Silvertip's Search

by Brand, Max

  The tall man moved away with Murcio, their voices again heard, but not distinctly, while around the corner of the building came the colossal bulk of Tom Higgins, the skirts of his great white apron fluttering as he strode along.

  He made gestures as he approached.

  Presently he had withdrawn a bit to the side with Christian, and they spoke earnestly together.

  What Higgins said, Silver could in no way make out, but the words were sufficient to make the pale-faced man turn suddenly toward the building. And again it seemed to Silver that a gun had been leveled at him.

  He stood up and went through the barroom.

  “Not leaving us, señor?” asked the big Mexican with a sudden strange access of courtesy.

  “Only taking a ride around the place before it’s dark,” said Silver. “I’ll be back, thank you.”

  Parade swept his master rapidly through the green of the oasis. Glancing back, Silver saw Alonso Santos stroll out from the saloon and stare after him, shading his eyes against the red flare of the western sky.

  There were other horses tied in front of the saloon, but none of them was mounted. For that matter, who would dream of pursuing the rider of Parade except with many reliefs of horses along the way?

  No, if there were danger in the oasis, he was winging safely away from it now. The long and heavy rhythm of the beating hoofs of the stallion made a Mexican woman turn to stare as he passed the little village of the laborers. She was hanging out clothes on a wash line, and she left a picture in the mind of Silver as he swept by. There were half a dozen of the little white-washed huts where the Mexicans lived. They were the men who had charge of the irrigation, because their race had been familiar with the handling of water for many hundreds of years before the Spaniards rode into Old Mexico. And now Tom Higgins kept enough of them to care for all the soil of his land.

  The flashing, wet washing and the gleaming white houses swept behind Silver. He passed the last of the trees. And presently the great stride of the stallion was carrying Silver out into the desert.

  He went straight on until the oasis drew into a dark patch behind him. Then he slowed Parade to a walk. There was no need for hurry. The twilight would soon cover him from any prying eyes, and at the slower pace he could put his thoughts in order more easily.

  He listed his newly gained knowledge.

  First, Christian! Again they were pitted against each other!

  Second, in spite of all possible acting and dissimulation, he was sure that Tom Higgins knew something about Rap Brender.

  Third, out of the fragments of the conversation which he had overheard, it seemed really clear that Murcio had in his possession a woman, a girl, out of whom he expected to make a great deal of money, and that Christian had helped Murcio by preventing the escape of the girl. For that help he was demanding a reward of such a size that Murcio was tortured at the mere thought of the sum. He would pay an ample reward, but he did not want to give a fifty-per-cent share in the prize. And yet, when he argued, he seemed to take it for granted that Barry Christian would be able to take what he chose before the end.

  It was not Brender alone who needed help. There was this girl, also, whoever she might be.

  “I would be a fool to return,” said Silver to himself. “They know me now. They’ll be watching for my face. I must not go back. I must try to get men together and come onto the Higgins place by force of many hands.”

  He shook his head as he had that thought, for he knew that long before he could cross the desert and get sufficient aid, the whole problem would be solved in another way, or else the girl would have been taken from the Higgins place. Besides, it would take a small army to force its way into Higgins’s place.

  What should he do, then?

  Suddenly he knew, calmly, surely, but with a wave of ice-cold apprehension, exactly what he would do. He would turn straight back toward the oasis toward the tremendous danger that was Christian, and under the coyer of night, use his wits to unlock a sufficiency of doors until he had found the girl that was in Murcio’s charge.

  But he could not return with an unaltered appearance.

  He made his changes quickly. He dismounted, stripped, and rubbed himself thoroughly with the brown of a liquid that he took from a small bottle. He took from a saddlebag a black wig — it was not the first time that he had turned himself into a Mexican — and fitted it onto his head. It left him with a lowered forehead and a shag of black hair falling down to the nape of his neck and over his eyes. He blackened his brows, and deftly and carefully blackened his eyelashes, also. And now, if he kept from staring at people, it would be very hard, by artificial light, to note that his eyes were of a pale color.

  He took out a little round mirror, and, since the sun had now gone so far down that only a few murky, ochre-colored lights gleamed in the sky, he lighted a match and examined his make-up in this manner. There were several alterations that had to be made. Here and there the stain had gone on his skin in streaks, leaving darker and lighter spots. The variations might not be noticed at night, but he had to make himself as perfect as possible. For suppose Christian were to give him one glance?

  He was making his plan little by little — mere strokes of light here and there against a great darkness — as he put on his outer clothes, stuffed the rest into his roll behind the saddle, and turned the head of Parade back toward the oasis.

  As he came closer again, as the trees grew great before him, each blotting out a rounded section of the stars, it seemed to Silver that the whisper of the wind was the murmur of human voices, and that dark forms were crouching there in the shadows, ready to start out at him.

  He made himself ride boldly through these shadows, but still shudders were working up and down the flesh of his back as he put the trees behind him. He wanted to look around, half expecting to see armed men gliding out on his trail, shutting him into a trap. He set his teeth against that weakness so hard that a fine perspiration broke out on him.

  If this was how he felt in the beginning, how would it be when he came close to the lights of the house that were glimmering in the distance?

  He told himself that he was only half a man, but he could hardly shame himself into a greater confidence.

  In the next grove he left Parade. He stripped the bridle from the head of the stallion and stuffed it into a saddlebag. Then for a moment he remained stroking the head of the horse, filled with gloomy thought.

  It was too much to ask of any man, he declared to himself. Before him there was no really tangible prospect of success. He would be like a blindfolded man fumbling in a room where enemies are at watch with a light to help them.

  Yet in spite of himself, he found that he had left Parade and was walking forward from the grove and toward the starry lamps that shone from the house of Tom Higgins!

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Lure of the Lamp

  HE made a detour toward the little cluster of Mexican huts. This meant careful work, for the children were out playing in the dark, their half-naked bodies flashing again and again across the shafts of golden lamp-light, and they had a troop of mongrel dogs with them, leaping and scurrying here and there.

  He moved like a snake around the house and came to the wash line which he had noted. It made an important link in the chain that he had planned for action, for he thought that he had seen some white shirts and cotton trousers in the lot.

  He was right. He stripped, trusting the dark stain on his body to keep it from being visible by the starlight, and, in fact, no human eye would have been able to locate him.

  He dressed rapidly in the clothes that he had found. The shirt was small. The trousers came hardly half the distance between his knees and ankles, so he rolled them up above the knees. Shoes he would have to do without, but for that matter the Mexicans he had seen at work were either barefooted or simply in huarachos.

  The shirt and trousers would have to serve him. They were still very damp, but that would have to be a point of minor imp
ortance.

  His discarded clothes he rolled into a compact bundle and put them into the center of a little shrub not far from the hotel of Tom Higgins. Then he began to close on the place in circles, as a beast of prey closes in on its quarry. It was partly that he wanted to find out the best means of getting up to the house unseen, and it was partly that he wanted to examine all the lay of the land around the place in case he had to flee for his life at any moment, and from any part of the hotel.

  In this manner he came around and around the hotel, and finally saw that the obvious place of approach was from the rear, through a big open court that, in turn, opened upon a patio on one side, and exposed one of the outer walls of the building on the other.

  The trouble with this avenue was that it was already occupied.

  The night was windless, except for small gusts that stirred up wisps of dust, and the heat of the desert, therefore, was not rolled in upon the oasis. The grass and the trees began to give out their coolness.

  The windmills were silent. The big wheels were no longer purring, and the gears had stopped their rattling and clanking. Instead — since water had to be flowing night and day on the plantation — a team of three mustangs labored constantly around and around an open-mouthed well, lifting an endless chain of buckets that dumped into a trough. Steadily the drawbeam moaned against the central shaft, and the water, with continual white pulses, gushed away down the trough. The driver sat on the drawbeam itself, feeding a black snake into his three horses from time to time, for the gait was not a walk, but a shuffling trot.

  The next relay of horses for the work was held by another driver near by.

  Silver saw these things as he moved from bush to bush, stalking forward. Now a third man came out of the darkness and spoke to the driver, who waited with his relief team. Silver could hear them clearly.

  “Tonio,” said the newcomer, “they are playing dice in Alfredo’s house. I myself have won five dollars. Luck is in the air. And this is the time for you to have your revenge.”

  “You see where I am!” said Tonio. “I must be here with my horses!”

  “Your boy can drive the team.”

  “A scorpion stung his foot this afternoon. He is lying groaning. You ought to know that! And how can he drive my team? But will you take them for an hour only?”

  “I know what your hour would be if you started winning,” said the other. “No, no! Drive your own horses. I was only telling you that the game has started.”

  “I thank you for nothing, then,” said Tonio angrily.

  Silver appeared, drifting slowly toward them through the night.

  “Well,” said Silver, “I would drive the team for twenty-five cents. I haven’t even money for tobacco.”

  They both turned on him. They stared a moment. The light was dim, but by the bigness of his outline they knew him to be a formidable fellow. Perhaps there was something in the drawling nature of his Spanish that made them suspicious.

  “Men who work are men with money in the pocket,” said Tonio. “And who are you?”

  “I am José Calderon. This very day I have walked forty miles — and not on green grass all the way. Is it work, my friends, to walk forty miles just in the hope of finding a job?”

  “There is no work for you here,” said Tonio stiffly. “The master wants no strangers.”

  “Curse him!” said Silver with apparent emotion. “I talked to him; I begged him; I crouched before him, but he would give me no hope of work.”

  “Where did you see him?” asked the suspicious Tonio.

  “In the saloon.”

  “Well?”

  “He cursed me like a brute because there was dust on my bare feet; he would have no dust marks on his floor, he said. I took the bandanna from my neck and got down on my hands and knees and wiped up the marks that I had made. I stood in the doorway and begged him to give me work. I said that I would work day and night for my food and no money — for my food and tobacco, until I could prove to him that I am a good man. But he would not take me!”

  “Well, if he took everybody,” said Tonio coldly, “the place would soon be crowded.”

  “Will you give me one pinch of tobacco?” he begged. “I have a paper to roll the cigarette!”

  “You’re a beggar,” answered Tonio. “I tell by the whine in your voice. You spoke of twenty-five cents. You don’t need more than five cents to buy tobacco for cigarettes. And that I’ll give you if you drive these horses around and around the well until I please to come back.”

  “Ah, señor!” said Silver. “You are very hard, but I am very poor.”

  “Honest men,” said Tonio, “are never as poor as all this. I make you my offer. Will you take it?”

  “You are a hard man,” said Silver. “But I crave for tobacco from the pit of my stomach.”

  “I know how that can be, too,” said Tonio more kindly. “Perhaps after all I shall give more than five cents to you. That depends on how well you handle the horses, and whether or not you have them all in the same degree of sweating when I come back. Here — now let me see you hitch them to the drawbeam!”

  The driver of the team that had been working till this moment now stopped, stepped down from his place, and commenced unhooking the singletree chains from the traces. So Silver took the three mustangs of the team of Tonio around to the proper place. He held them with a grip close to the bits. They laid their ears down and tossed their heads as he compelled them to back into place.

  “Well,” said Tonio, “you know something, and you have strong hands.”

  Silver hooked up the chains rapidly to the traces.

  He sat on the drawbeam, picked up the black snake, and called to the horses. They lurched into their collars. The drawbeam began to groan once more against the shaft; the endless chain of buckets began to disgorge the white pulses of water into the big trough, along which it ran swiftly and was received into a large-throated pipe, where it went swishing away, unseen.

  Tonio came in behind the drawbeam and began to talk.

  “Watch the gray mare,” he said. “She keeps her traces taut, but she is not pulling unless her head is down.”

  “Ah-ha! A cheat!” said Silver, and flicked the mare with the black snake.

  She shook her head and began to pull hard. Tonio laughed.

  “You understand,” he said. “You will do a good job if you keep your eyes open. Remember, if they are not all sweating in the same way, you get nothing from me! But if the gray mare sweats a little more than the rest, I shall be just as pleased. Now, there’s another thing. You see the window there, with the lamp shining in it?”

  “I see,” said Silver.

  “That lamp must continue to shine.”

  “If God wills that it shall,” said Silver.

  “The moment that it stops shining, the moment that it is put out of place, you must sound an alarm. You hear?”

  “What shall I do?”

  “Yell at the top of your voice. Yell for Señor Santos!”

  “Yes. And then?”

  “Then he will come, fool. And then you tell him that some one has disturbed the lamp. That is all. Look up at the lamp once in every round, or twice.”

  Silver stared up at the bright light. A great climbing vine with a trunk twisted like a rope, and thick as the stem of a tree, wound up the side of the house and cast its branches to either side of the window, where the lamp burned.

  “Is there some one in that room who prays by that light?” asked Silver.

  “There is a poor girl who wishes it were out, perhaps,” said Tonio. “How does it come that you wear wrinkled clothes?”

  “If you walked forty miles through the desert, your sweat would wrinkle your clothes,” said Silver.

  “There is no sweat caking that cloth,” said Tonio sharply.

  “No, because when I reached this place I poured water over myself,” said Silver. “I was so hot that the water hissed against my hide.”

  Tonio laughed again softly
.

  “Well,” he said, “now you are working honestly, and you are going to earn money — perhaps. Be diligent. Watch the window, and I shall be back here after a time.”

  Now that he was alone at last, Silver sighed with relief to have the sharp eyes of Tonio removed from him. As the horses made round after round of the well, the drawbeam still droning its steady song, he kept his eyes fixed on the light that flooded from the casement in the second-story window above him.

  Since there was a girl kept there, one who wished that the lamp might be darkened, would she not be the one about whom Murcio had talked that evening? Was it not she that had the fortune of which Christian so much wanted a share?

  But he had come here to find traces of Rap Brender, who had saved his life. All other things must wait upon that necessity.

  Yet for all he knew, Brender might be many a mile from this place, riding contentedly farther and farther from the danger that he feared from Barry Christian.

  If only Silver could penetrate to the meaning of Hig-gins’s start and downward look and confused words — if only he could have heard the respectful words which had been addressed by Higgins to the pale-faced man who was Barry Christian himself.

  In the meantime, the lamp shone from the casement above with a steady, insistent light. And it began to draw on Silver as with a hand.

  He felt the pull of the temptation like an imp of the perverse working upon him.

  The sense of duty which had brought him to this place forbade him interfering now in the affairs of that unknown girl, and still the ferment worked in Silver, until, with a stifled groan, he knew that he must yield to the temptation.

  He gave the three mustangs a slashing blow with the black snake in the hope that this encouragement would keep them at their work for a considerable time, and then ran in his bare feet toward the huge trunk of the climbing vine. The bareness of his feet would help him now. And the lightness of his clothes was an advantage, also. The only excess weight was that of the revolver which he carried strapped under the pit of his left arm, inside the open shirt. But that weight was not enough to keep him from mounting the twisted trunk of the vine like a wild cat.