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  The colonel opened the drawer; he was breathing hard.

  “Uncork it and take a good swallow.”

  The colonel obeyed with a military precision, and coughed as the hot liquor stung his throat.

  “Restore the flask to the drawer.”

  It was done.

  “Your color is already better. Now send for the next orderly.”

  So the bell was touched again. Again the door opened, and the voice of the colonel repeated the dictated order.

  There was a gasp from the orderly. “Sir,” he asked, “was it El Tigre you named?”

  The colonel leaped to his feet and beat on the surface of the desk. “Fool and dog,” he screamed, “have you ears to hear? I said El Tigre … and at once! At once!”

  The door closed with a bang. The colonel fell back with a groan in his chair.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To the ear of Charles Dupont there was never a sweeter or more solemn music than the chiming of chains as the door opened and let in from the hall the rattling of astonished voices, and that sound of steel on steel.

  “Halt!” the colonel said suddenly.

  There was the click of heels that announced an abrupt halt.

  “Put the keys on that table.”

  A faint jingle made due answer.

  “That will do.”

  “Sir …”

  “Ha!”

  “Alone in this room … with this man … even if his hands are secured …”

  “Out of the room!” thundered the colonel. “Ten thousand devils, have I to teach you discipline … or what danger is? Will you begin to teach me?”

  The orderly fairly fled, and the guard that had brought in the prisoner with him. When the door was closed the heavy silence began again, but now the colonel was looking straight before him at the man in irons and not at the muzzle of the leveled revolver.

  “Señor El Tigre … Señor Milaro,” said the colonel, correcting himself hastily, “a friend of yours is waiting for you.” And he waved toward the screen.

  Dupont stepped out with his gun.

  “It is to be murder, then,” said the deeply musical voice of the prisoner, a voice that thrilled the very heart of Dupont.

  “It is a fool’s attempt at freedom for you … and for him,” snarled the colonel, whose cheeks were now flushed by the brandy he had drunk.

  “Your hand, however,” Dupont said, “must complete the work of much grace that you have begun, Señor el coronel. There are the keys. You will free Señor Milaro.”

  And then he heard the deep breath of Milaro drawn. But there was no word from the prisoner. And again the heart of Dupont swelled.

  As for the colonel, he fell into a black passion. “I had rather lose my life here and now!” he cried. “Pull the trigger, and the devil take you. I shall not liberate this man with my own hands.”

  “Tush,” Dupont declared coldly. “I still believe in your discretion. Now that there is so much noise and so much confusion in the hall, I swear that I believe that a revolver shot would not be heard. However, I have another thought. Let the keys remain where they are for the moment. Call the orderly again. Tell him to have the trumpet sounded and the drums beat in the plaza so that the soldiers will fall in at once. At once, señor.”

  And the colonel pressed the bell. Once more the door opened, once more the order was given, word for word.

  “Now,” said Dupont, “you may begin.” And he waved toward the prisoner.

  As for the colonel, he made a long pause. And that pause was a great tribute to his courage. But discretion proved again the better part of valor. He advanced at length, took up the keys, and set about the work of unlocking the fetters.

  Dupont, standing behind the colonel, could look at the prisoner, also, for the first time. And he studied the bewilderment, carefully subdued, in the features of the outlaw. Bright hope was beginning, too, in his eyes, and his jaws were set.

  “And you, señor …” he said at last to Dupont.

  “It is El Crisco!” snarled out the colonel.

  At that, such a flood of light poured across the features of El Tigre that he became for the instant young again. “Ah, Señor Dupont,” he said, “my daughter has told me …” He stopped short. The last fetters were freed from his wrists and he stretched forth his long and powerful arms. That gesture and a single great indrawn breath—so it was that he welcomed the hope of liberty again.

  At the next moment the bugle began to blare in the plaza and there came the sound of rapid scuffling of feet in the hallway. Through the windows they could see the surprised soldiery falling in, the ranks forming as if by magic, while the astonished people of Nabor thronged thickly about the men of war, as though wondering what new enemy this preparation could be against.

  “There is one final courtesy,” said Dupont, “that we can offer to the colonel. Señor Milaro … there are the fetters.”

  El Tigre favored his young companion with a flashing glance like the look of an eagle, and, catching up the chains, he advanced upon poor Ramírez. As for the latter, his spirit was already broken, and, falling into a chair as he saw this last indignity about to be offered to him, he covered his face with his hands and submitted without a word or an effort. For his fame was torn from him, and great as he had been today, tomorrow he would be fully as crushed and small as the meanest man in his regiment.

  He submitted to the chains. He submitted, also, to the gag that was presently forced between his teeth, and, lying back in his chair, he saw El Tigre take the two gold-mounted revolvers that the colonel’s own regiment had presented as a token of faith and affection to their commanding officer.

  “I take them as a memento, señor,” said El Tigre. “I take them as a happy memento of the hours that I spent in the room in this building where I was exposed, señor, to the eyes of the good people of Nabor and the gentry from the estancias around about. They will also serve to remind me of the happy moment when men shall break down the door of this office and, coming in, find the famous Colonel Ramírez lying in his chair bound with the chains of … El Tigre.”

  So saying, he smiled down upon his victim, and showed two rows of perfectly even, perfectly white teeth. It was a smile that made even Dupont start, and once again he could recall the tale that he had heard from the estanciero, Valdivia. That there was good in this man he could not have doubted, after having once looked upon that magnificent forehead or into those deep-sunk, big eyes. That there was an infinite capacity for evil, also, he could not doubt from this instant.

  That reflection hardened his heart and enabled him to look forward to the other work that must lie before him if he were to complete all that he had set out to accomplish. It seemed morally easy, no matter how physically difficult it might prove. And with all scruples removed, his strength was doubled. Besides, he told himself, it was impossible to doubt the goodness of Valdivia as an essential thing, and, granting that goodness, it was impossible to doubt with equal strength the essential evil in Milaro, who the world called El Tigre.

  The last of the stoic in the staunch colonel had been quite exhausted by the taunts of El Tigre, and now he writhed in his chair and struggled against his gag to yell for help until he choked and his face swelled with purple blood. Disregarding this useless violence, El Tigre and his deliverer stepped to the window and looked forth upon the square. The last of the soldiers were falling in, the drums were still beating, and the inhabitants of the town were gathered thickly around the place, admiring and cheering.

  “There are two horses at the door to which that entrance leads,” explained Dupont. “One of them belongs to the colonel. I am sure he would not object if you rode it.”

  The bandit laid his hand upon the shoulder of the younger man. “My son,” he said, “to be free is a wonderful thing, but to be freed in this fashion is the best of all. To ride from Na
bor on the horse of the colonel …” He made a gesture that indicated that his satisfaction was complete.

  “Let us go now, then,” urged Dupont.

  “Not yet. They are still gathering. The plaza is now a theater. They flock to it. When the drum has beaten another minute, every man and child in Nabor will he gathered, and we will have no interruption on our way out.”

  There was no good argument against this statement, yet it was nervous work to remain there in the office of the colonel, knowing that before long he would be asked for. Or would they dare to ask for him, knowing that he was closeted with the great outlaw?

  At length, when the plaza was black with people, El Tigre gave his assent. They waved farewell to poor Ramírez, and, passing through the rear door of the room, they came upon a flight of steps that went steeply down to the ground outside the building. There at the entrance they found the bay mare, María, and beside her a tall black gelding, a magnificent animal. And up and down the alley, which ran past the municipal building and passed into the plaza, there was not a human being in sight. All the population of Nabor, it seemed, was gathered in the public square, waiting to see what this military festival might mean.

  So they mounted and rode up the narrow street. All was empty before them. There was no apparent need for a wild gallop that might attract attention as they rushed along. In the whole course of their ride through the town, they encountered only two children playing in a by-street, and one old woman walking with a bundle at her back, her steps propped up with a crooked stick. So they reached the shed where Twilight had been left. There was no one near it. The big horse whinnied gaily at the sight of his master, and, leaving the black gelding behind them, the two were soon cantering across the open Pampas.

  Still there was neither sign nor sound of a pursuit from behind. That critical departure from Nabor that Dupont had looked forward to as the most difficult and daring part of his adventure had been accomplished with ridiculous ease.

  One thing nettled him a little, and this was the small attention that Carlos Milaro paid to his savior as they journeyed together deeper and deeper into the bosom of safety. For neither by look nor by word did the famous outlaw pay the slightest heed to his companion. He seemed to be lost in the exploration of the broad plains that stretched before them. Or again, he talked to the beautiful mare that he was riding—talked like a child, commenting to her upon her paces, building a future for them both.

  “So,” he would say to her, when the noble creature strained at the bit and looked anxiously forward to the horizon as though, beyond it, she sensed a destination that they could not conceive with their mere human minds. “So, my dear. There is time. There is time for everything. You cannot race into the sky, my beauty. Run as fast as you will, you may round the world, but you will still be running upon dirt. Gently. Gently. They have trained you like a racer. But I shall feed you till you have a belly that means endurance. Ha, girl, we shall have our times together. We shall have our times together. There shall come a day when those good people of Nabor shall see that the whole price of their town is not worth the mischief I can do with such a witch under my saddle. Softly, my girl. We are coming to know one another … but slowly, slowly. Men and horses are not books … we cannot read one another or learn by heart.”

  So he would talk softly to the mare, until she began to cant back an ear toward him as if she were listening and striving with all her might to understand that gentle human voice. For perhaps the only language of men that she had been called upon to understand, before this, consisted of the pricking of spurs and the stinging of whips. She was all fire, ready to fly away and race until her heart broke. But under the care of El Tigre, she would learn other things.

  When they camped, they made their meal off the provisions that Dupont carried in his pack, and afterward the bandit, wrapped in his blanket, sat with his back to the stump of a dead willow tree and looked beyond his companion and into his own thoughts. Black thoughts, perhaps, for they kept his forehead creased with dark care.

  Perhaps he was meditating on the method of his revenge for the late indignities that he had undergone. And Dupont, watching his face covertly, decided that he had found, at last, a man who he felt worthy of fear. And, for all the wild things that he had seen and done in his days, for all the strong men with whom he had matched his own strength, he felt that in this somber and silent man he had encountered one stronger than himself. It was a disagreeable thought, a thought that translated itself into a weight felt at the bottom of the stomach.

  He rolled himself in his blanket to sleep, but, before he closed his eyes, he heard the deep, quiet voice of the bandit say: “Señor Dupont, I have always thought of death as the most horrible thing in the world. But I was taught today in Nabor that there are worse things. When I think of you, Señor Dupont, it shall always be as of one who rescued me from something far worse than death.”

  In that speech he summed up his gratitude. After that instant, he never again referred to this day. One might have thought, from this moment forward, that he had never seen Nabor and brave Colonel Ramírez.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In the weeks that followed the disappearance of El Crisco, Juan Carreño found that history and his master’s moods were revealed to him by flashes of lightning.

  In the first place, he received strict orders to collect all reports extant concerning the doings of Charles Dupont. He set about busily performing this service. It was much to his liking. In his fat body there was hidden a fat, sleek soul that sometimes dreamed of itself performing great things. He never received in humility one of the whiplash corrections of his master without dreaming the matter over when he was alone and seeing himself as the master, Valdivia as the secretary. Those moments of dreaming were his consolation. When he was alone with his thoughts he was always brave as a lion and often as terrible as that beast of prey. If he shrank from danger in the day, the day also gave him a dream in which he was a hero. Such is the compensation of cowards.

  Following the meteoric career of El Crisco, he found himself compiling a strange and wonderful narrative. It was drawn from many sources. There were the newspaper reports from Buenos Aires and from other large towns through the country. But best of all were the word-of-mouth reports. Men were constantly telling tales of El Crisco to the employees of the great estancia, and the smooth-tongued gauchos never lost an opportunity to repeat these stories, with some added embellishments from their own inventive wits, for they could always get a silver coin from the secretary of the estanciero, and the wilder the story the larger the piece of money. Having learned this, the result was inevitable. But Carreño never thought of doubting the honesty of the narratives that he gleaned out of the newspapers or from the gauchos on the ranch. He wrote out every report in his own style—crisp, concise, naming every detail without emotion. But though his language was dull and dry, how greatly his heart often swelled as he penned these relations. For now, when he daydreamed, he was always in the boots of El Crisco, riding the matchless chestnut over the Pampas, wherever his wild will led him.

  Besides the pleasure that he got out of this in itself, he had the constant knowledge that his master was even more interested than himself. When he read one of his reports to Valdivia, Don Sebastian was sure to favor him with the most absolute and childlike attention. He would nod over the high points of horrors.

  “And think, Carreño” he would say. “It is I who brought this horror into my country and launched it like a pestilence upon my poor fellow citizens.”

  After which Carreño would assure him that it was the will of God in the execution of which he was only a humble agent and no more. But sometimes the remarks of the master were a trifle disconcerting, as for instance when he said at the end of the third week: “How many men have been killed, they say, by this wild marauder, this El Crisco?”

  Carreño had that very day added up the total. “Seventy-one,” he could a
nswer glibly, very proud of his promptness,

  “Seventy-one,” Valdivia echoed quietly. “Well, well. That is a holocaust indeed. But, Carreño, one can hardly believe that for three weeks on end a man can average three slaughters a day? Do you not think so?”

  “Ah, señor,” Carreño answered, “this fellow is a strange and terrible man.”

  “To be sure he is, and nothing that he has done, to my thinking, is more terrible than, on the very same day, within five hours, to kill two men in Corrientes and three more eight hundred and fifty miles to the south and the west of that city.”

  Carreño considered this problem. It did not for an instant occur to him that it could not be solved.

  “One cannot understand everything in this world,” Carreño said at the last.

  That was a maxim with which he shifted many a weary load of perplexity from his shoulders and left it for the wisdom of other sages to lift up. But he continued to collect the reports concerning the deeds of the outlaw. Within a single fortnight his first scrapbook that had been set aside methodically for that purpose was jammed full from cover to cover. After that, he established a little filing system. It was cross-indexed by the industrious Carreño. He could, in an instant, discover what El Crisco had done at any time either by date or by name of those plundered and destroyed or the locality in which he had worked.

  “You will become the historian of El Crisco,” Valdivia said to his secretary one day. “Perhaps you will be remembered for this work when everything else about you is forgotten.”

  After that, the fat man had something else to dream of. Only part of the time, he now saw himself as a wild and destroying brigand. The rest, he imagined large headlines in newspapers announcing the goings and comings of Juan Carreño, the celebrated author. He even read a grammar and two books on style, preparing himself for his future labors when all the evidence concerning El Crisco had been collated.