The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California
track through the woodland, dignified by the title of road. They were
stationed one above the other.
Two hours had passed in these dispositions.
The moon had gone down lower and lower in the heavens, till, in the
end, it dropped beneath the eyeline, and opaque shadows enveloped the
country and blended all objects into one mass. In the stillness of a
cemetery, the two cavalcades, no longer visible to one another, awaited
the forthcoming enemy.
Wild Indians detest this hour, under the influence of a belief that
the soul of a warrior killed in the dark spell before dawn is doomed
to dwell everlastingly in gloom; but the converted peons had had this
superstition modified or obliterated altogether.
At all events, there was soon heard a confused murmur, which changed
speedily into a blending of shouting, monotonous chanting, and
occasional shots, while yellow flares crossed the darkest glades of the
pine woods.
In twenty minutes, the vanguard of a tumultuous gathering of brown
and black skinned men, women, and youths, filled the track. They were
almost naked, or merely attired in fragments of clothes to which they
had never been accustomed, some bearing torches, some crucibles from
mines, filled with oil and coarse wicks, and others candles of great
length taken from chapels.
They were allowed to pass unchallenged.
After them the more active insurgents, drunken, frenzied, hoarse, tired
with a long march, but demoniacal with their features twitching in
insatiable passion, surged up in a tolerable order, brandishing and
clashing their weapons, mostly of the improvised nature hinted at by
the scout in his description.
All of a sudden, the harsh croak of a sandhill crane was audible in
the thicket to the north of the road where Oliver had posted himself.
Immediately the man at the side of Gladsden imitated the clatter of
the beak of the same bird clearing it of the debris of a gobbled frog,
by tapping his pistol barrel on his lance shaft. The next instant
there was a rush of horses to the side of the forest track, and "_Viva
Mejico!_" resounded full throated from Oregon Ol.
"_Y Libertad!_" was the completion of the signal and war cry from the
followers of Gladsden, as they, too, set spurs to their steeds.
"Mexico and liberty!"
Simultaneously, therefore, the two companies burst upon the column of
Indians, cutting through and leaving a layer upon layer of pierced
mortality like in the track of a tornado. Having crossed, they made
a circuit, and, coming out on the road once more, one higher up, and
the other lower down the line of the previous charges, completed the
surprise of the insurgents.
"Wheel, face forward in chase!" was the next command.
In half an hour, the riders came into the rendezvous agreed upon,
having effectually frightened that column, and sent the surviving
members reeling and flying in panic through the woods, back whence they
came.
Five only of the Mexicans were missing. The wounds received were
unimportant. The horses were breathed; the cavaliers allowed to
congratulate themselves and their leaders. Oliver had a devoted
following now, for these Mexicans are too unused to easy triumphs not
to idolise the commander who gluts them with such a feast of vanity.
The collected horsemen rode off, slowly groping, to the appointed
place on the open ground where Silvano and the herders were to have
secured the semi-wild cattle. It was a little less dark, the false
dawn, in fact, and thus Gladsden, though not so accustomed to the night
marching as the rest, could see the horsemen of the Tigrero forming a
wide circle; in the centre were several strange objects, writhing and
beckoning to the stars. They were long-horned, thin, wiry cattle, of
the breed of old which never will fatten in Mexican pastures, fleet as
antelopes, savage as tigers. By dexterous casts of the lariat, they had
been roped, hurled to the ground, and secured there, heels in the air.
They were daunted but disdained to bow, mutely protesting by glaring
eyes, full of congested blood, and twitching of the tails. A little way
off, a heap of resinous wood was formed.
"Prime!" ejaculated the hunter, perceiving all this almost as clearly
as by day. "Don Benny shall give you a silver medal, old coon."
He issued instructions which were forthwith carried out with delighted
comprehension. The cattle were allowed to rise, but still held, half
choked and much hampered with the leather ropes, whilst some active
hands bound fat branches to their long horns, so that they soon assumed
an apologetic appearance of stags adorned with magnificent antlers,
which was amusing. Overcoming their humiliation on being anew on all
fours, the beasts began to chafe. Bushes of prickly nopals were made
for attaching to the animals' tails and hind quarters, like the pendent
goads to the bulls in the arena.
When the cattle were finally supplied with these prickles and the
wooden headgear, they were released of their trammels, and driven
forward before a crescent shaped formation of the horsemen, increasing
the pace perforce in order to keep up with them. Presently, the sparks
which had been applied to rags round the gummy wood, were fanned
into perceptible flames. By the time these living candelabra and
their remorseless goaders saw the hill of the hacienda loom up, the
frightened cattle were adorned with long streamers of flame. But as
they were broadened out into a line, one beside another, there was no
scare to make them turn back, and their only instinctive hope was to
continue their mad charge.
A deep hubbub as of bees around the hive was audible over and above the
bellowing of these fiery cattle, and a vivid glare seemed to encircle
the hacienda.
All at once, a yellow streak rose up in the sky, and a white star shone
over the buildings and enclosures, and the multitude surging up against
the pickets. Then the sky was striped luminously once more, but, this
time, a rosy glare surrounded a red star.
"Now we come whooping!" shouted Oliver, participating, like even the
Englishman, in the excitement of this frantic race at the heels of the
terrified bearers of the flames, forming a line of fire of continuous
aspect to the Yaquis in the hollow. "Level your lance--no! Draw rein!
Draw rein! And swerve to the left! What in thunder is that cry behind
us--on the sword hand? Great Jehosaphat! whar the Old Harry have _they_
sprung up from! Apaches, by the living thingumbob! Apaches!"
In plain earnest, the "hugh-ug-hugh!" of the Apaches rang out of the
pine forest, with an intonation of joy as if the sight of the rockets
and the disclosures thereby of the farm which had already been their
mark for massacre and pillage, had delighted them beyond control.
Then was heard, too, in a voice quite as gleeful and fiendish, the
vociferation of a number of white men, in Spanish and in English.
"_¡Viva!_ The Rustlers! _Los Ruidores_ of Captain Pedrillo forever!"
"The Rustlers!" repeated Oregon Ol., in perfect stupefaction. "Open
your airth and swaller me! The 'Pache' and the skunks they exchanged
shots with--that shed their blood--'malgamated, by gum! Take me into a
gully an' bury me! I'm licked!"
Meanwhile, not having the reasons for a halt that had checked the
Mexicans in the very commencement of a charge, the cattle infuriated
with the falling sparks from the wood beginning to become detached from
their horns, and blinded with the smarting smoke, tore down the incline
into the very vale where the Yaquis were crowded. Certainly their onset
would create a consternation, preventing any attention being bestowed
upon Oliver's little party, as it obeyed his earnest injunction and
wheeled off into an island of trees.
In ten minutes, as the dawn grew upon the scene, they could very well
discern, boldly emerging from the piney woods, not only some of the
stragglers of the column the Mexicans had discomfited, but two bodies
of mounted men, together over their own number, whom Oliver recognised
as the Apaches and the banditti, whom they had left at daggers drawn,
or, more exactly, at long shots with each other.
To explain this unparalleled occurrence in border records, the union of
two hostile forces in brotherly ties for active operation, we must turn
back a few pages.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PACT OF BLOOD.
Behind the fugitives, the rattle of dropping shots had gone on for an
hour so that Oregon Oliver's prophecy of the possible duration of such
skirmishing bid fair to be verified.
The Indians mode of warfare is to force a retrograde movement by the
gradual concentration of fire, and at the moment a retreat is begun,
whatever the cause--strategetic or from pure weakness or cowardice--a
charge is made by the best warriors in a body, whooping and brandishing
their weapons.
Knowing something of how resistless was such a rush, our old
acquaintance Don Aníbal, _alias_ The Slayer of Seven, was in no
humour for awaiting one. Already, from the glimpse he had of the
young Mexican girl borne away among the stampeded horses, his desire
for retaliation on don Benito had inspired him with a novel idea; he
hoped, against all precedent, to unite the Apaches with him in the same
purpose.
It was, indeed, our old acquaintance, the reader will see, perfectly
unscrupulous by what means he obtained his ends.
The miracle to which he owed the preservation of his rascally life had
been a lesson only for the time being.
When, plunging off the islet into the Gulf in order to elude the
infuriated husband of doña Dolores, the pirate was swimming for an
offing, he became the aim of more than one shark. Twice he escaped
being swallowed more or less in the maw of the most swift, for each
time he had swerved on one side as it blindly turned back downward for
the terrible bite. But, when so near the shore as to hope for full
immunity from this living danger at least, one of the tintoreras,
fearless of the shoaling water, flew forward like a flash of lightning,
and, amid an eddy of the churning water, poor Matasiete was seized
by the leg, and suffered the anguish of its being torn from half the
thigh. His scream was stifled as he was dragged down, and when he
arose, he was cast upon the strand. With the strength of infernal pain
and the madness of despair he not only dragged himself up under cover
of the mangroves, but twisted his cravat as a tourniquet around the
severed limb. Then he fainted away.
It was not until the morning that the pearl fishers were attracted to
him by his piteous groans. They had been so generously paid by Mr.
Gladsden after his securing the treasure that they took great care of
the dismembered Mexican, believing him one of the brigantine crew,
in which belief he took heed not to disturb them in his rare lucid
moments. They rewarded themselves by stripping him and cutting off his
silver buttons, and after a few weeks, changing their fishing ground,
left him in their best hut. Fever had gone, but he was as weak as a
child, and for some months seemed able only to crawl about. Thus he had
ample time for repentance even of so long a career of guilt.
He was penitent in his helplessness, and had such a man as Father
Serafino encountered him then, he might never have recurred to
his former life. But no one came near the crippled hermit but sea
otter hunters, and pearl and whale fishers, and they were rough,
unsympathetic souls, who only landed to buy, or take by force, the
vegetables which he raised.
In this way, chained to the spot by his loss of limb, with the
perpetual presence of the reef where that treasure had been drawn up,
to embitter his thoughts and his dreams, Matasiete nursed projects
of vengeance, not merely against the Englishman and don Benito, but
against all human kind.