Chapter VII: Part 7

“It must be forty kilometres and a difficult way except through Ribote.”

“I could find it,” Hi said.

The brother and sister looked at each other with some hesitation. Hi was afraid that they were wondering whether to trust a tramp, who came at midnight, with neither collar nor tie, from God knows where.

“I am sorry to say,” he said, “that I have got no money with me, but Mr. Winter, of Quezon, beyond Santa Barbara, knows me, and Señora Piranha and her daughter know me.”

“Rosa Piranha?” the girl said. “You know her?”

“Very well. Do you?”

“We were at the convent together,” the girl said. “Of course we will lend you a horse. What is your name?”

“Ridden. Will you tell me yours?”

“We are Ribotes,” she said. “But what makes us consider is, the road to Anselmo. It is no road, my brother says.”

“It is a bad road,” Anton said.

“I don’t mind how bad it is as long as it is a road,” he said. “And I’ll not let your horse down or give him a sore back or anything; I swear I won’t. And I don’t know how to thank you for saying you will lend me one. The point is, getting him back to you. I’m going to the Elenas, the horse-breeders, of Anselmo; I am sure they would send him back or I would bring him back myself, if you would not mind waiting a few days.”

“Bring him back yourself,” Anton said.

“Yes, yes,” the girl said.

“The horse will be all right,” Anton said, “but how about the rider? First you must have food.”

They gave him sausage, bread, coffee and figs. Then they filled saddle-bags with these things and with corn for him to take with him. Anton brought him a silk scarf.

“You will want this for your neck,” he said. “There will be ticks or mosquitoes in the forest.”

No doubt they would have given him money, had they not feared to hurt his feelings.

“I don’t know how to thank you two,” he said. “You have been most frightfully kind.”

“The least we could do,” Anton said, “after nearly murdering you in the dark, as I did.”

They brought him out to the stables, where they saddled a horse for him.

“He will take you to Anselmo all right,” Anton said. “The question is, will you be able to find your way there?”

“I will try,” Hi said.

“Not so easy,” Anton said. “Look there.”

From where he stood Hi could see nothing but great swathes of rolling forest, amid a mist that was lifting and falling as though it were alive.

“You see that it is not easy,” Anton said, “even when you get out of the forest.”

“I think I’ll find it all right,” Hi said. “I’m good at finding my way.”

Anton pursed up his lips and shook his head. “I hope,” he said, “I hope. You got good remembrance?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then I tell you all the way.”

“Right. I’ll remember.”

“It is difficult,” Anton said. “You follow this track here for three kilometres, through the scrub. Then you come to a place very big as a saucer; big, big. Then north-west across it to a hole, snap, cut off, like so, in the hills, a long way, fifteen kilometres. Out there you will see peones who ride. One will show you. You must not go so, no; but so, because, so, there is no ground; all is gone. But this not for twenty kilometres. Till then, you look for the place big as a pan, very big; and the hill that has like so; high, yet so, snap, see; no, more like so.”

This was not clear as a course should be, but his gestures made it clearer. Anton knew the dangers of losing a trail; he turned to his sister for an English rendering of what he wished to explain. Unfortunately she had not seen the place which he strove to describe, nor was her English much better than his, but she added a few words.

“After this track,” she said, “there is a . . . very big.”

“A lake?” Hi suggested.

“A what?”

“A water?”

“No, no, no; very big dry.”

“I understand. A dry valley?”

“Si, si. Then you cross this; oh, it is long. Then you look a way out. There is a hole in the hill, like so.”

“A pass?” Hi said. “A gap? A way to go through?”

“Si, si.”

“But,” Anton said, “you must not go to this side, right side, because no ground; go to left side. Ask peones.”

“Will there be peones?”

“Always peones.”

“And if I cannot find a peon to ask?” Hi said.

“Bad, bad,” Anton said. “A difficult way. Not for some kilometres. But keep north through the path through the forest; see?”

“Anselmo is north from the pass,” the girl said.

“I’ll find it,” Hi said.

“Si, si, you will find it. It is narrow road in the forest; but to the left. Then you get out of the forest you will see.”

Hi was well used to finding his way on the downs; he had plenty of confidence in himself. “I’ll find it,” he repeated. “But one thing more; if any people stop me, may I say that I come from you?”

“They will see that you come from us.”

“How?”

“The brand,” Anton said, pointing to two wavy marks, one above the other, on the horse’s quarter.

“Thank you again,” Hi said, “for all that you have done for me.”

“Good luck,” the girl said.

“Come tell us how you got on,” Anton said.

“I will, indeed, if I may. Thank you.”

His horse was one of the rather small, sturdy, savannah ranch horses, bred in the uplands from the descendants of the conquerors’ mares by the stallions imported from England. He was dark, wise and full of go.

“Will he buck?” Hi asked.

“If you meet a tiger.”

“If a pig, he kick; so you know,” the girl said.

“Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”

“Con Dios.”

The horse was as eager to be gone as Hi to go. He sailed sideways down the avenue. Just as he turned into the thicket, Hi looked back to wave to his friends; they waved back to him. In two seconds more they were out of sight; he was riding through forest that was all dropping dew and trailing mist.

“I am really off at last,” he thought. “Twenty-four hours late in starting and twice as far from Anselmo as I was.”

The mist strayed itself out into clearness and the tops of the trees began to glitter as the sun rose higher. Little birds came flying just in front of him, as though to show their speed. Their cries, as they flew, sounded as though each bird were calling to “go it.” “I’ll go it fast enough,” he said.

For a long time he heard no other noise than the cries of these birds and the drumming of the feet of the horse. As he went on, he caught another noise, which at first he thought must be the wind in the tree-tops. Then, as it grew louder, he recognised it as the noise of water. He came round a curve upon a scene so beautiful that it made him pull up.

He came unexpectedly upon a ravine or gash in the hill. Close to him, on his left side, the hill, which had always been steep, changed suddenly to crag, over which a brook was falling in white, delaying mists, for some seven hundred feet. At the foot of the fall some long distant collapse had made an undercliff, nearly flat, across which the water loitered in a broad shallow rock basin, till it reached another fall. What he had been hearing was the noise of the falls.

As the ravine and pool made a wide open space, all the hillside in front of him was in such light that he could see, for the first time, what colour can be. The timber grew to great heights beyond the pool, but all the timber down the glade was heaped and piled with a pouring fire of creeper in blossom. A white flowered creeper had piled itself like snow even to the tops of the green-hearts, and fell thence in streamers and banners.

All the crags, as well as the rocks of the pool, were of a pale blue colour, like lapis lazuli. Mists from the falling water made rainbows all down the cliff. White birds cruised among the rainbows and changed colour in them.

He saw all this in a few seconds of admiration. Then he saw that the broad shallow pool was peopled by a priesthood, in rosy mantles, moving with an exquisite peace along the water. The leading priest rose into the air silently and gracefully; the others followed, till all the flight were moving away, more like flowers or thoughts or dreams than birds. He watched them till their effortless wings drooped them to some lower pool out of sight. “Those are the rosy ibises,” he thought.

“Damned pretty birds,” his father had said, “only you don’t often get a shot at them.”

He rode through the pool to the rising trail beyond; soon he was in the gloom again, winding up into the hills among forest. “I must be near the big dry pan or valley,” he thought. “I hope I haven’t gone wrong.”

Almost as he uttered the thought the thickets thinned to an undergrowth in blossom noisy with bees. A few yards more brought him out to the “very big dry” of the savannah, which was unlike anything ever seen by him.

His first thought was that it was the crater of a volcano or the bed of a lake, perhaps twenty miles long by seven broad. It may well have been both, in turn. Now it was an expanse of grass ringed by hills. Some eagles were cruising over it; their majesty suited the vastness of the expanse. The emptiness and the freedom of the vastness made Hi catch his breath. He was the king of that space; there was nothing there but wind and grass, with clumps of tussock-grass standing out here and there.

He did not take it all in at once; then he thought, “I was to meet peones here, who will set me on my way. I see no peones.”

A searching of the distance showed him, far off, some specks, some white, some dark. “Those are the herds,” he thought. “And the peones are with them. How those white cattle shine in the sun. But they are all miles away from here. There is none near me.

“But what was it that they said I was to look for? I was to go ‘north-west across it to a hole, snap, so,’ ten miles away. Well, let’s have a look. That will be north-west, roughly. And there, by George, is a sort of snap in the hills, as though they were cut or broken. That is the pass he means; that is my way. So let us forward for there. But what a place, what a land, what a life.”

It was a good enough life for a man, to ride that expanse on a horse worthy of such going. The horse felt the stir of that freedom. Hi felt him kindle beneath him into the tireless stride of the horse of the savannah. As he went, his hoofs drummed up myriads of glittering green beetles which whirled about them and flew with them, sometimes settling on horse or man, then whirling on again, now with shrillness, now with droning, till the noise they made was the ride itself set to music. “I shall save her,” he sang to the music, “I shall save Carlotta. And she will marry her man, of course, but all the same I shall have done that; and we shall be friends of a special sort all our lives. It will be something that nobody else will have.”

He kept headed for the pass, but his eyes roved the land for a peon. Soon he was startled by the light on the distance to his left; he had seen nothing like it. All the things in that southern distance became so distinct that he felt that he was looking at them through a telescope. At the same time, the calls of the peones, the beating of their horses’ hoofs, and the movings of the cattle came to him from across the miles of the savannah. “It is odd that things should be so clear,” he thought. “I should say it means rain.” The tops of the southern hills brightened till they seemed to spout flames into the sky. These flames soon changed into streamers of cirrus, less fiery than copper-coloured, with rose half-way up the heavens. “It is just as though the sky were feeling bilious,” he thought. With this change in the heavens, a change came into the air and into the horse; all the delight of the going went; the beetles gave up their play. Presently the copper-colour darkened along the hilltops to something like the smoke of a burning.

“It’s going to be a storm,” Hi thought. “I’d be just as well in the cover of the pass before it breaks. Come up, horse.”

The horse made it clear that he was uneasy about something, or was in some way feeling Hi’s uneasiness. He had become nervy and on edge in a way which Hi could not explain. He himself felt nervy, but the restlessness of his horse frightened him. “I believe he smells some wild beast or snakes,” Hi thought; but he could see neither; there seemed to be no creatures on that llano save some beasts like tailless rats and a few birds which piped and fled. The edge of the clouds tattered out into rags which soon laid hold of the sun so that all the joy died from the scene.

“We’re in for a storm and a half,” Hi thought, “one of those electrical storms my father was always gassing about.” He took a look to his left, where now the darkness had blotted out the line of the hills, then he took a look to his right, where the hills stood in a glow which made them look like hills in hell. Straight ahead was the gash or pass by which he was to descend. He could see no cattle nor peones there. “Perhaps they are in the pass,” he thought, “in some ranch or corral there. But I hope they are, for then I may find some shelter.”

The air had long since lost its zest. It was flat yet heavy, though both Hi and the horse were sweating, there was a feeling of death being present, which suggested cold; all kinds of evil seemed about to happen. Waifs and strays of thought came into Hi’s mind and went out of it; he felt that he could not concentrate upon any one of them. A few drops of rain splashed down, like florins and half-crowns, with a rattle on the tough grass.

He had made an effort to be in the pass before the storm broke. He reached it in time but, being there, he found it grim enough. It was a gash, between two cliffs of rotten rock, which curved round into a grimmer gash, all black with a grove of vast trees. “Better under the trees than in the open,” he thought, so he turned towards the cover. The noise of the hoofs upon the stones made echoes like the smacking of nails into a coffin. “That’s got you, that’s got you,” the smacking seemed to say, “that’s got you.” He stopped the horse, so that the echoes might stop. Looking back at the crater over which he had ridden, he found that he could see little save a greyness out of which came a sighing. All the place seemed to moan at him with a moan of despair, that sounded like, “Oh, it’s got us at last.” Out of the greyness a coldness came suddenly from the icefields on the mountain. Then the great grassy expanse disappeared from view. The storm, sweeping up, shut out the world. “Very little more,” he thought, “and I should have been caught in the open.” Suddenly streaks of greyness ran like men along the ground and struck flashes with their feet. “By George, it’s rain,” he said; “it’s all rain. This is rain indeed.”

On the instant, the greyness sighed into a hissing, hissed into a rushing, and rushed into a roaring. It sucked up all the last of the savannah, surged over the mouth of the pass, beat Hi breathless and engulfed him, in a roaring of pouring, as though a river were falling. Hi felt that he was freezing and that everything else had turned to water: he was in water and under water, the air he breathed was water: the earth his horse stood on was running water. Thunder sounded not far off: he could not see the lightning, but remembered his father’s stories of iron outcrops in the rocks near the Meruel border, which seemed to “attract” any lightning there might be. He did not know whether iron outcrops could “attract” lightning; probably it was one of his father’s insane theories, but it might be the fact, in which case he was near the Meruel border, and might be standing on the magazine waiting for the spark. The thought of trying to push on, through the rain, did not enter his head: he could not see twenty yards in any direction.

The violence of the rain lasted for some two hours, after which it relented to a downpour not worse than that of steady rain in England. When once it had relented thus, it steadied, as though it would never cease: it was this steadiness which daunted Hi. “It’s raining like an eight-day clock,” Hi thought. “It might keep on at this pace for days.” He sought to the thickest cover that he could find and hoped for the best. In another hour, the heavens descended on him, so that while water streamed from heaven and forest, the air was a greyness of melting and moving cloud. All the forest was alive with the rushings, the laughters and the forebodings of rain falling or being shaken: sometimes it came at him like the footsteps of enemies, sometimes like lamentings, anon with a crackle as though a pack were afoot. “The horse would take me out of this,” he thought, “but he would take me straight back to the estancia, so that I should have to start again. I’d better wait here. After all, if it rains like this it must rain itself out before long: no clouds could stand it. I wonder where all the cloud can come from. As soon as this mist or cloud or fog goes, I’ll push on.”

Having made his plan, he stuck to it: the cloud seemed to do the same; it did not go: it even increased till the earth seemed melting and the air liquid. “Golly,” Hi thought, “this cloud isn’t going to go. I may be here for days.” He reckoned that he had been there already for some hours. “I must find some browsing for the horse.”

This the horse found without going far from where they were: he led the way to some shrubs, which he ate with relish. “I hope he knows what is good for him,” Hi thought, “for I don’t.”

He secured the horse from straying: then he sought about for a shelter from this never-ceasing drip: there was no shelter in sight. “Probably there isn’t one anywhere,” he thought, shuddering. “I shall be here for the day and night, and goodness knows how much longer besides.”

He had come back to his horse, partly from fear of losing him, partly for his company, when the greyness dimmed to a greater density, so that he could not see his outstretched hand. In this dimness an eternity passed. The rain continued unabated. He contrived to tend the horse, and to give him some of the corn which Anton had provided; later, when he had watered him, he contrived to tether him securely near the bushes where he could browse. After this he himself ate, very sparingly, of the food which Anton had given. When he had supped, it was dark: the night had fallen. Hi made himself a nest of unease in the edible bush, which smelt like his mother’s tooth-powder. Lying on a mess of trampled boughs, which kept him off the mud, he crouched himself into a ball till something like warmth came into him; then he even slept a little, in starts and nightmares, from which he would leap up, terrified that the horse had gone.

This was his second night upon the road to fetch Don Manuel. At about the time when he lay down upon his boughs Ezekiel Rust, dead beat, pulled up somewhere in sight of the lights of San Jacinto city, at the other end of the Central Province. Out there in the barrens, the old man was comforting his horse, before lying down in the sage with a rope round him to keep off the snakes. He had had such a ride as he had never dreamed of; but being soft to the saddle, after some years in a town, he could go no further without a rest.

XI

Some hours after midnight, Hi woke aching with cramps and dripping with sweat: it was oppressively hot and still: all the forest was holding its breath, as though about to do something dreadful. There was a deliberation, even about the droppings from the trees. “Golly,” Hi thought, “it feels as though the earth were going to open.” It was pitch dark in the forest: the mist had gone from the trees, yet there was no glimmer of any star: the moon, being young, was long since gone. The stew of air gave Hi the feeling that a heaven of cast-iron was descending bodily upon the tree-tops to squeeze the earth flat.

The suspense of waiting for the heaven to fall was broken suddenly by thunder, rain and wind, all rising in violence until, at about an hour after dawn, they reached a pitch such as Hi had not believed to be possible. Then, while the forest was crashing with falling boughs and trees, and the air all vehement water and flying fragments, the heart suddenly went out of the storm; the darkness from above rolled away to leeward, showing the sun. The wind, which had been a thing of death, at once became a thing of healing: the storm was over: nature was freed from prison: Hi could go on.

He could go on; but he had lost another complete day and the going was changed. He was in a world of mud like the first chaos. All the wood was littered with thousands of young leaves, twigs and caterpillars. The millioned life, which had thrust at the first rains, had been washed to a smalm by these last. The ground of the wood had been so worked by the rain that it looked and trod like a ploughed field in a wet November. He rode out of the wood, all streaming as he was, towards the gulley of the pass. For one glorious minute, he saw all things glitter in the sun: the warmth beat upon him like life itself; then the rain began again: not heavy rain, but a steady trickle.

By this time, he was in the ravine of the pass into which every gulley, meuse and cranny, as well as the gashes cut by the storm, had been draining for many hours. A mess as of a dozen ploughed fields, of different colours of clay, had been washed into the pass, plastered there and sprinkled with boulders. Here and there boulders too big to shift had stood as obstructions to the floods. Near these, small boulders and ridges of rotten stone had been washed or flung so as to form moraines or dams across the hollow of the valley. Sometimes these dams held pools of water many feet in depth. All the pass rang with the noise of falling water.

He went on, cold and soaked; on foot in the mud, leading a miserable horse through pools, morasses and over stones. The rain fell steadily, and there was no road nor signpost, nothing but the direction of the gulley down the hill, the noise of water, sometimes birds, but never beast nor man.

“And the worse of it is,” he thought, “that I must be coming to that place where I was to turn off, if I was to turn off. That was what he meant, I think: that I had to go to the left of a crossing. I only hope that it will clear before I reach the place.”

It did not clear: it went on raining.

“This is what father meant,” he thought, “when he said, ‘You’ll thank me before the year’s out for sending you to a land of the sun.’”

He wondered much into what kind of country he had come, for he could see so little, except the faces of rocks all streaming, then mist, then folds of hill, from which streamers of rain came out and passed. Presently he came to trees which had hard leaves that clacked: his teeth clacked in sympathy. Not long after this, he came to a bridge, not over but in a torrent; and here he had to blindfold his horse to get him across. On the other side of the bridge, at a little distance above the waters, was a stone with an inscription in Latin:

Pray for the souls
Of Espinar, Gamarro, Velarde.
Drowned here.

He wondered as he looked back at the bridge, with the water swirling across it between the balusters of the parapets, how he had ever crossed. He patted his horse “for being such a sport.” He judged that this river must be the upper waters of the river at La Boca; but any sense of direction was long since gone from him: he did not know where he was.

Memory of his friend’s direction, that there was no road to the right, made him edge to his left, whenever there was an opening. He was not on any track or trail now, but in mud or scrub among the clouds; sometimes rocks loomed out at him, sometimes trees. When he halted, as he sometimes did, to shout, in the hope of an answer, he had no answer, save the noise of the rain that wept as though all hope were gone. “Well, if I go on, I must reach somewhere,” he said. “I can’t go back, even if I wanted to, because the river’s rising, and nothing would take me over that bridge again, with the water worse than it was. One good thing about this rain is, that there won’t be any forest fever yet, since the rains aren’t at an end.”

It was consolation of a kind; but he was as sick and shaking from cold and misery as most fevers could have made him. He noticed after a time that he was going uphill again. After some hours of this he came into a forest of giant trees. There was no undergrowth and little light in this forest. He rode in a gloom full of sighing like voices and full of dropping like footsteps. The rain seeped in films and streaks through this wood: mists of it paused in places, like ghosts looking at him from behind trees. Sudden gusts sent rushes of water to the ground with the noise of the steps of beasts. It was in this wood that the rain began to slacken.

At first, he thought that this was only a seeming, due to the shelter of the trees; but soon the mists of the rain cleared from the boles, which at once became like gods for bulk and silence. Soon the birds and insects reappeared; ants came to forage among what the rain had brought to earth; ticks fell from the trees; the big red and yellow fungi at the tree roots unrolled themselves into enormous spiders which waved their front legs at Hi in a terrifying rhythm, as though they were trying to hypnotise him. They did it slowly, with their eyes fixed upon him. They seemed to be repeating:

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Hi could see no tracks anywhere on that wet earth, but he realised that his horse was leading him somewhere.

“Good old boy,” he said, “you know more about these parts than I do. If you can bring me to any comfort I’ll be grateful.”

A long time passed before comfort appeared. It came with the brightening of the light in the gaps among the tree-tops: the very sight of this was warmth to him. “The sun,” he said, “I’ll do it yet, if I can only find someone to direct me.” The horse went straight ahead till at about two in the afternoon, as Hi guessed, he paused and whinnied, and horses whinnied in reply.

There, at a little distance in front of him, on a level patch, where the trees, being small, had been easily cleared, was a hut or shack with smoke rising from the chimney. It was a white man’s, not an Indian’s hut, because it was sided and ended with unbarked planks and roofed with shingles. It was old and falling to pieces. It must have been deserted for years, Hi thought, yet smoke was rising from it. Beside it was a long, ruinous pent-house or shed, with a torn canvas crib or manger running along its wall. “I suppose it is an outlying camp,” Hi thought, “or some old winter house for the timber cutters; anyhow, thank Heaven, there are people there.” He could see two pale faces peering round the half-opened door at him. When he lifted his eyes from the house, he saw, at a little distance, two tethered horses pausing from their grass to stare at him. As he advanced from his halting place, the faces at the door moved forward, so that he could make out a man and a woman. The man advanced to a pace beyond the door. He was a short, fresh-coloured man, with fair hair, and a small sandy moustache. What Hi noticed more particularly was that the man looked guilty, as though he had been caught in the act of something. “He’s scared at something,” Hi thought. When the man saw that Hi was only a boy, a relief came over his face, a relief so great that it made him laugh unpleasantly.

The woman had drawn back out of sight inside the shed, where (from the sound) she seemed to be doing something with bedclothes, making a bed or packing something in blankets. Hi thought: “There’s something fishy here. I’ve caught them in the act at something. And it must be pretty bad or he wouldn’t be in such a funk.”

“Is this the way to Anselmo?” Hi asked. The man looked blank. Hi repeated the question, more than once; after a while the woman came to the door.

“Anselmo?” she asked.

“Si, si, Anselmo.”

“Por aqui, Anselmo.”

She was a willowy woman, all slink and gleam, with a speck in one eye and something swollen in lip and nose.

“This is, then, the way to Anselmo,” Hi said. “La via a Anselmo? The calle or route a l’Anselmo?”

“Si, si,” the woman said, nodding.

The first wish of the couple, to get the stranger away from the hut, without letting him peep inside, now changed to another wish: a strange look passed between them, which made Hi uneasy. The man had enormous fore-arm muscles: his right fore-arm had been bruised or scraped quite recently. In his trousers he had a gun pocket which plainly had been used for a gun, though no gun was there at the moment.

“Por aqui, Anselmo,” the man said, taking Hi’s bridle and turning the horse away from the shack.

“He show you,” the woman said in English.

“Is it far to Anselmo?” Hi asked.

The man said he could not understand.

“I don’t understand, either,” Hi thought, “what you two have been up to, here in the forest. You aren’t living here; you only came here an hour ago; because there are no tracks to the door, except brand new ones. Why do you two come here in the rains to pack something in blankets? What were you packing in blankets?” What indeed?

The man led him past the two tethered horses into the forest on the trail by which the horses had come there an hour or so before. Hi had noticed horse tracks ever since he was a child: he noticed suddenly the tracks of a third horse in the soft earth. Three horses had come towards the shack that morning: the third had gone off suddenly into the forest. Why?

The man led on, saying nothing, but thinking the more. Glancing back, Hi saw the woman moving from the shack into the forest. “I wonder if I’m going to be led round to meet her,” he thought. “And if so, why?” Glancing forward, Hi saw that the man was looking at him with a strange expression.

“I believe they’re up to no good,” he thought. “I’ll get out of it.”

For a moment, he did not know how to get out of it, nor how he could manage without a guide if he did. Then the certainty that this couple were wicked urged him to act. Something said in his brain, “Behind that door they had a lad like you, whom they had murdered.” A picture formed in his brain of the woman behind the door, rolling a body in a blanket. Whenever she rolled the body face up, the face which showed was his own. “It may be all imagination,” he thought, “but I’ll go on alone.”

He checked the horse, with a sign to the man: he did not know what on earth he was to do next.

“Dis donc,” he said in a mixed speech. “Esta Anselmo loin d’ici? Anselmo . . . sabe? Anselmo, est il bien loin? La ville d’Anselmo, est il far?”

The man nodded his head and grinned, as though to reassure him. Something in the man’s face, the pouchy look under the eyes, reminded Hi of one of the portraits of Henry VIII: it looked evil from evil done and evil planning. The man turned to his path and seemed about to lead the horse off the trail. “I daresay,” Hi thought, “the woman is the shot: she has the revolver. He’ll lead me round to her and she’ll pot me from behind a bush. Yet he’s as strong as an ox. I can’t hit him or break from him without getting the worst of it. What can I do?”

The voice in his brain said, “Scare him”; but he did not seem to be an easy man to scare. “I could make the horse shy,” he thought, “though if I do that, I may be bucked off myself.”

“Dis donc,” he said again, “sont ils beaucoup de guardias civiles in Anselmo? Moi, je ne veux pas le police. Sabe? Comprende Usted? Police? Muchas guardias me muchas afraido.”

The man said something in his sullen way that all would be well, better than well: again he turned to his task, leading the horse off the trail.

“Things are getting to be critical,” Hi thought. “I must try a scare.”

He was about to try some sudden startling of the horse, when the woman called out something. The man stopped and shouted in reply: from the woman’s answer Hi made out that she wanted the man for some reason, to do something which she could not do. “Wants him to load the revolver, probably,” he thought. The man seemed vexed at the request: he seemed to ask if she could not manage as she was: she answered “No.”

The man growled in his throat. “Bah. Las mujeres.” He let go the rein, with a look of threat and misgiving. He said something to Hi, which seemed to mean: “You stay here a minute: I’ll be back directly.” He strode off in the direction from which the woman had called. Hi let him go about ten yards, then he turned his horse, and urged him up. The man turned and called out to him to stop. Glancing back, as the horse got into his stride, Hi saw the man running back to where the horses were tethered.

“The brute’s going to chase me,” he thought. “And he’ll track me, even if I dodge him. The worst of it is, that I don’t know whether I am headed for Anselmo or the new Jerusalem; but I must come out somewhere if I keep on. This forest can’t go on for ever.”

This was true; but he had a memory of his father saying, “The forest goes all the way to Cualimaçu on the Matulingas, 1,500 miles if its an inch.” If he happened to be heading for Cualimaçu, his journey to Anselmo was likely to be protracted. For the moment, however, his thought was to get away from these people.

Almost at once, his horse shied from a pool of blood where men had trodden within the hour. It was surrounded by big blue butterflies as greedy for salt as English butterflies for honey. “That’s where the murder was,” he thought, “and those two will follow me because they know that I know.”

After an hour, however, when he halted for the third time to listen for the sound of pursuit, he felt sure that he was not pursued. He rode on slowly through the forest, leaving the direction to the horse, who now seemed to know where he was going. As far as he could tell, in the gloom of under the trees, he went westwards but not directly, for the thorn thickets forced him now in one direction, now in another.

Presently the horse cocked his ears at something and challenged. Hi halted, expecting and fearing to see some wild beast, but in a few seconds he saw that there was a horse in front of him, standing still among the tree trunks, watching him, some fifty yards ahead. He was almost invisible at first, for a horse will fade into any background or dimness; as he became distinct, Hi saw that he was saddled and bridled, though not mounted.

“That is it,” he thought, “the brute has headed me off. This is the murderer. He has slipped off his horse there, and is somewhere among the trees waiting to pot me. Even if I dodge him, there’ll still be Mrs. Now my only chance is to dodge.”

He was about to dodge, knowing the futility of dodging, when the horse strode out of his covert into view. He was a darker horse than the two big sorrels tethered near the shack. He had a running cut on his side and a saddle twisted underneath him. He came ramping from his place, full of power and alarm. “By George, it’s the dead man’s horse,” Hi cried, “and what a beauty. I’ll have him.” However, the horse had been terrified once that day; Hi’s coming set him off again full tilt into the wilderness, with his stirrups flying from flank to foreleg or swinging back to clank under his belly. Presently, the girth buckle broke, the saddle fell and made him stumble, but he recovered, shook it clear and strode off into the woods.

Soon after his stridings had ceased to beat in the ears, the air above began to sigh with the homings of countless birds which settled on the trees with cryings and shriekings. Then suddenly there came a darkening all over the forest, as though the light had been turned off at a tap. Hi knew what this meant. His father had often told him that when the sun went behind Mount Melchior the light went off, so that you couldn’t see to shoot. “Now here I am with the day gone,” he thought. “It will soon be dark, and I have not yet started for Anselmo. Buck up, old horse, and get me out of the forest.”

The horse seemed to be bound for somewhere; but after another hour of going, when it was beginning to be dark, he was still in the forest. He could see no gleam of open country nor hear anywhere any noise of men. When he halted to shout, he had no answer, except the sudden silence of birds and beasts. He was there in the depths, out of the reach of his kind, as alone as a man can be.

Perhaps in the past the horse had had some happiness in that part of the forest, which led him thither now. When it was almost too dark to go further, he bore his rider into a space where Indians had made a cassava patch by burning off the trees. Indians and cassava shrubs were long since gone, but the space was still clear of forest. In that patch of ground, some eighty by fifty yards across, there was tall grass of a bright yellow colour between two and three feet high. About this, the trees grew to less than their usual size, being (as it seemed) bowed down by the weight of the creepers. Over the patch was the dome or depth of violet sky in which there were already stars.

The horse thrust into the patch and fell to eating greedily. Hi dismounted to look about him; he found that there was water at one edge of the patch.

“I’d better stay here for the night,” he thought, “because I’m lost. In the morning perhaps I may be able to find a way out. If I could only see the sun or Polaris I would be out in no time.”

He unsaddled his horse, rubbed him well down with grass, and having haltered him, hitched him to a tree. He gathered him some armsfull of the grass, and talked to him, as he ate, for comfort.

All through his ride he had not tasted food, because of something he had said to himself at breakfast, “I hope my next meal may be at Anselmo.” Now, when he saw plainly that he could not reach Anselmo for many hours to come, he drew his food from his bags. The rain had made a paste of the bread, but he scraped some of the paste together and ate it with some sausage; he drank of the water of the pan, which smacked of the marsh. He reckoned that he still had one tolerable meal of paste left in his bag, and one good feed of oats for the horse. These things he resolved to keep in reserve. Under the paste of the bread he found five silver pesetas, which Anton or the girl had hidden for him.

He was much touched by this.

But his main feeling was one of overwhelming anxiety for his friends who were depending on him. “Oh, they must feel that I have failed them,” he thought. “They must have sent someone else. If this has happened to ’Zeke as well, God help Carlotta. God help her.”

A strange whiteness of light glimmered high up in the trees: in a few moments it died, leaving all things strangely dark.

“Here is the night,” he thought. “Oh, it is lonely. This is my third night away and I haven’t even started yet. But I’ll get my bearings and start at dawn. I’ll get through somehow.”

The stars deepened overhead: the birds lapsed into silence: what noises there had been in the wood became suddenly stealthier. Little bright burnings came and went in the air as the fireflies began. Hi gathered more grass for the horse, tried his tether, and then made himself a nest of grass in which he could not sleep, because of the cold.

During the morning of this, the third day, of Hi’s journey, Ezekiel Rust came at a gallop to the house at Encarnacion, where Don Manuel watched beside the dead body of his mother. Being admitted to Don Manuel, he delivered his message, with what news he could add from the underworld of Medinas. Don Manuel waited for half an hour, while his mother’s body was buried; then he rode to San Jacinto city, to intercept any other messenger coming from the capital. By the early afternoon he was summoning all his friends and adherents in the Western Provinces to come with arms, fodder and horses to a rendezvous east of the river. At about the time when Hi was settling to his nest, Don Manuel’s first supporter, Pascual Mestas, came in to the rendezvous with twenty men from Santiago. Ezekiel Rust was given a bed in the inn at San Jacinto, with the promise that he should not want again in life.

XII

After some hours, by crouching knee to chin, covered by his saddle, a kind of warmth crept over Hi, so that he slept an uneasy sleep, full of cramps and nightmares.

Uneasy as it was, it was deep. Eternity seemed to go over him like a sea. Down at the bottom of its pit, he became conscious that the universe was vast, and that in the depth of it, one little ache, which went from his back into his stomach, from the cold, was himself. All kinds of vast things watched this ache with indifference; but the ache was all-important to himself. It kept urging him to rise. “That is the point,” he muttered, “I’ve got to rise. I’ve got to rise.”

Something from the heart of things was calling him to rise. With an effort he shook himself out of the cramps and nightmares into the coolness and stillness of reality. He thrust aside the saddle and sat up, aching. There were the stars overhead, in all those odds and ends of constellations of the southern heaven which have no easy guides for the wanderer like King Charles’s Wain. The grass was all pale about him, the trees were all black, tree-tops and grass-tops seemed to waver a little: something near the water pan made a ticking noise, as though some mouse were snouting there under fallen twigs.

From all these things, he came suddenly to focus on the thing which mattered. His horse was staring intently, rigidly and silently at something which Hi could not see. This was why he had been called upon to rise. The sleeping partner in his horse had called him up to face the enemy. A wave of fear passed from the horse into the master; Hi sat up to stare as the horse stared; he rose to his knees and stared.

He could see nothing but the film of the grass against the black of the forest, yet somewhere in that space was something at which the horse was staring with all his nature. In that dimness and indistinctness before the darkness something was abroad, not stirring, but staring at them. What was it? Was it a snake waiting to strike, or a puma, or a ghost out of the grave? There was nothing to show, nothing to see; but both knew that there was something, deadly unspeakable. Hi felt the hair rise on his brow: he heard the sweat drip from himself and his horse.

How long this lasted he never knew, but at last, from that indistinctness in front, there came the faintest of sounds, that marked the ending of the tension. Something dark seemed on the instant to merge back into the darkness behind it. There was no noise of step or tread, no motion in the grass, nothing that one could swear to seeing, only the suggestion of a scent, like the ghost of the flavour of musk, and then the knowledge that the thing was no longer there. He believed that his horse sighed with relief, as he himself did.

He could see nothing, but the horse saw. Hi saw the horse’s eyes follow the thing slowly round. What thing was it that could move so slowly? What thing of precaution was moving, pausing and deliberating? When it deliberated, its will hardened against them, the horse knew it, and Hi knew it from the horse. The fear came again, that the thing might strike, had almost made up its mind to strike: it had some kind of a mind.

Yet again the tension snapped suddenly, with a sigh of relief from horse and man: the evil seemed to withdraw, so that the horse felt free to change his position. Then the night, which for some minutes had seemed to hold her breath, began again to speak with her myriad voices out of the darkness of her cruelty. The whisper and the droning of the forest sharpened into the rustlings of snakes, the wails of victims, the cry of the bats after the moths, and the moan of the million insects seeking blood.

For some two hours Hi stayed by his horse, waiting and watching, till at last he felt free to lie down to rest. The insects took toll of him, but he contrived some shelter, and being young, as well as weary, he slept again. He may perhaps have slept for as much as an hour.

He was wakened suddenly by that inner messenger who told him that the danger, whatever it was, had returned. He heard the horse wheel round with a little cry to face in a new direction. Hi faced it, but again could see nothing but a blackness of trees, now like steel at the tops from the false dawn. Hi stood beside the horse, with an arm on his neck, staring. There was tenseness and silence, with fear passing from beast to man and back again. What was there, Hi could not see, but the horse saw. All that Hi thought that he could distinguish was a blotch of blackness which wavered against the blackness that was steadfast. It seemed to him to be some snake swollen to the size of an upright at Stonehenge. When the waiting became unbearable he challenged.

“I see you,” he said. “What do you want?”

There came no answer, nor any sound from the thing; the only result of the challenge seemed to be that the tenseness became more tense and the silence more still. Staring forward more intently, Hi felt that the blotch of blackness was not there, but that something was there, but what thing? Ah, what thing could it be that was slow, silent as the coming of a fever, and deadlier than pestilence? It was there making up its mind for half an hour.

Then, as before, in one instant it was not: it was gone. Hi looked up at the heaven suddenly, to find that the steel of the tree-tops was now burnished with colour. Some birds in those tree-tops right over where the danger had been now woke all together with ejaculations and the clapping of wings, which spread from tree to tree, till all the forest was awake. High, shrill cacklings and screamings, full of good spirits and energy rang aloud all over the wood. With a clattering of the quills of wing-feathers, some big birds shook themselves loose from sleep. After a time, flocks of little birds passed overhead with thin, sweet cries. The false dawn, which had made the sky warm with colour, died away into dimness; then, almost at once, the darkness thinned and dispersed: colour surged into mid-heaven in flames of scarlet, which made the tree-tops glow. Within a few minutes it was dawn. Hi was cold, miserable, swollen and itching from bites, but safe from the powers of darkness; the night was gone; he had never understood what night was, now he knew.

In the glow of the warmth with all things so full of colour he looked at the place where the danger had threatened. The danger had now gone, the horse was eating at peace. There was no trace nor track that Hi could read, nor any mark that he could find, that might not have been made by himself or the horse. Yet about the places where the danger had been a flavour or sickliness of musk still lingered, so faintly that it could hardly be noted. “It is not musk, either,” Hi said to himself. “It has a sort of edge to it. It is the smell of some stuff that kills, it has to do with death. This is a deadly place; we’ll be gone from it.”

Having groomed and fed his horse and himself, he set out from that clearing. “I have got my bearings now,” he said. “I am facing north, probably straight towards Anselmo. Any going to the right will bring me out towards La Boca; any going to the left will put me too far to the west. As I am headed now, I ought to be clear of the forest by noon. I don’t know what Rosa will think of me, losing all this time, but I’ll get there somehow, so that she shan’t be too much ashamed of me.”