Chapter VIII: Part 8

He had not ridden for two minutes before he felt a change in his horse; all the gallantry was gone from his going, there was no spark nor stir passing from horse to rider. “Poor old boy,” he thought, “he has been awake all night, from that thing in the clearing, he is feeling a bit tucked up.” He went gently through the forest for rather more than an hour. It was good going, more open than it had been the day before, with patches of savannah where the trend of the shadows gave him his directions. He was thankful for these savannahs, because of their warmth and colour, which restored him like draughts of wine. But his horse went on like a log beneath him, with no life nor spirit, and his own heart was troubled enough at all the delays. “At least, I am started now,” he thought.

He came to a green expanse, broken up with pools of water, where reeds of delicate stems, topped by pale blue tufts of flowers, attracted multitudes of golden-throats, which poised at each tuft and glittered as they fluttered. The patch was perhaps three hundred yards across and of an intense glittering greenness. “Soft going,” Hi muttered; “this is bog.”

The horse knew something about earth of that greenness. He would have none of it. Hi dismounted to look at it; it looked like bottomless bog leading to deep water, with bog on the further side. In the midst of the green expanse there was a sort of bubbling wriggle of small snakes. Sometimes a red turtle crawled out of a pool, wallowed along the mud and sank into another. “Here’s a lively place,” Hi thought. “I’ll have to get round it. I’ll work round here to the right and go round the end of it.”

He set off in good spirits, but after two miles or more of exploration he found no end of it. Instead of an end, the bog seemed to have a growth in that direction into a lake or pool edged with bottomless mud. Something in the water, whether tincture or germ, had killed the trees which it had touched. Three or four hundred dead trees stood in a pool the colour of stagnant blood, each tree was leafless and barkless: they stood as bones, silent save for the beetles clicking on them. “Here’s a nice place,” Hi thought. “It would be first rate as a shrubbery to a morgue.”

There was no sign of any way across or round that bog. The blood-pool stretched on to what looked like an oil-pool, black and rancid, with prismatic gleams oozing outwards from it. Beyond this, there was swamp, with enormous plants with branches like water-lily roots, or like knots of snakes intertwisted, rising from the pools. The bark of these twigless branches had been gashed, perhaps in some act of growth, so that it hung in weepers, showing the red or yellow flesh beneath; “beggars with sores,” Hi called them.

“Since I can’t get round here,” he said, “I must go back and try the other end.” The mosquitoes were eating him alive here, so that when he clapped his neck suddenly his hand was covered with blood. As he had heard that oil will drive away mosquitoes, he smeared his hands, face and neck with the skimmings of one of the pools; this relieved him for a time.

At the other end, he found a tongue of dry land which seemed to thrust right across the bog. “Here is a way,” he thought, “this will take me over.” He set out upon it with good hope.

After a mile of open going, the reeds closed in on both sides of him, so that he rode in a narrow space between ranks of stems, grey-green and golden, topped by plumes of blue. The horse needed continual urging forward, until he came to a patch of a plant like rest-harrow, which attracted him; he seemed eager to crop it.

“Well, if it’s going to do you good, old boy,” Hi said, “you’d better eat some.” He slipped the bit from his mouth to let him eat, but it proved to be a sick beast’s fancy; he would not eat. He plucked two or three croppings, but dropped them from his mouth. Hi didn’t like the look of his eyes nor the feel of his skin. “What is it, old son?” he asked. “What is turning you up? Was it the rain yesterday, or what?”

The horse drooped his head and trembled a little. “This is bad,” Hi thought, “but I must get on, cruelty or no. He may be better presently.”

He led the horse forward till he reached a place where the reeds grew across the causeway. He thrust into the reeds for a minute, when he found that he was treading in water over his shoes. Four or five inches down, the roots of the reeds, the surface of the earth, or both things together, made a hard bed on which he could walk. “I think it will be all right,” he said; “it seems fairly safe: anyway, this is my direction; this bog can’t last much longer: I must be almost across, and I simply won’t waste time by trying for another way.”

He slopped on slowly for another hundred yards, leading the horse. The reeds grew thicker as he proceeded. They were hard in the leaf like cactus and tough in the stem like bamboo. He had to back into them, dragging the horse, who came unwillingly; sometimes he could not break through, but had to edge round a clump. It was hot work paddling backward thus. After the first hundred yards the water began to deepen. Birds which had never before seen a man moved away at his coming; a deep, intense droning of insects sounded about him: insects got into his eyes and seemed to like being there. Many midges, with tiny black spots upon their wings, thrust under the wrist-bands of his shirt and below his collar, where they bit like sparks of fire. Suddenly the reeds let in a great deal more light: he had backed through into the open. He found himself standing almost knee deep in a lake of water two or three miles long by a mile broad. There was no way across from there: he had come the wrong way.

Perhaps, in his disappointment, had his horse been fit, he might have tried to swim across, holding to his horse’s tail. The temptation to try was strong in him; the water, though deep, looked so beautiful, and the distance, in that light, so small. What made him hesitate was a patch of weed near the further shore. “I might get snarled up in that,” he thought, “or come to a mud patch and not be able to land.”

At the instant, something gave a sharp and savage pluck at his leg; he kicked the thing from him and at once splashed back among the reeds. “One of those snappers that father was always gassing about,” he thought, as he recovered from his start; “he always said that the fresh-water fish would eat a man. I must give up swimming it, that’s all.”

He turned back in depression through the reeds. “Just as I thought I’d crossed it,” he muttered. His horse seemed to share his depression. He came back through the reeds in a way which seemed to say, “I could have told you that you couldn’t cross here. Now you’ll have to fag all the way back again, and you know that I have not any strength to waste.” Going back made him realise how much further he had come than he had supposed. It seemed to be miles to the starting place, but he reached it at last.

“Dash it all,” he said, while he halted to consider, “I believe that this is the place which Anton mentioned: the place he meant when he said I couldn’t go so, because there was no ground. Well, if I’d only thought of that sooner, I might have spared myself some pain. Now he said that there was some sort of a track hereabouts, which would take me clean out of the forest. Puzzle, find the track. I see no trace of any track. I’ll take a cast, to see if I can hit it off.”

He took two casts, one in each direction, but could see nothing like a track. “If there was one,” he thought, “it was very likely washed out by the rain yesterday. Anyhow, I have tried the east and the middle: they are both wrong. If there’s any way at all to the north from here, it must be to the west. Here it is mid-day pretty nearly, and I have not started yet.”

He set out to the west, through a forest of vast trees, which stood over him like gods watching a beetle. When he had ridden for an hour, he turned into a valley, down which suddenly a mist of rain came sweeping. It came less violently than the rain of the day before, but settled in as though it would last for ever. In a few minutes the forest had changed to a dimness full of footsteps and sighings, across which shapes of cloud faded and formed and faded.

“I must keep on, and then bear to the right,” Hi said. “This won’t last as long as it did yesterday.”

He kept on for some hours at a walk, till he was stopped by a bog. A river or large stream which perhaps ran into the lake at its western end here had silted up its mouth over some acres of forest. A rotting mush barred the way; there was no passing. As moving to the right brought him to reeds growing in water, he moved to the left, uphill, until his horse stopped.

He had saved a feed of corn against an emergency: the horse nosed at it, but would not eat. “Poor beast,” Hi thought, “he’s in a pretty bad way. I’ll rub him down and give him a rest. If we both rest for a little it will do no harm.” After grooming the horse, he contrived what shelter he could, and fell asleep. He woke once, to find the rain streaming on his face, woke a second time, to find that the rain had stopped; then sleep took hold of him body and soul and held him as one dead.

He slept all through the afternoon and would have slept longer far into the night, but that he was suddenly startled by the shattering of a volley of shots from some place far away. “There it is,” he cried, starting up, “that is Don Manuel coming to the rescue.” Other shots followed, some, at first, close together in volleys, the later ones singly. After the shots, listening intently as he was, he thought that he heard the sound of many horses going together at a fast trot. Some such noise there was, it rang out, died down, clopped and clinked and then clattered. “Of course, it can’t be Don Manuel,” he said, coming to himself. “But it may be the Whites driving away the Reds. Anyhow, people are there: the forest ends. It may even be Anselmo. Come on, horse, here’s the world again. ‘They must be men, because they’re fighting, and they must be civilised because they’re doing it with guns.’”

The horse seemed the better either for the rest or the sound of his fellows; when Hi mounted, he set off with some kind of spirit. In a quarter of an hour he came to something which made the horse whinny; it was a trail.

“Here it is,” Hi cried, “the very little trail which Anton spoke of. Now I shall be out of it in no time. Just as well, too, because I’ve slept a lot longer than I thought: it is almost night.”

The sun was indeed behind Melchior; the birds had homed and were now screaming before falling silent. The patches of sky over the forest turned slowly scarlet, paled yellow, then changed to a green in which stars were bright. The sparks of the fireflies began to pass upon the air: cold silence and darkness came with them into the forest, so that Hi shivered. His heart, none the less, was beating with hope, because the horse was going with confidence. Then from somewhere ahead came the distant lowing of cattle, which brought tears to Hi’s eyes. It was the noise made by the cows of home coming into the barton at Tencombe: now here, in this strange place, it told of the homes of men, where life was lived wisely, away from towns, and far from the madness of rulers like Don Lopez.

Suddenly, from somewhere ahead, a single shot rang out: it may have been far away, but in that still air it sounded near by. It was followed almost at once by the sound of the gallop of a horse, which was either running away or being ridden by a man in fear for his life. It stretched at a full gallop across his front and so away into the west: one horse only, mad with fear, or with his rider’s fear, going at his utmost: from what?

“I wish I knew from what,” Hi thought. “Listen.”

He listened: many men were talking and shouting. Then there came the noise of many horses together: seventy or a hundred; “as many as in a hunt at home,” moving along a paven place at a walk, then rising to a fast trot together. “And they are within two miles of me,” Hi thought, “going from me.” He shouted, but had no answer save the sound of the horses dying away into the west. The cattle lowed again. “There must be a ranch there,” Hi said. “I’ll go to where those cows are.” He hailed again and was answered by little white owls which followed him on both sides, perhaps for grubs or beetles kicked up by the horse in his going.

Presently he came out of the forest into a little plantation of trees made as a wind-screen, possibly for cocoa. Beyond this, he saw a cleared space in which, less than half a mile away, were the long, low white buildings of a ranch lit up as for a festival. To his right, there seemed to be ordered plantations of fruit trees in blossom: he saw long streaks of paleness which he judged to be peach trees. To the left, rather further from him, were high corrales, where pale cattle moved and lowed; he heard them stamp and push: often they rattled their horns upon the bars.

He rode nearer to the buildings, then paused to hail, crying out that he was English, and that they were not to shoot. He had no answer to any of his hails. The place was still, save for the cattle: there was not even a dog. “The men must be all at supper,” he thought, “or milking, if they milk in these parts. But it is odd that they have no dog.”

The moon, now some three or four nights old, was low down over the house, near the tops of Sierras, which glittered. “I don’t know what sort of a course I’ve been riding,” he thought, “I seem to have been going due west: or is the moon different down here? It seems to slop about all over the place.”

Leaving the moon for the moment, he rode on towards the house, calling out that he was a friend. Some shrubs, newly planted, on both sides of his track, gave out a strong sweet scent: beetles and fireflies were swarming over them with a droning of wings which made the silence the more apparent.

“Is anybody there?” he cried. “Hullo there. Don’t shoot: I am a friend. House ahoy, I’m a friend.”

By this time he was at a long white gate which had been thrust and propped open far back to its supporting posts and rails. He entered the gate, riding cautiously, still calling that he was a friend, but having no answer, and hearing no sound, save the moving of the cattle in the corrales and the buzz of insects in the shrubs.

“Not even a dog,” he repeated, “and there must be fifty men in a ranch like this. What if they are all in ambush, waiting for me to come on?”

“It’s not likely,” he thought, after a moment, “but it is possible. They may be waiting at those windows to plug me like a nutmeg grater. But if they are, they’ll wait to see who is coming with me. It feels to me as if the house were deserted.”

Beyond the gate, the way had been paven, the horse’s hoofs struck on a road; the house cast back the echoes, clink, clink, at each step. As he advanced, the young moon bobbed lower down towards the house-roof: no sound came from the house.

“Hey,” Hi called, “I am a friend, an amigo; un ami. Je suis Anglais. Ingles.”

Something in the ominousness of the silence brought his calling to an end. There was something dreadful at work here. Something had stricken the heart of that house so that its life had ceased. Yet not quite ceased, for as Hi dismounted he saw a breath of smoke blow from one of the chimneys across the curve of the moon. “What in the wide earth is happening here?” he asked himself.

At a little distance from the house, to the left of the entrance, were tethering posts from which iron rings hung. He had thought at first that they were the posts at which the slaves were flogged; but he now knew better. He hitched his horse to one of the rings, and then went slowly towards the door. The house seemed to grow bigger as he approached it: he felt himself shrink. He wished that his footsteps did not make such a noise upon the road. “It is deserted,” he told himself, “it is all deserted. But it is all lit up, so that it can only have been deserted within the hour, after that shot was fired here.”

Six steps from the door a thought came to him which made his heart leap for joy. “Of course, this is Anselmo,” he said. “I’ve come to Anselmo. This is the Elena’s ranch, and the Elenas and all their men have either gone to Don Manuel or joined the other Whites. That is it of course. Well, here I am. And they’ve moved all their horses with them; those were the horses which I heard. I’m late enough, but word has reached them. ’Zeke must have got through.”

Thinking thus he crossed the two broad stone steps of the perron to the estancia door.

An electric light burned over the door: some moths were butting at it. The door itself was of black maruca, bound with steel. A big bronze pipkin, such as the country people all over Meruel use for milking, hung beside the door. “I suppose this is the bell,” he thought. “It’s just like a castle in the Morte d’Arthur. Here goes for a bang.”

He struck the bronze, which clanged aloud, spinning round upon its cord and thrilling: then he struck again more loudly, twice. The clang died down into a trembling of the air, but all within the house was silent, there was neither voice nor footstep. There came a rustling of wind from the madre de cacao trees; nobody came, nobody spoke. “Is anyone inside there?” Hi cried. There was no answer.

“I don’t believe that there is anybody here,” he said. Then the thought came: “Suppose the people have all been rounded up or killed by the Reds?”

“But, no,” he thought, “the Reds would have sacked and burned the place. It is not that. I don’t know what it is: it must be something queer.” He struck the bronze for a last time.

XIII

“Well, if they won’t answer, I’ll see if I can go in,” he said. He lifted the latch by plucking the plaited leather bobbin: the door was not locked, it opened before him into a long lit corridor or hall where an English clock was ticking. As he opened the door, the wind blowing in shook the pictures on the wall: they swayed and clacked for an instant, then steadied. There were lighted rooms opening from each side of the corridor, but no sound of any living being.

“Hullo, you inside here,” Hi called. “I am a friend. Is anyone there? Señor Elena. Señor George, Señor William. Hey, hey, heya. Is anyone here at all?”

His voice rang along the corridor and died away: no one was there. “Very well, I’ll go in,” Hi said. He stepped in, and closed the door against the wind. As he did so a letter and envelope, which had been lying on the edge of a table near him, fell to the stone flags with a clatter. He replaced them on the table; then paused to look about him.

He had heard that men of the great ranches lived like princes. The hall in which he stood was bare, big and white, lit by electric lights. There were two stiff black chairs, two black pictures of yellow nymphs, a table heaped with silver horse-trappings, and the English grandfather’s clock, gravely telling the time. He walked up to the clock and read the words on the dial:

Edward Hendred.
1807
Abingdon.

These two little things of old Berkshire met thus in this strange house so many miles from Thames and Down. “Hendred of Abingdon,” he repeated. “There may be a Berkshire man here who may know father.” He glanced at the pictures of the yellow nymphs in their clothes blown out in the grand manner. “Religious pictures,” he thought and glanced away. The house was so still that he hardly dared to go further.

“What can have happened?” he asked. “Some fight or some show or what?”

He walked to the nearest door, on his left. The door was ajar, shewing a lit room: he knocked at the door, had no answer, and therefore looked in. It was a big, long room, in use as the messroom of the household, for whom thirty places had been laid on the table. Food in abundance had been set there for a meal, which had been begun. Baskets of small Meruel loaves were on a sideboard near the door: he felt these by accident as he put out his hand: the under loaves were still warm from the oven. There was warmth in the vast silver cazuela tureen, which stood, more than half empty at the head of the table. The table was littered with the mess of the meal: broken loaves, bowls which had been used for cazuela, halves of oranges, skins of bananas, and the bones of big birds like turkeys. Yet from the look of the plates Hi felt that the meal had never been finished: something had interrupted it before they had reached the coffee and cigarettes. Somebody with some news had come there soon after they were half way through, then chairs had been thrust back and food left, half eaten and the eaters and talkers had gone. Why had they gone, and where? Hi did not like the feeling of this house.

He went again to the hall and cried: “Is there anybody here?” But there was no answer. “There must be someone somewhere in all this barrack,” he said. “Surely in the kitchen or outhouses there will be a woman or a negro or a peon. There must be at least a caretaker or night-watchman. The kitchens will be along the corridor somewhere at the back.”

He went down the corridor, where he found the kitchen. It was a vast room, bare, clean, and empty of people. The fire, which had done the work of cooking, had been allowed to die down; but the castle-kettle, once full of water for coffee and the washing-up of the dishes, was still boiling and half full. A black cat with its paw round its face was curled up asleep on a mat on a chair. “I’m glad that there is something alive here,” he said.

Doors opened from the kitchen into outhouses, sculleries and larders: Hi felt a dread of looking into these rooms, but he overcame it: no one was there.

“Well,” he said, “if there’s no one to ask, I will make a mash for my poor horse. No one could object to that.”

He took one of the big round-up stew cauldrons which lay against a wall. In this he made a hot mash of bread for his horse, adding some salt. He carried it out to the horse, who seemed glad of the warm food for a few instants; but it was not all that he had hoped; in a few instants his muzzle dropped from it. “Poor old boy,” Hi said, “I wish I knew what I could give you, that you would like.”

He lingered by the horse for a few minutes, to pull his ears, and rub him down. The breeze which had set in struck cold, so Hi moved the horse to a more sheltered place behind the immense rain vats a few yards from the tethering posts. He had hoped that somebody would come there while he was outside with the horse, but there came neither sight nor sound of anybody.

“I’ll go in to explore,” Hi said. “There must be someone, and if there’s someone there may be something I can do.”

It was harder to enter the house for this second time than it had been before. The uncanniness was greater now. The clock still ticked, the light still burned, the table still stood uncleared. “I don’t want to be caught bagging things in a strange house,” Hi thought, “but I’m jolly well going to bag some food and leave some money for it.”

He ate and drank of what was on the table, to the amount (as he judged) of a peseta, reckoning in the bread for the horse. He left one of his five pesetas on the table for this. “What am I to do, and where am I to go?” he wondered. “If I leave this? This may be Anselmo; almost must be: yet where are all the Elenas gone? Perhaps I’ll find something in the other rooms.”

There were three more rooms in the corridor of the hall: two on the opposite side, one on his side, nearer the kitchens. The rooms further down the corridor had the look of being offices or studies. “I’ll go into those, first,” he said. “Very likely I’ll come upon somebody dead in one, or on the old mad doctor who runs this private madhouse.” He knocked at the door beside him, which was shut: for one instant he was shocked by thinking that at the sound of his knocking someone within the room had turned the pages of a book. He opened the door upon a dark room, into which the breeze blew from an open ventilator high up in the wall. He saw the light switches and switched the lights fully on. The room was the estancia office, as he had supposed. There was a safe, built into the wall. There were two long tables heaped with papers; but another thing impressed Hi: chairs had been lifted from the floor on to these tables, so that the floor might be swept. Two brooms had begun to sweep the floor: there was the tide mark of dust, earth, torn paper, cigarette ends and cigar butts half way across the room. There were the two brooms resting against the table, just as the unknown sweepers had left them when their task had been interrupted by what? On a third table was a row of flat, square, white china dishes, each containing about a pint of brown or reddish liquid. Hi judged that the liquid was a chemical of some sort, perhaps a parasite mixture.

He crossed the corridor to the room opposite. This was plainly a room for the women. It contained a long settle which faced a row of spinning wheels. On a table there were heaps of palm-blades partly unravelled into the white bast from which the Meruel women plaited their hats. At the further end of the room were two hand-looms on which some weavers had already woven parts of saints for the back cloth of an altar. Someone had spilled a little bottle of scent upon the palm-blades. It was oozing from its cork into a rivulet which had dripped into a pool upon the floor. “There has been a hurry, even here,” Hi said. “Oh, I wish to goodness I had come here an hour ago. If only I had not taken that wrong turn, or slept quite so long, I might have found the people here: and they are good people, doing good things.”

He went again into the corridor to listen: no one had entered the house. “There are all the outhouses to search through presently,” he said. “I must find someone before I can leave here. I’ll try this other room, opposite the dining-room.”

This proved to be the main living-room of a company of men. One side of it was slung with Indian hammocks, loosely woven of dyed fibres: the rest was in the confusion in which undisciplined men will live. It was littered with clothes, shot-guns, cartridges, belts, knives, books, papers, watches, money, cigars, broken cigarettes, pipes, spurs, quirts, matches, plugs of tobacco, photographs of girls, prints of horses, shoes, laces, straps and twitches. Tobacco had been smoked there not more than an hour before, but another smell also struck Hi’s nostrils. It was a familiar smell, yet for an instant in that smell of tobacco he could not say what it was. Then the sight of an empty brass revolver shell upon the floor reminded him that what he smelt was the smell of gunpowder. Somebody had burned a cartridge in that room not more than an hour before: there was the shell of the cartridge.

He picked it up, with the thought that it was the heaviest revolver cartridge he had ever seen. “Why,” he thought, “a thing like this would stop a bison. This is a Jack the Giant Killer. Whoever has fired a thing like this in here?” He put the brass shell to his nose and instantly the pungent smell brought scenes into his mind of two months before. The first scene was of the wood on the down above Tencombe, on a sunny January afternoon, when he had shot a pheasant, and had stood to jerk out the shell. A red squirrel had appeared on one of the leafless oaks there: it had run along the branch to jabber at him, to within six feet of him. This scene floated by into another of the Blowbury Woods at sunset, when he had waited in the cold for wood-pigeons. The orange sky to the west had been netted black by the elm twigs, and the woods had stood still in the cold. He had had a shot at last, but had missed with both barrels, had jerked out the cartridges, and had smelt just this smell, from fumes curling up at him out of the breech.

He dropped the shell: it fell with a tinkle and rolled from him. He was standing, at that moment, some four feet from the door, within the room; he had not much more than entered to take his survey. Fear, anxiety, homesickness, and the torment of failing his friends were all preying upon him. Then he looked up, suddenly, towards one of the windows, where something made his heart stand still. A man with a white face and blazing eyes was watching him through the window with a look of rage which made his blood run cold. The man’s brow was pressed on the pane, while his right hand reached back for a gun. That man was no dweller in the house, but a spy and an enemy.

He did not stay for the hand to come round with the gun, but slipped sideways into the hall, closed the door behind him and drew the bolt with which each of those doors was fitted. He slipped sideways along the hall to the front door, which he bolted likewise. Then he stood for a minute with his heart thumping, listening to hear whether the man were breaking through the window or coming to the door for him.

After a minute, during which nothing happened, his eye caught the letter that had been blown to the floor when he entered the house. The letter was on the table within a few feet of him. “It must have been the last thing read in this house,” he thought. “What if it were the cause of all the people leaving here? It may have brought the deciding news, probably did. At least, it may be addressed to one of the Elenas, or will tell me if this be Anselmo.”

He looked at the envelope, which was addressed in a bold hand

—— J. G.

He had a horror of looking at a private letter, even when made public in a book or newspaper. “It’s a skunk’s trick,” he said, “but I do want to know where I am. I’ll apologise if I ever have the chance.” He pulled the enclosure from the envelope to read it. It proved not to be the letter (that had gone), but a piece of paper which had been sent with the letter. The paper was a half-sheet of coarse bluish notepaper on which the same hand had pencilled the words, “Si, Anselmo.”

“Now what on earth does that mean?” Hi asked himself. “Yes, Anselmo? I would give something to know what is happening in this place.” All was silent about him, save for that ticking of the clock.

With a little chirrupping cry, the black cat, which had been sleeping in the chair in the kitchen, came running along the passage. It was a slim, small-headed, short-coated cat, not yet of full growth; it rubbed against Hi’s legs and purred; Hi leaned down to stroke it, but watched the passage to the kitchen.

“That man has come in by way of the kitchen,” Hi thought. “He has scared the cat, or let in a draught upon him. I’ll be out of this.”

The office window seemed to be the exit most likely to bring him out beside his horse: he slipped into the office and closed the door behind him. Then he listened, with a beating heart, for some swift, stealthy footstep in the corridor or outside the window. “Perhaps,” he thought, “I shan’t hear any footsteps, only the brute’s hand on the latch. He’s a spy and a Red, that devil. Listen.”

In that silence, the beating of the clock clanged like the tolling of a bell. The cat, left to preen his fur in the hall, padded back towards the kitchen. Hi was on the point of turning to open the inner shutter of the window, when a little shrill whirring bell began to scream like an alarm-clock upon some metal hooks on a stand at the table end. The shock of the sound made his hair stand stiff upon his head. He saw the instrument shaking on its hooks with the vehemence of the bell. He had read and heard of these things, but had never before seen one. It rang for ten seconds, then paused, then rang for five seconds and paused again. Then it rang again with determination for half a minute on end, as though bent on having an answer. Someone was telephoning to that house of the dead.

His courage came back in a few seconds. Someone was telephoning: why should he not answer? Possibly an English voice would speak to him or someone who knew English. Even if there were a Red outside the door, he owed it to Carlotta to run the risk, if by running it he could learn where he was and where he should go next. He did not know how to take the call. He lifted the instrument from its hooks and listened, now at one end, now at the other, to silence. “The thing is stopped,” he said. “I don’t know how to work the beastly thing. Yes?” he called. “Yes? Who is there? What is it?”

No answer come to him, not even the murmur of other voices which sometimes comes over the telephone. Then suddenly the thought came to him that perhaps the wire had been cut, or the unseen speaker shot down somewhere far away. He put down the instrument, moved to the window and opened the shutter. As he pulled it aside, the bell tinkled a little, whimpered again, as though about to ring again, and then stopped. “The wires are cut,” he muttered, “that devil the spy has done it.”

Peering out of the window, he could see nothing but a darkness which gradually took shapes to itself of trees swaying in the wind, palms clicking and clacking, and stars which became brighter as he gazed. “Here goes,” Hi thought, “I cannot see that devil; I’ll risk it.” So he scrambled out, landed on his feet, and then stood for an instant lest someone should spring upon him. No one sprang; there was neither sight nor sound of anyone, only his horse nosing at the earth, and the wind shuffling and clicking. He unhitched his rein, mounted and cautiously rode forward.

At the space near the door he halted to listen and to try to see. No one was there.

“They’ll be where the spy was,” he thought, “crouched out of this cold wind. I’ll see and make sure.” He edged his horse a little and a little to the corner of the house, where he held him ready for a dash. Very cautiously he craned forward along his horse’s neck, till he could see round the corner. Then he stared with all his might at the space lit by the windows of the living-room. No horsemen were gathered there out of the wind, but at the lit window the figure of the spy still stood with his hand reached back for his gun and his brow pressed upon the pane. He was staring into the window: Hi could not see his face.

“Golly,” Hi thought, “he’s still there. He’s come here again.” He did not move a muscle for fully fifteen seconds; the spy did not move. Hi waited for that right hand to flash up suddenly with the gun, but it did not come.

Then Hi thought, “But what’s he up to? He saw me in the room five minutes ago; then probably he went after me in the kitchen. What brings him here again? What is he staring at there? Can there be another man in the room? He must know that I cleared out: he saw me do it. Is he waiting to plug me when I come back, or what?”

He waited for another fifteen seconds, but the man never stirred a muscle. He stood at the window, pressed to it, intently staring. Hi had seen cats and foxes waiting intently thus before springing; but the cats and foxes had at least trembled with the intensity of their control, this man was motionless.

“But who in the wide earth is he staring at?” Hi asked himself. “There must be someone in that room whom I never saw, but who was there when I was there.” Then he thought, “Whatever is in the room, there is something wrong with that man. He is not quite of this world.”

That was an opinion which the horse seemed to share, and the presence of it in the horse made Hi’s terror stronger. Yet the intentness of that watching figure “not quite of this world,” was fascinating. All purpose will arrest the purposeless, but this deadly purpose was absorbing. It made Hi forget that looking at a person will draw that person’s eyes towards the looker. For the moment, he did not care; he longed to see what the man saw. He stared: his horse also stared.

Suddenly a gust of the wind, now blowing at its height, caught the window by which Hi had escaped. Hi heard it crash to, with a tinkle of glass. The draught inside the house flung some door open, and blew ajar the unhasped casement by which the watcher stood. The result was something which Hi had not expected. The man slithered sideways, scraping along the wall, and collapsed, with his head towards Hi, and his gun arm twisted askew as no living arm could ever twist. The light, shining now from the unobstructed window pane, showed Hi the bullet-hole through which the body’s death had come.

The horse had swerved aside when the body fell. The knowledge that the man was dead, and had been dead from the first, came to Hi in a flash, at his first movement. The smell of powder in the room suddenly became significant. “That explains the big revolver shell,” he thought. “Oh, golly, let’s get out of this.”

The horse was out of sorts, but the cold had touched him up, and something of his rider’s terror was afflicting him. He swerved away from the house and galloped ahead across a peach plantation. Hi heard horses whinny and a man’s voice hailing him from behind him as he entered the plantation. The dreadful fear that it was the dead man mounted on the nightmare made him crouch on his horse’s neck and urge him forward. He heard shouts, calling to him to stop, or so it seemed.

At any other time, he might have stopped; but he could not now, after the corpse flopping down towards him. In a few moments, he was certain that men were shouting at him, several men, in earnest, shouting no Christian tongue. By this time he had crossed the plantation fence at a place where the bars were down, he was heading across a patch of savannah towards the forest. He heard horses coming after him. He called out that he was English and a friend. The man who was nearest to him, perhaps mistaking this for an insult, fired a shot in the direction of the voice, but missed. Hi crackled through some hard-leaved scrub into the darkness of the covert, leaving the direction to the horse. Many horses crackled into the scrub behind him. He called out again that he was English and a friend, but his bailers cursed him, called to him to stop and opened fire at him. As he rode, he heard the piping drone of birds; then, suddenly, some of the birds spat and hissed close to his ears, twigs fell from the trees about him; he knew suddenly that the birds were bullets.

The pursuers, with one exception, soon pulled up, the firing ceased, only one man still followed, calling to him to stop. Suddenly this one pursuer pulled up, and Hi at the same instant felt a coldness of fear all over him. There came a shot and shock, his horse swerved violently, staggered, recovered, and bolted into the forest. “He hit the horse,” Hi said, “but not badly, or he wouldn’t go like this.” For the rest of the ride his task was to keep on.

How long he rode the forest he never knew: the horse went on in his terror till he could go no more, then he halted, full of the ends of terror, nervy, starting at a shadow and trembling.

The moon was long since down. Hi could make out that he was in a kind of pan or crater in the forest, with wavy indistinctness everywhere, smelling of balm. He dismounted, tried to examine his horse, who would not let himself be examined, but had certainly been cut on the crupper. He tried to comfort the poor beast. Coming to a patch of grass near a brook, he offered him grazing and a drink, both of which he refused. “Poor old Bingo,” Hi said, “you’re dead beat, you shall rest.”

He tethered, unsaddled and spread his coat upon him. The beast stood where he was left without attempting to roll; he drooped his head as though he had come to the end.

“Now I am pretty nearly done,” Hi thought. “I don’t know where I am. I’ve been gone four days. I’ve killed one horse and cooked a second. Now I’m lost in the forest again.”

He listened for some noise of men or the creatures of men, but heard nothing save the noises of the forest. Terrors began to take hold of him, the dread of such a terror as had come the night before, the terror of the man at the window. Yet at last sleep took him from the terror of being awake: he fell into a pit of sleep and slept for hours.

During this, the fourth day of Hi’s journey, young Chacon the notary, reached Don Manuel with all the terrible news still to be told. By this time, men and horses had begun to arrive at the rendezvous. Some copies of the blasphemous proclamation, which had arrived in the west from Port Matoche, had roused intense feeling throughout the west: men answered Don Manuel’s call from all over San Jacinto. While Hi was lying down to sleep, Don Manuel, with an advanced guard of about a hundred men, pushed eastward from the river to begin his march.

XIV

Hi woke up suddenly into terror, for the forest was filled with a crying as of creatures gone mad. A pack of things was giving tongue with voices madder than a fox’s bark.

“Wild dogs gone mad,” he thought. The noise of the yap seemed to strike between the skull and the coats of the brain, as the idea of the weasel strikes into the brain of the rabbit. Hi jumped to the horse, who was already trembling. He cast loose the tethering rope and swung himself on to the beast’s bare back, gripping the headstall, and in an instant the horse was away with him, in a panic which Rosas himself could not have controlled. Horse and man fled like the bird knocked from roost in the night. What did the bags and the saddle matter while that crying filled the darkness?

“Oh, golly, what are those things?” he thought. “Oh, golly, if they are after us.” All the night seemed full of flaming eyes, but these were only fireflies, not a pack: the crying seemed to die away. The horse floundered through mud in a cane-brake, which crashed under his trampling. Hi dug his head into the horse’s neck and shut his eyes: it was like running the gauntlet for what seemed a long time. After it, he went through tall grass, which drenched him with dew. Hi felt him weakening beneath him as he came out of the grass: then suddenly water appeared before him as a lake or broad river, where the wind roused reflections of stars. Hi saw a fish leap and splash, shaking up a glittering; in an instant the horse was swimming, with the gleams all round him.

Hi knew that a very little thing would drown the horse in his present condition; he slipped off his back, slid sideways, caught his tail and swam with him. After about fifty yards, the horse put his feet down, stumbled on to his knees, but recovered and came to the bank. Hi with some trouble scrambled up in front of him, got a purchase on the reins, and helped him on to dry land. They stood there gasping together for a while, being both out of breath as well as very cold.

“O Lord,” Hi thought, “what on earth were those things? I’ve never heard anything so awful. Thank God, we got away when we did. A very little more, and they would have been on us. I think I should go mad if they were coming after me. Listen.”

There was no sound of any pack in cry coming after them. They had come to a part of the wilderness which was silent, save for the rustle of the reeds and the splash of the leaping fish. “I suppose it’s going to rain again,” Hi muttered with chattering teeth; “that is why the fish are leaping. I wish I’d brought my coat and the saddle.”

But they were left behind with the bags in a place which Hi was little likely to find again. “Lord, I do feel wretched,” he said, shivering. “I’ll get away from this water. There may be alligators in it. I never thought of them before. Come up, old Bingo; we’ll find a place for you.”

They moved away through a thicket into a space which had been burnt the year before. From the cold and from the colour of the sky, Hi judged that it was about an hour from the dawn. The horse stopped from exhaustion. “You’re sicker than I am,” Hi said. “I’ll do my best to warm you.”

He pulled grass: the horse would not touch it, but it served to rub him: he was trembling, his coat was staring, and his head was down. “I’d give something for a bucket of warm beer for him,” Hi said. “It’s hateful having nothing: even the bread is gone. Well, I must hope for the sun to come soon to warm him.”

The cold was so painful that he had to move away, to dance and flog his arms. The dawn seemed to take hours to bring any colour to the sky, yet it came at last.

“Thank God, here it comes at last,” he said. “If only I could hear a bell with it: even a cow-bell.”

It came with no sound of bells, but with a clapping of wings from all the near-by trees, as the multitudes of the birds awoke. Their cries were not sweet like the cries of so many English birds: only one seemed to have a sweetness in his voice. This was a biggish bird with black wings and orange breast. He had a sweet droning note which said, “Woe,” then, after an interval, “Woe” again. All the other birds seemed to be saying, “Damn it”: or so Hi thought.

As the light grew, the clamour of the birds rose to a roaring, for many of them, after trying their wings, took flight, wheeled, and sped away in their companies, to seek for food. Some of those who cried “Woe” settled on a tree which was covered with great white waxy flowers, intolerably sweet. Wafts of the sweetness came to Hi on the gusts of the wind. He saw them tear at the flowers and eat the petals. Hi, going to the tree, tasted a petal, thinking that what fed the birds could not harm himself. It was like sweetened church candle or much what he had imagined manna to have been. He ate of this manna with the knowledge that he, too, had been fed in the wilderness. When he returned to his horse, he found him stretched out dead.

It was the first time that he had lost a friend by death: he sat down beside him and wept. He was not a lad given to weeping: he had not wept for years, but he was shaken by the last four days, and in an extreme of loneliness, which made him know what a friend the horse had been in hours of danger and beastliness. Now that he was gone, Hi was alone indeed. The horse lay dead on his off side: his near crupper was scored with a bullet-mark. “So he was hit after all,” Hi said, “I thought he was. And the poor old Bingo saved me twice last night, and now he is dead.”

He remembered the last lines of a well-known song:

Could I think we’d meet again,
It would lighten half my pain,
At the place where the old horse died.

“Golly,” he thought, “I’ll never be unkind to a horse as long as I live, after this.”

After the stunned half hour, he picked himself up, to look round at where he was. He stood in a space of grass, ringed by trees, up which the creepers climbed in a fire of flowers. To his right were the reeds and the water, with the sun climbing above them; to his left was the dimness of the forest.

“I’m facing north,” he said. “Almost due north. I’m facing the plain as I stand. I’ve got about a day’s go in me. I must get to the plain this day, or I shall never get to it at all.”