CANNON IS BROUGHT TO BEAR.
Long and patiently had the environed garrison been awaiting the token of well faring with the adventurers who had so daringly left that shelter.
Only in the end of the night had the sudden, and, for the moment, inexplicable apparition of the cattle on which had been imposed that fiery burden, seemed to reveal the operations of their friends.
The charge of the furious and panic-stricken creatures, whose hides were singed and smoked with a nauseating odour, was unresisted by the rebels, huddled together just out of gunshot of the farm, in the obscurity. Nevertheless, as soon as the true nature of this attack was clear, and the more active Indians had speared those animals which had not broken their necks and extinguished the flames in the ditch, the alarm calmed down. It was at this juncture that don Benito, at the head of a hundred horsemen, galloped out of the corral and executed a terrible slashing and hewing, sweeping round amid carnage, and returning with insignificant loss. The moral effect was even greater than the material, for those of the insurgents who had previously thought nothing of rushing up to the farmhouse, and firing a shot at random amid tipsy threats and obscene imprecations, withdrew to a safe distance, and vociferated for the self-constituted leaders to evince their genius.
It was as don Benito's troop returned within the defences that they heard, to their dismay, the well-known war cry of the Apaches only too recently impressed on the hearing of all, and the shout of their newfound robber allies.
Of Oliver, the Englishman, and their followers, no intelligence whatever. It is only doing the master of the farm justice, as well as his family, to say that deep distress was added to that they felt in their plight with the fear that their daring friends had all fallen into some trap of the cunning savages now foremost in opposition.
The aurora appeared, and the whole valley was revealed, full of the rebels, amongst whom was added, as well as the sixty marauders who held captain Pedrillo as chief, the full hundred Apaches, whose proud and domineering carriage defined them from the Yaquis born under the yoke which these had never experienced. Besides, before the heat of the day forced both besiegers and besieged to take a siesta, the already enormous concourse was swollen by the last fragments of the dispersed column finding their way thither, burdened with plunder.
All the morning had passed in rash and irregular attacks on the houses, but when they were not repulsed, the few score Indians who clambered over the stockade were cut down by the horsemen inside. Twice the Apaches had charged up to the walls, but, apparently, merely to test the watchfulness of the inmates and the range of their firearms, for they made no assault on the palisades, to pull and hack at which, or even more to alight and clamber over, would have been ignoble in a horse Indian.
Still no sign of the party that had sallied forth.
Successful in that sally of their own, the Mexican gentlemen wished to retaliate on the Apaches in particular for the insult implied in their departing from their war custom of never charging an enclosure or building of any kind. But don Benito reminded them of the ladies who would be undefended if the horsemen were cut off, and pointed to the swarms of carousing Indians blackening the rising ground, where they had mounted to watch the farm with lustful gaze.
Little by little, after Pedrillo and his mongrels had quieted the hatred of the revolted Yaquis for anyone who reminded them of the superior race, he obtained a kind of rule over their leaders, only less potent than that which they had promptly accorded the Apaches. Iron Shirt was an idol. The fact of his having but three days before swept down upon that same stronghold still defying their hosts, and snatched the proprietor's daughter and the cream of the horses merrily away, sufficed to make each of these warriors to be followed by a tag-rag of open-eyed Yaquis wherever they strayed in the wide encampment.
The food and liquor were placed under guard; the drunkards, who were plunged in stupor, were bundled into the hollows out of the way, the horse thieves who had been racing about were pulled off the bare backs, and made to squat down and await orders for their superabundant energy to be more profitably expended. The weapons were served out anew, with some discrimination as to the bearer, so that the strong were no longer puzzled with arms for which light-handed urchins sufficed, and the youths disembarrassed of immense spears like Goliath's, and clubs that the famous giant races of the Hidden Cities could alone have swung.
The women and children, too, were pushed back, and set to cooking and other menial offices, which must have bewildered them as to the advantages of revolution.
Therefore, Oliver and his associates soon beheld the impassible barrier spread out broadly between them, and the surrounded fort became during the day more and more formidable by these evidences of discipline.
Happily their neighbourhood was not suspected. The column defeated on the previous night was composed of ignorant boors, who thought not at all by day to give an intelligible account of the lancers, who, indeed, having charged them from the ambush, were not well examined in the hurry-scurry.
"What are they waiting for?" queried Mr. Gladsden, impatiently. "Surely not for more reinforcements, when they are already a hundred to one!"
"That's the answer," said the white hunter. "Yon long string of naked copperskins dragging that shining object at their tail."
"A cannon?"
"Yes! Two shots o' that and thar will be a hole in the farmhouse that a herd of buffalo might traverse. Good night to our hidalgo if they get that piece trained on the house. When a bullet hits those grey blocks, hewn out of the volcano pumice stone, it will crumble like glass, and no two ways about it. The casa is a case."
"And can we do nothing, absolutely nothing? Can we not even pierce that multitude, and enter among our friends and die with them."
"Well, I like a gentleman that has boys in the tender leaf still, a-talking of dying anywhar's and so airly yit. Ef you hanker to run the resk o' dying, that's a man's talk, and you can volunteer to come along with me."
"Come along with you, Oliver?"
"Yes. If that cannon fires twice into that house, I tell 'ee, thar'll be nothing but the worst kind of smashed fruit that ever figgered in an old aunty's preserve pots. They may fire her off once, but not twice, if I hev' the right sort of luck in my idee. I think this sport hes gone quite far enough."
By this time Mr. Gladsden had become reconciled to Oliver having "idees."
"I am with you," he simply said, "and the more desperate the enterprise, the better it bids to quiet my blood, which is at boiling point."
"You'll hev' all the despiritness you want," answered the Oregonian.
Then, turning to the Mexicans, who had waited the conclusion of their dialogue restlessly, he continued:
"Whar's them skyrockets? Hand 'em here, Silvano. Keep close as you hev' done all along. When you see those fireworks cavorting (curvetting) around that big camp right smart, you sail in down the hill and stick every red nigger till you are right up to the house, if your heart backs your breastbone so far. And mark! Your government offers two hundred and fifty dollars for Injin scalps, and you kin have my share this trip, and welkim!"
His speech was received with enthusiasm, notably the peroration. He illustrated his intention to make scalps by throwing off his uniform coat, cutting his shirtsleeves off at the shoulder, and removing the spurs which he had donned for the ride. Then he took up a handful of live oak leaves, bruised them, and dyed his bared arms, neck and face with the juice to a brown hue. At his suggestion, the Englishman left his arms free and disguised his fairness of hue in the same manner.
"Do you see that rising ground up which they are toiling with that big gun? That's our aim. Come on!"
"In the midst of them?"
"Plum centre."
Which was all the reply the query elicited.
The Yaquis occupied the further side of a long valley, almost in an unbroken mass. These who elsewhere completed an environment of the hacienda were in groups, which changed position at fancy, and were less warlike than the main body. The rear was left to a natural guard; the inaccessibility of the hill, where, too, a barranca, or deep chasm, with perpendicular sides, caused by a torrent suddenly cutting its way to a subterranean reservoir, almost at right angles, divided the incline.
The watch, as is common with a sudden gathering, was nobody's business.
The Apaches and the Mexican half-breeds, self-constituted chiefs, were now scattered among the Yaquis, teaching the handling of weapons and promising them all manner of delights when the farm should be captured.
Oregon Ol. and his associate struck from the wood which concealed their companions, away at first from the valley, but on arriving fairly upon the north side, they advanced parallel with its crest, every now and then perceiving a flag waving on top of the hacienda. The ground was so rough that they had alternations of leaps and creeps over obstacles of which the hunter made light, but which delayed the Englishman. On reaching the gorge, the former paused to admit of the other coming up.
"Thar's our route," said the hunter, pointing down into this open tunnel and along its incline upward, "We kin settle down to a long scramble, but all the way thar'll be no alarms; those rum soakers haven't a good eye among the heap."
"That is the more gratifying, as there are enough of them to convert us into a pair of pincushions with their arrows."
Nevertheless, he could not help a shiver of repugnance to adventuring at such a risk.
"I do not say we could do it by night, for down thar the twilight allers dwells, save whar the line of sun glare travels at the bottom. But thar is no other road."
They spent a few moments in further disguise, removing or staining with red oxides every part of their remaining attire and exposed skin which would not favour the supposition to a chance observer that they were Indians floundering in the abyss where they had blundered during intoxication. They were armed only with knives and revolvers, but each carried one of the rockets.
They proceeded to descend the steep up and down side with all the precaution requisite. Difficult was not the word for their task, for none but a maniac or a lover or such as these staking all on the chance of being infinite service to their fellows, would have hazarded themselves.
The descent was a series of slides, checked by dwarf shrubs and rocks of all imaginable forms, cut, ground, polished, jagged by the water and sand; now and then, without any warnings, there were cracks and holes three or four yards wide at the remote bottom of which was to be heard a melancholy soughing and roaring as of raging demons or oppressed souls. Out of several, a thick, noisome, warm vapour sluggishly oozed. Once, when they had hardly succeeded in crossing a part of which the rim was of crumbling sand, Oliver had made a remark on the judiciousness of his comrade awaiting him there, but the answer was so stern and impregnated with such resolution that he never again remonstrated.
At last the centre of the trough was attained.
But here the chaos of sand, shrubs, and rocks, became next to inextricable, and to proceed up through the hindrances, varying each instant in material but not in degree, would have been pronounced simply preposterous by the most exacting.
Nevertheless, Oliver was a man whom nothing could stop in his purpose, for he twined in and out, crawled as supple as a serpent, thought nothing of his hands and knees exposed to the adamantine sands and the harsh catclaw bushes that would have frightened the half-naked savages, and if ofttimes he was compelled to retrace his steps when he had ventured into a non-egress, it was only the better to resume his unwearied way.
"I'm no hog," growled he once, when he paused to suck a more than usually deep briar scratch which he believed poisonous, "and I know when I hev' my fill o' sich 'snaking,' but it's got to be did. Besides," looking up from the semiobscurity to the top of the gorge where the sky glowed the more gorgeously by contrast, "night must not catch us no farther up, and agen," sniffing like an old sailor, "ain't thar rain in the air?"
"I am stifled with the sulphur reeking out of these cracks," returned his companion; "on this roof of Old Nick's kitchen, I really am not aware I have a nose upon me for weather scenting."
Oliver grunted as a kind of quiet laugh, and on he scrambled.
At the same time that one would have deemed all his faculties absorbed in picking the course and caring for his own safety, the hunter found time, not merely to caution his comrade, but to intervene at moments of peril. This constant attention in safekeeping once even almost led to his losing his life or limbs, for in choosing for himself the wider part of a crack, the edge gave way altogether, and but for Gladsden clutching by the side, with a little fold of the skin, too, in the grasp, the hunter must have fallen within the crust.
"Thank'ee, pard.!" observed the guide, wincing comically; "That time you grabbed flesh and ha'r. A little more of sich a grip, an' you'd hev' had to leave me behind, sot here; on my hind legs, a-howling!"
At last, after nearly twice the three hours assigned too rashly for the whole effort had been spent in scaling the anfractuosities at which a mountain sheep would have baulked, they had at all events ascended the barranca and were under the centre of the part of the hill where the Yaquis had dragged an old forty-pounder, brought over by the conquerors, and for long rusting at some farm in the neighbourhood. Their rejoicing at the accomplishment of their work coincided so closely with that of the two white men that the latter smiled to be so indirectly cheered.
Stopping to take breath, they looked back with relief and pride at the horrible gulfy path which they had overcome, darkening into blackness with the failing light.
Whilst the cannon was placed on some logs so that it could be trained on the hacienda, to the level of which this hill almost rose, the Yaquis were silent, so interested were they in the operation superintended by Lieutenant Garcia, inflated into abnormal pomposity by becoming the cynosure.
"Up!" said Oliver in this silence.
They had the abrupt side to climb when they would be beside the amateur artillerists. After what they had overcome this affair was merely one of time. The brink of the barranca was armed by stony mounds and the wrecks of half a dozen pines of the giant species, which must have been an imposing sight for miles around before the lightning or the tempest shattered them. Ensconced in this natural barricade, not more than three hundred feet from the nearest of the foe, they could easily take the repose they deserved, whilst studying the scene and the actors.
On their front, to the right, the hacienda and its corrals, into which they could gaze across the gully; farther away the forest where the Mexican detachment lay. Beside them, the hill covered with the insurgents, and more and still more of them in the vales. Disseminated thus, they seemed a veritable swarm of locusts, such as covers the plains of Arizona and Colorado.
They recognised without difficulty Captain Pedrillo on his horse, with his wooden leg sticking out and twitching free of the stirrup; the Apache chiefs, knowing nothing about ordnance, left the Mexicans to manage the loading of the cannon with blasting powder. A pile of the powder cans, some partly open and some altogether stove in and lidless, with all the carelessness of the inexperienced, stood near the piece on its wooden frame; at that distance the Englishman could even see the brand on the tins of the sun in glory of the Rayo del Sol Mining Company, from the works of which, by Regulus Pueblo, they had been taken by its truant ore carriers.
Darkness fell, deeper than usually, which confirmed Oliver in his forecast as to a tempest approaching, but the peons worked on at the clumsy pedestal of the cannon by the flare of torches.
Seeing that the piece would surely be in place, Captain Pedrillo, Iron Shirt, and the Apache subchiefs went into a large tent on the brow of the hill. It was open on the face towards the hacienda above, and consequently they were no longer visible to the two adventurers, who could see only the guard of Indians at the same point.