Ashley shook his hand warmly. The ranchero drew his hat over his eyes, adjusted his serape so that his face was almost hidden, and dropping into that utterly ungraceful posture into which the skilled horseman of Mexico relapses when he suffers his steed to take his own way and pace across a wearisome stretch of country, he turned his horse’s head toward the bridle-path they had left, and slowly receded from Ashley’s gaze. Once however beyond the crest of the hill, the rider’s eye brightened, his figure straightened; a distant sound of voices reached his keen ear,—it was so remote that but for the rarity of the atmosphere it would have failed to reach him. Bending his head, he listened intently for a moment; then raising it he gazed searchingly on every hand, rode for a short distance to the right, guided his nimble-footed beast down the cleft sides of a deep ravine and along the dry bottom of a rock-strewn path, which rapid floods had in some past time cut in their fierce descent from the steep sides of the frowning mountains, and so gradually gained the dark and solitary defiles that led directly to those eyries of bandit mountaineers, who under the guise of shepherds, charcoal-burners, and goat-herds had been, as Pepé well knew, the chosen comrades of Pedro Gomez and his mates in the boyhood days of that Don Leon whose wild deeds were still the theme of many a tale, and like the story of his death became more mythical with every repetition.
Pepé rode steadily on for hours, picturing to himself his meeting with Pedro should he find him, or the quiet exultation of Chinita when she should hear that he had deserted the troops, or of the return of Don ’Guardo to the hacienda. In his heart he was not displeased that the American should be separated from Chinita, though it left her the more completely to the gallant care of Ruiz. He had comprehended instantly the emotion which had seized upon Ashley at his kinsman’s grave,—the instinct for revenge. He said to himself that those Americans, after all, were people of sensibility, and he felt a certain satisfaction that he had been the instrument of calling into action a sentiment that did the foreigner so much credit.
Meanwhile the heat of noon passed, and Ashley’s horse stood with patient dejection in the shadow of the huge cactus to which he had been tethered, not even taking advantage of the freedom allowed by the length of the rope, so little temptation to browse was offered by the sparse and coarse tufts of herbage which struggled into existence here and there. The time wore on, and an occasional stamp attested his disapprobation of a master who lay prone upon the ground under a mesquite tree when the sun shone hottest, and who when the cool breeze of afternoon swept over the silent spot, stood long and still beside the grave he had not sought, and yet felt infinite reluctance to leave.
It was a foolish thought, but as he gazed across the broad valley to the great square of buildings set among the fields, the youth imagined how indeed the dead man might at times steal forth to visit again those fertile scenes where he had lived and loved. As he stood there, Ashley could see the people like pigmies passing in and out the great gateway, or going from hut to hut in the village. There was one figure—it seemed that of a woman—which his eye sought from time to time, as it appeared and disappeared in the corn and bean fields, and at last came out on the open road that lay between them and the reduction-works. He was becoming quite fascinated by its hesitating yet persistent progress, when he was startled by a sound; and glancing up, he saw a man leaning upon the crumbling wall and regarding him with a gaze so bewildered, so fixed, that involuntarily he moved a step toward him.
The stranger started, as if some frightful spell had been broken. Ashley saw that he crossed himself, and muttered some invocation; yet that he had not the look of a nervous man or a coward, but rather of a somnambulist pacing the earth under the impulse of some horrible dream. The man was not ill-looking,—no, decidedly not; and though his skin was deeply browned as if from much exposure, and his cheek bones were prominent, giving his face a certain cast below the eyes that was plebeian or Indian in character, the eyes themselves were dilated and brilliant, and the straight nose and pointed beard gave him the air of a Spanish cavalier, though he wore the broad sombrero and serape of a common soldier of the rural order. Perhaps on ordinary occasions even a more practised eye than that of Ashley Ward would have accepted the stranger for what he purported to be; but the American with an extraordinary feeling of repulsion little accounted for by the mere sense of intrusion caused by the man’s unexpected appearance, at once leaped to the conclusion that his dress—though he had no appearance of strangeness in it—was virtually a disguise, and that instead of a soldier of the ranks, the man before him was of no ordinary position or character.
The new-comer seemed to have risen out of the ground, so stealthily had he approached. It would have been quite possible for him, tall as he was, to have skirted the wall without observation from any one within the enclosure. But undoubtedly he had taken no precaution in that solitary place, which except at funeral times was shunned as the haunt of ghosts and ill-omened birds and reptiles, and thus had come unexpectedly upon the motionless figure of the tall young man clothed in a plain riding-suit of black, with bright conspicuous locks at the moment uncovered, and fair-skinned face of a characteristic American type,—all unremarkable in themselves but associated in the mind of the observer with one whom he had seen but twice or thrice, and this on the mad night when the moon had shone down upon a victim quivering in the death-agony above which he had exulted.
The two men held each the other’s gaze in silence for a full minute, both unmindful of the common courtesy usual in such chance encounters in solitary places. Then recovering from the superstitious awe which had overpowered him, the Mexican stepped over the broken wall. Ashley noticed as he did so that heavy silver spurs were on his heels, and that the fringed sides of his leathern trousers were stained as though with hard riding, and that, as if from habit, rather than any purpose of menace, his nervous hand closed upon the pistol in his scarlet band, as with a few long strides he reached the spot on which Ashley stood with that air of defiance which a sudden intrusion upon a solitude however secure naturally arouses in a man who is neither a coward nor an adept in the self-command that is perhaps the most perfect substitute for invincible courage.
“Señor,” said the Mexican, “your pistols are on your saddle. You are right; this is an evil habit to wear them so readily at one’s side. Pardon me if in my surprise I assumed an attitude of menace; but these are troublous times. One scarcely expects to find a cavalier alone in such a place.” He looked around him with a smile, which did not hinder a quiver of the lip expressing an excitement which his commonplace words denied.
Ashley regarded the speaker with ever increasing repugnance. It was true his pistols hung from the saddle, but there was a small knife in his belt, and his hand wandered to it stealthily as he answered: “Señor, I make no inquiry why you are here, and on foot,—which you must acknowledge might well cause some curiosity in this place; but in all courtesy I trust your errand is a happier one than mine. Whatever it is, I will not intrude upon it longer than will suffice to plant this cross.” And with an air of perfect security, yet with his knife in hand, he bent to the work, which the other regarded with an almost incredulous gaze,—the preservation of a grave or its tokens being a sort of sentimentality to which by tradition and training he was a stranger; and to see it exhibited for the first time in this God’s acre of laborers, almost sufficed to dissipate the impression the unexpected encounter had made upon him. As Ashley quietly pursued his work, the new-comer had an opportunity to look at him narrowly. After all, this one was like many another American! Yet there was something in the young man’s appearance that brought the sweat to the brow of the soldier; he pushed back his hat, and breathed hard. As he did so, Ashley braced the cross against his knee. The action brought the letters into clear and direct view. The eyes of the Mexican rested upon them. He fell back a step or two in superstitious awe, involuntarily exclaiming:
“Cristo! was he buried here? And who are you?”