The Mystery of The Barranca

  CHAPTER III

  "If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca earlyin the afternoon," Seyd had said, commenting on his order to themule-driver. But, fagged out by the day's hot travel, they did notawaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window barsand laid a golden finger across Billy's eyes.

  "We shall have to hustle now." Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican_mozo_ in general while they were dressing. "For you must see theBarranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grandas the Colorado Canon. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a propositionas the one I went by on the last trip, I'd rather not tackle it afterdark."

  It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, forafter breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Pazand Luz, the mules the senors were riding! And having roundly cursed thememory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocentcolthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon suchmisbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them:

  "Never were there such ungrateful brutes, senors. Not content with thegood barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out ofPadre Celso's arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle andBook. And the curse sticks, senors, working itself out by means of thisdevil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the_jefe_ of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year's earnings thattrick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes thatever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas andthe Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But thisshall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the endof this trip." In the mean time would the senors be pleased to wait foran hour?

  There being no other choice, the senors would, and, returning to theirlast night's perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorgeits dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, thesunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on theopposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illuminedsilver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not tomention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads--towhich some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch--acomedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departingtravelers, for only after an altercation which always required thewitness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were thegates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oathsthey went out, one by one, _cargadores_ __and peons, beggars andpilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and notuntil the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at hiswatch.

  "Nine o'clock. What has become of those--"

  Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned andforedoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkledpleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trailup a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corngrew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between thestones.

  Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all overthe land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light windin the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been ridingan hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urgingthe mules grew fainter in Seyd's ears, and, though he was conscious ina dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling,falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into thecopal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him toa grisly sight--the dozen and odd mummies whose withered limbs clickedin the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of abanyan.

  "_Bandidos_, senor, thieves and cutthroats." The bigger of the twomuleteers answered Seyd's question. "They were hanged by Don Sebastien."

  "Why, that's our friend back at the station." Billy commented on Seyd'stranslation. "I'm sure that was the name the agent gave him."

  "_Si_, senor," the mule-driver confirmed the impression. "And these arebut the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of thiscountry was overrun with _bandidos_ who took advantage of the absence ofthe principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They werelevying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastienreturned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, hebegan by hanging the bandits' messenger in the gates of his hacienda, anact that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of theplace from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attackedDon Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after thethieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer,into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he couldmark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there,everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hangedthem by twos and threes and left them to swing in the wind, and itspeaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father,mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail inthis country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came topass that you, senors, might now leave your purses on the open highwaywhere a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No manwould dare touch--"

  "--Except Don Sebastien," Seyd put in, laughing.

  But the man returned only a stare. "What use would he have of purses,senor, that has so many of his own?"

  "Perhaps to give to the Church." But he stopped laughing, surprised bythe sudden cloud that spread on the man's face.

  "Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien nevercrosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk hegives to the priest."

  "_Si! si!_" In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almostshook off his head. "It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule loadof charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires thepriest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery abovethe courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise--was there ever suchirreverence!--that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who standsbefore him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, thesteward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal.'I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall payyou one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel,myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet.Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come andgo at will through the hacienda--all but one place. If after this hourI find that your foot has touched my threshold I'll hang you in itsgates.' Thus he spoke, senor, and he would have done it--to a priestquicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which hehates the most."

  "Hum!" Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at thegrisly witnesses to the tale's truth, he commented: "I now begin tounderstand the general respect for our friend. A man who does thingslike that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pumpguns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loaderI'm darned if I'd have tackled your hunch."

  In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the smallfarmers began to give place to the _jacals_ of the country, flimsy hutswith sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed outfrom the eternal succession of corn and _maguey_ fields into wastes ofvolcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for noapparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which weresparsely timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley theycame upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more thanhalf buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they wouldhave passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run alongthe face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstroussquat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven intoan intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distortedfaces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat,long and thin, some were stretched in a wide gr
in, others thrust outtongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in apainful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed thequintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Throughanger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion toits death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed thecorner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, weresuch as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scaletheir mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absoluteforce. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd's imagination withpictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy wasmoved to remark:

  "Those old chaps couldn't have been very nice neighbors."

  "No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall havepresently." Later the thought was to recur under conditions that wouldlend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying,as he glanced at his watch: "We have been doing pretty well. At thisrate we'll make the Barranca quite early."

  He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually contentwith the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into theburros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Enteringon one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by thetime they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.

  "We'll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp atthe top."

  Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes fromboth muleteers. Carlos made answer. "No, senor, at this time of the yearone would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca withthe finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for everytime I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho--and Paz and Luz,devils as they are, could travel it blindfold." And whether, as Billysuggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with thefleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the muleswith oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. They kept after them so hard thatthe train trotted out of a forest of upland pinon upon the rim of agreat valley a full half hour before sundown.

  Though prepared by Seyd's descriptions for something unusually fine,Billy's blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule,staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet theland broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hillsuplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barrancawas so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with hiseye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in bluehaze through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed likemicroscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountainstossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterileand desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised themout of the sea.

  "Drunk! drunk!" Billy breathed, at last. "Nature gone on a jag. Drunkenmountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge.Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of ahole?"

  "About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand andmore in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch withthe old Pacific. Can't be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea."

  "The dear old pond. Isn't that pine on the other side?"

  "Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred orso miles farther up. That's a great old tree, and quite particular aboutthe company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along theslope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. Thatspark of green in the far distance is sugar cane--two thousand acres ofit on the General's hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash overthere, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from thetop--that is us, senor, the _mina_ Santa Gertrudis. And that remindsme--we'll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight._Vaminos_, Carlos."

  But the muleteer shook his head. "After you, senor, for if these devilsshould take to running again, not in six months should we fish yourbaggage out of the canons."

  Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shapedwall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, forat the first turn a stone from his mule's foot dropped five hundred feetplumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did thewidth of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs.Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail droppeddown to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billyobjected:

  "Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one."

  "Less than that--if your mule should happen to slip and take itsideways. Let me see--allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteenseconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But ifyou elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail youcannot see, it will take the full three hours."

  Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills weresuddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side liftedlike yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out,and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensifiedrather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precariousbalance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken onlyby the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followeddown and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singularhallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wallthat seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into thecanon, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a realtrial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd--to wit, thesenseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on hisheels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way inbetween him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when an easiergrade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.

  Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with aloose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thusit was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trotwhich had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, healmost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive inthe spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it.With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instinctsalmost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop.Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heardthe burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot,his voice came back.

  "Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!"