'Firebrand' Trevison
terror had seized him, his lips stuck together, the facial muscles
refusing their office. He dropped his hands to his sides and stared into
the glass, noting the ghastly pallor that had come over his face--the
dull, whitish yellow of muddy marble. He could not turn, his legs were
quivering. He knew it was conscience--only that. And yet Corrigan's
ominous silence continued. And now he caught his breath with a shuddering
gasp, for he saw Corrigan's face reflected in the glass, looking over his
shoulder--a mirthless smirk on it, the eyes cold, and dancing with a
merciless and cunning purpose. While he watched, he saw Corrigan's lips
open:
"Where's the board telephone, Braman?"
The banker wheeled, then. He tried to scream--the sound died in a gasping
gurgle as Corrigan leaped and throttled him. Later, he fought to loosen
the grip of the iron fingers at his throat, twisting, squirming, threshing
about the room in his agony. The grip held, tightened. When the banker was
quite still Corrigan put out the light, went into the banking room, where
he scattered the papers and books in the safe all around the room. Then he
twisted the lock off the door, using an iron bar that he had noticed in a
corner when he had come in, and stepped out into the shadow of the
building.
CHAPTER XXIII
FIRST PRINCIPLES
Judge Lindman shivered, though a merciless, blighting sun beat down on the
great stone ledge that spread in front of the opening, smothering him with
heat waves that eddied in and out, and though the interior of the
low-ceilinged chamber pulsed with the fetid heat sucked in from the plains
generations before. The adobe walls, gray-black in the subdued light, were
dry as powder and crumbling in spots, the stone floor was exposed in many
places; there was a strange, sickening odor, as though the naked,
perspiring bodies of inhabitants in ages past had soaked the walls and
floor with the man-scent, and intervening years of disuse had mingled
their musty breath with it. But for the presence of the serene-faced,
steady-eyed young man who leaned carelessly against the wall outside,
whose shoulder and profile he could see, the Judge might have yielded
completely to the overpowering conviction that he was dreaming, and that
his adventures of the past twelve hours were horrors of his imagination.
But he knew from the young man's presence at the door that his experience
had been real enough, and the knowledge kept his brain out of the
threatening chaos.
Some time during the night he had awakened on his cot in the rear room of
the courthouse to hear a cold, threatening voice warning him to silence.
He had recognized the voice, as he had recognized it once before, under
similar conditions. He had been gagged, his hands tied behind him. Then he
had been lifted, carried outside, placed on the back of a horse, in front
of his captor, and borne away in the darkness. They had ridden many miles
before the horse came to a halt and he was lifted down. Then he had been
forced to ascend a sharp slope; he could hear the horse clattering up
behind them. But he had not been able to see anything in the darkness,
though he felt he was walking along the edge of a cliff. The walk had
ended abruptly, when his captor had forced him into his present quarters
with a gruff admonition to sleep. Sleep had come hard, and he had done
little of it, napping merely, sitting on the stone floor, his back against
the wall, most of the time watching his captor. He had talked some, asking
questions which his captor ignored. Then a period of oblivion had come,
and he had awakened to the sunshine. For an hour he had sat where he was,
looking out at his captor and blinking at the brilliant sunshine. But he
had asked no questions since awakening, for he had become convinced of the
meaning of all this. But he was intensely curious, now.
"Where have you brought me?" he demanded of his jailor.
"You're awake, eh?" Trevison grinned as he wheeled and looked in at his
prisoner. "This," he waved a hand toward the ledge and its surroundings,
"is an Indian pueblo, long deserted. It makes an admirable prison, Judge.
It is also a sort of a fort. There is only one vulnerable point--the slope
we came up last night. I'll take you on a tour of examination, if you
like. And then you must return here, to stay until you disclose the
whereabouts of the original land record."
The Judge paled, partly from anger, partly from a fear that gripped him.
"This is an outrage, Trevison! This is America!"
"Is it?" The young man smiled imperturbably. "There have been times during
the past few weeks when I doubted it, very much. It _is_ America, though,
but it is a part of America that the average American sees little of--that
he knows little of. As little, let us say, as he knows of the weird
application of its laws--as applied by _some_ judges." He smiled as
Lindman winced. "I have given up hoping to secure justice in the regular
way, and so we are in the midst of a reversion to first principles--which
may lead us to our goal."
"What do you mean?"
"That I _must_ have the original record, Judge, I mean to have it."
"I deny--"
"Yes--of course. Deny, if you like. We shan't argue. Do you want to
explore the place? There will be plenty of time for talk."
He stepped aside as the Judge came out, and grinned broadly as he caught
the Judge's shrinking look at a rifle he took up as he turned. It had been
propped against the wall at his side. He swung it to the hollow of his
left elbow. "Your knowledge of firearms convinces you that you can't run
as fast as a rifle bullet, doesn't it, Judge?"
The Judge's face indicated that he understood.
"Ever make the acquaintance of an Indian pueblo, Judge?"
"No. I came West only a year ago, and I have kept pretty close to my
work."
"Well, you'll feel pretty intimate with this one by the time you leave
it--if you're obstinate," laughed Trevison. He stood still and watched the
Judge. The latter was staring hard at his surroundings, perhaps with
something of the awed reverence that overtakes the tourist when for the
first time he views an ancient ruin.
The pueblo seemed to be nothing more than a jumble of adobe boxes piled in
an indiscriminate heap on a gigantic stone level surmounting the crest of
a hill. A sheer rock wall, perhaps a hundred feet in height, descended to
the surrounding slopes; the latter sweeping down to join the plains. A
dust, light, dry, and feathery lay thickly on the adobe boxes on the
surrounding ledge on the slopes, like a gray ash sprinkled from a giant
sifter. Cactus and yucca dotted the slopes, thorny, lancelike, repellent;
lava, dull, hinting of volcanic fire, filled crevices and depressions, and
huge blocks of stone, detached in the progress of disintegration, were
scattered about.
"It has taken ages for this to happen!" the Judge heard himself
murmuring.
Trevison laughed lowly. "So it has, Judge. Makes you think of your school
days, doesn't it? You hardly remember it, though. You have a hazy sort of
recollection of a print of a pueblo in a geography, or in a geological
textbook, but at the time you were more interested in Greek roots, the
Alps, Louis Quinze, the heroes of mythology, or something equally foreign,
and you forgot that your own country might hold something of interest for
you. But the history of these pueblo towns must be pretty interesting, if
one could get at it. All that I have heard of it are some pretty weird
legends. There can be no doubt, I suppose, that the people who inhabited
these communal houses had laws to govern them--and judges to apply the
laws. And I presume that then, as now, the judges were swayed by powerful
influences in--"
The Judge glared at his tormentor. The latter laughed.
"It is reasonable to presume, too," he went on, "that in some cases the
judges rendered some pretty raw decisions. And carrying the supposition
further, we may believe that then, as now, the poor downtrodden
proletariat got rather hot under the collar. There are always some
hot-tempered fools among all classes and races that do, you know. They
simply can't stand the feel of the iron heel of the oppressor. Can you
picture a hot-tempered fool of that tribe abducting a judge of the court
of his people and carrying him away to some uninhabited place, there to
let him starve until he decided to do the right thing?"
"Starve!" gasped the Judge.
"The chambers and tunnels connecting these communal houses--they look like
mud boxes, don't they, Judge? And there isn't a soul in any of them--nor a
bite to eat! As I was about to remark, the chambers and tunnels and the
passages connecting these places are pretty bare and cheerless--if we
except scorpions, horned toads, centipedes, tarantulas--and other equally
undesirable occupants. Not a pleasant place to sojourn in until--How long
can a man live without eating, Judge? You know, of course, that the
Indians selected an elevated and isolated site, such as this, because of
its strategical advantages? This makes an ideal fort. Nobody can get into
it except by negotiating the slope we came up last night. And a rifle in
the hands of a man with a yearning to use it would make _that_ approach
pretty unsafe, wouldn't it?"
"My God!" moaned the Judge; "you talk like a man bereft of his senses!"
"Or like a man who is determined not to be robbed of his rights," added
Trevison. "Well, come along. We won't dwell on such things if they depress
you."
He took the Judge's arm and escorted him. They circled the broad stone
ledge. It ran in wide, irregular sweeps in the general outline of a huge
circle, surrounded by the dust-covered slopes melting into the plains, so
vast that the eye ached in an effort to comprehend them. Miles away they
could see smoke befouling the blue of the sky. The Judge knew the smoke
came from Manti, and he wondered if Corrigan were wondering over his
disappearance. He mentioned that to Trevison, and the latter grinned
faintly at him.
"I forgot to mention that to you. It was all arranged last night. Clay
Levins went to Dry Bottom on a night train. He took with him a letter,
which he was to mail at Dry Bottom, explaining your absence to Corrigan.
Needless to say, your signature was forged. But I did so good a job that
Corrigan will not suspect. Corrigan will get the letter by tonight. It
says that you are going to take a long rest."
The Judge gasped and looked quickly at Trevison. The young man's face was
wreathed in a significant grin.
"In the first analysis, this looks like a rather strange proceeding," said
Trevison. "But if you get deeper into it you see its logic. You know where
the original record is. I want it. I mean to have it. One life--a dozen
lives--won't stop me. Oh, well, we won't talk about it if you're going to
shudder that way."
He led the Judge up a flimsy, rotted ladder to a flat roof, forcing him to
look into a chamber where vermin fled at their appearance. Then through
numerous passages, low, narrow, reeking with a musty odor that nauseated
the Judge; on narrow ledges where they had to hug the walls to keep from
falling, and then into an open court with a stone floor, stained dark, in
the center a huge oblong block of stone, surmounting a pyramid, appalling
in its somber suggestiveness.
"The sacrificial altar," said Trevison, grimly. "These stains here,
are--"
He stopped, for the Judge had turned his back.
Trevison led him away. He had to help him down the ladder each time they
descended, and when they reached the chamber from which they had started
the Judge was white and shaking.
Trevison pushed him inside and silently took a position at the door. The
Judge sank to the floor of the chamber, groaning.
The hours dragged slowly. Trevison changed his position twice. Once he