by B. M. Bower
“You’ve got more nerve than I have, Annie,” Jean told her good-naturedly as she went by. “I’d hate to run a horse down there bareback.”
“I go where Wagalexa Conka say.” From the corner of her eye she saw the quick frown of jealousy upon the face of Ramon, and her pulse gave an extra beat of triumph.
With an easy spring she mounted the pinto pony, took the reins of her squaw bridle that was her only riding gear, folded her gay blanket snugly around her uncorseted body and touched the pinto with her moccasined heels. She was ready—ready to the least little tensed nerve that tingled with eagerness under the calm surface.
She rode slowly past luck, got her few final instructions and a warning to be careful and to take no chances of an accident—which brought that inscrutable smile to her face; for Wagalexa Conka knew, and she knew also, that in the mere act of riding down that slope faster than a walk she was taking a chance of an accident. It was that risk that lightened her heart which had been so heavy all day. The greater the risk, the more eager was she to take it. She would show Ramon that she, too, could ride.
“Oh, do be careful, Annie!” Jean called anxiously when she was riding into the mouth of the draw. “Turn to the right, when you come to that big flat rock, and don’t come down where I did. It’s too steep. Really,” she drawled to Rosemary and Lite, “my heart was in my mouth when I came straight down by that rock. It’s a lot steeper than it looks from here.”
“She won’t go round it,” Rosemary predicted pessimistically. “She’s in one of her contrary moods today. She’ll come down the worst way she can find just to scare the life out of us.”
Up the steep draw that led to the top, Annie-Many-Ponies rode exultantly. She would show Ramon that she could ride wherever the white girl dared ride. She would shame Wagalexa Conka, too, for his injustice to her. She would put the too, for big punch in that scene or—she would ride no more, unless it were upon a white cloud, drifting across the moon at night and looking, down at this world and upon Ramon.
At the top of the ridge she rode out to the edge and made the peace-sign to Luck as a signal that she was ready to do his bidding. Incidentally, while she held her hand high over her head, her eyes swept keenly the bowlder-strewn bluff beneath her. A little to one side was a narrow backbone of smoother soil than the rest, and here were printed deep the marks of Jean’s horse. Even there it was steep, and there was a bank, down there by the big flat rock which Jean had mentioned. Annie-Many-Ponies looked daringly to the left, where one would say the bluff was impassable. There she would come down, and no other place. She would show Ramon what she could do—he who had praised boldly another when she was by!
“All right, Annie!” Luck called to her through his megaphone. “Go back now and wait for whistle. Ride along the edge when you come, from bushes to where you stand. I want silhouette, you coming. You sabe?”
Annie-Many-Ponies raised her hand even with her breast, and swept it out and upward in the Indian sign-talk which meant “yes.” Luck’s eyes flashed appreciation of the gesture; he loved the sign-talk of the old plains tribes.
“Be careful, Annie,” he cried impulsively. “I don’t want you to be hurt.” He dropped the megaphone as she swung her horse back from the edge and disappeared. “I’d cut the whole scene out if I didn’t know what a rider she is,” he added to the others, more uneasy than he cared to own. “But it would hurt her a heap more if I wouldn’t let her ride where Jean rode. She’s proud; awfully proud and sensitive.”
“I’m glad you’re letting her do it,” Jean said sympathetically. “She’d hate me if you hadn’t. But I’m going to watch her with my eyes shut, just the same. It’s an awfully mean place in spots.”
“She’ll make it, all right,” Luck declared. But his tone was not so confident as his words, and he was manifestly reluctant to place the whistle to his lips. He fussed with his script, and he squinted into the viewfinder, and he made certain for the second time just where the side-lines came, and thrust half an inch deeper in the sandy soil the slender stakes which would tell Annie-Many-Ponies where she must guide the pinto when she came tearing down to foreground. But he could delay the signal only so long, unless he cut out the scene altogether.
“Get back, over on that side, Bill,” he commanded harshly. “Leave her plenty of room to pass that side of the camera. All ready, Pete?” Then, as if he wanted to have it over with as soon as possible, he whistled once, waited while he might have counted twenty, perhaps, and sent shrilling through the sunshine the signal that would bring her.
They watched, holding their breaths in fearful expectancy. Then they saw her flash into view and come galloping down along the edge of the ridge where the hill fell away so steeply that it might be called a cliff. Indian fashion, she was whipping the pinto down both sides with the end of her reins. Her slim legs hung straight, her moccasined toes pointing downward. One corner of her red-and-green striped blanket flapped out behind her. Haste—the haste of the pursuer—showed in every movement, every line of her figure.
She came to the descent, and the pinto, having no desire for applause but a very great hankering for whole bones in his body, planted his forefeet and slid to a stop upon the brink. His snort came clearly down to those below who watched.
“He won’t tackle it,” Pete Lowry predicted philosophically while he turned the camera crank steadily round and round and held himself ready to “panoram” the scene if the pinto bolted.
But the pinto, having Annie-Many-Ponies to reckon with, did not bolt. The braided rein-end of her squaw bridle lashed him stingingly; the moccasined heels dug without mercy into the tender part of his flanks. He came lunging down over the first rim of the bluff; then since he must, he gathered himself for the ordeal and came leaping down and down and down, gaining momentum with every jump. He could not have stopped then if he had tried—and Annie-Many-Ponies, still the incarnation of eager pursuit, would not let him try.
At the big flat rock of which Jean had warned her, the pinto would have swerved. But she yanked him into the straighter descent, down over the bank. He leaped, and he fell and slid twice his own length, his nose rooting the soil. Annie-Many-Ponies lurched, came hard against a boulder and somehow flung herself into place again on the horse. She lifted his head and called to him in short, harsh, Indian words. The pinto scrambled to his knees, got to his feet and felt again the sting of the rein-end in his flanks. Like a rabbit he came bounding down, down where the way was steepest and most treacherous. And at every jump the rein-end fell, first on one side and then along the other, as a skilled canoeman shifts the paddle to force his slight craft forward in a treacherous current.
Down the last slope he came thundering. On his back Annie-Many-Ponies lashed him steadily, straining her eyes in the direction which Jean had taken past the camera. She knew that they were watching her—she knew also that the camera crank in Pete Lowry’s hands was turning, turning, recording every move of hers, every little changing expression. She swept down upon them so close that Pete grabbed the tripod with one hand, ready to lift it and dodge away from the coming collision. Still leaning, still lashing and straining every nerve in pursuit, she dashed past, pivoted the pinto upon his hind feet, darted back toward the staring group and jumped off while he was yet running.
Now that she had done it; now that she had proven that she also had nerve and much skill in riding, black loneliness settled upon her again. She came slowly back, and as she came she heard them praise the ride she had made. She heard them saying how frightened they had been when the pinto fell, and she heard Wagalexa Conka call to her that she had made a strong scene for him. She did not answer. She sat down upon a rock, a little apart from them, and looking as remote as the Sandias Mountains, miles away to the north, folded her blanket around her and spoke no word to anyone.
Soon Ramon mounted his horse to return to his camp. He came riding down to her—for his trail lay that way—and as he rode he called to the others a good natured “Hasta luego!”
which is the Mexican equivalent of “See you later.” He did not seem to notice Annie-Many-Ponies at all as he rode past her. He was gazing off down the arroyo and riding with all his weight on one stirrup and the other foot swinging free, as is the nonchalant way of accustomed riders who would ease their muscles now and then. But as he passed the rock where she was sitting he murmured, “Tonight by the rock I wait for you, querida mia.” Though she gave no sign that she had heard, the heart of Annie-Many-Ponies gave a throb of gladness that was almost pain.
CHAPTER VII
ADVENTURE COMES SMILING
Luck, in the course of his enthusiastic picture making, reached the point where he must find a bank that was willing to be robbed—in broad daylight and for screen purposes only. If you know anything at all about our financial storehouses, you know that they are sensitive about being robbed, or even having it appear that they are being subjected to so humiliating a procedure. What Luck needed was a bank that was not only willing, but one that faced the sun as well. He was lucky, as usual. The Bernalillo County Bank stands on a corner facing east and south. It is an unpretentious little bank of the older style of architecture, and might well be located in the centre of any small range town and hold the shipping receipts of a cattleman who was growing rich as he grew old.
Luck stopped across the street and looked the bank over, and saw how the sun would shine in at the door and through the wide windows during the greater part of the afternoon, and hoped that the cashier was a human being and would not object to a fake robbery. Not liking suspense, he stepped off the pavement and dodged a jitney, and hurried over to interview the cashier.
You never know what secret ambitions hide behind the impassive courtesy of the average business man. This cashier, for instance, wore a green eyeshade whenever his hat was not on his, head. His hair was thin and his complexion pasty and his shoulders were too stooped for a man of his age. You never would have suspected, just to look at him through the fancy grating of his window, how he thirsted for that kind of adventure which fiction writers call red-blooded. He had never had an adventure in his life; but at night, after he had gone to bed and adjusted the electric light at his head, and his green eyeshade, and had put two pillows under the back of his neck, he read—you will scarcely believe it, but it is true—he read about the James boys and Kit. Carson and Pawnee Bill, and he could tell you—only he wouldn’t mention it, of course—just how many Texans were killed in the Alamo. He loved gun catalogues, and he frequently went out of his way to pass a store that displayed real, business-looking stock-saddles and quirts and spurs and things. He longed to be down in Mexico in the thick of the scrap there, and he knew every prominent Federal leader and every revolutionist that got into the papers; knew them by spelling at least, even if he couldn’t pronounce the names correctly.
He had come to Albuquerque for his lungs’ sake a few years ago, and he still thrilled at the sight of bright-shawled Pueblo Indians padding along the pavements in their moccasins and queer leggings that looked like joints of whitewashed stove-pipe; while to ride in an automobile out to Isleta, which is a terribly realistic Indian village of adobe huts, made the blood beat in his temples and his fingers tremble upon his knees. Even Martinez Town with its squatty houses and narrow streets held for him a peculiar fascination.
You can imagine, maybe, how his weak eyes snapped with excitement under that misleading green shade when Luck Lindsay walked in and smiled at him through the wicket, and explained who he was and what was the favor he had come to ask of the bank. You can, perhaps, imagine how he stood and made little marks on a blotter with his pencil while Luck explained just what he would want; and how he clung to the noncommittal manner which is a cashier’s professional shield, while Luck smiled his smile to cover his own feeling of doubt and stated that he merely wanted two Mexicans to enter, presumably overpower the cashier, and depart with a bag or two of gold.
The cashier made a few more pencil marks and said that it might be arranged, if Luck could find it convenient to make the picture just after the bank’s closing time. Obviously the cashier could not permit the bank’s patrons to be disturbed in any way—but what he really wanted was to have the thrill of the adventure all to himself.
With the two of them anxious to have the pictured robbery take place, of course they arranged it after a polite sparring on the part of the cashier, whose craving for adventure was carefully guarded as a guilty secret.
At three o’clock the next day, then—although Luck would have greatly preferred an earlier hour—the cashier had the bank cleared of patrons and superfluous clerks, and was watching, with his nerves all atingle and the sun shining in upon him through a side window, while Pete Lowry and Bill Holmes fussed outside with the camera, getting ready for the arrival of those realistic bandits, Ramon Chavez and Luis Rojas. On the street corner opposite, the Happy Family foregathered clannishly, waiting until they were called into the street-fight scene which Luck meant to make later.
The cashier’s cheeks were quite pink with excitement when finally Ramon and the Rojas villain walked past the window and looked in at him before going on to the door. He was disappointed because they were not masked, and because they did not wear bright sashes with fringe and striped serapes draped across their shoulders, and the hilts of wicked knives showing somewhere. They did not look like bandits at all—thanks to Luck’s sure knowledge and fine sense of realism. Still, they answered the purpose, and when they opened the door and came in the cashier got quite a start from the greedy look in their eyes when they saw the gold he had stacked in profusion on the counter before him.
They made the scene twice—the walking past the window and coming in at the door; and the second time Luck swore at them because they stopped too abruptly at the window and lingered too long there, looking in at the cashier and his gold, and exchanging meaning glances before they went to the door.
Later, there was an interior scene with reflectors almost blinding the cashier while he struggled self-consciously and ineffectually with Ramon Chavez. The gold that Ramon scraped from the cashier’s keeping into his own was not, of course, the real gold which the bandits had seen through the window. Luck, careful of his responsibilities, had waited while the cashier locked the bank’s money in the vault, and had replaced it with brass coins that looked real—to the camera.
The cashier lived then the biggest moments of his life. He was forced upon his back across a desk that had been carefully cleared of the bank’s papers and as carefully strewn with worthless ones which Luck had brought. A realistically uncomfortable gag had been forced into the mouth of the cashier—where it brought twinges from some fresh dental work, by the way—and the bandits had taken everything in sight that they fancied.
Ramon and Luis Rojas had proven themselves artists in this particular line of work, and the cashier, when it was all over and the camera and company were busily at work elsewhere, lived it in his imagination and felt that he was at least tasting the full flavor of red-blooded adventure without having to pay the usual price of bitterness and bodily suffering. He was mistaken, of course—as I am going to explain. What the cashier had taken part in was not the adventure itself but merely a rehearsal and general preparation for the real performance.
This had been on Wednesday, just after three o’clock in the afternoon. On Saturday forenoon the cashier was called upon the phone and asked if a part of that robbery stuff could be retaken that day. The cashier thrilled instantly at the thought of it. Certainly, they could retake as much as they pleased. Lucks voice—or a voice very like Luck’s—thanked him and said that they would not need to retake the interior stuff. What he wanted was to get the approach to the bank the entrance and going back to the cashier. That part of the negative was under-timed, said the voice. And would the cashier make a display of gold behind the wicket, so that the camera could register it through the window? The cashier thought that he could. “Just stack it up good and high,” directed the voice. “The more the better. And c
lear the bank—have the clerks out, and every thing as near as possible to what it was the other day. And you take up the same position. The scene ends where Ramon comes back and grabs you.”
“And listen! You did so well the other day that I’m going to leave this to you, to see that they get it the same. I can’t be there myself—I’ve got to catch some atmosphere stuff down here in Old Town. I’m just sending my assistant camera man and the two heavies and my scenic artist for this retake. It won’t be much—but be sure you have the bank cleared, old man—because it would ruin the following scenes to have extra people registered in this; see? You did such dandy work in that struggle that I want it to stand. Boy, your work’s sure going to stand out on the screen!”
Can you blame the cashier for drinking in every word of that, and for emptying the vault of gold and stacking it up in beautiful, high piles where the sun shone on it through the window—and where it would be within easy reach, by the way!—so that the camera could “register” it?
At ten minutes past twelve he had gotten rid of patrons and clerks, and he had the gold out and his green eyeshade adjusted as becomingly as a green eyeshade may be adjusted. He looked out and saw that the street was practically empty, because of the hour and the heat that was almost intolerable where the sun shone full. He saw a big red machine drive up to the corner and stop, and he saw a man climb out with camera already screwed, to the tripod. He saw the bandits throw away their cigarettes and follow the camera man, and then he hurried back and took up his station beside the stacks of gold, and waited in a twitter of excitement for this unhoped-for encore of last Wednesday’s glorious performance. Through the window he watched the camera being set up, and he watched also, from under his eyeshade, the approach of the two bandits.
From there on a gap occurs in the cashier’s memory of that day.