The Black Rider

by Max Brand

  Such was Señor Don Francisco Torreño.

  Now he had brought back from Spain another lovely girl, this time to become the wife of his son, Don Carlos. Men had told him that she was not only a d’Arquista, but that she was also the loveliest girl in all of Spain; and, although he had not believed the last, when he saw her now, swaying and tilting in the lumbering carriage like a very flower, he could not but agree that she was worthy to be a queen.

  And was not that, in fact, the destiny for which he was shaping her? In the end he found that he could give her the highest compliment which it was in his power to bestow on any woman—she was worthy to be the wife of the son of Francisco Torreño!

  As for Don Carlos, he was in a seventh heaven, an ecstasy of delight. He could not keep his eyes from touching on his bride to be and, every time they rested on her, he could not help smiling and twirling the ends of his little mustaches into dagger points. He went to his father.

  Ah, sir,” he said. “Where can I find words in the world to tell you of my gratitude? In all the kingdoms you have found the one lady of my heart.”

  Torreño was pleased, but he would have scorned to show his pleasure.

  “Bah!” he said. “You are young; therefore you are a fool. Remember that she is a woman, and every woman is a confederacy of danger in your household. When the married man locks his door, he has not closed out from his house his deadliest foe!”

  “I shall not believe that there is evil in her!” said the youth. He clapped his hand upon the hilt of his rapier. He had been to Milan and to Paris to learn the proper use of that weapon and, though some parts of his education might be at fault, in sword play he had been admitted a master even by the Spaniards, who fight by rule of book like mathematicians, and even by the French who fight like dreadful angels of grace. “And,” said Don Carlos, “if another man were to suggest such a thing, I should…cut his throat!”

  His father was pleased again. He loved violence in his boy, just as he loved his elegance. In all things, Don Carlos was his ideal of what a young man should be, just as he himself was what his ideal of what a man of sixty should be.

  “You throat-cutters,” said Don Francisco sneeringly “Powder and lead are the only things!”

  So saying, he snatched a pistol from the holster beside his saddle and, jerking it up level with his eye, fired. He had intended to shave the long plume which fluttered from the hat of one of his postilions. As a matter-of-fact, the ball knocked the hat off the head of the poor fellow, and even grazed his skull, so that he screamed with terror and clapped both hands to the top of his head.

  “Indians!” shouted the driver.

  “Indians!” echoed the rear guard and the front.

  Instantly they faced out and held their carbines at the ready. Don Francisco was convulsed with laughter. He rolled back and forth in his saddle and waved his pistol in the air, helpless with excess of mirth.

  “Ah,” he groaned in his joy, “did you see the face of the fool, Carlos? Did you see?”

  But Carlos was already at the side of the carriage, comforting his lady and assuring her that it was only a jest of his father’s. She had not uttered an outcry, but she sat stiff and straight in the carriage and looked at her fiancé with a very strange expression in her eyes— a strange, level glance that went through and through the soul of Don Carlos like the cold steel of a rapier— and out again at a twitch.

  “Ah,” she said without a smile, “was that a joke? What if the man had been killed?”

  “Why, there are a thousand others to take his place,” explained Don Carlos carefully.

  “I see,” she said.

  And that was all. But at that moment he would have given a very great deal if she had smiled even a very small smile.

  II “The Flute Player”

  In the confusion that followed the explosion of the gun, the carriage, as a matter of course, had come to a halt. It had stopped in the center of a deep hollow where the road, pounded repeatedly by the great wheels of the carts which brought the hides down to the seaport town, had been scored with great ruts, and the surface cut away to the undercrop of rocks. Against one of these the rear wheels were wedged and, when the postilions tried to start the coach, they failed. They could not, at once, get the team to work together, partly perhaps, because they were talking to one another—a rapid muttering running back and forth along the line of the drivers.

  In the meantime, Señorita Lucia stood up and beckoned to her cavalier. He was in the midst of a rapture which he was pouring forth to his father.

  “She is like a bird, sir,” he was saying. “She is full of music. There is nothing about her that is not delightful!”

  “Bah!” said the father, concealing his happiness as usual with a scowl. “Take care that she does not prove a sparrow-hawk, and you the sparrow!”

  “When I hear her voice, my heart stops. Her eyes take hold on my soul like a strong hand. I could wish for only one thing…that she would smile more often! Do you think that she is happy? That she will be happy?”

  His father turned short around in his saddle.

  “Is she a fool?” he asked. “Can she not see that this is my land? And that all that we are to journey through is my land? Are not the cattle mine, the trees mine, everything but the sky itself mine? Did she not eat from silver dishes yesterday? Does she not eat from golden dishes today? And yet you ask if she is happy? Carlos, that is the question of a madman!”

  “But she seems thoughtful.”

  “All women,” said his father, “think while they are young. There is a need for that. They use their brains until they have caught a husband. After that, their minds go to sleep. It is better so. Rather an unfaithful wife than a thinking wife! Such creatures give a man no rest. And in our homes we should have peace!”

  So said the great Torreño, and then nodded. Since he cared for the opinion of no one else in the world, he found a great delight in agreeing with himself.

  It was at this moment that the son saw his lady beckoning to him. He drove in the spurs so deep, in his haste, that the tortured horse leaped straight up into the air. But as well to have striven to unseat a centaur as to dispossess this master of the saddle. Presently Don Carlos drew rein beside the coach, his horse sliding to a halt upon braced legs. But to the dismay of the gallant Don Carlos, he found that Señorita Lucia was not even looking at him. She was raising one hand as though for silence. Her head was lifted and there was an expression of perfect concentration on her face.

  “Will you tell them to be quiet?” she asked him.

  “Idiots!” cried he. “Fools! Will you be still? Will you be barking like wild dogs?”

  He stormed up and down the line of the postilions. Each was transformed to stone, looking sullenly down upon the ground. He came back to Lucia smiling like a happy child. There was not a sound, now, except the heavy panting of the horses. The dust cloud rose and floated away on the slow wind. The sun beat steadily burningly down upon them. It dried the sweat on the flanks of the horses as fast as it formed and left powderings of salt.

  “Now,” said the girl, “you can hear it quite clearly! I thought I heard before…now I am sure!”

  Don Carlos listened in turn, pointed the eye of his mind, so to speak, in the direction to which she pointed, and then he made out, very far and faint, very thin but very clear, like a star ray on a dark black night, the sound of a whistled music which floated to them through the air, now drowned by a stir of the wind, now coming again.

  “That is a great flute player…that is a true musician!” said the lady.

  He gaped at her for a moment. Something that his father had said was recurring to his not over-alert brain. Indeed, this was very like the hawk which knew what duller fowl could not. How had she been able to pick up that liquid, tiny sound through the jingling, stamping, creaking, shouting of the caravan?

  It made her seem tall—though she was very small. It made her eye like the eye of an eagle, though it was only of the
mildest blue.

  He was filled with awe, and with astonishment. He had never felt such an emotion before, not even in the presence of his father, of whom he was terribly afraid.

  “Who is it?” asked the girl. “It must be a man famous in this part of the country.”

  He could not tell her. He shouted to his father. But Don Francisco could not say who it might be. Neither did any of the others in the train have a guess to venture.

  “I shall ride off to find him,” said Don Carlos. “I shall be back in a moment.”

  “No,” said the girl. “I shall go myself.”

  Among the led horses, of which there were half a dozen or more, there were two always kept saddled and ready for her in case she should choose to change from the carriage. She had not shown the slightest inclination to leave that lumbering vehicle before. Now, therefore, everyone watched with the greatest attention, and the silent eagerness of born horsemen, while she dismounted from the coach and stood before the two horses. One was a bay, beautiful as a picture, but a useless creature except for a gift of soft gaits. The other was a roan, ugly in color, but chosen because of its rare and eager spirit, combined with perfect manners, and a mouth as sensitive as the mouth of a human being.

  “Let us see,” said Don Francisco when those horses were selected for her special use, “if she can tell a horse from a horse. If she can do that, she can be happy in this wild country even if she were the bride of a beggar!”

  Now he rode close up.

  “There is a right one and a wrong one,” he said.

  He took a ring from his finger. There was an emerald in it.

  “You shall have this, my child, if you prove yourself wise!”

  She gave him a steady glance, once again without a smile. Then she turned back to the others and regarded their heads.

  “Not their heads only,” entreated Don Carlos, anxious that she might make a good impression upon his father. And of the two heads that of the bay was far the more beautiful. “Look at the whole body…the legs…the bone…the hard muscle, Lucia!”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I shall ride this one,” she said, and laid her hand on the nose of the roan.

  There was a little shout from the whole cavalcade. For she had run the gantlet unscathed! But Don Francisco was almost scowling on her as he gave her the ring. And he muttered to his son: “A hawk! A hawk! Poor Carlos!”

  Don Carlos did not quite follow the meaning that might be hidden away under this. He was too delighted by her victory. And, in another moment, she was galloping away at his side across the hills.

  It was even farther than he had guessed, but the music led them across two ranges of the little rolling hills, and on the second range they saw their man seated cross-legged under a tree, with the flute at his lips and his agile fingers dancing over it.

  He was a tall man with a white band of cloth around his long, black hair to keep it away from his face, and clean white trousers which extended to his heels. There was a sash around his waist. Altogether he was a romantic figure in such a setting among the olive-drab hills.

  “Look!” said Don Carlos, as they drew rein.

  At their approach, the musician had jumped up and whistled sharply. And at once the sheep which were feeding in that pasture land came running toward him, a rush of gray white which pooled around his feet, bleating and babbling.

  The Indian, as he arose, was revealed as a tall man, slender-waisted, broad shouldered—with the form of an athlete and the air of a gravely reserved thinker.

  “He looks,” said the girl, “like a hero.”

  “He?” said Don Carlos. “He is only an Indian.”

  “He is not like the others,” she said, looking thoughtfully at her fiancé.

  “The others are mere root grubbers, ditch diggers,” said the son of the lord of the land, shrugging his shoulders. “This fellow is different…yes. You can tell that he is a Navajo by that band around his hair and his white trousers. The Navajos are different. Most of them are men. But no Navajo with an ounce of blood in his veins would be herding sheep for a white man. This man is probably an outcast, a coward, perhaps a fool, certainly a knave!”

  She gave Don Carlos one look, a long one; she gave the Indian another glance, a short one.

  “I don’t agree with you,” she said.

  “Why not, Lucia?”

  “Because he is a musician. That’s one thing. And besides….”

  “Besides what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and added: “Talk to him, Carlos!”

  This was pronounced so shortly that Don Carlos stared a little, for he had never in his life received commands except from his father who, after all, was a sort of deity of another order. However, when he looked to the girl, he found her smiling so frankly that he quite forgot he had received an order.

  Now he reined his horse closer. The Indian had folded his hands and addressed his gaze to the distant mountains, lofty, naked rock faces, spotted richly with color all dim and blended behind a veiling mist.

  “Tell me, fellow,” said Don Carlos, “what is your name?”

  He had asked the question, of course, in Spanish, and the Indian returned to him a dull, unintelligent stare.

  “I shall ask him in Navajo,” said Don Carlos to the girl. “He has probably come here only newly. Otherwise he would have understood such a simple question. These Navajos, besides, are not such fools, you know.”

  He said to the Indian, in a broad, quick guttural: “What is your name? Quickly, because we cannot stay here. What is your name and what made you learn the flute?”

  Not a whit of intelligence glimmered in the steady black eyes of the other. Don Carlos flushed.

  “The oaf dares to keep silence!” he said. “I shall give him a lesson that will be written in his skin the rest of his life!”

  And he raised a riding whip. At the same instant, into the hand of the Indian came a long and heavy knife. He did not hold it by the hilt, but balanced it loosely in the palm of his hand, the knife blade extending over the fingers, so that it was plain he intended to throw it, and there was something in his unmoved air which gave assurance that his weapon would not miss the target. Don Carlos, with a gasp of rage and astonishment, whirled his horse away.

  “The scoundrel!” he cried. “We’ll silence that flute, by heaven! Turn your face, Lucia!”

  “Carlos!” she cried, riding straight between him and his intended target. “Do you mean to pistol him in cold blood?”

  “Cold blood?” cried he. “I tell you, Lucia, if we did not keep these desert rats down, they would eat through our walls and knife us in our sleep. They’d swarm over the whole land. There is only one way to treat an Indian…like a mad dog!”

  Her expression, for the moment, reminded him of that of the Navajo—it was the blank of one who veils a thought.

  “Here comes your father,” she said. “Perhaps he will speak for Señor Torreño.”

  Torreño, in fact, had followed the two at a slow gait, not close enough to interfere with their privacy, but at a sufficient distance to keep his eye upon them, as though he dared not risk the safety of the two human beings who meant the most to him in the world.

  III “TAKI”

  He had no sooner come up when his son explained everything that had happened in the following way:

  “I asked this Indian dog for his name in Spanish and in Navajo. He dared to remain silent.”

  “So?” said Torreño. “A Navajo, however, is not a dog, but a man…or half a man.” He said gently to the tall Indian: “Amigo, do you know me?”

  Instantly the other made answer in perfect Spanish, smooth, close-clipped, the truest Castilian: “You are my master, señoñ You are Señor Torreño.”

  Torreño turned to the girl with a broad grin on his face, as much as to say: “This you see is another matter when the right man speaks!”

  He added to the Indian. “And now your name?” “I am Taki, the son of….”

 
“That is enough. So, Taki, you have drawn a knife upon my son?”

  “A knife?” said Taki blankly. “I cannot remember that!”

  The girl broke into ringing laughter, a small, sweet voice in the vast silence of those hills. The music of it softened the hard heart of Torreño.

  “I should have had him flayed alive,” said he. “But since he has amused you, dear girl, I shall forgive him.”

  “Flayed alive?” murmured the girl. “Are such things possible here?”

  “In this country,” said Torreño, “one must be a king or a slave; and to be a king one must be a tyrant. I señorita, am a tyrant, partly because it is necessary partly because it pleases me to be one. Where I am, there is no other word, except for the sake of conversation.”

  He said this with a grave, sharp glance at her, which could not avoid giving the words a certain meaning. Whether she understood or not, however, could not be seen, for again her face wore an expression as grave and as unreadable as the Indian’s. Torreño turned back to the culprit.

  “You have drawn a knife upon my son…who is my flesh, who is me! Would you strike steel into my arm?”

  “Heaven forbid, señor”

  “This Don Carlos is more than my arm. He is part of my heart. He is that part of me which will live after my death. To touch him is to touch me.”

  He added aside to the girl: “That is rather neatly spoken, child, is it not?”

  “A pretty speech,” said she without emotion.

  “Señor, my master,” said the Indian.

  “Well?” queried Torreño.

  “I have a horse, señor!”

  “You are rich, then? But what of the horse?”

  “He is mine. He is my slave.”