by Max Brand
To this astonishing speech Carreño listened with starting eyes, for certainly it seemed that his master was giving up every advantage that he might have taken in order to bring this warrior to the Southland. Indeed, if he so desired, he could deftly hang Twilight before the gunfighter as a reward that would be received only after the great effort had been made to destroy El Tigre. But all of these opportunities were now cast away. Carreño could not believe his ears.
Then he heard the astonished and delighted voice of Dupont exclaiming: “Señor, whatever may have been in my mind before, I swear to you that after your magnificent generosity, you may consider that you have bought both Twilight and myself. We are both at your service, if you can use us!”
Carreño started. Here was a most unexpected turn—a man to whom freedom and a great gift were offered who refused to accept of either and entered into voluntary slavery. This could not be understood no matter how he attempted to look at it. And was it not doubly strange that he offered himself to Valdivia in almost the very words that the master himself had used? For Valdivia had stated that he was buying a man, and not a horse.
“Use you?” the Argentinean echoed gloomily. “Alas, my friend, consider me as one who, when he returns to his home land, returns to the most deadly peril. Consider me as one who journeys back to a daily dread of destruction. Then ask me if there is a use that I can make of one with your fearless heart and your sure and swift hands. No, you will not ask, Señor Dupont. You will see that the service of such a man as you becomes a surety of life to me.”
It was a speech and the tone of an equal addressing an equal. And again Carreño wondered a little bitterly. For no matter how confidentially the master addressed him, there was always a little difference—a talking down. The very kindness of Valdivia tasted to Carreño like charity. But here was an equal, or at least one whom he found it expedient, in the matchless duplicity of his heart, to treat for the moment like an equal.
Then Carreño heard The Crisco Kid protesting boundless astonishment. Was there no law in the Argentine to protect her most eminent citizens?
“Consider,” Valdivia said, “that this man is a devil. Men cannot handle him. He is a devil, and he has picked me out from the rest of humanity to practice his torments upon me.”
“In the name of heaven, señor,” cried the young American, “why don’t you gather half a dozen good men together and ride after him?”
“Consider, my young friend, that half a dozen would not be enough to master him. He is surrounded often by a score of devoted adherents. Besides, he has friends, here and there among the poor, scattered over the country. The fools! Because when he robs a rich man of a thousand pesos, he gives ten to a few starved wretches, and they call him a benefactor and forget his crimes. Do you see?”
“I’ve heard of the same thing in the West,” answered Dupont. “The long riders do the same thing. When they blow a bank, they give away a few hundreds here and there and this keeps them in friends up and down the range. If they are pursued by a posse, these friends give them shelter, tell them where and how the posse is reported to be riding, and furnish them with fresh horses if they are hard pressed.”
“Exactly so! And it is true in the Argentine. The poor gauchos swear by El Tigre.”
“A pretty name,” Dupont said thoughtfully.
“Diablo would be a better one for him, however. Tiger is far too mild. But he is as secret and bloodthirsty a murderer as the tiger, Señor Dupont. He has covered the face of the country with his eyes and ears, as these stupid adherents of his are. He can afford to ride alone. When he needs men, he need hardly more than whistle, and they start up out of the ground, so to speak. Do you understand?”
“A shifty rat,” muttered Dupont.
“If vengeance could have reached him, be sure that I should have taken him long ago. But money is not strong enough to defeat him.”
“How has he come to hate you above others?”
“Because twenty years ago he wronged me, and those who we have wronged, we are apt to hate. Is that not true? You, for instance, had been wronged by this man, Carew. Therefore he hated you. You forgave him and freed him. Therefore, believe me, he hates you now more than ever before and would follow you around the world to destroy you.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know it. But El Tigre, having robbed me of the woman I was to marry …”
“What!” Dupont cried, and Carreño heard the soft, heavy sound of his feet as he leaped from his chair.
“It is even so.”
“Ten thousand devils!” Dupont groaned. “Is it possible?”
“It is true.”
“He stole the girl you loved?”
“He did.”
“He carried her away … by force?”
“True again. Do not ask me to speak of this thing, Señor Dupont. It sets my heart on fire.”
Then Carreño heard a long, soft stride go up and down the room, swiftly, and the floor quivered with the weight of the walking man. He began himself to tremble, and he shrank a little from the door. He forgot that it was a man walking up and down. It seemed the slouching tread of a terrible lion.
“And this all twenty years ago?” Dupont breathed.
“Twenty years of sorrow. I have lived my life away from my homeland. To return to my country is to return to sad memories.”
“Tell me, then, if nothing can ever be done to destroy this fiend?”
“There is only one way, and that is a desperate one that only a madman, desperately regardless of his life, would follow.”
“However, let me hear it?”
“Suppose,” said the voice of Valdivia, “that some hate-crazed man … cunning, nevertheless … were to pretend to be outlawed, were even to commit a crime to give truth to the appearance. Suppose that he were then to make himself so well-known among the criminals who haunt the foothills of the mountains that El Tigre would be forced to take notice of him. Then you may be sure that El Tigre would strive to button him to himself and make him one of the dependents. Suppose, then, that this wild-hearted madman and hero should play the part of a member of the band until he found an opportunity to face El Tigre when the two were alone together, and shoot him down like a dog … then leap onto a horse and flee … flee with all the speed of a fast animal …”
He paused, and Carreño could hear the hard breathing of his master.
“In such a way, in such a desperate way, the thing might be done. But you will hunt through Argentina in vain to find a man willing to stand up before that destroying beast.”
“Señor,” the husky voice of Dupont said, “one thing at least is true … all things are possible.”
“But here,” Valdivia said, “is another matter. The woman he stole away from me bore to the beast, El Tigre, a girl baby and died in giving it birth. The child has grown up wild as an animal, but beautiful as a blessed angel. What will come of her in the hands of El Tigre and his mates?”
“Dear God!” cried Charles Dupont. “No power under heaven could keep me from Argentina. Señor Valdivia, we are agreed I travel south with you?”
“I am a thousand times delighted.”
“I shall see you again. Adiós.” The door closed heavily.
“Carreño!” shouted the master. He tore open the door. “Did you hear?” he gasped out.
Carreño had never seen the Valdivia in such a convulsion of joyous excitement. His whole body shivered with it. His eyes glittered. His face was pale with happiness.
“I heard … señor. It is very wonderful. He intends to go to El Tigre and to …”
“Ah?” Valdivia said, his expression changing suddenly. “It is as I thought! You have dared to eavesdrop?”
Seeing that he was so neatly caught, two thoughts flashed into the brain of the poor secretary. The one was wonder at the shrewdness of Valdivia in prete
nding such headlong impulse in order to find out if his man had been prying at his secret conference, the other emotion of Carreño was utter despair if he should lose his place.
He searched feebly for an excuse. Then he clasped his hands together and gaped upon his master. His knees were unstrung and began to sag.
“Señor, señor … in heaven’s name,” he whined.
“Stand up!” Valdivia snarled. “I have always known that you were a dog. I see that I have always been utterly right. But … there are dogs that have their uses, and you happen to be one. Stand up … but so long as you live, never forget …”
The pale raised hand was to Carreño like a flashing thunderbolt. He shuddered beneath it.
“I shall never forget. I shall remember beyond the grave, señor!”
“Tush,” Valdivia said, suddenly smiling again. “But did you hear him?”
“Sí, sí, señor. He talked like a man eager for this terrible service.”
“It was the mention of the woman that did it. The fool has gone to dream of a blessed saint who is forced by her brute of a father to lead the life of a wild Indian.”
“E-exactly,” stuttered the cowed Carreño.
“And he will never rest by day or by night until he has found her,” Valdivia said, and he broke into laughter so hearty that he had to hold his sides.
“But she is beautiful, señor!”
“What of that?”
“Why, if all should go as you wish … if he should accomplish the miracle and be able to join El Tigre … if he should see Francesca …”
“Well?”
“But, adoring her, how could he find it in his heart to lay a hand upon her father?”
“You do not know these men, Carreño. It is impossible for you to conceive the iron of which they are made. He is now a madman … a crusader. To destroy El Tigre and bring the girl away is now his only thought.”
“Bring her away? Impossible!”
“Nothing is impossible. To climb to a star is a small thing to such a man as this Charles Dupont. And when he brings her back … as I swear I believe that he will … why, Carreño, I have reached an age where I must marry soon or else give up hope of having an heir.”
“Señor!”
“It is true. Having bearded the devil in his den and taken the girl away to be his bride … I cross his game and marry her myself.” He laughed again. “Is it not perfect, Carreño? But it is still a dream … it is still a dream … I must not think of it too much.”
Chapter Eight
From any viewpoint it was a dull trip. The Charlotte P. McGuire, which was the name of the old tramp freighter that the man of the Argentine had chartered, had slogged her way south across the oily waters of the Gulf and bent down around the blunt elbow that South America pushes east into the Atlantic, and south and south along the Brazilian coast, and south and west toward the Argentine with no more excitement than the long, monotonous swells that the southern trades kick regularly toward the equator. It was in every way a musty, drowsy trip with the strong smell of the stabled horses between decks and the moist, warm wind wafting lazily across the prow.
The crew grew tired of gambling or lost all its money, then played cards for nothing until the spots were rubbed thin on the packs, then listened to one another telling tales until they were thrice repeated, then cursed the diet on which they lived, the air they breathed, the ship they sailed in, the sky beneath which they sailed, and one another’s faces.
Only three men endured the passage with any equanimity. These were first Carreño, who found any scene exciting that embraced his master; secondly there was the master himself, whose whistle could be heard sounding shrill from the bridge as he watched the ship roll on her course, or whose light shone in his cabin where he read his books until late into the night; thirdly there was the tall form of Charles Dupont standing usually in the prow, sometimes looking back where the smoke of the Charlotte P. McGuire rolled out of the stack and drifted in immense curves up to the clouds, sometimes staring far ahead to a cloud or a star on the horizon, sometimes leaning over the rail to watch the blunt bow squash through the dull blue sea. Through all that dreary passage he was like a man rushing home on a ferry at the end of a day’s work or at its beginning, his eye on fire with the things that he would do. Perhaps he was closeted in the cabin of Señor Valdivia, where he learned to regard the fat face of Carreño as no more than a design against the wall and in whose presence one might talk as one pleased, unroll the very scroll of the heart and see no more than the blinking of dull, uncomprehending eyes as the secretary stared from a corner of the cabin. Perhaps, with his head full of the tales that the owner of the great estancia told, he went to his own cabin to read, or try to read, but always fiery visions of the things to be crossed his mind, and he was forced to put the book aside. Perhaps, and this more often than any other thing, he drew one of the Argentineans, who mostly made up the crew, into conversation about their land.
There is no one like your man of the Argentine when it comes to talking of his own country. Perhaps because that country is fairly new, at least in the bulk of its population, the inhabitants are more militantly eager in their defense and their praise of it. But, lying on the southern rim of the world, with a greater actual acreage of truly cultivable soil than any other country, with only the surface of the natural resources scratched, with wealth increasing dizzily, swarming with native millionaires whose fortunes even they themselves cannot compute, the Argentinean declares himself to be at the center of things and by no means upon the outskirts. They talked to Charles Dupont of the huge tropic forests and immense rivers of their northern domain, where the great Plata rolls out like a vast muddy sea to meet the ocean, of the measureless horizons of the Pampas, and the frozen steppes of Patagonia. They talked of their cattle that swarm thickly over the rich plains, of their roads that pass on day after day, with never a turn or a bend, through the heart of the dead-level cattle country, of estancias as large as kingdoms, of millionaires greater than kings, dollar for dollar.
But, now and again, he turned their eager chatter to El Tigre. It was not hard to do, for just as they boasted of the extent of their plains and the height of their Andean Mountains to the west, and of the size of their rivers, so they boasted, also, of the deeds of El Tigre. Through the space of almost a full generation he had lived in outlawry, and therefore he had become an almost legendary figure among them. They talked of him with all their fire, and their fire was that of a religious man striving to make a convert. They were trying to convert Charles Dupont, and just as they boasted of their country’s wealth and glorious future, so they boasted, also, of owning the very most terrible of all the bandits in the world.
Of how the career of El Tigre began he could learn little. Every one of his narrators had a theory and a gaudy tale full of circumstantial details to give it substance. But each tale differed from the others. And so did the accounts of his exploits. They would begin, for instance, somewhat as follows.
“My father’s brother, señor, was a waterman who worked on a ship that plied up and down the Panama River, and he himself knew a man very well who lived in Corrientes. Therefore this story is very true. My father’s brother was a very honest man, señor, and therefore does it not hold that his friends would also be honest men? What I tell to you is the story just as this man told it to my father’s brother, who told it to my father when I was a boy, and I remembered it, every word. For who could forget when El Tigre was named?”
This story was told to The Crisco Kid by a tall, thin youth who was in the last stages of consumption, his sallow skin wrinkled and dry as parchment, his eyes alternately filmed with dullness and again fire bright. He had a faint, husky voice that was to Dupont unspeakably touching, and he talked with a sort of desperate enthusiasm, as though he would forget in the narration the dreadful death that was every day creeping closer and closer upon him. But at leas
t he was sure to live until he reached the country of his birth and the land of his love. And this fact gave him some happiness. And, as his story was no more extravagant than a hundred others that were told to Dupont by the Argentineans during that voyage, while the Charlotte P. McGuire slouched steadily southward at ten knots an hour—except when the wind freshened and cut her back to seven—it may as well be told in toto and in the words of poor José himself.
He told that story three times. And each time he omitted not a syllable of the opening assurance concerning the honesty of his uncle and his uncle’s friend. In fact, he could not vary his story. He had told it so long that the words of it were like part of his flesh.
“You must know that there was in Corrientes a very great man. He was a Spaniard. His name was Alvarado Sandoval. In the old, old days his family owned much land and was very rich. After we were freed from Spain, that family continued rich. Alvarado Sandoval was the last of his family … he had no child, nor would he ever have one. And as though he might be repaid for that great loss, he succeeded in everything else that he could desire. There were not twenty men in the Argentine who were richer than he. I dare to swear it. If he wanted more money, it came to him by magic. If he wanted more land, he found a way to take it almost for nothing. He always succeeded in his undertakings.
