VIII.
AFTER THE FIGHT.
Rayburn stood panting for a moment over the Indian's body; and then,having satisfied himself by a look around among our fallen enemies thatevery one of them was either dead or dying, he stooped down beside thestream to drink from it, and then to bathe an ugly gash in his foreheadmade by a spear thrust that luckily had glanced aside.
Indeed, we all had wounds or bruises by which we were likely toremember our fight for a good many days to come. In addition to the cuton his forehead, Rayburn had an arm badly bruised by a crack from aclub; Young had a cut in the calf of his leg that must have been made byone of the Indians after he had fallen wounded; Fray Antonio had theslight cut in his arm that he received in rescuing Pablo; a blow from aclub on my shoulder had completely disabled my left arm, and my head wasbeginning to ache from the wound in my forehead where the arrow hadnipped me; and Pablo, by a square knock-down blow on the head thattumbled him among the rocks, had a bad gash in his cheek and was bruisedall over. And yet the very first thing that boy did when the fight wasended--being still dazed, no doubt, by the blow on his head--was to playa bit of "Rory O'More" on his mouth-organ in order to make sure that hisbeloved "instrumentito" had not been injured by his fall. The sound ofthis air gave my heart a wrench, as I thought of poor Dennis; whosegallant race with death assuredly had saved all of us from dying withouta chance to strike a blow. And both of our Otomi Indians were dead too.
But while we had suffered thus severely we had the satisfaction ofknowing that we had inflicted a most signal punishment upon our enemies.Of the whole company that had attacked us--eighteen in number, as wefound by counting their bodies--only two remained alive when the fightended; and these two speedily relieved us of all responsibilityconcerning them by dying of their wounds. As Young tersely expressedit, we had "given the whole outfit a through bill of lading to KingdomCome!"
Notwithstanding the pain that I was in, the first thought that came tome after we had achieved peace (by the effective yet somewhat radicalprocess of killing all of our enemies) was concerning the strange weaponwith which Pablo had been fighting; and by his prompt use of which in mydefence my life had been saved. He had laid it upon a rock--whiletesting the integrity of his mouth-organ--and as I now carefullyexamined it I found that my glimpse of it as Pablo had mashed theIndian's head had not deceived me. It truly was a maccuahuitl, theprimitive Aztec sword, but very unlike any description of that weaponthat I had ever seen. The maccuahuitl, as described by the Spaniards atthe time of the conquest and as shown by the Aztec pictures of itpreserved in various museums, was a wooden blade from three and a halfto four feet long and from four to five inches wide. Along its twoedges, like great saw teeth, fragments of obsidian, about three incheslong and two inches wide, were inserted; and as these were keenly sharpthe weapon was a most ferocious one. The sword that I held in my handwas identical in its essential features with this primitive design; butit was shorter, narrower, and thinner. What was still more extraordinaryabout it was that, while it seemed to be made of brass, it had thebright glitter of gold and the temper and the elasticity of steel. Beingtested by bending, it instantly sprung straight again; andnotwithstanding the vigorous use that Pablo had been making of it on thebones of several Indians, the thin edges of the projecting teeth wereonly nicked a little--as the edge of a steel sword would have beennicked under like circumstances--and not one of these teeth was bent outof place, as assuredly would have been the case had the metal beenordinary brass.
Fray Antonio, by this time, had returned to us again--looking rathershamefaced because of the part that he had taken in the fight--and Ieagerly showed him this strange weapon that had been so strangely found;for Pablo's account of it was simply that, just as his revolver wasemptied upon the Indians charging towards us, when there was no time toreload, his eyes were caught by the glitter of the sword as it stuck ina cleft in a rock; whereupon he most gladly seized it--and instantlyused it to good purpose upon the Indian who was so close to ending me withhis spear, and subsequently contrived with it to send two more Indiansto their account.
Fray Antonio's knowledge of the matter having a wider practical rangethan mine, for he knew well the contents of the several Mexican museumsin which specimens of the primitive weapons are preserved, I thought itpossible that he might be able to match this curious maccuahuitl with anaccount of another like it which he somewhere had seen. That there wasno record in the books of this weapon made of metal I knew very well.But Fray Antonio's surprise over it was greater than my own; and hecertainly found more in it to please him than I did; for this metalmaccuahuitl, supposing it to belong to ancient times, settled in hisfavor a controversy that for some time past we had been amicably butearnestly carrying on. I had adopted the ingenious theory of my friendBandelier that the serrated edge of the Aztec sword was accidental;resulting from the breaking away in use of portions of what at first wasa continuous edge of obsidian. Fray Antonio, on the other hand, had heldfirmly to the ordinarily accepted opinion that the sword was such as Ihave described above (I must confess regretfully) the primitive weaponto have been.
My contention therefore was that the sword that Pablo had found was notan antique; and I fortified my position, as I considered impregnably, bythe fact that while Aztecs, before the Spanish conquest, did make someslight use of copper and gold, they assuredly had no knowledge whateverof either brass or steel. And my natural irritation very well may beimagined, by any one familiar with controversies of this nature, when Iadd that Fray Antonio endeavored to cut the ground from under me byasserting that, inasmuch as the weapon obviously was not made of brassor steel, my argument was based upon false premises and consequently ledto illogical conclusions. I am afraid that I showed a little temper onthis occasion; for Fray Antonio manifested a persistence in his defenceof what I regarded as his wholly untenable position that amounted towhat I held to be downright pig-headedness. And so, for a considerablelength of time, we stood there, among the bodies of the dead Indians,and first one of us and then the other handled the sword, and expressedwith increasing warmth our views respecting it and each other; and wemight have stood there much longer had not Young--with the best ofintentions, no doubt, but in a way the certainly was notagreeable--taken upon himself to bring our controversy for the timebeing to an end.
"I don't exactly know what you and the Padre are jawing about at such arate, Professor," he struck in; "but as well as I can catch on, it'sabout things which happened three or four hundred years ago. I don'twant to interrupt you, of course; but I do want the Padre--he knowssomething about surgery, as I saw the other day when he took that cactusthorn out of Pablo--to do something to plug up this hole in my leg. It'sbleeding a good deal, and it hurts like the very devil. And I guessRayburn'd be glad to have that slit in his forehead tied up too."
To do Fray Antonio justice, he took this interruption in better partthan I did; for I was deeply interested in the argument in which we wereengaged, and wished to continue it. But when I explained what Youngwanted, he turned to him at once, and very tenderly as well as veryskilfully dressed his wound; and then bandaged the gash in Rayburn'sforehead, and the cut in Pablo's cheek. Pablo decidedly objected to thisbandaging, for it put a peremptory stop for a while to his playing onhis mouth-organ. For me no surgery was required. Fray Antonio carefullyfelt my shoulder while he moved my arm--thereby hurting me mosthorribly--and as the result of his investigations he assured me that thebones were neither broken nor out of place.
Rayburn also examined the maccuahuitl with much interest. "Of course itis not brass," he said, "and of course it cannot possibly bephosphor-bronze. But, if such a thing were a metallurgical possibility,I should say that it was gold--treated in some manner that gives it asgreat a hardness as bronze receives when treated with phosphorus, butwith some chemical change wrought in its constitution that gives it alsothe tempered quality of steel. Nothing but gold, you see," he added,"could lie around out-of-doors this way and not get tarnished byoxidization."
"If I was you, Professor," said Young as I ceased speaking, "I wouldn'tbe so everlastin'ly down on these poor devils of Indians for whatthey've done. They killed Dennis, an' that's a pretty bad business; an'they got away with our two _mozos_, too; an' they've pretty wellbattered th' rest of us. But I take it that we've about evened things upby killin' eighteen of 'em--or six of their crowd dead for each one deadin ours. I guess we can call that part of th' business about square. Butwhat I'm gettin' at is, if it hadn't been for the Indians we'd neverhave come up this valley; an' so we'd never have struck th' King'ssymbol trail at all."
"But what good did it do us to find it, when we could not follow it?" Iasked. "We cannot go back to examine the sign without risking our lives;and unless we do examine it we cannot know where the next one is, and sothe trail is lost."
"I've just been waitin'," said Young, "t' see if I was th' only man inthis party that God-a-mighty'd given a pair of eyes to. I guess I am.Suppose you just get up, Professor, an' turn around, an' take a look atthat place where there's a brown mark on th' side of th' rock; an'suppose th' rest of you look there too. If that isn't th' King's symbol,just as plain as th' noses in all your faces, I'll eat every dead Indianin this canon."
And Young spoke the truth. Just above the cleft whence Pablo had takenthe sword, graven so deeply in the rock that after all the weathering ofcenturies it still remained distinct and clear, was identically the samefigure that Fray Francisco in the far past time had represented in hisletter, and that was repeated also on the far more ancient piece ofgold. Above it was cut an arrow that pointed directly up the canon.
It was a good thing that something came to cheer us just then; for whatwith the death of Dennis and of our two poor Indians, and our own hurts,and the melancholy feeling that must oppress men always--save those ofcruel and hardened natures--when a fight is ended in which they havespilled freely human blood, we all were oppressed sensibly by aconsuming sadness.
But here was cheer indeed. Not only had we surely found the trail atlast, but we found it leading in precisely the direction that at thatmoment we desired to go. For us to return down the valley to the opencountry, we knew was full of most signal danger; for the Indians who sounaccountably had declined to take part in attacking us assuredly werelying in wait for us by the way. Our only chance to escape them was tostrike into the mountains; and the sign that we now had gave promisethat we should find some sort of a path along which we might go.Therefore it was with good heart that we set about getting as far intothe depths of the canon as possible before night should be wholly uponus; trusting, in regard to possible pursuit, somewhat to thesuperstition of the Indians which so unaccountably yet so obviously hadbeen aroused, and also to the wholesome dread that they must have of usupon finding that every one of their companions had been slain. Thebodies of our poor Otomis we placed in a deep fissure in the rock, andthere heaped stones upon them, while Fray Antonio said over them thebriefer office; but the body of Dennis we carried with us, that we mightgive him a more tender and reverent burial in gratitude for his bravestruggle to save our lives when he knew that his own life was lost. Asfor the eighteen dead Indians--who had invited the death that sopromptly had come to them--we did not bother ourselves about them atall. We left them to the coyotes.
The Aztec Treasure-House Page 10
