The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California
the same time the first intimation they had of the revolt of the peons,
was their riding into the midst of the column shattered by the sham
lancers of Oregon Oliver. The severed portions of this column, like one
of those fabulous serpents which had the power of healing its wounds,
and joining its segments, had rallied into one mass. The leaders were
hesitating on the course to take when the Mexicans appeared, and they
feared a renewal of the disaster. Fortunately, before the panic was
revived, the Apaches delighted them, for they saw friends in men of
their colour if not of their race. An understanding was soon arrived
at. Needless to say, Pedrillo and Garcia congratulated themselves on
having such allies, and the prospect of overcoming not merely the farm
of don Benito, but of many another, made their faces radiant with
smiles.
Thus reinforced, the squadrons resumed the advance, followed closely by
the peons, who derived much enheartenment from such warlike adherents,
and, passing the detachment from Monte Tesoro still ensconced in the
pine and cedar woods, the throng poured into the valley with loud
clamour echoed by the assembled rebels. This joyous uproar did not
tend to reassure the beleaguered Mexicans, though its cause was not
perceptible.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CANNON IS BROUGHT TO BEAR.
Long and patiently had the environed garrison been awaiting the token
of well faring with the adventurers who had so daringly left that
shelter.
Only in the end of the night had the sudden, and, for the moment,
inexplicable apparition of the cattle on which had been imposed that
fiery burden, seemed to reveal the operations of their friends.
The charge of the furious and panic-stricken creatures, whose hides
were singed and smoked with a nauseating odour, was unresisted by
the rebels, huddled together just out of gunshot of the farm, in the
obscurity. Nevertheless, as soon as the true nature of this attack was
clear, and the more active Indians had speared those animals which had
not broken their necks and extinguished the flames in the ditch, the
alarm calmed down. It was at this juncture that don Benito, at the
head of a hundred horsemen, galloped out of the corral and executed
a terrible slashing and hewing, sweeping round amid carnage, and
returning with insignificant loss. The moral effect was even greater
than the material, for those of the insurgents who had previously
thought nothing of rushing up to the farmhouse, and firing a shot at
random amid tipsy threats and obscene imprecations, withdrew to a safe
distance, and vociferated for the self-constituted leaders to evince
their genius.
It was as don Benito's troop returned within the defences that they
heard, to their dismay, the well-known war cry of the Apaches only
too recently impressed on the hearing of all, and the shout of their
newfound robber allies.
Of Oliver, the Englishman, and their followers, no intelligence
whatever. It is only doing the master of the farm justice, as well as
his family, to say that deep distress was added to that they felt in
their plight with the fear that their daring friends had all fallen
into some trap of the cunning savages now foremost in opposition.
The aurora appeared, and the whole valley was revealed, full of the
rebels, amongst whom was added, as well as the sixty marauders who
held captain Pedrillo as chief, the full hundred Apaches, whose proud
and domineering carriage defined them from the Yaquis born under the
yoke which these had never experienced. Besides, before the heat of the
day forced both besiegers and besieged to take a siesta, the already
enormous concourse was swollen by the last fragments of the dispersed
column finding their way thither, burdened with plunder.
All the morning had passed in rash and irregular attacks on the houses,
but when they were not repulsed, the few score Indians who clambered
over the stockade were cut down by the horsemen inside. Twice the
Apaches had charged up to the walls, but, apparently, merely to test
the watchfulness of the inmates and the range of their firearms, for
they made no assault on the palisades, to pull and hack at which, or
even more to alight and clamber over, would have been ignoble in a
horse Indian.
Still no sign of the party that had sallied forth.
Successful in that sally of their own, the Mexican gentlemen wished
to retaliate on the Apaches in particular for the insult implied in
their departing from their war custom of never charging an enclosure or
building of any kind. But don Benito reminded them of the ladies who
would be undefended if the horsemen were cut off, and pointed to the
swarms of carousing Indians blackening the rising ground, where they
had mounted to watch the farm with lustful gaze.
Little by little, after Pedrillo and his mongrels had quieted the
hatred of the revolted Yaquis for anyone who reminded them of the
superior race, he obtained a kind of rule over their leaders, only less
potent than that which they had promptly accorded the Apaches. Iron
Shirt was an idol. The fact of his having but three days before swept
down upon that same stronghold still defying their hosts, and snatched
the proprietor's daughter and the cream of the horses merrily away,
sufficed to make each of these warriors to be followed by a tag-rag of
open-eyed Yaquis wherever they strayed in the wide encampment.
The food and liquor were placed under guard; the drunkards, who were
plunged in stupor, were bundled into the hollows out of the way, the
horse thieves who had been racing about were pulled off the bare backs,
and made to squat down and await orders for their superabundant energy
to be more profitably expended. The weapons were served out anew, with
some discrimination as to the bearer, so that the strong were no longer
puzzled with arms for which light-handed urchins sufficed, and the
youths disembarrassed of immense spears like Goliath's, and clubs that
the famous giant races of the Hidden Cities could alone have swung.
The women and children, too, were pushed back, and set to cooking
and other menial offices, which must have bewildered them as to the
advantages of revolution.
Therefore, Oliver and his associates soon beheld the impassible barrier
spread out broadly between them, and the surrounded fort became during
the day more and more formidable by these evidences of discipline.
Happily their neighbourhood was not suspected. The column defeated on
the previous night was composed of ignorant boors, who thought not at
all by day to give an intelligible account of the lancers, who, indeed,
having charged them from the ambush, were not well examined in the
hurry-scurry.
"What are they waiting for?" queried Mr. Gladsden, impatiently. "Surely
not for more reinforcements, when they are already a hundred to one!"
"That's the answer," said the white hunter. "Yon long string of naked
copperskins dragging that shining object at their tail."
"A cannon?"
"Yes! Two shots o' that and thar will be a hole in the farmhouse that a
herd of buffalo might traverse. Good night to our hidalgo if they get
that piece trained on the house. When a bullet hits those grey blocks,
hewn out of the volcano pumice stone, it will crumble like glass, and
no two ways about it. The _casa_ is a case."
"And can we do nothing, absolutely nothing? Can we not even pierce that
multitude, and enter among our friends and die with them."
"Well, I like a gentleman that has boys in the tender leaf still,
a-talking of dying anywhar's and so airly yit. Ef you hanker to run the
resk o' dying, that's a man's talk, and you can volunteer to come along
with me."
"Come along with you, Oliver?"
"Yes. If that cannon fires twice into that house, I tell 'ee, thar'll
be nothing but the worst kind of smashed fruit that ever figgered in an
old aunty's preserve pots. They may fire her off once, but not twice,
if I hev' the right sort of luck in my idee. I think this sport hes
gone quite far enough."
By this time Mr. Gladsden had become reconciled to Oliver having
"idees."
"I am with you," he simply said, "and the more desperate the
enterprise, the better it bids to quiet my blood, which is at boiling
point."
"You'll hev' all the despiritness you want," answered the Oregonian.
Then, turning to the Mexicans, who had waited the conclusion of their
dialogue restlessly, he continued:
"Whar's them skyrockets? Hand 'em here, Silvano. Keep close as you hev'
done all along. When you see those fireworks cavorting (curvetting)
around that big camp right smart, you sail in down the hill and stick
every red nigger till you are right up to the house, if your heart
backs your breastbone so far. And mark! Your government offers two
hundred and fifty dollars for Injin scalps, and you kin have my share
this trip, and welkim!"
His speech was received with enthusiasm, notably the peroration. He
illustrated his intention to make scalps by throwing off his uniform
coat, cutting his shirtsleeves off at the shoulder, and removing the
spurs which he had donned for the ride. Then he took up a handful of
live oak leaves, bruised them, and dyed his bared arms, neck and face
with the juice to a brown hue. At his suggestion, the Englishman left
his arms free and disguised his fairness of hue in the same manner.
"Do you see that rising ground up which they are toiling with that big
gun? That's our aim. Come on!"
"In the midst of them?"
"Plum centre."
Which was all the reply the query elicited.
The Yaquis occupied the further side of a long valley, almost in an
unbroken mass. These who elsewhere completed an environment of the
hacienda were in groups, which changed position at fancy, and were less
warlike than the main body. The rear was left to a natural guard; the
inaccessibility of the hill, where, too, a barranca, or deep chasm,
with perpendicular sides, caused by a torrent suddenly cutting its
way to a subterranean reservoir, almost at right angles, divided the
incline.
The watch, as is common with a sudden gathering, was nobody's business.
The Apaches and the Mexican half-breeds, self-constituted chiefs, were
now scattered among the Yaquis, teaching the handling of weapons and
promising them all manner of delights when the farm should be captured.
Oregon Ol. and his associate struck from the wood which concealed their
companions, away at first from the valley, but on arriving fairly upon
the north side, they advanced parallel with its crest, every now and
then perceiving a flag waving on top of the hacienda. The ground was
so rough that they had alternations of leaps and creeps over obstacles
of which the hunter made light, but which delayed the Englishman. On
reaching the gorge, the former paused to admit of the other coming up.
"Thar's our route," said the hunter, pointing down into this open
tunnel and along its incline upward, "We kin settle down to a long
scramble, but all the way thar'll be no alarms; those rum soakers
haven't a good eye among the heap."
"That is the more gratifying, as there are enough of them to convert us
into a pair of pincushions with their arrows."
Nevertheless, he could not help a shiver of repugnance to adventuring
at such a risk.
"I do not say we could do it by night, for down thar the twilight
allers dwells, save whar the line of sun glare travels at the bottom.
But thar is no other road."
They spent a few moments in further disguise, removing or staining
with red oxides every part of their remaining attire and exposed skin
which would not favour the supposition to a chance observer that they
were Indians floundering in the abyss where they had blundered during
intoxication. They were armed only with knives and revolvers, but each
carried one of the rockets.