"Oh, the sierra!" said the cacique impatiently. "That will do to-morrow.
My daughter is gone and my horse is gone and there's nothing else to go after them on. You must lend yours for once."
"Not to be ridden to death after them," said Stephens. "Why, they're leagues away by this time. You'll have to ride like the very mischief to catch them." There was an accent of contempt in his voice which infuriated the Indian. Stephens valued the mare, which he had brought with him from Denver, above all earthly things, and the idea of letting an Indian ride her near to death in a long, stern chase seemed to him the blankest absurdity. "Why, I wouldn't do it for my own brother!" he went on. "You can't have her, Cacique, and that's flat."
"But I must," said the Indian, enraged at an opposition he had not expected. "I must and I will. What's a horse for but to ride?" He turned to the crowd of Indians behind him, and called out, "Saddle her up, will you, quick!"
Two or three began instantly to run towards the corral, and the rest were starting to follow when the loud, clear voice of the prospector arrested their movement.
"Stop right there!" were his words. "You do no such thing. If anyone touches my stock without my leave I'll shoot him."
The Indians stopped.
"I'll drive you out of here, you Americano," said the angry cacique, laying his hand upon the butt of his revolver and advancing directly towards Stephens, who was of course quite unarmed.
"Drive away then, and be d----d to you," returned the American. "I've hired these rooms from old Reyna till the end of April, and I sha'n't budge before." And his eyes flashed back defiance.
Salvador kept advancing in a threatening manner, and the younger Indian men, of whom there were thirty or forty on the spot, closed up behind their leader; they half felt that he was wrong, but still he was their chosen cacique.
Stephens stood his ground, and faced the mob with dauntless coolness. An odd thing struck him. He knew them all personally quite well, but now he hardly seemed to recognise them. The expression of their faces, usually so peaceful, was entirely altered. It gave him quite a turn to think that people who had crowded round him so full of fun, and so eager to show their friendship and gratitude only the day before, should change so quickly to a cruel mob. Yesterday's momentary outburst of suspicion excited by the dreaded charge of witchcraft had revealed to him the explosive forces that lay hidden under their quiet exterior, but that had been dissipated by his own prompt repudiation of the charge, and by the cacique's influence. Now it was the cacique himself who was assailing him, and there was none to help, nor hope of anyone. A hundred black, flashing eyes were fixed on him with an angry glare. He felt as if he were shut up in a den of wild beasts. He was quite alone; the new storekeeper at San Remo was the only other American within sixty miles.
"Take your hand off that pistol, Salvador," said he quietly. "You can't scare me, so don't you try it on."
The Indian stopped, but his hand plucked nervously at the hilt of the weapon. Stephens observed his opponent's indecision, and continued: "A pretty lot of fellows you are, to come crowding round me as you did yesterday, and call me your best friend, and say how you'll sing my praises to the third generation, and now this morning you're ready to cut my throat before breakfast, all about nothing! I've heard of the gratitude of Indians before now," he continued, "but this beats all."
The Indians visibly winced at this taunt, the justice of which they could not but acknowledge, and began to interchange rapid words in their own language, thereby making themselves unintelligible to Stephens.
Just at this moment came a most welcome diversion. Round the corner dashed Miguel full charge on a fiery steed. The Indians scattered right and left before him. With a jerk on the terrible Spanish bit he set the horse on his haunches, and as he sprang to the ground he cried, "Here, Cacique! Here's the horse of the new storekeeper at San Remo. I've got him for you."
Salvador never spoke, but seizing the rein offered him by Miguel he sprang to the saddle, turned his back on Stephens and the crowd, and dashed wildly forwards to the trail.
All eyes were bent on his rapid course. The trackers on foot had already traced the hoof-marks from the acequia across to the Ensenada trail, and were running half a mile off like hounds in full cry. In less than two minutes the galloping horseman overtook them, and cantered alongside to hear what they had to tell. They reported that the tracks were several hours old and that the horse carried double.
"I could have told you that," said Salvador, as he plied the whip freshly, and galloping ahead disappeared in the direction of the mesas from the sight of those who were watching him.
"Wonder what he'll do if he catches Felipe!" said Stephens to himself as he saw him vanish over the hills. "That young man'll have to look out for himself, as sure as he's a foot high. Rather lucky for me," he ruminated, turning to go in, "that chap Miguel's coming up with Backus's horse! I wonder, by the way, how he came to get him. I don't know what I should have done if Mr. Salvador had gone for me with that six-shooter, and he was just about mad enough to try it on. Blamed if it wasn't the suddenest scare I ever did get let in for! Why, hallo, Faro, old man,"
said he aloud, on finding the dog at his heels, "what's up with you? I don't often see you out of the blankets before breakfast. Blamed if I don't believe you heard me a-talkin' to them fellers and just come out to take a hand!" He was right. The dog's quick ear had caught the note of danger in his master's voice, and he had flown to his assistance.
Stephens took another look at the Indians around. Some were still watching the mesas; others were going about their daily business. It seemed as if those who knew him best kept aloof, feeling ashamed to come up and speak to him. However, an old man whom he hardly knew, and who spoke Spanish badly, approached him in an apologetic sort of way, and said, "Salvador very angry!"
"Well," answered Stephens, with a grim laugh, "I should think he's gone mad."
"Yes, mad, silly," assented the old man; "for why get angry? No good, no good,"--and he stood there wagging his old head and saying "no good" in a way that the prospector quite understood to be intended for an _amende honorable_ on the part of his fellows.
Nor was he the only one. "Senor Americano," said a cracked voice close beside him, and Stephens felt a light touch on his elbow. He turned and found himself face to face with Reyna, the Turquoise squaw from whom he rented his rooms. She and her husband lived next door to him, and from her he often bought eggs and meal. She of course had been a witness of the whole affair. She now produced two eggs, and holding them out to him said, "See, two."
"Yes, I see," said Stephens, "but I don't want 'em to-day. Haven't got the five cents."
"No, no!" she cried. "No money--two."
Her Spanish was weaker even than the old man's. Stephens turned to him.
"What does she mean?" he asked. "I can't make out what she's up to."
The two Indians exchanged some words in their own language.
"She means, your honour," said the old Indian man, speaking with painful elaboration, "that this is for the gratitude of the Indians. Excuse her, your honour, she does not speak much in Spanish--that is, not like us, the men"--he added explanatorily, "but she can understand, and she heard you say the Indians got no gratitude, and this is for her."
Stephens turned to the old squaw and took the eggs, thanking her as well as he knew how. "And I'm going now to cook them for breakfast,"
said he, as he went back to his room.
"Well, who'd have thought that?" he said to himself, as he began to whittle shavings from a piece of fat pine to light his fire with.
"They're a queer lot, Indians are, but I suppose it takes all sorts of people to make a world." His thoughts wandered back to Salvador and the fugitives. "Wonder what Salvador'll do," he said half aloud. "He's mad enough to kill the boy, if he gets close enough. Blamed if I don't think he was about mad enough to kill me! He's real ugly when he's mad, and it's no foolin' when it comes to six-shooters." He went over the scene of the early dawn again in his mind. "It does beat cock-fightin'," he continued to himself, "how folks like these Indians, that's as quiet and decent and orderly as can be, should flare up all in a moment and glare at you like a lot of wildcats, and all for nothing. Why, if I'd gone and killed somebody, or run off with somebody's wife, there'd be some sense in it, but to burst out just because I wouldn't lend my mare to be rode plumb to death! It does beat all."
The fire now burned up brightly, and after setting the coffee-pot on to boil he filled the nose-bags himself, and went out to feed his stock.
"Confound that boy, running off like this," he grumbled, "and leaving me this job! Told his little brother Tomas, indeed! I don't see him around yet; not much; don't expect to neither."
He leaned up against the fence waiting while the stock ate their feed.
Someone must keep watch in order to drive off the hungry Indian pigs, who prowled around and would have disputed their corn with the horses.
The sun had just risen, and his level rays lit up like a flame the red cliffs crowned with dark pines, which formed the western side of the valley. But Stephens did not see them. He was facing east, with the sunlight full in his face, and his eyes fixed on the bare, flat-topped table-lands which divided the Santiago valley from the Rio Grande.
"Confound him!" he growled again. "What a fool trick for him to play!
I'm mighty glad it isn't my mare he's playing it on. He'll find himself in a muss, too, if he don't mind out, sure. I don't more than half like the notion of that ugly savage of a cacique getting after him with a six-shooter."
He waited till the stock had finished feeding, and then went back to his rooms. But he decided not to start for the sierra till the next day.
"Confound the boy!" said he the third time. "I can't take that little fool, Tomas, and I want somebody to help me dry the meat and pack it down. Why the dickens couldn't he run off some other time! He want a wife! He wants a nurse and a birch rod, I should say."
Thoroughly vexed, he prepared to put in the rest of his morning, or at least as much of it as he could spare from swearing at Felipe's escapade, in fixing up pack-saddles, mending his tent, cleaning his beloved repeating rifle, and generally getting ready for the trip he so unwillingly postponed.
But his plans for the day were destined to be interfered with for the second time. The inquisitive face of Mr. Backus appeared suddenly in the open door.
"Mornin', Mr. Stephens," he began; "can I come in? So this is where you live when you're at home." He dragged a heavy saddle across the threshold and took a seat. "I told you I wouldn't be long before comin'
up to take a squint at your white squaw."
"She's no squaw of mine, Mr. Backus," said Stephens with rising anger.
"I think I told you so already. And if you want to see her you can't, for it so happens that she has just eloped." He turned his back on the storekeeper, kneeling down to arrange his pack-cinches with a preoccupied air.
"Oh," returned the other, "is that it? I didn't tumble to it that she was the one who had bolted." His eye wandered around Stephens's modest abode, taking in every detail, as he tried to gratify his curiosity concerning the prospector's domestic arrangements. It seemed to him an incredible thing that a man should settle down like this among the Indians and not provide himself with at least a temporary wife. But in these bachelor's quarters there was no sign of feminine occupation, temporary or permanent. The one novelty that puzzled him was the neatly built assaying furnace, which he at first took for a new sort of bread oven, until he detected the parcels of ore beside it and its true nature dawned upon him. But postponing the idea of asking questions about it for the present, he went babbling on: "And here I've been and loaned my horse to a chief to go chasing after her upon, and left myself afoot.
Guess I'll have to try and borrow that mule of yourn to get back to San Remo on." Stephens's face at this suggestion became the picture of disgust. "Say, though," he went on, "I was forgetting. You're badly wanted down there. I come up partly just to tell you that. Don Nepomuceno is in a mighty awkward fix. What do you think that son of his, Andres, has been up to? You'll never guess in a month of Sundays.
He's bin and had a fuss with a Navajo up yonder in the mountains over a game of cards, and killed him, and half burned the body in the camp-fire to try and get rid of the thing. And the Navajos have got right up on their ear about it and there's a whole band of 'em now down at San Remo wanting old Sanchez to turn 'em over his whole sheep herd to pay for it.
How's that for high, eh?"
Stephens leaped to his feet. "Who told you this?" he cried.
"Why, Andres himself," replied the storekeeper. "I've seen him. He's hidden away now in an inner room down at the house. The Indians are having a big pow-wow outside. Oh, they'd just murder him if they could get their hands on him once."
Without a word Stephens caught up his saddle and his Winchester and started for the door.
"Where are you off to so quick?" asked Backus, rising also.
"To get my mare," was the answer, "and go straight down there. And you'd best come along, too. You can have that mule."