The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California

CHAPTER V.

THE GODSEND

The inhabitants of the wilderness, red or white, black or yellow, obliged often to "let go of all," as our sailor friend would word it, and "get" (as he would probably say if his foolhardy behaviour allowed him to live long enough in that region to acquire the cant language), and pretty suddenly too, to follow the chase or avoid an ambush, are necessitated to abandon their plunder and traps, using these words in their legitimate sense. As, at the same time, they have no inclination to renounce their property, they bank it, or, as the trappers say, cache it.

The model cache is thus constructed: the first thing is to spread blankets or buffalo robes around the chosen spot for the excavation, which is scooped out in any desirable shape with knives and flat stones; all the extracted ground, loam, sand, or whatever its nature, being carefully put on the spreads. When the pit is sufficiently capacious it is lined with buffalo hides to keep out damp, and the valuables are deposited within, even packed up in hide, if necessary. The earth is restored and trodden down, or rammed firmly with the rifle butts, water is sometimes sprinkled on the top to facilitate the settling, and upon the replaced sod to prevent it dying after the injury to its roots. All the earth left over is carried to a running water, or scattered to the four winds, so as to make the least evidences of the concealment vanish. The cache is generally so well hidden that only the eye of an uncommonly gifted man can discover it. Often, then, he only chances upon one that has been opened and emptied by the owners, who, after that, of course, were easy in their second operation. The contents of a well-constructed cache may keep half a dozen years without spoiling.

Benito Bustamente believed he had been led to die upon a cache.

To a man dropping of fatigue and famine such a find was of inestimable value. It might reasonably offer him the primary necessities of which he was denuded, and he would be revived, literally, on being furnished with the means to fight his way to civilisation, where otherwise he and Dolores, always hoping the young girl had not preceded him past the bourne, must perish.

For a few instants, propped up on both hands, in a wistful attitude, which I never saw in a pictorial representation of a human being, but which was recalled to me by the pose of the bloodhound in Landseer's picture of the trail of blood, in which floats a broken plume.

A moment of suspense!

He was swayed by indefinable sensations, fascinated, so as to be fearful of breaking the spell.

When, at length, he mastered his emotion, he did not forget the duty of an honest man constrained to invade the property of another, though that other might be his enemy!

Trapper law is explicit; wanton breaking into a cache is punishable by death.

So he shaped out a square of the sod with a sharp mussel shell which he spied glistening near him, and slowly removed that piece, anxiously quivering in the act. Other turf he removed in the same manner, more and more sure that it was a cache. This preliminary over, he paused to take breath, and to enjoy the luxury of discounting a pleasure which came as veritable life in the midst of death.

Then he resumed a task terrible for one exhausted by privations and loss of blood. Many times he was forced to stop, his energy giving out.

Slow went on the work; no indications of his being correct arose to corroborate his surmise. The shell broke, but then he used the two fragments, held in his hand with such tenacity that they seemed to be supplementary nails. Vain as was the toil, here lay, he still believed, the sole chance of safety; if heaven smiled on his efforts, his darling Dolores might yet be a happy woman. So he clung to this last chance offered by happy hazard with that energy of despair, the immense power of Archimedes, for which nothing is impossible.

The hole, of no contemptible size, yawned blankly before him. Nothing augured success, and, whatever the indomitable energy of the young man's character, he felt discouragement cast a new gloom over his soul. His eyelids, red with fever, licked up the tear that ventured to soothe them, and his lips cracked as he pressed them together.

"At least, here I dig a grave for don José, and my poor love," he said wildly. "It shall be deep enough to baffle the wolf!"

He renewed his tearing at the soil, when suddenly the shells snapped off, both pieces together, and his nails also scraping something of a different material to the earth, turned back at their jagged ends, but not at that supreme moment giving him the pain which at another time the same accident must have caused. Some hairs were mingled with the earth, and a scent different from that of the freshly bared ground intoxicated him with its musk.

Disdaining the shattered mussel shell, he used his hands as scoops, and presently unearthed a buffalo skin.

Instead of tugging at it with greedy relish to feast on the treasure it doubtlessly muffled, Benito drew back his hands and stared with worse tribulation than ever.

A cache– yes! A full one – who knew?

Long ago it might have been pillaged. With but one movement between him and the verification or annihilation of his hopes the Mexican hesitated. He was frightened.

His labour under difficulties had been so great, he had cherished so many dreams and nursed so many chimeras, that he instinctively dreaded the seeing them swiftly to flee, and leave him falling from his crumbling anticipations into the frightful reality that closed in upon him with inexorable jaws.

In the end, determined to do or die, for to that it had truly come, Benito's trembling hands buried themselves in the buffalo robe, clutched it irresistibly and hauled it up into his palpitating bosom. His haggard eyes swam with joyful gush of many tears, so that he could not see the sky to which he had raised them in gratitude.

Benito had fallen on a hunter's and trapper's store. Not only were there traps and springes of several sorts, weapons, powder horns, bullet bags, shot moulds, leaden bars, horse caparisons, hide for lassoes, but eatables in hermetically sealed tins of modern make, not then familiar to Mexicans, and liquor in bottles protected by homemade wicker and leather plaiting.

He was stretching out his hands ravenously to the bottles and a role of jerked beef, when it seemed to him that the voice of the Unseen prompted him with "God! Thank God!" and repeating the words in a voice unintelligible from stifling emotions, he fairly swooned across the pit as if to defend it with his poor, worn, hard-tried body.

His face was serene when he unclosed his eyes anew. Soberly, by a great control, he ate of some tinned meat and the crackers and swallowed as slowly some cognac. The latter filled him with fire, and he could have leaped into a treetop and crowed defiance to the vultures which were sailing overhead as if baulked of their prey.

In that momentary calmness, he felt so strong and so rejoiced in his self-command that his spirit seemed to spurn its casket. But instantly, with the blood careering anew, the wound in his shoulder smarted furiously, and all down that arm and up to his neck he felt a strange and novel sensation; it was as if molten lead was in the veins, scorching and making heavy the limb.

"The arrow! I am poisoned!" he muttered. "Oh, is this windfall come merely to embitter my death?"

That taste of liquor made his mouth water, and there was suggested to him by the sight of the brandy bottle that here was the remedy which the wisest frontiersman and medicine man would have prescribed. He put the cognac to his lips, and emptied the bottle.

Almost instantly he felt an aching in every pore away and beyond that of the wound; his brain appeared to swell to bursting its cell, and howling himself hoarse, he thought – though, in reality, his inarticulate cries were strangled in his throat – he rolled upon the ground, too weak to dance upon his feet, as he imagined he was doing.

This intoxication left him abruptly, and he fell insensible. But for his stertorous breathing, which finally became regular and gentle, he was as a corpse beside the greedy grave.

He woke up, lame in every bone, but clear-eyed, and the ringing in his head abated. Either the remedy had succeeded, or constitution, for he was able to set about his task with surprising vigour.

Thereupon, he chose out of the store a pair of revolvers, their cartridges in quantity, two powder horns and bullets to fit the finest rifle, a bowie knife and a cutlass, and a length of leather thong to make a lasso, and a spade for the grave of don José, filled a game bag with matches in metal boxes, sewing materials, and other odds and ends for the traveller. Tobacco, too, he took, and was looking for paper to make cigarettes, when a small book met his eyes.

It was stamped in gold, "London, Liverpool, and West State of Mexico Agnas Caparrosas Mining Company." It was an account book of the company – one of those enterprises to which, he had heard, his father had lent a favourable attention. A pencil was attached to the book; he wrote on a blank page the list of all the articles he took, signing:

"Require the payment of me. – I, BENITO VÁZQUEZ DE BUSTAMENTE."

As quickly as he could he replaced what he did not wish to be burdened with, made the concealment good, and swept the grass with two buffalo skins, which he had also taken for clothing. This duty of a thankful and honourable man being accomplished, he darted back to where he had left Dolores with a free and easy movement, of which he had not believed himself ever again to be capable only a short time before.

He was amazed that a little food and spirit had restored him, and began to fear the reaction.

His wits remained clear. He remembered very distinctly indeed his confrontation of the savage who had been blasted as by a heavenly thunderbolt. He was not surprised when he found that redskin where he had rolled him. But what was his pain when he saw no trace of Dolores but the same fragment of her dress which Gladsden was, soon after, also to behold!

Sounds in the chaparral which reminded him of the four-footed scavengers in rivalry of the carrion birds that circled above, urged him to ply the spade, and he piously laid don José to his final rest.

Then, his rifle loaded, his frame fortified by the refreshment which he took at intervals on his march, he went forward in the trail which the abductor of the Mexican's daughter had been unable, so burdened, to avoid making manifest, all his emotions, even gratitude to the chief, set aside for the desire of vengeance on the remorseless foes to whom he owed so many and distressful losses, and on whom he had not yet been enabled to inflict any reprisal.

"Let me but overtake him, or them," thought he, "before the tempest obliterates this track with its deluge, and I will flesh this sword, or essay this new rifle on his vile carcass!"

CHAPTER VI.

ANY PORT IN A STORM

Gladsden was groping along when he perceived the thorn thicket changing into a prairie, only slightly interspersed with scrub. At the same time, though underfoot, the scene cleared, the indications of atmospheric perturbation increased in number and in ominous importance. Already the material man triumphed over the romantic one, and our Englishman thought considerably better of a solid refuge from the tempest than to come up with the abductor of the Mexican girl. Spite of its sinister aspect, therefore, his eyes were delighted when he saw, outlined against the northeastern sky, sullenly blackening, a curiously shaped tower. In a civilised country he would have ignobly supposed it a factory shaft.

He knew nothing whatever about this pillar of sunbaked bricks, some fifty feet in altitude, and, we repeat, cared nothing for the monument from any point of view but its qualities as a shelter.

Nevertheless, an archaeologist would have given a fortune to have studied this Nameless Tower, for the aboriginal held it too sacred for mention in common parlance. It was slightly pyramidal; the north side, not quite the true meridian, presented a right angle, presumably to breast and divide the wind of winter prevalent at its erection, while the rest was rounded trimly. The excellence of the work was better shown in the cement, not mud, or ground gypsum, having resisted the weather and particularly the sandy winds themselves, though they had worn the dobies (adobes, sun dried bricks) away deeply in places, without making airholes through. There was nothing like a window or depression save these natural pits, until the view reached the ragged top, where a sort of lantern or cupola, so far as a few vestiges indicated, had once crowned the edifice; there the floor of this disappeared chamber had become the roof, and an orifice, perhaps a loophole enlarged by rot, yawned like a deep set eye beside an arm of metal terminating in a hook. Presumably the column was a priest's watchtower, where a sacred fire was preserved in peace times to imitate the sun. It is known, the ancient Mexicans adored the sun. A beacon, too, in war times, for the fire and smoke signal code of the American Indians is too complete to have been the invention of yesterday. The entrance at the base cut in the rock utilised for nearly all the foundation. Once blocked up, the watcher, remote from lances, slingshots, and bowshots, could count the besiegers on this plain, and telegraph their number to his friends at a distance. The metal arm may have suspended a pulley block and rope by which provisions and even an assistant could be hauled up to him.

The natives avoid the tower and its proximity. The white rovers deem it uncanny, and, having no curiosity to gratify, also leave the spot untroubled.

Gladsden regarded the tall mass with some uneasiness as he approached sufficiently near to measure its dimensions and examine the emblems stained, rather than painted, on the alabaster base stone. A colossal half human, half bovine head, armed with terrible horns, and showing long angular teeth in a ferocious grin, was prominent among these designs.

All was so still that he hesitated to wake the echoes with a more or less tolerable imitation of the wildcat, to which no response came, or if from a distance such was raised, the approaching thunderpeals overcame it.

He boldly plunged into the doorless passage, the way to which had been to a more wary man suspiciously free from brambles.

A smell of smoke, and even of tobacco smoke, he thought, overcame that of damp earth.

The only light was that which the doorway admitted, but several plates of mica, backed rudely with metal, which time and damp had tarnished, made the interior a little less sombre by their dull reflections. A ladder of wood, all the fastenings of rawhide, could be distinguished climbing like a twin snake up the wall; on high a grayish eye seemed to look unwinkingly down: it was the light oozing in at the gap at the top.

There were red streaks on the wall: paintings in red pipe clay partially effaced, or mementoes of slaughter, just as the spectator chose to believe or fancy.

At the moment, the intruder was chiefly interested in the charcoal under his feet, almost warm, certainly so fresh that he concluded that others than he chose it for a refuge under stress of weather, no doubt Master Pepillo's congeners.

Less courageous, he would have shrunk away without pondering over the nature of his predecessors, possibly regular hosts of this lugubrious domicile of owl and vulture.

Convinced that he was, for the time being, the sole tenant, Gladsden resolved, however, to explore the portion unrevealed. To his hands and feet the ladder presented no obstacle, and he ran up the rough rattlings swiftly, spite of fatigue. It brought him into a species of manhole under the roof, close to the gap, and yet shielded from its draft by a jutting piece of wall.

"This will do," thought he, finding it dry and clean; "I will kill a brace of birds frightened into stupidity by the oncoming storm, roast them on that charcoal, and bring them up here for supper. If the robbers surprise me, I will maintain that I was merely killing time before the arrival of lieutenant Ignacio, and claim that gentleman's friendship by reason of my charge from his brother. If I am interrupted, I shall pull up the ladder, in trust that it will come free, and sleep here, safe from prowling beasts and serpents."

Suddenly gloom fell on all the landscape, as if a mighty hand had eclipsed the waning sun. The air was very much more thick and oppressive, and there were innumerable though faint crepitations like feeble snappings of electricity. To take the game he spoke of, before the rainfall drowned them out of their nests, it was needful to hasten. But he had not descended three rounds of the ladder, before he stopped all of a piece. From every side, there was the sound of an arrival of men, both on foot and ahorse. Instinctively he drew himself up, arranged his form on the floor so as to project only his forehead and eyes over the ledge where ended the means of ascension, and stared below.

A number of persons, congratulating themselves on their reunion loudly with the hyperbolic phrases of the Spanish ceremony of greeting, clattered into the tower. Presently a light was struck, and a roaring fire kindled. As the shaft thus became the chimney, Gladsden was forced to cough, though he smothered the sound as much as possible, hoped, as did the man who lighted the damp wood, that it would lose no time in burning up clearly.

When he could protrude his face over the peephole again, he beheld a dozen persons, swarthy, robust, richly clad as the prairie rovers, or cattle thieves, armed to the teeth. Cruel of eye, malignant and ferocious, he judged it highly imprudent to make their acquaintance, unless Ignacio was the introducer.

Before very many sentences were uttered, every syllable of which came to his ears direct, the overhearer was not allowed to cherish any error as to their profession. They were the Gentlemen of the Night, the road robbers, the scourges of Sonora, belonging to the squad (cuadrilla) of Matasiete, "the Slayer of Seven."

The gestures of the Mexicans grew animated as they sat around the fire, or leaned against the wall, which the gleams showed to be painted by the Indians; now and then they clapped their unwashed but jewelled hands to their weapons – at which moments the witness earnestly prayed that they would join in a free fight and kill everyone to the last. They were wrangling over the division of spoil, and perhaps the plunder would have cost additional lives to those of its original proprietors, when the advent of someone in authority caused the dispute to cease. It was their captain.

He was not the heroic figure that Gladsden had imagined fit to rule such desperadoes. He was tall, but lean, don Quixote with Punch's nose and chin, rather the fox than the wolf, and though his features were set stern and his voice was savage, doubts might be conceived as to his own reliance on his bullying mode of government.

"At your differences again," he cried in a sharp voice, which now and then ran up shrill and high, spite of himself, more to the resemblance of the puppet show hero than ever. "¡Caray! Why can't you pull together like honourable gentlemen of the prairie?"

Two of the brigands began an explanation which their leader cut short by replying to the less ruffianly of the two:

"Silence! I'll not be bothered by a single word! ¡Viva Dios! Here you are hugging the fire like herders broiling a steak, without a thought of our common safety. I have had to post sentries myself, and even they grumbled at such important duty, just because there is a barrel of water coming down. I tell you I heard a shot in the thicket, which was not from any of our guns."

Another of the gang spoke up, with whom he judged it meet to argue. It is due to the estimable captain Matasiete to say that the debater in question was picking a fragment of buffalo beef out of a huge hollow grinder, with an unpleasant long knife.

"It is true, Ricardo, that the red men do never approach the Owl Tower; but what is that? Someday our secret haunt will be surprised and the Yaquis will fall on us for profaning the old pile. Where is Ignacio? Where is the lieutenant, I say?"

Neither he nor his brother had arrived, that was the answer, to Mr. Gladsden's chagrin.

"Then will they get their boots choked with rain," remarked the commander of these precious rogues, comfortably installing himself at the fire, in the very manner which he had disapproved of in his men. There was a flash of lightning. The thunder roared round the tower, which bravely met the precursor shower, though it was of a drenching nature to justify the repugnance of the salteadores to standing sentinel in the open, whilst their luckier comrades enjoyed the shelter and the fire.

There was silence within the tower: the bandits, drawing a little aloof from their chief, in respect or lack of sympathy, prepared supper, priced their property with a view of staking it in card play, or, as far as two or three were concerned, lounged at the door, watching the ground smoke after the wetting, and glancing tauntingly at their brothers on guard, who shone with moisture in the chance ray from the glorious fire.

The extreme heat around Gladsden, his fatigue and a dulness engendered by the recent strain on his faculties, forced his eyes to close now and then, and he was about falling into a torpor, when a commotion below aroused him.