The Mystery of The Barranca

For nearly a week now it had rained heavily night and day, and here and there on the bottoms small inundations gave early warning of coming floods. Though the river still ran in its banks opposite San Nicolas, the dugout in which they crossed was swept with the swimming horses half a mile downstream before they made a landing, and it was easily to be seen that another week’s rain would cut off travel on that side of the stream.

Riding in to the great square, Seyd’s pulses beat a lively accompaniment to the thought: “It is now the end of the second week. She is sure to be home.” Yet in the moment of its riotous birth the hope gave place to black misgivings at the sight of the shut house.

His spirits touched zero when the sliding hatch left Paulo’s wrinkled visage framed again in the blank oaken face of the door. “Don Luis is still in Mexico, señor.” He anticipated Seyd’s question.

“But he returned – was seen the day before yesterday at the station.”

“At the station, señor? How could that be?” His brown beads of eyes blinked in uneasy surprise; then in an instant the wrinkled mask fell into an expression of simple cunning. “Or, if so, then it must be that he has gone to join the señora and the niña, who are still at El Quiss.”

She was not there! For the third time he found himself confronted by silence, mysterious and complete as that which had attended her previous disappearances. But, though oppressed by a weight of care, he tried to hide his bitter disappointment from the administrador’s inquisition. Once again he spent a black hour while the beasts were feeding. His broodings, riding homeward, shed no light on the enigma. A night of dark thought left him baffled, furious, in good fettle for the news that Caliban gleaned from a passing charcoal-burner.

“Don Luis must have been there, señor, for Benito saw him ride forth this morning. He has gone north to see for himself the gringo dam.”

“Oh, he has, has he!” Seyd ground the words out between his teeth. “The old fox! But now I’ll chase him into his earth.”

In this, however, he had forgotten to allow for the rains which, driving down the Barranca in great wet sheets, caused Don Luis to put in at El Quiss, there to wait in the leisurely fashion of the country until the weather should break and Sebastien have time to accompany him. Arriving at the power plant after two days’ wallowing on jungle trails, Seyd found himself foiled once more in their little game of hide and seek.

The trip, however, was not altogether wasted, for the pert young Chicagoan in charge gave him uproarious welcome. “So you’re the fellow that has been bucking the whole state of Guerrero! I’m awfully glad to know you, Mr. Seyd, though I’m puzzled yet as to how you managed to hold out. It took a whole regiment of Diaz’s rurales to establish us here, and if they were withdrawn even now we wouldn’t last long.”

Also it was worth the labor to see the dam. A huge earthen structure, nearly a hundred feet high, it spanned the Barranca just where the valley nipped in from a wide angle to a passage a quarter mile wide. Behind it a muddy lake stretched as far as the eye could reach, and while standing in the center Seyd recalled and quoted Peters’s prediction.

“‘Boulders big as churches were piled up in the bed of the stream like pebbles, and if that dam was built of solid concrete instead of clay they’d go through it like it was dough.’”

The Chicagoan, however, laughed at the quotation. “If the devil himself was bowling them I’d defy him to knock off a single chip. She’s solid, and the sluiceways allow ample flood escape. Nothing but an earthquake could touch it – a jim dandy, at that.”

Nevertheless, while that enormous volume of water hung suspended, as it were, over the valley, Seyd felt nervous. Traveling homeward the next day, he measured with a careful eye the valley floor, and, using last year’s high-water mark as a base for his calculations, concluded that only San Nicolas, the smelter, and one or two haciendas that stood on higher ground would escape destruction if the dam should happen to burst. Approaching El Quiss, he noted, in particular, that, standing on level ground, it would surely be inundated.

For some fifteen miles his trail ran through Sebastien’s lands, and, climbing in one place over a knoll, it afforded a view of the hacienda buildings across the rain-swept pastures. As, reining in, Seyd watched the faint pink of the walls flash out and fade in the shifting vapors he was seized with a mad impulse to ride in. But his native good sense quickly reasserted itself, for a moment’s reflection showed that the intrusion could only result in humiliation for Francesca and himself. The knowledge, however, did not render her proximity less maddening. He was sitting there restlessly chafing when Caliban’s voice suddenly rose behind.

“If it were desired to leave a message there is one I know that could place it in her own hands.”

Startled, Seyd swung in the saddle. He had known long ago that kindly usage had transformed the hunchback into a faithful friend, but he was not prepared either for the sympathy that softened his glittering beads of eyes or his uncanny divination.

“Si.” The hunchback nodded. “A cousin of my woman is in Don Sebastien’s household service. ’Twould be easy to pass a paper by the little maid you picked out of the river. The señorita keeps her always close to her own body.”

Before he finished Seyd had cut a pencil and was writing on the back of an envelope under cover of his raincoat. At first he gave free vent to his feelings, but, remembering the danger of interception, he tore it up and wrote instead a humorous protest against her continued absence. Then, after instructing Caliban to take all the time necessary to procure an answer, he journeyed on alone.

It was well, too, that he gave the hunchback free rein, for three days elapsed before he returned to the mine soaked to the marrow by the continuous rains that had raised the floods almost to last year’s mark. “With Don Sebastien one goes slowly,” he explained. “If the sharp eye of him had once touched me ’twould have been a short shrift under the nearest tree. For two days I lay close in the jacal of my woman’s cousin before she brought me this.”

It was a considerable package, and Seyd rather wondered at its size while tearing away the dried corn leaves in which Caliban had wrapped it. When the last leaf fell off he stared at first in surprise, then, as his eye fell on the ink scores, in utter consternation at the Albuquerque Times. Minutes passed before he could command words to send the hunchback away, then, sitting down by the table, he leaned his head on his hand and remained for some time plunged in black reflection.

From a long distance in time and space his first insincerity had come home to roost. But, while he saw himself as the designer of his own undoing, he was by no means resigned. Presently hard, mutinous lights broke in his gloomy eyes. The stubborn fighter awoke. Throwing the traitorous sheet across the room, he picked up a pen and began to write.

Wasting no time in wonder at the fortuitous chance that had placed the paper in Francesca’s hands, he wrote steadily on the story of his love from the first doubtful beginnings to its actual consummation. Very clearly he explained his first natural dislike to intrude his personal affairs upon people for whom he had no reason to suppose they would have the slightest interest, the later honorable intention that had always been frustrated by unfavorable circumstances. And he finished with a statement that is never unwelcome in a woman’s ear:

“No matter what comes I shall always love you.”

Steady rain all that day and night had given the floods another lift and sent the river roaming wide through the jungle. Once again the valley opposite the mine was converted into a great lake dotted with wooded islands between which swift currents hurtled floating debris. Profiting by last year’s lesson, Seyd had had two roomy dugouts fitted with oars and rowlocks, and early the next morning he rowed Caliban across himself. Returning, he was to send a smoke signal to call the boat, and when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Seyd spied the thin blue spiral through a break in the drifting rain he almost cracked his back rowing across the flood.

But his glowing hope died at the shake of the hunchback’s head. “The señorita is gone with her mother and Don Luis to San Nicolas, señor. But she is to return to El Quiss in a few days. The cousin of my woman had it from Roberta, the little maid. She is still there, and will deliver the letter when the señorita returns.”

The news was not altogether bad, for Francesca, at least, was now at San Nicolas. Within the hour Seyd crossed the river to the inn – where a horse was to be had for hire – and his purpose gained strength from a wire that he found waiting there from Billy.

“San Francisco burned to the ground. Not a cent to be raised in California. Am going east.”

In view of the aforesaid game of hide and seek he had been playing with Don Luis the situation looked very dark. But, serious as it was, when, halfway to San Nicolas, he met Paulo riding at the head of a mule train loaded with fagots it was wiped altogether out of his mind.

“We go to build beacons along the rim of the Barranca to give warning against the bursting of the gringo dam,” he answered Seyd. “Si, Don Luis and the señora are at the casa. The señorita?” His creases drew into a malevolent grin. “The señora, you mean. She was married two hours ago to Don Sebastien.”

CHAPTER XX

“What!” In the language of the good old romances, Seyd roared the word.

In the main, Paulo was not a bad old chap. To further the interests of a Garcia he would cheerfully have surrendered his old bones to be boiled in oil, and in his joy at the event he allowed his natural garrulity to dominate his prejudice against the gringo.

“Si, señor, they were married at the hacienda by the priest of Chilpancin. On account of the death of Don Sebastien’s mother Don Luis and the señora only were present, and immediately afterward the young couple went home alone to El Quiss. A sensible practice, say I! When young hot blood mixes it should be left to cool and settle. Over there at El Quiss the fur will be flying before the end of a week, and put me down as a liar if Francesca do not keep him busy. She has run too long single not to kick at double harness. But she’ll settle to it, and like the fine wench she is, there is to be no European travel or such kickshaws as now are common with our rich young folk. No, in the good old Mexican fashion she goes from the church straight to her man’s home, there to stay till the first babe makes us all completely happy.”

Over and above his real joy in the event the old fellow was undoubtedly aware of its effect on Seyd. While speaking, his small red eyes searched his victim’s face for the pain beneath its confusion. But even under the spur of race hatred his imagination could not divine a tithe of the torture he was inflicting. Like all lovers, Seyd had dreamed long moving pictures of himself and Francesca as husband and wife, and now, with the speed of light, the reels spun backward, exhibiting her with another in the thousand and one intimacies of married life. Through all, his stiff Anglo-Saxon reserve persisted, and, finding egress at his heels, the pain that he tried to hide brought the situation to a ludicrous close. Springing from the unconscious pressure of his spurs, his horse, a mettled little beast, collided with Paulo and knocked him flat on his back.

More hurt in his pride than body, the old fellow scrambled up and stood shaking his fist and cursing. But Seyd rode on without attempt to check the animal, whose top speed ran slower than his own hot thought. Indeed, when, from sheer fatigue, it slowed he laid on with quirt and spur, and kept on at a gallop till violent exercise had withdrawn the blood from his swelling brain.

In place of pulsing waves of confused pain came the tortures of clear thought. In turn he was ruled by anger, despair, unbelief. The thought of Francesca as he had seen her on the train, quiet, lovely, sympathetic, inspired the last. It was not possible! Then up would rise the blank ink scores round the divorce notice to provide the motive and plunge him back into deep despair. Lastly came anger, blind and unreasoning, in furious gusts.

Occasionally through his welter of feeling there flashed a glimmer of reason. “She’s married now! She’s married! That ends it – for you!” But instead of despair the thought produced furious reactions. “I don’t care! She’s mine! I’ll have her – I have to take her by force!” It rose again and again, his cry on the trail of the other day.

By instinct rather than conscious thought he had turned his horse into a path which presently curved at a sharp angle into one that led from San Nicolas up to the rim of the Barranca where at this season ran the only passable trail. At the forks he came on the fresh tracks of shod horses that led up the zigzag staircases.

Overlapping each other on the narrow trail, they might have been made by two or a half dozen, and not until he saw two sets clearly imprinted side by side crossing a small plateau did he think of the riders. If proof were required it was presently furnished by the little handkerchief that hung, fluttering in the rain and wind, on a “crucifixion thorn.”

As, reining in, he examined the corner initial a whiff of violets rose in his nostrils. Under the sudden crush of his hand it shed a rain of tears.

CHAPTER XXI

Fifteen miles away along the rim Francesca and Sebastien had just reined in. On a bare knoll close to the trail which led down to El Quiss three peons were building a beacon of dry wood around a core of hay, and while Sebastien talked with them the girl looked out over the valley.

Ever since, in a burst of anger at Seyd’s message, she confirmed her conditional promise she had lived in a fever of feeling which precluded clear thought. In the same way that a sufferer from toothache anticipates with almost revengeful pleasure the wrench of the extraction she had looked forward to marriage as though it were to bring the end of her pain. Not until the words that made her a wife fell like a chill on her fever did she perceive the illusion. Riding along the trail, the consequences had presented themselves, and they grew with every mile until they filled her mind with horror. She had shrunk in fear and revulsion when Sebastien offered the ordinary courtesies of the road. When he buttoned his own big rain capote around her she trembled under his hands. Again, when her beast slipped and he threw his arm round her to lift her out of the saddle, she uttered a nervous cry, and, though he released her at once, she shuddered under her cloak. Yet, with all her pain, when she gazed out over the storm-beaten valley her old passion for nature asserted itself through her agony.

Along the Barranca the south wind herded great fleecy clouds. There they piled themselves up in shadowy hills, there they rolled and tumbled like thistledown in a breeze, and again cascaded down to lower levels to dissolve with muttering thunder in slaty sheets of rain. One minute the vapors filled the Barranca, flowing, a ghostly river, between the towering walls. The next a sudden rent in the veil permitted a fleeting glimpse of the trail falling like a yellow snake with myriad writhings into the treetops thousands of feet below. Enormous in scale, the scene was rendered more impressive by the roll of low thunders and flash of pale lightnings amidst leaden writhing shapes. Watching it, Francesca was forgetful until, through a sudden rift, she caught the distant pink flash of the El Quiss walls. Then she shivered, and she was still trembling when, turning from the peons, Sebastien spoke.

“It is one of a chain of beacons they are building up and down the valley to warn the people if the gringo dam should burst.” Noticing her shiver, he added: “You are cold, querida? Let us ride on.”

His usual stern gravity had given place in the last few hours to a look soft, pleasant, and very human. If she had looked into his eyes she might have read there both sympathy and understanding. But softness in him just then merely added to her fear. Following downhill, too, she watched him closely with dark, frightened eyes. In the past his strong face and lithe figure had aroused in her a certain admiration, but now they inspired revulsion. A lost spirit descending into Hades could not have battled more fiercely than did she descending the interminable staircases, and the struggle left her so pale and exhausted that Sebastien remarked upon it when they rode out at last on the valley floor.

“You are tired? We shall soon be there.”

That started her again upon a conflict which continued all the way across the pastures to the hacienda gates and reached its climax when she entered her room – not the one she had occupied before, but that which had chambered before her the line of wives and mothers which began with the Aztec bride of Flores Rocha, the conquistador. In that long line the room may have harbored a bride fully as unhappy, but none more mutinous than its present occupant.

“The señora is fatigued. She will have the meal served in her room.” Sebastien’s quiet order had dispersed the brown maids who flocked about her like cooing pigeons with greetings and offers of service. Unaware that he would observe it himself, she sprang out of her chair and ran a few steps toward the barred window when a tap sounded upon her door. In her relief when it proved to be only Roberta, she pulled the child in to her bosom.