Bandit's Trail Page 6

  “He grew as big with money as a pig is big with fat. Do you understand me, Señor Dupont? He was not a rich man as Valdivia is rich, for Valdivia is like a king … kind and gentle to those who are poor. But this Sandoval had a devil in him. If one begged for more time when money was due, he said … ‘I am in a hurry. I have no time myself. How can I give you time?’

  “His reason was that since he could not leave his name and his money to a son who could go on making it grow, he swore that he would make his own name so great that people would never forget him. He swore that, when he died, he would leave all his money for the building of the tallest building in the world. Such was this Sandoval. You will say that he was a fool. Perhaps he was. But for money-making he had a great talent.

  “This is why I tell you so much of Sandoval.

  “On a day … it was in June, when the calves are weaned and the alfalfa is sowed and the sheep are dipped for scab … the great El Tigre was riding near Corrientes, and, being hungry at the end of the day, he stopped at a house and asked for food. The fellow in the house was a fool who did not know him. He was a bully, likewise, this stupid man in the house. He told El Tigre that if he had not earned by honest work enough money to buy his food, he could starve. He told El Tigre that the crows might pick him, for all of him.

  “So El Tigre tied that man by the thumbs against the wall. Then he took food and ate it. Afterward he rode away. Do you understand? So long as that man could stand he was well enough, but when his legs grew tired and he fell down, then all his weight would come on his thumbs … ah!” Here José always paused to rub his own thumbs affectionately, as though he were very glad indeed that they were still with him.

  “When this fellow was found it was night, and they heard him screaming in the distance. So they cut him down from the wall and all he could say was this … ‘A devil has been here.’

  “Afterward when he could talk, he described the man who had tied him there and everyone knew that it must be El Tigre.

  “Now that house and that estancia were owned by this Alvarado Sandoval. When he learned what had happened, he was very angry, and he said he would have El Tigre caught and boiled in oil, slowly. He offered a great deal of money … I think it was fifty thousand pesos … to those who might bring him El Tigre. Do you see?

  “However, many others had offered great sums of money for that outlaw, and he had never been caught, so all of Corrientes thought very little of that promise of fifty thousand pesos. But El Tigre, while he did not mind the money that was offered … for that was any man’s right against an outlaw … was very angry because of the boiling in oil that was promised him if he were caught.

  “One morning in that same month of June, he flew down on Corrientes with forty of his men like forty great, lean, ugly condors. They were all forty of them fighting devils with scarred faces and rifles in their hands. They went first to the house of Sandoval and took the señor from his house and marched him down before them in his nightgown … for they had come very early, do you see?

  “They made him go to his own bank. They made him unlock the vaults. Then they marched him out again with sacks of gold and sacks of paper money across the pommels of their saddles. They walked him down the largest street of Corrientes. Had I but been there to see and to laugh.

  “Some went before him and some went behind him, and as they rode, they shouted that Señor Sandoval had come to do penance because he had thought an evil thought concerning El Tigre. Great crowds came out to see and to laugh at the rich man in his bare feet and his nightgown. But as they went, they gave Sandoval sack after sack of his own money. They made him throw it into the crowds on either side in handfuls.

  “He went shouting for help and for the police. But what could the police do? When they tried to come near, the people kept them back, laughing and shouting that this was a holy thing … this was a penance. Then they scrambled for the money on the ground.

  “Ah, but that was a bitter day for Sandoval, sowing his paper money in the air and his gold coins in the dirt. Perhaps it was sorrow and perhaps it was only rage, but as he walked, he began to weep. Still they goaded him with an ox goad from behind and made him dance and yell and then throw more money out of the sacks. When all that money was gone …”

  “What? Did they keep none for themselves?” Dupont interrupted.

  “Not a single peso. It was holy work, do you see? Would such a man as El Tigre profit by the penance of another? No, no!”

  And José would break into the heartiest laughter in his husky voice.

  Then he would continue: “When all the money was gone, El Tigre and his forty men rode on out of Corrientes. And they left Sandoval, unharmed, behind them. He offered a hundred thousand pesos to those who would catch the rascal. But who would ride in such a hunt? Who would ride after El Tigre and his forty devils? No, no! Their pockets were already full of the money of Sandoval, and they did not care to work any more that day. Besides, their ribs were so sore from laughter that they surely could not have sat in saddles on such a hunt.

  “After that, Señor Sandoval fell into a decline. He swore that he had thrown away the income of two years and that his heart was broken. And, perhaps, it was. For six months after that he lay on his deathbed, but El Tigre was still free and riding through the country where he would. He was not yet boiled in oil.”

  Chapter Nine

  Such were the stories that Charles Dupont heard concerning El Tigre as the Charlotte P. McGuire wallowed south and south through the rolling Atlantic. And though he did not believe a tithe of what he heard, he knew well enough that where there is so much smoke there is sure to be some fire. And whatever else could be said of the great bandit, certain it was that he had impressed the minds of his fellow countrymen and had impressed them, on the whole, favorably. These, of course, were the poor men, and the rich would have quite another tale to tell. To them doubtlessly the outlaw was but the scum of the earth—a worthless vagabond, a murderer, and a thief on a large scale. To the others, he remained a jovial dealer out of charity from the funds that he took from those whose wallets were filled. This, too, was of significance—that not a single member among all the unruly men who, from time to time, followed El Tigre had ever been tempted by the huge rewards offered here and there and everywhere for the apprehension of the bandit.

  Such a man was a tower of strength, and certainly a project similar to that which had been roughly sketched for him by the rich Valdivia seemed the crowning folly. And yet that first idea lingered in the mind of Charles Dupont like a great dream, filled with fire and wonder. Not that the owner of the great estancia ever referred to the idea again. He might even have been thought to have forgotten the outlaw, for he never mentioned El Tigre saving when Dupont brought up the subject, and then it was with a manifest regret that he spoke the name of the outlaw.

  “Yet,” he would say to Dupont, “I swear to you, señor, that I could not enter my land again with a feeling of safety if I did not have such a man as you by my side.”

  “Do not your friends know that this fiend is your enemy?” Dupont asked him once.

  “Why should I tell them?” asked the millionaire with a graceful wave of his hand. “It would only mean that their minds would be clouded with anxiety so long as I were among them. There would be no point served.”

  In this fashion, he left Dupont convinced that in the world there was only one perfect gentleman with a soul of gentleness and grace—and that was Señor Don Sebastian Valdivia. For his own part, he could not even think of the Argentinean without a swelling heart. When he contemplated that serene goodness of heart that had, in the first place, sought to prevent the combat between himself and Bud Carew by buying the horse, when he thought, in the second place, of the exquisite delicacy of soul with which Valdivia had induced him to come to the Argentine—yet offering Twilight freely to him if he did not wish to make the long journey into a foreign land—the
very soul of Dupont was moved, and he vowed to himself that this was a man for whom he would willingly die.

  And when he marked, too, the gaiety of the Argentinean, unaltered from day to day, he swore again that there are more sorts of courage than that which is based upon conscious power of mind or adroitness with weapons.

  They had sighted the shore, a low-lying rim of blue to the west, above the gray-blue sea. Steadily they skirted south and south through the flawless weather, making for a small port out of which they could ship the horses by rail straight for the home estancia.

  On Thursday night the sun went down over the land in a red splendor. On Friday morning they turned out of their bunks early. For the Charlotte P. McGuire was doing her best to stand up her nose in the trough of every wave, and she was creaking and straining through every one of her ancient beams, and a thousand loosened bolts and nuts were rattling and chattering in her as she staggered into the teeth of the gale.

  They came out on deck to find that she was keeping headway, and that was all. It was more than a mere cupful of wind. It was a true gale, blowing from dead ahead. The sky was sheeted with gray. The tops of the leaping waves were sliced away by the fury of the storm, and level-driving clouds of mist whipped across the waters and rattled against the ship. They stung the face of Dupont like many needle points.

  Then he saw Don Sebastian come out of his cabin and walk gingerly down the deck, whose pitching surface made him eddy about like a waltzer. Yet he reached Dupont with a smile and clung to the rail near to him.

  “Is everything going well?” asked the cowpuncher.

  “Between you and me,” said the Argentinean, “I think that we are going down.”

  He spoke so calmly that Dupont would have thought the remark a jest. He stared at his companion, bewildered.

  “We are holding our own, at least,” he said hopefully.

  “Oh, more than holding our own. But we are far from shore. So much the better, is it not? If the wind should veer around and cut in toward the land … that might be much more serious, I should think. Then we might be in danger of being driven on the shore, though I can’t make out the shore just now …”

  “We have been blown somewhat off our course. We are heading straight in for the coast now.”

  “Straight in!” Dupont cried, and he frowned at the rancher.

  For, in what he had read of ships and shipways, it was usually well to have plenty of sea room in a heavy blow.

  “Yes,” Valdivia repeated, smiling still. “We are rushing for the beach as fast as we can make it, which is not very fast against this storm, as you see. But … I have my doubt.”

  “About what?”

  “About getting where we want to get. In one word, my dear fellow, the only time in my life that I have been economical now proves that economy is a sin.”

  “I cannot understand you, señor,” said Dupont, gravely guessing at very serious matters.

  “No doubt you cannot. But when I chartered the Charlotte it was chiefly because she was so ridiculously cheap. I now understand the reason. The rotten old tub should never have put to sea, believe me. She has been straining and heaving enough during the past few hours to open her seams, and she is now leaking like a sieve.”

  “Leaking!” Dupont exclaimed, and turned pale.

  Valdivia looked curiously at him. “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  “In the name of heaven,” Dupont said, “are not you?”

  “Why,” said the Argentinean, “what will be, will be. Nothing that we can do will effect what is predestined to come to us for evil or for good.”

  And with this cold consolation he went up on the deck, as gaily as ever, while Dupont, staring after him, felt that he had seen the man for the first time. If he needed any confirmation of the serious nature of the predicament in which they then were, he received it the next moment when he saw the captain go by him, running, his face gray and stern. He was a fat old Hollander who wobbled before him as he ran. There was no doubt that he was an able seaman and would do what he could for the ship as well as for himself, but it was also plain that he was worried to the bottom of his heart.

  The pumps had been laboring furiously for the last hour or so, Dupont learned, and that accounted for a curious, staccato throbbing that he had noticed from time to time. It had even waked him from his sleep that morning.

  Then he went below. He found pandemonium among the horses. Wedged closely together as they were, there was still room enough for them to stagger and slip as the ship heeled from side to side or else pitched up and down, head and tail, like a little toy boat on a lake, struck by a low-sweeping gust. Twilight stood with his ears flattened to his neck and his eyes listening. That was his way. Where other horses were hysterical with terror, the gallant stallion was merely angered by the presence of danger. He wanted to find this mysterious enemy that rocked the deck beneath him. Instead, he was roped there helplessly.

  And when Dupont thought of that brave spirit floundering helplessly in the wind-wracked water, his heart turned cold and he stayed only to rub the nose of Twilight until the sharp ears pricked forward. Then he returned to the deck.

  The wind was unquestionably abating. One could open one’s mouth now without having an air pocket blown stiffly out in one’s cheek. And the Charlotte, with her engines working their best, was eating into the teeth of the storm steadily. The mist cleared, also, to some degree, and presently he could see the low-sketched line of the shore before them.

  José passed him, laboring and gasping under the weight of a great coil of cable. “The good God will save us!” he yelled to Dupont. “Pray to Him, señor!”

  The whole crew, then, knew the condition of the vessel, and that did not augur well for discipline. But here he had counted without including the spirit of the captain. That hearty soul might be daunted by the catastrophe that now looked him in the face, but he was in no wise unnerved. He seemed to be everywhere at once, and Dupont had an impression that through the single efforts of the captain the Charlotte was being held together in the crisis.

  For another hour they struggled on, with the wind still mercifully falling, but the Charlotte was now manifestly settling. She had gone down so far that the heave of the waves no longer jerked the propeller out of the water with a roar from time to time. She had gone down so far, in fact, that she presented a smaller surface to the wind, by far, and for this reason as much as any other, perhaps, the old ship made better headway toward the land.

  Yet how slowly that shore was drawing toward them. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the wind dropped away to nothing, and a wild yelling broke out through the vessel from the happy sailors with half the burden taken from their hearts.

  Dupont found Valdivia on the bridge, standing with his arms folded inside his cloak.

  “There are ten degrees more color in your face, my friend,” said Valdivia, “than when I last saw you.”

  “Because, I suppose, there is now no doubt that we’ll get to the shore. And that smooth beach should make an easy landing place. I saw it through my glasses a little while ago.”

  “Exactly,” said the master of the Charlotte’s cargo. “But unfortunately we have discovered that there is not a single lifeboat on the old tub that will swim five minutes after it has been loaded.”

  Dupont turned gray again. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “For those who cannot swim, that is a tragedy. Thank God that I do very well in the water.” He added hastily: “And you, señor?”

  Valdivia had begun to whistle. He broke to add quietly: “I have never swum a stroke in my life.”

  There was a little silence between them.

  “The waves are falling rapidly,” Valdivia said as calm as ever. “And if …”

  The Charlotte, settling with a dropping wave, came to an abrupt halt and flung them both forward against the railing of the bridge. When they picked t
hemselves up, there was a wild tumult of yelling voices through the ship. But only one word came from the lips of Dupont: “Twilight!”

  He turned to go, but paused to catch Valdivia by the shoulder. “The horses might make shore,” he said. “We must cut them loose and herd them overboard if we can. Then, señor, remain close to me. I swim strongly. We will make the land together or …”

  In such a time men do not pause to give thanks. Valdivia, without a word, hurried down to the deck after his companion.

  There they found that riot was the word of the hour. The Charlotte P. McGuire had not yet heeled over, but she hung shuddering in her tracks, twisted due northwest, with the waves crashing against her port side in a series of thunderous shocks. One of the lifeboats struck the water at the same moment and was instantly half filled with men—whereat the rotten craft sank suddenly beneath them and they were left to clamber up the side of the boat as best they might, clutching the ropes that were thrown down to them by their companions from above.

  “There is still the port boat,” Valdivia said. “I think we may as well try that …”

  Chapter Ten

  They ran to the port side of the ship, but found that the captain, in spite of all his fat, was already before them, bawling out his orders, intermixed with stentorian oaths. According to his directions the lifeboat was lowered from the davits while men from the deck strove to push the craft away from the side of the ship as it swung in the air.

  They succeeded. It touched the water, but had no sooner done so than a great wave picked it up like a gigantic hand and flung it against the solid plates of the side of the Charlotte P. McGuire. They could see, then, that the report of Valdivia about the condition of the boats was even less than the truth. For a shock that a sound boat should have withstood with the greatest ease stove in the whole starboard side of the craft and it instantly filled and sank, followed by the wild yells of despair of the crew.