With flickering, shrewd eyes Ignacio had watched her distress. He craved the word that should call him to service and was off with a bound. His rushing, agitated figure was precipitated into a scene hard set as men on a chess-board in deadly serenity. Leddy and Jack, were already facing each other.
"Señor! Señor!" Ignacio shouted, as he ran. "Señor Don't Care of the Big
Spurs—wait!"
The message which he had to give was his mistress's and, therefore, nobody else's business. He rose on tiptoes to whisper it into Jack's ear. Jack listened, with head bent to catch the words. He looked over to Mary for an instant of intent silence and then raised his empty left hand in signal.
"Sorry, but I must ask for a little delay!" he called to Leddy. His tone was wonderful in its politeness and he bowed considerately to his adversary.
"I thought it was all bluff!" Leddy answered. "You'll get it, though—you'll get it in the old way if you haven't the nerve to take it in yours!"
"Really, I am stubbornly fond of my way," Jack said. "I shall be only a minute. That will give you time to steady your nerves," he added, in the encouraging, reassuring strain of a coach to a man going to the bat.
He was coming toward Mary with his easy, languid gait, radiant of casual inquiry. The time of his steps seemed to be reckoned in succeeding hammer-beats in her brain. He was coming and she had to find reasons to keep him from going back; because if it had not been for her he would be quite safe. Oh, if she could only be free of that idea of obligation to him! All the pain, the confusion, the embarrassment was on her side. His very manner of approach, in keeping with the whole story of his conduct toward her, showed him incapable of such feelings. She had another reaction. She devoutly wished that she had not sent for him.
Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands? If he preferred to die, why should it be her concern? Should she volunteer herself as a rescuer of fools? The gleaming sand of the arroyo rose in a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged. He was so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on his shoulder. His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland, questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he had in her first glimpse of him on the pass.
"I don't care! Go on! Go on!" she was going to say. "You have made sport of me! You make sport of everything! Life itself is a joke to you!"
The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her tongue's end. It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain, which appeared on his face. Was it possible, after all, that he could feel? The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after that sleepless night.
"I beg of you—I implore you—don't!"
Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of herself as mad. Wasn't she mad? Wasn't he mad? Yet she broke into passionate appeal.
"It is horrible—unspeakable! I cannot bear it!"
A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine, almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy.
"Don't you realize what death is?" she asked.
The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him. It changed him back to his careless self. He laughed in the way of one who deprecates another's illusion or passing fancy. This added to her conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing, his position.
"Do you think I am about to die?" he asked softly.
"With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away—yes! And you pose—you pose! If you were human you would be serious!"
"Pose?" He repeated the word. It startled him, mystified him. "The clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face lighting.
"No, about death. It is horrible—horrible! Death for which I am responsible!"
"Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the desert. I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the expense of a sore throat."
Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires.
"Leddy, wasn't it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that made you want satisfaction? You remember"—and he broke into a whistle. His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was different. It was shrill and mocking.
"Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that and live!"
Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands:
"There, you see! I brought it on myself."
"You are brutal! You are without feeling—you are ridiculous—you—" she stormed, chokingly.
And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical.
"Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little comédie humaine. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then, I must play out the game I've started."
He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him with the element of fear of him.
"Remember I am of age—and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest glint of satire in his reassurance.
He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream trickling across a highway.
IX
THE DEVIL IS OUT
She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the Eternal Painter lay dead!
What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next; while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the only sound in her ears.
"Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.
"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.
She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.
"Why?" she asked. "How?"
"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There is a devil, a big devil, in Señor Don't Care. It sleeps so much