"Then we will come and take it," said the man below.
He signed to his companions, and when three or four of them gathered about him clamoring excitedly Nares felt his blood tingle and his face grow hot. Perhaps it was the fever working in him, and he was certainly overwrought, and, perhaps, it was a subconscious awakening of the white man's pride. After all, the men of his color held dominion, and it was an intolerable thing that one of them should submit to personal indignity at a negro's hand. A little quiver ran through him, but his restraint did not break down until the big truculent negro came up the stairway and laid a greasy black hand upon the shoulder of the worn and haggard man who ruled the station. He shook him roughly, grinning as he did it, and then Nares' self-control suddenly left him. Swinging forward on his left foot he struck at the middle of the heavy, animal face, and the negro staggering went backwards down the stairway. Then with the sting of his knuckles a change came over Nares, for the passions he had long held in stern subjection were suddenly unloosed. At last he had broken down under a tension that had been steadily growing intolerable, and he turned on his persecutors as other men of his faith have done. When men of that kind strike they strike shrewdly.
There was also a change in the negroes' attitude. They had maltreated their own countrymen at their will, but they had as yet never laid hands upon a white man. Perhaps, it was the rum Herrero had given them which had stirred their courage, and, perhaps, they regarded a missionary as a good-humored fool who had for some inconceivable reason flung the white man's prerogative away. In any case, they were coming up the stairway, three or four of them, and now the first man carried a matchet, an instrument which resembles an old-fashioned cutlass. Nares, who asked for no directions, sprang into the room behind him where one of the trestle cots not unusual in that country stood. It had a stout wooden frame, and he rent one bar from the canvas laced to it. In another moment he was back at the head of the stairway where the man in charge of the station stood, frail, and haggard, but very quiet, with his thin jacket rent open where the negro had seized him. A foot or two below him the man with the matchet was coming up, naked to the waist, and half-crazed with rum. Nares could see his eyes in the moonlight, and that was enough.
He swung the bar high with both hands, and it descended on the negro's crown. The man went backwards, but another who carried a long gun sprang over him, and the heavy bar came crashing down on his naked arm. Then it whirled again, and there was a curious thud as it left its mark upon a dusky face. There was a clamor from the men below, a gasp behind Nares, and a folded canvas chair struck the next negro on the breast. He, too, lost his balance, and in another moment the stairway was empty except for one of the dusky men who lay still upon the lower steps of it. Nares stood on the veranda, with a suffused face, and the perspiration dripping from him, and smiled curiously when the man in charge of the station glanced at him with wonder and a vague reproof in his eyes.
"I am not sure that I have anything to regret," he said. "They are coming back again."
Herrero's boys were once more at the foot of the stairway, trampling on their comrade as they scrambled over him, but there were now two men with extemporized weapons at the head of it who stood above them and had them at a disadvantage. Nares was, however, never quite clear as to what happened during the next few minutes, for an unreasoning fury came upon him, and he saw only the woolly heads and dusky faces as he gasped and smote, though he was vaguely conscious that now and then a shattered chair somebody whirled by the legs swung above his head. Then a long gun flashed, and the detonation was answered by a sharper, ringing crash. One of Herrero's boys screamed shrilly, and the half-naked figures went scrambling down the stairway. They had scarcely floundered clear of it when a man in white duck appeared in the space below, and flung up a rifle, and another of the boys who went down headlong lay writhing horribly in the sand. After that there was a shouting and a patter of flying feet, and further dusky men with matchets and Snider rifles poured out of the path that wound down the hillside. Nares quietly laid the bar he held against the wall, and turned to the others with a gasp.
"It's Ormsgill," he said.
CHAPTER XXIV
BENICIA MAKES A BARGAIN
Except for the two unsightly objects that lay in the soft moonlight, there was no sign of Herrero's boys when Ormsgill walked up the stairway with a rifle in his hand. A little smoke curled from the breech which he opened before he shook hands with Nares.