Chapter X: Part THREE (5)

He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest. Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang. It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.

The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine trees.

“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.

“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.

“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.

“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”

“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that will take me there?”

“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”

“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the Sierra, going eastwards from this?”

“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here, keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only pass in all that range.”

“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.

“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”

Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women. They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree, then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him, firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned and ran.

He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.

Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.

“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”

Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines. Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought, “as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.

Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of the _Pathfinder_, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven, casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese, butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of the _Pathfinder_ came to his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr. Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.” Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.

He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale. When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must be some way through the mountains there.

He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags, but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water. Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.

It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone. Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.

He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone that had ceased to be stone.

In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in that waste.

He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake, and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake, found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep has no cause to grumble.”

He slept until the sun went down. He was wakened by the crying of the hawk. Rousing up from his lair, he saw the bird perched on the tree with his wings spread, crying what seemed to be a curse upon all that desolation. Hope suddenly came into Sard, for perhaps there was a nest with eggs within the tree. He had been too tired to think of it before, but now the very thought gave him life. He shook with excitement. He went out and swarmed up the tree, found a nest, and though the hawks beat at him and struck him with wings and talons, he took the two eggs, each bigger than a duck’s egg and of a mottled reddish colour. In the nest was half of a large lizard which the hawk had brought thither. At other times he would have shrunk from such meat, but now he judged that if it would nourish the hawk, it would nourish him. He ate it with the eggs and wished that it had been ten times its size. Having sucked the eggs, he broke and licked the eggshells. He found that he was not thinking of the wilderness. His thoughts were almost continually in a little English country town, at a grocer’s shop, where there were boxes of eggs at the door. He kept thinking of those boxes of hundreds of eggs together, perhaps a thousand eggs in one shop, and of rounds of cheese, weighing a stone apiece. But the eggs were what stirred him most.

Thinking of these eggs, he stumbled and scrambled back over the eleven miles of rock to the pinewood. From his childhood he had been accustomed to take bearings wherever he went, and he had little difficulty in finding his way. In the moonlight he saw the tree with the cut rope still dangling from the bough. Under the tree was the body of the dead man, which had been roughly buried where Sard had laid him. His feet stuck up out of the earth, one bare and one slippered foot. Sard did not think of him, but of the bits of tamale that had been scattered there the day before. To his intense joy they were there still; altogether there were enough bits of tamale and bean pulp to outweigh a ship’s biscuit. Hungry as he was, he determined to save half of his find for the next day. He thought, “I depend on a bandit’s hanging for to-day’s food: to-morrow I need not expect to be so lucky: ‘it is not always May’: still, ‘God will provide.’”

He followed the tracks of the bandits till he heard a wolf howling, with a dog answering him howl for howl. Presently, as he went on, he heard horses squealing at each other: he smelt horses. Next he heard a man singing in a shrill falsetto, with many shakes, to the twangle of a guitar.

Following the noise in the moonlight, he came to a flat pan or gully through which a brook, that had made the gully, still passed on its way to the sea. The hills came closely about the pan, giving it shelter from all gales: this (with the water supply) had made it desirable to the Indians in old time.

The Indians had long since gone from it. It was now peopled by the outlaws who had done the hanging in the pine-barren: their tracks led into it; their voices sounded from the midst of it. Sard made out a line of huts stretching irregularly across the pan on the line of a track or trail. The falsetto singer was in the midst of the pan, dancing as he sang. Men were sitting about at the doors of their huts, talking, or at least uttering remarks.

“Such, indeed, is life.”

“Between Sunday and Monday there is ever midnight.”

“She, being a woman, is, as one may say, a woman.”

“The gringos, the accursed: is there anything more accursed?”

“Good wine, good water and good sausage: truly three good things.”

Sard heard these things uttered with all the dignity of a Solomon pronouncing judgments. Dogs were nosing about among the huts, picking bits of tamale. Sard felt that it would be wiser to move boldly down to the village than to stay skulking in the brush till a dog nosed him. He walked boldly down into the gully and passed at the back of the first huts straight into a lover with his lass. Both cursed him under their breath, but were too much interested in themselves to heed him. He muttered an apology as he escaped. A few huts further along the line he came to a corner where an old ruined adobe wall jutting from an occupied hut made shelter for him. He settled into the shelter, meaning to wait till the men were quiet, when he hoped to be able to find food or a pass, perhaps both. He knew that he was in the presence of men who would cut his throat if they found him, yet he listened to what was going on with enjoyment.

Two or three men were sitting on the other side of the adobe hut; they were engaged chiefly in silence, which they sometimes broke with speech, but more often by spitting. The wind blowing from them brought Sard wafts of cigarette smoke.

“Was that someone passing at the back of the house?” one asked.

“No,” another said. “It was some dog.”

“To me,” another said, “the noise was as of a pig.”

“A pig or a dog,” the second replied; “when I said that it was a dog, I meant that it was not a Christian.”

They talked for a while about different kinds of Christians, of which there seemed to be four sorts: themselves, the ricos, the rojos, and the gringos. There seemed to be something not quite-quite, something not of the sincerest milk of the word, about the last three sorts. They talked about pigs when they had finished with the Christians.

“Never will I be as the gringos,” one said, “who will eat of pig, even though it be nourished upon their grandmothers.”

“My uncle, who lived not here,” the second said, “being indeed from Havana, a city of Cuba, sold certain pigs to certain sailors who were gringos. These pigs these gringos greedily ate; their eyes shone, my uncle said. Yet were those pigs, pigs that had eaten many Christians.”

“Lo, now,” the third said, “it is not pigs who eat Christians, but witches, the accursed ones, who take the shape of pigs that they may eat: this also only gringos do.”

“Yet are the gringos fools,” the first answered. “There is Anselmo, who spoke with one but yesterday. Hola, Anselmo, come tell us of the gringo with whom you spoke upon these mountains. Hither, Anselmo. Listen, you, all of you, that you may die with laughter at what Anselmo tells.”

There was a pause while Anselmo came to the group: there were greetings of “How so?”; then the first speaker spoke again.

“Anselmo,” he said, “these have not heard of your meeting with the gringo upon these mountains. Tell them, then.”

“Ah,” Anselmo answered in the voice of him who had shot at Sard the day before. “It is thus; if you will see. I was in the mountains, in the pine-barren, where lately a justice of the people was achieved. I, sauntering there, considering many things, since it is my nature to consider, beheld suddenly a gringo, beastly even beyond the nature of such. For a moment I thought, ‘Lo, now, a prospector.’ Then I saw from certain signs that he was neither this nor that, but an Americano, a Tejano, an Inglés, what matter? This one (I also saw) was lost, as such always are if ever they leave a marked road.

“‘Good day, sir,’ I said; since it is ever my custom to be courteous. What, we are not brutes nor Luteranos, I hope; we can be civil one to other. Civility, as they say, costs nothing, yet makes many debtors. I, therefore, did not spit at him as one without faith. ‘Good day, sir,’ I said, ‘I trust that you are well, that your señora is well, that your honoured parents preserve their health, even at their great age.’

“He rolled his eyes upon me like a cow dying of thirst. The gringos have the eyes of cows rather than of men. ‘Tell me,’ he said to me, ‘the way out of these mountains.’

“‘Truly, sir,’ I said, ‘you who bring civilisation to our savageries will not so soon leave us. Stay, I entreat you, to dine, or at least to sup, or to sing thus to the piano as do the women of you gringos. Yet, since you must leave us, continue,’ I said, ‘a day’s journey north-eastward, till you reach a place where all the rocks are rotten. There you will find a path over the mountains, good for men, excellent for beasts, having grass, inns, a road, good air, good water and good bells, gravel soil and Holy Communion.’

“He was a big man, even for an Americano. He wore no boots, but slippers, such as women wear.”

“So you sent him to the rotten rocks,” the others said. “But did he go, Anselmo? He surely did not go?”

“Americanos believe all that they are told,” Anselmo said. “He either went to the rotten rocks or to another place far from me, which was my desire in speaking to him. Since there was nothing to be had from him, then plainly it was my task to be rid of him.”

“Long live Anselmo!” the man said. “So he went to the rotten rocks without question. This is it to be a gringo!”

“Without doubt he will be at the rotten rocks, dead?”

“Without doubt.”

The men laughed at this: presently the youngest of them said:

“You say that he had slippers such as women wear? Would it be worth the while to retrieve the slippers for Mariquita?”

“It would not,” Anselmo said. “This man was outcast from the gringos, unable to live even their easy life. His slippers were not women’s slippers, but the wreck of boots cut to that size. He was in all respects ruined: moreover he was lousy.”

They continued to talk of gringos for some little time, though the thought recurred to the youngest of the men that Sard’s body might be worth the rummaging: he asked Anselmo whether Sard had “a belt of the Americans,” or at least “a pouch for tobacco, such as he had seen.”

“No,” Anselmo answered. “This gringo had nothing: even the crows will have nothing from him. Had he had anything, I, Anselmo, would have had it: as it was, let the vultures give Anselmo thanks.”

They talked on, of gringos, gringo women, the women of the district, the recent cock-fights, the ingredients of sausages, the natures of parasites, etc., etc., till Sard, lulled by their drawling low speech, fell asleep. He was in a dangerous place, but danger will not keep men awake so well as love or grief. Besides, few stop to identify a sleeping man. He slept as a sailor will sleep, like a dead man. In his sleep, some two hours later, he shifted about, so as to detach a piece of adobe from his shelter. It fell, with a little clatter which he half heard through his drowsiness. Unfortunately, it roused a little dog within the hut; the dog began to bark. Sard sat up at once, wide awake; his movement knocked down more adobe; the dog barked louder: a man within the hut cursed the dog; but the dog, aware of Sard, would not be silent.

“Listen,” said the man in the hut, “be silent, Chaco. Listen; there is someone there.”

“Who would be there?” a woman asked. “It is but a dog, prowling for bones.”

“I do not know who may be there,” the man answered, “but it is no dog, since dog will answer dog with barking.”

“It is some drunkard or some pig of the poblacion,” the woman said. “Come here, Chaco; down, dog; quiet!”

Unfortunately, Sard in rising to his feet stirred Chaco to bark louder.

“Your drunkard or your dog or your pig,” the man said, “these are likely excuses, are they not? Where are my boots?”

Sard heard him drag his boots to the bedside, muttering.

“What then do you expect to find, Andrés?” the woman asked.

“You know well what I expect to find,” Andrés replied.

“Indeed I know no such matter,” she answered, “since the expectations of a husband are beyond the wit of wives. If you will tell me, then shall I know.”

“Know, then,” Andrés answered, “that I expect to find Martin, your lover, who taps here, like a second Pyramus, and shall die here in his sin, like a second Chico the Blanco.”

Sard did not wish to be the second Chico the Blanco; he slipped up the line of huts as swiftly as he could. He slid round the corner of a hut, under its eaves, into the grey of the wall. He was hardly quiet there when Andrés came rushing past looking for Martin.

“Stay, Martin accursed,” he cried; “we have accounts to settle, offspring of a dog.” He ran, cursing, along the line of huts.

The village or poblacion had not composed itself to sleep: it was perhaps always ready for a row. Sard heard a general rushing to doors, as the inhabitants came to see the fun. Some boys brushed past Sard, who joined them.

“What is it? What is it?” the boys asked.

“Andrés seeks Martin, to kill him,” Sard answered.

“Andrés is killing Martin,” the boys cried. “Come, boys, Andrés has killed Martin.” Sard found himself in the midst of a crowd of men, women and children, hurrying up the line of huts. The crowd stopped towards the end of the line where Andrés was beating with his knife-hilt upon a door.

“Come out, you Martin,” he was crying. “I will have thy liver as a bake meat, yea and I will mince thy heart and eat it with red pepper, without grace.”

There was a general edging back of the crowd at this, to get out of the line of fire from Martin’s door: Sard edged back too, till his back was against a hut wall. He could see Andrés’ wife at her hut door, peering after her husband. All waited for Martin to answer the challenge: Andrés even waited for a reply: none came.

“So, scum of a Martin,” Andrés continued, “half-breed of a toad and a heretic, you justly fear my vengeance. See, now, brothers, this Martin, before I take his skin to be my bed-mat, makes his last prayers: he confesses, he sues for mercy. But I am not one to grant mercy till blood has flown on my front teeth. So come out, Martin, offspring of a dog, till I crack your marrow-bones with nutcrackers and take your marrow for boot-grease.”

Suddenly the door of Martin’s hut was flung open and a woman faced the madman.

“Who is it calls Martin?” she said. “Who is it couples a fine name with the filth of a drunkard’s ravings? You, Andrés? I thought no less. Martin is away, as is well known, or by this your tongue would have been tied round your neck with your own entrails, dog of a drunkard. Away, accursed one, trouble not the houses of the honest. But when Martin returns, then he shall know of this, Andrés, and then, Andrés, shall you be squeezed in the press till we know if your blood be wine or oil.”

Sard expected that Andrés would at least reply, but there was silence. Martin’s wife took up the word once more.

“And you people of the town,” she said, “have you nothing better to do than to watch the antics of this fool? Go, every one to his house, or Martin shall deal with you, even as with him.”

There was silence again for about thirty seconds, then three or four of the children, who had been on the outskirts of the little crowd, edged sheepishly away. They were followed by others. Sard had no time to dodge or hide; any movement of the sort would have betrayed him. He stood where he was, somewhat bent and peering towards Martin’s hut, with his left hand shading his face and eyes. Half-a-dozen people, children and grown-ups, passed him on their way to their huts. They looked at him rather hard, but no one spoke to him. A man and boy, as they passed, looked perhaps harder than the others. After they had passed, Sard heard the man ask under his breath:

“Who was that by the corner of the house?”

The boy said, “Old Ortiz, I thought. Good-night, Ortiz.”

Sard answered and muttered good-night. As he spoke, a couple of lads, who were running, jolted into the two friends and jolted Ortiz out of their minds. Up and down the line of huts people went home and closed their doors. Martin’s wife stood at her door, looking at them. The last to pass was Andrés, who went shambling past, muttering and twitching. Sard heard him mutter, “With my good knife I would have laid him low, I would have laid him low.”

Now from Andrés’ hut came the cry of a woman:

“Where is that creature calling himself a man, to whom the church has bound me in matrimony, who suspects me of infamy? Where is this Andrés, who from the blackness of his heart asperses the whiteness of my honour? Let me see him that I may cast his foul calumny in his teeth. Is it for this, O dog of all the dunghills of Spain, that I redeemed thee from thy life as hangman’s boy and made thee a knight-at-arms?”

Those who had not gone home hurried to watch Andrés receive his wife’s eloquence. Sard saw Andrés enter his home, but then something made him look up suddenly. He saw that Martin’s wife, who had come a few paces from her door, was looking at him with curiosity. It was bright moonlight; no one who looked at him could fail to see that he did not belong there.

“Well, I’m caught now,” Sard thought. “It’s neck or nothing now. Well, the straightest way is the quickest.”

He walked straight up to her.

“Madam,” he said, “I’m not a spy or the police, or anything. I’m lost here in these hills; will you help me out?”

She looked at him for some moments. “Go further up the line,” she said, “the third hut from here is empty. Pass in there and have no fear.”

She closed her own door in his face, and Sard did as he was bid. The third hut from hers was empty. He went into it. At some early time there had been a mud wall across the hut, dividing it into two. This had fallen into a pile of loose earth. Sard got behind this pile and thought, “Well, here I am; and if that woman lifts a finger, my throat will be cut on this doorstep, and that little beast, Chaco, will lick my blood.”

He waited; each minute seemed an hour. At the end hut of the village the man still sang to his mandoline, in his falsetto voice, a poem of intolerable length and folly, which Sard recognised as a rhymed romance of the early 17th century. Footsteps passed up and down outside the door. Once three men came to the door and stopped there, muttering in low voices for two or three minutes. They were smoking cigarettes and spitting. One of the men was carrying harness, which clinked.

One of them said, “Well, sooner or later that’s what it’ll have to come to.”

And another said, “We can count on you then?”

The other replied, “Well, come here, come on inside here; I’ll just give you my reasons.”

He had his hand on the door-latch and the door eight inches ajar, when the other said, “No, not in there, thank you. There are tarantulas in there. Come on up along.”

They moved away. Then for a long time Sard sat there, thinking of what they had said: “There are tarantulas in there.” He heard a queer, regular, clicking noise in one of the corners, two or three yards from him. It was a little dry, slight clicking noise, rather like two wooden skewers being tapped together. Some one had told him, years before, that tarantulas click their mandibles together before they attack. “That’s what it is,” he thought, “it’s a tarantula in the corner.”

He kept himself breathlessly still, and then suddenly he heard a little light pattering. There was a swift, flurrying scutter along the floor, a shrill squeal, something leapt and fell across his feet and writhed away squealing. He heard the thing, whatever it was, rat or mouse, trying to shake itself free in the corner of the room. The squeals soon died to a whimper and the whimper to a sigh, as the tarantula in the darkness sucked his fill. Sard presently heard the corpse sink down, as the insect moved away. He waited with his feet drawn up under him and his hands covering his throat, lest the insect should want more blood and come to him for it.

The time went slowly by, the man with the mandoline ceased his song, somebody who wished to sleep cursed a howling dog until it came indoors. But the wolves out on the mountains crept nearer. From time to time one would cry his cry. Whenever this happened, the dogs in the huts whimpered and were uneasy. Everybody, by this time, had gone to rest in that village of outlaws. Sard thought that it could not be long before the woman redeemed her promise.

Then from somewhere up above he heard the sound of drunken singing, which became louder as the singer came down into the village. Sard presently picked up the words of the song, which was one of the romances of the Moors in Spain. As the drunkard entered the village, every dog in every hut flew to the door barking with all its strength, in spite of the curses and boots of the owners. The drunkard paused outside the row of houses and cried in a loud voice, “Here I am, old Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as I want to be. Come on out, Martin, Tomás, Ramón, Espinello, for I tell you I’m not Pappa Peppy, but an avenging angel of the Day of Doom. I’m the Lord’s second coming and now I’m come.” And at this he let fly with two revolvers at the doors of the huts, in succession. Drunk as he was, he had extraordinary precision. The bullets thudded into the doors as though he were running a stick along palings.

“Come, Tomás,” he cried, “and I’ll shoot the white out of your eye. Come, Ramón, and I’ll see the colour of your blood; for I’m Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as Noah when he got home.”

There came another volley. Sard noticed that none of the bullets came into his door. He thought: “This is that ruffian’s hut, he’ll presently come in here to sleep.” The drunkard went to another hut and beat upon the door with the revolver butt. “Come out, Ramón,” he said, “and let’s shoot, man to man.”

Sard heard the voice of Ramón: “Take another drink, Pappa Peppy, and let us shoot in the morning, for now I’m sober, and how can a sober man hope to shoot like you?” A bottle seemed to be passed through a cautiously opened shutter, and Sard heard Pappa Peppy say, “You’re a Christian gentleman, Ramón. All I ever wanted was a drink, and now I’ve got it.”

Sard heard him take a drink and then come unsteadily to the door of the hut where he lay. He fumbled at the door, opened it, and stood groping there, feeling along the wall as though for a ledge where matches and candle stood.

“The lamp’s gone,” he said; “th’ only lamp I ever loved all gone. They all turn from Pappa Peppy.”

He came fumbling along the wall into the hut, and then went fumbling back and shut the door. Then he said: “Well, I’ve got box o’ matches. First of all, I’ll put the nice brandy up in the corner. I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I tell you I’ve got a box of matches and then I’ll show them. They aren’t going to fool Pappa Peppy.”

Sard heard him creep back to the door, holding on by the wall, and heard him say: “I’ll just kneel down very carefully and I’ll put down the brandy there, and I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I know I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. The man who says I haven’t got a box of matches, I’ll shoot the white out of his eye. Who says I haven’t got a box of matches? That’s the sort of skunk they are. They daren’t say it to my face, not one of them. Of course I’ve got a box of matches.”

He proceeded to empty his pockets in the dark, muttering over each thing. “What in the name of all the saints is this? Bit of a cigar. What in the—oh, bit more cigar. That’s a bottle of peppermint, all broken. Ugh! the glass is all broken.” A reek of peppermint liqueur filled the little hut. “No good looking for them in that pocket,” said the man; “there’s cigars in this pocket. There goes the box of matches. I knew I had a box of matches and it’s gone on the floor.”

The box of matches jerked out of the pocket and fell very close to Sard. The drunkard went down on hands and knees, diffusing a warm breath of peppermint liqueur and aniseed brandy. Sard felt as though he was to leeward of one of the Spice Islands. The man began to grope for the box of matches, patting with his great hands and breathing with difficulty. “I know the box of matches isn’t far,” he said. “It’s very stormy to-night. In a wind like this one has to go miles out of one’s way. Oh, the wind’s roaring, the wind’s roaring! And well it might roar, for I’m not Pappa Peppy, I’m the Day of Judgment. I’m the Day of Judgment, and I’m dawning and I’m coming up over the mountains now, just like blood, and if I lay my hands on that box of matches, they’ll be the first thing I’ll blast. I’ll teach ’em to fool the Day of Judgment!”

Presently he paused in his search. He had missed Sard by half inches two or three times. Presently Pappa Peppy stopped not more than a yard from Sard and said in a little, cold, clear voice, “Lord pity the poor sailors on a night like this! That’s ten times I’ve been round this room looking for that drink. It’s been witchcraft. I can see you here, and well I’ve known you were here all the time, and I know you’re doing it with your witchcraft, you black beast. I’ve watched you doing it, but you needn’t think to scare Pappa Peppy. He’s the Lord’s, he is; he isn’t one of yours. He’s a lily for the pure to look to. He fears not Satan nor all his minions. Ah! here’s the bottle. I knew I’d come to it, if I kept to the south far enough.”

Sard heard the cork drawn from the bottle and the gurgle as he drank raw aniseed brandy.

“That was what I wanted,” said Pappa Peppy. “A man like me who takes a lot out of himself has to put it back or go under. And I’ll have another like that—ah! I’ll have another like that. And now I can lie down on the floor without holding on, and let the storm roar itself sick. I don’t care, I don’t care. To-morrow when I get hold of that box of matches, I’ll show it what I think of it.”

The bottle dropped from his hand. It must still have been a third full, for as it rolled away some liquid gurgled out of it. Pappa Peppy gurgled in sympathy or in tune, and composed himself to sleep, sitting up against the wall. He passed into a drunken unconsciousness almost at once, breathing with dreadful difficulty, being in fact at the point of strangulation, through his throat pressing against his collar. After two or three convulsive gasps, he shook himself out of his dangerous position and lapsed sideways. “There’ll be death upon the sea this night,” he murmured; “I’ve known gales, but never anything like this.” After this he slept and the village slept.

It must have been full midnight when the door opened suddenly and the cool night wind blew in from the desert. The woman was there. “Come you,” she said.

Pappa Peppy groaned and fought with his drink. Sard rose up and came to the door. The woman had a little leather bag full of food for him and a leather-covered gourd full of water.

“If you go past the houses,” she said, “and follow up the cañon, to the end, you will come out below the icefields. In all my living here I have only heard of one man who has ever crossed those fields. His name was Gonzalez: he lived a hundred years ago. He crossed them and reached San Agostino in five days.”

“It’s San Agostino that I want to reach,” Sard said.

“Go then,” the woman said, “and may you have that man’s luck. He was my grandfather. But know this: you’re in the land of the bad men, the land of Red Sleeve and the Jacarillos, and not one other soul for thirty miles would have done what I do, not one other soul.”

“Tell me your name,” Sard said, “that if ever I get among my people again, I will think of you with gratitude until I die.”

“We have no names in the Jacarillo country,” she said; “but if ever you come to some church in Christian country, say a prayer to the Virgin for Juanita of the Bolson. And now go.”

She was herself gone on the instant and flitted back like a thief into her hut. Pappa Peppy gurgled in his sleep and cried, “I’ll deal with you if I can get at you!” and then cried, “O God!” and moaned. Sard knelt down, picked up Pappa Peppy’s box of matches, took his two pistols and cartridge belt, loaded both pistols, slung his provisions over his shoulder, and set out with a pistol in each hand from that city of the Jacarillos.

Fifty yards from the huts, he entered the cañon, now stealthy with the noises of the night. Near the mouth of the cañon a sentry lay asleep within the ring of his rope which screened him from snakes. Sard crept past him on tiptoe, but need not have taken such precaution, since the man slept like the dead. Not far away, something large, grey and silent, probably a wolf, which had been creeping up to steal the sentry’s food, glided into the sage brush.

In another fifty yards the trail turned upwards into the hills, out of sight of the gully. Sard went on as hard as he could put foot to ground for three hours. Then coming suddenly round a corner, walking rather carelessly, thinking that he was quite out of the reach of pursuit, the faint smell of smoke crossed his path; immediately he was in sight of three mud huts by the side of the road. He was reassured an instant later by seeing that two of the huts were ruined. There came a rustling from within the third; a hideous old Indian woman came out. She might have been any age from a hundred and twenty downwards. They looked at each other in the grey light in the heart of the wilderness. She mumbled something in reply to his question, but any wits she once had had long since gone.

Sard pointed to the snowy peaks below the stars in the sky. He asked in Spanish, “Is there a trail across the Sierras?” He made signs of a trail and of mountains.

Some memory lit up intelligence in her faded mind. She laughed. “They all go over the mountains,” she said. “All the young men go into the mountains. That’s why all the mountains are white, for all their bones are on the mountains. Your bones will be white on the mountains. I live up here among the mountains and I can hear them. All the round white skulls come rolling down the mountains.” She ran into her hut and returned with the skulls of three white men. “They all rolled down the mountain,” she said, “for they are Indian mountains, and the white men know much, but they don’t know about the mountains. By and by I’ll have your skull. I’ll put him in the ants’ nest to clean and I’ll keep him on the shelf.”

Sard hurried away from her, but for about half a mile she followed him, hugging the skulls. He pushed uphill as hard as he could go, but in the stillness of that glen he could hear her voice for a long time, saying that his skull would roll down the mountain.

There was now no trail, but he fixed his course straight to the frozen crag, which gleamed above him against the sky. Dawn found him still pushing onward and upward in a trackless wilderness that seemed to bear no living thing. When the sun rose, he found some shelter among the rocks, where he might defend himself if attacked. He expected that the Jacarillos would trail him as soon as it was light enough to see tracks, and that with ponies or donkeys they might well be on him before noon. In this he was unjust to the Jacarillos: they did not trail those whom they judged to be already doomed. In his shelter he ate, drank and then slept; he did not wake until the setting sun shone through a crevice among the rocks on to his face. After eating and drinking he set out again into the Sierras.

All littleness was gone from the mountains now. His world was one with the elements, the sky, great stars, and gigantic crags, silent except when now and then there came a roar from something breaking in the glacier, or the thunder of a boulder falling. The moon rose to light his going up a slope of rock, which seemed curtained by other slopes of rock. Here he laid down one of the revolvers which he had taken from Pappa Peppy. He laid it on the rock beside him. Instantly it slithered down, gathering small stones as it went, till it was thundering down the rocky slope far, far below, with an avalanche about it. He saw it flash and presently heard a report, and realised, as he had not realised before, that he might have slipped like the gun and gone gliddering down among the boulders in the same way.

At about midnight he reached a ledge of rock, where he slept until daybreak. When he woke he saw what he took to be three cloaked Indians, sitting on the ledge beside him. He sat up and looked at them. They withdrew their heads from their blankets. They were no Indians, but vultures. They looked at him with interest and without fear. He spoke to them, they muttered a little and moved uneasily.

“So you’re waiting for me to die, are you?” he said. “I’m not dead yet.” They craned and sidled with their bald heads. “Get out of this,” he said, smiting at one. It went sidelong off the ledge, and the others with it. They beat with their wings, recovered their poise, and sailed out into the air. An instant before, they had been squalid, stinking, huddled creatures; now they were floating in the majesty of beauty. Two hovered at a little distance from the ledge, the third rose above it in a short spire. He had never seen any bird of prey circling at such close quarters. He watched the great pinions soar up above him, while the others hovered away and mewed and cried. Suddenly the bird above him launched itself down upon him and beat him with its great wings, so that he was almost over the ledge. Instantly it was up in the air and repeated its swoop. It came down sighing and struck and hissed at Sard, and immediately the two birds who had been waiting, swooped and struck at him. “So you’re going to get me down into the valley and pick my bones,” Sard said. He lay flat down upon the ledge, face upwards, and drew his other revolver. The bird came down on him again, crying and smiting. He fired; the bird went up, poised, went up a few feet further, beat with its wings, mounted yet a little further like a towering partridge, then crumpled up and dropped. Sard saw it strike and roll and lie still. Its companions swayed away to look at it and then descended to the body.

Sard looked down and wondered how he could ever have climbed that crag at night without falling. He knew that he could not go down it by daylight. He looked at the crag which rose up above him from the ledge, and felt that he could not climb it. He had reached a point from which he could neither go nor come. He ate and drank and then thought, “Perhaps when I’m rested I will be able to try this rock. If not, I shall end here.”

He slept on the rock until the beating of the midday sun became unbearable. He twisted to an angle where his head could lie in some shade, and slept again. He was aware in his sleep that someone stood upon that ledge and told him to come on. He sat up, looked at this figure and knew that it was only partly human. In his dream, or fever, it seemed like the spirit of the _Pathfinder_, fierce, hard, and of great beauty. He told himself, “This is all nonsense. The _Pathfinder_ is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a woman.”