Yet this was not the incident, nor the portion of the incident which startled both him and Paz. Not that, but something else more serious than a tame deer crossing an open grassland a few hundred yards in diameter each way. There was nothing to startle in that--though much to do so in what followed.
What followed being that as the deer, still slowly trotting over the broad-leaved grass, which here forms so luxurious a pasture for all kinds of cattle, came into line with Julian and Paz riding almost side by side, though with the latter somewhat ahead of the former--there came from out of the mangrove trees on the other side of the little opening, a spit of flame, a puff of smoke, and the sharp crack of a rifle, while, a second later, from off the side of a logwood tree close by them there fell a strip of bark to the ground.
"By Jove!" exclaimed Julian, his accustomed coolness not deserting him even at this agitating moment, "the gallant sportsman is a reckless kind of gentleman. One would think we were the game he is after and not the deer which, by-the-bye, has departed like a streak of greased lightning. I say, Paz, that bullet passed about three inches behind your head and not many more in front of my nose. People don't go out shooting human beings here as they do partridges at home, do they?" and he turned his eyes on his companion.
If, as an extra excitement to add to the incident, he had desired to observe now a specimen of native-born ferocity, he would have been gratified as he thus regarded Paz. For the man in whose veins ran the hot blood of a Spaniard, mixed with the still more hot and tempestuous blood of the Indian, seemed almost beside himself now with rage and fury. His dark coffee-hued skin had turned livid, his eyes glared like those of a maddened wolf, and his hands, which were now unstrapping the rifle that he too carried slung to his saddle, resembled masses of vibrating cords. Yet they became calm enough as, the antique long-barrelled weapon being released, he raised that rifle quickly, brought it to the shoulder and fired towards the exact spot whence they had observed the flame and smoke of the previous rifle to come.
"Are you mad?" exclaimed Julian, horrified at the act. "Great Heavens! Do you want to commit a murder? If the person who let drive at that deer has not moved away yet, you have very likely taken a human life."
But Paz, who seemed now to have recovered his equanimity and to have relieved his feelings entirely by that savage idea of retaliation, which had been not only sprung into his mind, but had also been instantly put into practice, only shrugged his shoulders indifferently while he restrapped his rifle. Then he pointed a long lean finger at the spot across the glade where the first discharge had taken place, directing the digit next to the spot where the deer had been, after which he pointed next to their heads and then to the tree, in which they could see the hole where the bullet was buried two or three inches. Having done all which, he muttered:
"Fired at the deer. At the deer! The deer was there--there--there," and he directed his eyes to a spot five yards off the line which would be drawn between the other side of the glade whence the fire had come and the deer, "and we are here. Tree here, too."
"What do you suspect?" Julian asked, white to the lips now himself--appalled at some hitherto unsuspected horror. "What? Whom?" And as he spoke his lips seemed to take the form of a name which, still, he hesitated to give utterance to.
"No," the half-caste said in reply, his quick intelligence grasping without the aid of any speech the identity of the man to whom Julian's expression pointed. "No. He is in Belize by now. He must be there. He has money--much money--to pay to lawyer this morning. Not him. Not him." After which the mysterious creature laughed in a manner that set Julian's mind reflecting on how he had heard the Indians of old laughed at the tortures endured by their victims.
"Come," he said now, feeling suddenly cold and chilled, as he had felt once or twice before in Desolada and its surroundings. "Come, let us go ho----back to the house," and he started the mustang forward on the route they had been following.