They were miles distant from the scene of battle when the fugitives at last paused; and here for the first time Ramirez knew of the special prisoner that had been made. When his eyes fell upon the youth, a frown which darkened as with a palpable cloud his already rigid and pitiless face, overspread the countenance of Ramirez and made it absolutely terrible. Even to fallen angels the crime of ingratitude may seem the one damnable offence. In Ruiz, remembering the love and favor he had shown him, Ramirez held it so to be. This insignificant boy had compassed his ruin; his life seemed too poor a forfeit to condone the offence. The baffled, desperate, outraged chieftain cursed the fate which had cast the treacherous favorite into his power. But the terrible blackness of his face still deepened, as he gazed.
A lasso had been drawn tightly around the waist of Ruiz. His face was cut and bleeding; the gold lace and epaulettes had been torn from his coat; his uncovered hair was filled with dust, and his face reeking with sweat. He raised his bloodshot eyes appealingly. He knew the man before him,—the man, worthless and unscrupulous though he was, who had been kind to him, whom he had betrayed, and whose death he had attempted to compass. Ruiz did not attempt to speak, but fell on his knees and raised his bound hands. Ramirez gazed at him a moment in silence, then without the quiver of a muscle in his impassive face uttered the sentence, “Let him be shot at once!”
Shot at once,—from that terrible mandate there was no appeal. There was not one there to utter a word in the traitor’s behalf, but only a moan from the dust to which he had sunk. Reyes was not there; probably the result would have been the same had he been. The soldiers raised the young officer and stood him against a tree.
At the last moment that strange indifference to death, which among his countrymen so often counterfeits courage, caused Ruiz to straighten his figure and raise his head; and in the insolence of despair he said to Ramirez, with a glance of malignant contempt, “Had you fallen into my hands I would have shot you with my own pistol an hour ago.”
Perhaps the still proud youth hoped by this speech to escape the ignominy of execution by a file of common soldiers. If so he was mistaken. Ramirez gave the signal; the balls whizzed through the air and found their way to their destined aim. Ruiz fell without a groan. Ramirez himself, though still with an impassive face, to the astonishment of all stooped and stretched the limbs and crossed the hands of the young man upon his breast. There was a spot of blood upon the face, and the chief wiped it away as tenderly as a mother might lave the face of her dead infant; and yet but a few moments before he had commanded this youth to a violent death, and according to the creed he held, his soul to purgatory without benefit of clergy.
Forgetting to give the expected order for the execution of the other prisoners, Ramirez turned away. In another moment he had placed himself at the head of the party and continued the retreat. “At the next halt it can be done as well,” remarked the lieutenant, philosophically. “There are plenty of horses; bind the prisoners well and bring them along.”
And thus for that day at least Pepé Ortiz among others knew he had escaped a fate of which the very idea—with the remembrance of Ruiz to intensify its horror—made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth and his knees quiver with terror. Yet the day came when he, like the traitor whose end he had witnessed, straightened himself against a tree, and with apparent coolness awaited the mandate of Ramirez that was to consign him to eternity; naught but a miracle it seemed could save him. He only begged a cigarette of a soldier, remarking that they might be scarce where he was going,—secretly hoping thus to hide the quiver of the lips which belied the bravado of his words.
Shortly after this time, Chata to her surprise received by the hand of an Indian fruitseller a brief note from Ramirez. At the first reading its contents seemed hard and indifferent. He spoke with an almost savage irony of those who were driving him back like a wolf to his mountain lairs. “I know of fastnesses, if I care to seek them, where no foot but mine has ever trod, and where this accursed American who is hunting me down like fate could never hope to follow me,” he wrote. “But it shall never be said that Ramirez fled from man or spirit, were it Satan himself. After all, a man may not escape from him who is destined to bring death to him. Ruiz was marked to die by me. I loved him, yet his fate is accomplished.”
Chata shuddered. It seemed incredible that save by accident such a thing could happen, so sacred is esteemed by Mexicans the tie between sponsor and godchild; and the tone of the letter impressed her as that of a desperate man who was ready for unheard-of deeds. Had Ramirez in truth deliberately destroyed the man whom for years he had associated in his every hope and plan, to whom he had promised the hand of his child? Deep indeed must have been the villany that had merited such an end. The sigh of relief which Chata involuntarily breathed, that she was free from the possible accomplishment of the destiny that had been marked out for her, was perhaps as sympathetic as any caused by the death of Fernando Ruiz.
A reperusal of the letter gave to Chata’s mind an impression of the longing, the stinging regret, the remorse which the words had been designed to conceal rather than display. The pride, the fierceness, the unconquerable will of the writer pervaded them; yet the wail of a lost spirit crying for the one good that it had known, and now believed forfeited forever, seemed to echo through her soul. “He loves me,” she thought remorsefully. “He believes himself doomed to die, and that he will see me no more. Oh! if it were possible I would go to him. Oh, if I dared tell Doña Isabel!—but no, she would keep me from him; she would mock my pain with the cry that this was but the just recompense of the evil he had brought upon her long ago. She believes her brother dead; why torture her by telling her my miserable history?”