The Fugitive (6 page)

He had forgotten the wind—the cursed land breeze bringing the scent of him squarely down the road. But now she had it and presently she would go mad to get to him. Yes, now she reared—she pitched. She hurled herself backward against the rope like a frantic tigress. All was confusion.
Don
Rudolfo was turning back. The duenna screamed and clasped her hands. The two who had been assigned to handle the precious mare danced here and there helplessly—and the rear guard came hurrying up while the vanguard turned back.

Stephen groaned and set his teeth. If only she had been three strides nearer—but, if he acted at all, he must act now. For the eight men from front and rear were hurrying up, and he would be helpless against such numbers. He sprang silently from behind his rocks. He would have come unmarked, but the quick eye of Constancia caught him, and her warning shout made the nearest of the men turn.

The man snatched at a gun as he glimpsed Stephen, but he snatched too late. A hand of iron was in his face, and he went down, with a spurt of crimson from nose and mouth. The heavy hilt of the hunting knife crunched along the head of the second man, and he rolled in the velvet dust without a sound.

One spring again, and Stephen was in the saddle, slashing at the rope. Alas, had it been the stoutest hemp in the world, it would have been shorn through at the first cut, but it was rawhide, almost as tough as steel, flexible as a serpent, now that it hung slack. Twice and again he slashed at it, and the lariat yielded and swung away from the edge of the knife.

Then the four from the rear were around him. Half a dozen bullets had whistled around his ears, but now that they were close, they dared not fire again, for the bullets might strike Don Rudolfo or his daughter. They clubbed their rifles to smite him to the ground.

He had one backward glimpse of them and knew that the battle was lost. So he came out of the saddle as a lynx comes from the branch of a tree. Instead of teeth and claws, he had a Colt in either hand, and they were speaking while he was still in the air.

One man spun around with a scream and clasped his body in his agonized arms. A second dropped into the roadway and clutched at his wounded thigh. And Stephen Macdona, springing through them, headed for his one chance of escape—the marsh beside the road.

He saw its black waters, filmed with green scum. To touch it would be like touching leprosy. But yonder was the half-exposed curve of a fallen trunk. He leaped for that, felt the rotten wood crunch and sag beneath his weight, and sprang instantly again. A little ridge of mud received him, and he floundered out of sight among the trees.

Bullets followed him, but they were fired from shaking hands. All these who rode with Don Rudolfo were followers worthy of their famous master. They had been proved in the wars. But after all, they were not prepared to fight a lion, hand to hand. As for the marsh, they dreaded it hardly less than a pointed gun. Few had been known to enter it and come forth alive. If they escaped the engulfing mud, the fever poisoned them, and they died afterward. So they looked upon this sudden madman as one already dead. Why should they pursue him? They turned to the work of helping the wounded. There was plenty in that task to employ all hands.

 

Out of the marsh, in the dusk of that day, a mudencrusted monster crawled. He staggered with weariness for even the panther-like strength in his body had been exhausted by the brief mile he had toiled through the marshes. When he came to a stretch of clean grass, he flung himself down on his back and lay gasping, his misted eyes fixed on the stars, his chest heaving convulsively.

Half an hour, and he was up again. He found a clear rill from the mountains flowing into a clean, gravel–bedded pond, and into it he dipped, clothes and all. He swam out on the farther side, refreshed and purified, and strode on up the trail toward the lights beyond.

Walking and the warm wind that blew through the night dried him. When he reached the town, he stopped at a little lunch wagon, where tortillas and tamales were for sale. Keeping to the shadows, he ate and ate to repletion, and listened to the talk.

There was only the one theme—the wild man who had attacked the great Don Rudolfo. However, this man was now dead, or as good as dead, since he had spent the day in the marshes. Strict watch had been kept. He could not have escaped. There he would perish, or else crawl out, a fever-stricken refugee, and surrender himself to the hands of the law.

Stephen Macdona listened and smiled. He bought a flagon of dreadful pulque, downed it at a draft, and then he continued his quest.

Christy was not in the railroad village. She had been shipped on toward the mountains, and the rumor went that she had been heavily guarded. So, that night, when the freight pulled pantingly out of the yard and up the first severe grade, Macdona lay upon the beams and closed his eyes to keep out the flying cinders. They had not yet shaken him from the trail.

He made half the distance to the mountains, on that first stage. When the freight stopped in the cool of the morning, he went out to forage for food. It was a very rash thing to attempt, and he paid the penalty of his rashness. For a fat policeman saw him and, without asking questions, emptied a revolver at him as Macdona zigzagged down the street and around the corner. He heard the route of the pursuit behind him, and therefore he simply dived through the back window of a hovel and into the midst of a humble family circle, sitting around the breakfast pot.

So Macdona squatted in a corner of the room with a gun resting on his knee.

“Eat,” said Stephen.

And they ate, while he helped himself to a remnant of roast kid that remained from a feast of the night before. When the pursuit poured past that door, a voice shouted a query.

“You have seen nothing except your breakfast,” Stephen whispered.

“We have seen nothing except our breakfast,” said the man of the house in a trembling but loud voice.

And the crowd rushed on.

An hour later—“Here is one peso for my breakfast and four for this lodging,” said Macdona. “I am the man who attacked the party of Señor Alvarez, and, if you help to catch me, you will have some thousands more to reward you for your work over me.” And he left by the window through which he had entered. It would be pleasant to state that his frankness disarmed the host. But truth is that he had not gone fifty yards before the wild clamor was raised.

He found a saddled horse in the next street with a stalwart youth climbing into the stirrups. Macdona plucked him out again and tossed him over his shoulders. Then he rode for the hills.

They hunted him, hot and close, all that day, and just as he was safely distancing them, on the third horse he had borrowed for the day's riding, a random party of vaqueros came down and blocked his way. They had not placed themselves across that trail on purpose. But they smelled mischief while it was still a long distance off, and their guns were out. Most willingly would Stephen have given them the road, but the rocks climbed upward on either hand into the heart of the sky. Even a mountain goat would have turned dizzy with one glance along their polished sides.

He bent over the pommel of the saddle and spurred straight ahead, his guns flashing from either hand. Three went down, and one, perhaps, would never rise again. But they had had enough. There were five of them left, but it seemed to them that the light was very dim—and yonder stranger must have the eyes of a cat to shoot so straight at such an hour. They paused to recruit their forces with the posse that followed after.

In the meantime, Macdona was deep in the heart of the mountains. He came out through a narrow gorge the next day and looked down on the loveliest valley of creation. In a mighty ring against the sky stood white-headed mountains, and beneath them lordly forests marched down over the hills to the plains beneath. All those plains were green as emerald and streaked with the winding silver of many a stream, that paused here and again in flashing lakes, and passed in their leisurely journeyings villages and towns that were white blurs upon the landscape. There stood the central ring of cities. In the midst of all was Venduras with its clustered lakes around.

The heart of Macdona swelled as he looked on all this beauty. But he could give it only a casual glance, for yonder was Christy. Somewhere among those green plains or in those white cities, men were wondering at the beauty of the mare, and that was more to him than all the rest of the world beside.

Down the valley, he met a girl, pacing up the road with a jar of water poised on her head, climbing patiently toward her father's little whitewashed hovel on the hillside. Perhaps Venduras was backward in many respects, but at least the country possessed telegraphs enough to spread such news far and wide. She knew him the instant that her eyes fell on him, and turned with a scream. The jar fell to the roadway and cracked in a hundred pieces on a rock.

Stephen, with a shout, spurred his horse ahead. He jumped the hedge and caught the girl beyond it. The strong sweep of his arm lifted her onto the horse before him, and, still laughing, he placed his hand over her mouth and watched her terrified eyes widening at him as she strove to scream again.

“Yes,” he said, “I am Valentin Guadalvo, but I shall not cut your throat, sweetheart. See, here is a peso to mend the jar. And here is another to make you happy, and here is another for the news which you are going to give me.”

Now, when Mother Nature made Stephen Macdona with such loving care, she placed her master touches in the creation of his eyes, making them just that shade of brown that no woman, north or south or east or west, can look into without a leaping of the heart.

This maiden of the mountains was standing presently close to Stephen by the roadside and telling him all that was locked in her little head. Afterward she waited until the dust he raked had wound out of sight down the trail, and she was left again to the lonely brightness of the morning sun, and cold, shaggy mountains, and the empty sky.

But Stephen had found out where the ranch of Don Rudolfo was situated, and he made toward it as straight as the needle of the compass points. They sighted him by chance near San Gabriel and hounded him down the valley until he twisted out of their traces among the lowest hills. Another night march carried him toward his goal by a long distance. Then a keen-eyed goatherd saw him in the distance and sent in the warning. They picked up his trail with hunting hounds and pressed him so hard that he had to turn back toward the hills again. And only the skillful use of his rifle kept them at a safe distance.

He lurked in the foothills and tried again, three days later. And again he was marked and ridden until his horse staggered. That might well have been his last day on earth, but he saw the white walls of a little town and rode straight for it. He found there what he expected—more than one gun blazing at him as he passed. But he also found what he had hoped—a fresh, strong horse standing at a tethering post in the plaza.

He made the change in an instant and rode safely out into the plains beyond, with only a bullet hole through the crown of his hat to tell of the encounter. But although he shook off the pursuit on this day, also, he felt that he had already more than half failed in his quest. For by this time the whole of Venduras knew that he was desperately bent on regaining the black chestnut mare, and, of course, Don Rudolfo knew a little better than the rest. So, even if he could gain the ranch, would he not find the mare guarded heavily, day and night, with chosen men close to her?

Now, resting in the hills, and drifting restlessly here and there while he strove to make new plans, on a day, he saw a solitary horseman on a nearby hill, stationary, with something held glittering before his face. Some lookout had evidently spotted him with field glasses, and Macdona with a groan resigned himself to another hunt.

He got down first and looked to his cinches, which were somewhat loose. When he climbed into the saddle again, he saw a strange thing—the single rider was coming toward him with both hands raised above his head. Macdona paused with his rifle at the ready and let the other come into close half pistol shot—and then nearer. He began to see that he had nothing to fear from the stranger, who was an unshaven rascal with two pistols in the saddle holsters and two more at his belt, to say nothing of a rifle thrust into the long gun bag beneath his knee. The clothes of this man would have shamed a beggar, but his horse was fit for a prince to bestride. It seemed to Macdona that there was only one sort of man in the world who would be thus accoutered.

The other stopped ten paces away, with both his hands still shoulder high. “Consider, Señor Guadalvo,” he said, “that two are stronger than one, and that three are stronger than two.”

“You speak”—Macdona smiled—“like a school-book. But where is the third?”

The other pursed his lips and raised a whistle that blew screaming down the wind. At once a dozen riders started to the crest of the nearest hill.

“Señor,” said Stephen, “I see that there is more to you than meets the eye. Are we to be friends?”

“Ah,” said the brigand, “it is for that purpose that God made us.”

 

To be a bandit, in other countries, was to be a cutthroat, a thief, a vagabond, and a general scoundrel. But to be a bandit in Venduras was something else. Guido de los Pazos, that same roughly dressed and splendidly mounted thief who had encountered Stephen Macdona, was decidedly something else. He had been, at one time, a rich landholder, a man of education, and a senator who sat in the tobacco-flavored senatorial chamber in the capital city. The crosscurrents of two or three revolutions had altered his manner of living and his ambitions. He had risen, you might say, from the comparative obscurity of a politician and ranch owner to the bright fame of a bandit. From the western to the eastern sea he was known and well considered.

Now he sat in his village, and, reclining in his favorite chair, he comforted himself with cool drafts of scented smoke, drawn from a water pipe. He looked through the window upon the rough rocks of the mountainside, pleasantly crossed with a cedar bracken, here and there, up to the point where the goatherd drowsed on a stump and watched his flock that was scattered higher up, beyond the view of Don Guido's window. He smoked with the calm content of a philosopher, and like a philosopher he received the news that was presently brought to him.