The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California
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 young female form beside the dead Mexican,
and don Benito's weak condition.
Indeed, the latter, instead of carrying out his implied threat,
tottered back and leaned against the cottonwood, just under one arrow,
and with the other shattered shaft bristling at his shoulder.
The red man chose to interpret this movement as a flattery for his
warlike appearance, for he smiled contentedly, and, drawing his long
knife, cried holding up three fingers of his left hand:
"La Garra de Rapina--the Claw of Rapine--will now take his harvest for
thrice five days' toil."
Benito sought to summon his failing powers, but a mist seemed to
spring up and becloud his gaze, through which he less and less clearly
saw the Indian's slow and cruel approach. Nevertheless, he was about
to make a snatch at hazard for the steel that rose over his bosom,
when a flash of fire from a gun so near that he almost saw the hither
extremity blind the redskin, preceded a shot that crashed through the
latter's skull. Benito, unable to check his own leap, received the
dead yet convulsed body in his arms, and the shock hurled him to the
ground. Neither rose! One was dead; the other within an ace of the same
impassable portals. It seemed to him, as he lost consciousness, that
there was a struggle in the brush.
When Benito reopened his eyes he believed all had been a dream, but,
on gazing anxiously about him, he saw the dead Indian by his side.
Above him, too, when he rose on his knees by an effort, the two silent
witnesses of his miraculous deliverance were still recumbent.
No trace of another living soul; nevertheless, the Indian's weapons had
all disappeared.
Suddenly, as he lifted himself to his feet, aching all over as if he
had been bastinadoed on every accessible place, he heard Dolores moan.
She was animated by the acute racking of hunger.
He gasped, "Food! Food for her!" and reeled to the greenest spot, where
he began to tear up the earth with his nails. At length he dislodged a
little stem of yucca, the somewhat tasty root which yields a species of
maniac.
When he returned to the tree, Dolores, horrified at seeing her father's
blood, had fallen off the tree top, rather than climbed down, and was
too insensible to hear his appeals. He dragged the Indian's body partly
aside, for to do so wholly was too weighty a task, and heaped leaves
over the other portion. He placed the root in Dolores' passive hands,
and was about to repeat his hoarse babble of hope, which he did not
feel at heart, when abruptly the arrow wound in his shoulder gave a
sharp, deep, scorching sensation, which filled him from head to sole
with fever and awe.
"Oh, heavens!" he groaned. "The arrow was poisoned! I shall die in
madness! I shall, perhaps, tear her, my dear Dolores, in my blind,
ungovernable rage!"
So feels the man whom hydrophobia has seized upon, as the latest
promptings of reason bid him hie aloof from his endangered fellows.
Benito laid his glances about him wildly; his recently dull eyes blazed
till his very features, already earthy, lit up, and he howled;
"Welcome, death! But anywhere save here!"
He trampled on the Indian corpse in his flight, and plunged into the
thorns as if bent on rending himself to shreds. He must have rushed
madly on for half an hour, the venom firing his thinned blood till
his veins ran flames, but as the wound on his left side affected that
portion of the frame disproportionately, he described a circle, and in
the end had almost returned to the spot where Dolores still rested in a
swoon.
At last, stumbling, groping, he fell, only to crawl a little way, then,
a slight mound opposing his hands and knees, he rolled upon it. His
head appeared to have been cleared by the Mazeppa-like course, and he
was, at least, conscious of the raised grass reminding him of a funeral
mound.
"A grave!" he breathed, dashing the sweat out of his eyes, "Yes, a
grave here will the last of the Bustamentes die!"
He stretched out at full length, he folded his arms, one of them
palsied already, and was beginning to pray, when his tone changed to
joy, or at least, profound hopefulness. He fell over on his side, then
rose to his knees, ran his band over the mound eagerly, and cried:
"God of mercy, deceive me not! The grave I coveted, is it not a
_cache?_ Thank God!"
CHAPTER III.
THE PIRATE'S BEQUEST.
The wanderer whose careless progress through the brake sufficiently
clearly revealed that he was a stranger of a bold heart and contempt
for customs different from his own, was, in fact, one of those
Englishmen who seem born to illustrate, in the nature of exceptions,
the formal character of his race.
Left an orphan in the fetters of a trustee who forgot he had ever
been young, and showed no sympathy with his charge, George Frederick
Gladsden had broken his bondage and run away from school at the age of
twelve. Reaching a Scotch port, after a long tramp, he shipped as boy
on a herring fisher, and so made his novitiate with Neptune. After that
initiation, very severe, he chose to become a sailor of that irregular
kind which is known as the _pier head jumping_. That is to say, instead
of duly entering on a vessel and book at the office in broad daylight,
"George" would lounge on the wharf till the very moment of her casting
off. Then, of course, the captain is happy to take anybody in the least
nautical or even able-bodied, who offers himself in lieu of one of
the regularly engaged mariners detained by accident, debt, or drink.
By this means Gladsden's trustee and kinsfolk could never prevent him
going wheresoever he willed, and it pleased this briny Arab to keep his
whereabouts a mystery, though, to amuse himself and annoy his guardian,
he would send him a letter from some dreadfully out-of-the-way port,
just to show he did exist, and to prevent the estate being locked up or
diverted under the law.
Meanwhile, the young roaming Englishman became so thorough a proficient
in the honourable calling, and had so much courage and intelligence
that, even in the merchant service, where the prizes are few and hotly
fought for, he must have obtained a supportable, if not a brilliant
position.
Unfortunately for himself he had an execrably fitful head, and was the
declared foe of Draconian discipline. If there had been pirates on
the seas he might even have joined them, only then to have enjoyed a
delightful existence of "Jack his own master."
Quarrelling with his latest skipper, a seal hunter, on the Lower
Californian coast, that Spaniard, rather alarmed at the turbulent mate,
was relieved when he accepted the offer of an Hermosillo planter to
become his manager, and not only broke the engagement between them,
but presented Gladsden with some dollars and his gun on their parting.
The Englishman promised well up in the country, but the fowl in the
swamp allured him into hunting trips with some Indians, and he turned
such a vagabond that the indolent Sonoran came to the conclusion
that, as the skipper of the seal fur cruiser had warned him, he had
contracted with a maniac.
One day, Gladsden and the Indians, turning their backs on the San