The Mystery of The Barranca

“Why, that’s our friend back at the station.” Billy commented on Seyd’s translation. “I’m sure that was the name the agent gave him.”

“Si, señor,” the mule-driver confirmed the impression. “And these are but the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of this country was overrun with bandidos who took advantage of the absence of the principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They were levying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastien returned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, he began by hanging the bandits’ messenger in the gates of his hacienda, an act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer, into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there, everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hanged them by twos and threes and left them to swing in the wind, and it speaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father, mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail in this country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came to pass that you, señors, might now leave your purses on the open highway where a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No man would dare touch – ”

“ – Except Don Sebastien,” Seyd put in, laughing.

But the man returned only a stare. “What use would he have of purses, señor, that has so many of his own?”

“Perhaps to give to the Church.” But he stopped laughing, surprised by the sudden cloud that spread on the man’s face.

“Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien never crosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk he gives to the priest.”

“Si! si!” In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almost shook off his head. “It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule load of charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires the priest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery above the courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise – was there ever such irreverence! – that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who stands before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the steward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal. ‘I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel, myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet. Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come and go at will through the hacienda – all but one place. If after this hour I find that your foot has touched my threshold I’ll hang you in its gates.’ Thus he spoke, señor, and he would have done it – to a priest quicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which he hates the most.”

“Hum!” Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at the grisly witnesses to the tale’s truth, he commented: “I now begin to understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pump guns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loader I’m darned if I’d have tackled your hunch.”

In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the small farmers began to give place to the jacals of the country, flimsy huts with sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed out from the eternal succession of corn and maguey fields into wastes of volcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for no apparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which were sparsely timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley they came upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more than half buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they would have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into an intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted faces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat, long and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out tongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a painful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed the quintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Through anger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion to its death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed the corner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, were such as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scale their mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absolute force. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd’s imagination with pictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy was moved to remark:

“Those old chaps couldn’t have been very nice neighbors.”

“No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall have presently.” Later the thought was to recur under conditions that would lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying, as he glanced at his watch: “We have been doing pretty well. At this rate we’ll make the Barranca quite early.”

He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually content with the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into the burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering on one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by the time they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.

“We’ll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp at the top.”

Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes from both muleteers. Carlos made answer. “No, señor, at this time of the year one would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca with the finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for every time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho – and Paz and Luz, devils as they are, could travel it blindfold.” And whether, as Billy suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the fleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the mules with oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. They kept after them so hard that the train trotted out of a forest of upland piñon upon the rim of a great valley a full half hour before sundown.

Though prepared by Seyd’s descriptions for something unusually fine, Billy’s blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule, staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet the land broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hills uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca was so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his eye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue haze through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed like microscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountains tossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterile and desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised them out of the sea.

“Drunk! drunk!” Billy breathed, at last. “Nature gone on a jag. Drunken mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge. Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of a hole?”

“About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand and more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with the old Pacific. Can’t be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea.”

“The dear old pond. Isn’t that pine on the other side?”

“Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred or so miles farther up. That’s a great old tree, and quite particular about the company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along the slope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane – two thousand acres of it on the General’s hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over there, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from the top – that is us, señor, the mina Santa Gertrudis. And that reminds me – we’ll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight. Vaminos, Carlos.”

But the muleteer shook his head. “After you, señor, for if these devils should take to running again, not in six months should we fish your baggage out of the cañons.”

Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shaped wall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, for at the first turn a stone from his mule’s foot dropped five hundred feet plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs. Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail dropped down to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billy objected:

“Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one.”

“Less than that – if your mule should happen to slip and take it sideways. Let me see – allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteen seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if you elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail you cannot see, it will take the full three hours.”

Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills were suddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side lifted like yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out, and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensified rather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precarious balance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed down and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the cañon, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a real trial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd – to wit, the senseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on his heels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way in between him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when an easier grade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.

Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with a loose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thus it was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trot which had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, he almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it. With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instincts almost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop. Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heard the burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot, his voice came back.

“Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!”

CHAPTER IV

Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy’s hair stood on end, and when, in the face of Seyd’s shouts in Spanish to stop, the burros still came on he felt his cap move.

“Billy!” Seyd’s command rang out sharply. “Dismount and lie down. It’s our only chance.”

In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust, uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy’s red head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and vanished.

In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd’s mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell, a sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy’s hysterical profanity formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the events of the day. The scraps of muleteers’ talk the night before, the runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers’ refusal to camp on the rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.

“It’s a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us off in the dark.”

“But where are they now?” Billy gazed down into the dark void. “Surely they didn’t all go over.”

“No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it out of the way. Listen!” A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above. “There they go, and it’s up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up and turn. If we don’t give them the run of their lives we’ll deserve all they tried to give us.”

And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down, Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers. Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.

“Now, then! Run them down!” Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined his beast to one side of the trail.

“It is you, señor?”

Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and, though the man’s face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright, graceful figure. “Come to see if the job is done.” He thought it while answering aloud, “As you perceive, señor.”

“Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and I have ridden hard – used up one horse and half killed this poor beast. But no matter so long as I am in time.”

“Hypocrite!” Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. “You would not have been if these fellows had had their way.”

“Caramba, señor! Why?”

If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done. While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action. Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders. Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.

It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into Billy’s comment. “It looks, after all, as though they had done it themselves.”

Seyd shrugged. “Perhaps; in any case we have no proof.”

“Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!” Sebastien’s cold voice broke in. “Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules.” Seyd’s suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. “You will have to stay here till morning, señors, for it is many miles along the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that went into the cañon, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a proverb, ‘A warm fire helps the empty belly,’ and to-morrow you will be able to recover your goods.”

Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him to ask a sudden question.

“Did I not see you at the hotel last night?”

But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. “Perhaps. I was there.”

He did look up at Billy’s vigorous comment on his answer as translated by Seyd: “Then why didn’t he show himself this morning? Goodness knows we left late enough.”

He even asked, “What does he say?” And the sense having been softened in translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he quietly replied, “I do not doubt that the señor’s departure was fraught with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep.”