A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to help.
He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose out of the cañon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the arriero’s sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling up out on the level.
The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the arriero only one thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his rifle across the animal’s back showed how he came to be still riding the trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and “requisitions.” As he had seen Lee pass the fonda with Gordon, one word, “revolutionists,” fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his clucks of commiseration.
“Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied remedies to my own niñas when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will cry her eyes out over this!”
Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his questions with frightful oaths.
“How many were they, señor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all with one flick of my knife! Take thou this.”
It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own riding-mule, he ran on:
“You shall ride her, señor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding. But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse’s two. An hour’s start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in five, or less if they camp at dark.”
He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back down the ravine to the lush grass by the fonda, where old Antonio would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle across his arm, saddle machete and knife close to his hand, black eyes glittering under his sombrero, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready for the start.
Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made up in utility. Justifying its owner’s boast, it navigated steeps, slid down into cañons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds, now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained steadily upon the first.