Savage bride

by Cornell Woolrich; Internet Archive

  At the sound of his voice she suddenly broke into a furious, toiling, upward scamper, her horse's hoofs spilling little trickles of stone down at every straining fall. The horse wasn't running away with her, or it would not have chosen that difficult direction. She was the one directing its heroic efforts. He could even see the scissoring effect her knees made gouging into it, from where he was.

  He put on a burst of speed, plunged down into shallow trough and up again, and went scrambling up the far side after her, the up-ended ground rattling and sidling as it passed between them like a rnoving belt.

  She took a deal of overtaking. He only overhauled her, finally, by driving his own horse to the uttermost. Even then he had to partly block her off, and reach out and snatch the reins from her hand, to get her to come to a stop. He quickly jumped down and pulled her off after him. She came down in his arms, inert, passive, like a sack, still looking upward to the last toward the goal she had set for herself.

  He had to shake her to try to get her to look at him. "What's the matter with you? I can't stand any more of this! It's starting to— Will you look at me? Will you tell me what's wrong with you?"

  She strained away from him even in his very arms, in a stubborn, wordless sort of way.

  He couldn't do anything with her. "Mitty, stop it! Stand still. You're not well. I'm going to get you out of here. Now come on, I'm taking you back to the finca with me."

  "I want to go. Let me go. I want to go up there. I want to see what's on the other side."

  "Mitty." His voice was tightening up.

  Her head rolled loosely around on her shoulders, though the eyes remained open. "I want to see the white-haired mother of us all," he thought he heard her say. "The snow-capped lady is calling to me. I want to see Coatli again."

  Suddenly his open hand had swung in sharply, slapped her on the face.

  She fell motionless. He looked down at her. Neither of them said anything. It was the first passage of violence there had ever been between them.

  He motioned her to climb up on his horse, braced her, placed her on the forepart of the saddle, and mounted directly behind her. Then he started down with her that way, leading her riderless horse alongside by its bridle.

  They didn't speak. Their heads were very close together all the way back. Their heads never once touched.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He came out, closing the door of their room quietly after him. He was restless, he couldn't sleep. She had retired some time before. Whether she was asleep or not he couldn't tell. Most likely not; he'd detected two studs of glistening brightness set into the dim outline of her face, where it lay motionless on the pillow, as if her eyes were open in the gloom.

  He had a strange feeling that he couldn't remember ever having had before where she was concerned. He hadn't wanted to stay in the room with her. He wanted

  to be away from her, for a little, by himself, or more preferably still, with just another man. Someone to talk with for a while, uncomplicated, simple, as he was. One of his own kind. Someone he could feel relaxed with, without having to be on guard every moment, watchful of every sound or sign he made. That sort of feeling.

  He drew a deep breath, without being aware of it himself, and went out on the veranda.

  A figure motionless against one of the uprights turned its head, and the half-swallowed grunt of greeting told him it was Mallory. That was what he wanted, someone like that to talk to.

  He went over to him, and they went through the small, friendly traffic of preparing to have a smoke together.

  Mallory's eyes met his questioningly over their mutual match flare in the darkness, as though sensing that Jones wanted to ask him something.

  He took a minute or two, and finally began, "I suppose'' you know the ground pretty well—er, over there on the upslope?"

  Mallory took another moment or two to answer. "As well as anyone, I guess."

  "Did you know there was a well, a sort of pool, up there at one place?"

  "No, there's no water up that way. It's dry as a bone. It's the first time I've heard of it, if there is one." He waited a while; then, since nothing more was forthcoming, he said, "Why, did you happen to find one up around there?"

  "Yes, we found one up there this morning," Jones said. He thought about it for a while. "I suppose some of your workmen around here would know of it, though."

  But if she couldn't talk Spanish and they couldn't talk English, how could they have told her about it anvway?

  "They might," Mallory admitted. "Though I still claim to know as much or more about.my own place than anyone else on it."

  Jones watched the paleness of his smoke trail off into the darkness past the veranda rail. "What's on the other side of that rise, anyway?" he asked presently.

  Mallory took a long time about answering, as though weighing his words. "Tierra de los Muerfos," he murmured at last. "The Land of the Dead. That's the hands' name for it, anyway. It's supposed to be peopled by ghosts, evil spirits."

  Jones chuckled a little. Mallory, he noticed, didn't join him in it.

  "It's got a bad reputation," Mallory went on quietly. "Every once in a while someone disappears around here. Then they blame it on the other side of the mountains. Some of them even claim to have seen the spirits of phantom warriors slinking along the skyline at night, and to have heard ghost drums pounding the still air. I don't take any stock in native superstitions myself, but it's undoubtedly true that from time to time somebody does vanish."

  "Lose their way and die of exposure, I suppose," Jones supplied. "Or a wild animal gets them. But then when they come across them—or their remains—again, doesn't that prove to them it had nothing to do with the mountains?"

  The finca manager didn't answer immediately. Then he shook his head a little. "They never do come across them again," he murmured. "They never have yet."

  They'd reached the well again.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's go back now. This is our usual turning-around place."

  She made no move to follow. "No, I want to go on to that cleft."

  He reached over and caught her horse by the bridle, abruptly. He held it fast that way, drawn in protectively close to his own. "It's a good additional half hour's ride, at least, as close as it looks from here. You won't see anything different from there than you already do from here."

  "But why don't you want to go?"

  "Because I say so. Don't ask me why."

  Suddenly, for no reason that he could account for, a clash of wills was in the making. It had nothing to do with domination. He could feel some uncertain element stiffening his determination against her, uneasiness or even a slight tincture of fear. He tugged commandingly at the gripped bridle and her horse came around obediently in company with his own.

  "Mitty, look at me. Listen to what I'm saying. I'm getting sick of this spooky nonsense. I forbid you to go any farther up that way. Today or any other time. He was surrpised at his own starkness of voice.

  He had strayed down by the native workers' shacks. There was nothing there, but he was at loose ends with himself. A chicken paused in its pecking about to quirk its head at him quizzically, one claw furled off the ground. An elderly woman, on her knees kneading moist meal with a stone roller down an inclined stone, looked up and grinned at him, showing blackened tooth crevices.

  He grinned back and stood watching her. She sprinkled a little water on the meal and rolled it thin. A youngster came to the doorless opening of the jacal behind her, his stomach thrust forward under a faded yellow shirt, and stood gaping at him. Another joined him, in a faded green shirt. Then a third, without any shift at all. A woman's voice called out something inside the hut, and the three of them disappeared.

  He found nothing to interest him and went on from there after a moment or two of loitering about. Down a way farther in the pleasant heat of the sunlight, strong but not wilting up here as it was down on the coast, he passed the well where they got their water. It had a little parapet of
cemented pumice stones built around it, and a little shed structure over it to keep the sun off. Then a little farther on there were a number of scrubby trees gathered together in one place, struggling, rather than growing, out of the sloped ground. They were too few to be called a grove, but they cast a light stenciling of shade about in this one place. He sat down under one of them and leaped his back against it, and let his eyes stray down the descending lines of coffee bushes, with small figures moving along them here and there.

  He didn't hear her step behind him until she was already standing there at his back.

  "Hello," she said shyly.

  There was a shade of formality lingering there that she had long ago discarded with Mitty.

  She came around in front of him and sat down beside him.

  He looked at her with a sort of approving disapproval. The approval Was for her appearance in general, the disapproval for a new detail he had not noticed before. "Where'd you get that?" he challenged her, almost as though he were her father.

  There was a crumbling and inexpert tracing of red overlapping her mouth, in particular her upper lip. It had slipped its moorings several times.

  "Mitty—Mrs. Jones—gave me one of hers." He shook his head a little. He felt like saying, "Why don't you leave yourself alone? Don't you know there isn't an older woman in the world who wouldn't give anything to be just as you are at this moment? Don't you know you're going to lose that soon enough, and never get it back?" But he didn't. It was none of his business.

  "I think she's wonderful," she said. "I wish I could be like her."

  "Why not be just the way you are? No two people can be alike."

  "You married her suddenly, didn't you?"

  "How'd you know that?"

  "She told me." She sighed wistfully. "I think that's awfully romantic."

  "I did, too." He realized he'd used the past tense. "I mean, I—guess it is."

  Presently he became aware of something. Or thought he did. He waited a moment to confirm it. "Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

  "Because I like to look at you." She didn't smile.

  He tried to change the subject. "Is that good for you, to keep eating so many of those green coffee beans?"

  "I just chew them and spit them out. You haven't been watching. What did you think I was doing when I kept turning my head away like that?"

  The conversation lapsed for a few moments. He thought idly, What do you talk about with kids that age? Suddenly she had reared to her knees, inching closer. "A caterpillar just got on you. Wait, don't move. I'll get it off. I can see it and you can't. It's on your collar, around at the back." She picked up a twig. "Keep your head over that way."

  He could feel the twig lightly brushing him once or twice. Finally he said, "It's taking you a long time. My neck is getting stiff."

  "He won't get on it. He keeps wanting to go on straight down your collar."

  He turned back. "There isn't anything there."

  She laughed, a little shakily. "I just said there was. I don't know why."

  He looked in another direction and swallowed.

  Presently she said, "I like to watch you smoke a cigarette. I like to watch everything you do. I like to watch my father, too, but—I don't know—I like to watch you in a different way than I like to watch him."

  I suppose they all have to go through this stage, he thought remorsefully. I should be some kid her own age, but she's been so cut off out here—

  He reached out and chucked her under the chin, mechanically, without any meaning.

  Instantly her smile died, and she looked at him with a sort of wistful gravity. Her face moved forward slightly, toward his own, then drew back again.

  He looked full at her for a minute, with a sort of inflexibility in the expression of his eyes. Then he got up.

  "Come on, we're going back now," he said quietly.

  He took her by the hand and led her firmly along with him, out at a little distance, as you do with a child who has been misbehaving.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Their room was still deeper in the throes of drawn than on other mornings when he awakened, yet she had already risen and gone out before him, he saw when he opened his eyes. He thought she might be waiting for him on the veranda, but when he dressed and went out there, there was no sign of her. He called to Pascual, and the latter came shuffling across the violet-tinted compound bringing a single horse with him.

  "The senora go already?"

  "Si, senor."

  "Why did you let her go alone?"

  "She said you would follow. She said not to trouble, that she knew the way."

  He might have known she'd do something like this, he told himself. He mounted and set off fast, along the familiar up trail they took together every day.

  Incredible dawn colors began to streak the slopes as he went along, but his face was sullen against their vivid glow. There were gashes of flesh pink, coral, and mauve, and overhead a sky that glistened like light-blue cellophane. More of that will-o'-the-wisp stuff, like down at Puerto Santo, he kept thinking.

  By the time he'd come to the spring, the sun had cleared the crest, the rainbow tints were gone, and the entire terrain around him had taken on a bisque monotone. He stopped there briefly and let his horse drink. Well, she'd got that cleft out of her system, at least. Maybe after this there wouldn't be any more attraction to it.

  He went on up from there, breaking new trail now for the first time. There was still no sign of her anywhere ahead. The cleft, as he finally neared it, proved to be somewhat in the nature of an optical illusion. That is to say, from below, from where they'd been before, it might have seemed to be a sharp notch, an indentation in the billowing horizon line above. Now it became simply a curved, semicircular aisle or lane, running between two moundlike elevations of ground, one partially telescoped behind the other. It was the superimposition of their tops that made a little dip in the skyline, but they were actually not abreast; one was forward of the other. In between them wound a little curving gully, of no great depth, scarcely deep enough to hide a rider's head from view when he was mounted. A great many little scrub bushes dotted the ground up here, and, uneven as it was, it was on the horizontal plane now, no longer sharply tilted. Somewhere beyond, the mountain must begin to descend again, into that mystic valley that had them all so terrified.

  His shadow and his horse's rippled along the side of the mound beside him as he rode along the little depressed track, undulating fluidly over scrub bushes, boulders, and lumps of sun-baked earth.

  And then as he slowly circled and the domelike impediment sidled rearward on its axis, she suddenly came into view.

  She had dismounted and her horse was nudging at one of the bushes off to one side of her. She was kneeling beside what at first sight seemed to be a cone-shaped pile of stones. Her outlines were thinned, colorless, almost transparent, unlike the horse, which stood out boldly black, although it was only a yard or two away from her. It was as though she were veiled with dust, and he couldn't tell what was causing it, for it blended so with the color of the barranca around her that it was invisible save where her own figure gave its filmy texture background.

  Then when he looked upward, over her, he saw that it wasn't dust, for it didn't hang hstlessly inert against the sky but rose in agile activity straight upward. It was faint smoke from a fire.

  As he came on toward her he saw her open a furled horse blanket that she had brought along with her, and fling it down with both hands so that the orifice of the stones was covered. Her figure cleared into its full color strength, and the upper smoke against the blue of the sky was erased as if by a gigantic puff of breath. Then she drew the blanket off again, and haze once more fumed from the stones. She turned to greet him as he dismounted, holding the blanket doubled and stretched out between her hands. There was something vainglorious in her attitude.

  He nudged his toe against the odd-looking cone of stones, the hollow in its middle as deep and as perfe
ctly rounded as though it had been cemented by hand. Scattered about lay twigs and branches of numerous small bushes that she must have uprooted with her bare hands.

  He looked at her curiously. "What did you light that for? Are you cold?"

  "No, I—I just came across this sort of kiln here and I thought I'd like to try it out. Those bushes bum wonderfully."

  "But how'd you know what it was for? You ckn hardly tell what it is now, even with the fire in it."

  "I don't know; it just seemed to be for that and nothing else." She gathered up a few more twigs and dropped them in.

  She watched for a moment. "Now it's gaining strength," she said. She tilted her head back admiringly. "Look. Look how straight up it goes. So thin and clear. Like a ribbon. Now watch when I do this."

  She took the blanket and flung it down, stifling the orifice.

  The slender column stopped short. It continued to rise, but the break in it rose with it, ending it as it went. Then as she raised the blanket it shot upward again.

  He laughed a little. "What are you trying to do, send signals by Morse code?"

  "I don't know the Morse code," she said gravely. She recapped it again, waited, and withdrew it once more.

  "Then what are you doing, making up a code of your own as you go along?"

  "I don't know any code of my own." "Then how do you know when to bring the damper down and when to take it off again?"

  "I don't. My arms just seem to do it of their own accord." She stared bemusedly upward, fascinated by her own handiwork.

  "Come on," he said, "that's enough." He sounded irritated about it even to himself. He kicked his foot down into the stones, scattering burning brands and smoldering twigs. A dozen separate little skeins of smoke now rose, but not strong enough to reach past the skyline, as the one main one previously had. They died with the faltering little sparks that caused them.

  He remounted, waited until she had done so too, and stood aside until she had gone ahead, then turned and rode after her, as if ushering her away.