Silvertip

by Brand, Max

  There was a rush of the party for the house, a storming of footfalls wending down into the cool dimness of the cellars.

  He saw Arturo Monterey come for an instant into sight, then disappear into the house, calling orders loudly to his men. He saw Julia Monterey from a corner of his eye, he hardly knew where.

  Those who supported him had dropped his body to rush after their master, Monterey. He lay sprawling. He raised himself to his hands and shouted out the name of the one man who, he felt, might come to him before all others.

  “Juan Perez! Juan Perez!”

  There was no answer.

  It seemed to Silver that all the vast effort had been in vain, and that the oath he had breathed silently above the dead man in Cruces had been taken to no end, for now that the greatest need of Pedro Monterey’s aid had come, his substitute had to sit sprawling on the pavement of the patio of the house, helpless.

  “Juan Perez!” he screamed.

  Then he looked up and saw Perez standing by him. Other feet were running close by. That was Julia Monterey. He looked at her face as through a fog. There was no need of women at a time like this. Men had died in this cause, and more men were about to die unless the premonition in his mind were very wrong indeed.

  “Lift me, Perez — help me!” he said.

  The strong hands of the Mexican raised him suddenly to his feet. Where the hands touched his wounded body, they burned him with fiery pain. But he was all one wound, and therefore the pain was not strange.

  “I shall take you to a safe place,” Perez was saying. “And I shall not leave you. Have no fear, señor!”

  “Safe place?” groaned Silver. “Take me down into the cellars. Take me down into the old mine. I have a gun and I can still use it. Perez, lend me your strength and take me where I can help!”

  “I shall!” cried Juan Perez. “Oh, that there should be such a man in the world!”

  “Perez! He’s dying now!” cried the voice of the girl.

  She tried to break in between them.

  “Leave him — only help me take him to a bed,” she commanded.

  “Away with her — she’s only a woman — there’s no place for ’em now!” shouted Silver. “While we talk the fighting has started!”

  “He shall have his way!” cried Perez to Julia Monterey.

  “It will be murder, not fighting, if you go down among the guns!” she pleaded, turning to Silver.

  “I tell you,” said Silver in a frenzy, “this is the time to die!”

  “It is the time to die!” echoed Perez, and began to help Silver strongly forward.

  More help came to that wounded, half-naked body from the other side. He looked in bewilderment, and saw that it was Julia Monterey who had passed an arm around him and placed her strong shoulder beneath his. A good part of his weight she was supporting.

  They passed through the door of the house. She it was who picked up a lantern, never relaxing her efforts to help sustain the half-benumbed body of Silver.

  Juan Perez pulled open the tall door that led to the cellar. Out from the dimness came a medley of departing shouts that sank deeper and deeper into the gloom.

  “Go back, Julia!” commanded Silver. “You’re not needed. I don’t want you! Go back!”

  “No,” she said. “Steady, Juan Perez! The steps are slippery.”

  “Julia, go back!” shouted Silver.

  “It is the time to die,” she answered. “Heaven knows how willingly I come to that time!”

  “Perez!” cried Silver as he was taken swiftly down the first flight of the steps and into the gloom of a great gallery.

  “Yes, señor,” said Perez, already panting.

  “Send the girl back! It is no place for her.”

  “Alas, señor,” said Juan Perez, “she is a Monterey, and their women are as the men, ever ready for death.”

  Before them, out of what seemed an infinite distance, came explosions that struck with rapid impacts against the ear of Silver. And he knew that he was too late to be in the forefront of the battle. The men of Drummon already had come through the river door, and the shooting had commenced.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The Battle

  AS THE sound of the firing stopped their progress, with a silent assent, Silver said: “Julia, you know a place, perhaps, where they’re apt to come if there’s a retreat of Monterey’s men. Is there one place they’re apt to pass?”

  “Two places, where big shafts join together,” she said. “Ah!”

  She cried out at a nearer echo of a death yell that rang out far away.

  “Take me to one of the two places. No, tell Juan Perez how to go there, and then run back!”

  “Turn to the right — here,” said the girl. “Quickly, Juan Perez! There may not be time. The Drummons are so many devils, and our men cannot stop them. Quickly — quickly — if we are to reach the place in time where we may fight. Now to the left — now down these steps.”

  “Julia, tell us the way and go back!” shouted Silver.

  “Am I a child?” she panted. “I shall not leave you. If you die, there is one of the Montereys ready to die with you. Juan Perez — faster — faster!”

  They reached the bottom of a long descent, and then hurried forward to a place where several galleries converged in a meeting point powerfully sustained by great buttresses of the living rock. The lantern light glimmered brightly over the moisture that covered the stone.

  “Now!” said the girl breathlessly. “If we place the lantern here in this gap — so! — the light shines down the passages they may come by. And we are left in shadow. Juan Perez, have you a second gun? I can shoot, also!”

  They had placed Silver where he sat with his back against a wall, his legs sprawled out helplessly before him. With the lantern put in an adjoining corridor, it flung its light straight on down a mighty hall, where the pick marks showed on all sides, and left the three of them in the darker shadow.

  “I have a second gun,” said Juan Perez, “but that is for the señor. There is no way for you to help us now. Go back, señorita.”

  “Go back! Go back!” yelled Silver desperately. “There is no way that you can help here. Go back to the house — they are coming, Julia! Are you to stay here and drive us mad?”

  “I am going,” answered the girl quietly. “Juan Perez, guard him with your life!”

  She was gone from the sight of Silver.

  He heard Perez murmuring: “I have already sworn it. My life for yours, señor, and your life for mine. And that is the way that dying is easy. They are coming! Now we shall mow them down!”

  “Look sharp!” answered Silver. “It may be that they are the men of Monterey retreating. Listen!”

  For wild cries in Spanish now broke on their ears as the approaching tumult swept around an adjacent corner of the tunnels. And then the lantern light struck on a mob of frantic faces — the men of the house of Monterey in headlong flight, reaching out their hands before them as they dashed through the gloom, screeching out the names of their patron saints.

  “Curse them!” groaned Juan Perez. “Oh, dogs who betray the hand that fed them. Look — the master is among them — he beats them — but they will not turn and fight!”

  For yonder was the silver hair and the white beard of Monterey as he was borne headlong by the current of the flight.

  From the rear came the bawling voices of the Drummons in the height of their victory.

  Now, behind the place where Silver sat, with a gun in either hand, and Juan Perez kneeling beside him in desperate readiness, he heard the shrill voice of Julia crying:

  “Turn back! There is help here! Señor Silver is here — and Juan Perez — and great help! The fight is ours! Turn back, cowards! Turn back and face the bullets with me! Señor Silver is here, and he cannot die alone!”

  He heard the girl’s shouting as the leaders of the Drummon throng poured around the next bend of the hallway. He saw their faces gleaming white in the dull light of the lantern
, like sickly creatures of the sea seen deep down in the shadowy water.

  Right into the faces of those charging men Silver and Juan Perez poured a deadly fire.

  He saw one man fall. He saw another pitch sidewise. He saw a third leap upward like a wounded deer, yelling. And the whole rout slowed, wavered.

  A gap opened. In the rear he had a glimpse of the great form of Hank Drummon, borne on his litter by several pairs of hands. He had stripped himself to the waist, naked, like a sailor going into action on a battleship of the old days, and as though he expected to bathe in blood. In his hands were weapons. About his head was the broad white bandage. He seemed like a pirate picture out of the past.

  “José Bandini!” he was thundering. “Show these cowardly fools the way to go forward. Charge the dogs! Charge ’em home and they’ll vanish. Come on, boys!”

  Into the van leaped the brilliant form of José Bandini. If he were a thousand times a villain, he was a thousand times a hero, also. He ran straight forward to lead the rest, and as he ran he laughed with the joy of the conflict, and waved a revolver above his head.

  Behind him, the men of the Drummons rallied and surged ahead in a wave.

  Silver, leveling his revolver, was about to fire with a deadly aim at Bandini when another form intervened before him.

  It was old Arturo Monterey, running straight at his enemy, with his white hair blown back from his head. He shouted a wordless battle cry as he ran.

  The moment was lost to Silver. The next instant he saw vast forms bulking above him, and loosed the fire of his gun among them. Half lighted by the lantern, but only enough to make them jumping, swaying, whirling silhouettes, he saw the men of Drummon rush at him.

  He saw the fine form of José Bandini lead the others. At that body he fired as Bandini leveled a gun and rushed at him, guided by the darting fires from the mouth of Silver’s Colt.

  It seemed a bitter shame to meet that moment seated.

  With a vast effort, Silver struggled to one knee. A bullet struck his body, he knew not where. The weight of the impact flattened him back against the wall.

  A swinging foot kicked the gun from his left hand — that in the right was already empty. He was caught by the hair of the head and jerked forward on his face. And, turning as he fell, he saw Bandini lift a revolver by the barrel. That gun must have been empty, also, but a stroke with the butt of it would crack his skull.

  His own hands were empty. But beside him lay Juan Perez, senseless, his face covered with blood that poured from a scalp wound, his arms outflung; and in the nearer hand, held out as though it were an offering in time of need to his friend, there was a Colt lying.

  Silver threw up his left arm. The falling heel of the gun that Bandini wielded crushed the flesh against the bone, and beat the whole arm heavily down against his face.

  But at the same instant his right hand had caught the weapon from the hand of poor Juan Perez.

  “Take that!” cried Bandini. “I wish there were a thousand lives in you that I could beat out one by one. Gringo — take this! And — ”

  Silver fired upward, the muzzle of his gun inches from the body of Bandini. And the man fell forward on him, a loose, soft, warm weight.

  The brain of Silver reeled.

  He could hear two voices. The first was that of the girl, who was still crying out to the men of Monterey. And they had rallied. That was the meaning of the trampling and the stamping all around him. That was the meaning of the curses in Spanish and in English, one mixed with the other.

  And the second voice was wailing not far away: “The Alligator’s dead — save yourselves! Hank Drummon’s dead!”

  It was that yelling voice of dismay that beat the Drummons more than the sudden, fierce, and unexpected rally of the Mexicans. The cry that one man had started was taken up by others. As Silver worked the weight of the dead Bandini from his body and sat up, he saw the gallery filled with the thronging flight of the Drummons, the big men fighting to get one past the other. After them ran the victorious men of Monterey, yelling insanely with their victory.

  Behind them were the dead.

  It was amazing that so few had fallen in a fight so close and hot. Bandini was dead, to be sure. And two of the men of Monterey. And yonder sat the great Drummon in his litter, bloodstained about the breast where a great cross had been slashed with a knife, and under it a wavering line — the brand of the Cross and Snake!

  On the floor beside him was a small body, with a head of white hair, but that body stirred, moved, stood up, staggering.

  Juan Perez, who had recovered consciousness, was leaning over him, asking how he was. And then the girl slipped in between them and caught Silver in her arms, saying:

  “Do you ask questions like a fool? He’s shot through the body! He’s dying! Call for help! If he’s lost, there’s no glory left in this day for the house of Monterey!”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Geese Across the Moon

  IF SILVER did not die, it would be because, said the two doctors who worked over him by day and by night, he obstinately refused to give up life, even when all that remained to him was only a little handful of the immortal fire.

  But he lived, and when he could sit up in the bed, he learned the great tidings of events that had happened while he lay senseless, near to death.

  The Drummons were gone. Their long fight, for generations, to win and hold the Haverhill Valley for themselves, had failed. Their leader was dead. Their spirits were broken. And they had sold out their lands for a song and left the Haverhill in a great procession of horses and wagons, like a picture of emigration out of an earlier day. Farther west and farther north, they would try to find a new home for themselves.

  In the meantime, old Arturo Monterey, at the end of his life, had swept in for little cost all the lands that he had fought for so long. As for the village, it was gone. On the morning of the day when the Drummons moved out, a fire had started mysteriously, and in a few hours it was uncontrollably sweeping the place. Now rains were beating and winds blowing the black ash heaps of the spot where the place had stood.

  All of these things Silver heard. And he could have guessed them, he often thought, merely by the sounds of song and laughter which, all day long, flowed through the house of Monterey — now near at hand, now sweet with distance.

  He began to recover rapidly. The day came when he could walk, and then he could ride out with Juan Perez. And the peons in the fields ran to the fences and shouted and cheered him like a hero.

  It made Silver laugh with joy to hear them.

  Every day he rode out, and every day, when he returned, he felt that he was being brought nearer and nearer to the crucial point of his life. Monterey had said nothing; the girl had said nothing; but he knew that their eyes were waiting for him to speak. And the question that he must answer was as to whether or not he chose to spend his life here in Haverhill, now that it was purged of its plague.

  If he spoke, he knew without vanity that the girl would marry him, and that old Monterey would leave the whole estate to her. But neither of them spoke, and he, day by day, tried to face the question, and could not.

  His thought was totally in solution, and something from the outside was needed to precipitate it in the form of action.

  It was turning cool now in the evenings, but still they dined on the garden terrace and in the twilight of this day a big golden moon came up out of the east and climbed softly up the sky.

  A streak of shadow moved across it. Silver stared, and could not understand, for no cloud could be at once so narrow and so dark a line, nor could the wind blow any mist with such speed, he felt.

  A breeze cut at them from the mountains. And Julia went into the house to get a heavier cloak. But old Monterey remained seated in his chair, his eyes rarely leaving the face of Silver.

  It was the night when some word must be spoken, Silver felt. There was a warm and happy flow of temptation when he thought of the quiet days of contentment which could st
retch before him if he married the girl and settled to life in the Haverhill.

  And yet something checked him, and he could not tell what.

  More often, day by day, he thought of young Pedro Monterey, to whom this place should have gone in right succession. He could think without sharp pain of the dead man now, for the vow he had made silently in Cruces had been discharged. And still Pedro Monterey remained the shadow on his mind.

  So on this night, as he sat with old Monterey in the garden, he heard a vague sound come out of the upper air, and looked up, startled.

  He could see nothing.

  It was a cry that he had heard before, he could not tell where. His inactive brain would not place the note that had reached his ears. But it stirred infinite echoes within him.

  “What is it, my son?” said the gentle voice of Don Arturo.

  “Nothing,” said Silver briefly.

  But his heart began to throb uneasily. A melancholy desire for he knew not what possessed him.

  He stood up and began to walk the terrace with rapid steps, feeling the glance of Monterey swing back and forth with him.

  Again the dark, triangular line swept across the face of the moon, and a moment later the cry came out of the sky again.

  Wild geese! Wild geese flying south! Now he knew what it was that stirred in his blood. He, also, wanted to be on the wing to another land. And suddenly the mountains on either side of the Haverhill rose for him like prison walls.

  Again that half melodious, half brazen call came tingling out of the upper air and ran through all his blood.

  “I’m going inside,” he said thickly. “I’ll get — something to put on!”

  That was how he left them.

  It was not many minutes afterward that Julia Monterey came down and looked eagerly, anxiously, but saw that Silver was gone. Monterey answered her look.

  “He has gone inside to get a heavier coat,” said the old man. “He is very restless. He has been walking up and down the terrace. To-night, my dear, he is surely going to speak. And after that we shall be happy together forever.”