Bandit's Trail Page 7

  “There remains swimming … but the horses first!” Dupont yelled through the uproar and in the ear of Valdivia.

  “Let the horses go … our own lives, my friend …”

  Perhaps never before had Valdivia received such a glance of wonder and of scorn as he now received. But at least he did not repeat the suggestion, following mutely on at the side of his friend.

  Dupont paused again to grip the fat captain by the arm. “Your cargo?” he shouted.

  The captain turned grim eyes upon the questioner. He was a man of few words, however, and more intent upon action. The fate of the Charlotte P. McGuire was now sealed. She could not be budged from her bed, and the thunder blows of the waves that crashed against her port side gave strong assurance that, before long, she would break up. The lifeboats being gone, it was now a case of every man for himself in what best manner he would work for his safety. Those two items were, therefore, very largely taken from the conscience of the captain. He could now afford to think of his cargo.

  “What of the horses?” he asked. “They are lost, eh?”

  “They’ll swim as well as men swim,” Dupont said. “But we’ll need help to cut them loose and to drive them up the runway to the deck, and then force them over the side.”

  But the captain was already forging in the lead, thundering commands. That voice that made the crew tremble in ordinary times was now powerless, however, or nearly so. Only two fellows detached themselves from a wild attempt to make a raft on which they could float to the shore. The two made a corps of five with which they were to handle nearly two hundred horses. First they erected two strong, high barricades on the sides of the entrance of the runway. Then they beat open the sliding gate that closed the rail. All was now prepared for the drive of the horses.

  It was descending into an infernal region to enter the crowded hold of the vessel now. Every horse was snorting, stamping, raging, squealing. All eyes were red with fury and with terror, while the deck shuddered and quaked with their stamping and with the terrible hammer strokes of the waves upon the port side. The violence of those had now greatly abated, but they still swelled high enough to complete the work of ruin that their stronger forerunners had begun. Through half a dozen opening seams along the side of the vessel the salt-water spurted, plainly visible in the dull lantern light of the ’tween decks, while the horses, nearby, snorted and neighed in a frenzy of struggling terror.

  They were ready to stampede. There was no doubt of that, and if they could be stampeded toward the runway …

  With that thought half formed in the brain of Dupont, while he made for Twilight, the whole mass of the Charlotte P. McGuire shifted its position and rolled upon its side with a heavy groaning. At the same time there was a loud scraping and bumping noise from the deck above, followed by a wild shout of fury and grief.

  “The raft!” shouted the Dutch captain to Valdivia.

  There could be no doubt of that. The half-made raft had been tilted from its position and slid overboard before anyone could get a position on it.

  In the meantime, the heel of the vessel gave the horses a sharply sloping position on the deck and brought fresh squeals of terror from them. Dupont started the work of liberation. He started at the very foot of the gangway, where the animals were almost sure to rush up the slope toward the irregular rectangle of light that showed above. There he cut loose half a dozen of the frightened creatures as fast as his knife would work. And they started forward in a cluster, while he waved and yelled behind them, and he heard them groan with the violence of their struggle and their fear.

  Up the gangway they fled with flattened ears, flying manes, and straight-stretched tails behind them, jostling one another, terrible in their strength and their speed. They shot up from the gangway to the narrow strip of the deck at the side of the ship. There, in vain, they strove to check their flight where they saw the edge of the vessel and the gray, restless sea beyond. But it was too late to hold back. The wet deck was as slippery as oil beneath their planted hoofs, and the whole thick cluster of horseflesh shot off into the thin air beyond.

  A steady stream of the other fugitives followed. They had seen the game begin. They had even seen the forerunners falter and hold back at the head of the gangway and perhaps each intended to do likewise, but, once they were under way, the rush of other animals behind them drove them frantic, and the crash of the waves behind them, from which they were escaping, the yelling of the men above and below, whipped them forward up the gangway and over the side just as the first cluster had gone. In a trice every horse in the hold was raging with eagerness to join that thin swift procession.

  Three-fourths of them were already gone when there was a fearful crashing on the port side. A whole section had been beaten in, as the half-rotten side of a big tin can crashes in when it is kicked. It was the blunt foot of the sea that had done that work, and the sea itself followed, rushing over the nearest horses and shooting far up along the floor.

  “Save yourselves!” screamed the two sailors who had kept their nerve up to this point. “Save yourselves!” And they bolted up the gangway.

  “Señor Dupont!” Valdivia shouted, and caught the arm of the cowpuncher. “It is too late for the rest of the horses … ourselves … unless we are to be drowned here like filthy rats … come!”

  His hand was struck away. And Dupont leaped on to his work.

  There was not time to have saved them all with only one man setting them free, and undoubtedly the prediction of Valdivia would have proven true for Dupont if they had abandoned him. But abandon them they would not. His example shamed them into imitation, and, muttering through their teeth, glancing aside with frightened eyes as the waves leaped through the gap in the side of the Charlotte, staggering through the lunging water, they worked on until the last horse was freed. And that last horse was Twilight.

  At the heels of the frightened animals, when the last horse had been set free, ran the captain and Valdivia. Behind them came Dupont, his hand clutching the halter of the black chestnut. He heard the stallion panting with terror; he felt the body of the big horse shuddering with his fear and eagerness, and yet Twilight kept to his place behind the master and attempted no burst for swift freedom.

  They had hardly gained the gangway before the whole remaining side of the Charlotte gave way and the empty stalls where the horses had been tethered were instantly awash with the swishing seas. The wave followed on with a strong head and smote Twilight and Dupont as they struggled forward, but it only served to wash them higher. As it settled back again, and as the Charlotte P. McGuire rolled more heavily upon its side, they came out upon the side of the deck.

  Everywhere before them the rolling seas were marked with the heads of horses and with men clinging to bits of wreckage. The fat captain, clutching half a broken door, now plunged over the side. But Valdivia waited, his arms folded, rather like a spectator of the scene than one wrapped in the peril of it.

  Dupont shouted to him to find something that would serve him as a life preserver, but he had to take up a piece of broken railing and put it in the hands of the Argentinean. Then Valdivia stepped to the side, paused to wave farewell, and sprang out into the thin air.

  Dupont saw him sink beneath the water. He was down for a long moment before the white painted strip of rail appeared again with the estanciero clinging to it. He could see Valdivia kicking out blindly with his legs and paddling with one hand. In that confused effort he would never make the shore.

  Then the cowpuncher turned his attention to the stallion and strove to drag him forward to the edge of the ship. It was a useless effort. What point there was in leaving this firm footing for the treacherous and terrifying waters beneath, Twilight could not see. Neither could he understand why he should leave the master.

  Cold perspiration of horror formed on the forehead of Dupont, but there was no strength in his arms to handle twelve hundred pounds of
bone and muscle, now resisting with braced hoofs. He could only hope against hope that the stallion would follow him if he himself leaped down.

  He paused to take that magnificent head in his arms and stroke the wet, glistening neck. Then he stepped to the side and dived. It was a long, shallow dive that carried him to some distance from the Charlotte P. McGuire, and, as he reached the surface, he turned on his back and looked up.

  Twilight stood at the very edge of the ship, cowering back on account of the slant of the deck and for fear of the rolling seas, but with pricked ear, searching the waters. So Dupont waved an arm and shouted. At that, the great chestnut straightened. His neigh came like a trumpet call over the waters, and he sprang out into the air.

  He landed not three yards away. The foam and spray leaped high above his body. In another instant he was swimming like a dog at the side of his master—his sharp ears pricked joyously. There was another object in the mind of Dupont, however, and that was Valdivia, who he had seen struggling so clumsily through the water. Then, as a wave tossed him gently upward, he saw the estanciero clinging to his bit of wood in the nearest hollow. Dupont was instantly at his side, and over the desperate and set face of the Argentinean he saw a smile of welcome flicker like a light over a dark room.

  “You have not forgot, amigo mío,” Valdivia said.

  “I have not forgot. Let the wood go. Put a hand on my shoulder … so. Now it will be better.”

  Swimming strongly, he brought Valdivia in behind Twilight. There he showed him how to hold the tip of the stallion’s tail with one hand and kick with his legs and paddle with his free hand. He showed him how to lie low in the water, so that there might be as little weight as possible to tow. Then with a practiced, swift stroke, he gained the head of Twilight again and led the way toward the shore.

  Weighted with this burden from behind, the stallion, though he swam more strongly than ever, made only slow progress. And had he continued in his self-selected course, he could never have gained the shore. But the master led him quartering across the waves where their sway would not catch them full in the face and throw them back and where the sharpness of the crests bothered them less.

  In this fashion they worked on slowly, slowly to the beach. Other unhampered swimmers were already on the white sands. He could see them wringing the water out of their clothes, dancing for joy of their deliverance and embracing one another. But they had no thought, it seemed, for those who were still struggling in the sea.

  From time to time, he turned his head and studied Twilight as the gallant stallion struggled in the rear. For a time there was no change, then he could see the nostrils straining wider and the eyes glare with exhaustion. At that, he reached for the floating rope, found it, and, swimming on ahead, he caught the end of the rope in his teeth and began to work with all his might. Perhaps it would have seemed a foolish thing for a man to attempt to help a horse through the water, but where the salt sea water already buoys the body, there needs only a little added power to make a huge difference.

  So Dupont strained on with all his might. He dared not look behind him at the exhausted head of the stallion. He knew that his own strength was running out of his body like water through a sieve. Mists of blackness tinged with red began to float across his eyes, and still the shore seemed farther and farther away when, from a wave top, he looked ahead.

  The end came with heavenly suddenness. Something with a snake body cut the water ahead of him and a distant shout ran in his ears. It was a rope thrown from the shore, and, clutching it with one hand and holding the halter of Twilight with the other, they were drawn toward safety.

  So terrible were those efforts that he had made as he swam that, when he found the soft beach at last beneath his feet, he reeled up the gentle slope like a drunkard, with one arm hanging over the drooped neck of the chestnut stallion. But at last they came into the dry, white sand, and the hot sun burned upon them, and the keen breeze clipped against their faces, and above all the joy of deliverance restored them.

  Out of the great distance—or so it seemed to his roaring ears—he heard a cry, and he saw the fat form of Carreño, painfully outlined in all its flabby truth by his clinging, wet clothes, wobbling toward Valdivia, shouting, staggering with exhaustion and with joy and throwing up his hands to heaven.

  “The dog is glad that I am saved,” Valdivia said to Dupont, “but he allowed a stranger to save me. Señor, I shall never forget. And look … there is the last of the Charlotte.”

  The hold of the freighter had been gradually filling as her sides were staved in. Now she pushed her nose high as though she were striving to leap from the ocean that was destroying her, and she sank suddenly by the heel. In five minutes there was nothing left but the narrow strip of the prow, covered thick with spray with the beat of every wave.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was mid-December when they reached the camp; the locusts were already there and gone after laying their eggs, and now the saltonas were creeping everywhere. Being mid-December, the Argentine summer was beginning, and a hot beginning it was, but to The Crisco Kid, accustomed to the furnace days of August in the Arizona desert, all degrees of heat were endurable. He could withstand the fiery blasts of the winds and the focused brilliance of the sun and the strangeness of the country. But the creeping locusts, or saltonas, he could not stand. They filled him with an unspeakable loathing. And Jeff Slinger, the majordomo of the camp, as the Argentinean calls a ranch, assured him that he could spend years and years without losing that horror of the crawling multitudes.

  A friendship had risen at once between Jeff and The Crisco Kid. It originated on the second day after the arrival of Valdivia with his horses and his men, when Dupont sat out the furious antics of a three-year-old Cleveland bay stallion that had never been backed before by a man. It was a hot battle during which the peons stood about the corral and muttered: “Muy gaucho.” And when the big bay was subdued, Jeff Slinger deigned to open a conversation with the following eloquent praise: “You’ve rode a bit, stranger?”

  Slinger was a man who had seen a great deal of what the world has to offer and who had suffered as much as he had enjoyed. His body was wrecked. His left arm was badly stiffened as a result of a mine explosion in Colorado; he was crippled with rheumatism from long exposure to icy water in a shipwreck on Lake Michigan; a great scar furrowed the right side of his face, gathering the flesh to it and distorting his thin mouth to a mirthless grin at all times. A lion’s paw in South Africa had made that scar. Both legs had been broken several times while he was breaking horses in Texas in his youth, and on the ground his gait was a hitching, shuffling, sidewise thing, painful to behold. But in the saddle the little, broken man was still graceful and there was still in his eye an undimmed fire. Here, in a strange land, he had finally worked himself up to the second position of importance on a domain of five hundred square miles. His word was the second in command in dictating the laws that controlled three hundred men and sixty-five thousand cattle and twenty thousand sheep. In a year or so opportunity would come that would make him, perhaps, manager of another camp and give him his $10,000 or $15,000 yearly salary. Yet he remained that which he was born, a slangy Western cowpuncher with no more personal dignity than a child.

  From Slinger, The Crisco Kid learned many things about criollo and gaucho and the ways of the land, but, first of all, he learned about the coming of the locusts.

  On a mid-October day, the gulls about the estancia became excited, rustling their wings, flying in confused directions, and gaping their beaks as though in anticipation that their crops would soon be fatly filled, and then Jeff Slinger had seen a thin drift of transparent gauge and sparkling points of light high above him—the first drifts of the locusts, with whirring wings and bright-armored bodies in the sunshine. Myriads and myriads in each transparent, high-flying cloud of the insects, yet these enormous armies were but the forerunners, the flying outer scouts of the mass
es that came behind. For when the main body hove in view it came in cubic miles of purple haze, a living fog.

  By night, the willows were covered with dun-colored locusts so thickly that the green of the trees were streaked and overshadowed. Here they roosted at night above the reach of the dew. When they descended for the business of laying, the great instinct took command of them. Fear left them in the mighty urge of maternity. They huddled on all the firm ground they could find—roads or dry, beaten, naked patches among the fields, monsters of the insect world with a five-inch spread of wings and a three-inch body. With two talons at the end of the tail they dug holes bit by bit until their bodies were buried to the thorax, then they filled the hole with a hundred or more eggs, covering these with glutinous foam.

  In two weeks from the time of their coming, the laying locusts were gone. No harm had been done. The green things remained everywhere. Only, thousands of miles of road surface were honeycombed with new life waiting to come forth. There lay the plague asleep, as it were, and patient under whatever hand would destroy it. But how could they be destroyed? The earth was too hard to take a plow, and even had plowing been possible, there were not enough hands available to perform the work.

  At the end of December over the roads and the beaten patches of firm ground everywhere, swarming multitudes of green things appeared, and with white specks among them—little locusts a quarter of an inch long still attached, here and there, to the egg skin. Through the weeks that followed, the tiny creatures fed until their shell cases were bursting, then changed the old skin for a looser dress, fed that fat in turn, and so through half a dozen skin changes until at last came the alteration from the creeping saltona to the flying locust. Red, yellow, black, and green, the roads were soon packed with them issuing from the shell, or streaming across from one pasture to the next, voracious feeders all, strong-jawed, but tender of body so that they climbed above the dew at night and wriggled up posts and stout grasses on the hottest days to escape from the scorching touch of the earth.