CHAPTER XXV
These were days of power and success, days of a glamour that lingered longin his mind. Beyond a doubt he was destroying MacDougall's plan andrealizing his own. Sometimes he met a surly Mexican who would not listento him, but nearly always he won the man over in the end. He was amazed athis own resourcefulness and eloquence. It seemed as though some inhibitionin him had been broken down, some magical elixir poured into hisimagination. He found that he could literally take a sheep camp by storm,entering into the life of the men, telling them stories, singing themsongs, passing out presents of tobacco and whisky, often delivering awildly applauded harangue on the necessity for all Mexicans to acttogether against the gringos, who would otherwise soon own the country.Never once did he think of the incongruity of thus fanning the flames ofrace hatred for the love of a girl with grey eyes and yellow hair.
He did not always reach a house or a sheep camp at night. Many a time hecamped alone, catching trout for his supper from a mountain stream, andgoing to sleep to the lonely music of running water in a wilderness. Atsuch times many a man would have lost faith in himself, would have fearedhis crimes and lost his hopes. But to Ramon this loneliness was an oldfriend. Like all who have lived much out-of-doors he was at heart apantheist, and felt more at peace and unity with wild nature than ever hehad with men.
But there was one such night when he felt troubled. As he rode up theTusas Canyon at twilight, a sense of insecurity came over him, amountingalmost to fear. He had had a somewhat similar feeling once when a pantherhad trailed him on a winter night. Now, as then, he had no idea what itwas that menaced him; he was simply warned by that sixth sense whichbelongs to all wild things, and to men in whom there remains something ofthe feral. His horses shared his unrest. When he picketed them, justbefore dark, they fed uneasily, stopping now and then to stand likestatues with lifted heads, testing the wind with their nostrils, movingtheir ears to catch some sound beyond human perception.
When he had eaten his supper and made his bed, Ramon took the littleautomatic revolver out of its scabbard and went down the canyon a quarterof a mile, slipping along in the shadow of the brush that lined the banksof the stream. This was necessary because a half-moon made the open gladesbright. He paused and peered a dozen times. So cautious were his movementsthat he came within forty feet of a drinking deer, and was badly startledwhen it bounded away with a snort and a smashing of brush. But he sawnothing dangerous and went back to his camp and to bed. There he lay awakefor an hour, still troubled, oppressed by a vague feeling of thelittleness and insecurity of human life.
A long, rippling snort of fear from his saddle horse, picketed near hisbed, awakened him and probably saved his life. When he opened his eyes, hesaw the figure of a man standing directly over him. He was about to speak,when the man lifted his arms, swinging upward a heavy club. With quickpresence of mind, Ramon jerked the blankets and the heavy canvas tarpaulinabout his head, at the same time rolling over. The club came down withcrushing force on his right shoulder. He continued to roll and flounderwith all his might, going down a sharp slope toward the creek which wasonly a few yards away. Twice more he felt the club, once on his arm andonce on his ribs, but his head escaped and the heavy blankets protectedhis body.
The next thing he knew, he had gone over the bank of the creek, which wasseveral feet high in that place, and lay in the shallow icy water.Meantime he had gotten his hand on the automatic pistol. He now jerkedupright and fired at the form of his assailant, which bulked above him.The man disappeared. For a moment Ramon sat still. He heard footsteps, andsomething like a grunt or a groan. Then he extricated himself from thecold, sodden blankets, climbed upon the bank, and began cautiouslysearching about, with his weapon ready. He found the club--a heavy lengthof green spruce-and put his hand accidentally on something wet, which heascertained by smelling it to be blood.
He was shivering with cold and badly bruised in several places, but he wasafraid to build a fire. In case his enemy were not badly injured or had acompanion, that would have been risking another attack. He stood in theshadow of a spruce, stamping his feet and rubbing himself, acutelyuncomfortable, waiting for daylight and wondering what this attack meant.He doubted whether MacDougall would have countenanced such tactics, but itmight well have been an agent of MacDougall acting on his ownresponsibility. Or it might have been some one sent by old Archulera.Then, too, there were many poor connections of the Delcasar family whowould profit by his death.
As he stood there in the dark, shivering and miserable, the idea of deathwas not hard for him to conceive. He realized that but for the snort ofthe saddle horse he would now be lying under the tree with the top of hishead crushed in. The man would probably have dragged his body into thethick timber and left it. There he would have lain and rotted. Or perhapsthe coyotes would have eaten him and the buzzards afterward picked hisbones. He shuddered. Despite his acute misery, life had never seemed moredesirable. He thought of sunlight and warmth, of good food and of the loveof women, and these things seemed more sweet than ever before. Herealized, for the first time, too, that he faced many dangers and that thechance of death walked with him all the time. He resolved fiercely that hewould beat all his enemies, that he would live and have his desires whichwere so sweet to him.
Daylight came at last, showing him first the rim of the mountain serratedwith spruce tops, and then lighting the canyon, revealing his disorderedcamp and his horses grazing quietly in the open. He went immediately andexamined the ground where the struggle had taken place. A plain trail ofblood lead away from the place, as he had expected. He formed a plan ofaction immediately.
First he made a great fire, dried and warmed himself, cooked and ate hisbreakfast, drinking a full pint of hot coffee. Then he rolled up all hisbelongings, hid them in the bushes, and picketed his horses in a sidecanyon where the grass was good. When these preparations were complete, hetook the trail of blood and followed it with the utmost care. He carriedhis weapon cocked in his hand, and always before he went around a bend inthe canyon, or passed through a clump of trees, he paused and looked longand carefully, like an animal stalking dangerous prey.
At last, from the cover of some willows, he saw a man sitting beside thecreek. The man was half-naked, and was binding up his leg with some stripstorn from his dirty shirt. He was a Mexican of the lowest and most brutaltype, with a swarthy skin, black hair and a bullet-shaped head. Ramonwalked toward him.
"_Buenas Dias, amigo_," he saluted.
The man looked up with eyes full of patient suffering, like the eyes of ahurt animal. He did not seem either surprised or frightened. He nodded andwent on binding up his leg.
Ramon watched him a minute. He saw that the man was weak from loss ofblood. There was a great patch of dried blood on the ground beside him,now beginning to flake and curl in the sun.
"I will come back in a minute, friend," he said.
He went back to his camp, saddled his horses, putting some food in thesaddle pockets. When he returned, the Mexican sat in exactly the sameplace with his back against a rock and his legs and arms inert. Ramonfried bacon and made coffee for him. He had to help the man put the foodin his mouth and hold a cup for him to drink. Afterward, with greatdifficulty, he loaded the man on his saddle horse, where he sat heavily,clutching the pommel with both hands. Ramon mounted the pack horsebareback.
"Where do you live, friend?" Ramon asked.
"Tusas," the Mexican replied, naming a little village ten miles down thecanyon.
They exchanged no other words until they came within sight of the group of_adobe_ houses. Then Ramon stopped his horse and turned to the man.
"You were hunting," he told him slowly and impressively, "and you droppedyour gun and shot yourself. _Sabes?_"
The man nodded.
"How much were you paid to kill me, friend?" Ramon then asked.
The man looked at the pommel of the saddle, and his swarthy face darkenedwith a heavy flush.
"One hund
red dollars," he admitted. "I needed the money to christen achild. Could I let my child go to hell? But I did not mean to kill you.Only to beat you, so you would go away. Do not ask who sent me, for thelove of God.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}"
"I ask nothing more, friend," Ramon assured him. "And since you were tohave a hundred dollars for making me leave the country, here is a hundreddollars for not succeeding."
Both of them laughed. Ramon then rode on and delivered the man to hisexcited and grateful wife. He went back to his camp very weary and sore,but feeling that he had done an excellent stroke of work for his purpose.