He gathered up the riata of the mare, and started to pick his way with her through the Lava Beds to the oasis where the Navajos were camped, while the Pueblos speedily made themselves scarce in the opposite direction.
By the time Stephens reached the camp the Navajos had collected their scanty equipment and bound it on their saddles; they all took a long drink of pure, cool water from the hidden "tinaja" or rock-cistern, and, leading their animals, made the best of their way over the Lava Beds to the open country. Stephens explained to Mahletonkwa before starting that he had arranged for his party to return to San Remo by the route they came.
"_Bueno_," said Mahletonkwa shortly, "and we will go by another. I know many trails through the sierra; there is one that I like well, and I will take you by it."
"Right you are," said Stephens, "that suits me. Lead on." His object now was to avoid any chance of a collision between the Navajos and Mexicans till they should meet at San Remo.
Manuelita walked beside him as they followed the winding and difficult trail taken, by the Navajos through the Lava Beds, but as soon as they emerged from them and found themselves on the smooth ground beyond, he spread a blanket over the saddle to make it easy for her, and insisted on her riding Morgana while he ran alongside.
After a while the leading Indians came to a halt, and were seen to be examining the ground intently. When Stephens and the girl came up to them he found that they had cut their own trail made by themselves the previous day. But there were more hoof-marks in it now than those of the eleven ponies, and they were busily studying the newer signs. Stephens looked at them, too; they were undoubtedly the tracks of the pursuing party under Don Nepomuceno; it was hard to say just how many of them there were, as they were confused with those of the Indians, and the Mexican horses being barefooted, like the Indian ponies, it was impossible to distinguish them. But there were more than a dozen at least, and not one of them wore shoes.
"No soldiers in this party," said Mahletonkwa, looking up at Stephens suspiciously. United States army horses are always shod, as he well knew.
"Certainly not," answered the American unhesitatingly. "These are not the tracks of my party. I never was over this piece of ground before. My scouts cut your trail farther on."
"You had the Santiago scouts with you?" said the Navajo; "I was sure of that when you came to the Lava Beds so quick. Which of them did you have?--the cacique?" His dark eyes snapped as he mentioned him.
"Miguel, perhaps, that tall, slim one with the scar on his cheek?" He knew a good deal about the Santiago folk; after the submission of the Navajos had ended the long wars, there had been some intercourse between the former enemies.
Stephens thought it better not to give any names. "Oh, I got some good trailers," he said easily; "but there are other Pueblos besides Santiago, and there are trailers in all of them. Cochiti has men who are first-class on reading signs."
"I know you had that Santiago cacique," said Mahletonkwa cunningly.
"Then if you think so, you'd better ask him to tell you about it when we get back to the settlement," rejoined the American.
They entered the sierra a little before nightfall, and were soon involved in a difficult and tortuous way amidst pine-crowned crags and precipices. Sometimes their horses' feet clattered upon shady slopes of debris; at times they trod softly upon a padded carpet of fir-needles.
They were traversing a little canon just after sunset, when, nearly two hundred yards away on the opposite side, the forms of a herd of deer were silhouetted against the fading sky.
Instinctively Stephens threw up his rifle to his shoulder; he got a bead as well as he could, though it was too dark to pick the exact spot on the animal's side as he pressed the trigger, and at the sharp report the band of dark forms disappeared as if by magic, but the loud "thud" of the bullet proclaimed that one of them had been struck. Instantly he and three of the Navajo young men dashed on foot across the little gorge and scaled the opposite steep, Faro leading the way. The bulldog nosed around for a moment where the deer had been, and as the climbers emerged on top they heard him give one joyful yelp as he darted forward on the scent; two minutes later they heard his triumphant bark, and when they got up to the spot they found him over the dead carcass of a yearling buck, shot through the lungs. It had run some five hundred yards before it dropped, and the bulldog coming up had seized it by the throat and finished the business.
The Indians were loud in praise of the dog, as their knives rapidly and skilfully dressed and cut up the game, while Stephens looked on and rewarded his pet with the tit-bits. All three of the Navajos spoke Spanish well enough for him to understand them as they praised the dog, but when they turned over the deer, and found the place where the conical bullet had come out on the other side, they changed from Spanish into Navajo, and significant laughter followed as they pointed out to one another the two holes, and then pointed to Stephens's rifle.
Suddenly it flashed across him that they had got a joke on about something, and that it was not a thing new to him. Their manner made him think instantly of the day when he drove the nail, and Mahletonkwa pointed to his Winchester and told the funny story--funny, that is to say, for the Navajos--about the murder of the prospector. Though he understood no word of what they said, their gestures were too full of meaning for him to mistake them.
"I say," said he abruptly, but with seeming carelessness, "aint this the place that Mahletonkwa told that story about? About the man who was shot with his own rifle, you know?"
The young Indian who was stooping over the game stopped and withdrew his hand from the deer. "What makes you think that?" he asked.
"Well," said Stephens, "he said it happened up in these mountains, and I heard him say, also, that he was particularly fond of this trail we're on. So I just guessed it might have been pretty nigh where we are now."
"So it was," said the Indian, whom Stephens had learned to know as Kaniache, "it was right up this gulch where it opens out above." They had crossed a divide in their chase after the wounded buck, and were in another little canon not unlike the one where they had left the rest of the party. The darkness was increasing every minute, but the Indian knew precisely where they were. Stephens marked the place in his memory as well as he could, and resolved that he would return to it as soon as might be, to seek out and bury the bones of the unfortunate victim of Navajo treachery and cunning.
They gathered up the meat of their quarry, and hastening back to where the rest of the party were waiting for them, they pushed on for fully two hours by the light of the moon, in spite of the difficulty of the way. Camp was made at last by a little stream in a park, and a fire was lighted, though Mahletonkwa was so suspicious of being followed that he put a couple of scouts to watch their back trail and signal the approach of any possible pursuers.
Stephens sat down by the fire, and set to work roasting pieces of the venison on spits of willow for Manuelita and himself. She was tired, but not exhausted, and he could not but wonder at the power she exhibited of enduring fatigue, she who ordinarily took no more exercise than that involved in doing her share of the labours of the household, varied by walking over to the store or paying a visit to a neighbour. But she came of a tireless race. It might be said of the Spanish _conquistadores_, that for them--
"The hardest day was never too hard, nor the longest day too long,"
and this endurance has descended to the women sprung from them as well as to their sons.
Stephens aired for her benefit the only wraps he had to offer her, the blankets that had been under and over the saddle; but he went to a clump of young pines growing near, and with his hunting-knife hewed off a quantity of the small shoots from the ends of the boughs.
"You'll never guess in a month of Sundays, senorita, what we call these on the frontier," said he, as he proceeded to arrange them in neat layers, to make for her an elastic couch. "Give it up? We call them 'Colorado feathers,' and they're no slouches in the way of feathers neither. Besides, they say the smell of turpentine's mighty wholesome.
The doctors in Denver recommend camping out to the consumptives who come out for their health, just that they may get the benefit of them. Spruce makes the best, and it's the most aromatic."
"Here, you get out, Faro," he apostrophised his dog, who had as usual promptly taken possession of the blankets as soon as they were spread down, "you get out of that, that's not your place;" and he pushed him off.
"Oh, don't hurt him!" cried the girl; "he likes it; let him stay."
"Well, all right, then, senorita," he said, pleased that his pet should find favour, "if you don't mind having him there, he'll lie at your feet and keep them warm; and now you'd better lie down and rest yourself all you can, for we aint home yet, and you can bet it's a 'rocky road to Dublin' through this sierra that we've got to go to-morrow"; and with these words he turned away to the fire.
"But," cried she, looking at the provision he had made for her, "you have kept no blanket for yourself; you must take one or you will freeze." His generosity distressed her.
"No fear," he returned without looking at her, while he deliberately settled himself down beside the fire and lit his pipe with a coal, "no fear, senorita. I'm calculating to keep guard anyhow, and there's lots of firewood here. That's the beauty of a mountain camp."
"No, thank you, Mahletonkwa," this was spoken to the chief, who at this juncture came and offered him a blanket, being anxious to conciliate the man whom he now depended on for so much, "not for me, thank you; _muchas gratias_; I'm all right. I'm going to keep this fire warm, and watch the 'Guardias' circle round the North Star." The "Warders," two bright stars of the Little Bear, act as the hour-hand of a clock which has the Pole for its centre, and by them a frontiersman on night-herd knows when his watch begins and ends.
The Indians, suspicious as ever of a possible attack, kept aloof from the fire, and lay down to sleep at a little distance outside the ring of light. Stephens established himself on the windward side of the fire, and set up the skin of the buck he had shot as a windbreak behind his back against the chill night air of the sierra.
Tired as he was with his long day's walk on foot, he lay there, warming first one side and then the other, and replenishing the fire at intervals, while he listened to the well-known sounds that from time to time broke the silence of the hours of watch--the sough of the night wind in the pines, like waves beating upon a far-off shore; the strange, nocturnal love-call of an unseen bird; the long-drawn, melancholy howl of a night-wandering wolf, seeking his meat abroad; and once his ears thrilled at the agonising death-cry of a creature that felt the sudden grip of the remorseless fangs of the beast of prey.
"Beasts of prey," he mused, "yes, that's just what we humans are too, the most of us, and we take our turn to be victims. Killers and killed.
Well, if anybody's to blame for it, I suppose it's the nature of man."
Going back in his mind over the events of the day, he recalled the fierce desire to shed blood that had possessed him when he left the cacique and his fellows and set out to handle these Navajos alone. It seemed as if that much-angered man with the tense-strung nerves was some other than he. Now, peace was made, the captive was safe; and as he looked at the girl sleeping there unharmed, dreaming, it might well be, of her safe return home on the morrow, he felt a sort of mechanical wonder at the rage that had then filled his heart. He thought, too, of the shots that had been fired at him by the Navajo,--he had not cared to inquire which one it was,--and in imagination he felt the hot lead splash on his cheek again. He had been mighty near the jumping-off place that time, sure. And yet it had been all about nothing, so to speak. It had been a sort of mistake. He had wanted peace, really, and so had they; yet how near they had come to turning that little oasis into a slaughter-house. Fate was a queer thing. He looked up at the velvet black of the sky overhead and the endless procession of the stars. The moon had gone, but Jupiter still blazed in the western heavens. What did it all mean, and what was one put here for, anyway? He confessed to himself that he did not know; that he had no theory of life; he lived from day to day, doing the work that lay next him, and doing it with his might; but in the watches of the night he brooded now--not for the first time--over the old problem, "Was life worth living, and if so, why?" To that question he was not sure that he had any answer to give. Perhaps the secret might lie in caring for somebody very much, and at present he cared for nobody--very much--so far as he knew. Suppose that Navajo bullet had found its billet in his brain, thus it seemed to him in these morbid imaginings of the weary night watch, he would be sleeping now the last sleep of all, like that other victim in the canon over yonder; and what was there in that that he should mind it? Perhaps it would have been better so--perhaps, yes, perhaps.
CHAPTER XXII
A WOUNDED MAN
When the triumphant cacique rode off with the daughter he had recaptured on the banks of the Rio Grande, he left Felipe stretched upon the ground, breathless from his last desperate rush and half stupefied with despair. The angry voice of the cacique sounded farther and farther off; the hoof-beats of the horses died away in the distance. Felipe lifted his head from the sand; he was alone under the wide sky by the great river. The monotonous rush of the water seemed to intensify the stillness; the sun blazed down out of the blue sky; everything was at peace except the despairing, rebellious heart of the boy alone in the desert. How could everything go on so quietly when such a wicked thing had just been done? Why did not the cacique's horse stumble and fall and kill him as he deserved? Why was life so full of injustice and cruelty?
Poor Felipe! The first time that it is brought home to us that the scheme of events has not been arranged for our personal satisfaction, nay, that it may involve our extreme personal misery, is a hard trial--too hard sometimes for a philosopher; how much more so for a poor, untaught Indian boy.
"Cruel, savage, barbarous," he groaned, as he thought of the blows that had rained down upon the shrinking form of his sweetheart. "Poor little thing! Poor little Josefa! I can do nothing for you now; I had best go and drown myself--there is nothing left to live for."
He got up and walked deliberately towards the river.
But before he reached the brink he had had time to reflect. "Nothing left to live for?" he thought. "Yes, there is. I could kill Salvador first. I could get my father's gun and do it. I don't care if they do hang me afterwards."
He knelt down on the river-bank, and bending his head over the water he dipped his left hand in, and by a quick throwing movement of the wrist tossed a continuous stream of water into his mouth in the wonderful Indian fashion which gives quite the effect of a dog lapping. As he quenched his burning thirst, and felt the cool, refreshing dash of the water against his face, his spirit rose.
"I'll go straight back," he said to himself, with a dangerous expression on his set face. "I don't need any rest. I'll be there before the sun's much past noon, and he'll be dead before night."