The Quest of the Four: A Story of the Comanches and Buena Vista

by Joseph A. Altsheler

A second day passed without event, and a third, and then a fourth. John Bedford was overcome by a terrible depression. Catarina was old and foolish, or perhaps she, too, had shown at last the cunning and trickery that he began to ascribe to all these people. He would stay in that cell all his life, fairly buried alive. A fierce, unreasoning anger took hold of him. He would have flared out at stolid Diego who brought the food, but he did not want those heavy chains put back on his ankles. His head was now healed enough for the removal of the bandage, but a red streak would remain for some time under the hair. Doubtless the hair had saved him from a fracture of the skull. Every time he put his hand to the wound, which was often, his anger against de Armijo rose. It was that cold, silent anger which is the most terrible and lasting of all.

Although he was back in the depths, John felt that the brief spell of hope had been of help to him. His wound had healed more rapidly, and he was sure that he was physically stronger. Yet the black depression remained. It was even painful for him to look through the slit at his piece of the slope, which he sometimes called his mountain garden. He avoided it, as a place of hope that had failed. On the sixth day, Diego brought him his dinner a little after the dinner hour. He was sitting on the edge of his cot and he bit into a tamale. His teeth encountered something tough and fibrous, and he was about to throw it down in disgust. Then the words of Catarina, those words which he had begun to despise, came suddenly back to him. He put the tamale down and began to eat a tortilla, keeping his eye on Diego, who slouched by the wall in the attitude of a Mexican of the lower classes, that lazy, dreaming attitude that they can maintain, for hours.

Presently Diego glanced at the loophole, and in an instant John whipped the tamale off the plate and thrust it under the cover of the cot. Then he went on calmly with his eating, and drank the usual amount of bad coffee. Diego, who had noticed nothing, took the empty tray and went out, carefully locking the heavy door behind him. Then John Bedford did something that showed his wonderful power of self-restraint. He did not rush to the bed, eager to read what the tamale might contain, but strolled to the loophole and looked out for at least a quarter of an hour. He did not wish any trick to be played upon him by a sudden return of Diego. Yet he was quivering in every nerve with impatience.

When he felt that he was safe, he returned to the cot and took out the tamale. He carefully pulled it open, and in the middle he found the tough, fibrous substance that his teeth had met. He had half expected a paper of some kind, rolled closely together, that the writing might not perish, and what he really did find caused a disappointment so keen that he uttered a low cry of pain.

He held it up in his hand. It was nothing more than a small package of thread, such as might have been put in a thimble. What could it mean? Of what possible use was a coil of fifty yards or so of thread that would not sustain the weight of half a pound? Was he to escape through the loophole on that as a rope? He looked at the loophole four inches broad, and then at the tiny thread, and it seemed to him such a pitiful joke that he sat down on the cot and laughed, not at the joke itself, but at any one who was foolish enough to perpetrate such a thing.

He tested the thread. It was stronger than he had thought. Then he put it on his knee, took his head in his two hands, and sat staring at the thread for a long time, concentrating his thoughts and trying to evolve something from this riddle. It did mean something. No one would go to so much trouble to play a miserable joke on a helpless captive like himself. Catarina certainly would not do it, and she had given him the hint about the food, a hint that had come true. He kept his mind upon the one point so steadily and with so much force that his brain grew hot, and the wound, so nearly cured, began to ache again. Yet he kept at it, studying out every possible twist and turn of the riddle. At last he tested the thread again. It was undeniably strong, and then he looked at the loophole. Only one guess savored of possibility. He must hang the thread out of the loophole.

He ate the rest of the tamale, hid the little package under his clothing, and at night, after supper, when the darkness was heavy, he threw the end of the thread through the long slot, a cast in which he did not succeed until about the twelfth attempt. Then he let the thread drop down. He knew about how many feet it was to the pavement below, and he let out enough with three or four yards for good count. Then he found that he had several yards left, which he tied around one of the iron bars at the edge of the loophole. It was a black thread, and, although some one might see it by daylight, there was not one chance in a thousand that any one would see it at night.

"Fishing," he said to himself, as he lay down on his cot, intending to sleep awhile, but to draw in the thread before the day came. It might be an idle guess, he could not even know that the thread was not clinging to the stone wall, instead of reaching the ground, but there was relief in action, in trying something. He fell asleep finally, and when he awoke he sprang in an instant to the floor. The fear came with his waking senses that he might have slept too long, and that it was broad daylight. The fear was false. It was still night, with only the moon shining at the loophole. But he judged that most of the night had passed, and his impatience told him that if anything was going to happen it had happened already. He went to the window. His thread was there, tied to the bar and, like a fisherman, he began to pull it in. He felt this simile himself. "Drawing in the line," he murmured. "Now I wonder if I have got a bite."

Although he spoke lightly to himself, as if a calm man would soothe an excitable one, he felt the cold chill that runs down one's spine in moments of intense excitement. The moonlight was good, and he watched the black thread come in, inch by inch, while the hand that drew it trembled. But he soon saw that there was no weight at the other end, and down his heart went again into the blackest depths of black despair. Nevertheless, he continued to pull on the thread, and, as it emerged from the darkness into the far end of the loophole, he thought he saw something tied on the end, although he was not sure, it looked so small and dim. Here he paused and leaned against the wall, because he suddenly felt weak in both mind and body. These alternations between hope and despair were shattering to one who had been confined so long between four walls. The very strength of his desire for it might make him see something at the end of the thread when nothing was really there.

He recovered himself and pulled in the thread, and now hope surged up in a full tide. Something was on the end of the thread. It was a little piece of paper not more than an inch long, rolled closely and tied tightly around the center with the thread. He drew up his stool and sat down on it by the loophole, where the moonlight fell. Then he carefully picked loose the knot and unrolled the paper. The light was good enough, and he read these amazing words: