Suddenly gloom fell on all the landscape, as if a mighty hand had eclipsed the waning sun. The air was very much more thick and oppressive, and there were innumerable though faint crepitations like feeble snappings of electricity. To take the game he spoke of, before the rainfall drowned them out of their nests, it was needful to hasten. But he had not descended three rounds of the ladder, before he stopped all of a piece. From every side, there was the sound of an arrival of men, both on foot and ahorse. Instinctively he drew himself up, arranged his form on the floor so as to project only his forehead and eyes over the ledge where ended the means of ascension, and stared below.
A number of persons, congratulating themselves on their reunion loudly with the hyperbolic phrases of the Spanish ceremony of greeting, clattered into the tower. Presently a light was struck, and a roaring fire kindled. As the shaft thus became the chimney, Gladsden was forced to cough, though he smothered the sound as much as possible, hoped, as did the man who lighted the damp wood, that it would lose no time in burning up clearly.
When he could protrude his face over the peephole again, he beheld a dozen persons, swarthy, robust, richly clad as the prairie rovers, or cattle thieves, armed to the teeth. Cruel of eye, malignant and ferocious, he judged it highly imprudent to make their acquaintance, unless Ignacio was the introducer.
Before very many sentences were uttered, every syllable of which came to his ears direct, the overhearer was not allowed to cherish any error as to their profession. They were the Gentlemen of the Night, the road robbers, the scourges of Sonora, belonging to the squad (cuadrilla) of Matasiete, "the Slayer of Seven."
The gestures of the Mexicans grew animated as they sat around the fire, or leaned against the wall, which the gleams showed to be painted by the Indians; now and then they clapped their unwashed but jewelled hands to their weapons—at which moments the witness earnestly prayed that they would join in a free fight and kill everyone to the last. They were wrangling over the division of spoil, and perhaps the plunder would have cost additional lives to those of its original proprietors, when the advent of someone in authority caused the dispute to cease. It was their captain.
He was not the heroic figure that Gladsden had imagined fit to rule such desperadoes. He was tall, but lean, don Quixote with Punch's nose and chin, rather the fox than the wolf, and though his features were set stern and his voice was savage, doubts might be conceived as to his own reliance on his bullying mode of government.
"At your differences again," he cried in a sharp voice, which now and then ran up shrill and high, spite of himself, more to the resemblance of the puppet show hero than ever. "¡Caray! Why can't you pull together like honourable gentlemen of the prairie?"
Two of the brigands began an explanation which their leader cut short by replying to the less ruffianly of the two:
"Silence! I'll not be bothered by a single word! ¡Viva Dios! Here you are hugging the fire like herders broiling a steak, without a thought of our common safety. I have had to post sentries myself, and even they grumbled at such important duty, just because there is a barrel of water coming down. I tell you I heard a shot in the thicket, which was not from any of our guns."
Another of the gang spoke up, with whom he judged it meet to argue. It is due to the estimable captain Matasiete to say that the debater in question was picking a fragment of buffalo beef out of a huge hollow grinder, with an unpleasant long knife.