Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

PART THREE

When Sard found that his bicycle was gone, he thought that the lodge-keepers had taken it within the lodge. He knocked at the lodge door to ask; getting no answer, he looked within: the lodge was empty, the bicycle was not there.

It was dim in that track through the forest: Sard struck a match to see what marks were on the ground. The earth was still moist from the rains. Two or three matches showed him that someone with long feet had taken two strides out of the road, wheeled the bicycle into the road and had then ridden away upon it. The tyre tracks were firmly printed on the road; the thief was no doubt heavy as well as tall.

Sard had never been heard to swear, either on deck or aloft; he did not swear now. He thought, “I am well paid, for leaving it out of my sight in a place like this. But he cannot be more than five minutes ahead of me, and may be only a minute. If I run, I may catch him.”

He took two more matches, carefully examined the tracks and made sure, mainly from the length of the feet, that the thief was a tall negro, wearing boots which needed soling, and that he was riding, not very fast, into the forest, away from Las Palomas. “I’ll catch him,” he said, “but I’ll have to be quick.”

He set off at a slow lope along the forest road, thinking that when he reached Enobbio’s, if he had not caught the thief, he would have to hire a horse, and gallop back to his duty. “I’m running it very close,” he said, “but I’ll do it yet. If the worst comes to the worst, the police-boat would run me on board, even if she’s out as far as the Rip-Raps. I’ve got half an hour of possible time; if I ride by the beach, thirty-five minutes.”

He stopped at the bridge to have another look at the tracks: they were still there, leading on towards Enobbio’s; so he set off again, at a quicker pace, through the forest, which was evil all about him all the time. He made good way to the clearing, which shone from the forge fire. A lamp was lit in the inn. Enobbio sat with his wife at a table there, eating frijoles from earthen platters and drinking wine and water from cups of horn. Sard hailed them at the door:

“Good-evening, señora and señor. May I intrude upon your peace to ask: Have you seen anyone ride by on a bicycle?”

“Yes, señor,” Enobbio’s wife said, “a negro rode by two minutes past.”

“It was more than two minutes, my heart,” Enobbio said, “for to my mind it cannot have been since we sat down to supper.”

“Desire of my eyes,” his wife said, “it was when you went to the forge for the bread. When I say two minutes, I do not tie myself to a second, but to two minutes, which the world knows to be a space of time. It was a space of time since the negro rode past. I am not one, as it is well known, like these giglots and inglesas and ayankiadas, whom one sees in Las Palomas, may the Lord have vengeance on them, shameless as they are, even as Jezebel, always painting and purple-powdering and making their eyes to shine with poison; I am not one, I say, like these, to spend my time in noticing each male who passes and in endeavouring to ensnare his soul. No, my heart’s affection, Enobbio mio, when a male passes, I thank God that God has created women differently, in such a way that they can regard such passing with indifference. Therefore, when a negro passes or when a white man passes, be he an Emperor of Rome or decked even as a pumper in the fire-brigade, I can control myself, I can think calmly, even as St. Lawrence upon the gridiron, of other things. Therefore, when this negro who so suddenly excites your jealousy, rode past, I did not hasten to the clock of San Agostino, nor yet to my confessor, nor to the Four Liars of Las Palomas, where four clocks together tell each a different time to a different road, to make sure of the precise instant at which he passed. For to me, as one more dowered with knowledge would have known, a negro is but a negro and a passing a passing.”

“This, O affection of my life,” Enobbio said, “no man dare question. But, señor, permit us to request you to eat and drink, reclining at your ease upon this chair, so that you may enquire concerning this negro more as becomes you.”

“Thank you, indeed,” Sard said, “would that I might; but I am pressed both by spur and quirt, and cannot stay. May I ask the señora whether she noticed in which direction the negro rode, when it fortuned that he had the honour to pass her?”

“In which direction, joy of my hearth,” Enobbio asked, “did this negro proceed?”

“Sun of my worldly life,” his wife replied, “it is said that, at the allotting of talents, the Padre Eterno gave to woman such talents as man would not sensibly feel the need of. Even as, in equipping her with flesh, He allotted to her that rib which man could not use and has not missed, so in endowing her with mental faculties, which some call reason and others soul, He chose those qualities of acuteness which man, though made loutish by their lack, could not, when he had them, use. Thus it comes about that the wife blushes for her husband in conversation before strangers. For, behold, had not the Padre Eterno deprived you of such acuteness, you would have perceived that sitting as I have been sitting, facing the open door, which we have not yet to keep closed (as is our custom, señor, later in the season, on account of the flies) I could indeed perceive the approach of the negro upon the bicycle, coming from the forest towards me, but not without showing indecent curiosity could I tell into which direction he proceeded; nor, as I have said, should I, in any case, have observed, since as it is well known, a road is as a brook, in which one regards what passes, but not what is past.”

“Señor,” Enobbio said, “beyond the forge there are three ways; to the sea, to the north and to the mines. The negro must have ridden on one of these. Let us examine the tracks, since there is light enough. Is it possible that you should desire to stay this negro?”

“He has stolen the bicycle, which I need.”

“Let us, then, be swift,” Enobbio said.

The tracks at the road-meet led away to the left, into the forest.

“You see,” Enobbio said, “it goes there, this wheel-track, to the direction of the mines. You see, Camilla mia, this thief will be one of the negroes of Los Jardinillos.”

“They are indeed a thievish company,” Camilla said. “But if the señor be swift, he will confound the thief in the moment of his exultation.”

“How far is it to Los Jardinillos?” Sard asked.

“It cannot take long if taken swiftly,” Camilla said.

“My love,” Enobbio said, “it is the half of a league, or two kilometres. It would take the señor twenty minutes or more, only to the clearing.”

“It may well be, my earthly consolation,” Camilla said, “that if the señor should walk, or indeed trot, to Los Jardinillos, his progress would not be swifter than a walk or trot. But as my remark suggested, comrade of my earthly trial, if the señor should proceed swiftly, his arrival would be likewise swift.”

“Can you lend me a bicycle or horse,” Sard asked, “so that I can go in chase?”

“Alas, we have neither.”

“Is there anyone here who might lend either?”

“There is no one here with horse or bicycle. I have, by the blessing of God, a small ass; but God has afflicted him with worms, doubtless lest I should become proud.”

“Are there many negroes in Los Jardinillos?”

“There are fifty, señor, and no whites. Doubtless you know him who has taken your bicycle.”

“I do not,” Sard said: “I am following so that I may know him.”

Enobbio did not answer this. Sard noticed that the husband and wife looked at each other, with a look as though the bottom had fallen out of their comprehension.

“Assuredly,” Enobbio said at last.

“Assuredly,” Camilla answered. They looked at each other again. As in a Latin exercise, Sard was conscious of a good many words “understood.”

“Assuredly,” Enobbio said at last, in a different tone, “the señor will carry weapons?”

“I am a sailor,” Sard answered. “A sailor has always ten weapons and a knife.”

He saw in a flash that he had no chance of retaking the bicycle that night by himself.

“I am a sailor,” he continued. “The bicycle was to take me to the quay, where I must be in all speed. Has anyone here a cart or conveyance to take me there, for money paid, or had I better run?”

“Paco has a horse, which is in Las Palomas this day,” Enobbio said. “His son, Enrique, has a mule.”

“Enrique is indeed by God’s mercy the owner of a mule,” Camilla said, “but on this day he is with the mule, packing stores to the railway siding for the miners.”

“A railway siding,” Sard said. “They might run me to Las Palomas in a truck.”

“The rail does not run to Las Palomas, señor. It runs from the mines of Tloatlucan to the seashore here, where barges come for the copper.”

“Then I had better run,” Sard said.

“Run,” Enobbio said, “run to Las Palomas?”

“Yes.”

“It is a league and a half.”

“Even so. I must be on board my ship within half an hour.”

“But you could not run more than a league. Stay, señor, let me consult my wife. Tell me, my heart, is not Miguel stabling horses each night in the old huts near the salt-pans?”

“Who knows what Miguel does? His doings, being modernist, do not concern us, but rather stir our horror.”

“It is true, my life, that Miguel errs in mind, but not, my delight, in heart. In his heart he may be the instrument of good. Listen, señor. In less than one kilometre north-east from this are salt-pans near the beach, with huts. Run thither by this track to the right. It is likely that at this time you will find Miguel there with the horses of his occupation. He, for money if not for love, will lend you a horse and ride with you, so that he may lead it back. Say that I, Enobbio, sent you, knowing the goodness of his nature. Thus will you reach your ship in time, and in no other way can you do this.”

“You say that it is only likely that he will be there.”

“He will be there, señor,” Camilla said; “he is always there at this hour with his horses: never does he fail.”

“You may count quite certainly on his being there and on his lending you a horse,” Enobbio said. “I, who am Enobbio, will serve you as to bread and lodging for a year, without reward, should he not be there.”

“He will lend assuredly,” Camilla said, “to any señor such as the señor whose need is as the señor’s.”

Sard felt in her speech the insincerity of one anxious to be rid of him: he made up his mind at once.

“Can I reach the seashore by this path to the right?”

“Assuredly, señor. Miguel and the salt-pans are on the seashore.”

“I mean, can I come at once to the seashore?”

“Assuredly, señor.”

“It is not a good path, save where men have gone,” Enobbio said. “In fact, it is no path, but what is opposite to path.”

“I must risk that.”

Sard thanked them both for their kindness and apologised for having disturbed them at their supper. He set off at a fast trot along the path towards the salt-pans. He meant to burst through the thickets to the seashore and then run straight along the beach as hard as he could put foot to it, to the water-front.

“It is a full three miles,” he thought, “even by the beach; but with luck I can be there by half-past. The old man will give me some grace, and the police-boat may be there; but I’ll do it somehow.”

In a couple of hundred yards from the clearing, he put his arm before his eyes and thrust into the bushes towards the sea. He judged that the sea beach would be about half a mile from him and that he would save at least three-quarters of a mile by going by the beach. The thought of passing right under the walls of Los Xicales helped in his decision.

He burst through his thicket into a sort of meadow of tussocks, over which he made good time. Beyond the tussocks the woods began again, shutting out all his bearings, but by taking a departure he kept a straight course, as he thought, from the point where he left the track. Just inside the woods, when he came into them, was a tangle of thorn along which he had to run for a hundred yards before he could find a way through. He came out on to a soft patch, which had harder ground beneath it, though all was covered with the wreck of thorns which the bog had killed. He floundered across it to the other side, which was a rise of red earth covered with pines. He skirted the rise to a point where it was split by a gully, which barred his progress.

Not more than a year or two before, some rains heavier than usual had made all the upper ground a bog. This from its weight had at last torn through the bank beyond it and gone in a torrent of mud and water into a ravine below. All along the sides of this ravine were the rampikes of trees, killed by the stuff brought down, but still standing, sometimes with half their roots laid bare. Not less than fifty of these trees had already been picked and sucked to their bones by the ravin of tropical life. They now stood like a valley of bones come to life. They stood up white in the dusk, waving their arms. Many of them glistened with decay or with vermin shining from decay. On many of them fungus had seized with a greed that seemed to have purpose and plan. One quite near to Sard was a tree grey with death, barkless to the tips and swathed with a sprawl of fungus that was scarlet at its fringes. It was as though the fungus had sucked out all the blood from its victim, except these last drops.

Many trees had fallen into the ruin of the bog and now lay there, submerged or half submerged in mud. The antlers of their branches were white. Rank things had sprouted out and hoisted themselves up by these prongs. One bulk or stump of a tree which Sard saw in the swamp was covered with xicales, all forward, in profuse blossom, a mass of blue and white, crawled on by gorged flies.

Flowers like enormous flags shot up on firm fleshy stalks among the morass. Some, which were very tall, had whitish blossoms as big as faces, splotched with darkness like faces; these seemed to lean forward and mow at Sard; they were like ghosts, lean and intense, but very beautiful.

All that place of death, thick as death, sickly with the forms and the smell of death, with that evil, low, over-abundant life which brings death, had a sort of weltering chuckle as though it exulted in its rottenness. The water in its pockets droned to puddle below, there was a suck of noise like that of a beast trying to get out, but sinking back.

All this danger barred Sard’s path in the worst possible way: it shut him from the beach and from the port: it ran north-west and south-east across his course.

“I’ll get across,” he said: “I’m not going to lose my passage. Now that I have come this way, I will go this way.”

The light was off the place and the sun was down, but it was daylight still. He marked a place in the ravine, below the xicales flowers, where he thought there would be a fairly easy crossing. A fallen tree lay sloped there as a safe approach or step into a pool of water which might be forded or swum. Beyond the pool two great trees lay locked together; they were barkless, like the rest, yet so placed in the mud that Sard judged that he could cross by them, or almost cross, to the further side of the gully. The last two or three yards beyond the trees looked dangerous, but not bad enough to stop him. It was quicker to cross than to go round, whichever way he tried it.

He had no time nor very good light for survey. He made up his mind and went at it within thirty seconds, quoting his sea-proverb of “the sooner the quicker.” Blood-sucking water-midges were already at him in a swarm: the drone of their horns called up their reserves: a faint smoke of them was rising. He jumped like a cat from tussock to tussock, scrambled over the roots of the tree on to the trunk, steadied himself, and then balanced like a tight-rope walker down the bole to the water. He saw the whiteness of the pilled boughs in the ink of that pond stretching deep down. He was amazed at the depth of the water. “Better deep water than mud,” he said; so in he went with a thrust which carried him across.

He edged along the nearer of the fallen trees, caught a good hold of a bough, felt bottom with his feet, got one foot against the bole, gave a great heave, and was instantly backwards in the water with the broken bough on top of him. He came up with his eyes full of touchwood, and felt something run along his head. He brushed it off into the water and caught his tree again: something ran along his hand; he brushed it off, fearing a scorpion; but instantly other things ran in its place. He shook them off and backed away, till he saw that the things were wood-eating beetles, whose colony he had disturbed. “A scorpion would be a bore,” he said.

He trod water while he looked for a better place. He swam in, caught a bough, swung himself up, and instantly went backwards into the water for the second time with the bough in his hand.

He came up, somewhat troubled, for a third attempt. This time he dodged in under the boughs, laid hold of the body of the tree and hove his weight on to it.

With a sort of flounder of deliberation, the tree moved sideways to his weight, then tilted suddenly as the heavy branches gave leverage, then it rolled over into deeper water, carrying Sard down.

Sard had learned in a hard school to look out, to know when to let go and when to stand-from-under. He went down with the tree as it rolled, right under water, so that he never saw his hat again, but he kept above the tree and emerged when it settled. Very cautiously he moved along its bulk, as soon as it was firm, with the feeling that he was riding a beast whose ways were not to be trusted. He felt it waver in front of him and settle behind him as the submerged boughs went deeper into the mud. There came a sudden crack and drop, as these gave way: the tree soused him to his waist and then steadied. It was just then that he felt vicious pricking bites in his legs as the leeches began.

He stood upon the bole and had “a look-see.” The second tree, which was to be his gang-plank to the shore, was now further away than it had been. He could no longer step to it from where he was. “A little more swimming,” he muttered: so in he went to be done with it.

The second tree was steady in the mud, but as he neared it, he saw that the yellow-tail bees had a nest in the bole. Away from the nest and dangling from the boughs, there were strings of withered poison-ivy, which he knew both by sight and from experience. He swam inshore as far as he could to avoid these dangers, then scrambled up upon the bole and slipped along it to the roots. A few bees came round him, to make sure, but did not attack; he dodged the poison-plant. He scrambled up the gabion of roots, all tangled and earthed, to look beyond at the banks. As he stood up, the cloud of water-midges settled down upon him: ants came from earth of the roots to bite him: the leeches of the pond bit and sucked.

He had not liked the look of the banks from the other side, but he liked their look much less from near at hand. They were nine feet from him beyond a mud pond of unknown depth. They rose rather steeply from this mud pond, in a bulge of wet, red, oozing mud, which shone and trickled. A few blades of grass grew out of this mud, but not enough to give it firmness. The mass looked to be bulging out to burst. A rain-storm more, or the weight of a body trying to climb it, would bring it all down like an avalanche out of which there would be no rising. The bank of mud was eight or nine feet high: above it there was a shoot of reeds sheathed in pale grey dangling and shining husks. “If I can get hold of the reeds,” he said, “I’ll be out of this in half a minute; if I can’t, I may never be heard of again. That mud looks evil; but the longer I look, the less I shall see. There’s a star already.”

Looking up from where he was, he saw a blackness of trees above and beyond the reeds. Against the blackness, the pale fluffy flowers of the reeds stood out like gun sponges, with white moths, as big as humming birds, wavering over them: above them a star appeared in a sky changing from greenish to violet. It grew rapidly darker: or, rather, objects became less distinct and the pilled branches more uncanny.

“Come along,” he said. He clambered over the roots, hung on by a root which stood his test, and edged out along submerged roots till he touched the mud. It was soft, bulging, full of evil, with neither foot nor hand-hold. “If that should come down,” he said, “I shall be gulfed, like that man in the Venturer who got under the wheat-tip in the hold and wasn’t heard of till we got the hatches off in Hamburg five months later. But with this difference: I shall never be heard of again. The way to get up that mud is to drive in stakes to climb by.”

There were many branches ready to hand. He tore a stake and thrust it into the mud. It sank in for three feet as easily as if the mud were something softer than butter. With a sobbing noise, followed by a gurgle, some reddish water, rapidly turning to something black, iridescent and semi-solid, exuded from about it. Sard drove in a second stake above it, with a third above that: at each thrust the bank quaked and water or liquid mud exuded: there was also an ominous sag in the body of the bank. “Neck or nothing,” Sard said. He drove in a fourth stake and instantly swung himself up on to the gabion or fan of the roots by which he held. He was only just in time. The fourth stake broke the last strength of the barrier: it gave outwards: a shoot of water spurted it outwards: a swirl of running mud followed the shoot: then it all came down with a crash, which picked up Sard’s tree, canted it out to mid-gully, and dashed it against a dam of other trees, on to which Sard was pitched.

He picked himself up and slipped along a tree bole to a hand-hold by which he swung himself up to safety, just as the dam gave way. He was back almost at his starting-point, wet to the skin, mud to the thigh, bitten, sucked and foiled. The long pent-up seepings of the rains poured down from the burst bank before him. “I’m well out of that,” he thought, “but I’m going to cross this gully; for it is the short way and I still have time.”

He trotted up the gully for a few yards, wondering at the increase in the darkness since he stood there before. It had seemed to him that his crossing had only taken a minute, yet here it was sensibly darker; there were now five stars in the heaven where before was one. He broke a stake and sounded some of the going. It was like sounding the vale of Siddim.

Then lifting his eyes from the mud, he started, for there in the gully was the mound covered with xicale flowers. “There,” he said, “I will try it there. I believe that the xicale flowers are a sign. I shall get across there.”

At his feet, almost as though prepared for him, was a heap of what had once been a tree, but was now a sodden log easy to break into lengths. He picked up pieces of this and laid or tossed them one by one as steps before him in the marsh; then very swiftly, holding his stick as a balancing pole, he ran across them to the stump covered by the xicales. To his astonishment, it proved not to be a tree at all, but a rock or sarsen, thrusting from a patch of firm earth in which the xicales were rooted. He edged round it carefully to the gully beyond.

The first two steps from the xicales were over his shoes; his third and fourth, being parts of the same flounder, took him over his knees, but brought him to the pikes of a tree on which he could tread. Branches of this tree served as treads to his going for the next six yards, but beyond those six yards lay ten yards of bog, which he could not clearly distinguish nor test. Here, for the first time, he began to wish that he had not tried his short cut across country to the beach. “All the same,” he said, “if I can get to the beach in five minutes, or even ten, I’ll do it yet.”

He took a swift survey of the bog ahead of him: it did not look easy; but he always held that it is better to be in a difficulty than expecting to be in one. He took a note of possible tussocks in a line, drew a breath, and set off in a hop, skip and jump.

The hop took him to firmish tussock which squelched, but gave him some support for his skip. The skip took him to something very soft with a log about a foot beneath the surface, from which he made his jump. The jump took him into what had looked like grass, but which proved to be weed-covered water: he went into it over his head. He came out again, thinking fiercely of the Pathfinder’s fo’c’sle-head and of that iron rail over which he ought at that moment to be peering. The soft green grasses gave before him; they stroked his face gently, they closed in at the back of his neck, he felt them caress his body and tremble along his legs and lay enfoldments about his feet. When he thrust out his hands to swim, they sped from him, for they were frail grass and he a strong man; but before his stroke was made, they were back again: he felt them at his chest; they touched his chin: they rose from the water and touched his face. He swam six strokes and then felt for bottom. There was bottom at five feet: he touched it, but it went over his foot; he wrenched the foot clear, but it went over his other foot; he wrenched that foot clear, and, lo, all those soft little frail grasses seemed to come all about him with a whisper, and they were as heavy as lead and as strong as sailmaker’s twine.

“Whatever I do,” Sard said, “I must not fight these things, but go where they will let me go.”

He was not afraid, but very cautious, knowing the power of his enemy. He had once known a boy who had been drowned by waterweed. “He was caught deep down, where they are strong: at the surface they yield.”

When he yielded they also yielded; he floated clear; the little soft grasses, fine as flax, unclasped their hands, they whispered about him and let him go. Little moths floated about the water and a bird somewhere in the thickets made a plaintive cry. All that Sard could see was what the bull-frog sees: gleams of water, little starry blossoms on the grasses, ripples like steel, bubbles.

He turned upon his back and swam thus for a few strokes till he slid on to the mud in which the grasses were thickly rooted. He gripped handfuls of the grass and pulled himself forward, but they came from the mud into his hand. When he pressed his foot down, the mud went over it like softness’ self. Great bubbles gurgled up and burst about him with the smell of decay.

Sard reached forward till he could lay a hand upon something ahead which looked like earth. It was firmer than anything there; he drew himself to it, and pressed himself up upon it. It gave beneath him, being very sponge, but it did not collapse, it did not try to swallow him.

“Not much further,” Sard said. “A few feet more, and I will be there.”

He said these words aloud, for the comfort of hearing a voice. Instantly, from in front of him, came a splash and scutter: things were swimming away from something dark in the water; he could not see what the things were nor the thing from which they swam. “They are snakes,” he said, “and here is one of them coming at me.”

He struck at it. To his great relief, it gave a squeal and dived from him. “Rats,” he said. “They have a carcase here. I’ll get out of this.”

He saw that the dark thing was a body. His first thought was that it was a man, but groping forward, he was reassured: it was one of the half-wild razor-back hogs which the negroes allowed to stray in the woods there. It had been drowned there some hours before and now the rats were at it.

Sard had his hand upon it as he floundered forward, when the texture of the stuff beneath his feet changed suddenly from mush to something vicious. His feet, sinking into it, were held: the stuff closed over his feet and fastened them: he sank lower down: the stuff caught him round the ankles. He knew on the instant that he had met his match: he was gripped to his death as the hog had been. If he did not get out of that quag in the next minute, while he had his strength, the rats would eat him there before dawn.

He put both hands on the hog’s back, pressing it down and himself up. He dragged his right foot up, then slipped sideways to his left, giving himself a nasty wrench. The bubbles gurgled up all about him: they popped with a flapping noise. He hove again, pressing with all his power on the carcase; he got his right knee on to the body, and urged it down into the mud; his left foot came out of the mud; he stood up, balancing, on the corpse, for the next leap.

“If I get into a place like that,” he said, “without anybody to give me a purchase, I shall be posted as missing.”

He peered ahead; but there was nothing to guide him; all before him was bog: there were pools of water, juttings of mud and grasses growing out of water.

“If I step into that,” he said, “I may never step back to this pig nor forward to the bank, but be caught right there. My best chance is a standing leap, to get as near to the bank as may be.”

He measured it roughly as nine feet to hand-hold on the bank. He gathered himself for it, swinging his arms, above the unstable corpse which squeezed out the bubbles. He launched himself violently forward into a mess which gulfed him to the waist. He urged himself through this for a foot of two, felt it drag him quietly back, made a greater effort, got a purchase on some grasses, which helped him for another two feet; then he floundered, trampling on stuff which gave beneath him yet came back folding over him. He thrust forward, but his feet were fast; he fell on his face, the stuff surged up over his back. He kept his head up and thrust with his hands and wrenched with his feet. All the fat, weltering, bubbling bog seemed to chuckle at having got him. The bubbles burst in his face: they were as big as inverted saucers and came from the heart of corruption.

“I’m not going to die in a place like this,” he said. “Come out of it, port main; up with her!”

The old rallying cry timed his efforts: it was like one man standing the scrimmage of a pack of forwards in football. The bog gave an ounch of release, like a beast smacking its lips. He got hold of something on the bank. It had prickles on it, but it was solid and grew in dryness. Then as he put his weight upon it, it came out of the ground by the roots: a little avalanche of earth and stones came over his head, blinding him for the moment with grit in his eyes.

He could not see; he could only flounder forward with spread arms which availed nothing: the bog had him fast for all his effort.

Then his hand touched a liane brought down by the bush. It was a double liane, tough as flax and as thick as honeysuckle. He caught it and pulled on it, and instantly a great flowering spray of xicale flowers came floundering down from above, into his face. He saw them for what they were. “Xicale flowers,” he said, “xicales. I’m going to be saved.”

He got both hands deeply into the lianes of the xicales and pulled as he had never pulled, never, on any yard or on any rope. Digging forward into the squash of the bog he found something hard for one foot. “Oh, heave,” he cried, as he had so often cried to his watch. “Oh, heave, son, heave; oh, heave and start her; heave for glory.”

He found himself half out, with his right knee and side on hard earth and his left leg stuck in the bog. He drew deep breath for a minute, as once he had stopped to breathe when beaten dead by a sail five years before. Then gathering all his powers, he hove “all together,” and emerged erect on sound earth, shaking with the strain, and without his left shoe.

“Xicales,” he said, “you’ve saved my life. I knew that you were mixed up somehow with my life; and I’ll carry some of you with me in gratitude till I’m laid in my grave.”

He picked both flowers and leaves for his soaking pocket-book. His hands shook: he was cold to the marrow and filthy beyond description.

“I’ll do it yet,” he said. “But first I must make a shoe of sorts, or I shall be lamed.”

He cut off his trouser-legs at the knees, with his knife. With one of the pieces, folded fourfold, he made a shoe, and with the other he made thongs which secured it as a sandal to his foot. It was a rough and ready sandal, but it stayed on when put. It was good enough to run on.

He did not think of what the time might be. He roughly judged that he could reach Las Palomas in twenty minutes or twenty-five minutes by running along the beach with all his might. Any waterman on the front would put him aboard: the police-launch would take him. “I can’t miss my passage,” he said, “I must be on board. I told the old man I would be on board.” For the first time he said to himself, “And the old man will give me an hour’s grace.”

He set off over the headland of the gully under the clump of pines whose blackness he had seen from the mud. It was soft but firm going on the pine-needles; the trees over his head made a sighing which merged as he ran into the sterner sighing of the water on the beach. At the foot of the spur over which he had run, he came to the outcrops of the springs all overgrown with azaleas. They ran all along the foot of the spur, so thick with blossoms that they looked like an unbursting wave which was yet foaming at the crest. Over all the foam of blossom the fireflies glowed and went out, now as many as stars, now few, now like sparks, but always beautiful. Just beyond them was the broad sea-beach, with the breakers only fifty yards away. The sea was coming in, as it will in a shallow bay, in half-a-dozen long lines, each glowing with mild fire, shining as it neared the sand, then flashing like the moonlight, as the wave burst, then gleaming greenish, and showing the globes of the stars, as it wasted and died out upon the sand.

Sard burst through the azaleas to the sands, which stretched along for a great distance right and left. To his right (seemingly quite near) was a shining, which he knew to be the river near Los Xicales; beyond it, in the darkness of trees, was the house of his dream with one light burning. All a vast expanse of night, the sea-beach, the forest, and muttering water lay behind him. He rushed down to the sea and let three breakers go over him to cleanse him from the swamp and the leeches.

“Now, Sard Harker,” he said, “come on, port main, up with her!” He broke into a steady run facing to the Los Xicales light. The pine trees on the spit shut away a view of the anchorage so that he could not see the Pathfinder; he could only hope and put his best leg foremost. “Upon them that hope,” he thought, “is His mercy.” He ran at his steady pace which, as he knew, he could keep for miles.

Though it seemed so near, that shining on the sands, which he knew to be the river, was a full half-mile away. Before he had gone three hundred yards of it, he saw that the sand just ahead of him was darker and shinier than the sand under his feet. A memory of another dangerous sand, far away on an English sea-coast, shot into his mind on the instant, but the footing failed before he could stop. The sand gave beneath the one foot and let in the other: ooze of water shot up to the surface: he flung himself backwards violently, and got out, but fell, and saw, or thought that he saw, the surface of the sand shaking as though it were laughing at him. He rolled himself clear, then rose and looked at it. “That’s a pretty bad quicksand,” he said. “I might get through, but from the pull on that foot, I think that it would pull me down. Probably I can get round the shoreward end of it.”

He tried, but failed: the shoreward end of the quicksand was tropical bog.

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll swim round the seaward end. It is only a hundred yards. I need not go far out. It will be something to have the swamp washed off me again.” He went knee-deep into the sea, with some misgivings, for the shallows of all that coast are haunted with sand sharks, which come right in to have the warmth of the sand. He splashed as he went, to scare them. He had gone about thigh deep into the water and was just settling down to swim, when there came suddenly an agonising pain in his left foot.

His first thought was, “I’m on a thorn,” then, “I’m on a snake”; then, as the pain ran in a long, hot, stabbing streamer up his leg, he knew the truth, that he had trodden on a sting-ray. He hopped out of the water to the shore, feeling all the blood in his foot turn to vitriol and come surging along, as vitriol, to his heart. Most excruciating agony made him fling himself down. He tried to hold out his leg, but that was unendurable torment. He tried to kneel upon it, while he put a ligature above the knee, but the pain made him so sick that he could not bear it. He tried to lie down, but that was unbearable. He rolled over and over, moaning: then staggered up, and hopped and hopped, gasping with pain, until he fell. He had never known any pain in his life, except the bangs and knocks of his profession, but now he tasted a full measure.

Although he fell, the pain did not stop, it hit him when he was down, it grew worse. The cold, deadly, flat thing in the sand had emptied his horn into him. He buried his face in the sand: he dug his hands into the sand. Then the poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve a message of agony.

He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to the left of the road. He wondered why he was not on his bicycle. He said that his foot was dead, that it had died of the gout, and would drop from his body and never grow again.

All the venom came in pain on to his abdominal muscles; then he felt it come swimming along like little fiery rats round the carcase of his heart. He saw his heart for a moment or two like a black pig caught in a bog; the rats came all round it together, from every side, they closed in on it and bit it, bit it, bit it.

When he came to himself a little, he said something about the stars being too many, altogether too many, for the job in hand. He said that he could not pick up the guiding lights. Then he felt that every star was a steamer’s masthead light, and that all those myriads of steamers were bearing down upon him without sidelights. “Their look-out-men are all asleep,” he said, “I can’t see how they are bearing, and I have no lights at all. I must find a flare and burn them off.” He groped for a flare, but found only his wet clothes pressing on his body. “The flares are all damp,” he said, “the flares won’t burn. It is my fault; I stored them in the pickle-house. They ought to have been in the chart-room with the flags.” He wandered off in his thoughts far away from the lights of the stars. He lost all knowledge that he was lying on the sand three or four thousand miles from home. His main thought was that he was wandering along corridors in search of doors. He knew that it was very important to find doors, but whenever he found any, they closed in his face and became parts of the walls.

After a long time he roused himself up, feeling weak and sick. He knew at once, from the feel of things, that it was midnight. A sense of his position came to him. The Pathfinder must have sailed: he had lost his passage: he was miles from anywhere: he had lost Richard’s bicycle. All these things had happened because of his dream, because of Los Xicales. He sat up, but saw no light in the direction of the house. Over the spit with the pine trees there came a sort of flashing glimmer twice a minute as the light swung round in the tower of Manola point. He was bitterly cold, for besides being wet through, a mizzling rain was falling on him. He was sick and wretched. The closeness in the air was gone; a breeze was blowing the rain straight along the beach. The trees inshore were whistling and rustling: the seas broke as though they were cross, with a sharp smash instead of the relenting wash of twilight. All sorts of little life was scuttering about the sand: white owls, or sea-birds, cruised overhead as silently as sails.

Sard sat up and tried his left leg. It was numb and much swollen. He could not feel anything in it from his mid-thigh to his toe. It had become as dead as a leg of clay or mutton. When he dinted the flesh by pressing on it, the dint remained.

With a little difficulty he stood up on one leg. He then felt for the first time that he had only one leg, that the other would not act. He could move it, but not bend it; when he put it on the sand, leaned on it, or tried to walk with it, the thing ceased to be his, it neither obeyed nor rebelled, it failed. He was so cold that he felt that he would die. He sat for twenty minutes working to restore his leg. He no longer felt pain in it, the pain was gone, but it was as though the poison had burnt out the life. In some ways he would rather have had pain than this deadness.

“Now I am in a bad way,” he said, “for not many come to this beach, and none in this State will wander about looking for me. If I could only reach Los Xicales . . . However, I can’t reach Los Xicales this way: the quicksand bars the land and I’m not going to risk another sting in the sea. I can’t get back to Enobbio’s inn by that swamp. But I might crawl along the beach to that man who has the horses, Miguel, with the good heart, near the salt-pans. He might not be very far: two kilometres. He might take me in to the port, or at least to Los Xicales, where I should be in time, if those fellows were trying anything.”

He was suffering much: the leech-bites in his right leg itched like mosquito-bites, but were also hot and stinging; his mouth had fur in it, which tasted like brown paper; he felt that he was dying of cold. His hands, neck and face were swollen from the bites of the midges. His blood seemed to have changed within him to something grey and slow. Worse than his bodily state was the thought that he had broken his word to Captain Cary and missed his passage; “mizzled his dick,” as Pompey Hopkins called it.

“She’ll be sailed by this time,” he thought. “Whatever grace Captain Cary gave me, she’ll have gone by this.”

He stood up to look about him: he now realised, for the first time, the change in the weather.

The northern section of the heaven was covered with intense darkness. Over the blackness a sort of copper-coloured wisp, like smoke, was driving at a great speed. The blackness was lit up continually by lightning, which burned sometimes in steady glows, sometimes in sharp stabs of light. The wind had risen; directly Sard crossed the sandy spit, it struck him with fury, driving sand and fragments of shell against his face and down his neck. The sea was not yet breaking with any violence upon the beach. It was white as far as the eye could see, as though the heads of every wave had been whipped off and flogged into foam which shone as though with moonlight from the phosphorescence. Washes of breaker burst and rushed up the sand to Sard’s feet, like washes of fire in which all the marvellous shells of which the beach was composed, were lit up like jewels. Far away to the right, out at sea on the edge of the sky, there was, as it were, a shaking wall of white from the sea already running upon the Rip-Raps. He could see it waver, but it never seemed to change. There was a roller there before the last had gone.

“This is the norther,” Sard thought. “I hope the old man did not wait too long for me, but got clear of the Rip-Raps before it came on.”

He re-bandaged his foot, picked some stakes from among the driftwood, to serve as walking sticks, and with the help of these set out towards the salt-pans to borrow a horse. He hobbled forward, dead into the teeth of the gale. The worst thing about the gale was the cold. Far south as it was, the wind came down directly from the northern icefields. To Sard, who was thinly clad and wet through, it was piercing. He stumbled along against it, keeping his direction by the pale flame of the breakers which roared at his side and flung their fire at his feet.

When he had gone about a mile, he saw the stretch of the salt-pans like a patch of white heather away ahead, distant he knew not how far. It might be a mile, or it might be two miles; no man could judge distance on a sand so flat. At anchor, under the head beyond the sand, was a ship which had not lain there when he came to the beach. She seemed to be a small tramp or large coaster, sheltering from the norther. She carried no lights. Sard judged that she had come there to load copper from the mines of Tloatlucan. He knew that there was a pier there, at the mouth of a river, and that the ore came by a light railway direct to the pier from the mine.

He hobbled on towards the whiteness of the salt-pans: a flat road is a long road at best; against a gale it is a bad road.

Nearly all the way a great white bird (whether an owl or some sea-bird, he could not tell) flew above and ahead of him. It seemed to him that this bird shone. Perhaps the poison had upset his eyes, or perhaps his eyes never lost the shine of the sea breaking beside him. In his shaken state, this bird seemed like a luminous swan, guiding him to quiet.

Near the southern end of the pans he saw a shack or stable, facing him. The seaward end of this shack was a small adobe house, with a palm roof. The stable was empty: there was neither ass nor dog there.

Sard listened for half a minute, standing still, at ten paces from the house, while he took stock. The house was closed to the night, yet it had the look or feel of having someone there. Perhaps an animal instinct survives in us from the time when it was important to know if a lair were blank or not.

Sard went no nearer; he hailed the house in Spanish, calling on Don Miguel by name. The place was silent, except for the flogging of the palmetto on the roof, the scutter of crabs and gophers on the bents and the wail of the wind across the salt-pans. Then presently something tinkled within the house. It might have been a revolver cartridge, or a knife coming out of a sheath, or a bottle upon glass. Sard hailed again, saying that he came alone, in peace, from Don Enobbio, with desire to hire a horse.

This time, Sard saw the shutter which covered the window (a space a foot square near the door) move about three inches to one side. He heard no noise, but he was watching the shutter and saw its greyness change to blackness as the wood moved. “I am a friend,” he called. “I come from Don Enobbio to Don Miguel to hire a horse. I, a sick man, wish to ride to Las Palomas if Don Miguel will give aid, thus emulating the Good Samaritan.”

He heard the heavy iron-wood bar of the door go back in its runners; the door opened about eighteen inches; a young woman appeared, yawning.

“Enrique,” she said, “Enrique, back already?”

“I am not Enrique, lady,” Sard said, “but a traveller in need of a horse.”

“Dios mio,” she said, “and I not combed! I thought you were Enrique. Wait, then.”

He did not have to wait more than a minute; a light appeared at the shutter; a tin basin or pan was kicked into a corner; then the door was opened, the young woman called:

“Will the caballero enter, then?”

“Enter,” Sard thought, “and have my throat cut, perhaps; but I will enter.”

He went in, with a watchful eye lest Miguel, who “erred in mind,” should be lying in wait with a sand-bag just behind the door. However, Miguel was not there, the young woman was alone in the one-roomed house.

She had lighted a little tin lamp, which had a smoke-blackened glass, broken at the top. By the light of this Sard saw the room to be bare and untidy. The bed was an array of small pine boughs, with their needles, covered with sacks, ponchos and old serapes. The young woman had just risen from her nest there; she was “not combed,” as she had said, nor dressed, but hung about, as it were, with a long undergarment torn at the shoulder. She was a plump young woman, just beginning to grow fat: she was very dirty: her long, black hair shone from an unguent; she flung it rakishly back from her brow with the gesture of a great actress. Her eyes were like mules’ eyes, black and shining, with yellow whites. Her mouth was exceedingly good-natured. She stood near the door, clutching her sacking to her shoulder with one hand, while with the other she motioned Sard to enter. She grinned at Sard as a comely woman will grin at one whose praise of her comeliness would be esteemed.

The room, which was next door to the stable, had been lived and slept in for some months with closed door and shutter. It smelt of oil, tortillas, frijoles, horses, rats, mice, espinillo, hair-grease, poverty, garlic, tobacco, joss-stick and musk. A sort of mental image of a life made of all these things, all flavoursome and with a tang to them, reached Sard at once through his nostrils, with the further thought that it was not such a bad life, since it left the person both dignified and kind.

He explained that he needed a horse.

“Ay de mi,” she exclaimed, “but Miguel is with the horses at the siding beside the jetty, a half league hence. Assuredly he will lend a horse, but it is further on, at the quay, that you will find him now.”

“I will go on, then,” Sard said.

“But you are wet and have known misfortune. Enter, I pray you, and rest from your misfortune. Ay de mi, your foot has trodden unhappily.”

“Not since it has led me to your presence,” Sard said. “But thank you, I must not enter. I will go on to Miguel, to the horse.”

Something in his tone or bearing or look, something in himself, seemed to impress the woman.

“Assuredly,” she said, “the good Jesu comes thus, but must not go thus. Sit you, Sir caballero.” She brought forward a three-legged stool, the only seat in the room, and made him sit. “Sit you down till I see your foot,” she said. She would have none of his protests, but had his bandage off.

“You have met a snake,” she said.

“No; a sting-ray.”

“Then you have been in the sea and are of the ship, no doubt; ay de mi, all wet, all wet, what misery.” She felt his arm and shoulder and cold hand. “And a sting-ray; often have I seen them, with their horns. There is a negro who can cure such with a white powder; but I have nothing. Nothing but love which is a part of the love of God.”

She was kneeling at his side with his foot in her hands, kneading the swollen flesh.

“No,” she said, “this is no time for the cure. The poison has killed, but is now dead: the flesh is dead. It takes a day, two days, who knows, after a sting-ray. Then, when the life begins to return, one can help. See now, I can, by God’s mercy, do something. I have here a stirrup shoe made long ago, but still of use. I have but the one, for the other was cast out in error, as I always maintain; while others, on the contrary, think that Martin took it, Martin the pedlar, the old soldier, who comes round with saints and handkerchiefs. See now, a shoe for a count or duke.”

She produced what had been the stirrup-shoe of a count or duke in the days when such things were. It was a sort of wooden-soled slipper, with a sole of wood, and heel and toecaps of cuir-bouilli. The great silver bosses and brackets had long since been wrenched from it. The last user had fixed it to his leathers with wire. The design on the cuir-bouilli was of a coat-of-arms, but eaten away by ants and green with mould.

“See now,” she said, fitting it to his foot, “a shoe for a count or duke. You shall walk the better for it. It is a shoe such as might have been made for you.”

Her hand rested for an instant on Sard’s pocket, from which a draggled silk handkerchief hung.

“Dios mio,” she said, “you are count or duke. It is so soft. This is silk of the countess.”

She fingered it with a child’s delight in the texture. “Is it all like this?” she said. “Truly, if you are not count or duke, you are servant to one.”

“That’s more like it,” Sard said, rising, so as to tread upon the shoe. “I’m a servant, to a limited company. Your shoe, señora, is as water to one dying in the desert. You have been a friend to me in time of need. You know the wise saying, ‘a friend to the beggars will never lack guests.’ I say, ‘May a host to a beggar never lack friends.’ ”

“The good Jesu comes in all shapes,” she answered. “And you are not a beggar, but very much a caballero; oh, very, very much a duke or count. You are English. They say that the English are as ice, and therefore come hither to be thawed.”

“That is partly true, señora. I have been melted by your kindness.”

“It is also said (though this I do not believe) that no Englishman will kiss a woman to whom he has not been married by the priest.”

“That is assuredly true, señora.”

“Never, never, never; even if all things conspired: the moonlight, perfumes, music, and beauty such as hers of Sheba?”

“Never, never, never,” he said.

“Ay de mi,” she said. “But it is said that the English are as Turks, and are married to very many.”

“We are as God made us, not as people say, señora; but we remember kindly acts forever and I shall remember you.”

“Forever?”

“I think so.”

“That is very caballero. But what is memory? A thought. You have not even asked me my name.”

“I was going to ask it.”

“You were going to ask it?”

“Assuredly.”

“Assuredly,” she said. “It is true, then, as they say, that the English are as ice. ‘Assuredly.’ You said it with a peck, as from a beak. ‘Assuredly.’ If I were to take a dagger and thrust it into my heart so that I fell dead, you would say ‘Assuredly she has driven the point too far. Assuredly she is no longer alive.’ ”

“Not so,” Sard said; “I should not say it. I might think it.”

“Would you be sorry?”

“I am sorry for any suicide.”

“Your cold ice would not thaw one tear. But, vaya, if I were countess, and lay dead, you would stand like marble and say poetry. Listen: my name, the name I call myself, is Rose of the South: will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Assuredly?”

“No; faith of caballero.”

“Will you remember me, who am that name?”

“Yes.”

“It is me, myself, that name. When I was little, I had a sister: we used to play grand ladies out in the sage brush. She was Lily of the West; I was Rose of the South. She is dead, pobrecita, the Lily: she was of this world, which needs a man, not a woman: pobrecita mia.”

“What is your real name?” Sard asked.

“Clara,” she said, “Clara of the Salt-Pans, the woman of Miguel, called Miguel sin Nada.”

“He is Miguel con Mucha, with yourself, señora,” Sard said. “And now adios, and always my thanks, siempre, siempre, siempre. I will return your shoe by Miguel.”

“For the love of all the saints in bliss, caballero,” she said, “in no way let Miguel suspect that you have talked with me. Ay de mi, we women; we suffer for our hearts. Miguel is of a jealousy that would make proud, being such evidence of love, if it were not such inconvenience. A thought, a turn of the head, a look, and he at once ranks me with those infamous of life, with her of Sheba, and Ysabel, Queen of England.”

“I will not let him suspect,” Sard said. “And now farewell, and my thanks and again my thanks.”

“Stay yet,” she said. “Stay yet for one instant. I shall be here sixty years, perhaps, like Caterina La Fea, below, at the poblacion, old, old, and wrinkled like the devil, red-eyed, blind, from sitting in the smoke, sucking bits of meat at last, with her gums. And little children flinging dead rats at her and calling her Witch-Witch. I have had one instant with you; let me have one other; only one; since it has to last for sixty years, you would not grudge me one instant? Then when I am as Caterina, I shall think, ah, but truly I lived, once, at that midnight, when one like St. Gabriel came to my door, and was as a count or duke to me, who am Clara the woman of Miguel.”

“Señora,” Sard said, “I, too, shall think of you, at times, for whatever years may remain to me; but now I must go, and so I say again, thank you and farewell.”

He turned away as fast as he could hobble.

“Stay yet,” she implored. “I do not importune, but I do not know your name. Tell me your name. I would think of your name and pray for you in the chapel and before the image here.”

“My name is Harker.”

“Harker. What does that mean?”

“I do not know: perhaps ‘one who listens.’ ”

“Listens for what?”

“What do people listen for?”

“The sea wind in the heat,” she said thoughtfully; “and the crowing of the cock in the night of pain; and, in life, the footstep of the beloved who never comes; or when he does come, goes on the instant.”

“Good-bye.”

“What do you listen for?” she cried.

“A change of wind, perhaps. Adios.”

He turned from her rapidly, but as he turned she knelt suddenly at his side, snatched his hand and kissed it. “Thank you,” he said, “but men are not worthy of that, señora.” He withdrew his hand and hobbled a few steps away. At this little distance, he called: “I thank you, señora; good night.”

He knew that she would not follow him into the darkness: she did not, but he heard her break into a wild crying of tears and lamentation. The last that he saw of her was the grey of her sacking and the pallor of her face, standing looking after him while she lifted up her voice and wept.

Perhaps three-quarters of an hour after leaving Rose of the South, when it was (as he judged) a little after two in the morning, Sard saw in front of him the sheds of “the siding beside the jetty.” Sard could see no horses, but there was an engine on the line with steam up; a glow was on the smoke coming from its funnel; a glare from its fire made the stoker and driver ruddy with light. The engine was headed inland with a load of trucks coupled to it. Men were moving about between the quay and the trucks, either loading or unloading something heavy.

At any other time he might have wondered why men were shipping copper-ore at midnight during a norther, though indeed the jetty was screened from the wind by the high land beyond it. He had no suspicion of these men. He was perhaps stupid from poison and fatigue; he thought that he had reached his rest.

One of the workers came away from the trucks to get a drink at a scuttle-butt. Sard heard the chain of the dipper clink, and the water splash. Then the man spat and went slowly back to work, singing in a little low clear voice the song about the rattlesnake.

“There was a nice young man,

He lived upon a hill;

A very nice young man,

I knew him we-e-ell.

To-me-rattle-to-me-roo-rah-ree.”

Sard drew nearer, to look for Miguel and the horses. He came down on to a loop-line, crossed it, and passed between sheds and shacks, some piles of pit props, fuel blocks and drums of wire rope, on to the pier-head. A naphtha-flare was burning there to give light to a gang of men who were handing cases from a launch, which lay below the level of the jetty, to the trucks coupled up to the engine. Even then, Sard did not see at once what company he had come among. One of the men, who had been watching his advance, whistled. A man, who seemed to be in authority, moved up swiftly and rather threateningly on the right: two other men came up from the left: the work of the gang stopped. The men put down the cases which they were carrying and faced Sard in a pointed manner. Most of them had been humming or singing to themselves as they worked, but their singing stopped on the instant. More than this, a voice in the launch asked:

“What’s the rally?”

One of the men in front of Sard replied, without turning his head: “Strangers in the house.”

Three heads showed over the edge of the jetty, then three more men sprang up from the launch on to the jetty itself. Sard found himself facing about a dozen men, with other men closing in on each side of him. All the men were silent, most of them were watching him intently, though some peered into the night behind him. All the men, without perceptible motion, had pistols in their hands.

“Stop just right where you are, brother,” the man on Sard’s right said.

Sard stopped.

“Drop them palos and put them up.” The tone rather than the words made Sard drop his sticks and lift his hands.

“Are you alone?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Move right down to the edge of the jetty. Keep your hands up.”

“I can’t walk without sticks.”

“Walk him down there, two of you.”

Two of them did “walk him down” to the edge of the jetty. Ill as Sard was, the men, their voices and their every action, made him feel that his life hung upon a thread.

He knew, too late, that he had come upon a gang of rum-runners in the act of putting their freight ashore. There was no question of showing fight; he could only hope that they would not shoot him in the back and leave him to the crabs.

He was walked to the hard-wood blinders at the very edge of the jetty. He saw beneath him a broadish stretch of water reaching to the high land beyond. The river bar was noisy at some little distance to his left. Just below him was a scow-launch half full of cases. She was lifting and drooping a little to the motion of the water. A deck hand, sitting on her forward gunwale, was staring up at him. A short, foreign-looking man, with a bush of hair under which gold earrings shone, came out from the covered engine-room abaft-all, and stood there, in a glow of light, holding on by the wheel. He, too, stared up at Sard, but went on eating an onion: he did not speak. His eyes were intensely bright: his shirt, which was whitish, with a few coloured stripes, seemed to shine as though it were made of silk.

Sard took all these things in very exactly in an instant of time, but noticed most the man with the bright eyes who munched the onion and stared. The deck hand who was sitting forward pitched a folded tarpaulin over some cases directly below Sard. He did it on the instant, with a backward jerk of his hand. Sard knew on the instant what had passed through the man’s mind; that it would be a pity if his, Sard’s, corpse should break any of the good rum bottles in falling.

The man in authority called out behind Sard.

“If there are any more of you, who try to lift a finger, over your friend goes.”

Sard kept very still; everybody was very still, except for the launchman munching his onion and the clicking back of revolver cocks. The man in authority called out again:

“Go through him, you two.”

The two men “went through” Sard’s pockets, not like thieves, but like policemen.

“Is he heeled?”

“No, sir; he’s got a knife. He’s been in the water.”

“He’ll be in again, for keeps, if he tries any monkey-tricks. Now, brother, answer me and no damned shinanniking. Are you alone?”

“Yes,” Sard said.

“Who are you?”

“A sailor.”

“What in hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been on a sting-ray and came here to get a horse from Miguel.”

“What the hell do you know of Miguel?”

“I heard he had horses here.”

“Who told you he had horses here?”

“Some people in the poblacion.”

The man in authority called to one of the other men:

“Antonio!”

“Si, señor.”

“Here a moment.”

Sard heard the man go across to the officer. They talked together in a low tone for a minute: Sard could not hear what they said. Presently the officer called again:

“You, brother: turn round.”

Sard turned about into the light of the flare, to find himself covered by half-a-dozen revolvers.

“Do you know him, any of you?” the officer asked.

The men stared at him, then gave their verdict that they did not know him. “No, sir.” “Never seen him.” “Never set eyes on him.” One man, who had been standing aloof, somewhat behind the officer, came forward, to have a nearer look. He was a man of short stature, but enormous breadth of chest. He had a sallow face, intensely bright black eyes, a short nose, a mouth of unusual width slowly working upon a quid of tobacco, and both hands thrust forward into deep waistcoat pockets, where they rested on revolver-butts. He came forward slowly, chewing his tobacco, with a good-humoured leer upon the world. There was something in his slouch which was of the very essence of the man: it was his style: his pace à lui: if the world wished to go faster or slower, it might, for all he cared, nothing would make him change. He came to within a few paces of Sard, who seemed to remember that slouch and leer, but could not place the man.

“D’you know him, Doug?”

“Nar.”

He winked at Sard with one eye and slouched off to the left, to stand among the other men.

“What’s your name?” the officer asked.

“Harker.”

“What ship do you belong to?”

“The Pathfinder.”

“That’s a god-dam lie,” one of the men said, “the Pathfinder sailed last night.”

“Will you just stopper your lip?” the officer said. “If I want your dam’ soprano in this duet, I’ll call it.”

“Well, it is a god-dam lie,” the man said. “She did sail.”

“You hear what this man says?” the officer said. “That your ship sailed last night. What have you to say?”

“I missed my passage,” Sard said. “I was ashore, cycling. My bicycle was stolen: I trod upon a sting-ray down on the beach and came hopping here to try to get a horse, to take me to Las Palomas.”

“That’s a dam’ likely tale,” one of the men said.

“Py Chesus,” another said, “he trod upon a tam sting-ray! Py Gott, he iss a got-tam police-spy.”

“Less lip,” the officer said. He seemed to debate the evidence within his mind for an instant, then he said:

“What are you in the Pathfinder?”

“Mate.”

“What were you doing ashore, cycling, when your ship was sailing?”

“I came out to see an Englishman in the house along the beach there.”

“What Englishman?”

“Kingsborough.”

“Did you see him?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“No.”

“What brought you to him, then, when your place was on board your ship?”

“I heard that he was threatened by a gang of rough-necks, so I rode out to warn him.”

“You did? Did you also warn the police?”

“I did.”

This roused a storm among the men: there were cries of “Narker”! “Put it on him, George!” “I set he was a spy, py Gott!” “Hay que matarle!” etc.

“What business was it of yours, to warn the police?” the officer said.

“One would do as much as that for one’s countryman, I hope.”

“What did the police undertake to do?”

“I do not know.”

“Give me the god-dam truth now. Whom did you see at the police?”

“No one. I sent word there.”

“By whom?”

“Find out.”

At this point, which might have been troublous but for intervention, the Scandinavian interfered. He was a sinister-looking man with a swollen lower lip which drooped. This gave him permanently the look of a gargoyle. He looked, on the whole, like a young devil just after his first night in hell, a little bloated and battered, but thrilled by the way Beelzebub wore his bowler. He came forward towards the officer.

“Mr. O’Prien,” he said, “dis feller he wass one got-tam police-spy. What he want de police for? What he come putt in for? He call hisself mate of de Pathfinder, by Chesus. Py Chesus, I don’t pelieve one got-tam wort he say, py Chesus. And this got-tam yarn about a got-tam sting-ray. You see, fellers, he iss a spy. Dat’s what dis feller is: a spy. He tell de police and get us pinched.”

The black-eyed smiling sloucher slouched forward as the Scandinavian warmed to his appeal. His left hand shot out suddenly, caught him on the chest and slung him violently backward. The motion seemed effortless, but the strength used must have been that of a bull, for the Scandinavian went backwards tottering for five steps and then sat down. The other men laughed. The sloucher grinned at the Scandinavian.

“Come off with your folly,” he said. “Tell it to the marines but not to the deck department.”

The Scandinavian rose up whimpering and rubbing the sore place.

“Py Chesus, Doug,” he said, “if you wass not trunk, I make you pay for dat. It’s your being trunk saves you, py Chesus.”

“Well, I am drunk,” Douglas said, “I thank God I am drunk. I like being drunk: it’s so cadoodle. But let’s see this man who says he’s mate of the Pathfinder. Keep all fast with your enquiries till I’ve had a go at him.” He slouched up towards Sard, with his hands drooped down as before on the revolver-butts in his waistcoat pockets. His whole being seemed to slouch, to smile and to chew tobacco. He seemed to be chewing a sort of cud of tobacco. He seemed to give forth a gospel of slouching, smiling and chewing tobacco. He stood slouched before Sard, a man of immense strength, fearing nothing on earth and capable of any folly and any kindness. Sard could not place him, even yet, but the slouch was familiar; he had surely seen that grin before.

“ ’Arker, my bye,” Douglas began. Instantly a thrill shot through Sard, for the words “my bye,” spoken in that way, gave him a clue to the speaker. “ ’Arker, my bye, answer my question, my bye. Who’s the captain of the Pathfinder?”

“Captain Cary.”

“What mark has he got on the right side of his chin?”

“A mole; a dark brown mole.”

“Down in the cabin of the Pathfinder, what is hung on the starboard bulkheads?”

“Nothing at all, except two canary cages.”

“What is the name of that black cat you have?”

“Nibbins.”

“What is odd about your fiferails?”

“We have small hand-winches on them (monkey-winches), so that we can get a bit on anything, with two men and a boy.”

“That’s right enough,” Douglas said, “he belongs to the Pathfinder all right.”

“That’s not in question,” the officer said. “The questions are, what he is doing here and what he has been doing with the police.”

Again there might have been trouble, but for intervention. This time the launchman interfered. He had finished his onion and had licked his fingers and was now on the jetty close to Sard.

“Meesta O’Brien,” he said.

“Avast heaving,” O’Brien said.

“Meesta O’Brien.”

“I’m dealing with this man here.”

“Meesta O’Brien, I wanna know.”

“What in hell d’you want to know?”

“I wanna know how long we stay-a here? The capitan-a he say-a to me be back by the six-a bell. Here it come the six-a-bell. The whiska still in the launch-a and all a talk-a, talk-a, talk-a and wow-wow-wow with-a the pistol.”

“Get to hell out of this!”

“No, I tell you, I not get-a to hell; not for you I not get-a hell; I get-a to hell when I like, what road I like. But the capitan-a, he say-a to me, be along-a the side at six-a bell. Here it come the six-a bell. And all the stuff lie in the launch-a and you talk-a, talk-a. Why you not get the stuff out of the launch? It six-a bell, soon seven-a bell. I tell-a you now, I tell-a all of you. You get-a this stuff out of the launch. Or if you not get-a this stuff out of the launch, I tell-a you what I do. I get-a to hell out of here: see? I go back straight away to the capitan-a. He soon see what for, hey. He know why you talk-a, talk-a. He want to know what-a for.”

“Shut your dam’ Dago head!”

“You tell-a me to shut-a my head. I shut-a your head. I got-a stiletto, good as your pistol. What for you tell-a me to shut-a my head? Shut-a your own head. You get-a the stuff out of the launch. Never mind you this sick-a man, but get-a the whisk out of the launch. My Jesu, too much-a talk-a talk-a. Get-a the launch clear, see, or I go back to the capitan-a. I cast-a loose, I go, see.”

“See here now, Jesus-Maria, mind yourself. I’ll clear your launch and you too, in my own time. I’m captain in this gang, and I’m going to be it.”

“You are not capitan-a in my launch. I am. And if you not get-a out the stuff, I not-a stay.”

Douglas, the sloucher, came forward again, not addressing either Jesus-Maria or O’Brien, but the men.

“Come on, boys,” he said, “we’ve still got some of these dam’ medical comforts to sling ashore.”

“We’ll get the stuff ashore, when we’ve finished this enquiry,” O’Brien said. “I want to know about this man.” He turned again to Sard. “What are you?” he asked. “A Protestant?”

“Yes, thank God.”

The men cheered Sard for this, not because they were Protestants, but because O’Brien was not. One of the men, who had taken no part whatever in the court of enquiry, but had been sitting on some pit props drinking from a bottle, now came up to Sard and shook his hand.

“Shake hands,” he said, “if you’re a Protestant. You belong to a blurry fine religion, if you’re a Protestant. I’m not, if you understand what I mean, a Protestant myself, if you understand what I mean, but I do believe in crissen berrel, which is as near as the next, if you understand what I mean.”

“Come along, George,” Douglas said, “we’ll get this medical comfort ashore and then we’ll have one long cool one on the house.”

“Are you a Protestant?” George asked.

“Sure, Mike.”

“There’s a lot of fellows going about,” George said, “if you understand what I mean, who call themselves blurry Buddhists. I’ll shake hands with a Protestant and I’ll shake hands with a Mahommedan. It’s true they have a lot of wives. I honour them for it. I’d do the same myself if I could afford it. But these Buddhist fellows: I want to tell you about these Buddhist fellows. All right Mr. O’Brien, if you don’t want to listen, you can do the other thing. These Buddhist fellows, they’re not Buddhist fellows, if you know what I mean, they’re a secre-ciety. That is,” he concluded, “if you understand what I mean.”

“They’re a lot of vegetarians,” Douglas said. “But come on, boys, and let’s get the stuff ashore.”

“You’ll not get-a the stuff ashore,” came from the Italian on the launch. “The capitan-a tell-a me ‘be back by six-a bell.’ You not clear-a the launch, so now I go. I tell-a the capitan-a. He give-a you what-a for.”

The launch had been thrust clear of the jetty; she lay two boat-lengths away, canted so that the current was swinging her.

“Come back with that launch, you Jesus-Maria!”

The Italian made an obscene gesture and sent the launch at full speed for the distant ship.

“There,” one of the men said, “there you are, O’Brien; half the cases not ashore, all because you want to hold a private Old Bailey.”

“And I’m going to hold it,” O’Brien said. “This man is a police-spy and I’m going to shoot him.”

“You’ll shoot him, hell,” Douglas said.

“Not on your life,” George said, “not on your life. He is a Protestant, if you understand what I mean. And why is he a Protestant? Because he isn’t a low-down vegetarian secre-ciety Buddhist. Because he isn’t a Mahommedan. He might have been a Mahommedan. They offered him seven wives, if you understand what I mean, and he scorned the action. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m a Protestant,’ he said, ‘to blazes with your houris,’ he said. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what he said. Isn’t it what you said?”

“Now, George Henderson, mind yourself now, or I’ll put a head on you which you’ll remember.”

“You’ll put a head on me? Who’ll put a head on me?”

“I will.”

“You silly blighter, we’re not in Ireland here, we’re talking religion at El Cobre.”

“No, we’re not talking religion,” O’Brien said; “we’re landing rum, and I’m going to see that we land it safely. What is this man but a spy?”

“He’s no spy,” Douglas said, “he’s a sailor like yourself.”

“Only he’s ate a damn sight less flapdoodle,” someone added.

“Well, if he’s no spy, what are we going to do with him?”

“Let him have Miguel and the horses and ride back to Las Palomas as he wants.”

“So that he can leave word with the police in time to have us headed off at the mines. To hell with him having the horses!”

“He cannot in any case have the horses,” said the man known as Antonio, “since Miguel took the horses, some time since, by the footpath.”

“He can stay here, then, after we are gone.”

“Well, O’Brien, I wonder at you,” Douglas said. “Here’s a man half dead, as you can see, from poison, and a better fellow, I daresay, than any of us. If we leave him here, he’ll be dead before noon, from cold and exposure. He’s coming in the cars with us to Tloatlucan, where he can take the branch line to Las Palomas before noon. And meanwhile, boys,” he added, raising his voice, “here’s a man pretty damn wet and sick; what do you say to dibs all round to give him a dry shift? I say a pair of trousers.”

They all said something out of the little they had. O’Brien moved away to talk to the engine-driver. Douglas and Antonio brought Sard the dry shift and helped him to change. “Here’s a dry shift,” Douglas said. “And I’m afraid they’re like a pig’s breakfast, a little of all sorts.”

“Get on board here,” O’Brien said.

“On board, hell,” Douglas answered. “This man’s not shifted yet.”

“I don’t give a pea-vren. This ain’t Delmonico’s, nor Maggy Murphy’s. This train’s going.”

“It’s going, hell,” Douglas answered.

“Very well, then; it’ll go without you.”

“Without me, hell!”

O’Brien turned from him savagely, darted forward to the engine-driver and cursed the other hands into the cars. Douglas winked at Sard. “Chief officer’s perk,” he said. “All the same, we’d better hop it.”

The nearest car to them was the last in the train, and empty but for some tarpaulins and rolls of slickers. Douglas helped Sard into it, hove his wet things after him, and was starting to heave himself in, when the train started. A man less strong in the arms would have been pitched headlong, but Douglas clambered into the car, made a warm corner for Sard, covered him up and sat beside him.

“Ambitious swab, that terrier,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Very grateful to you,” Sard said, “for without you, things would have gone hard with me. Who are you? Aren’t you Castleton? Weren’t you once C.P.F.?”

“Yes. I used to be Castleton, C.P.F. I was a year senior to you,” Douglas said. “You wouldn’t remember me, for that reason; but I remembered you. You see, I’ve got a memory which can’t forget. I often wish it could.”

“I remember you now, of course,” Sard said. “But when were you on board the Pathfinder?”

“Never.”

“But how did you know about Captain Cary’s mole; and the cat, and the monkey-winches?”

“Three days ago I passed under the Pathfinder’s stern, as I went ashore to see my girl. I saw a man with a mole on his chin doing hygrometer at the taffrail. I knew it must be the captain. It couldn’t have been anybody else. The cat was fooling about on deck and the old man called it Nibbins. As for the monkey-winches on the fiferail, you were clearing a boat with one of them. I thought it a dam’ fine little contrivance.”

“But how did you know about the cabin bulkheads?”

“I didn’t. The point was that you did.”

“Well, you staggered me,” Sard said. “I was wondering when you could have been on board.”

“It’s a dam’ easy game, being mysterious, when you’ve anything at all to go on. Your Christian name’s Chisholm, isn’t it? I saw you first on 2nd February, 1883. I remember you coming on board, by the tug, when you were a new chum. The chests were hove in on the port lower deck and the lock of your chest was broken by that old fool Goose-rump letting it drop off the slide.”

“I remember,” Sard said. “You swore at old Goose-rump. You sailed with him later, by the way. What became of old Goose-rump?”

“He went to hell on the Barbary coast.”

“What are you doing?”

“Running rum up to Entre las Montanas.”

“It must be exciting work,” Sard said.

“It’s the finest life on earth. That dam’ terrier is an ambitious swine, but even he can’t spoil it. I count all my life just wasted till I began rousting rum. I’ve been at it seven years.”

“You’ve got a ticket, haven’t you?”

“Ticket, hell. Yes, I’ve got a dam’ fine second mate’s ticket, for which I could get four pounds a month and find my own tobacco. Ticket, hell! Watch and watch, when it isn’t all hands, boxing another man’s yards around. Ticket, hell! At this job I’m pretty well my own master; sleep when I like, get drunk when I like, and see my girl when I like.”

“Are you married?”

“Married, hell.”

“Isn’t it a rather dangerous life? Things may have been slack, but they’re tautening up. I hear that Colonel Mackenzie is going to put an end to rum-running. The penalties are severe.”

“We’ve a stronger combination than some think.”

“I don’t doubt it. The combination is strengthening against you. Two torpedo-boats on the coast would stop you.”

“We’d buy them.”

“Not with Colonel Mackenzie.”

“We’d get them, then.”

“How?”

“Put a stick of dynamite in the crankshaft.”

“Where do you go with this train of rum?”

“We go right up the mountains with it, till we reach the jumping-off place.”

“Do you never have trouble?”

“We have had a certain amount of trouble. There was trouble on the Mesa Line one time. But trouble, hell. You lie still and get your strength.”

“Heya, you, Doug!”

“Heya yourself.”

As the train jolted up towards the mines, along the bank of the river, a man came catlike towards them, from truck to truck, from the direction of the engine. He hung on somehow by his eyelids, and jangled as he came with hook-pots of hot cazuela slung round his neck. From time to time jolts of the truck spilt the hot broth on to his knees. When this happened, he cursed in Spanish. He it was who called Douglas from his talk.

“Cazuela,” he said. “Catch a hold. And here’s a hook-pot for the other fella.”

“Got any pan?”

“Mucho pan.”

Douglas leaned out, took the hook-pots with the care of one well used to guarding an allowance, gave a pot to Sard, and then salved the bread, which was supplied in yellow hot buns split and filled with sausage and peppers.

“That’s more homelike,” Doug said. “Heave round and eat: it will give you strength.”

Sard did not want to eat: the thought of the hot dough made him faint, but he sipped the broth and felt the better for it. He was warm again, there in the shelter of the car under the tarpaulins. With the warmth came a queer feeling in his skin, all altered by the poisons which had afflicted it, that the norther was going to be a bad one. He felt too weak to look at the heaven, but he said to Doug:

“Is it very black to the northward?”

“A bit dark.”

“Much lightning?”

“Yes. It has been flashing a little.”

“We’re in for a bad norther.”

“We’re in a norther,” Doug answered. “But we’re running out of it. But you’d better sleep. I’ll cant these slickers from under you, for the hands will want them. Now, sleep.”

Sard was so weary that he was almost asleep while Doug routed out the slicker rolls. He felt Doug heave a tarpaulin over him and smelt the overpowering sweet rum-like smell of the Lucky Hit being chewed in Doug’s mouth; he noticed the stars going out under trails of smoke; then the world ceased for him while the train jolted on.

He woke, or half woke, when the stopping of the train sent all the rear trucks one after the other with a bumping clank into the buffers of the truck in front of it. He did not know where he was and did not much care, being as weak and drowsy as one full of a drug. He noticed that Doug was gone, but heard, as it were far away, Doug’s voice saying something to someone about uncoupling the last three trucks. In his drowse he heard men swearing at chains which clanked: then he heard men pushing the truck in which he was a little further down the line. He heard their “O heave! O heave!” and “That’s got her. There she goes!” and the sound of their feet padding beside the rails. He heard someone say: “That’s you. Leave them there,” and then the motion stopped and the feet moved away. The wind seemed to have risen during the passage from the coast, but he could not care. He was not awake enough to care much about anything. He heard in his drowse the noise of engines, steam was being let off, a shunting engine went swiftly by, and above these noises there came at intervals a dull grunting thud or stamp from some machine or pump not far from the railway. Men moved to and fro, and voices called, there was a noise of running water and of wind. Afterwards, it seemed to him that while he was at this place, wherever it was, he heard men running. The thought came into his brain that he was at Tloatlucan, where he would presently get a shift-train to Las Palomas, but he felt that all that would be presently, mañana, not then, not anything like then. He lapsed into sleep again.

In his usual health, he would have been up and out striding on foot to Las Palomas, without waiting for any shift-train, but he was only the wreck of himself, all weak and weary. Perhaps a salvo of guns, a blast of trumpets, or the noise of all three masts going over the side, would have failed to rouse him then. He slept, as sailors say, “dead-oh.” He would not have wakened for less than a kick in the face.

Presently, however, he roused again at the battering clank of a train of trucks backing in upon the truck in which he was lying. He roused enough to hear voices and the clank of chain, with the thought that they were doing something with a steam winch, he could not care what. He drowsed off at once into the deeps of sleep into which none but harvesters and sailors ever sink. In his sleep, he became conscious of vibration, as though he were in a berth above the engines in some small steamer under way. It was soothing, or at least not unpleasant, to his mood of feverish drowsiness, to be shaken thus, perhaps he slept the better for it.

For some hours he slept. Gradually, as he came to himself, he found himself listening in his sleep for the bell, so that he might know how much of his watch remained to him. The bell did not strike, though he hearkened after it. He felt cold, and was aware that sprays were hitting the side of the deck-housecontinually.

Then, punctually at the “one bell,” at the moment at which he would have been called, he roused up wide awake with the knowledge that something was very wrong indeed.

He was accustomed to turning out and being on deck within a minute. He roused up now with one heave, weak, stiff and aching as he was, ready for action. He came to himself, remembering all the events of the night before, and at once took stock of things. He was in the truck, which was jolting along a bad line at about fifteen miles an hour. It was daylight, yet all dim with storm. The hitting on the truck which he had taken to be sprays on the deckhouse was sand, pelting in from the desert. The floor of the truck was covered with a fine layer of sand. A pelt of sand flew over the side of the car continually. As he stood shakily up to see where he was, the sand blew into his eyes, hair and mouth, down his neck, into his clothes, into his lungs. It came on a cold wind in little dry particular pellets. Hard snow coming in a gale has a similar power of annoying and confusing; this had a power beyond snow, of maddening. It stung like hard snow, but after it had stung it did not melt, it remained as grit where it had fallen, in the clothes, the eyes or the mouth.

He could see, perhaps, sixty yards to windward and a hundred yards to leeward of his truck, which seemed to be somewhere towards the end of a goods or freight train. The train was going along a waterless land which was sometimes a scrub of chaparral and mezquite and sometimes a desert, with cactus and prickly pear. Over all this expanse the accursed norther came down like a devil pelting sand, never in any great volume, but in a drift which never ceased. Sard noticed that the side of the next truck to his had already had a kind of polish given to it by the never-ceasing pitting of the pellets.

He knew that the “norther” being as cold as it was, must be blowing from within three points of north. This gave him the train’s course as roughly north-west. The sort of glow in the sky, which marked where the sun would be, as well as his own sense of time, always very acute, showed him that it was about eight o’clock in the morning. Reckoning that the train had picked up his trucks between three and four o’clock, he judged that he had been carried some sixty or seventy miles into the desert of Tloatlucan, and that the next stop would be fifty miles further on, in the foothills beyond the desert, where the railway began its climb into the Sierra.

Doug and his brother smugglers had of course gone with their freight on the other fork of the railway far to the west. Looking about in the sand on the floor of the truck, Sard found a hook-pot half full of cold cazuela and two of the small loaves stuffed with sausage. He was glad of these, in spite of their being gritty with sand. When he had breakfasted, he felt more like himself.

As he could neither stop the train nor get out of it he went on with it, wondering how soon he would be able to return. And as he wondered, he took stock of his equipment. He was dressed in a pair of old serge trousers belonging to Doug, a pair of slippers which had been cut down from bluchers, an old flannel shirt, as clean and soft as lint, a blue dungaree jacket, blackened with stains of dried oil, plainly the gift of one of the launch-men, and a tam-o’-shanter working-cap, wanting the topknot, which had once belonged to a sailor in the French battleship Suffren. He had his own belt and knife, an old blue handkerchief printed with the legend “A present from Bradford,” a paper collar, one sock and one stocking. His own wet clothes, which he had put in the truck, were gone. His watch, his money, penknife, key-ring and “pocket tool chest,” a little appliance containing a marler, screwdriver, nipper, spanner and corkscrew, were all gone. He had put them into the pocket of the dungaree jacket, when he had changed his clothes, but they were gone. He had nothing but the clothes in which he stood, his sheath-knife and a little brown pocket-case which contained a few pulpy visiting cards, some stamps ruined by the wet, a few matches, and three crushed xicale flowers.

He had lost his job, his passage, his clothes, his possessions, his identity. He was being carried across the desert into the heart of a continent. What he was to do when he left the train, in order to get back to Las Palomas, was not very clear.

“After all,” he said, “there will be someone at the way-station who will let me have a passage back in a truck. When once I am there, I can get along.”

The events of the night before seemed to belong to a past life or to another man. He rose up again to take stock of his whereabouts and to see if he could see a train-hand. He saw the trucks forging and jolting ahead. Beyond the trucks, both in front and behind, were the high, closed, yellow, wooden Occidental freight-cars, marked with capacity marks in dull red. The train lurched and jangled along the desert in a ceaseless pelt of sand. The sand was merciless and pitiless, a little and a little and a little. The chaparral bowed a little to it, the cactus seemed to put back its ears. Everything was dry with it, gritty, cracked, burnished. The persistence of its small annoyance told on all things. As the dropping of water wears the stone, so the pelting of the sand wore the spirit. Sard remembered what he had heard of these northers: how the children are kept from school lest they should mutiny, and how men, maddened by that insistent patting, will strike and kill. The thought crossed his mind that if he had to walk back along the track in that pelting, that annoyance of the tiny hands pat-pat-patting on face and hands would be soon unbearable. Even there, sheltered in the truck, it came pat-pat-patting, flying like a little dry-shot over the sides, filtering up through cracks in the bottom, and dancing there, like grains in a spring, till they were flung away. From time to time the dry, quiet pat-pat-patting deepened to a noise of water, with a roaring and a swish, into which the train joggled, lurched, jangled and clanked, and at last seemed to tread down and over-roar.

He had plenty of thoughts to worry him. First of these was disappointment that he had not seen “Her,” as he had hoped, the night before; next to this came rage at missing his passage; then came anxiety for that brother and sister in Los Xicales; what had happened to them? Lastly, from somewhere in the background of his mind, the thought came that it might not be easy to rejoin the Pathfinder. It was going to be a good deal more difficult than he supposed.

“Hi, ya!”

The yell of “Hi, ya” was repeated from somewhere ahead. It was a shout or hail loud enough to be heard above the noise of the train and of the storm. It was addressed to him.

He stood up, screening his eyes from the sand. There, on the top of the freight-car nearest to the trucks, a train-hand lay. He seemed annoyed at Sard’s presence. He yelled at him and motioned to him to get out of the truck. He was a hard-looking man with a swollen face and a kind of vindictive energy. He lay crouched on the freight-car, hanging on with his left hand to the iron rail on the car-roof. In his right hand he had a long club, like a baseball club, which had a leather wrist-thong. He shook this club at Sard and motioned to him with it, that he should get out of the car. He also yelled at Sard in Spanish to ask what he was doing on the train and to tell him to get out of it. As he seemed to be an unreasonable man, Sard smiled at him and resumed his seat. The man crept a little nearer, perhaps to make certain that Sard was alone, and shouted:

“I’ll have you out of it before long, my white-faced Luterano with the pip!”

“Will you have me out of it by force, or by your sweet persuasion?” Sard asked him.

“You will see.”

“That will be something to look forward to.”

“You wait.”

“I am waiting.”

The man crept a foot nearer, spat towards Sard (not very successfully against the norther) and called him some filthy names.

“I will open your bag,” he said, “with my knife, which is used to opening the bags of Englishmen. I will see whether it is true that Englishmen have the tripes of cats, as it is said.”

“It is quite true,” Sard answered. “They have. May I ask if you are in love?”

“I will soon teach you.”

“What does your lady love in you; your appearance or your breeding?”

The man champed with his teeth, bit and worried his thumb as though he were a dog and it a bone, and as it were jerked the worry at Sard. It is a passionate gesture which looks more effective than it sounds. Sard smiled at him. Sard was slightly to windward of the man and could speak to him without effort with the certainty of being heard.

“You will get blood-poisoning,” he said, “if you bite your thumb with those teeth.”

The man seemed to focus into a pair of flaming eyes; the balls of the eyes rolled upwards so as to leave nothing but glaring yellow, then they rolled down in a frenzy. He opened his mouth, grinned with clenched teeth, hissed like a snake and howled like a hyæna. He spat thrice at Sard, nodded at him, and then retreated along the freight-car top out of sight. Sard noticed then that another train-hand was watching him from the nearest freight-car to the rear of him. This man did not speak, and did not meet his eyes. When Sard looked at him the man dropped his eyelids and seemed to be looking at the ground, but in another instant he was watching again and making a motion that Sard should leave the cars. Sard could not see him so clearly as he had seen the other man, but he made out a look of shiftiness and hardness, a mixture of prison and the boxing-ring, yet tanned, as it were, or coloured with the fineness of endurance. A sort of glimmer of high quality showed in the pitiless evil mug, as in the faces of old soldiers, with bad records, who have been through great campaigns. Sard judged that this man was not an Occidental. There was a look of English or American about him. Then he did not speak nor threaten: he used neither curse nor club, only watched. Presently he caught Sard’s eyes and undoubtedly made the motion that Sard should leave the cars.

“Beat it, kid,” the man cried.

This seemed so unreasonable that Sard paid no heed to him: he looked the other way.

“Beat it,” the man cried. “Pasea.”

Sard looked at him; then looked away.

“Hell and Maria,” the man said, “if you ain’t got a gall!”

Perhaps in normal runs the train-hands on that freighter foregathered for talk, drink or cards in the after-car. Perhaps the three trucks in the middle of the train made the journey impossible on this occasion, or it may be that Sard, the unknown man sitting in the truck, with the look of one able to guard himself, made them think the norther not worth the facing. They did not attempt the journey. The train pounded and jangled on across the desert, in the ceaseless pelting and pitting of the sand. The train presently reached a part of the desert where the wind for some reason had more scope. Perhaps the line there crossed the mouth of some great gut in the distant Sierra. The wind suddenly rose in strength and voice, lifting the sand so that it looked like a smoke into which the train had to butt. “Ai, ai!” it cried, just as it cries in rigging, while the sand came over like sprays. Sard kept well ducked down under a tarpaulin. When he looked up from his place towards his left, he sometimes saw the train-hand watching him. Whenever their eyes met, the train-hand motioned to him to leave the cars. Presently the train-hand grew weary of such foolishness: he shouted something which Sard could not hear, and then beat his way aft, out of sight.

Sard knew enough about the train-hands on these freighters to be sure of evil from them. Hoboes had killed so many train-hands that now the train crews always carried clubs, which they used on any hoboes who were unable to pay their way or to defend themselves. Sard had no doubts about being able to defend himself, but that evil face abaft-all made him wonder how he was to get back across the desert to Las Palomas. How would he fare, he wondered, if the train-hands on the returning train were that sort of men? He realised that he was not now Sard Harker, the mate of a crack ship, but a ragged-looking rough-neck, dirty and unshaven, who would get “the hoboes’ deal, a bat on the head and six months’ road-gang.” He began to have misgivings about his future.

For another two hours the train ran on across the storm. It was running away from the storm, all the time, so that the violence of the wind and the annoyance of the sand both abated. Presently the sand ceased to pelt, the train ran out into the sun, leaving behind it a cloud of sand-coloured storm, stretching up into the heaven, where it smoked like sulphur fumes.

Now on both hands in a winking bright light was the desert of the Indios Salvajes with the Sierra of the Holy Ghost beyond. After the misery of the night and the nuisance of the storm, the beauty of the wilderness was overwhelming. It lay in a half-circle, stretching for ninety miles under the spine of the Sierra. It was all shining, vast, mysterious, lonely beyond belief, empty of any life that was not poisonous and spined and savage. There were patches of chaparral, a few mezquite trees, a few giant cactuses. The most of it was empty shining sand, many-coloured, flitting, sometimes danced over by eddies. Rocks of violent colours rose out of it like the bones of dead beasts. Parts of it seemed to be alive and thinking, other parts of it seemed dead from old time, all parts of it drew Sard like a temptation.

He knelt on his tarpaulin to stare at it. He had known the desert of the sea for a good many years. There men exist by effort and strength, pitting their worth against it day by day. This was the desert of the land, which calls men, not to try their worth, but to consider their nature and their source, and to let all their effort and their strength be absorbed in that contemplation.

He felt power come into him from that vast expanse which bore no life, or almost none, that was not deadly, yet had absorbed for centuries, unshielded, the energy of the sun in his strength.

At about midday the train, which had been running in sight of the Sierra, passed so close under the foothills that Sard lost sight of them. He was feeling rested and well: his leg was still numb, but fit for use. He looked ahead along the line. There in an opening of the foothills a couple of miles away were the houses of a settlement. They were adobe houses, some of them limewashed, under a roll of foothill which bore the marks of silver-mining. There was a white church with a red-tiled campanile pierced in the Mission fashion for three bells. Sard could see that there was a station here. Something made him look back suddenly behind him. He was not in any danger, but from his perch in the after-car the hard-faced man was watching him.

“Beat it, kid,” the man shouted. “Beat it like hell.” He signed to Sard to leap from the car on the desert side. “Kid,” he cried, “this ain’t no kid glove foolishness. You wanna beat it just like smoke.”

Unfortunately, Sard had heard of men shot while trying to “beat it” from a freight-car. He did not want to beat it, but to explain his presence and get a lift back to the coast. Besides, with one leg numb from poison, it was not easy to beat it while the train was moving. The train-hand shook his head much as Pilate washed his hands; he moved aft along the cars out of sight again.

The Occidental train-hand, who had promised to look at his tripes, reappeared for an instant to make sure that he was still there. He showed his teeth at Sard and made a motion of cutting open a waistcoat with the upward sweep of one hand. The train slackened speed so that Sard could hear the clanging of the bell on the engine. Looking out, he could see the population of the town sauntering to the station to watch the train come to a stop. She curved in to the platform, which had been made there some years before for a President’s visit. Only the engine and one car could draw to the platform at one time. On the end of the station building the name of the place, Tlotoatin, was painted on a plank. The train stopped.

As she stopped, Sard laid hold of the truck side to swing himself out. At that instant, the train jerked forward and then backwards violently, so that he was pitched down into his truck. He was out of the train just three seconds after the train-hands.

To his surprise, neither of these men made any movement towards him: they stood watching, while a squad of soldiers followed their officers out of the rear cars. The officers and men wore the grey uniforms and green tejada-de-burro caps of the Nacionales. The officers plainly knew of Sard’s presence on the train. They came straight towards him with drawn revolvers in their hands. One of the officers was an elderly captain, fat, pompous, slow-witted, and with a face like a slab of something: the other was a little thin dapper lieutenant, with legs like pipestems cased in tight patent-leather boots to the knees. Sard knew at once that these men were coming back to barracks after being escort to a consignment of silver from the mines. He saluted the officers, who did not return his salute: on the contrary, they seemed indignant at his saluting. A couple of soldiers covered Sard with their rifles.

“Who are you?” the captain asked.

Sard told him.

“So. You speak Spanish. What are you doing on the line?”

Sard told him.

“A likely story, eh, lieutenant?”

“Very likely, my captain.”

“You know the law against trespass on the line?”

“No, captain,” Sard said.

“That is false,” the captain answered; “since you know Spanish, you must know it.”

“I am English, and do not,” Sard said.

“That is false,” the captain answered. “You are not English. You are French. Your cap proves it. You are a deserter from the French ship which called here.”

“If there be any English or Scotchman here,” Sard said, “or any American, I can prove that I am English.”

“We desire no proof, since we need none. You were on the line, that suffices; without papers, which clinches it. You are arrested.”

“You had better not arrest me,” Sard said; “in spite of my clothes, I am an officer, equal in rank to yourself.”

“Enough words,” the captain said.

“By many, too many words,” the lieutenant said.

“At least,” Sard said, “you can telegraph to the British Consul at Las Palomas about me, or send me to him.”

“It is not for you to prescribe our course of action,” the captain said. “You are arrested. Your case will have every consideration. Meanwhile, to the barracks.”

“To the barracks: march,” the lieutenant added.

If he had resisted, perhaps if he had said another word, they would have shot him and pitched him down a disused working. Sard knew that the silver escorts were apt to shoot to save trouble. He judged it best to submit. “They are cross from the sandstorm,” he thought; “soon they will have lunched; then they will listen to reason; or I can get word to some Englishman, or to the Consul.” Like all sailors, he had the utmost contempt for soldiers; to be jailed by soldiers was a bitter experience.

The guards fell in on each side of him; two men came behind him with fixed bayonets; the officers brought up the rear with drawn revolvers; the captain called “March!” As they set out, the Occidental train-hand darted two steps forward and crouched to screech some insults. He mocked, showed his teeth and jeered at Sard, making again the gesture of the stomach-ripper. “You get him,” he screeched in English, “you get-a your bag cut. A te te . . . ucho!”

Just a couple of paces beyond this screamer, the other train-hand stood, twirling his club as though puzzled. He was looking hard at Sard with a face made of broken commandments: Sard expected a bat on the head from him as he passed. He did not get it: the man dropped his eyes as before, and spat sideways as though dismissing the thought of Sard. They passed out of the station enclosure to the town, which was crowded with inhabitants, who had either come to see the train or were now coming to see “the bandit.” Most of the citizens were mestizos or Indios. Sard looked in vain for an American or English face. He heard the comments passed upon him.

“An English bandit who robbed the silver train.”

“That a white so sickly should have so much blood!”

“Ha, dirty thief, to the gallows!”

“Ho, Englishman, it is not so easy to rob our silver: we are not your Africans from whom you may rob gold.”

“Englishman, the garota: cluck-cluck!”

“They say he killed seven before being taken.”

“He? An Englishman? They were asleep, covered in their blankets. He stabbed them sleeping.”

“Hear you, he killed seven, sleeping.”

“Let them kill him, then. We have enough of these whites at our doors without Englishmen.”

The barracks were close to the station. The party marched into the patio of the barrack buildings: the heavy maruca-wood gates were closed behind them. The place looked as dingy as a prison and as mean as a workhouse: it smelt like a cesspool. One end of it, the men’s end, was two storeys high and covered with scaling plaster, the sides were one storey adobe buildings which had been limewashed once since they were built. The left side of the square seemed to be officers’ quarters, for it was screened by a verandah. On the side opposite to it were stables, kitchens, and a sort of barton where two charrucas were housed.

“You will be imprisoned till you can give an account of yourself,” the lieutenant said. “Take him to the cells, you men.”

“I am perfectly ready to go to the cells,” Sard said, “but I wish to let the English of this town know that I am here.”

“This is not England,” the lieutenant said, “but the Occidental Republic, where the English, the Irish, and other accursed gringos have no voice, save when they mew like cats for the charity of our leavings. Your presence shall be explained to such English as may be here. The brothel-keeper is English and the town-scavenger Irish. There is also a Scotchman in the road-gang for murder. Such are the places of your race among the Occidentales.”

“We do the things most needed,” Sard answered. “Next to begetting a new race.”

“For half a peseta I would blow your brains out.”

“Any Occidental would do murder for half a peseta.”

“You will find, my dog, that we do justice for nothing.”

“So America thinks.”

The lieutenant whirled right round upon his heel, a complete circle. He gurgled in his throat, thrust his revolver-butt into his mouth and bit it, so that marks showed upon the wood. His face turned black with rage: he stamped with his feet so that Sard expected his little brittle pipestems to snap.

“Remove him to the cells,” he said, as soon as he could speak.

“I am going to the cells,” Sard said. “Remember that you have been warned that you are jailing an officer and will be held responsible.” He turned his back upon the lieutenant and followed a corporal through the barton to a yard beyond. In this yard, which was fenced with a high adobe wall, tiled at the top, were the cells. The corporal unlocked the door of one of the cells and motioned to Sard to enter. Sard cast a glance about the yard. He noticed all down the western wall a line of bullet-marks about breast-high. He had seen similar marks on walls in Santa Barbara: they marked executions.

“Enter, then,” the corporal said. The cell was dirty, but the dirt was old dirt.

“Look,” Sard said, pausing at the door. “Will you, or one of your men, send word to the engineers of the mines that I, an Englishman, am in the cells here?”

“Assuredly.”

“At once, can you go or send at once?”

“Assuredly.”

“I will see that you are rewarded.”

“Assuredly.”

“Send to the chief English or Scotch engineer at the chief mine.”

“Assuredly,” the corporal said. “Meanwhile, enter.”

Sard entered and was locked in. The corporal opened the grating in the door and said, “How am I to be rewarded for this sending to the engineers?”

“You shall be rewarded when they come.”

“Who will reward me?” the corporal asked; “will it be yourself or the engineers?”

“It will be myself.”

“Truly, then,” the corporal said, “since it will be you who will reward me, when the work is done, it must be you who shall make it worth my while to do it. How much then? A hundred pesetas?”

“Not a penny piece,” Sard said, “till the engineers are here. Then indeed you shall be rewarded.”

“There is a very wise proverb,” the corporal said, “ ‘Paid first never grieves.’ And yet another proverb says, ‘Will-pay is a fine bird, but cash-down sings.’ ”

“There is yet another proverb,” Sard answered, “ ‘The fed hound never hunts,’ and another still, ‘Penny-pouched is promise-broken.’ ”

“These are English proverbs,” the corporal said, “and do not concern me. Show me at least the colour of your money, or no message will go.”

“There is another proverb,” Sard said, “which says, ‘Grudging greed gets not.’ ”

“Adios,” the corporal said, “grudging greed will get no food nor drink; no message to any engineer; nor blanket at night, if blanket be needed.” He slipped the shutter across the grating and moved across the yard, back into the barton, leaving Sard alone. The cell was empty of any furniture. It measured about seven feet each way. Its roof sloped down from about eight feet at the door to six feet at the back. The floor was earth, the walls adobe, the roof ceiled with plaster, European fashion, against tarantulas. The cell was lit by the omission of one block of adobe just under the eaves at the back. Sard could just see out of this hole by standing on tiptoe. He saw a patch of sandy soil which had been channelled and pitted by people wanting sand; rats were humping about in this among refuse tipped there from the barracks. Beyond the sandy strip and distant about 120 yards was the railway, with its platform, water tank, fuel heap, and the legend

Tlotoatin.

Beyond this was the desert reaching to infinity, where violet rocks gleaming with snow merged into the shimmer of the sky.

The shutter of his door was pulled back: a private soldier peered at him through the bars.

“See,” he said, “you want a message taken to an engineer?”

“Yes,” Sard said.

“Which engineer?”

“Any English engineer. There must be some.”

“Yes. There is one, Mason, at Chicuna Mine.”

“Can you go to him? Will you go?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell him of me and ask him to come here?”

“Yes. Listen. That corporal is a fool. He is put on to ask money by the lieutenant.”

“Indeed.”

“He is a greedy one, the lieutenant. But one who will squeeze his feet will bleed his mother, as we say. And to ask money of one whom God has afflicted . . .”

“You, who ask no money, shall be well rewarded.”

“I ask no reward,” the man said. “God forbid that I should make profit from distress. One thing only I would ask: that you would lend me your coat, so that I could leave the barracks, since in uniform it is forbidden.”

“Truly I will do that,” Sard said.

“If you will pass it through the bars,” the man said, “then I will put it on and hurry to the Chicuna Mine, so as to be there before the whistle blows. It will blow for dinner and siesta in a few minutes now.”

Sard knew that the siesta hour must be very near and that the moment was propitious for the finding of a fellow-countryman. He had only been a few minutes in prison, but already the thought of being locked up through the siesta when he might be outside made him anxious for the engineer to be there.

“Give to the engineer this card,” he said, “and urge him hither at once; any engineer who speaks my tongue.”

“There is a penalty,” the man said, “if we are caught outside the gates in uniform.”

“What penalty?”

“That of the thumbs.”

“Still, in this coat,” Sard said, “you could surely pass out unobserved?”

“They will not catch me,” the man said; “and if they do (though they will not), it will be well worth while, since to help the afflicted can never be a sin. This will I always maintain.”

“Surely rightly,” Sard said, stripping off the old and oily jacket. “But here is the disguise for you; this coat. You had better take the cap as well.”

Sard could just make out that some other soldiers were in the yard not very far away.

“Is it safe?” he asked. “There are men there who may see you take the coat. Will they betray you, if they see you?”

“Never,” the man answered. “They are my brothers, set there to watch for the corporal.”

“Take then the coat and cap.”

The soldier cast a glance about him, to see if it were safe to take them; then he slipped them through the bars and under his coat. “Wait yet, one moment,” he said; “should you desire food or drink, I would buy some, if you would give the penny. I mention this, because otherwise you will have neither food nor drink.”

“Thank you, I need neither food nor drink,” Sard said, “but only the engineer, as soon as you can bring him.”

“Right, Excellency,” the man said. “And now it will be necessary that I close the shutter.”

“Right,” Sard said. “And thank you.”

The man closed the shutter. “I will start straight away,” he said.

Sard heard him move away to the other soldiers who were standing in the shade of the wall.

“I have the coat,” he said proudly to his comrades. “And not only that, he said, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ I had asked for the coat as a disguise, thinking it the limit that I could ask, when, lo, he himself says, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ ”

There came a roar of laughter from the soldiers.

“Cap and coat too?”

“Yes; and it was he himself who said, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ And I had not thought of the cap. Never once should I have dreamed of it. But he himself thrust it on me, ‘Take the cap as well, O take the cap as well.’ ‘I beseech you,’ he said to me, ‘take the cap as well.’ ”

“It is a French cap, Martin,” one of the soldiers said. “The Little Twig-Legs remarked of it, that it is a French cap. Thus we have the Paris fashions at Tlotoatin.”

“Mind” (another said) “that the French cap do not bring within itself the French crown.”

“This Englishman is more innocent than Joseph.”

“Wait, Martin,” one of the men said; “did not this Englishman offer you money?”

“Money? Why, he has no money. I, who watched his face, know well that he has no money.”

“No money and no coat and no cap.”

“Stay yet,” one objected. “He handed you paper, as I myself observed. Was not that money?”

“It was this, which I was to give to an engineer.”

“What engineer?”

“One Mason, of the Chicuna Mine: such being the names which came into my head. He asked, ‘Is there an English engineer?’ ‘Truly,’ I said, following my inspiration, ‘there is Mason of the Chicuna Mine.’ ‘Give him this, then,’ he said.”

“What is it?”

“I know not. Writing. He had several like it.”

“Is it English money?”

“No. The English use only gold.”

“Accursed Lutherans, and that they steal!”

“I think that the writing is the symbol of a secret society to which all these dogs belong,” one of the soldiers said. “These symbols they pass to each other by messengers to give warning of their accursednesses.”

“Tear it up then.”

“Meanwhile,” Martin said, “I will with this coat and this cap to Eustaphia; madre de las putas that she is, even she will assuredly give me one twenty-five for them.”

“They are old,” a soldier objected. “She will not give one twenty-five, but one five, or one ten, not a Portuguese milrei more.”

“One five or one ten. They are of European weaving and will last for many lives. But to market.”

As the soldier passed Sard’s door, to market the coat and cap, he called out, with a fair imitation of Sard’s voice and accent:

“Take then the coat and cap. You had better take the cap as well.”

As a blow, which would have been pleasanter than an answer, was impossible, Sard kept silent, though his thoughts were bitter. In about ten minutes, Martin returned triumphantly. He passed close to the cell-door, so that Sard not only heard him but smelt the fragrant reek of the hot tamales and annis brandy, which he had bought with the spoils.

“See,” he said, “she being glad with brandy gave me one-forty.”

“One-forty; is it possible?”

“Let us, then, into our room, away from corporal and Little Twig-Legs.”

“Stay yet,” one soldier said. “Shall we not give a tamale and a tot of brandy to this Englishman?”

“He has refused it,” Martin answered. “He refused it with scorn, almost with insult. ‘I need neither food nor drink,’ he said, ‘only the engineer, who is my sole passion, now that my wife has fled with the lodger.’ ”

Sard would have been very glad of a tamale and a drink of water, but neither was offered. The men moved off and closed a door behind them. Soon after that, the hooter-whistles blew at three different mines. A trumpeter, taking the time from them, blew a call in the patio of the barracks. For a few minutes Sard could hear the shuffling of many feet, hurrying to those calls to dinner and siesta. “No one will come to me now,” Sard said, “for three hours. I am locked in till they choose to remember me, and nobody who knows me knows where I am.” He tried the door, which was locked, as well as barred across: the upper and lower panels of it were metalled. He tried the walls: they were made of a kind of adobe which had been furnace-burnt: they were brick. The roof he could not easily reach, except at the back of the cell. The floor was of clay which had been puddled and beetled.

Of all these four barriers, the floor seemed to him to be the most easy to remove. He hung the handkerchief, “A present from Bradford,” over the grating in the door, lest some spy should pull back the shutter. When he had done this, he knelt down close to the back of the cell, took out his knife and began to dig bare the lowest courses of adobe.

His knife had been given to him years before as a keepsake by his second in the port main; it had been with him in his first voyage in the Venturer, and ever since, in all his sea-going. It had not been taken from him by the soldiers, because they had not expected that any man would carry a weapon where a sailor carries his knife. They had tapped his side, breast and hip pockets, but not the middle of his back. The knife was of the common type of sailors’ sheath-knife. He had cut nicks on the handle, a nick for every passage completed between port and port; thirty-six nicks altogether. The sheath was not the original sheath, but a gift from a sailor called Panther Jack, who had made it for him in the Pathfinder out of an old boot. The knife-blade was worn away to a thin crescent of steel by repeated sharpenings at the grindstone. It was as good a knife as a man might hope for in work aloft, cutting stops or ropes’ ends, but it was the poorest kind of trowel. In his eagerness, he put too much weight upon it and snapped the blade across about an inch from the handle.

He was disheartened by this, but continued to scrape till he discovered that the pounded clay on the floor had been laid on a spread of pebbles set in mortar. The mortar was queer stuff, very hard near the pebbles, but soft between them. It took Sard one hour to clear out three pebbles. Under the third was an iron bolt, or nail, the length and weight of a marline-spike. It had been bent a little. In its day it had had a good deal of battering. It was rusty, but very well fitted to be a punch to drift out other pebbles. Using a pebble as a mallet, Sard was making good progress when a low voice called him:

“Kid!”

“Who’s there?” he asked.

“Say, Kid, don’t make any noise, but come right up to the hole there.”

Sard came cautiously, half expecting a missile through the hole. He saw that the hole was blocked by a man’s face, which so shut out the light that he could not recognise it.

“Say, Kid.”

The face swung away from the hole, for the stone on which the man was standing slipped a little. Sard recognised the ugly-looking train-hand who had watched him from the after-car.

“Say, Kid,” the man repeated, as he clawed back into position, “you wanna get quit of here, or you’ll line the cold-meat cart.”

“I’m trying to get quit,” Sard said.

“Well, you wanna try pretty dam’ hard. You was on the silver line and you ain’t got any plunks, I guess.”

“No.”

“Well, you wanna get out before sundown, sport. These silver-escort guys, they’ll keep a man till sundown, to see if he’ll pay to be let out. If he can’t, they bring him into the yard ‘for exercise’ and shoot him full of holes. If any question’s asked, they say they shot him while he was trying to escape. What the hell did you stay on the train for till she pulled up? I gave you the flag to beat it, and you put your dam’ hoof right on it.”

“I thought you were going to shoot me,” Sard said. “Anyhow, I could not have jumped from the train, because my leg is queer.”

“Hell!” the man said. “You ain’t got ten plunks?”

“No.”

“I mean, sewed away anywheres, against an emergency?”

“I haven’t a penny.”

“Because if you have ten plunks, you’re up against your emergency, don’t you make any mistake.”

“I haven’t a farthing.”

“Hell!” the man said, “I was cleaned out at pinochle myself, only last night, by that dam’ Dutchman. Hell!” He climbed from his perch, readjusted his foothold and clambered back.

“Dam’ that Dutchman’s soul and that dam’ Las Palomas Pilsener.” He seemed to be busy with his hands and eyes: soon he spoke again.

“Say, Kid, you gotta get out-a here. Watch-a doing? Digging?”

“Yes.”

“Is the roof ceiled inside? I see it is. Hold on, then, till I have a try.”

Sard heard him heave himself up on to the roof, where he seemed to lie prone, working busily, with very little noise, for ten minutes. It was still siesta time, but Sard judged that someone in the barracks might see or hear at any moment. Mutterings, mainly curses, came from the man on the roof, with the scraping and raking of tiles. For all the attempt to keep quiet, a good deal of force was being used; soon pieces of tile went slithering down the roof with what seemed to Sard a devilish tumult. Then the man seemed to get a purchase on a key-tile and wrench it this way and that, with the noise of a riveter’s yard. Sard felt that any sleeper within a hundred yards must be roused by the racket. Worse followed, for the tile broke; some of it flew off into the yard and smashed upon a stone, the rest bounced on the roof and then slithered down it and off it: the train-hand cursed it and its parents.

One of the soldiers, who had been sleeping in the barton, came into the yard, looked about him, saw the man on the roof and challenged.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m mending this dam’ roof. Remediando this dam’ teja.”

“Who told you to mend the roof?”

“The capataz and also the teniente.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes, my brave, it is true. Go you and ask them if you don’t believe me.”

“What do you say?”

“Go you and ask them, if you do not believe.”

“They did not say so to me, that the roof should be mended.”

“See here, brother: they said so to me. Do you get that? To me, that is me here, they dicoed that I should mend this dam’ roof; and I’m mending it; and when it’s ended, you can have the dam’ bits to scratch with.”

“Bueno,” the man said, after a pause. “Esta bueno.”

“I guess it is bueno,” the train-hand muttered. “It’s pretty dam’ bueno, if you ask me.”

He went on working. Having cleared away two tiles, his task was easier, because he could get at the pegs in the heads of the course below them. He cracked each tile at the peg by a smart tap, then shook it clear and piled it to one side. Presently he wrenched a couple of laths away, beat violently downwards with them and knocked a foot of the ceiling into Sard’s cell. He had begun his work with some precautions against noise: he now took none. A second soldier came yawning out of the barton. He stood staring with his mate at the breaking of the tiles.

“What is he doing?” he asked.

“Mending the roof.”

“Verdad?”

“Verdad.”

“See here now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “can you ketch aholt of these laths and give a swig down on them?”

“Yes.”

“He is talking to the prisoner,” the second soldier said to his comrade. “He ought not to talk to the prisoner.”

“Assuredly he ought not.”

“And what was I saying to the prisoner?” the train-hand answered. “The prisoner was talking to me. He was complaining that I broke his siesta.” He bent his head down, as though speaking to Sard. “You say you’ll complain at having your siesta broken; complain to the capataz. You’ll complain hell. I’m doing my duty in mending this roof.” Then under his breath he added in English: “Two more swigs like that and she’ll make hell-gate on the flood. Heave, Kid, you can git more purchase on it than I can.”

Sard could get purchase on it, by leaping up, catching at a lath or at the plaster, and tearing it down by his weight. The noise of the wreckage falling into the cell gave the two soldiers some uneasiness. They looked at each other at each fall, with comments.

“He is making much mess.”

“Assuredly.”

“Do you think that it is all right? What?”

“That is what I ask.”

“I heard no word of the mending of this roof.”

“Nor I.”

“I half think that I ought to report it.”

“Such is half my thought also.”

“Assuredly, if aught should happen that should not . . .”

“Then, indeed . . .”

“Suppose, then, that you acquaint the corporal . . .”

“Yes; but if all be truly well, if the roof be entitled to this mending, then shall we be like him who, fearing the burglar, shot the priest.”

“If it be not so entitled, on the other hand, what then?”

“Then, indeed . . .”

The train-hand judged that this conversation had reached a danger-point. He started a counter-topic.

“My aunt hell,” he cried.

“What is it?” the soldiers asked.

“Good Sarah, watch the devils.”

“Watch what?”

“Say,” the train-hand said, in an excited tone, “Pronto now, where does this ceiling end? At each end of the building, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but why, what has happened?”

“Get you within doors, then; one at each end; quick now; take sticks. Do as I tell you; quickly.”

“Yes, yes; here are sticks; what are we to do?”

“Into the building, one at each end, quickly now. It is rattlesnakes curled up here, twenty at least. Get in. I’ll drive them down to you. There is a reward, half a peseta a rattle. One at each end, now. And watch. I’ll drive them down to you.”

“Watch where?”

“Where shall we watch?”

“At the ventilators. Quick, quick, or they’ll be gone. Get down and kill them as they crawl out. It will be ten pesetas each.”

The men did not know where to go, but realised that they were to be indoors, watching the ventilators. They had picked up laths from a bundle lying against a wall. After a half a minute of confusion, turning this way and that, they did as they were bidden, they ran indoors, one at each end of the building.

“Shut the doors behind you,” the train-hand cried, “or they’ll be out into the yard.”

The doors were slammed to.

“Now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “now, Kid, hump yourself. Get a holt of this rafter and out, pretty P.D.Q.”

Sard leaped to the rafter, caught it, drew himself up to it, got an arm over it, got his head above the roof and saw the station and the desert, both beautiful with freedom. The train-hand gripped him by the belt and hove upon him. With a wrestle and a struggle he got his other arm over a rafter, then his knees; he was on the roof top.

“Beat it, Kid, like hell,” the train-hand said. “Here’s Twig-Legs.”

Sard just saw that someone was entering the yard from the barton. He did not stay to see who it was, but shot himself off the roof into the waste with one heave. He swerved to his left under cover of the barrack wall and “beat it” as his helper had bade. His helper hurled bits of tile into Twig-Legs’ face, then flung himself off the roof and “beat it” in the other direction.

Sard turned at the angle of the barracks into a sandy street of adobe houses, some of which had white canvas screens spread across their stoops. The street was like a street of the dead in the siesta. A few dogs, the exact colour of the sand, lay in the sun as though killed by a pestilence. Sard dodged their bodies, darted down a lane to the right, and found himself barred by a wall, which was topped by spikes. He got hold of a spike, swung himself up and scrambled over, into a graveyard in which the dead seemed to be coming out of their graves.

The rats and dogs snarled at him as he crossed the graveyard, the skulls looked out at him, the hands clutched at him. He went across the graveyard and out of it, by a gap where the wall had fallen, into a lane. He turned to his left, ran along the lane for about fifty yards and turned sharply to his right into a street of detached houses, some of which had palms growing in boxes at their gates. He walked along this street for a little way, listening for pursuers but hearing none.

“I must find out if they’re after that train-hand,” he said; “I must find that train-hand and thank him.”

He listened intently, expecting to hear a tumult at the barracks, but all was still there. He brushed the plaster and tile dust from his clothes. He regretted that he had no hat: not even “A present from Bradford,” which he had left screening the shutter on the door of his cell. He remembered suddenly three cases of murderers arrested from having lost their hats at the scene of their crimes. He remembered another case, from the time of the Terror in Paris, of a man saved from the guillotine by having a hat thrust suddenly upon his head, while he waited his turn in the dusk and rain at the place of execution. When his turn came at the end of the batch, he was judged to be one of the spectators and passed by.

“I’m suspect without a hat,” he thought, “and I am also guilty of train-trespass and prison-breaking. But I’m not going to beat it from here till I know whether that man has beaten it.”

He turned to his left, walked along another sandy road of silent adobe houses and sleeping dogs, and soon reached a road which he recognised. Far down it, a quarter of a mile away, on the left, was the barrack entrance, with its flag-pole, bearing the green-grey-blue tricolour of the Occidental Republic. Opposite Sard, as he stopped to reconnoitre, was a pulperia, with a hoarding on its roof. It was this hoarding which was familiar; he had noticed it while he was being led to the barracks; it bore a legend which he could now read, in translation:

Palace of Pleasure.

Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5¢.

Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.

Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.

“Beans, beer and a bed,” Sard thought, “how good those things are, and how lucky they are who can afford them. Well is it called a palace of pleasure, if that is the kind of life they live here. I begin to understand the phrase now: ‘he hasn’t got a bean.’ And at this time yesterday I was mate of a crack ship.”

From a mine to the westward from him there came the blare of a hooter, giving warning that siesta was nearly ended. Other hooters took up the blast, till the place rang with echoes coming back from the hills. Now from some of the houses workers came half awake, like sailors coming on deck, buttoning their shirts. They went slouching off towards the mines, rubbing their eyes.

A man came yawning from the door of the Palace of Pleasure. He had a straw-broom in one hand with which he pretended to sweep the doorstep. Half his face was covered with one hand as he yawned. It was the train-hand.

“Say, Kid,” he said, “step inside here.”

He stepped inside and shook the man’s hand and thanked him.

“Aw, come off,” the man said, shutting the door. “Come in here.” He led the way by a dark passage past a flight of stairs. Sard heard the rustle of skirts and smelt scent; looking up suddenly, he saw the heads of two women looking over the stair-rail on the landing above. One of them coquettishly sucked her cigarette to a glow as he passed, so that he might see her face the better.

The man opened a door into a room which had a bar at one side of it, and a long table, with benches, at the other. The bar was closed by a grating. Two men were asleep on the benches with their heads drooped on their outstretched arms; they were breathing heavily from purple faces: “Feeling their siesta doing them good,” the train-hand called it. A third man, powerfully built, with a mottled olive face, brass earrings and a purple neckerchief, was sitting at the table eating with his knife. He had a small slab of something pale upon a dish in front of him. He shovelled flakes of this on to his knife-blade and then shovelled them into his mouth. He was a noisy as well as an untidy eater, being still a little in drink. He seemed displeased at the entrance of Sard: he dug his knife-point twice into the table, as though into someone’s body, and he said nothing, which was unusual in a land where all at least offer to share their food and drink with the newcomer.

The train-hand took Sard to the end of the table away from the other three and sat him down.

“Say, Kid,” he said, “you wanna beat it right out-a here.”

“How about you?” Sard asked.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You broke prison. You helped me to escape. You flung a tile at the officer, and some of those men must have recognised you, since they came in on the train with you.”

“I’m not lying awake any,” the man said. “I’m one of the boys. But you ain’t. What in hell you doing here? That’s what gets me.”

Sard told him.

“Where you wanna get to?”

“Las Palomas.”

“How’re you going to get?”

“Could I get a ride on a freight-car?”

“No, sir. The only freight-cars from here is silver cars. There’s not much these ’Tale guys mind, but they mind their silver. You’d be shot, sure as hell.”

“Could I get a job on the train, shovelling coal?”

“Nit.”

“Why not?” Sard asked.

“Cut the train right out of your thought,” the man said. “The freight-cars ain’t going to be healthy to you. My mate Antonio will remember you.”

“Very well, then; I’ll walk along the line.”

“Hell, Kid,” the man said, “it’s a hundred and seven miles, desert all the way; and anyone seeing you on the silver line would shoot you sure as hell.”

“What am I to do then?”

“You could get a job in the Chicuna mine, sinking the new shaft. But I guess you’d have to stay a fortnight, before you touched your wad: they always hold back the first week. After that you could go in on the cars to Las Palomas. No, you couldn’t neither. You’d have to stay another week, or six days. They ain’t only but one train a week. They call her the Flying Fornicator or the Hop to Whoredom. I guess she’s about rightly christened.”

“I can’t wait,” Sard said, “I must start back right away. I’ll walk it. If I can’t walk along the line, I’ll shape a course of my own across the desert.”

“Watcha going to eat? Watcha going to drink? Kid, you can’t do it. Besides there’s snakes in the desert. Even the Jackarillers didn’t cross the desert from here. No, Kid; cut it right out; and go up to the Chicuna to-morrow before the whistle. It will be the quickest in the end. Here’s the boss; he’ll tell you the same.”

The boss came in with a demijohn and funnel; he had been doctoring cider with red pepper to serve as whisky for the later drinks of the evening. He was a very tall, fair-haired, sandy-moustached man, with a cold and evil blue eye. He carried a gun in front as well as one in a hip pocket. He nodded at the train-hand and cast an eye over Sard. He was in the business which brings men much into touch with the broken. He summed up Sard at once as being “on his uppers,” or penniless.

“Pitch,” the train-hand called. “ ’Low me to introduce my friend. What did you say your name was, Kid?”

“Harker.”

“Mr. Harker. Mr. Pitch Hanssen.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Pitch said: he did not look it. He put down his demijohn and funnel upon the bar, and stood there, looking at the company.

“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “Mr. Harker wants to get to Las Palomas. He ain’t got too much money; so I say he’d better put in a fortnight at the Chicuna. What do you say, Pitch?”

“He wants to get to Las Palomas?”

“Yes, or the coast,” Sard said.

“I guess you’d better inform yourself, sir,” Pitch said. “There’s only two ways of getting to a place; you know that as well as I do.”

“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “this gentleman’s a friend of mine.”

“If he’d like to order anything,” Pitch said, “he’ll be a friend of mine. But if he ain’t got any dough, or is the dead-broke bum I take him to be, I’ll ask him to take a walk. This is a place for men who can pay their way and can afford hats. Are you going to order, Alonzo?”

“Yes,” Sard said. “I am.”

Although his leg was numb from the poison, he could still move like an athlete. He slid from his bench to the landlord in one motion.

“I’m going to order you to mind how you talk to me.”

“Order me hell,” Pitch said. “You’d best order yourself a hat, you low-down hobo. Or order yourself a shave, while you’re at it. And now take a walk to some place where you can buy. Get out of it.”

He did not pull a gun, probably his guns were not loaded, but he poked up his left at Sard’s face as Sard had expected he would. Sard on the instant cross-countered with his right to the point. Pitch slithered sideways along the bar, fell, rolled over on the floor and lay quiet.

“Carai!” screamed the man with brass earrings, “Hijo de la gran puta. You dog-assassin of English!” He flung his knife at Sard with the backward flick from the wrist which “takes a year to learn,” so the bad men say. Had he flung the knife before screaming, Sard would have had the point through his throat, but the scream warned him; he had time to dodge. The knife stuck in the bar. Sard pulled it out. The two men at the table woke up. “Rough house,” one of them said.

“Cut out your dam’ row and let us sleep,” the other said.

“Carai, carai, carai,” cried the man with brass earrings. “I’ll give you dog-assassin with the bottle.” He came across the table at Sard with a bottle, knocking over one of the sleepers as well as a bench. Floundering in this wreck, he himself fell, cursing. There came a scurry of swift yet heavy steps on the floor above.

“Beat it, Kid,” the train-hand cried to Sard. “Here’s the missus.” He held the door open for Sard, who slipped through it to the front door, which was already open. He was moving swiftly, but had a glimpse as he fled of a monstrous woman, with an inflamed and frowsy face, who was floundering downstairs to him, calling him to stop. Something cracked the woodwork of the door to his left and something banged to his right: the woman was shooting at him.

He reached the street, turned sharply, ran round the house, scrambled over a low wall into an enclosure, and ran along it, while the pursuit grew loud behind him. At the end of the enclosure there was a wall, which he climbed. As he climbed it, there came cries of “There he is!” and bullets struck the wall and the earth beneath it. He dropped into a second enclosure. At the end of the enclosure there was a house, at the door of which a man lay in a chair taking his siesta with a gun upon his knees. The man woke up as Sard reached him, and at the same instant the pursuers reached the enclosure wall and opened fire. Sard slipped past the man in the chair into the house. He said, “Excuse me,” as he passed, and slammed the door behind him. There was a door on his left; a woman opened it, asking him, in Spanish, what was the matter. He said, “It is the washing, Madam,” and slipped past her and up the flight of stairs. On the upper floor were three children, who screamed when they saw him. He called out to them, in Spanish, that their mother was bringing them some sweets.

He tried a door, which was locked, and another door, which opened into a shuttered room; he then ran up the next floor. There was a door opposite the top of the stairs. He opened it, and found a young man lying on the bed, taking his siesta. The young man’s slouch hat was on the floor; Sard picked it up and put it on. There was no sash to the window of that room, but closed, green, jalousied shutters. He unhooked them, took a hurried look out, and found to his great joy that there was a fire-escape. He went down it, hand over hand, and reached the ground as the young man looked out, and asked him what in the blazes he was doing. He did not stop to answer, for he was collared, on the instant, by the man who had been sleeping in the chair. Sard back-heeled him, sent him flying and reached the garden gate, just as the woman and the three children came out of the door with a couple of dogs.

He got out of the garden gate with the dogs at his heels, and ran along the road, hearing the pursuit increase, as the men from the Palace of Pleasure joined in. He turned to his right, then sharp to his left, then again to his right, the dogs following him and joined now by three or four pariahs, which had been sleeping in the sand. The last turn that he made was into a blind alley. There was a wall at the end of it, overhung with trees. He leapt for a branch, but the branch broke in his hand, and he came down into the midst of the dogs. He sent them flying with a few blows, scrambled up the wall and down on to the other side. On the other side there was a woman sitting in a rocking-chair, knitting. “For the land’s sake,” she said, “for the land’s sake, young man, this ain’t no right of way. Go back the way you came.”

“I’m going back,” he said, and ran on.

“George! George!” the woman cried, “get your gun quick; there’s a rough-neck come through the garden.”

Somebody inside the house answered, “What’s that you say, Anna?”

Sard called to the man, “There’s a rough-neck murdered Mr. Davis; I’ve got to break it to the widow.”

“Stop him, George,” the woman said.

The man tried to stop him, and got one on the jaw which he remembered for a long time.

Sard got out into a road which led quite clear of the houses into the wilderness of the foothills. There was a sort of trail leading up the hill, through a sparsely-grown jungle of brushwood. He took his chance of snakes and dodged into the brush and zigzagged through it, keeping uphill all the time. At the top of the cañon, half a mile from the town, he stopped for a moment, but he heard people as well as dogs, so he set off downhill into a gully.

At the foot of the gully there were great rocks among which a little river ran. He ran upstream in the water for about a hundred yards, so as to puzzle the dogs, and then scrambled out of the water up a great rock. At the top of the rock there was a recess filled with dry sand and screened by boulders. In the sand were the fresh footprints of a wild cat, but Sard judged that wild cats are less dangerous than men, and flung himself down to get his breath.

In a couple of minutes he heard the dogs at the water, and the voices of men, encouraging the dogs to hunt. He judged that there were at least eight men up with the hounds, and others joined them. He could hear their conversation as they walked up and down, and poked among the rocks.

“He’s the silver bandit who broke gaol at the barracks this afternoon.”

Another said, “He nearly killed Hanssen at the Palace.”

Another said, “Mother Hanssen reckon she hit him with one of her shots; leastways there was blood under that wall.”

Another said, “He took to the water all right, but these dogs don’t seem to get the scent any.”

Another said, “Well, he must have gone upstream, because if he’d gone downstream, they would have got him.”

Another said, “He can’t have much breath left in him, the clip he has been going. Like as not he’s got in among these rocks here; maybe he’s listening all the time we’re talking.”

Another said, “The hell he ain’t got much breath! He goes over the darned ground like a darned cyclone.”

Another said, “Come, Peppy; come, Toto; I’ll just take this couple of dogs up along this further bank, and you get on upstream and see if we can’t pick up where he’s landed.”

A voice came from amongst the bushes: “Say, boys, did you get him yet?”

They said, “No, we ain’t got him yet, but we guess we’re going to get him.”

“I guess I’m going to get him too,” the voice said. “He come into my room, when I was having a lay down, and sneaked my hat right off of my pillow.”

“Well, come on,” said another, “and we’ll get him and the hat.”

They went splashing up the stream, and then presently all the dogs burst into a frenzy of barking. He heard cries of “They’re on to him! Come on, boys, they’re on to him; he can’t only be but a little ways ahead.”

Sard heard the hunt pass upstream and gradually grow fainter towards the head of the gully. He lay still for about half an hour. He heard some shouts and presently the footsteps of men returning, some distance up the stream.

“It’s very odd where he’s got away to,” one of them said.

Another said, “It’s my belief he never got away, but just lay quiet somewheres. Back in town is the place to look for him, if you ask me.”

Another said, “That’s right. You know that time the dogs went on like they was crazy; it’s my belief they was on a panther, not on a man at all. It was somewheres around here we lost him, and it’s somewhere around here we’d find him again.”

“Well, the scent’s cold now,” another said; “and not only that, the dogs has forgotten what he smelled like. Besides, the trail’s been all trodden out. We’d best get back to town.”

“Well, I ain’t going back to town,” said the young man, “not without my hat I ain’t.”

“Well,” another said, “no one seems to me to be able to describe the fellow. You saw him, kid; what was he like?”

“I wasn’t only half awake,” the boy said. “He was a great big fellow, an ugly fellow, and Pop says he was a big fellow; and he ain’t got no coat, only just pants and a shirt.”

A man said, “Well, kid, even if he were to spring up right among us now, I guess you couldn’t say it was him. Maybe he’s gone downstream after all.”

“Well, I guess I’m going to get my hat,” the boy said; “no cheap skate ain’t going to pinch my hat and get away with it.”

“That’s right, kid,” said a man, “you get him, and when you get him, soak him good.”

They moved away downstream all together, beating with their sticks as they went, to scare the snakes. Presently they were out of earshot, down the stream. Sard lay very still, waiting for darkness. He heard the hooters from the mines blowing for six o’clock. The light by this time was going from the river-bed, but from where he lay he could see the brush shining in the sun at the top of the cañon. He was very weary of lying still. He said to himself, “They’ve gone, it’ll be safe to move, I might be starting now.”

He was on the very point of rising from where he lay, when a rifle was suddenly fired, not twenty yards from him, on the other side of the river. It was a repeating rifle, followed by a second shot an instant later. He heard something snarl, and a man’s voice cried, “Got you, you son of a gun!”

Another voice said, “Well, was she a painter?”

The other said, “No, a wild cat, and she’s got her nest hereabouts. Maybe we could find the kittens. She’s got her nest somewhere among them rocks, the other side of the water. I see’d her little tracks, where she’s hopped from stone to stone, so as not to get her feet wet. See here.”

“What’s she carrying?” said one of the men. “Is it a rabbit?”

“Not it; it’s a woodchuck, I guess.”

“Are you sure she’s dead,” said one man. “I’ve known ’em to play dead, so as to get a bit of their own back.”

“She’s dead,” said the other. “See here. Pretty poor, too; skin’s no good, but I guess I’ll take her along. If we’d got dogs, we’d have them kittens out. See here, the tracks lead this way. Here’s the place she crossed. My, that’s a pretty good lep! But where did she go, after this? That darned bunch this afternoon have trodden out all the signs. She’s gone somewhere up them rocks, and it’s in among there, most likely. If you’ll give me a leg up, I’ll go up and have a look round.”

“Hold on a minute,” said the other; “it ain’t too light down here. I guess I’m not going to poke around in any cavern when this cat’s mate may be about. The toms are as bad as the shes, and if it’s up there laying for us, I’d guess we should know it. We’ll come around in the morning and bring a couple of dogs.”

“Now come on, man,” said the other; “the tom’ll have hidden the kittens to-morrow morning. Finish the job, now we’re at it. Give me a leg up.”

“I guess I won’t,” said the other. “These cats blinded old ’Lije Goldschmidt. He went after ’em into a place where he couldn’t see, and they fair tore his face off him.”

“Funk!” said the other man.

“I guess I am a funk,” said his friend; “but I don’t want to sit at any street corner holding a tin pan for pennies, the way old ’Lije done, for the rest of my days. But I’ll come along to-morrow morning, and I’ll bring a shot-gun, which is a sight more use than the thing you’re using.”

“Well, if you don’t care to come,” said the other man, “I’ll do it alone. You take my rifle and hand it up to me when I’m up.”

“No,” his friend said, “I ain’t going to be a party to no such foolishness. If you want to get your eyes clawed out, you can. Even if you got your rifle up there, you couldn’t see to shoot. It’s just darned foolishness, and I’m not going to stand for it. We’ve got the she, after waiting long enough, and the whistle’s been gone this half-hour. Take what we’ve got and come on, and we’ll come again in the morning.”

The other man growled a little at his friend, but, at last, picked up the dead cat and turned homewards up the gully. They stopped every now and then to complain of the steepness of the climb, then their voices ceased to sound.

It was fast falling dark and the stars were already bright above the gully. Sard cautiously rose, wondering whether the cat’s mate were thereabouts. He was very stiff from lying still. It was cold down there among the rocks and he was faint from want of food. He scrambled down to the water and drank. After groping about for a little while, he found the woodchuck, which he brought along.

He scrambled up the cañon on the side away from the town. It was very steep, the scrub was full of prickles. Presently he reached the top and saw a wilderness of scrubby foothills stretching away for miles, as it seemed, into the Sierra. Behind him, whenever he turned, he could see the lights of the town, and hear the dull thumping of the machinery and the noise of the band playing in the Plaza. On his right was a vast sea of ghostly paleness stretching away for hundreds of miles into the sky, where crimson faded into a kind of green. In the green, here and there, the tops of mountains made jagged marks. The stars were bright in the heaven. He looked up to the eastward stars, with the thought that by rights he should be in his ship, watching these stars, four degrees to the eastward from where he was. He realised that there was no reaching the coast by the railway line.

“I’ll go eastwards,” he said. “Among these foothills there must be some trail by which I can reach the coast.”

He had seven matches remaining to him. By the help of two of these he contrived a little fire, at which he cooked the woodchuck, by toasting collops of it upon skewers. It was not as juicy as rabbit, nor so rank as ferret, but something between the two. He saved some of it for breakfast next morning. Then taking his bearings from the stars he set out to walk to the coast. He knew the trend of the coast from the charts; it was all in his favour. If Las Palomas were one hundred and seven miles from him, he reckoned that he might reach the port of San Agostino in ninety miles. He judged that he might do it in four days.

At the end of two hours of walking, he entered a sheltered valley in a high state of cultivation. He burst through bushes into a track, which led, presently, to a settlement, where the people were already asleep. He could see the little grey-tiled houses scattered, at intervals, among orchards. Dogs barked at his approach. The smell of oranges came to him on a warm breath of wind. He found himself walking between two orange fields. He could see great globes of the fruit among the dark and shining leaves. Some oranges had fallen and lay beneath the trees. He took some and ate them, skin and all, as he walked. At the end of the village or community, the fruit was thicker on the trees, and he was planning to step into one of the orchards to take some oranges when two men with guns stepped from underneath the trees, and called to him to stop.

“What are you doing here?” they said. One was a European fruit-farmer, the other a native servant.

“I’m walking through,” said Sard.

“Walking through? Where to?”

“San Agostino.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the coast,” he said.

“On the coast? How do you expect to make the coast from here?”

“Walk there,” Sard said.

“Walk? Hell!” said the farmer, “you’ve come along orange-pinching. You walk to hell clean out of here, or you’ll get lead into you so mighty darned quick, that you’ll think a cyclone’s struck you. Now get out, and don’t stop to pick no flowers till you’re past the end of my plantation.”

Sard walked on along the trail; the two men followed him at a distance of about a dozen yards, until he was clear of the plantation. The trail led on uphill out of the valley. It seemed to go on interminably, winding up the foothills, but remaining a track, apparently a good deal used. At about eleven o’clock that night the track swerved to the left towards a northern valley, which Sard judged to be useless to him. A sort of track or trail led on in his direction. Though he did not know it, the track was one made in the course of centuries by animals going to drink at the brook below. He followed it for about half an hour and then came out on a lonely hillside, from which he could see no sign of human habitation except the glare in the sky above the mining town, now many miles away. He could see little but mountains, most of them covered either with scrub or with pine trees. A kind of ghostly glimmer stood out into the sky in front, from those peaks of the Sierra which ran into the snow. In the sandy soil among the sage brush all round him there were little scurryings and squeakings from the gophers. Far away, he could not tell how far, it might have been miles away, he heard the howling of solitary wolves, a noise more uncanny than the crying of owls and more melancholy than lamentation.

High up there, in the foothills, the wind never ceased. It stirred the sage brush continually so that the whole hillside seemed filled with footsteps and the noise of people pushing through the brush. He could go no further for that night, but scooped himself a place in the sand in a sheltered nook of the hill, out of the wind. There he covered himself up and slept.

All through the next day he held on across the foothills through the sparse-growing sage. He was already in the wilderness, for the hills were waterless even so soon after the rains. He saw no sign of man all through that day, except once, when he had a view of the desert far below with a train, trailing under smoke, going to the west. As he was still fresh, he resolved to march without food this day: this resolve he kept. He found no water anywhere until towards the evening, when he struck an animal trail which led him to a dripping rock. In the pan of water below the rock the carrion of a wolf lay. He stayed at the rock to catch the drippings till his thirst was assuaged: then feeling like a new man, he went on till he could go no further. This was a good day compared with what followed. He made good some twenty miles of his course. He slept on the ground where he stopped; but slept ill owing to annoyance from the ticks.

After some hours he rose up as a sailor will, knowing that his watch was at an end. It was about a quarter to four. He felt uneasy, and sitting up in his shelter, he heard horsemen close to him. He heard the muttering of voices and horses wrenching at the brush. After listening intently, he decided that what he heard was neither men nor horses, but some other thing, he could not tell what. He remembered now that some six weeks before, on board the Pathfinder, he had talked with an Occidental, who had come on board on ship’s business, about these very mountainous tracks in which he was wandering. He remembered that the man had said, “No one goes there, even to prospect for metals. They are bad places where bad things happen.” He remembered, too, stray bits of talk or of reading about these mountains, how nobody really knew them, except a body of men known as the Jacarillos, a tribe of most savage desert Indians, to whom all the most savage of the native bandits fled. These men, alone, were supposed to live in the Sierra, and when Sard sat up in the cold morning, hearing that muttering all around him in the dark, he judged that a war-party of the Jacarillos was passing that way.

Then he thought that that could not be so, because no frontiersman, and certainly no desert Indian, would speak when on a war-party, except by signs. There was something there that he did not understand. He crept very cautiously towards the noise, and presently was able to peer between boulders, at the hillside whence the noise came. It was not perfect darkness; he could see an open space where the brush was low. In this space, moving about exactly as though they had dropped something, which they were trying to pick up or hoping to find, were some gigantic men. One of them was standing not far from him. He was not very tall, less tall, perhaps, than Sard himself, but in bulk and bigness like a gorilla. They were going slowly over the ground in a suspicious way, muttering to each other. They were uneasy about something for which they were looking. Sard felt that they knew that he was there, and that they were looking for him. Then he felt that though they were men, they wanted some of the senses of men; they were like some race of men born blind, who felt for their enemies by some sense which men no longer have. They went very slowly over the ground across which he had certainly passed some hours before. They seemed to feel the ground and lift samples of it, then they muttered remarks about the samples. One of them, away to the right, the one furthest from Sard, seemed to be the captain. When this man reached the point where Sard had stumbled on his way to his lair, he paused and felt the ground and gave a little cry, at which all the others hurried to him. Sard could hear their mutterings and a discussion going on among them. Evidently they had come upon his trail and were puzzled about it.

For a few moments the thought of dealing with a race of giants was unnerving. He saw how such a race could live in that land in the great caves of the limestone, coming out only at night into the wilder places of the hills, taking their prey and going back before dawn. Then he thought, “They cannot be men, they must be bears. But if they are bears, it won’t be any better. They can only be grizzly bears who attack any man on sight.”

He kept still as a mouse for half an hour, while the bears loitered about and muttered among themselves and rummaged in the earth and seemed to find food, though he couldn’t think what. One of them came lumbering quite close to where he crouched. He saw him stand and look up at the stars, in an attitude exactly like that of one of the seamen in the Pathfinder, at the wheel. While he was standing thus, he seemed to be conscious of some scent that was not usual. Sard could see his head tip up and down in an attempt to get the stray wafts, to give some certain evidence, one way or the other. He moved away a little and repeated the process, and then moved back, moving with his head exactly like a questing hound and peering sometimes in Sard’s direction, yet not seeing him. At last he seemed to be satisfied, and went shambling off to his fellows. They moved off into the thickets and he saw them no more.

When he felt that they were out of earshot and smell of him, he turned his back upon that place and went on through the scrub up a hill that went up and up, yet never came to any summit. He must have walked for about two hours when he stopped suddenly, hearing a woman singing. It sounded like an Indian woman with a very sweet voice, singing one of the tuneless Indian songs. A little listening showed him that it was not a woman, but a little hidden spring of water, gurgling from a pipe to a trough. The air came with a waft of sweetness upon his face, as of azaleas in blossom and oranges in fruit growing together in a thicket.

He said, “There’s a house here.” He called aloud in Spanish, “Is anybody there? I am a friend. Is anybody there?” In front of him he could see this thicket, which smelled so sweet, all starred either with blossoms or with fruits. He knew from the look and feel of the place that it had been made by good people and was good, and that the people were there, watching him, to see what he would do.

“I am not armed,” he said. “I am an English sailor going to the coast. Don’t turn your dogs at me, but let me have shelter.”

Nobody answered, but he felt quite certain that the thicket was full of people looking at him.

He said, “Don’t shoot. You see I put my hands up. I am alone.”

He went forward to the thicket and there saw that there was no one, only a profusion of creeping flowers that looked at him like eyes, out of the darkness of the hedge. It must have been years since anybody had lived there. The hedge, which had been planted, had gone back to jungle. He walked round it till he came to what had been the gate. There he could see within a little ruined chapel with one bell. As he came through the gateway in the first of the dusk, a bird, perhaps an owl, which had been perched beneath the bell, flew out with a cry. Her wings struck the bell, which jangled a little. It was exactly as though Sard had rung the door-bell. He drew his breath and stood still in the court, wondering who would answer the bell.

It was still not more than twilight, but birds were stirring in the scrub, and colours could be seen. Some blue birds with orange breasts came wavering down among the bushes, tore a few petals apart, from wantonness, and flew on, talking to each other.

Sard stepped across the courtyard and looked in at the deserted chapel’s western door. It must have been built very soon after the Conquest. It had been deserted for perhaps half a century, which in that dry climate had not been enough to destroy it. The roof had gone, except over the altar. From the wall-plate of the falling roof great strings of flowers hung. Many flowers and grasses had sprouted among the stones. Just over the altar a bough had thrust through the wall, and had blossomed there with a white clustered blossom which smelled sweeter than honeycomb. The wall above the altar had once been painted in fresco. Most of the paintings were now gone, but Sard saw, as it were, the heads of men, eagerly looking upward. To right and to left of the door within the enclosure there were marks in the earth which showed where the mission huts had once stood. But monks, converts, mission, and the very memory of their dealings were utterly gone. Sard might well have been the first man to have stood there, since the mission ended. It ended in pestilence, he thought; nobody was left alive here for the mission to save. He judged that the pestilence which had destroyed the mission might still be there, in the air, the earth, the water. Yet the place seemed good, it was unvisited, it seemed sheltered, and there were no scorpions nor snakes.

He lay down in the shelter of the altar, and instantly fell asleep. He had not slept long before he became aware that somebody was calling him by name from infinitely far away, in a voice which was familiar and yet strange. The voice called, “Harker! Sard Harker! Sard!” from a distance so great that it seemed like another continent. He knew, in his sleep, that the voice wanted him to wake. He woke and sat up and found it still twilight there in the chapel, with the stars not yet gone from the hole in the roof. No one was calling, the blue birds were back again, tearing the blossoms, no call had disturbed them. He thought, “I wonder whose voice that was. I seem to know the voice”; and while he wondered, he fell asleep.

In his sleep he saw the owner of the voice, a boy called Peter Maxwell, who had been dead eleven years. He saw Peter, not as he had ever known him, but eager, like the faces in the fresco. He knew that Peter had some message for him, yet could not say it, having no longer any human tongue or any use for human thought. He saw Peter leaning out of the altar wall from the place where the branch was blossoming. Peter was stretching out his right hand to him, but what he wanted he could not tell. He cried out, “Peter, old man, is that you?” and in his gladness at seeing Peter so near, he woke up and saw the blossoming branch shaking, as though someone had brushed it by. It was daylight but not sunlight as he rose up. No one was there, no one had been there; the birds were still tearing the blossoms, uttering little cries. No man could have been within a mile of them, probably no human being was within ten miles, and yet he expected to see Peter Maxwell.

“Peter,” he said, “Peter.”

When he saw that there was no Peter, he thought, “That was a strange dream. Peter Maxwell has been dead since 1886. He died of yellow fever in the Cliomene. Yet that was Peter in my dream.”

He walked round the little enclosure. There was nothing to alarm him, except the sense that he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He was weary from his tramp and his hard day. He returned to the chapel and presently slept again. This time he slept for some hours, but towards noon, at about the time when his watch would be drawing to an end, he was aware that a trumpet was being blown and that armed figures were there, wanting him to go. With a little effort he cleared his eyes, so that he could see these figures. There were three: two women and a man. The man was standing between the women and raised above them. He was standing on the altar blowing a blast upon the trumpet, and the notes of the trumpet came out like flames, so that Sard could see them as well as hear them. The women were looking at him with faces so calm that they could not have been mortal, yet when they saw that he saw them, their faces became alive and incredibly eager. They both turned to him and bent to raise him, and with their free hands they pointed at the trumpeter, who shone in all his being and pointed the way to go, and blew upon his trumpet a blast like a cock-crow: “Get you gone out of here, get you gone out of here!”

In his dream Sard called to the trumpeter: “What is it, Peter, what is it? What is it, you great spirits?”

But the women faded from him, Peter faded from him into the wall, but he could still see the shining trumpet and notes like flakes of fire failing all around him. The trumpet dwindled slowly and resolved itself into the blossoming branch that had grown through a crack in the wall. The figures were gone, the fiery notes had vanished, only as Sard stood up he smelled very faintly a smell of burning. He walked to the altar and felt along the wall. It was a wall of perishing plaster. No one had been there. He went out into the enclosure, and as he passed through the door, he smelled again the smell of burning. “Get you gone out of here,” he repeated. “Get you gone out of here! What is that smell of burning?”

Once long before, far out at sea in the Pacific, he had smelled a smell of burning during the night-watch and had reported it to his mate. The mate said, “Yes, you often smell that here, at this season of the year. They are burning the scrub on the mountains four hundred miles away.” He thought of that remark now. Looking out of the enclosure at the thickets beyond, he saw a faint trail of smoke curling among some dwarf oaks.

“I believe this scrub’s on fire,” he said. “I’d better get me gone out of here, or I’ll be burnt like a rat in a trap.”

As near as he could judge, the wind was blowing from the north-west, and his course was to the east of north. If the scrub were on fire, as he supposed, he would have to get across its path. He left the enclosure of the ruined chapel and set off further up the hill to a clear space among the scrub, where he could see. The foothill on which he stood looked like a moraine across the track of some ancient glacier. From the top of it he could look right up the valley down which the glacier may once have flowed. The wind was blowing straight down this valley, driving a line of fire behind a wall of smoke, which was beaten down below the tops of the dwarf oaks. Suckers and snakes of flame ran out along the sides of the valley and over its summit. From time to time these suckers seemed to die out, but others always leaped up in front of them. It was advancing in a ragged line, coming pretty fast, with a crackling, hissing, sighing noise that sounded very terrible. Sard judged that it might be, at the furthest, a mile from him. It died down and glittered up like a living thing. At that distance it did not look like a raging fire, but it was laying all things dead behind it.

Sard could not see how far it stretched on the side towards which he was going, but he judged that he would have to hurry to get round it, so he set off at his best pace along the ridge of what might have been the moraine. As he went along, the air thickened with intensely bitter smoke from the burnt bush. Little floating fiery particles came flying past and settled on his clothes. Every now and then some streamer of flame would blow down on something dry, set it on fire and blow out. He ran for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and he reached the top of that side of the valley to which he ran. He found that on the other side of the hill the ground tipped very sharply down into a rocky chasm. Beyond this rocky chasm, which contained water, was a hillside covered with scrub, blazing like the Day of Judgment. There was no possibility of getting round the fire. He was shut in on that side, and he hadn’t time to get back. His only chance was to get down to the water.

There was a place where the crag had fallen in a scree of big pieces of stone. He scrambled down this towards the water, but the scrub burning on the other side of the stream was so bright and hot that he had to cover his eyes as he slithered down. Quite close to the lip of the water there was a big shelving stone, worn smooth by floods. It was so hot from the blaze that he could hardly bear his hand upon it. He slithered into the water from it, just as a flame seized the scrub upon the opposite bank, and scorched it into nothing.

In a minute the fury of the fire had passed, and it was running up the hillside away from him, leaving a blackened earth, covered with glowing stalks, which hissed and sighed. It went on, he could see it running up the hill, licking down the scrub and leaving blackness. The wind blew over the burnt tract, bringing soft ash, little fiery particles, and a breath as from a furnace door.

Sard clambered out of the water, which was brackish and quite unfit to drink, and set off upon his course again. He walked, like Satan, on the burning marl, in a desert which had been grim before, but was now terrible. He followed along the course of the chasm for half a mile, and came out above on to a sort of tableland of rock, where the fire had ceased. He paused here to take his bearings, and noticed, for the first time, that a house or hut had been destroyed by the fire, close to where he stood. It must have been almost the last thing burned; so he went to it, thinking that perhaps somebody had been burnt in it. On a sort of shelf at one end of it was a skeleton of a man, gripping a crucifix. It might have been there fifty years. The only other remains were a couple of earthenware ollas of a good size. These were Indian pots of a dull yellow colour, with decorations of black and red. One of them had a thong about its mouth, and had been used as a waterbucket; the other, which was still covered with its earthenware lid, contained parched corn, shrivelled to the dryness and toughness of split peas, but still food. There was nothing to show what the man had been. He was tall for an Indian; the crucifix seemed against his being a miner or prospector. He may have been some hermit, or contemplative.

Sard removed the ollas into the open. After a little search he found the spring where the hermit had got his drinking water. He made a fire and cooked what was left of the woodchuck with the parched corn, and took his bearings while the meal was cooking. In front of him the path of the fire still ran on along the valley. It was already far away, running in little bright flickers of flame, under driven-down smoke. To his left, on the line of his course, there was a mile of scrubless desert of sand and rock, without even a cactus or a prickly pear, stretching to the rocky bulk of the Sierra. By the Sierra, in the direction in which he wished to go, was a chasm or cleft or cañon, it could hardly be called a glen. It ran into the very heart of the hills, for a mile or two, as far as he could see, but beyond it there were crags with pine trees, and beyond those more crags, and beyond those, crags with snow and more crags. To his right he could see very little. Foothills shut in the line of sight on that side. Wherever he looked there was no sign of the works of man, there was desert, rock, desolation and death. Between sixty and seventy miles of unknown country still lay between him and the coast. With some tough tendrils which had escaped the fire he contrived slings for the two ollas. He was now equipped with bread and water for two days.

As he judged that the chasm or cleft would give him an easier path into the hills, he set off towards it. As he drew near to its entrance, it looked like the entrance to hell. He remembered that he had read somewhere, or somebody had told him, that the Indians dreaded these clefts in the mountains, and said that unspeakable things lived in them. Now as he drew near the mouth, he heard far up the cañon something like a voice, which was not a voice, crying in the heart of the rocks. It was a strange, metallic cry of “Ohoy!” The echoes repeated it. It was no beast that he knew. It was not like a beast. It was like the voice of the rock itself. He stopped at the very mouth of the cañon, trying to think what that voice could be. It was not any human voice, and yet it had a human ring. It was not the voice of any beast, and yet it came, as it were, from the strength of a beast. It could not be the voice of a bird, no bird could be big enough, and yet there was something birdlike in its tone. If it were not the voice of a man, beast or bird, what could it be? Though it could not be a bird, it was likest to a bird; there was something spiritual and birdlike about it. It gave him the impression of some giant bird, some bird of poetry, some phœnix or roc, crying from a full heart. Then in its deeper notes it sounded like the voice of some giant who was beating on an anvil, and crying as he struck the blows, “Ohoy!” At these times it came with a pure metallic clang, which thrilled him to the marrow. He stood still to listen to it. Whatever it was, it came from some living thing, it had not the rhythm of any machine. It was not any drill or pile-driver beating into the heart of the rock. Sard’s mind offered many suggestions, one after the other. Now it was like some great bell, but it was not a bell. Now it was like some ringing true blow struck by a gigantic tuning-fork, or like the blow of an axe upon a gong, or like the drilling of some gigantic woodpecker into a musical wood. He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It came from the heart of the wilderness of rock, miles from any human dwelling. It was like the rock speaking. Into his mind there came again those words which he had read or heard, “The Indians do not go into the Sierra, nobody goes into the Sierra; there are strange things in the Sierra which do not want to be known.”

He asked himself whether he were not delirious and imagining this noise. But it rang clearly and made an echo.

The cañon was paven with clean dry desert sand. It led into the heart of the hills. The side of the mountain had been snapped asunder there and torn fifty yards apart. Sard could see a great black boulder midway up the cliff, on his right hand, and its other half on his left hand. He saw the patterns of veins and lines, where they once had joined each other. It needed some little resolution to go on towards that noise, but he repeated his proverb, “A danger met is less than a danger expected,” and went forwards toward it.

There were no tracks in the sand, perhaps no human foot had trodden that path for fifty years or five hundred years. “Here,” he thought, “I may come upon some unknown beast or bird or race of men or giants, for there may be anything in a place like this.” Half a mile up the cañon he stopped, for in front of him the walls of the cañon drew together, and there at each side of the chasm the rock had been hewn into a semblance of columns, a hundred feet high. Drawing a little nearer, he saw that the heads of the columns were carven with the heads of monsters which were crushing human skulls between their teeth; blood seemed to be flowing from their mouths; blood spattered the columns; as he drew near, he could hear it dripping on the rocks below. The noise of the great bird, or whatever it was, had been silent for some time; now he heard it much nearer and with a new note, not of joy nor of sorrow, but of laughter that had no feeling in it. Sard stopped; he felt his hair stand on end, while his heart seemed to come up into his throat and thump there till it was as dry as bone.

“All the same, I’ll go on,” he said; “there’s no going back. That thing knows that I’m here. If I’ve got to die, I’ll die, and I may as well get it over.”

All the time the great figures on the columns seemed to chew their quids and the blood spattered down upon the rocks.

“They’re only those streams,” he said, “with iron ore or with red pigment in them, and they’ve led them in channels to those figures’ mouths. That’s all it is.”

It was all that it was, but in the dusk of the cañon and of the day, to one very weak and weary as well as feverish, it was enough. He walked boldly up to the feet of the figures. They stood in blood, like butchers, and the red water splashed Sard as he stood there. Though he had expected much, he had not expected what he saw. The two great columns stood one on each side of a narrow pass, not more than four feet across. Within the pass the cañon widened out again, but not very far. On both sides of it the rocks had been carven into gigantic shapes. It was an avenue of the gods, all of them terrible; they seemed to turn their heads and look at him; the wardens at the gate seemed to turn round upon him after he had passed them. Into his mind, from some forgotten book or speaker, came the phrase of what the Indians in that country had said of these old temples, that their gods come to life at dusk, and are alive all night, and live on men. They seemed to gnash their teeth and lick their lips, and to tremble as he drew near.

He would have thought nothing of it had he had so much as a dog beside him. A lunatic, even a village idiot, would have seemed a comrade and a backing to him. But he had to face it alone. He backed into the rock of the pass and tried to reassure himself, but he kept telling himself, “It was one of these things whom I heard singing. They do come to life at dusk.”

Then he said, “It isn’t so. If these things were beautiful, I would fear them, but they are not, and there is nothing in them that I will recognise as gods. These things are all over this land: I have heard of them. I’ll go on, and if they kill me, they’ll get little glory by it.”

He went on, and as he went a strange moaning music seemed to wind from one god to another. It was the wind striking sharp angles in the rocks at the chasm top, but it sounded like the song of the figure of Memnon in Egypt. Just in such a way should the thoughts of the gods pass to each other, without a movement of the lips.

“Those Indians spoke the truth,” he thought, “when they said that the gods speak in music from dusk to dawn.”

At the head of the cañon was a small stone temple, high up at the top of a flight of steps. The columns and the walls were brightly painted with images of terror and of power, in war and triumph. Bats were flickering out from the temple door. They were the first living things that he had seen since he entered the cañon. They made him feel that he was coming back to life, after walking in the kingdom of death. As he went up the temple steps, which were as perfect as when they had been laid down, centuries before, the voice of the bird, or whatever it was, rose up from somewhere in the mountain not far ahead. It rose up with a new note, it was like laughter with exultation. He could see nothing because the temple shut away all that was in front of him, but he heard above the noise of the laughter the clanking as of enormous wings, slowly rising from the ground and gathering power and moving away and away.

As he entered the temple there came a great rush of many hundreds of bats, whirling past his ears into the air. He passed between walls of carven and painted figures, which were still sharp and bright in detail. He went through a first room, as long as a cricket-pitch, into another, which was pleasant with the sound of water. A pool had been cut in the rock in the midst of this great room; water spouted into it from the tongues of grotesque heads. At the end of the room there were stairs leading up to an altar made of a piece of black obsidian chipped to a point. At the back of this altar there were rooms filled with the murmur of pigeons. These rooms must once have been the priests’ dwellings. They were now dovecotes for the blue rock-pigeons which flew out, on his approach. He clambered out after them on to a terrace cut upon the rock of the mountain for two hundred yards by a people who had no explosives save the will of their rulers. There was no green thing in sight, nothing but rocks and sand. The rocks were of every savagery of splinter, of savage colours, bright blue, yellow, red and black, all spiked and toppled and tumbled, and only brought into order upon this terrace by the unknown priests of dead gods.

He took what he could of the eggs of the rock-pigeons, then shaped his course and went on into the wilderness, until his way was barred by a cliff across his path, eight hundred feet high and more. He walked along it for over a mile, but found no scaling place. At the end of his walk the cliff bowed over so as to make a shelter or cave. Here in some remote time some forgotten tribe had built up a house for themselves by piling a wall of stones without mortar, between the hollow and the light. The path of these men still led to their entrance, a hole in the wall, just big enough for a small man to crawl through. Sard did not dare to try to enter by that door for fear of snakes. There was a sheltered place among the rocks where he lay down to rest. He fell into a deep sleep, and slept until the cold woke him. He felt something pressed against his chest which had not been there before. It was some snake which had crawled there for the warmth. Very cautiously he moved his stiff arms, until he could fling it from him, and leap up in the one motion. He leaped clear of it, and then leaped clear of the place.

It was then about four in the morning and intensely cold. The snake was perhaps too sluggish to attack. He was too miserable with cold to stay longer there. He ate a little of his food, and went on along the face of the cliff, until he found a place of fallen rocks where it was possible to climb.

It seemed to him that he had gone for hours out of his way trying to find a path, and that already he was weaker than he had been from want of proper food and rest. He knew now how easy it would be for him to die up there in the Sierra; why, he might wander for days trying to find food or drink, the way out or the way back. He knew now that he might have been wiser to risk the silver escorts, and follow the railway across the desert.

All that day he wandered on among the mountains, far to the west of his proper course. The crags of a great snowy peak were like a wall upon his right hand, they seemed to edge him off to the west at every point. He would walk for a mile and then think, “Now I can get across to the eastward,” but always when he had scrambled up the screes, he would come to some cliff which he could not climb. He saw no living thing in all this day, except two little birds running among the rocks, and the eagles quartering in the heaven.

At last as he wandered, he saw above him a gash or chimney in the cliff. He scrambled to its very foot and looked up it. There was a percolation of water down the side, which he tasted and found sweet. The rock was very rotten, but he saw that it was a way up this cliff. As it was a possible means of getting back to his course, he set himself to climb it. It took him an hour to reach the top, and as he scrambled up to safety above it, the thongs of his ollas broke, and both jars dropped to the bottom of the chimney and smashed to pieces there.

He found himself on a great heave of rocky mountain which went on to a pine forest. Beyond the pine forest the main crags of the Sierra rose, covered with snow. They were blindingly bright in front of him, rocks as blue as steel and ice as white as death, a wall between him and the sea, which he would have to climb.

At about sunset, when he was entered into the pine forest, he smelled suddenly a smell of smoke. It was the smoke of burning pine-cones or pine-needles. He judged that it came from a little fire, because he so easily lost the scent. He turned towards it, thinking that even the most savage of mountain Indians would be less terrible than that loneliness. Sometimes he lost the scent, then he cast about like a dog, until he picked it up again. Presently he was almost certain that he heard a moan. It seemed the fitting speech for such a place. He went towards it, and soon heard the moaning pass into something much more savage, a cursing and a calling down of vengeance. After a minute of violence, it died again into grief and mourning and lamentation.

He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest. Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang. It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.

The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine trees.

“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.

“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.

“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.

“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”

“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that will take me there?”

“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”

“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the Sierra, going eastwards from this?”

“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here, keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only pass in all that range.”

“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.

“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”

Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women. They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree, then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him, firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned and ran.

He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.

Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.

“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”

Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines. Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought, “as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.

Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of the Pathfinder, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven, casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese, butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of the Pathfinder came to his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr. Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.” Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.

He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale. When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must be some way through the mountains there.

He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags, but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water. Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.

It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone. Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.

He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone that had ceased to be stone.

In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in that waste.

He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake, and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake, found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep has no cause to grumble.”

He slept until the sun went down. He was wakened by the crying of the hawk. Rousing up from his lair, he saw the bird perched on the tree with his wings spread, crying what seemed to be a curse upon all that desolation. Hope suddenly came into Sard, for perhaps there was a nest with eggs within the tree. He had been too tired to think of it before, but now the very thought gave him life. He shook with excitement. He went out and swarmed up the tree, found a nest, and though the hawks beat at him and struck him with wings and talons, he took the two eggs, each bigger than a duck’s egg and of a mottled reddish colour. In the nest was half of a large lizard which the hawk had brought thither. At other times he would have shrunk from such meat, but now he judged that if it would nourish the hawk, it would nourish him. He ate it with the eggs and wished that it had been ten times its size. Having sucked the eggs, he broke and licked the eggshells. He found that he was not thinking of the wilderness. His thoughts were almost continually in a little English country town, at a grocer’s shop, where there were boxes of eggs at the door. He kept thinking of those boxes of hundreds of eggs together, perhaps a thousand eggs in one shop, and of rounds of cheese, weighing a stone apiece. But the eggs were what stirred him most.

Thinking of these eggs, he stumbled and scrambled back over the eleven miles of rock to the pinewood. From his childhood he had been accustomed to take bearings wherever he went, and he had little difficulty in finding his way. In the moonlight he saw the tree with the cut rope still dangling from the bough. Under the tree was the body of the dead man, which had been roughly buried where Sard had laid him. His feet stuck up out of the earth, one bare and one slippered foot. Sard did not think of him, but of the bits of tamale that had been scattered there the day before. To his intense joy they were there still; altogether there were enough bits of tamale and bean pulp to outweigh a ship’s biscuit. Hungry as he was, he determined to save half of his find for the next day. He thought, “I depend on a bandit’s hanging for to-day’s food: to-morrow I need not expect to be so lucky: ‘it is not always May’: still, ‘God will provide.’ ”

He followed the tracks of the bandits till he heard a wolf howling, with a dog answering him howl for howl. Presently, as he went on, he heard horses squealing at each other: he smelt horses. Next he heard a man singing in a shrill falsetto, with many shakes, to the twangle of a guitar.

Following the noise in the moonlight, he came to a flat pan or gully through which a brook, that had made the gully, still passed on its way to the sea. The hills came closely about the pan, giving it shelter from all gales: this (with the water supply) had made it desirable to the Indians in old time.

The Indians had long since gone from it. It was now peopled by the outlaws who had done the hanging in the pine-barren: their tracks led into it; their voices sounded from the midst of it. Sard made out a line of huts stretching irregularly across the pan on the line of a track or trail. The falsetto singer was in the midst of the pan, dancing as he sang. Men were sitting about at the doors of their huts, talking, or at least uttering remarks.

“Such, indeed, is life.”

“Between Sunday and Monday there is ever midnight.”

“She, being a woman, is, as one may say, a woman.”

“The gringos, the accursed: is there anything more accursed?”

“Good wine, good water and good sausage: truly three good things.”

Sard heard these things uttered with all the dignity of a Solomon pronouncing judgments. Dogs were nosing about among the huts, picking bits of tamale. Sard felt that it would be wiser to move boldly down to the village than to stay skulking in the brush till a dog nosed him. He walked boldly down into the gully and passed at the back of the first huts straight into a lover with his lass. Both cursed him under their breath, but were too much interested in themselves to heed him. He muttered an apology as he escaped. A few huts further along the line he came to a corner where an old ruined adobe wall jutting from an occupied hut made shelter for him. He settled into the shelter, meaning to wait till the men were quiet, when he hoped to be able to find food or a pass, perhaps both. He knew that he was in the presence of men who would cut his throat if they found him, yet he listened to what was going on with enjoyment.

Two or three men were sitting on the other side of the adobe hut; they were engaged chiefly in silence, which they sometimes broke with speech, but more often by spitting. The wind blowing from them brought Sard wafts of cigarette smoke.

“Was that someone passing at the back of the house?” one asked.

“No,” another said. “It was some dog.”

“To me,” another said, “the noise was as of a pig.”

“A pig or a dog,” the second replied; “when I said that it was a dog, I meant that it was not a Christian.”

They talked for a while about different kinds of Christians, of which there seemed to be four sorts: themselves, the ricos, the rojos, and the gringos. There seemed to be something not quite-quite, something not of the sincerest milk of the word, about the last three sorts. They talked about pigs when they had finished with the Christians.

“Never will I be as the gringos,” one said, “who will eat of pig, even though it be nourished upon their grandmothers.”

“My uncle, who lived not here,” the second said, “being indeed from Havana, a city of Cuba, sold certain pigs to certain sailors who were gringos. These pigs these gringos greedily ate; their eyes shone, my uncle said. Yet were those pigs, pigs that had eaten many Christians.”

“Lo, now,” the third said, “it is not pigs who eat Christians, but witches, the accursed ones, who take the shape of pigs that they may eat: this also only gringos do.”

“Yet are the gringos fools,” the first answered. “There is Anselmo, who spoke with one but yesterday. Hola, Anselmo, come tell us of the gringo with whom you spoke upon these mountains. Hither, Anselmo. Listen, you, all of you, that you may die with laughter at what Anselmo tells.”

There was a pause while Anselmo came to the group: there were greetings of “How so?”; then the first speaker spoke again.

“Anselmo,” he said, “these have not heard of your meeting with the gringo upon these mountains. Tell them, then.”

“Ah,” Anselmo answered in the voice of him who had shot at Sard the day before. “It is thus; if you will see. I was in the mountains, in the pine-barren, where lately a justice of the people was achieved. I, sauntering there, considering many things, since it is my nature to consider, beheld suddenly a gringo, beastly even beyond the nature of such. For a moment I thought, ‘Lo, now, a prospector.’ Then I saw from certain signs that he was neither this nor that, but an Americano, a Tejano, an Inglés, what matter? This one (I also saw) was lost, as such always are if ever they leave a marked road.

“ ‘Good day, sir,’ I said; since it is ever my custom to be courteous. What, we are not brutes nor Luteranos, I hope; we can be civil one to other. Civility, as they say, costs nothing, yet makes many debtors. I, therefore, did not spit at him as one without faith. ‘Good day, sir,’ I said, ‘I trust that you are well, that your señora is well, that your honoured parents preserve their health, even at their great age.’

“He rolled his eyes upon me like a cow dying of thirst. The gringos have the eyes of cows rather than of men. ‘Tell me,’ he said to me, ‘the way out of these mountains.’

“ ‘Truly, sir,’ I said, ‘you who bring civilisation to our savageries will not so soon leave us. Stay, I entreat you, to dine, or at least to sup, or to sing thus to the piano as do the women of you gringos. Yet, since you must leave us, continue,’ I said, ‘a day’s journey north-eastward, till you reach a place where all the rocks are rotten. There you will find a path over the mountains, good for men, excellent for beasts, having grass, inns, a road, good air, good water and good bells, gravel soil and Holy Communion.’

“He was a big man, even for an Americano. He wore no boots, but slippers, such as women wear.”

“So you sent him to the rotten rocks,” the others said. “But did he go, Anselmo? He surely did not go?”

“Americanos believe all that they are told,” Anselmo said. “He either went to the rotten rocks or to another place far from me, which was my desire in speaking to him. Since there was nothing to be had from him, then plainly it was my task to be rid of him.”

“Long live Anselmo!” the man said. “So he went to the rotten rocks without question. This is it to be a gringo!”

“Without doubt he will be at the rotten rocks, dead?”

“Without doubt.”

The men laughed at this: presently the youngest of them said:

“You say that he had slippers such as women wear? Would it be worth the while to retrieve the slippers for Mariquita?”

“It would not,” Anselmo said. “This man was outcast from the gringos, unable to live even their easy life. His slippers were not women’s slippers, but the wreck of boots cut to that size. He was in all respects ruined: moreover he was lousy.”

They continued to talk of gringos for some little time, though the thought recurred to the youngest of the men that Sard’s body might be worth the rummaging: he asked Anselmo whether Sard had “a belt of the Americans,” or at least “a pouch for tobacco, such as he had seen.”

“No,” Anselmo answered. “This gringo had nothing: even the crows will have nothing from him. Had he had anything, I, Anselmo, would have had it: as it was, let the vultures give Anselmo thanks.”

They talked on, of gringos, gringo women, the women of the district, the recent cock-fights, the ingredients of sausages, the natures of parasites, etc., etc., till Sard, lulled by their drawling low speech, fell asleep. He was in a dangerous place, but danger will not keep men awake so well as love or grief. Besides, few stop to identify a sleeping man. He slept as a sailor will sleep, like a dead man. In his sleep, some two hours later, he shifted about, so as to detach a piece of adobe from his shelter. It fell, with a little clatter which he half heard through his drowsiness. Unfortunately, it roused a little dog within the hut; the dog began to bark. Sard sat up at once, wide awake; his movement knocked down more adobe; the dog barked louder: a man within the hut cursed the dog; but the dog, aware of Sard, would not be silent.

“Listen,” said the man in the hut, “be silent, Chaco. Listen; there is someone there.”

“Who would be there?” a woman asked. “It is but a dog, prowling for bones.”

“I do not know who may be there,” the man answered, “but it is no dog, since dog will answer dog with barking.”

“It is some drunkard or some pig of the poblacion,” the woman said. “Come here, Chaco; down, dog; quiet!”

Unfortunately, Sard in rising to his feet stirred Chaco to bark louder.

“Your drunkard or your dog or your pig,” the man said, “these are likely excuses, are they not? Where are my boots?”

Sard heard him drag his boots to the bedside, muttering.

“What then do you expect to find, Andrés?” the woman asked.

“You know well what I expect to find,” Andrés replied.

“Indeed I know no such matter,” she answered, “since the expectations of a husband are beyond the wit of wives. If you will tell me, then shall I know.”

“Know, then,” Andrés answered, “that I expect to find Martin, your lover, who taps here, like a second Pyramus, and shall die here in his sin, like a second Chico the Blanco.”

Sard did not wish to be the second Chico the Blanco; he slipped up the line of huts as swiftly as he could. He slid round the corner of a hut, under its eaves, into the grey of the wall. He was hardly quiet there when Andrés came rushing past looking for Martin.

“Stay, Martin accursed,” he cried; “we have accounts to settle, offspring of a dog.” He ran, cursing, along the line of huts.

The village or poblacion had not composed itself to sleep: it was perhaps always ready for a row. Sard heard a general rushing to doors, as the inhabitants came to see the fun. Some boys brushed past Sard, who joined them.

“What is it? What is it?” the boys asked.

“Andrés seeks Martin, to kill him,” Sard answered.

“Andrés is killing Martin,” the boys cried. “Come, boys, Andrés has killed Martin.” Sard found himself in the midst of a crowd of men, women and children, hurrying up the line of huts. The crowd stopped towards the end of the line where Andrés was beating with his knife-hilt upon a door.

“Come out, you Martin,” he was crying. “I will have thy liver as a bake meat, yea and I will mince thy heart and eat it with red pepper, without grace.”

There was a general edging back of the crowd at this, to get out of the line of fire from Martin’s door: Sard edged back too, till his back was against a hut wall. He could see Andrés’ wife at her hut door, peering after her husband. All waited for Martin to answer the challenge: Andrés even waited for a reply: none came.

“So, scum of a Martin,” Andrés continued, “half-breed of a toad and a heretic, you justly fear my vengeance. See, now, brothers, this Martin, before I take his skin to be my bed-mat, makes his last prayers: he confesses, he sues for mercy. But I am not one to grant mercy till blood has flown on my front teeth. So come out, Martin, offspring of a dog, till I crack your marrow-bones with nutcrackers and take your marrow for boot-grease.”

Suddenly the door of Martin’s hut was flung open and a woman faced the madman.

“Who is it calls Martin?” she said. “Who is it couples a fine name with the filth of a drunkard’s ravings? You, Andrés? I thought no less. Martin is away, as is well known, or by this your tongue would have been tied round your neck with your own entrails, dog of a drunkard. Away, accursed one, trouble not the houses of the honest. But when Martin returns, then he shall know of this, Andrés, and then, Andrés, shall you be squeezed in the press till we know if your blood be wine or oil.”

Sard expected that Andrés would at least reply, but there was silence. Martin’s wife took up the word once more.

“And you people of the town,” she said, “have you nothing better to do than to watch the antics of this fool? Go, every one to his house, or Martin shall deal with you, even as with him.”

There was silence again for about thirty seconds, then three or four of the children, who had been on the outskirts of the little crowd, edged sheepishly away. They were followed by others. Sard had no time to dodge or hide; any movement of the sort would have betrayed him. He stood where he was, somewhat bent and peering towards Martin’s hut, with his left hand shading his face and eyes. Half-a-dozen people, children and grown-ups, passed him on their way to their huts. They looked at him rather hard, but no one spoke to him. A man and boy, as they passed, looked perhaps harder than the others. After they had passed, Sard heard the man ask under his breath:

“Who was that by the corner of the house?”

The boy said, “Old Ortiz, I thought. Good-night, Ortiz.”

Sard answered and muttered good-night. As he spoke, a couple of lads, who were running, jolted into the two friends and jolted Ortiz out of their minds. Up and down the line of huts people went home and closed their doors. Martin’s wife stood at her door, looking at them. The last to pass was Andrés, who went shambling past, muttering and twitching. Sard heard him mutter, “With my good knife I would have laid him low, I would have laid him low.”

Now from Andrés’ hut came the cry of a woman:

“Where is that creature calling himself a man, to whom the church has bound me in matrimony, who suspects me of infamy? Where is this Andrés, who from the blackness of his heart asperses the whiteness of my honour? Let me see him that I may cast his foul calumny in his teeth. Is it for this, O dog of all the dunghills of Spain, that I redeemed thee from thy life as hangman’s boy and made thee a knight-at-arms?”

Those who had not gone home hurried to watch Andrés receive his wife’s eloquence. Sard saw Andrés enter his home, but then something made him look up suddenly. He saw that Martin’s wife, who had come a few paces from her door, was looking at him with curiosity. It was bright moonlight; no one who looked at him could fail to see that he did not belong there.

“Well, I’m caught now,” Sard thought. “It’s neck or nothing now. Well, the straightest way is the quickest.”

He walked straight up to her.

“Madam,” he said, “I’m not a spy or the police, or anything. I’m lost here in these hills; will you help me out?”

She looked at him for some moments. “Go further up the line,” she said, “the third hut from here is empty. Pass in there and have no fear.”

She closed her own door in his face, and Sard did as he was bid. The third hut from hers was empty. He went into it. At some early time there had been a mud wall across the hut, dividing it into two. This had fallen into a pile of loose earth. Sard got behind this pile and thought, “Well, here I am; and if that woman lifts a finger, my throat will be cut on this doorstep, and that little beast, Chaco, will lick my blood.”

He waited; each minute seemed an hour. At the end hut of the village the man still sang to his mandoline, in his falsetto voice, a poem of intolerable length and folly, which Sard recognised as a rhymed romance of the early 17th century. Footsteps passed up and down outside the door. Once three men came to the door and stopped there, muttering in low voices for two or three minutes. They were smoking cigarettes and spitting. One of the men was carrying harness, which clinked.

One of them said, “Well, sooner or later that’s what it’ll have to come to.”

And another said, “We can count on you then?”

The other replied, “Well, come here, come on inside here; I’ll just give you my reasons.”

He had his hand on the door-latch and the door eight inches ajar, when the other said, “No, not in there, thank you. There are tarantulas in there. Come on up along.”

They moved away. Then for a long time Sard sat there, thinking of what they had said: “There are tarantulas in there.” He heard a queer, regular, clicking noise in one of the corners, two or three yards from him. It was a little dry, slight clicking noise, rather like two wooden skewers being tapped together. Some one had told him, years before, that tarantulas click their mandibles together before they attack. “That’s what it is,” he thought, “it’s a tarantula in the corner.”

He kept himself breathlessly still, and then suddenly he heard a little light pattering. There was a swift, flurrying scutter along the floor, a shrill squeal, something leapt and fell across his feet and writhed away squealing. He heard the thing, whatever it was, rat or mouse, trying to shake itself free in the corner of the room. The squeals soon died to a whimper and the whimper to a sigh, as the tarantula in the darkness sucked his fill. Sard presently heard the corpse sink down, as the insect moved away. He waited with his feet drawn up under him and his hands covering his throat, lest the insect should want more blood and come to him for it.

The time went slowly by, the man with the mandoline ceased his song, somebody who wished to sleep cursed a howling dog until it came indoors. But the wolves out on the mountains crept nearer. From time to time one would cry his cry. Whenever this happened, the dogs in the huts whimpered and were uneasy. Everybody, by this time, had gone to rest in that village of outlaws. Sard thought that it could not be long before the woman redeemed her promise.

Then from somewhere up above he heard the sound of drunken singing, which became louder as the singer came down into the village. Sard presently picked up the words of the song, which was one of the romances of the Moors in Spain. As the drunkard entered the village, every dog in every hut flew to the door barking with all its strength, in spite of the curses and boots of the owners. The drunkard paused outside the row of houses and cried in a loud voice, “Here I am, old Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as I want to be. Come on out, Martin, Tomás, Ramón, Espinello, for I tell you I’m not Pappa Peppy, but an avenging angel of the Day of Doom. I’m the Lord’s second coming and now I’m come.” And at this he let fly with two revolvers at the doors of the huts, in succession. Drunk as he was, he had extraordinary precision. The bullets thudded into the doors as though he were running a stick along palings.

“Come, Tomás,” he cried, “and I’ll shoot the white out of your eye. Come, Ramón, and I’ll see the colour of your blood; for I’m Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as Noah when he got home.”

There came another volley. Sard noticed that none of the bullets came into his door. He thought: “This is that ruffian’s hut, he’ll presently come in here to sleep.” The drunkard went to another hut and beat upon the door with the revolver butt. “Come out, Ramón,” he said, “and let’s shoot, man to man.”

Sard heard the voice of Ramón: “Take another drink, Pappa Peppy, and let us shoot in the morning, for now I’m sober, and how can a sober man hope to shoot like you?” A bottle seemed to be passed through a cautiously opened shutter, and Sard heard Pappa Peppy say, “You’re a Christian gentleman, Ramón. All I ever wanted was a drink, and now I’ve got it.”

Sard heard him take a drink and then come unsteadily to the door of the hut where he lay. He fumbled at the door, opened it, and stood groping there, feeling along the wall as though for a ledge where matches and candle stood.

“The lamp’s gone,” he said; “th’ only lamp I ever loved all gone. They all turn from Pappa Peppy.”

He came fumbling along the wall into the hut, and then went fumbling back and shut the door. Then he said: “Well, I’ve got box o’ matches. First of all, I’ll put the nice brandy up in the corner. I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I tell you I’ve got a box of matches and then I’ll show them. They aren’t going to fool Pappa Peppy.”

Sard heard him creep back to the door, holding on by the wall, and heard him say: “I’ll just kneel down very carefully and I’ll put down the brandy there, and I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I know I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. The man who says I haven’t got a box of matches, I’ll shoot the white out of his eye. Who says I haven’t got a box of matches? That’s the sort of skunk they are. They daren’t say it to my face, not one of them. Of course I’ve got a box of matches.”

He proceeded to empty his pockets in the dark, muttering over each thing. “What in the name of all the saints is this? Bit of a cigar. What in the—oh, bit more cigar. That’s a bottle of peppermint, all broken. Ugh! the glass is all broken.” A reek of peppermint liqueur filled the little hut. “No good looking for them in that pocket,” said the man; “there’s cigars in this pocket. There goes the box of matches. I knew I had a box of matches and it’s gone on the floor.”

The box of matches jerked out of the pocket and fell very close to Sard. The drunkard went down on hands and knees, diffusing a warm breath of peppermint liqueur and aniseed brandy. Sard felt as though he was to leeward of one of the Spice Islands. The man began to grope for the box of matches, patting with his great hands and breathing with difficulty. “I know the box of matches isn’t far,” he said. “It’s very stormy to-night. In a wind like this one has to go miles out of one’s way. Oh, the wind’s roaring, the wind’s roaring! And well it might roar, for I’m not Pappa Peppy, I’m the Day of Judgment. I’m the Day of Judgment, and I’m dawning and I’m coming up over the mountains now, just like blood, and if I lay my hands on that box of matches, they’ll be the first thing I’ll blast. I’ll teach ’em to fool the Day of Judgment!”

Presently he paused in his search. He had missed Sard by half inches two or three times. Presently Pappa Peppy stopped not more than a yard from Sard and said in a little, cold, clear voice, “Lord pity the poor sailors on a night like this! That’s ten times I’ve been round this room looking for that drink. It’s been witchcraft. I can see you here, and well I’ve known you were here all the time, and I know you’re doing it with your witchcraft, you black beast. I’ve watched you doing it, but you needn’t think to scare Pappa Peppy. He’s the Lord’s, he is; he isn’t one of yours. He’s a lily for the pure to look to. He fears not Satan nor all his minions. Ah! here’s the bottle. I knew I’d come to it, if I kept to the south far enough.”

Sard heard the cork drawn from the bottle and the gurgle as he drank raw aniseed brandy.

“That was what I wanted,” said Pappa Peppy. “A man like me who takes a lot out of himself has to put it back or go under. And I’ll have another like that—ah! I’ll have another like that. And now I can lie down on the floor without holding on, and let the storm roar itself sick. I don’t care, I don’t care. To-morrow when I get hold of that box of matches, I’ll show it what I think of it.”

The bottle dropped from his hand. It must still have been a third full, for as it rolled away some liquid gurgled out of it. Pappa Peppy gurgled in sympathy or in tune, and composed himself to sleep, sitting up against the wall. He passed into a drunken unconsciousness almost at once, breathing with dreadful difficulty, being in fact at the point of strangulation, through his throat pressing against his collar. After two or three convulsive gasps, he shook himself out of his dangerous position and lapsed sideways. “There’ll be death upon the sea this night,” he murmured; “I’ve known gales, but never anything like this.” After this he slept and the village slept.

It must have been full midnight when the door opened suddenly and the cool night wind blew in from the desert. The woman was there. “Come you,” she said.

Pappa Peppy groaned and fought with his drink. Sard rose up and came to the door. The woman had a little leather bag full of food for him and a leather-covered gourd full of water.

“If you go past the houses,” she said, “and follow up the cañon, to the end, you will come out below the icefields. In all my living here I have only heard of one man who has ever crossed those fields. His name was Gonzalez: he lived a hundred years ago. He crossed them and reached San Agostino in five days.”

“It’s San Agostino that I want to reach,” Sard said.

“Go then,” the woman said, “and may you have that man’s luck. He was my grandfather. But know this: you’re in the land of the bad men, the land of Red Sleeve and the Jacarillos, and not one other soul for thirty miles would have done what I do, not one other soul.”

“Tell me your name,” Sard said, “that if ever I get among my people again, I will think of you with gratitude until I die.”

“We have no names in the Jacarillo country,” she said; “but if ever you come to some church in Christian country, say a prayer to the Virgin for Juanita of the Bolson. And now go.”

She was herself gone on the instant and flitted back like a thief into her hut. Pappa Peppy gurgled in his sleep and cried, “I’ll deal with you if I can get at you!” and then cried, “O God!” and moaned. Sard knelt down, picked up Pappa Peppy’s box of matches, took his two pistols and cartridge belt, loaded both pistols, slung his provisions over his shoulder, and set out with a pistol in each hand from that city of the Jacarillos.

Fifty yards from the huts, he entered the cañon, now stealthy with the noises of the night. Near the mouth of the cañon a sentry lay asleep within the ring of his rope which screened him from snakes. Sard crept past him on tiptoe, but need not have taken such precaution, since the man slept like the dead. Not far away, something large, grey and silent, probably a wolf, which had been creeping up to steal the sentry’s food, glided into the sage brush.

In another fifty yards the trail turned upwards into the hills, out of sight of the gully. Sard went on as hard as he could put foot to ground for three hours. Then coming suddenly round a corner, walking rather carelessly, thinking that he was quite out of the reach of pursuit, the faint smell of smoke crossed his path; immediately he was in sight of three mud huts by the side of the road. He was reassured an instant later by seeing that two of the huts were ruined. There came a rustling from within the third; a hideous old Indian woman came out. She might have been any age from a hundred and twenty downwards. They looked at each other in the grey light in the heart of the wilderness. She mumbled something in reply to his question, but any wits she once had had long since gone.

Sard pointed to the snowy peaks below the stars in the sky. He asked in Spanish, “Is there a trail across the Sierras?” He made signs of a trail and of mountains.

Some memory lit up intelligence in her faded mind. She laughed. “They all go over the mountains,” she said. “All the young men go into the mountains. That’s why all the mountains are white, for all their bones are on the mountains. Your bones will be white on the mountains. I live up here among the mountains and I can hear them. All the round white skulls come rolling down the mountains.” She ran into her hut and returned with the skulls of three white men. “They all rolled down the mountain,” she said, “for they are Indian mountains, and the white men know much, but they don’t know about the mountains. By and by I’ll have your skull. I’ll put him in the ants’ nest to clean and I’ll keep him on the shelf.”

Sard hurried away from her, but for about half a mile she followed him, hugging the skulls. He pushed uphill as hard as he could go, but in the stillness of that glen he could hear her voice for a long time, saying that his skull would roll down the mountain.

There was now no trail, but he fixed his course straight to the frozen crag, which gleamed above him against the sky. Dawn found him still pushing onward and upward in a trackless wilderness that seemed to bear no living thing. When the sun rose, he found some shelter among the rocks, where he might defend himself if attacked. He expected that the Jacarillos would trail him as soon as it was light enough to see tracks, and that with ponies or donkeys they might well be on him before noon. In this he was unjust to the Jacarillos: they did not trail those whom they judged to be already doomed. In his shelter he ate, drank and then slept; he did not wake until the setting sun shone through a crevice among the rocks on to his face. After eating and drinking he set out again into the Sierras.

All littleness was gone from the mountains now. His world was one with the elements, the sky, great stars, and gigantic crags, silent except when now and then there came a roar from something breaking in the glacier, or the thunder of a boulder falling. The moon rose to light his going up a slope of rock, which seemed curtained by other slopes of rock. Here he laid down one of the revolvers which he had taken from Pappa Peppy. He laid it on the rock beside him. Instantly it slithered down, gathering small stones as it went, till it was thundering down the rocky slope far, far below, with an avalanche about it. He saw it flash and presently heard a report, and realised, as he had not realised before, that he might have slipped like the gun and gone gliddering down among the boulders in the same way.

At about midnight he reached a ledge of rock, where he slept until daybreak. When he woke he saw what he took to be three cloaked Indians, sitting on the ledge beside him. He sat up and looked at them. They withdrew their heads from their blankets. They were no Indians, but vultures. They looked at him with interest and without fear. He spoke to them, they muttered a little and moved uneasily.

“So you’re waiting for me to die, are you?” he said. “I’m not dead yet.” They craned and sidled with their bald heads. “Get out of this,” he said, smiting at one. It went sidelong off the ledge, and the others with it. They beat with their wings, recovered their poise, and sailed out into the air. An instant before, they had been squalid, stinking, huddled creatures; now they were floating in the majesty of beauty. Two hovered at a little distance from the ledge, the third rose above it in a short spire. He had never seen any bird of prey circling at such close quarters. He watched the great pinions soar up above him, while the others hovered away and mewed and cried. Suddenly the bird above him launched itself down upon him and beat him with its great wings, so that he was almost over the ledge. Instantly it was up in the air and repeated its swoop. It came down sighing and struck and hissed at Sard, and immediately the two birds who had been waiting, swooped and struck at him. “So you’re going to get me down into the valley and pick my bones,” Sard said. He lay flat down upon the ledge, face upwards, and drew his other revolver. The bird came down on him again, crying and smiting. He fired; the bird went up, poised, went up a few feet further, beat with its wings, mounted yet a little further like a towering partridge, then crumpled up and dropped. Sard saw it strike and roll and lie still. Its companions swayed away to look at it and then descended to the body.

Sard looked down and wondered how he could ever have climbed that crag at night without falling. He knew that he could not go down it by daylight. He looked at the crag which rose up above him from the ledge, and felt that he could not climb it. He had reached a point from which he could neither go nor come. He ate and drank and then thought, “Perhaps when I’m rested I will be able to try this rock. If not, I shall end here.”

He slept on the rock until the beating of the midday sun became unbearable. He twisted to an angle where his head could lie in some shade, and slept again. He was aware in his sleep that someone stood upon that ledge and told him to come on. He sat up, looked at this figure and knew that it was only partly human. In his dream, or fever, it seemed like the spirit of the Pathfinder, fierce, hard, and of great beauty. He told himself, “This is all nonsense. The Pathfinder is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a woman.”

But the figure said, “I am the Pathfinder. I can find a path for you.” She lead on up the rock and Sard followed. He could see her in front of him; he followed where she trod. There was a great star above the crags. The crags were thick with greenish ice, the star shone upon the ice, till it glittered like a crown. Sard said, “I’ll put my hand on the crown of the mountain.”

At daybreak he came out on a wild place near a brook.

There was grass there whistling in the wind. There was a little bird somewhere, not far away, crying a double note that sounded like a curse, continually repeated. Sard drank of the brook, sheltered from the wind and slept; nor did he know when the woman had passed from there. Afterwards, he was puzzled about that part of his march; sometimes it was in his mind all blurred, like the events of a fever, sometimes it seemed the only reality among things dreamed.

When he woke he was out in the snowfields. He thought that he had reached the summit, but he found that he was only on the top of a small shoulder. Beyond and above him were crags, sprinkled, heaped or overwhelmed with snow, some of it dirty from fallings of rock, some of it violet from shadow, the rest of it glittering. There was no sign of any living thing. If he looked up, there were peaks glittering against the sky; if he looked down, there were glittering snowfields, crags and chasms.

He could not see the country from which he had come, because greyness was hiding it from him. Grey shapes, like the leaders of a herd, were moving into it. A herd of mists followed their leaders, so like oxen that he expected them to bellow. They jostled on in myriads till all the lower slopes of the mountains were blotted out. Soon a sea of mist washed all about those miles of Sierras; the peaks stood out of this sea like islands. “If that sea rises,” Sard thought, “I shall be drowned up here. I must move while I have light.”

He had his direction from the sun. He pushed on, now up, now down, over snow of every degree of rottenness. He had a little food left in his wallet. He guarded this, but slaked his thirst with snow and chewed upon a piece of his belt.

In the evening it began to blow bitterly cold with a small snow. In one of the whirls of the gale he found himself upon a piece of a made road. He could hardly believe his eyes; but there was no doubt: it had been made by men. It had been cut out of the side of the crag; the crag at its side had been carven with the figures of the gods. A tall god with his tongue transfixed by a bramble was pouring libation on an altar; beyond the altar was a door leading into the crag. As he stood there, the sun shone out through a rift to light the eyrie he was perched upon. Used as he was to heights, it made him sick to think of the will that had spent men, like water, to hew that rock at that height. The sun shone into the doorway. Looking within, he saw two figures upon a throne. They sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. They were staring straight at him.

“Yes,” he said, “what are you? Who are you there?”

Peering in, he saw that they were the bodies of a king and queen who had been buried there in that mountain tomb, perhaps centuries before the Spaniards came. He crept into the tomb to look at them. Once the door of a slab of stone had been mortared flush with the face of the crag, but it had fallen like most of the road that led to it. The mummies sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. Masks of gold still covered their faces. The masks had, no doubt, been modelled on the dead faces and preserved likenesses of that king and queen. Both were tiny; they looked like children to Sard. They were the rulers who had driven men up the mountain to make that road. All about the walls were paintings of the lives of those two.

“Ah,” Sard thought, “he was a king and when he died the kingdom fell to pieces. She knew that it would be so, so when he died she killed herself.”

The sun, which had been shining, was now suddenly blotted out again. A cloud of intense blackness seemed to rush out of the heaven to engulf the crag. The air was filled with crying and small snow. Sard sat there in the darkness and fell asleep at the feet of the king and queen.

He woke often, because it was so cold. Whenever he woke, he heard the gale full of bells tolling, or voices crying to him: often he answered them. Once or twice he went to the door to answer voices; but no one was there except the gale, full of small snow. He wondered if he were alive, or if this were death; not final death, but the leaving of the body which is the prelude to it.

In the morning the wind dropped: the snow ceased: the storm went bodily off across heaven like an army that had been beaten, in a sullen mass, with rearguards of sulphurous smoke followed fast by the angels of heaven with light. The sun followed hot upon it with fire, till presently it was far, far away, engaged upon the southern horizon.

As Sard came out into the sun, he saw a name cut or scratched upon the lintel of the door of the tomb. The letters were lastingly but rudely graven by a strong illiterate.

Gonzalez Medina.

1795.

“Gonzalez Medina,” he said. “That woman’s grandfather. The only man who ever crossed these mountains. Here I am upon his track. If he blazed his trail thus, I may still find my way out.”

The finding of that blaze was companionship to him all that day, which was a hard day, one of his hardest.

* * * * *

One of the worst of the hardships was the knowledge that all was not well with the Pathfinder. He had put so much of his virtue into that ship, that she was almost part of him. He felt that things were going wrong on board her. Sometimes, as he struggled on, he knew that someone was in his place, making evil, and that Captain Cary wanted him. He kept thinking that Father Garsinton had brought the evil.

He could not remember Father Garsinton clearly, yet he stayed in his mind, like a blur of evil.

* * * * *

Long afterwards, in thinking over his climbing of the Sierra, some things came back into his mind as pictures or dreams or happenings; he never knew really which they were. Often it seemed to him that at this point in his journey he heard a beating of pans and the murmuring of bees: he saw bees swarming and a big Spanish woman beating pans to make them settle. He asked to be allowed to beat pans; afterwards he hived the bees into a straw basket.

Then the woman suggested that he should drink some honey drink, and took him to a house where she and her husband, a much older and much yellower person, gave him drink in a strange cup and asked him what he saw after he had drunk.

He said, “I see a path leading upwards.”

They said, “Go along the path. Now what do you see?”

He said, “I see a little house at the end of the path, shining as though it was made of some white metal.”

They said, “Is the door open?”

He said, “No, the door is locked.”

They said, “Go and put your hand on the sill of the door and see if the key is there.”

He said, “It is there.”

They said, “Open the door and go in.”

He opened the door, but inside all was darkness with a smell of carib leaf which choked his throat and made his head stupid.

They said to him, “What do you see?”

He said, “Nothing but a brazier burning carib leaf, which throws out a thick smoke which chokes me.”

They said, “No; but to right and left of the brazier what do you see?”

He said, “Two pillars and a person bound to each pillar.”

They said, “Look well; who are the people bound to the pillars?”

He looked with all his strength into the thickness of the smoke. It was agony to him not to be able to see clearly, but he said, “One is Juanita de la Torre and the other is myself, and we are being choked by the smoke.”

They said, “It is not the smoke, it is something coming from the brazier.”

Then from the brazier the little tongues of flame, writhing among the carib leaves, changed to red snakes which were arms and hands that came twining about the throats of the two bound figures. The fire in the brazier glowed into the likeness of a human soul with the face of Father Garsinton, who laughed and said, “I crush you lesser spirits as a sacrifice to my master.”

Then all became dim with carib smoke choking and stupefying, but the words, “I crush you lesser spirits” were repeated many times, while the house, the honey-cup, and the Spanish man and woman faded and disappeared.

* * * * *

Soon after this he climbed a spine of rock, expecting to find on the further side a dip of snow with a higher spine beyond it. To his amazement, there was no such dip nor spine; but the slope of the mountain falling below him into a different world. On this ocean side of the Sierra there was no desert. Instead of a chaos of rock blasted by the sun to rottenness, there were heaves of hill flinging their waters to the forests. Forests covered the valleys like a fleece. In places where there was no forest Sard could see little white houses. The smoke of a train ran like a caterpillar along the valley beneath the foothills. Beyond the foothills was a dark mass, like a bar of metal, yet not like a bar of metal, because it seemed to be alive, it gave Sard the thought that it trembled: it was the sea.

Far away, on the brink of this darkness, was a smudge or cloud in which some chimneys stood like stalks. The smoke merged into the air so that a tiny golden dome glittered: it was the cathedral in San Agostino. Almost at once, quite clearly, though faintly, in some chance channel of upper air or freak of sound, the chimes from the dome reached Sard. It was a familiar Spanish chime to which Sard always put the words of the poet:

“Gloria in las alturas,

Cantad in vuestra jaula, criaturas.”

Worn, footsore, more than half-starved as he was, he could not see his goal nor hear that chime without “singing in his cage.” There was his desired haven, within how many hours of march? He could not tell how many hours; perhaps very many hours; but no matter what his pains were, he felt sure that having seen his goal, he could reach it.

Going down was like soul’s delivery after the toils of the last days. In a few miles he was in the timber, going down a glen of great trees towards a smell of honey which came thickly upon the air to him. Sometimes he missed it for a few yards, but it always returned on the next gust. Sometimes it brought to him memories of tea in England, but more often the intense memory of a picnic at Yapavai, where he had sat near a field of the yellow melilotis hovered over by countless blue butterflies.

At the end of the glen he came out on to a heave of the hill, where he found the cause of the honey scent: eleven great trees lay broken on the ground.

Nine of the eleven were hollow from the ground to the upper branches. In all these, for perhaps centuries, the wild bees had nested, till now many hundreds weight of honey lay broken or spilt upon the ground. Over this, in some places, the bees were still flying confusedly, but by this time most of them had gone with their queens to new shelters. Gorged bee-eaters sat on neighbouring boughs. Some small mountain bears boldly foraged in the tree-boles. They clawed out great paws-full of comb which they plastered into their muzzles in spite of the stings. Sard found a piece of broken yellow comb the size of a bathsponge. On this he fed with thoughts of the prophets fed miraculously in the wilderness. After this, the miseries of the wilderness fell from him as though they had never been. Perhaps the honey had in it some drug of excitement or of comfort. He wandered on happily, feeling sure that all his troubles were at an end. He bathed in the pool of a mountain stream on the banks of which wild strawberries grew so thickly that the ground looked like the foot of a red hawthorn tree after a storm in June. After this he went on through a forest of big timber which grew on easy slopes with little undergrowth.

The moon had risen before he came to any trace of men. He came to a clearing and followed wheel-tracks downhill till he saw the lights of huts. Men in the huts were beating tin pans and singing:

“Is that Mr. Riley

Who sets such a styley?

Is that Mr. Riley who keeps the hotel?

Is that Mr. Riley they speak of so highly?

How d’ye do, Mr. Riley, are you doing quite well?”

As he came to the door of the first hut, a man who was tapping out his pipe there, hailed him:

“Hello, sport! where in hell do you come from?”

“Over the mountain.”

“Mountain, hell! Are you looking for a job?”

“No.”

“Doing it for a bet, then?”

“No. Trying to rejoin my ship.”

“Hell!” the man said. “Here, boys, here’s a son of a gun come across the mountain, trying to rejoin his ship. Come in, son, and have one on the house.”

* * * * *

At noon the next day Sard was in San Agostino, washed, shaven, fed, reclad, and with money in his pocket. He walked in the crowded street, listening to speech, hearing the bells. Shops were full of food, drink, shoes and clothes; women were looking into shops; work was going on; men with places in life were filling them.

He had no place. He knew now how little a thing will put a man out of a place, into the wilderness beyond, where to be at all is to be an outlaw.

He stopped on the steps of the Consulate to look at the ships in port: among them was the big English steam yacht, the Yuba, which he had seen in Las Palomas, as it seemed in another life. A man hailed him by name.

“Hullo, Harker!”

It was Billy Binge, his old captain of the main.

“I say, Harker,” he said, “are you ashore here? Yes? What topping luck! Could you take the Yuba to Santa Barbara?”

“Yes.”

“Sir James has sacked his old man for crooking his little finger: going on the jag, in other words. He wants a new old man, muy pronto, and the worst of it is all the masters on the beach here are out at elbows.”

“So am I,” Sard said.

“Only in your gear,” Billy said. “These other fellows are in their souls. I can vouch for you personally. So if you really can take her, come along, I’ll fit you out a bit and then I’ll take you to Sir James.”

“One minute,” said Sard. “Have you heard anything of an abduction case at Las Palomas?”

“Abduction of Miss Kingsborough?” Billy said. “We’ve heard nothing else. She’s been carried clean away.”

“Where to?” Sard asked.

“Search me,” Billy said. “Some damned trader in Eve’s flesh; but there’s a fine old breeze about it. Now come along.”

“What brings you to San Agostino?”

Sard told him in few words.

* * * * *

Billy Binge’s recommendation was sufficient; Sir James engaged Sard to command the Yuba. She sailed late that night, up the coast to the Recalde reef to take some dredgings. After a few days at the reef, she sailed for Santa Barbara, where she arrived at noon just nineteen days from Sard’s going ashore at Las Palomas.

Sir James stood at his side as he brought the Yuba into Santa Barbara harbour.

“You’ve not been here recently, Captain Harker,” he said. “You’ll not know the place; it’s a different place: almost a different city. They’re making this place the Athens of the West: I say they, but it’s really he, the Dictator, Don Manuel. Look at the cathedral; there’ll be nothing so beautiful in the New World when it’s finished. Do you see your ship, the Pathfinder?”

“No, Sir James, she isn’t in the sailing ship berths.”

“That is unfortunate for you,” Sir James said, “as I suppose it means that she has both come and gone; but it is fortunate for me, for I hope it will mean that you will come home with us in the Yuba.”

* * * * *

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