The Black Rider (12 page)

Now down the hall to the rear of the house. They reached a stairway at the back, narrow, swiftly turning, and down this Richard Gidden descended first, with the girl behind him, and as he climbed down he could feel the tremor of her breath behind him and sometimes catch a whispered word, so he knew that she was praying for their safety. But he needed no prayers to help him; he felt the strength of a lion in him.

They turned a sharp corner of the stairs—a servant, scampering up, crashed against Gidden and recoiled, staggering.

“In the name of heaven,” he gasped out.

“Dog!” said Gidden sternly. “Are you a blind bat?”

The magnificence of his manner struck the other full of awe. He cowered against the wall.

“Alas,
señor
, on these steps…the servants only…I did not know….”

Gidden brushed past him with the girl on his arm.

“He has stopped and is staring after us. He begins to suspect something,” said Gidden. “The devil fly away with him. I should have stabbed him to the heart and gone on without a word!”

“No, no, Richard, only when your own life is in danger…swear that you will not harm a single human soul! If there is blood on this first day….”

“The devil is loose!” murmured Gidden. “He has given an alarm. Did you have the hood over your face?”

There was a loud babbling of voices from the rear of the great house.

“I had the hood over it. He could not have guessed.”

“He has guessed, nevertheless, Lucia. We can never reach the bottom of the hill by the hidden stairs before the whole household will be swarming like hornets.”

“We are lost, then, Richard? Shall I turn back? Shall I hide you?”

“You could not hide me here if I were no larger than a grain of sand. Old Torreño would smell me out. Keep heart, Lucia. We walk straight forward and trust to blind chance!”

They entered the great hall. Yonder sat Don Carlos himself at a small table with a book in his hand, but with idle, sad eyes fixed straight before him.

“We are lost!” whispered the girl.

“Not yet. He knows my red face, not my white one. And you are hooded. He will think it strange but he is in a dream. Perhaps he will not even see. We must walk straight toward the big door, yonder. If I have to delay run straight forward, dear. There are horses in the courtyard tethered at the rack. Take one and ride with all
speed down the hill. I shall be after you in a trice…or else I shall be a dead man. Do you hear?”

“Yes!”

“And are you afraid?”

“No!”

“Then….”

“Señor, señoñ”
broke in the voice of Don Carlos from the side.

“Señor
Torreño!” said Gidden in his perfect Spanish and with a courteous intonation. To the girl: “Faster, my dear!”

“One moment!”

“On, on!” whispered Gidden. “I must stop here for an instant. Show no haste. Be slow and at ease. Sing a song softly. It will be better than a mask!”

He turned to Carlos.

“I have not your face in my mind,
señor.
Are you one of poor Don Hernandez’s men?”

“I am,
señor,”
said Gidden.

“Your name, then?”

“Christobal Parana.”

“Parana? I have heard all the names of his men. I do not recall that one. Yet there is something familiar about your face. It is connected with some sinister recollection in my mind, sir.”

“I shall explain to you whatever you wish when I return. The girl….”

He gestured.

“Señoñ”
said Carlos sternly. “Stand where you are. I have the strangest thought in the world. You are Gidden!”

He was drawing his pistol as he spoke. Half of its silver-chased length was in view when Gidden caught his wrist with fingers of hot steel that crushed the flesh against the bone and made him drop the weapon. He himself tore the pistol out and with the heavy barrel of
it struck poor Don Carlos to the floor and that in the view of half a dozen
mozos.
The servants raised a shout. Someone fired a gun. But Gidden was already out of the hall and down the white stone steps into the courtyard. There he saw Lucia mounted on a tall gelding, with the reins of another in her hand. Before her stood a cavalier of Guadalmo’s troop, half frowning, half smiling. No doubt it was his very horse, by unlucky chance, that she had mounted.

He saw before him greater obstacles. There were a dozen armed men in that court. Two watched the gate steadfastly. Others were scattered here and there. It was plain that Torreño considered his house a garrisoned fort until that marriage was consummated.

“Don Carlos!” shouted Gidden as he raced out. “They are murdering Don Carlos! Help!”

That startling word brought a rush from the nearest men to the door, and there they crushed against the outcoming tide of those in pursuit of Gidden. Only one man had stayed by his place, and that was he who argued with Lucia. Gidden bounded on him like a tiger and struck him to the ground, then leaped into the saddle of the horse which Lucia held. He had one glimpse of her pale, set face, then they whirled and raced for the gateway.

Through that gateway they pressed at full speed and, out of the babble swelling confusedly behind them, they heard one great single voice—the voice of Don Carlos: “It is Gidden and the
Señorita
Lucia! Kill the man.”

A gun exploded; but it must have been fired wildly for not even the sound of the bullet came to them. Then they were rushing down the looping road which led to the base of the hill. Halfway down they looked back to Casa Torreño’s stone face, pale in the moonlight, and a dark tangle of horsemen who spurred out from the gate.

Then face forward, they goaded their horses and galloped for the stream. The stone bridge rang beneath the heavy hoofs. They tore up the valley toward that shadow of trees beneath the hills where the picked horses of Gidden waited for them.

Twenty riders stormed behind them, and the leaders were gaining when Gidden and the girl reached the covert. It seemed the ropes which tied the horses were strands of iron, refusing to be loosed. And the horses themselves were possessed of devils, dancing wildly, unwilling to be mounted. By sheer might of hand he raised the girl and put her into the saddle. Then into the saddle on the back of the bay. The brush was already crashing with the charge of Torreno’s men as they started away on their fresh mounts.

They issued on the farther side. Through the trees, shadows among shadows, the horsemen of Torreño cursed and spurred and shouted. Don Carlos, pressing toward the front, was offering thousands and fresh thousands for the capture.

But the fugitives had beneath them, now, speed like the gallop of the wind. A long level lay before them, twisting around the shoulders of hills which stepped down into the valley, and over it they raced, with the clamor growing fainter behind them.

It was a black sea under the cold light of dawn that they saw at last. But rocking on the waters of the little harbor they saw the long body of a ship. To them it was like a promised land. On the hilltop above the beach they loosed the two horses. The black mare raced off with high head and flaring tail, but the bay horse followed his master curiously and watched as the pair with numbed, weary hands, gathered driftwood and kindled two fires.

“If they come…if Torreño comes before the boat?”
she breathed, as they stood shivering beside the growing fires.

“Fate,” said Gidden, “is against them. Look!”

From the side of the ship a boat had put off and was heading to the shore, swinging on with the rhythmic stroke of half a dozen men. It came closer. In the sheets stood a tall man, waving his hat, calling. And they hurried down to the edge of the water, where the wet sands yielded beneath their feet.

The bow cut the sand. The sailors leaped out, regardless of the icy water; but Gidden was already waist deep beside the gunwale, bearing the girl in his arms. And as she was lowered gently to a place, she heard a man in the bow saying in the unfamiliar English tongue: “Dick Gidden, we have cheated the devil and got you safe! But here are two birds instead of one!”

“It is the spring of the year,” said Gidden.

H
is father was a Macdonald of the old strain which once claimed the proud title of Lord of the Isles. His mother was a Connell of that family which had once owned Connell Castle. After that terrible slaughter of the Connells at the Boyne, those who were left of the race fled to the colonies. After the Macdonalds had followed Bonny Prince Charlie into England in that luckless year, 1715, the remnants of the proscribed race waited for vengeance among the Highlands, or else followed the Connells across the Atlantic.

The Connells were great black men, with hands which could crush flagons or break heads. The Macdonalds were red-headed giants, with heaven-blue eyes and a hunger for battle. But the passing of generations changed them. They became city dwellers, in part, and those who dwelt in cities shrank in stature and diminished in numbers. They became merchants, shrewd dealers, capable of sharp practice. They lived by their wits and not by the strength of their hands. They gave corporals and raw-handed sergeants to the war of the Revolution; to the Civil War, nearly four generations later, they gave majors and colonels and generals. Their minds were growing and their bodies were shrinking.

And so at last a Mary Connell, small, slim-throated, silken black of hair, wedded a Gordon Macdonald, with shadowy red hair and mild, patient, blue eyes. They
were little people. He was a scant five feet and six inches in height, and yet he seemed big and burly when he stood by the side of his wife. What manner of children should they have? For five years there was no child at all, and then Mary died in giving birth to a son. He was born shrieking rage at the world, with his red hands doubled into fat balls of flesh, and his blue eyes staring up with the battle fury—he was born with red hair gleaming upon his head. His father looked down upon him in sadness and bewilderment. Surely this was no true son of his!

His wonder grew with the years. At thirteen, young Gordon Macdonald was taller than his father and heavier. He had great, long-fingered bony hands and huge wrists, from the latter of which the tendons stood out, as though begging for the muscles which were to come. And his joy was not in his books and his tutor. His pleasure was in the streets. When the door was locked upon him, he stole out of his bed at night and climbed down from the window of his room, like a young pirate, and went abroad in search of adventure. And he would come back again two days later with his clothes in rags, his face purpled and swollen with blows, and his knuckles raw. They sent him to a school famous for Latin and broken heads. He prostrated two masters within three months with nervous breakdowns, and he was expelled from the school weak, bruised, but triumphant.

“Force is the thing for him then,” said his weary-minded parent. “Let us discipline his body and pray God that time may bring him mildness. Labor was the curse laid on Adam. Let his shoulders now feel its weight!”

So he was made an apprentice in a factory, at the ripe age of fifteen, to bow his six feet two of bones and sinews with heavy weights of iron and to callous his hands with
the rough handles of sledge hammers. But though he came home at night staggering, he came home singing. And if he grew lean with the anguish of labor in the first month, he began to grow fat on it in the second. His father cut off his allowance. But on Saturday nights Gordon began to disappear; money rolled into his pockets, and he dressed like a dandy. Presently his father read in one paper of a rising young light heavyweight who was crushing old and experienced pugilists in the first and second rounds under the weight of a wild-cat onslaught; and in a second paper he saw a picture of this “Red Jack” and discovered that he was his own and only son!

After that he took his head between his hands and prayed for guidance, and he received an inspiration to send his boy away from the wiles of the wicked city for a year and a day. So he signed Gordon Macdonald on a sailing ship bound for Australia. He bade his boy farewell, gave him a blessing, and died the next month, his mind shattered by a financial crash. But he had accomplished one thing at least with his son—Gordon Macdonald came back to Manhattan no more.

In the port of Sydney, far from his homeland, he celebrated his seventeenth birthday with a drunken carousal, and the next day he insulted the first mate, broke his jaw with a pile-driving jab, and was thrown into the hold in irons. He filed through his chains that night, went above, threw the watch into the sea, dived in after him, and swam ashore.

He was hotly pursued by the infuriated captain. The police were appealed to. He stole a horse to help him on his flight. He was cornered at the end of the seventh day, starved, but lion-like. With his bare hands he attacked six armed men. He smashed two ribs of one, the jaw of another, and fractured the skull of the third before
he was brought down spouting crimson from a dozen bullet wounds.