Silvertip

by Brand, Max

“Those words will undo everything else she may say to the master,” he told Silver. “Day and night she will serve you, gringo. Is that the truth? Señor Monterey shall hear what she said. I shall see to that. And afterward — hai! You’ll feel the spur as well as the toe of the boot!”

  He laughed again, this time out loud, and left Silver in the black darkness.

  And there Silver crouched, chewing eagerly at the bread, while the rats swarmed over his feet, leaped up on his clothes, in their eagerness to come at the food. The air was foul with the smell of their vile bodies, but the ravenous hunger of Silver stilled all the other senses. He ate, drank the water to the last drop, and then lay down and slept. Something would be done for him. The girl had promised. And he would believe her more than the oaths of a hundred men.

  But nothing was done!

  Bread and water were brought to him regularly, once a day, and that was all. The cell was not changed. Not one item of comfort was added to him. And two days later, Juan Perez came again, alone. He unlocked the door, put the lantern on the floor, and made a cornucopia-shaped cigarette, which he lighted, and then blew the smoke toward Silver, to make sure that the full flavor of the tobacco would reach him. The very heart of Silver quaked with yearning, but he made his eye calm, and kept it fixed on the Mexican.

  “So I repeated the kind words of the Señorita Julia to the master,” said Juan Perez. “And you see what has happened? You see the comfortable bed you lie on? You see the warm sunshine that streams through your window? You taste the good tobacco that is given you to smoke? You breathe the pure air? You relish the fine roasts and the stews and the dried meats that are brought to you? For all of those things, Señor Fool, Señor Dog, you can thank Juan Perez!”

  Silver slowly dragged up his legs until they were half doubled under him. A plan was forming dimly in his brain. Now he merely smiled at Perez. That smile seemed to strike the Mexican like a blow. He started, and then scowled.

  “You think that you’ve tormented me, Perez,” said Silver. “As a matter of fact, I have to stay here for another day or two. That is all. Then I shall leave. Before I go, I shall have certain words to say to you, certain blows to strike you with a whip, certain speeches that I shall listen to you making on your knees, while you grovel before me, and beg for your life.”

  “Dog!” breathed Juan Perez. “You mean that I, Perez, shall be on my knees before you? You mean that in a day or two you’ll be gone? Ah, I see — your mind is touched, you are losing your wits in the long darkness!”

  “Poor Perez!” said Silver. “You cannot understand?”

  “Understand?” said the Mexican, coming a stride closer. “What is there to understand?”

  “That you have been a fool from the first! You can’t understand that?” said Silver.

  “I? I a fool? I who walk with free feet and eat and sleep as I will, and breathe the fresh air — I am the fool — and you are the wise man?”

  He drew a shade closer.

  Silver leaned his head and shoulders back against the wall. And he smiled at Juan Perez as if out of the deeps of a profound contentment.

  “Poor Juan Perez!” he said, and shook his head a little, as though words could not fit the matter.

  “Gringo beast!” gasped Perez suddenly, and striding one step nearer, he struck Silver full in the face.

  The next instant the legs of the Mexican were knocked from under him, for the two manacled feet of Silver had shot out with a true aim and a desperate vigor. Perez, falling, pitched straight forward at the prisoner. Silver, with both hands raised, met the dropping body with a club stroke over the head. The weight of the irons on his wrists helped home that blow, and Juan Perez lay face down on the stones, without a quiver.

  Silver went through the man’s pockets. He knew, he thought, the very look and face of the key that fitted into his manacles. And he found it in the pocket of the deerskin vest of Perez. It was clumsy work to fit that key into the lock of the hand irons, and it was impossible to turn it with his fingers. He had to go to the little crevice in the wall, and there laboriously fit the handle of the key into the base of the crack, and then turn his arms until the lock was sprung. But a moment later he was free, both in arms and hands and feet.

  A wave of half hysterical delight shot through him, and centered in his throat.

  It was dashed away, a moment later, by the fear that he heard footfalls hurrying down the corridor outside his room. Then he realized that it was merely the beat and flutter of his racing heart.

  Juan Perez groaned, and sat up. He saw Silver standing over him, with the gun of Perez himself in his hand, and he groaned. In the rage of his despair, he cast himself back, and the slime into which he fell was flung out in a fine spray on either side.

  “You see, Perez?” said Silver. “After all, you were a fool, and sooner than you expected. But be patient, my friend. When you leave this room, a good many things may have happened, and, above all, the whole world will know that Perez is a fool!”

  He took the lantern, and left the Mexican groaning, beating his head with his hands. He left the room. A small, cold draft was stirring in the corridor, and as Silver locked the heavy door behind him, and pocketed the key, it seemed to him that all the freshness of the spring and the sweetness of spring flowers was in that air!

  He went up the hallway. There was no plan in his mind. He must simply pray that it was night, that he could be able to reach the outer door that led into the patio, that he could pass from the patio into freedom.

  And leave behind him the great task unfinished, and poor Pedro Monterey doubly dead?

  His heart failed him, when he thought of making such a surrender. Have not men said that nothing is impossible to the resolute mind? He thought of that saying, also, as he roamed up the corridors beneath the house of Monterey. But it seemed to him that it would be almost a sufficient miracle if he could save his life from the hands of the old man.

  But the thing persisted in him. He had set his soul on the purpose for too long. And the completion of the life of Pedro Monterey had become a spiritual necessity to him. That was why, as he roved through the passages, he began to deny in himself the thought of mere flight and take to his heart a greater steadiness.

  If he were to remain near Monterey, another miracle must happen, greater than any which had gone before. But Silver determined to let the events of each moment dictate what he was to do with himself in the immediate future.

  There was the problem of getting up from the cellars at all. And that seemed enough to fill his mind. For hours he wandered, and always he was coming to the end of passages that stopped against solid stone. The flame in the lantern burned low, flickered, died. He was left in a horror of darkness that seemed to keep flowing past him.

  A man might pass days, fumbling through that blindness, and never come to an exit. He might be so far lost that not even the faintest echo of his voice would reach to any ears.

  Silver leaned against a wall and closed his eyes, and tried to find in his mind some solution, but all his thoughts were whirling, spinning like foolish squirrels in a cage.

  He was still standing there when something clinked like the lock of a door. He looked up, and a flash of light entered the passage just before him, and footfalls came clumping down steps. Then light shone again, swinging out from behind the voluminous skirts of a woman.

  Silver crouched close to the floor, with hope once more in his heart. The light disappeared. The woman was singing softly as she went on some familiar errand, her wooden heels bumping on the stone.

  But what was important to Silver was that door through which she had come, for it seemed that his lantern had failed him when he was very few steps from salvation.

  He hurried through the darkness, spreading his hands far out before him. Then his feet struck the steps. He climbed. He came, at the top of the steps, to the kind touch of wood, and fumbling, he soon found the knob.

  Softly he opened the door, and peered out. At once the r
attle of many voices in laughter and raillery struck on his ears as if with open mockery of all that he was attempting.

  CHAPTER X

  In the Garden

  HE SHRANK back, then thrust the door wide in a sudden desperation. And springing out into the hall, he discovered to his amazement that it was empty.

  Still the voices persisted, but plainly they must come from some adjoining room, beating through a thin partition.

  He went rapidly to the end of the hall. The clinking of his spurs followed him like an accusing voice, so he drew off his boots, and left them in a corner.

  He tried the nearest door. It opened with a dull groan of hinges and let him into a big room. He knew its bigness, only, by the faintest of high lights that glimmered here and there in the chamber. It was a bedroom, and crossing it to the stars that filled a window, he looked out and down.

  Beneath him, he saw still another drop of twenty feet of unbroken wall, with a garden spread over the ground under the window. He must be on the first floor of the house, but on this side another story was added below. It was just the garden that a Mexican would conceive in happy dreams — a little flat of ground with a canal of water lilies driven through it, and a rectangular pool at one end, with a fountain rising over it. That was the chief feature, together with a semicupola, a sort of open-faced summer-house raised on narrow columns, so that one would have both shade and wind.

  Silvertip saw this by the light of a big yellow moon which was lifting over the eastern mountains with its cheeks still puffed beyond the full. And this light showed him, moreover, a table laid in the cool beside the canal of water lilies. The girl, Julia, sat there, and opposite her old Monterey, rigid with dignity. The moon gleamed faintly on his long hair and his pointed beard.

  There was no escape by that window. So Silvertip turned, and, crouching low so that no light might strike up and outward through the window, he scratched a match. Cupping the flame securely in his hands, he threw the dull flash of it here and there about the room. He saw, at once, a small door to the right; he saw the big bed, like a mahogany house, the fireplace, and above it a portrait that drew him suddenly across the room. He ventured rising and passing the light from the match across the face in the picture. It was Pedro Monterey, younger, and alive and smiling.

  The flame of the match seared the fingers of Silvertip before he dropped it on the hearth, and still in the darkness he remained staring before him as though he could still see the portrait. The bitterness he had been feeling toward old Monterey now vanished. It was only strange to him that the slayer of the son had not been slain out of hand.

  He fumbled his way with outstretched hands through the darkness and came to the little door that he had seen on the right. When he opened it, a cool breath of air moved upward into his face. And he had a sense, though no sight, of steps descending through the shadows before him. With his foot he reached and found, as he had expected, a stairway that led down. He shut the door behind him. The draft no longer blew. A close dampness of moist stone surrounded him as he descended a winding way until one outstretched hand told him of another door.

  He opened it with great care, and instantly found the outdoors before his face, the yellow of the moonlight striking directly against him. It was the garden where the girl sat with Monterey.

  The silhouette of a man moved before him, close enough to touch. But the figure did not pause at the partially opened door. It went on, bearing a large tray with glasses twinkling on it, and a luster of half-seen silver.

  Silvertip ventured outside. Other people moved here and there, but all at a sufficiently safe distance, so he stole for the nearest shelter. It was a bank of shadow that looked to him like brush, but turned out to be tall flowers, which were hedged up here as a margin and border to surround the garden.

  Delicately he moved forward, putting the great, rank stalks aside until he had made for himself a covert of darkness. There he crouched, and parting the branches before him, he could look out on the garden scene and the table with a more intimate eye.

  They spoke suddenly, and then turned their faces directly toward him.

  “There is something in the flowers,” said the girl.

  “There is the wind,” said the voice of Señor Monterey.

  “Something moved in there, slowly,” she insisted.

  “A snake, perhaps,” suggested the old man.

  He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. The wind stirred his long hair, and his beard, and the moon glittered over him till he looked to Silvertip like a patriarchal form that had walked out of a distant age.

  “You think of him still,” said Monterey suddenly.

  The bowed head of the girl lifted slowly. And a touch on the heart of Silver told him that it was of him that Monterey was speaking. That was hardly strange.

  “I think of him,” she answered. “I keep thinking. I keep trying for words that will move you, Uncle Arturo.”

  The old man answered: “You would not need to whisper to me, Julia, if I dreamed that he is what you say — honest! But he can’t be honest. There is no honesty in his race. I have suffered at their hands enough to have broken the hearts of twenty stronger men than I, and only my hope for revenge keeps life in me. Now that my boy is gone, you will wonder that I can still hope even for revenge, but let me tell you that the dream has been in my heart so long that it cannot die as quickly as Pedrillo did. I think that even bullets could not kill it. If my body came to an end, the hate for the gringos would still live. It would take a bodiless form; it would walk the earth like a ghost. But no matter how I hate his race, if this man were honest, I would set him free, reward him, beg for his pardon.”

  “He is honest, if I ever saw honesty!” said the girl. “And now he lies in a pen where you would not even put swine!”

  “He is like his people — a liar and a traitor!” exclaimed Monterey. “How many times they have betrayed me, Julia! You know only a little of it! And now I think of how he tried to deceive you, of how he told you that he came here only hoping that he could fill the place of my dead boy, in some way. Oh, my child, it was the sort of a story that a man might use to a woman, but never to another man.”

  “Uncle Arturo,” said the girl, “he came with the horse, he told the truth of the death of poor Pedro, and he put himself in your hands. How could he have done those things unless he meant honestly?”

  But there was no response to her plea. After a pause of silence, the girl stirred.

  “To the good, all creatures are virtuous,” said Monterey. “and there is such a well of goodness in you that you could forgive the devil himself for his craft and his fiendishness. You would pity him for the pain that he lies in. But let me tell you that I shall never again believe well of a gringo until his virtue is established more plainly than the mountains that stand by the Haverhill Valley!”

  She looked steadily at the old man for a moment. Then she sighed.

  “It’s time to go in,” said Julia. “Oñate and Alvarez have been quarreling again, and you’ll have to see them.”

  “I can see them out here,” said Arturo Monterey.

  “It’s not safe,” she answered. She leaned a little across the table. “The men of Drummon are bolder every day; how can you tell how bold they’ll be at night? They may slip up here. They have a moon to show them their way. They may be here now. What I heard there among the flowers may be one of them lying still and watching, and listening.”

  “Let them watch, and let them listen,” said Monterey. “I have a feeling, Julia, that I’ve come to the end of my day. Let it close as soon as it will. I’m ready for it.”

  The girl waited an instant. Then she said: “You’re tired to-day, Uncle Arturo. And when a person is tired, the gloomy thoughts are the ones that come up in the mind.”

  He answered: “I’ve been marked by my shame long enough, and if I am to die, I am ready for it.”

  He touched his forehead significantly as he spoke, on the band of dark cloth t
hat crossed his forehead.

  The girl would have spoken again, but he stopped her with a raised hand, saying:

  “There is nothing but cold and emptiness in my heart. And I should die even gladly, except that there is the one great purpose of all these years unaccomplished.”

  “But if you stay out here,” said the girl, “if you throw yourself away into the hands of Drummon’s brutes — is there any chance, then, of doing what you promised yourself?”

  He answered: “If the hand of God is against me, why should I attempt to defend myself?”

  CHAPTER XI

  Brand of Shame

  OLD Monterey was asking to have Oñate and Alvarez brought before him. They must have been attending close at hand, for now they came in, together, escorted by two vaqueros who had bound the hands of the pair. And they stood with bowed heads before the master. One was young, one a grizzled veteran. They were peons of the field, not cattle herders; they wore huarachos on their bare feet, and they were dressed in white cotton that shimmered in the moonlight.

  “Now, Tonio?” said Arturo Monterey.

  One of the vaqueros made half a step forward. He was a solid fellow with a grave, steady look.

  “Their houses are side by side, as you know, señor,” said Tonio. “They have always been friends. Oñate is a good man, and he has helped Alvarez. He’s older, this Oñate, and he has a head on his shoulders. But now, all at once, they are enemies. They run at each other with knives. We ask them why they quarrel. They give us no answer. They will not speak to each other. They will not speak to us. So we have brought them to you, señor.”

  “Who began this quarrel?” asked Monterey.

  The two peons looked at one another, and were silent, staring again at the ground.

  “Answer!” cried Monterey, lifting his voice suddenly to thunder.

  They both started violently, and with one voice, both exclaimed: “I started the trouble, señor.”

  Then they were mute, and again gaped on one another.