The Treasure Trail

by Marah Ellis Ryan

  The shadows were growing long, and some Indian boys were jogging across the far flats. He reached for his field glass and saw that one of them had a deer across his saddle. Isidro explained that the boys were planting corn in a far field, and often brought a deer when they came in for more seed or provisions. They had a hut and ramada at the edge of the planted land six miles away. They were good boys, Benito and Mariano Bravo, and seldom both left the fields at the same time. He called to Valencia that there would be deer for supper, then watched the two riders as they approached, and smiled as they perceptibly slowed up their broncos at sight of the bearded stranger on the rawhide cot against the wall.

  “See you!” he pointed out to Kit. “These are the days of changes. Each day we looking for another enemy, maybe that army of the south, and the boys they think that way too.”

  The boys, on being hailed, came to the house with their offering, and bunkered down in the shadow with a certain shy stolidity, until Kit spoke, when they at once beamed recognition, and made jokes of his beard as a blanket.

  But they had news to tell, great news, for a child of Miguel had broken away from the slavers and had hidden in the mountains, and at last had found her way back to Palomitas. She was very tired and very poor in raiment, and the people were weeping over her. Miguel, her father, was dead from a wound, and was under the ground, and of the others who went on she could tell nothing, only that Conrad, the German friend of Don José, was the man who covered his face and helped take the women. Her sister Anita had recognized him, calling out his name, and he had struck her with a quirt.

  The women left their work to listen to this, and to add the memories of some of their friends who had hidden and luckily escaped.

  “That white man should be crucified and left for the vultures,” said the boy Benito.

  “No,” said the soft voice of Valencia, “God was sacrificed, but this man is a white Judas; the death of God is too good for that man. It has been talked about. He will be found some place,––and the Judas death will be his. The women are making prayers.”

  “It will soon be Easter,” said Isidro.

  Kit did not know what was meant by a “Judas” death, though he did know many of the church legends had been turned by the Indians into strange and lurid caricatures. He thought it would be interesting to see how they could enlarge on the drama of Judas, but he made no comment, as a direct question would turn the Indians thoughtful, and silence them.

  They all appeared alert for the return of Rotil. No one believed he had retired utterly from the region without demanding tribute from Soledad. It was generally suspected that Perez received and held munitions for use against the revolutionists though no one knew where they were hidden. There were Indian tales of underground tunnels of Soledad Mission for retreat in the old days in case of hostile attacks, and the Soledad ranch house was built over part of that foundation. No one at Soledad knew the entrance except Perez himself, though it was surmised that Juan Gonsalvo had known, and had been the one to store the mule loads and wagon loads of freight shipped over the border before Miguel Herrara was caught at the work from the American side. Perez was a careful man, and not more than one man was trusted at one time. That man seemed marked by the angels for accident, for something had always ended him, and it was no good fortune to be a favorite of Don José––Doña Jocasta was learning that!

  Thus the gossip and surmise went on around Rhodes for his brief hour of rest and readjustment. He encouraged the expression of opinion from every source, for he had the job ahead of him to get three hundred pounds of gold across the border and through a region where every burro was liable to examination by some of the warring factions. It behooved him to consider every tendency of the genus homo with which he came in contact. Also the bonds between them,––especially the bonds, since the various groups were much of a sameness, and only “good” or “bad” according to their affiliations. Simple Benito and his brother, and soft-voiced motherly Valencia who could conceive a worse death for the German Judas than crucifixion, were typical of the primitive people of desert and sierra.

  “How many head of stock think you still ranges Mesa Blanca?” he asked Isidro, who confessed that he no longer rode abroad or kept tally, but Clodomiro would know, and would be in to supper. Benito and Mariano told of one stallion and a dozen mares beyond the hills, and a spring near their fields had been muddied the day before by a bunch of cows and calves, they thought perhaps twenty, and they had seen three mules with the Mesa Blanca brand when they were getting wood.

  “Three mules, eh? Well, I may need those mules and the favor will be to me if you keep them in sight,” he said addressing the boys. “I am to round up what I can and remove them after Señor Whitely, together with other belongings.”

  “Others, señor?” asked Isidro.

  Rhodes took the letter from his pocket, and perused it as if to refresh his memory.

  “The old Spanish chest is to go if possible, and other things of Mrs. Whitely’s,” he said. “I will speak of these to your wife if the plan can carry, but there is chance of troops from the south and––who knows?––we may be caught between the two armies and ground as meal on a metate.”

  He thus avoided all detail as to the loads the pack animals were to carry, and the written word was a safe mystery to the Indian. He was making no definite plans, but was learning all possibilities with a mind prepared to take advantage of the most promising.

  Thus the late afternoon wore on in apparent restful idleness after the hard trail. The boys secured their little allowance of beans and salt, and corn for planting, but lingered after the good supper of Valencia, a holiday feast compared with their own sketchy culinary performance in the jacal of the far fields. They scanned the trail towards Palomitas, and then the way down the far western valley, evidently loath to leave until their friend Clodomiro should arrive, and Isidro expected him before sunset.

  But he came later from towards Soledad, a tall lad with fluttering ribbands of pink and green from his banda and his elbows, and a girdle of yellow fluttering fringed ends to the breeze,––all the frank insignia of a youth in the market for marriage. He suggested a gay graceful bird as he rode rapidly in the long lope of the range. His boy friends of the planted fields went out to meet him at the corral, and look after his horse while he went in to supper. He halted to greet them, and then walked soberly across the plaza where pepper trees and great white alisos trailed dusk shadows in the early starlight.

  “What reata held you?” asked Isidro. “Has Soledad grown a place for comradeship?”

  “No, señor,” said the lad passing into the dining room where two candles gave him light in the old adobe room, “it is comradeship we do not need, but it is coming to us.”

  He seated himself on the wooden bench and his grandmother helped him from a smoking plate of venison. He looked tired and troubled, and he had not even taken note that a stranger was beside Isidro in the shadows.

  “What nettle stings you, boy?” asked his grandfather sarcastically, and at that he looked up and rose to his feet at sight of Rhodes.

  “Your pardon, señor, I stumbled past like a bat blind in the light,” he muttered, and as he met Kit’s eyes and recognized him his face lit up and his white teeth gleamed in a smile.

  “The saints are in it that you are here again, señor!” he exclaimed, “and you came on this day when most needed.”

  “Eat and then tell your meaning,” said Isidro, but Clodomiro glanced toward the kitchen, and then listened for the other boys. They were laughing down at the corral. Clodomiro’s horse had thrown one of them.

  “With your permission, grandfather, talk first,” he said and the two men moved to the bench opposite, leaning over towards him as his voice was lowered.

  “Today Marto Cavayso sent for me, he is foreman over there, and strange things are going forward. He has heard that General Rotil stripped Mesa Blanca and that all white people are gone from it. He wants this house and will pay us
well to open the door. It is for the woman. They have played a game for her, and he has won, but she is a wild woman when he goes near her, and his plan is to steal her out at night and hide her from the others. So he wants this house. He offered me a good gun. He offers us the protection of Don José Perez.”

  “But––why––that is not credible,” protested Kit. “He could not count on protection from Perez if he stole the woman whom many call Señora Perez, for that is what they did call Doña Jocasta in Hermosillo.”

  “Maybe so,” assented Clodomiro stolidly, “but now he is to be the esposo of a Doña Dolores who is the child of General Terain, so Marto says. Well, this Doña Jocasta has done some killing, and Don José does not give her to prison. He sends her to the desert that she brings him no disgrace; and if another man takes her or sinks her in the quicksands then that man will be helping Don José. That is how it is. Marto says the woman has bewitched him, and he is crazy about her. Some of the other men, will take her, if not him.”

  Kit exchanged a long look with the old Indian.

  “The house is yours, señor,” said Isidro. “By the word of Señor Whitely, you are manager of Mesa Blanca.”

  “Many thanks,” replied Kit, and sat with his elbows on the table and his hands over his eyes, thinking––thinking of the task he had set himself in Sonora, and the new turn of the wheel of fortune.

  “You say the lady is a prisoner?” he asked.

  “Sure,” returned Clodomiro promptly. “She broke loose coming through a little pueblo and ran to the church. She found the priest and told him things, so they also take that priest! If they let him go he will talk, and Don José wanting no talk now of this woman. That priest is well cared for, but not let go away. After awhile, maybe so.”

  “She is bright, and her father was a priest,” mused Kit. “So there is three chances out of four that she can read and write,––a little anyway. Could you get a letter to her?”

  “Elena could.”

  Kit got up, took one of the candles from the table and walked through the rooms surrounding the patio. Some of them had wooden bars in the windows, but others had iron grating, and he examined these carefully.

  “There are two rooms fit for perfectly good jails,” he decided, “so I vote we give this bewitched Don Marto the open door. How many guns can we muster?”

  “He promised to give me one, and ammunition.”

  “Well, you get it! Get two if you can, but at least get plenty of ammunition. Isidro, will your wife be brave and willing to help?”

  The old Indian nodded his head vigorously and smiled. Evidently only a stranger would ask if his Valencia could be brave!

  The two brothers came in, and conversation was more guarded until Clodomiro had finished his supper, and gone a little ways home with them to repay them the long wait for comradeship.

  When he came back Kit had his plans fairly settled, and had a brief note written to Señora Jocasta Perez, as follows:

  Honored Señora:

  One chance of safety is yours. Let yourself be persuaded to leave Soledad with Marto. You will be rescued from him by

  An American.

  “I reckon that will do the trick,” decided Kit. “I feel like a blooming Robin Hood without the merry men,––but the Indians will play safe, even if they are not merry. When can you get this to Elena?”

  “In time of breakfast,” said Clodomiro promptly. “I go tonight, and tomorrow night he steals that woman. Maybe Elena helps.”

  “You take Elena a present from me to encourage that help,” suggested Kit, and he poured a little of the gold from his belt on the paper. “Also there is the same for you when the lady comes safe. It is best that you make willing offer of your service in all ways so that he calls on none of his own men for help.”

  “As you say, señor,” assented Clodomiro, “and that will march well with his desires, for to keep the others from knowing is the principal thing. She has beauty like a lily in the shade.”

  “He tells you that?” asked Kit quizzically, but the boy shook his head.

  “My own eyes looked on her. She is truly of the beauty of the holy pictures of the saints in the chapel, but Marto says she is a witch, and has him enchanted;––also that evil is very strong in her. I do not know.”

  “Well, cross your fingers and tackle the job,” suggested Kit. “Get what sleep you can, for you may not get much tomorrow night. It is the work of a brave man you are going to do, and your pay will be a man’s pay.”

  The eyes of the Indian boy glowed with pleasure.

  “At your service, señor. I will do this thing or I will not see Mesa Blanca again.”

  Kit looked after Clodomiro and rolled another cigarette before turning in to sleep.

  “When all’s said and done, I may be the chief goat of this dame adventure,” he told himself in derision. “Maybe my own fingers need crossing.”

  Chapter 13

  A WOMAN OF EMERALD EYES

  At the first break of dawn, Rhodes was up, and without waiting for breakfast walked over to the rancherias of Palomitas to see Tula.

  She was with some little girls and old women carrying water from the well as stolidly as though adventure had never stalked across her path. A whole garment had been given her instead of the tatter of rags in which she had returned to the little Indian pueblo. She replied briefly to his queries regarding her welfare, and when he asked where she was living, she accompanied him to an old adobe where there were two other motherless children––victims of the raiders.

  An old, half-blind woman stirred meal into a kettle of porridge, and to her Kit addressed himself.

  “A blessing will be on your house, but you have too many to feed here,” he said “and the child of Miguel should go to the ranch house of Mesa Blanca. The wife of Isidro is a good woman and will give her care.”

  “Yes, señor, she is a good woman,” agreed the old Indian. “Also it may be a safe house for a maiden, who knows? Here it is not safe; other raiders may come.”

  “That is true. Send her after she has eaten.”

  He then sought out one of the older men to learn who could be counted on to round up the stray cattle of the ranges. After that he went at once back to the ranch house, and did not even speak to Tula again. There was nothing to indicate that she was the principal object of his visit, or that she had acquired a guardian who was taking his job seriously.

  Later in the day she was brought to Mesa Blanca by an elderly Indian woman of her mother’s clan, and settled in the quiet Indian manner in the new dwelling place. Valencia was full of pity for the girl of few years who had yet known the hard trail, and had mourned alone for her dead.

  There was a sort of suppressed bustle about la casa de Mesa Blanca that day, dainties of cookery prepared with difficulty from the diminished stores, and the rooms of the iron bars sprinkled and swept, and pillows of wondrous drawnwork decorated the more pretentious bed. To Tula it was more of magnificence than she had ever seen in her brief life, and the many rooms in one dwelling was a wonder. She would stand staring across the patio and into the various doorways through which she hesitated to pass. She for whom the wide silences of the desert held few terrors, hesitated to linger alone in the shadows of the circling walls. Kit noted that when each little task was finished for Valencia, she would go outside in the sunlight where she had the familiar ranges and far blue mountains in sight.

  “Here it makes much trouble only to live in a house,” she said pointing to the needlework on a table cover. “The bowls of food will make that dirty in one eating, and then what? Women in fine houses are only as mares in time of thrashing the grain––no end and no beginning to the work,––they only tread their circle.”

  “Right you are, sister,” agreed Kit, “they do make a lot of whirligig work for themselves, all the same as your grandmothers painting pottery that smash like eggshells. But life here isn’t all play at that, and there may be something doing before sleep time tonight. I went after you so I
would have a comrade I knew would stick.”

  She only gazed at him without question.

  “You remember, Tula, the woman led by the padre at Soledad?”

  She nodded silently.

  “It may be that woman is captive to the same men who took your people,” he said slowly watching her, “and it may be we can save her.”

  “May it also be that we can catch the man?” she asked, and her eyes half closed, peered up at him in curious intensity. “Can that be, O friend?”

  “Some day it must surely be, Tula.”

  “One day it must be,––one day, and prayers are making all the times for that day,” she insisted stolidly. “The old women are talking, and for that day they want him.”

  “What day, Tula?”

  “The Judas day.”

  Kit Rhodes felt a curious creepy sensation of being near an unseen danger, some sleeping serpent basking in the sun, harmless until aroused for attack. He thought of the gentle domestic Valencia, and now this child, both centered on one thought––to sacrifice a traitor on the day of Judas!

  “Little girls should make helpful prayers,” he ventured rather lamely, “not vengeance prayers.”

  “I was the one to make cry of a woman, when my father went under the earth,” she said. It was her only expression of the fact that she had borne a woman’s share of all their joint toil in the desert,––and he caught her by the shoulder, as she turned away.

  “Why, Kid Cleopatra, it isn’t a woman’s work you’ve done at all. It’s a man’s job you’ve held down and held level,” he declared heartily. “That’s why I am counting on you now. I need eyes to watch when I have to be in other places.”

  “I watch,” she agreed, “I watch for you, but maybe I make my own prayers also;––all the time prayers.”

  “Make one for a straight trail to the border, and all sentries asleep!” he suggested. “We have a pile of yellow rock to get across, to say nothing of our latest puzzling prospect.”