“He got only one swipe at thee, it seems. It’s all right, so that I came in time to give thee a more merciful death. So we won’t grudge the breath it cost me. But the least thanks thou canst give me is that precious pelt.” Drawing his knife, the hunter soon removed that very softest and most exquisite of all furs. Then with an uneasy glance at the clouds he turned away, walking as briskly as his protesting lungs would allow.
Good! There was the mule all right. It had not budged a foot; and now, though still in an attitude of utter dejection, was clearly out of danger. Directly, master and mule were jogging off toward the trail at a most doleful gait—which doubtless would have been mended, if they could have seen through the rounded hill just ahead. But the hill was opaque, as hills and circumstances ahead are so prone to be; and they pottered along lazily, until, at a turn over the ridge, the spurs went drumming such an unexpected tattoo upon his echoing ribs that the mule quite forgot himself, and went pitching down the hill at a pace he had not taken in a month.
IV.
Away down yonder, a superannuated buggy and its team stood in the trail. A few rods ahead of it, and just at the heels of a wilted pack-mule, two men were scuffling in the dust; and over them a hooded figure was bringing down a heavy club. At that instant the pack beast wakened enough to turn his head interrogatively, cocking one ear forward and the other back. Even as he did so, his nigh hind leg could be seen to gather itself and suddenly lunge out behind. A long, linen-shrouded form, white capped at one end, thereupon doubled in half, and rose in the air and went whirling like a boomerang. It fell a full rod away and did not rise. Then a similar figure sprang from the buggy and rushed at the wrestlers; but midway went down all at once in a loose heap, as if struck by a bullet. No wonder the stranger up yonder drummed with his heels, and jockeyed, and whooped; and, finding his charger still too slow, leaped from its back and came bounding down the hillside like a loosened rock.
Andrés was sitting placidly astride his prostrate foe, breathing rather hard, but looking stupidly good-natured as ever. One of his fingers was broken, and blood from a gash on his forehead trickled down his nose.
“Mps, viracocha,” he answered to the breathless traveler’s glance of inquiry, “the caballeros were set to see the inside of your boxes, and because I refused they went to beat me. But when this cannibal here came upon me, then it was to fight. The blows of a gentleman, yes—but not of a chuncho.[31] So I measured him, thus. And when the gentleman went to crack me the squash with his quirt, then did Big-Ears here, forgetting respect to the powerful, set heel to his stomach and lift him until over yonder.”
“And this? I saw him fall as he ran at you,” the viracocha mustered breath to say.
“He? Mps, but it will be the sorojchi—see you not how the blood falls from his mouth? And you see, viracocha, how strong is the coca! Because I sacrificed at the apacheta, as one should, to the spirits of the high places, it has all come as the mouth would ask. Without that, then, the gentlemen would have left me here, of no more use to your grace, and the magic boxes would be emptied in the light.”
When night came down on the Quimca-chata, a gusty snowstorm, with howling intervals of hail, beset the pass. It roared at the hills, it swooped down the cañons as if in search of some living thing it might turn to ice before morning. But inside the low, dirty tambo, they only laughed at its rage. The bald stone hut in a little nook under the shoulder of a hill had neither window nor chimney; and a heavy poncho of llama hair was the temporary door. It was a fair type of the tambos of the Andes—those tenantless, cheerless wayside shelters that save the traveler in those bleak lands from perishing. On the sooty hearth a faint blaze of taqui wavered, and the smoke wandered out as best it could or made itself at home in the bare room. Upon the rough stone bench along the walls sat five men, and in the farther corner six mules nosed wistfully in a rubbish heap for casual straws. Of the men two were Indians, and both wore bandaged heads. The third guest of this inn without a landlord appeared to be an American, and he also had a handkerchief bound about his skull. The two others were handsome, swarthy men in costly vicuña ponchos. They sat on linen dusters, from the pockets of which peeped the tasseled ends of two white caps.