A Vendetta of the Hills

“He has princely tastes and princely wealth as well – this you will have seen for yourself today. He travels a great deal abroad, sometimes for a whole year at a time, and then returns quietly to his hermitage. He has taken a great fancy to you, Mr. Willoughby. You are lucky in gaining the friendship of such a man.”

“I think I’ll like him, too – when I know him better,” replied Willoughby, with cautious reserve.

CHAPTER XI – A Rejected Suitor

IN Dick Willoughby’s presence Marshall Thurston contented himself with sullen looks. But beyond his sight and hearing he spoke truculently of what he was going to do some day to get level with “the hired hand who had had the infernal insolence to call him down in public.” So all the little world on the rancho knew, or at least believed, that a bitter feud was in progress.

Two or three of the cowboys fostered young Marshall’s feelings of animosity, partly out of sheer devilment, partly because they deemed it good policy to keep in the good graces of the heir to the rancho. Moreover, so long as old Ben Thurston knew nothing about it, they were always willing to break a bottle with the dissipated spendthrift, not only because good liquor was not to be despised at any time, but also for the sake of the amusement afforded by Marshall, in his cups, with his stories of fast life in New York and his apparently inexhaustible fund of highly spiced anecdotes. Even his braggart threats against Willoughby had an element of fun.

“Why don’t you cut him out with the girl?” one of his boon companions had suggested on an occasion of this kind.

“By gad, I will,” Marshall had responded with vehemence. “You just watch me.”

Thenceforward this thought was uppermost in his alcohol-sodden brain.

Marshall Thurston had met Mrs. Darlington and her daughter on several occasions, but, although he had been formally introduced, he had never been invited to call at La Siesta. Nor up to the present had he felt any inducement to take the initiative. Like clings to like, and these people were not of his kind – in the presence of pure and refined womanhood the human toad becomes uncomfortably conscious of his own loathsomeness.

But now there was a valid reason to egg him on. He would show Dick Willoughby who was who on the San Antonio Rancho. If the heir to all those broad acres chose to pay court to Merle Farnsworth, the girl would only be too glad to jump at him and his millions. He would tell her, too, that Willoughby was going to be fired and that the fellow was not worth a moment’s consideration.

Such was his mood one afternoon when, his motor car being in the repair shop, he had not made his usual trip to Bakersfield. “Yes, he would ride over that very day to La Siesta;” and he proceeded to fortify the resolve by opening a bottle of champagne in the solitary seclusion of his den. After gulping down the wine he felt brave enough to face the devil himself. Yet, when mounted on his horse, he still evinced sufficient discretion to make a wide detour lest Willoughby should catch sight of him and divine his intentions.

As he rode along young Thurston nursed his wrath to keep it warm. At the same time the desire to possess the girl for her own sake began to inflame his imagination. Unscrupulous passion had been bred in the very bone of this worthless degenerate. Just as his father, Ben Thurston, had thirty years before trampled on the virtue of the young Spanish beauty, Senorita Rosetta, the sister of Don Manuel, so now was the son hatching in his brain a foul plot of spoliation.

“I’ll get even with Willoughby, by God, in the very way that will hurt his pride the most. Women! – pshaw, they’re all alike. And she’s a peacherino all right – those flashing dark eyes – she sure looks good to me.” This was now the tenor of his musing as his pony cantered up the slope to La Siesta.

He advanced on foot to the portico with a swagger and a smile, and there, as luck would have it, he found Merle seated in a rocker, reading, and alone. She rose with quiet courtesy and returned his greeting.

“I am sorry,” she said, “mother is not at home. She and my sister Grace have driven over to the dairy. We have a model dairy, you know, on La Siesta,” she went on, anxious to make conversation that would not prove embarrassing. For already she divined some particular object in the young man’s visit, knowing as she did that he and Willoughby had recently exchanged angry words.

“Won’t you show me your famous rose gardens?” asked Thurston, boldly.

“With pleasure,” she replied, assenting with a sweet smile of politeness, although there was sore reluctance in her heart, as she stepped from under the portico.

But, unknown to herself, she did not go unattended, for as Merle and her visitor passed round the house and through the shrubberies there glided after them the figure of a woman, clothed in black, wearing over her head and shoulders a Spanish mantilla. It was Tia Teresa, the ever watchful duenna.

The roses of La Siesta, as Marshall Thurston had said, were indeed famous. Here were all the finest varieties, growing in the perfection to which only care and scientific skill applied under ideal climatic conditions can attain. Merle was glad to point out the different blooms and give them their names – the topic was certainly an innocuous one, and she smiled at the thought as they strolled along. She was vaguely wondering, too, whether Dick Willoughby would approve even this slight measure of courtesy toward the visitor to her home. Although she had as yet not the remotest conception that the quarrel at the round-up had been in any way connected with her name, she knew that the two young men were at daggers drawn, and toward Dick there was the instinctive loyalty in her heart that prompted her to count his enemies as her enemies, his friends as her friends.

The young girl was too unversed in the ways of the world to notice that Marshall Thurston was under the influence of wine. He was too experienced a toper to show any signs of unsteadiness on his feet, but all the same there was undoubted tipsiness in his leering side-glances and occasional slurring of his words. Of this Merle in her maidenly innocence was supremely unconscious, nor did she dream that the very sparkle of her eyes was completing the intoxication of wine fumes.

Once she cast a look up the hill and asked herself whether the wizard of the red-tiled tower had his spy-glass on La Siesta and was even then quietly surveying the scene in the gardens. The thought made her uncomfortable; she felt sure that her kind friend, Mr. Robles, would not look with favor on her condescending to show even the slightest attention to one whose evil ways of living were notorious.

Suddenly she came to a halt, close beside a little clump of oleander trees laden with rich blossoms.

“I am sorry I must leave you now,” she said, quite abruptly.

“Leave me?” stammered Thurston. “What for?”

“I have other things to attend to,” she replied.

“Oh, I say, Miss Farnsworth” – the inebriate as he spoke made a gesture of appeal – “I hope you are not angry with me. If that scalawag of a fellow Willoughby told you I said anything disrespectful of you the other day, he is a demed liar – that’s what he is, a derned liar, and a poor penniless beggar as well, whom my father’s going to fire off the ranch.”

Merle stood speechless. She stepped back when Thurston advanced with outstretched hands.

“The truth of the whole matter is,” he rambled on, with growing incoherence, “I am madly in love with you myself. That’s what I am, and I’m going to have you, too.” And he grabbed her fiercely and attempted to draw her to him.

Merle screamed both in fear and in repulsion as she tried to push him away.

Just then, from among the oleanders, rushed Tia Teresa. The old duenna came like a cyclone. Her eyes blazed with anger. Grasping the young libertine by the collar of his coat, she pulled him madly from the now half-fainting girl. Then, whirling him around, she rushed him, with the strength and ferocity of a tigress defending her whelps, down the gravelled path and flung him bodily over the low retaining wall along the embankment that separated the rose gardens from the public road. She spat upon his prostrate figure below and rained down on him a torrent of imprecations in the Spanish tongue.

It was all over in one brief minute. When young Thurston picked himself up, it was to see the aged fury half-leading, half-carrying Merle away in the direction of the house.

“The hell cat,” he murmured.

Then he brushed the dirt from his coat and straightened out his tumbled appearance as best he could. His horse was tied to the gate post a hundred yards along the road. He slunk toward it, climbed into the saddle, and rode slowly away in the falling twilight. He had been thoroughly sobered by the incident, yet continued somewhat dazed, for his horse was headed toward the woods and hills and not in the direction of home.

CHAPTER XII – The Sped Bullet

MEANWHILE events had been happening in the conning tower high up among the hills. The Mexican boy on duty had observed the lone rider approaching the gateway at La Siesta, and for a brief few moments had put the figure under observation by the telescope. He had then sprung alertly erect and pressed a button on the wall. Mr. Robles had quickly responded to the summons, and it was he who had had his eye to the lens during the scene in the rose garden which had terminated in the ignominious expulsion of young Thurston at the hands of the infuriated duenna.

When the recluse at last withdrew his gaze, his hands were clenched and he stood absolutely rigid in the tenseness of his indignation. He had seen Merle’s insultor ride toward the hills and Merle herself taken indoors under Tia Teresa’s protecting care. For almost a minute the storm of rage held him, then he relaxed and his look changed to one of terrible determination. He seized a rifle that was hanging on one of the walls and swiftly departed.

At the arched gateway he spoke a few words to the two retainers on guard, and when he passed through the postern one of them, also equipped with a rifle, followed. Taking a cross-cut from the high road, together they descended the wooded hillside.

In a little canyon just below the forest Dick Willoughby was rounding up a bunch of vagrant steers. He was alone, riding at a walking pace, driving a dozen or more beasts in front of him, and keeping an eye among the brushwood searching for more.

On the roadway through the woods Marshall Thurston ambled along. He was a poor and awkward rider at all times, the discreetly-veiled jest of the nimble cowboys, to whom reins, saddle, and spurs were all as second nature. Now, when he imagined himself free from observation, he did not take pains to display even a semblance of horsemanship and, with bridle dropped, steadied himself by a grip on the saddle horn.

In her bedroom Merle had soon recovered from her distress of mind. Dashing the tears from her eyes, she had enjoined Tia Teresa to say nothing to anyone about the unpleasant incident. Mrs. Darlington would be angered and would certainly tell Mr. Robles, while if the story ever reached Dick’s ears there could be no saying what further trouble might not ensue – a horse-whipping at least, with jeopardy to Dick’s position at the rancho and embitterment of an already dangerous quarrel. So Tia Teresa, to complete the comforting process, had assented to secrecy.

On the pathway down through the forest the Mexican, now in advance, uttered a low “hist,” halted, and held out a warning hand toward his master. The gaze of both was now fixed in the same direction. Below them could be seen the figure of the horseman coming around a bend in the roadway. The Mexican raised his rifle to the shoulder, but the hand of Robles detained him. The time was not yet – the distance was too great in view of the obstructing timber.

Robles turned away and rested an arm against a tree trunk. His eyes were downcast; for the moment his mind was far away. He saw once again the little cemetery on the hill, with the marble cross inscribed “Hermana,” and the other gravestone at the head of the twin mounds that marked the resting place of his parents whose hearts had been broken by Rosetta’s tragic end. The fingers of the man who had long years ago sworn the vendetta worked nervously, closing and unclosing themselves.

The rider was nearer now, in a higher loop of the road where the trees were more scattered than below. Merle, drowsy from the reaction of her emotions, had dropped off asleep on her sofa. Tia Teresa had returned to the portico, to make sure that the interloper had taken himself off for good and would not return. In the little canyon Dick Willoughby was quietly riding behind his accumulating drove of cattle.

Suddenly a shot from among the woods rang through the air. Tia Teresa heard it, and after the start of first surprise, into her eyes came the light of swift comprehension and her whole face was illumed by fierce vindictive joy. “At last, at last,” she murmured, “vengeance begins.” And in the fervor of her triumph she threw up her extended arms, as if to give benediction to a righteous deed.

Dick also heard the sharp detonation which his experienced ear knew at once to be from a rifle, not from the shot-gun that some sportsman after quail or rabbits might have been using. He betrayed no great surprise – just the unspoken word “curious” hovered on his lips as, halting his horse, he turned in his saddle to glance upward in the direction whence the sound had come. Then after a moment he wheeled the pony round, and, abandoning his drove for the present, ascended at a leisurely pace the narrow pathway which he knew communicated with the winding highroad above.

When the bullet had reached its fated billet, Marshall Thurston’s fingers were still gripping the saddle horn. And right there the missile of death struck, glancing upward from the metal crown and piercing the victim right through the heart. Not a cry – just an outflung arm, a swaying figure slipping down onto the roadway, and a terrified riderless horse pivoting quickly round on its haunches, then galloping madly for home.

Dick, glancing upward through the timber, caught a glimpse of the fleeing steed, and he touched his own pony with the spur so that it, too, darted forward.

Farther along the road Tia Teresa heard the clatter of the hoofs and saw the animal in its swift stride disappear in the direction of the rancho. She knew now for certain that her surmise was correct, and the first flush of triumph on her fact settled down into an expression of grim satisfaction. “It served him right in any case.” she muttered. “It was just what the young villain deserved.” Then she re-entered the house and passed upstairs. Her young mistress was placidly asleep, smiling in her dreams. The duenna nodded her head in a satisfied sort of way; Merle would learn the news at the proper time, and would not meanwhile be agitated by wild conjectures. So she tiptoed from the room, and was soon busied with domestic duties as if nothing had happened.

Dick, emerging on foot from the last steep ascent of the canyon, promptly swung himself again into the saddle and started at a loping canter up the winding roadway through the woods. After rounding the first comer he spied the huddled figure on the ground. Before he turned the body over he knew that the man was dead. But when the dead face looked up at his, it was with a terrible shock of surprise that he recognized Marshall Thurston.

Dick stood for a few moments, gazing around in utter bewilderment. One hand of the dead man was shattered and bloody, while a big splurge of red on the shirt showed where the bullet had completed its work. Murder – palpable murder! But who could have done this deed? Who had any valid motive to rid the world of this stray piece of humanity – and in such coldblooded manner, not in the heat of some angry quarrel, but by a deliberate act of assassination in a place so lonely as these pine-clad hills? Dick sat him down by the roadside and pondered these questions.