All at once, Benito received word that a messenger from his mother had arrived at Guaymas, bearing the very good news that she expected to obtain a revocation of the sentence of banishment against the brood of Bustamente, and then he could publicly avow his name.
He had already imparted his secret to Captain Miranda.
The messenger had grievously suffered with seasickness, and was unable to come up the valley. Miranda counselled Benito to go to him therefore, and besides, as the formalities attending the settlement of his estate upon his daughter, under the marriage contract, required such legal owls as nestled alone in the port, he volunteered to accompany the young man. Over and above all this pleasing arrangement, as Dolores had never seen the city, of which the five thousand inhabitants think no little – for after all it is the finest harbour in the Gulf of California – he proposed she should be of the party.
Another reason, which he did not confide in anyone, acted as a spur. A neighbour had told don José that, from a communication of his majordomo, an expert in border warfare, he believed that the illustrious don Aníbal de Luna was not wholly above complicity with a troop of robbers who lately infested Sonora, and caused as much dread and more damage, forasmuch as they were intelligently directed to the best stores of plunder as the Indians themselves. This neighbour, though he loved doña Josefa no more cordially than anybody else, still deemed it dutiful to prevent Captain Miranda allowing a "gentleman of the highway" to marry into his family.
Don José felt the caution more painfully, as his sister had plainly let him know that the famous don Aníbal was not so much her worshipper as her niece's. He might have thanked the salteador to rid his house of the old maid, but to allow one to court his daughter was another matter. At the same time, as of such dubious characters are made the "colonels" who buckler up a Mexican revolutionary pretender, don José was scarcely less coldly civil to the hidalgo, though he hastened on the preparations to withdraw his daughter from the swoop of the bird of rapine.
Doña Maria Josefa drew a long face at the prospect of being left alone at the hacienda, but she was too great a dependant on her brother, and too hypocritical to trammel the undertaking.
The party set forth, then, under good and sufficient escort. But the very foul fiend himself appeared to have taken all doña Maria Josefa's evil wishes in hand to carry them out, to say nothing of the baulked don Aníbal's.
Half the escort left without returning, at a mere alarm of the Indios bravos ("hostiles") being at La Palma, and massacring and firing farmhouses wholesale. The rest were lost in the bush, were abandoned dead or dying; the mules and horses were "stampeded" by unseen foes; and finally a fatal bowman slew the two horses which had borne don José and his daughter in their futile endeavour to regain the lost track; and, to come to the present time, their dog, of whom the instinct had preserved them more than once from death by thirst, had been despatched by the same relentless demon.
Still, there was the contradictory consolation which the persistent enemy afforded by these evidences of his bloodthirsty hunt. By a singular anomaly of the human organisation, as long as man knows his fellows are at hand, even though they be enemies, he does not feel utterly stripped of hope. In the depth of his heart, the vaguest of hope sustains and encourages him, though he may not reason about it. But as soon as all human vestiges disappear, the imperceptible human waif on the sea, alone with nature, trembles in full revelation of his paltriness. The colossal surroundings daunt him, and he acknowledges it is folly to struggle with the waves that multitudinously mount up to swamp him from all sides.
Meanwhile, no further occasion to be fearful had been shown, the sun went down, and shot up one short gleam ere the swift darkness shrouded the sky. The howling of wild beasts rushing out to enjoy their time of sport could be traced from the lair to the "licks" and springs.
But our disarmed gente perdida, the lost ones, durst not light a fire; had they the means to scare the wolf away, it might have afforded a mark for the unknown archer. Don José wept as he saw his daughter, who pretended to sleep, to give him and her lover less uneasiness. But sleep does not come under these circumstances to them who court it.
Indeed, only those who have undergone the horror of a night in the untamed forest can imagine its poignancy. Lugubrious phantoms people the glades, the wild beasts intone a devilish concert, the limbs of trees seem to be animated into semblances of the really awakened serpents, whose scales can be heard gliding with a slime softened hush over the bending boughs. None but the experienced can reckon how many ages are compressed in one second of this gruesome "fix," a nightmare of the wakeful, during which the racked mind finds a distorted relish in picturing the most monstrous lucubrations, particularly when the faint yet tantalised appetite sets the brain palpitating with delirium.
After enduring this strain for some hours of the gloom, hope or mere instinct of self-preservation caused Benito to suggest, as one acquainted with hunters expedients, that the shelter existed by the increasing danger of their position on the ground, was upon the summit of a huge broken cottonwood tree. He assisted don José to mount to the top, which he found tolerably solid, spite of wet and solar rot, passed him up poor Dolores, and stood on guard at the base. He meant to have kept awake, or, rather, had not the least idea that he should go off to sleep, but famine had passed its acute stage, and fatigue collaborated with it to lull him. The last look he gave upwards showed him vaguely, like a St. Simon Stylites, the elder Mexican on the broad summit of the stump, his daughter reclining on the bed of pith at his feet. Don José was then praying, his face turned to the east, where no doubt he trusted to behold a less unhappy sun than had last scorched them.
Suddenly don Benito started: something like a hot snake had run down his cheek and buried itself in his bosom. At almost the same instant, whilst he was awakening fully, a smart sting in the left shoulder, preceded by a hissing, short and angry, made the young man utter an exclamation rather in rage than pain.
The sun had risen; at least, he could see about him and be warmed and vivified a little, through a fresh day commenced of intolerable torments.
As he looked up, the repetition of the sensation of the reptile gliding adown his face, but less warm and more slow this time, caused him to apply his hand to the line traversed. He withdrew it speedily, and in disgust – his fingers were smeared with blood!
"Oh, Don José!" he ejaculated. "Dolores, dear!"
Stupefied, speechless, like a statue, the girl upon the natural pedestal was supporting the lifeless body of the old Mexican. An arrow was broken off in his temple, and his beard, roughly sprouted out and white with this week of hardship, was flooded with the blackening blood of which Benito in his post below had received the drip.
The young man stared fiercely around, and instantly perceiving something on the move in the thicket, sprang up the tree.
At the same time aimed at him to redeem the marksman for his first failure, which had lodged the shaft in the young Mexican's shoulder instead of his head or his heart; a second projectile of the same description whizzed into the gap between his legs, opened by his leap, and smote a knot so violently as to shiver into a dozen splinters.
Unable for want of strength to keep his hold, the youthful Mexican slipped down to the ground. Then, facing about in frenzy of indignation, as being so badgered by the unknown, he called out savagely:
"Coward! Confront the last of your victims, if you have a drop of manly blood!"
Because he had concluded his last shot serious, or from disdain for his antagonist, or sheer recklessness – for it is not likely that a savage so far forgot his training as to let such a white man's taunt sting him into the imprudence – the Indian who had dogged the unfortunate trio stalked out of the underwood, and only ceased his advance when a lance length from the desperate man who had invoked him.
"¡Presente!" he said in Spanish, with a hoarse chuckle, as in one glance he saw the insensible