Bandit's Trail Page 16

  He sauntered through the blinding sunshine toward the nearest saloon. There was no room inside. Little tables had been brought out upon the verandah and under the trees nearby. Assistant bartenders, hired for the nonce at ridiculous salaries, were busy here and there, making mistakes in change, cursing themselves and their tasks, and then taking comfort out of a stolen bottle. Here, in a corner against a wall of the house, he found a place where an upturned box served him as a seat. He could watch the swirl of life along the plaza, he could hear the snatches of talk from passersby, and just opposite he could see the municipal building with its stately, broad flight of steps.

  It was in that building that the distinguished prisoner was now being guarded, and guarded by no other than the indomitable Colonel Alfonso Ramírez himself. But for that matter, one could have guessed that El Tigre was in that place by the frequency with which the gossipers turned their eyes in that direction and by the steady stream of people who flocked up the steps.

  Dupont began to give ear to those who were buzzing so busily around him. Most of it was the rankest nonsense. In this fashion was rumor born.

  “A thousand pesos to ten,” said one fat-faced peon as he tippled his wine, “that those soldiers who wrestled with El Tigre wished that they had tried a wildcat sooner.”

  And as he left the table, another sat down in his place.

  “What news?” he asked.

  “We have been hearing how El Tigre threw the soldiers around when they jumped at him,” he was told.

  “Ah, yes, he must have broken some heads. He is as strong as any three men. He must have thrown them around.” He departed in his turn.

  In five minutes the same theme was taken up again. Only one of the original group around that table remained.

  “We have had news of El Tigre at the moment when he was captured,” he told the newcomers.

  They were instantly reduced to a reverent silence.

  “They jumped on him from every side. His hands were clogged with their bodies, you might say. He had no room to turn himself about. He had to leave his weapons with them as he tore himself away. But he could not get clear. They swarmed after him again like ants over an ant hill. What a man he is. He took one … a fat soldier … and threw him the length of the room. They say that man’s skull was broken. He took another by the heels and used him for a club. He has the strength of at least four men, you know. But finally some twenty of them spilled over him like water over a roof. He was washed to the floor by men falling on him as thick as drops of rain.”

  And as that story was received with shouts of surprise and delight, Dupont grinned behind his broad hand that held his cigarette. He tasted his red wine, and suddenly he saw that the table at which the gossip had been circulating so busily was empty. Everyone who had heard that last amazing tale had scattered here and there and everywhere to repeat what he had heard. Behold, a new sensation had been added to this day of days in the honest town of Nabor.

  Here all talk ceased suddenly. At the head of the wide steps of the municipal building there appeared a tall and resplendent figure. It was a tall man in military uniform—his hat, his coat, his trousers fairly encrusted with gold lace and his narrow breast decked with medals. One hand rested upon the hilt of his narrow sword, the other doffed his hat that glistened with yellow metal as he bowed to the plaudits of the crowd.

  And what plaudits these were. Everyone was instantly up from boxes and chairs and shouting, yelling, raving, waving hands and hats and silken handkerchiefs of bright colors.

  “Colonel Ramírez! Colonel Ramírez!”

  This was the great man, the savior of society, the queller of that dragon, El Tigre. Good reason to shout. They opened their throats and strained their lungs with their acclaim.

  “Colonel Ramírez!”

  The colonel walked slowly down the steps. A throng engulfed him before he reached the bottom. He struggled with amiable violence through it. A file of soldiers thrust into the jam and pushed back the struggling crowd with their rifles—in vain. They opened a channel that was instantly closed again. Women came running and held up their children to see the famous hero. Those in back pressed upon those in front.

  “Colonel Ramírez!”

  They pushed the soldiers, shouting, laughing, before them. They were around the colonel again, shaking his hand, blessing his courage and his wisdom.

  At length he reached his horse, a dancing bay mare, beautiful in the sun, tossing her bridle and all its polished silver ornament. Behold. He is raised to the saddle by twenty hands. He is seated with his hat cocked over one eye. The mare starts away. She dances sidewise, as though delighted by her burden. And the brave colonel is gone down the street, with a crowd rushing out before him, and closing in behind regardless of the heels of the bay, which dart out now and again as she prances along.

  But the brave colonel, the good colonel—how could even his horse do harm to the people of Nabor?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Like birds roused from their sleep by a sudden squall of wind that shakes them on their chilly perches among the trees, the good folk settled back to their boxes and to their chairs once more. Two jovial gauchos, come in from an estancia to take part in the celebration, settled down at the table where Charles Dupont sat.

  “There is a man,” said one.

  “He could be a king,” the other said.

  “Perhaps he will be? Or a president?”

  “He will be a general for this.”

  “Yes. If he is not promoted for this, there is no justice in the Argentine.”

  “A kind man, too.”

  “And modest.”

  “Did you see him pat the head of the old man?”

  “And he kissed that little boy whose mother held him up.”

  “Yes, one can see that the colonel is as good as he is brave.”

  “If he looks fierce, it is because he is terrible only to his enemies.”

  “If there were a war, there is only one general for our country.”

  This sample Dupont heard close at hand, but the same talk was going on everywhere. Waves of quieting noise swept through the plaza back and forth and back again. Then the gauchos turned to Dupont. They would buy him wine. But he had luckily forestalled them and ordered a vintage three times as expensive as their pockets could afford. An excellent Médoc, old enough to have something of that musty taste that is dear to the heart of the wine lover.

  They drank it slowly, smacking their lips after the first swallow.

  “You know wine, señor!”

  “Oh, a little. Only a little, amigos.”

  They grinned more broadly. That word had placed them definitely in their own class, out of which the quality of the wine had seemed to lift him for a moment. He was only a gaucho like themselves, they decided—a gaucho with something in the purse and a free hand to spend it.

  “You are working near Nabor?”

  “I have been traveling west. Now that El Tigre is gone, one may travel safely, eh?”

  “If there were only El Tigre. Well, he is not the last. But the other will soon go. People will not endure him. He is a mad dog … a wild wolf …”

  “Who, amigos?”

  “Why, who but El Crisco?”

  “Yes, yes. To be sure, there is El Crisco. But his hand is not as strong or his arm as long as El Tigre’s.”

  “Perhaps not. But he is poison. He is a tarantula. Poor El Tigre. After all, he was a kind man. But this El Crisco … however, you have heard of what he did only this morning?”

  “Not I.”

  “Well, the news has just reached Nabor. He is a devil. May he die by inches, the dog!”

  “What has he done, this El Crisco?” Dupont asked curiously.

  “What has he done? There is nothing more devilish. He caught an old man, a harmless old fellow named Perez. I mys
elf know this Perez. He is very old. Muy criollo, too. Very good. This El Crisco catches him in a little hut. He is afraid that if Perez gets away, he will raise the people of the next town. So this El Crisco decides to murder Perez. That is bad, but the rest … bah! It is the way he determines on the murder. He will enjoy the killing, this El Crisco. He ties the poor old man to the wall of the house, very tight. There is nothing but iron and adobe in the house. He piles what wood there is around the feet of the old man. Then he goes away a little distance to collect more wood. While he is gone, Perez gets strength from God … or from the fear of being roasted alive. For that was Crisco’s plan … to burn that old gaucho alive. Faugh! Is that not a fiend? But Perez gets strength, pulls an arm loose from the ropes, and so cuts his way clear, and runs out to his horse and rides away, with El Crisco shooting after him until he rode out of range. Poor Perez … he showed them a hole through his hat when he reached the town.”

  This recital was greeted with grunts of savage fury by the companion of the narrator. As for Charles Dupont, he felt like smiling, but he forced a scowl upon his face. “Such fiends should be given such a death as they prepared for others,” he declared, and he was heartily agreed with.

  “They hunted for this El Crisco, then?” he asked.

  “Half a hundred men hunted. But, of course, his stallion has wings. It flies over the ground. The devil who befriends El Crisco puts his strength into that wild beast … that horse that kills men even as its master does.”

  “Which way did the trail run?”

  “Toward us … toward Nabor.”

  The perspiration rolled out on the forehead of Charles Dupont. For suppose the trailers were to come upon Twilight in the shed? However, he forced that unhappy thought from his mind. There were more immediate dangers.

  Here a fresh clamor rolled up the street. The colonel was returning, and in spite of all the enthusiasm that had been expended upon him before, there seemed an equal store remaining. Again he passed through a small triumph. Again the crowd flocked with him up the steps of the municipal building and, after he had disappeared, cheered until their throats were hoarse. After which, unable to speak in more than husky whispers, they rushed back for more wine to recruit their enthusiasm.

  When it was quiet again, Dupont started from his place and, sauntering across the street, joined the mob that filed steadily into the municipal building and out again. All was noise and confusion in the great hall into which he stepped through the front doors. People milled up and down like cattle in a corral, or collected in small groups and exchanged opinions and gossip busily until tall gendarmes hustled them on their way because the traffic was blocked. The line of those going in was kept thin and steady by police supervision, and, falling into his place in it, Dupont progressed slowly toward a door on one side of the hall.

  On the way, the whole line was talking at the top of their voices, but when the door was reached, men and women seemed to shrink in size. Hats were automatically removed. All voices hushed to utter silence and so, in his turn and time, Dupont stepped into a big, high-ceilinged chamber where the quiet was like the quiet of a museum—the Egyptian rooms of a great museum where the past breathes upon the present a musty and stupefying perfume, and all that is great in history seems dead and never to live again.

  There were the same whispers, the same focusing of eyes, the same cautious footfalls. And yonder sat the object of all this attention. Behind his chair, four soldiers leaned upon their rifles. On either side of him, four more soldiers stood at ease, their eyes gloomily fixed upon their prisoner, their shining bayonets extending above the muzzles of their guns. Twelve men to watch one, and that one bound with steel chains.

  His wrists lay in his lap, handcuffed, and from the handcuffs to his ankles ran another chain, strong enough to have held a ship at its moorings, and around the ankles were fitted other bands of steel, and to his anklets was anchored a great ball of lead of forty pounds weight. So secured, the authorities of law and order exhibited their prisoner to the eyes of the curious world, and the townsfolk and all who had ridden in from the surrounding farms and estancias went slowly, softly by, staring in awe at that face that had frightened their children to sleep on many and many a night.

  After all, he was not extraordinary when analyzed. He was not much above six feet in actual inches, perhaps. He was less than Charles Dupont in poundage. And upon his face and his shoulders were stamped the writing of some fifty years. Neither was there anything brutal in his expression. It was rather a thoughtful face, a noble forehead, lips compressed as though by pain and worry, and sunken eyes of thought. Yet there was about him that which made him a giant. Seated as he was, he overshadowed the stalwart guards, the chosen men of the regiment who stood post around him.

  He was neither sullen nor defiant, or threatening. Instead, he regarded the slow movement of faces past his station with a considerate look of one who has read in human nature as in a book all the days of his life and continues to read until his last breathing moment. He seemed almost on the point of speaking, now and then, as someone who passed excited a keen emotion or brought some thought to him.

  But after the first sharp glance Charles Dupont saw only one thing. It was a fleeting shadowy thing—no more than the flick of a bird’s wings across a windowpane, and the bird gone on singing. But into the mind of Dupont there flashed a glimpse of recognition, and a feeling that he must have seen this face before. And then the knowledge came strongly back upon him in a cold wave that rolled across his heart and his brain. The shadow of recognition sprang from a ghost of similarity between this man and his daughter Francesca. No, it was not in the features, handsome though they were. It was in his spirit. And the spirit is that which cannot be exposed or explained through the facts of the flesh.

  He went on out from the room, his mind whirling, his feet moving in a fumbling manner until he was again in the outer hall. There, the instant they issued from the room, the rest of the line broke into exclamations, subdued to whispers at first, under the influence of the awe that had so lately and so heavily weighed upon them, but presently rising to shrillness as they realized they were released from the curious, searching eyes of the great outlaw.

  What comment they made then, as they came out.

  “Did you see his eyes? Like a lion’s in a cage, studying us so that he could remember and tear us to bits if he ever met us again.”

  “I wouldn’t go back in that room for a thousand pesos!” This from a woman, of course. Her husband laughed at her, but in a sickly fashion.

  “And his hands, José. Did you see his hands?”

  “Like a woman’s hands … so slender and so small.”

  “That’s why they can move so fast.”

  “Well, he’s’ still the quickest man in the world with a gun.”

  “Bah! That’s because he frightens people to death when they meet him. They can’t endure to be in front of him. He made me, for, instance, feel like a little boy.”

  “Someday somebody might have beaten him in fair fight, but I don’t think so.”

  “No, I think not. There was never anyone like El Tigre.”

  “I was almost sorry …”

  “At least the colonel was not afraid of him.”

  “Oh, no, the colonel would laugh at the devil.”

  “Yes, honor is everything to a man like …”

  “Thank God, that there are such men in the Argentine.”

  “Yes, he should be …”

  Charles Dupont stepped away from this group. He passed others. It was the same everywhere up and down the hall. The talk was all of the terrible El Tigre in his chains. And of the brave colonel.

  And something grew cold in the great heart of Charles Dupont. How strange it was, he thought, that in this crowd there was not one who appreciated the horror of showing such a man to a crowd and making a show out of his downfall. For, great though
the sins of such a man might be, at least he was brave, and courage is a virtue that wipes out the worst of vices, to some extent. Brave? Yes, it seemed to Dupont that he had never before seen such courage as this iron man showed, looking at his tormentors with calm eyes, banishing from his face every trace and taint of the shame and the horror and the fury that must be raging in his soul.

  So, having seen his man and having blushed for looking at him, Dupont prepared himself for the last steps in the great venture.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  One could easily tell the room in which the colonel sat by the quality of the people who passed through a certain door in front of which stood two sergeants, fellows in their dress uniforms with their medals on their breasts, proud soldiers and brave soldiers who carried their guns as if they knew what shooting and being shot at meant. For those who passed through that door were all of the quality of the land. There were rich estancieros, the officials of the town, the bankers, the great men of the community, dressed in their best, proud of themselves, a little frightened at going into the presence of such a person as the colonel had so recently proved himself to be. They went in stiff and awed. They came out smiling, glancing at one another, exchanging pleased comments. Evidently the colonel was a man who knew how to receive others with a certain social grace. He was not all the stern warrior.

  How many votes was he preparing on his behalf should he ever decide on a political life? At least, in Nabor, he could have been elected king the next day.

  Dupont walked up to the door. Two rifles were crossed before his breast instantly, the bright bayonets glittering, close to his eyes.

  “Your pass, señor?”

  “I have very important business.”

  “The lieutenant is in the next room. You may go there. But the colonel is …”

  They spoke as men speak when they use the name of the deity, and do not use it profanely. Apparently this colonel was not a god to the outer world only; he was respected even by his own troops.