is.” He read aloud:
Dear Señor Mirandos: This will let you know what you may have heard already—that Elena Blanca has been caught. But it will tell you what, perhaps, you cannot learn from any person quite so well as from me. The man who caught the mare is named Sweyn, and the only Christian name that is known for him is Sandy. To give you your bad news in a lump—Sandy Sweyn is a hopeless half-wit.
At this, Señor Mirandos lowered the letter and smiled grimly upon his daughter.
“No, no,” poor Catalina said. “You would never give me to such a creature as that.”
“Do not try to tell me what I would do, but listen to me, Catalina.”
“I listen, Father. But…a half-wit…a-dull-eyed, loose-mouthed, stupid….”
“If you had exceptions in mind, you should have made them before you published yourself abroad, my dear. The whole world knows that you have vowed to give yourself to the man who brings the mare to you. And as for me….”
“You are a Mirandos,” Catalina said unevenly. “You would never see….”
“Hush,” the rancher said. “There is more to follow. You have not heard all the facts that concern this lover of yours.”
Thirty-Two
He shook out the letter again. Dick, seeing that he was unnoticed by either of them, slunk gladly away toward the lawn. He could not quite decide to go out of sight. It might be considered by that quick-tempered and suspicious mistress of his that he was committing a fault by slipping from view. Therefore, the setter lay down at the entrance to the patio, and with one eye he watched the seductive green coolness of the lawn, and with the other, he kept in mind the uneasy face of his mistress.
Señor Mirandos continued:
I have known this fellow for a long time, and it is only right that I should give you the advantage of my experience and my knowledge of him. It is not unknown to you, perhaps, that I myself have spent a good deal of time and money to capture Elena Blanca. As a matter of fact, the half-wit was in my employ when he caught the mare. At the last moment, a freak of fancy came over him. He stole her away, and now he is going through the mountains to find your daughter and claim the reward of her hand.
“That is theft!” Catalina gasped out, shuddering with fright. “Something can be done about that. There is a sheriff who….”
“Your promise,” the rancher said, “was only to take the mare from any hand that brought her back, and thereafter to marry him, as a reward. If he has stolen the mare, does that make any real difference? No. You did not say that it should be the man who secured the capture of the mare. You only specified him who brought her to you. You must remember the facts, my dear, and you must be limited by them.”
He went on with the reading of the letter:
It occurs to me that you may find it worthwhile to attempt to stop this man before he can come to your daughter with the mare and claim that reward of which we know. This would be a tragedy so terrible that I am as much horrified as you can possibly be.
Let me tell you, in the first place, that any attempt to stop the half-wit would have to be made by more than one man. He is, as I have said, defective mentally, but he replaces the lack of real intelligence, to a certain extent, by a species of brute cunning. He is sharp and wide-awake. You may take that for granted, when he is on the trail, however dull and sleepy he may appear in a house.
You will need more than one man, and you will need numbers for several reasons. One of these is his enormous strength. In this, as in a great many respects, he is very deceptive. He looks to be, say, a fellow of about five feet and nine inches. He appears to be rather broad and plump, and you would put him down at about a hundred and sixty or seventy pounds, at the most.
As a matter of fact, he is not much under six feet in height, I believe, and what appears to be plumpness is in reality iron-hard muscle. I am not a weak man, and I have known many powerful people, but he is without exception the strongest man I have ever seen or heard of. I have no hesitation in saying so. I really believe that there is more brute power in his hands and arms than in those of any two men!
Here Señor Mirandos looked up from his reading. “It would not do to anger such a fellow, if he were your husband. Do you agree to that, my dear girl?”
Catalina, clasping her delicate hands together in front of her white, sick face, could not make any answer. Her imagination was far too busy in probing the unimaginable horrors of the future.
Her father, after a single keen glance at her, continued:
There are other qualities that make him formidable. He is, as I have said, very deceptive in his appearance, which disarms people who he meets for the first time. He is about two inches, I should say, taller than the usual guess. And I think that he is thirty or forty pounds heavier. His sleek and sleepy appearance gives an impression of stolid immobility, but that is by no means what he possesses. When he is roused to his work—and in the open air and on the trail he is nearly always roused—this man unites to his physical strength an uncanny power of eye and ear. He is so thoroughly in tune with the animal world—of which he is really a part—that nothing escapes him. He draws information, I should almost say, from the very scents on the air, like a hunting wolf. Though I don’t want you to take this literally—some of the things that he accomplishes are positively beyond any normal understanding.
In addition to this, let no one think that he is incapable of moving with celerity. Among men, he is like the wolverine. And you know that the wolverine, when it is roused, can fight with the speed of a demon. It is the same with this monster, Sandy Sweyn.
He travels armed, of course, and he handles a gun or a knife really as if it were a part of him—equipped with the same nerves and senses th
at run in his own flesh. He seems incapable of missing his mark, the more sudden the emergency, the more critical the need, the steadier and surer he is bound to be. There is only one way to gain an advantage over him without a terrible loss. That is through surprise, I should say.
I must say, also, that so far as I am concerned I should not regard this person as a human being, but as a sort of beast that walks upon two legs, and wears the face, the voice, and some of the mannerisms of other men. At heart, he is totally dissimilar to other men.
As for his appearance. I have warned you in part. I must say that his face is not displeasing, except in its stupidity. When he is on a trail, and his face lights, he is positively handsome, though in the house there is sure to be something disgustingly sodden and piggish about him. It is only when he is roused that a flare of light appears in his face. The rest of the time, his wits sleep.
His hair has the color that his nickname suggests, or it is perhaps a little more yellow than actual sand. And he has strangely colored eyes—very close to the shade of the lashes and brows themselves. They give a very odd effect. One often can hardly tell when he is watching one. The emotions never show in those eyes until he had been roused to a frenzy, and then they turn to yellow flame.
I have talked to you about this man at a great deal of length. It may be, as I suppose, that you will decide to stop him on the way. But you will not succeed. He has proved too strong for me, and I am sure that he will prove too strong for you, unless you send out sure marksmen to lie in wait for him, as you would make an ambush for a wild grizzly bear. Believe me, the similarity is not entirely far-fetched!
I remain yours with a thousand good wishes. Instruct me in what I can be of service.
Peter Dunstan
“Let me see!” pleaded the girl. And, taking the letter, she read it through again—letter by letter, printing the awful truth deeper and deeper in her mind. “But it is not possible!” Catalina gasped out. “You could never give me to a beast like this.”
Her father was very pale, and his face had become quite drawn. He began to walk up and down the patio. As he walked, he talked—not so much to her as to his own soul.
“You have always been a delight to my eyes, Catalina,” he said. “I have always been foolishly proud of your beauty. But I have not given you the sort of treatment that a girl should be able to expect from her father.”
“You have always been kind…you will still be kind,” Catalina whispered, sobbing.
“Exactly. I have always been kind. I have been too kind, and a child has a right to expect that its parents will give it such discipline that it will be prepared for the coldness of the rest of the world. A girl who has been raised with love only is not prepared for the facts in the world as she will find it. That is cruel. I have been cruel in just this way, my dear. In the meantime, shall I tell you a little truth?”
“Yes, if you will.”
“Very dear as you have been to me, I have been able to see certain faults in you…such as cowardice, cruelty, selfishness, and others of that kind.”
“You hate me?”
“No, child. I have a great and foolish love for you. I see these faults in you, but still I hope that they are things that will be lived down. I hope that you will change before you come into full womanhood. That is what hope says, rather than what reason speaks. But there are the facts for me to face. On the other hand, there is another thing to which I have given half of my love.”
Catalina started erect.
“In that other thing,” Señor Mirandos said, “I can see no fault. It is pure and perfect, and I shall keep it so at the cost of everything…my life and yours. It is my honor, Catalina.”
She turned paler than ever, now—and there was a hopelessness in her eyes. The honor of her father was an old, familiar foe to her. No matter of what malleable stuff he might be made, when that sense of honor was encroached upon, she reached a wall of granite that threw back her advances.
“Since the honor of this name has been clean in my hands, I must give you a final warning, my child. I shall not raise so much as a little finger of one hand to prevent the approach of this man who has caught the horse. Once he brings her here, I shall see that you marry him, if I have to drag you to the altar and whip the responses from your lips.”
As he spoke, it was no longer flesh and blood to which she listened, but an abstraction. Honor, indeed!
He turned away from her on his heel. Catalina watched him go, filled with horror, knowing that to appeal would be the height of folly.
She ran toward the entrance of the patio, as though she hoped that help might be seen coming to her—or as though the flashing white body of Elena Blanca might be in view. There was nothing except the windy hillside. She quirted the setter at her feet. “Stupid fool of a dog!” Catalina cried through her teeth. “How can you help me?”
Thirty-Three
She ran out to the stable. “I want the bay gelding!” the girl cried to Filipo.
“Ah, but, señorita…he is very wild, and he is very fast. And he has not been ridden during these two weeks.”
“That is why I want him, fool! Now hurry, hurry!”
While she waited for the gelding to be caught, she looked down at her clothes. Now that she was in a crisis, she must make her appeal carry the greatest possible force, and she could never do this if she were not looking her best. Back to the house she ran. In her room she scattered all about her and made two hours’ work for her maid in five minutes of searching.
At last she had the correct silken scarf, knotted in the proper manner about her waist. She had the proper sombrero on her head, tilted at the smartest angle, with the right feather curling in a crimson streak along its brim. She pirouetted and viewed herself from every side. She needed still something—some touch of color—so she caught up a pair of gaudy emerald earrings and set them in place.
After that, she was content, and with a greater sense of power warming her blood, she raced from the room, still clutching the letter that had brought the fatal warning.
The bay gelding was waiting when she reached the stable. Woe to Filipo if he had taken longer than this to prepare the wild colt. He threw her up to the saddle, for she rode like a boy.
There was need for good riding, here. The bay gelding reared and danced like a very devil, his ears back, foam in his gaping mouth. At length whip and spur rocked him forward. He left the ground with a long leap, and shot off like a greyhound down the valley.
She knew that road well, and it was good that she did, for never did a horse career over it more wildly than the horse of Catalina on this day.
The first mile was done at the first speed of the gelding. After that it began to falter a little from this terrible pace, and the spurs on the heels of the girl turned crimson as she drove them home. Every second seemed an eternity. In the meantime, there was a savage satisfaction in tearing the last ounce of power from the tormented body of the gelding.
She turned in a cloud of dust through the gateway of another ranch, leaped down, threw the reins at the head of the mozo, and rushed into the house itself. A house moza appeared with a smile that turned into a stare.
“Where is José Rézan?” Catalina cried. “Where is José Rézan? Instantly! Do you hear? Instantly!”
“He is here. Has your father been hurt, señorita?”
“José! Bring José to me, instantly!”
The moza fled as for life. Presently a door crashed. Then there was a hurrying footfall, and here was big José Rézan, looking, if possible, more handsome and huger than ever. He could hardly speak; he was delighted to see this unexpected visitor. He could only extend his hands toward her, and Catalina thrust into those hands the letter that she still carried with her.
“And my father will do nothing!” Catalina cried. She threw herself into a chair and clasped her hands before her eyes.
&
nbsp; As for José, he was in a passion of dread when he saw his idol in such a state of mind. Before he had read two words in the letter, Catalina herself was almost forgotten. He read that dreadful missive through from beginning to end, and then glanced back to make sure of the more vital parts. All was vital; all was terrible to him. He threw himself upon his knees before the girl.
“A half-wit!” Catalina sobbed.
“Catalina, my dearest, have I your permission to try to stop him?”
“Do you have to wait for that?” Catalina asked. “Do you stand here, kneeling and moping, while the half-wit is bringing Elena every instant closer to me? If he brings her in, actually, then it is the end. It is the end! Because my father swears like a madman that, for the sake of honor, he will force me to marry this insane man. He will drag me to the altar with his own hands. Do you hear, José Rézan? And still do you stand there and do nothing?”
José Rézan stood still no longer.
Even Catalina was satisfied by the manner in which he rushed from the house; even she smiled with content when she heard his great voice booming in the distance.
There was a hasty stir of preparation in the house. She was aware, past doors and down corridors, of the running of the mozos and mozas. She heard the clattering of voices, frantic with haste. Here was a household to her taste. Here the position of José Rézan was not that of mere landowner, but, rather like a feudal lord, he had some claim upon the very lives and souls of his dependents, as it were. Obedience to him was an almost religious duty. Oh, that such an atmosphere could be imported into her father’s house.
Presently José Rézan himself, mounted upon a superb cream-colored charger with a glistening silver mane and silver tail, rushed forth past the house, still thrusting his rifle into the long holster that ran along the saddle beneath his knee. Behind him rode a full dozen of hardy young cavaliers and old, men who had devoted all their lives to the service of the family of Rézan, now ready to live or to die for him.