Silvertip (1942) (10 page)

They came up to look at that immobile face, and as they passed by Silvertip, they looked with fear, with wonder, with hatred, also, upon him. He felt the shifting of their eyes upward, to the two gray tufts of his hair, like incipient horns rising. Tonio made the sign against the evil eye.

"This one is called Terry," said Tonio. "He is one of the leaders for Drummon. He is one who hires others. We have seen him before come near the house, like a buzzard sailing in a clear sky. And now he's caught and down- caught and down! Gringo! Hai! You grin at us now, eh? But we are laughing. If all-"

"Be quiet, Tonio," said Monterey. "Do you forget that this man who has saved my life is also an American?" He went up to Silver and faced him closely. All of Mon-terey's visage was old, the lines down-flowing from the brows and the mouth, but the eyes remained unflattened and undimmed by years, like the eyes of an artist.

"Take the body away," said Monterey to the peons. "And leave me alone with this man."

He remained standing close to Silver. The girl had come up beside him. And the servants rapidly picked up and carried away the dead man. One of his arms hung down, and the loose, dead fingers trailed along the ground.

"Sit down," said Monterey suddenly. "Sit here. Yo
u
are weak. Julia, pour some wine. Here, senior. Sit down!"

He made Silver take the very chair in which he ha
d
been seated. He took the glass of wine from Julia, an
d
passed it to Silver.

"I cannot drink alone!" said Silver. "You shall not," said Arturo Monterey, and put a little wine in two more glasses.

The old man held up one of them as high as his head, until the wine sparkled in the moonlight.

"I see you in clothes covered with the slime of the cellar water," said Monterey. "I see you with a haggard and unshaven face, senior, and for every hair that grows upon it, I know you have had a bitter thought about me. Ho
w
I wish, now, that I could have seen you with the clear eyes of Julia! But I can only drink to you now out of the gratitude of my heart. Gratitude, senor, to the man wh
o
killed my-"

The words disappeared in a groan.

"I ask your forgiveness," went on Monterey, suddenly, as Silver rose from the chair. "I drink to kindliness between us, and perfect trust!"

"To the trust between us!" said Silver, and drank the wine. And over the edge of the glass his eyes found the eyes of old Monterey, and held them.

They lowered the glasses, all three.

"Were you here when I spoke to Julia of the past?" asked Monterey.

"I was here," said Silver.

"You have seen the Drummons," said Monterey, "and everything that I said about them is less than the truth. One of them you have killed. Therefore the whole tribe will hunt you down. You must leave the valley. You shall have guides and fast horses. Once beyond the mountains, you will be safe. In five minutes you must leave!"

"Not unless you gather your men and have me tied into a saddle and make them lead me out," answered Silver.

"Do you hear?" said the girl softly. "Uncle Arturo, do you hear? He will not leave you!"

"He must leave me," answered Monterey. "He has been treated like a dog. There must still be hatred in him."

"The wine has washed it away," answered Silver. "Senor, I am bound to this valley by an oath."

"To whom?" asked Monterey.

"To a dead man," said Silver. "It is a promise I made to Pedro Monterey as he lay dead. I swore then that I would never give up his back trail until I found what purpose he had in life, and that I would try to fulfill it. Tonight I've heard of the thing he was to do. I shall stay here in the Haverhill until there is the Cross and Snake brand on the door of the Drummon house, on the forehead of Drummon, and over his heart."

The words were somewhat magniloquent; the voice that spoke them was perfectly quiet and subdued. Arturo Monterey stared at the speaker, and then at the girl.

"I understand," he said at last. "And now that you hav
e
spoken, there is no word fit to make a reply to you. You have spoken to Juan Perez. Even Perez could believe you, and that is why you were free to come here?"

Silver smiled faintly.

"Perez is lying in the room where I was kept," he answered. "He came to see me. I managed to knock his feet from under him, stun him, get the key, and free myself. After that I locked the door on him, and it was mostly chance that brought me here."

"Chance?" cried Monterey. "Chance? There is no chance in it! If ever God showed His hand, it is in this."

Monterey turned to the girl.

"Do you hear, Julia?" he asked.

"I hear," she said, watching the face of Silver all the while.

The old man lifted his voice, suddenly and loudly: "I believe! Do you see a justice in this? The very people who wronged me have sent me a champion. Providence is working. In every way, this surpasses ordinary human accident. The man is sent to me as a helper; he is attacked in front of my house; he is imprisoned; he breaks out to save my life, and offers me his own good right hand to help me in the fight. Do you see, Julia? It is a stroke out of the sky!"

He lifted his hand over his head as he spoke, and Silver-tip saw the grisly distortion of it, a black, twisted thing against the brilliance of the moonlit sky. The voice and the hand of old Monterey fell at one moment. The strength dissolved out of him. He took the arm of the girl on one side and the arm of the gringo on the other, and so went slowly into the house.

Chapter
. XIII

Accepte
d
MONTEREY himself led the way to a closed door and paused before it. He said to Silvertip: "When a man comes closer to the grave, he comes nearer to a belief in many things formerly deemed incredible. I am old, my friend, and therefore I am superstitious. I take you as a great gift out of the hand of fortune. Senior Silver, for twenty-five years nobody of your race has entered this house, but now I am opening a room for you. I open this door for you, I open my hand and my heart and my faith to you, also."
He cast the door open. A servant carried in a lighted lamp before them to reveal a big chamber. Silvertip saw a gleaming of dark, polished wooden chests of drawers and a huge wardrobe, and the slender, shining posts of another big four-poster bed. The servant pushed open the heavy shutters of two windows and let the thin dappling of the stars be seen. They looked both close and dim, except one burning yellow eye of light. Old Monterey took Silver's hand. "In
everything
you
say
and
everything
you
do he said, "you are now as the master of the house. Senior, good night. An old man gives you his blessing."

The girl went out with him. The servant remained for a moment, moving slowly here and there to open the bed, to dust the window sills, which were covered with fine silt. Before he left, the fellow paused at the door and looked at Silvertip out of narrowed eyes. He continued to stare, unwinking, for a moment, then he nodded, and, with a muttered good night, left the room.

Silver could not settle down at once. He had to walk between the hall door and the windows, back and forth, back and forth, struggling with the thoughts that worked like moles under the surface of his mind.

As he looked back on the events that had occurred since that evening when he rode down from the mountains into Cruces, it seemed to him that miraculous influences had been working on him all the while. He had been seized upon like driftwood by a powerful current, and brought straight down to the moment he desired. Now he was accepted by the family of the man he had killed. All the strength of Monterey and his men would be focused to help him in his work, and he was given freely his opportunity to step into the shoes of the dead man. In a sense, the ghost of young Pedro Monterey was most certainly walking up and down with him.

Other things, small problems, remained to be explained. For one thing, if Bandini had been retained as a tutor to educate Pedro as a fighting man, it was odd that the teacher and the pupil should have been so obviously quarreling when they were in Cruces together. But this was a minor point. The main fact was that at last he was confronting the unfinished life work of the dead man. He could not falter now. But though that work was exactly where his strength was the greatest, he felt assured that there were odds against him too great to be overcome. Monterey, with all of his men, had struggled vainly these many years. It would be strange indeed if he could succeed where so many had failed utterly.

Even when he had been imprisoned he had hardly felt a more intimate sense of peril than that which followed him coldly up and down through this room. And in th
e
background of his brain the thought of the Drummons rose up like thunderheads in a winter sky.

He was still pacing the floor when a tap came at the door, and he opened it on Julia. There seemed to be no light whatever in the hallway. The black hand of darkness held her in sharp relief.

"Is your uncle still holding a stiff upper lip?" asked Silver. "I've never seen a stronger will."

"He's shaking like a leaf now," said the girl. "But he won't let himself think about Pedrillo. He keeps poor Pedro out of his mind. That's the reason why he's able to bear up. And he'll keep fighting back the sorrow, because that alone would be enough to kill him, and he won't die until he's made the Drummons suffer."

Silver nodded. "Senorita," he said, "I want to know a few things."

"I thought you would," she answered. "Ask me."

"About you first. Who are you?"

"I'm the waif, the orphan, the poor relation. My name is Monterey, also."

"You're no more Mexican," said he, "than I am."

"My mother was American," she told him. "That's al
l
about me."

"Your father and your mother died, and Don Artur
o
took you in?"

"Yes."

"And you've been happy here?"

"Who can be really happy in the Haverhill? There's a curse on the entire valley."

"How close a relation are you of this family?"

"A third cousin."

"And you want to leave the Haverhill and the Cas
a
Monterey?"

"Not until Uncle Arturo is either happy or-dead."

"Tell me about Pedro. Sit down and tell me."

She sat on the edge of a chair. He sat down in turn an
d
took his unshaven, unclean face between his hands.
"Pedro was handsome-but you saw him." "The finest-looking lad I ever saw." "And he was the true steel all the way through. He laughed a little too much to please his father. But he had the making of a fine man."

"I knew it," said Silver bitterly. "There was no flaw in him, and I-" He finished with a gesture. "Tell me more about him," he urged.

"You only shortened his life a little," she answered. "He was to go against the Drummons in a short time, and they would have crushed him at once. Pedro was not clever. He was not very wise or strong-minded, either. He was simply honest and cheerful and brave. He would not have known how to meet the Drummons. He would have ridden straight at them-and that would have been the end."

Silver lifted his head and looked at her, but he was seeing the face of the dead man again. He felt that it was true-that young Pedro would have charged a mountain blindly.

"There's another thing-Bandini," he said.

"Bandini is a rascal."

"Does Monterey know that?"

"No. Uncle Arturo loves him-simply because he can ride well and shoot straight, and because he pretends to have a deathless devotion to my uncle and his cause. But as a matter of fact, all that he's interested in is in lining his wallet with more money. I'm sure of it. He worked here teaching Pedro how to ride, how to shoot, even how to fight with a knife. It used to be a savage thing to see them fighting, even although the knives were wood! But Uncle Arturo believes in Bandini almost as he believes in the Bible,"

"Where will Bandini be now?"

"Taking charge of the body of poor Pedrillo, seeing that it's embalmed, bringing it back toward the Haverhill."

"He'll be here soon?"

"Yes. What else do you want to know?"

His eyes surveyed her face curiously. She was not beautiful, but something from the mind spoke in her face. The lips and chin were modeled with the tender delicacy of childhood still; but across the forehead and eyes she was a woman.

"Only one other thing," said Silvertip. "That's about the servants. They hate me. But will you try to tell them that I'm not a monster?"

"You're wise," she answered. "You're so wise that you'll add a few days to your life, perhaps."

"A few days?" said Silver. "I'll live to be as old as Monterey."

She looked up at him and smiled.

"I hope so," she said, and almost immediately she said good night, and walked off into the thick blackness of the hall with the surety of one born blind and stepping through a familiar place.