Overland Part 5

"I fear that I shall not be able to go with you," he said. "I have received orders to wait for a sergeant and three recruits who have been a.s.signed to my company. The messenger reports that they are on the march from Fort Bent with an emigrant train, and will not be here for a week. It annoys me horribly, Miss Van Diemen. I thought I saw my way clear to be of your party. I a.s.sure you I earnestly desired it. This route--I am afraid of it--I wanted to be with you."

"To protect me?" queried Clara, her face lighting up with a grateful smile, so innocent and frank was she. Then she turned grave, again, and added, "I am sorry."

Thankful for these last words, but nevertheless quite miserable, the youngster worshipped her and trembled for her.

This conversation had been carried on in a quiet tone, so that the others of the party had not overheard it, not even the watchful Coronado.

"It is too unfortunate," said Clara, turning to them, "Lieutenant Thurstane cannot go with us."

Garcia and Coronado exchanged a look which said, "Thank--the devil!"

CHAPTER IV.

The next day brought news of an obstacle to the march of the wagon train through Santa Anna and Rio Arriba.

It was reported that the audacious and savage Apache chieftain, Manga Colorada, or Red Sleeve, under pretence of wanting to make a treaty with the Americans, had approached within sixty miles of Santa Fe to the west, and camped there, on the route to the San Juan country, not making treaties at all, but simply making hot beefsteaks out of Mexican cattle and cold carca.s.ses out of Mexican rancheros.

"We shall have to get those fellows off that trail and put them across the Bernalillo route," said Coronado to Garcia.

"The pigs! the dogs! the wicked beasts! the devils!" barked the old man, dancing about the room in a rage. After a while he dropped breathless into a chair and looked eagerly at his nephew for help.

"It will cost at least another thousand," observed the younger man.

"You have had two thousand," shuddered Garcia. "You were to do the whole accursed job with that."

"I did not count on Manga Colorada. Besides, I have given a thousand to our little cousin. I must keep a thousand to meet the chances that may come. There are men to be bribed."

Garcia groaned, hesitated, decided, went to some h.o.a.rd which he had put aside for great needs, counted out a hundred American eagles, toyed with them, wept over them, and brought them to Coronado.

"Will that do?" he asked. "It must do. There is no more."

"I will try with that," said the nephew. "Now let me have a few good men and your best horses. I want to see them all before I trust myself with them."

Coronado felt himself in a position to dictate, and it was curious to see how quick he put on magisterial airs; he was one of those who enjoy authority, though little and brief.

"Accursed beast!" thought Garcia, who did not dare just now to break out with his "pig, dog," etc. "He wants me to pay everything. The thousand ought to be enough for men and horses and all. Why not poison the girl at once, and save all this money? If he had the spirit of a man! O Madre de Dios! Madre de Dios! What extremities! what extremities!"

But Garcia was like a good many of us; his thoughts were worse than his deeds and words. While he was cogitating thus savagely, he was saying aloud, "My son, my dear Carlos, come and choose for yourself."

Turning into the court of the house, they strolled through a medley of wagons, mules, horses, merchandise, muleteers, teamsters, idlers, white men and Indians. Coronado soon picked out a couple of rancheros whom he knew as capital riders, fair marksmen, faithful and intelligent. Next his eye fell upon a man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as the ordinary Mexican, but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and ferocity of expression marked him as of another and more pugnacious, more imperial race.

"You are an American," said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two manners as opposite as the poles.

"I be," replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.

"May I ask what your name is?"

"Some folks call me Texas Smith."

Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of a tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained. He was face to face with a fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the borders of Texas to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.

This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years old, had the horrible fame of a score of murders. His appearance mated well with his frightful history and reputation. His intensely black eyes, blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity. It was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare of a tiger; it was an intentional malignity, super-beastly and sub-human.

They were eyes which no other man ever looked into and afterward forgot.

His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly face, stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence in savage pa.s.sions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final touches to this countenance of a cougar.

"He is my man," whispered Garcia to Coronado. "I have hired him for the great adventure. Sixty piastres a month. Why not take him with you to-day?"

Coronado gave another glance at the gladiator and meditated. Should he trust this beast of a Texan to guard him against those other beasts, the Apaches? Well, he could die but once; this whole affair was detestably risky; he must not lose time in shuddering over the first steps.

"Mr. Smith," he said, "very glad to know that you are with us. Can you start in an hour for the camp of Manga Colorada? Sixty miles there. We must be back by to-morrow night. It would be best not to say where we are going."

Texas Smith nodded, turned abruptly on the huge heels of his Mexican boots, stalked to where his horse was fastened, and began to saddle him.

"My dear uncle, why didn't you hire the devil?" whispered Coronado as he stared after the cutthroat.

"Get yourself ready, my nephew," was Garcia's reply. "I will see to the men and horses."

In an hour the expedition was off at full gallop. Coronado had laid aside his American dandy raiment, and was in the full costume of a Mexican of the provinces--broad-brimmed hat of white straw, blue broadcloth jacket adorned with numerous small silver b.u.t.tons, velvet vest of similar splendor, blue trousers slashed from the knee downwards and gay with b.u.t.tons, high, loose embroidered boots of crimson leather, long steel spurs jingling and shining. The change became him; he seemed a larger and handsomer man for it; he looked the caballero and almost the hidalgo.

Three hours took the party thirty miles to a hacienda of Garcia's, where they changed horses, leaving their first mounting for the return. After half an hour for dinner, they pushed on again, always at a gallop, the hoofs clattering over the hard, yellow, sunbaked earth, or dashing recklessly along smooth sheets of rock, or through fields of loose, slippery stones. Rare halts to breathe the animals; then the steady, tearing gallop again; no walking or other leisurely gait. Coronado led the way and hastened the pace. There was no tiring him; his thin, sinewy, sun-hardened frame could bear enormous fatigue; moreover, the saddle was so familiar to him that he almost reposed in it. If he had needed physical support, he would have found it in his mental energy. He was capable of that executive furor, that intense pa.s.sion of exertion, which the man of Latin race can exhibit when he has once fairly set himself to an enterprise. He was of the breed which in n.o.bler days had produced Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro, and Darien.

These riders had set out at ten o'clock in the morning; at five in the afternoon they drew bridle in sight of the Apache encampment. They were on the brow of a stony hill: a pile of bare, gray, glaring, treeless, herbless layers of rock; a pyramid truncated near its base, but still of majestic alt.i.tude; one of the pyramids of nature in that region; in short, a b.u.t.te. Below them lay a valley of six or eight miles in length by one or two in breadth, through the centre of which a rivulet had drawn a paradise of verdure. In the middle of the valley, at the head of a bend in the rivulet, was a camp of human brutes. It was a bivouac rather than a camp.

The large tents of bison hide used by the northern Indians are unknown to the Apaches; they have not the bison, and they have less need of shelter in winter. What Coronado saw at this distance was, a few huts of branches, a strolling of many horses, and some scattered riders.

Texas Smith gave him a glance of inquiry which said, "Shall we go ahead--or fire?"

Coronado spurred his horse down the rough, disjointed, slippery declivity, and the others followed. They were soon perceived; the Apache swarm was instantly in a buzz; horses were saddled and mounted, or mounted without saddling; there was a consultation, and then a wild dash toward the travellers. As the two parties neared each other at a gallop, Coronado rode to the front of his squad, waving his sombrero. An Indian who wore the dress of a Mexican caballero, jacket, loose trousers, hat, and boots, spurred in like manner to the front, gestured to his followers to halt, brought his horse to a walk, and slowly approached the white man. Coronado made a sign to show that his pistols were in his holsters; and the Apache responded by dropping his lance and slinging his bow over his shoulder.

The two met midway between the two squads of staring, silent hors.e.m.e.n.

"Is it Manga Colorada?" asked the Mexican, in Spanish.

"Manga Colorada," replied the Apache, his long, dark, haggard, savage face lighting up for a moment with a smile of gratified vanity.

"I come in peace, then," said Coronado. "I want your help; I will pay for it."

In our account of this interview we shall translate the broken Spanish of the Indian into ordinary English.

"Manga Colorada will help," he said, "if the pay is good."

Even during this short dialogue the Apaches had with difficulty restrained their curiosity; and their little wiry horses were now caracoling, rearing, and plunging in close proximity to the two speakers.

"We will talk of this by ourselves," said Coronado. "Let us go to your camp."

The conjoint movement of the leaders toward the Indian bivouac was a signal for their followers to mingle and exchange greetings. The adventurers were enveloped and very nearly ridden down by over two hundred prancing, screaming hors.e.m.e.n, shouting to their visitors in their own guttural tongue or in broken Spanish, and enforcing their wild speech with vehement gestures. It was a pandemonium which horribly frightened the Mexican rancheros, and made Coronado's dark cheek turn to an ashy yellow.