CHAPTER I.

THE PIECES AND THE BOARD.

We stand on Mexican soil. We are on the seaward skirt of its
westernmost State of Sonora, in the wild lands almost washed by the
Californian Gulf, which will be the formidable last ditch of the
unconquerable red men flying before the Star of the Empire.

Before us, the immensity of land; behind us, that of the Pacific Ocean.

O immeasurable stretches of verdure which form the ever-unknown
territory, the poetically entitled Far West, grand and attractive,
sweet and terrible, the natural trellis of so rich, beautiful, mighty,
and unkempt flora, that India has none of more vigour of production!

To an aeronaut’s glance, these green and yellow plains would offer only
a vast carpet embroidered with dazzling flowers and foliage, almost as
gay and multicoloured, irregularly blocked out like the pieces of glass
in ancient church windows with the lead, by rivers torrential in the
wet season, rugged hollows of glistening quicksands and neck-deep mud
in summer, all of which blend with an unexampled brilliant azure on the
clear horizon.

It is only gradually, after the view has become inured to the
fascinating landscape, that it can make out the details: hills not to
be scorned for altitude, steep banks of rivers, and a thousand other
unforeseen impediments for the wretch fleeing from hostile animals or
fellow beings, which agreeably spoil the somewhat saddening sameness,
and are hidden completely from the general glance by the rank grass,
rich canes, and gigantic flower stalks.

Oh, for the time–the reader would find the patience–to enumerate
the charming products of this primitive nature, which shoots up and
athwart, hangs, swings, juts out, crosses, interlaces, binds, twines,
catches, encircles, and strays at random to the end of the naturalist’s
investigation, describing majestic parabolas, forming grandiose
arcades, and finally completes the most splendid, aye, and sublime
spectacle that is given to any man on the footstool to admire for
superabundant contrasts, and enthralling harmonies.

The man in the balloon whom we imagine to be hovering over this mighty
picture, even higher up than the eagle of the Sierra Madre itself, who
sails in long circles above the bald-headed vulture about to descend on
a prey, which the king of the air disdains–this lofty viewer, we say,
would spy, on the afternoon when we guide the reader to these wilds
apparently unpeopled, more than one human creature wriggling like worms
in the labyrinth.

At one point some twenty men, white and yet swarthy, unlike in dress
but similarly armed to the teeth, were separately “worming” their
tortuous way, we repeat, through the _chaparral_ proper, or plantations
of the low branching live oak, as well as the gigantic ferns, mesquite,
cactus, nopal, and fruit laden shrubs, the oblong-leaved mahogany, the
bread tree, the fan-leaved abanico, the pirijao languidly swinging its
enormous golden fruit in clusters, the royal palm, devoid of foliage
along the stem, but softly nodding its high, majestically plumed head;
the guava, the banana, the intoxicating chirimoya, the cork oak, the
Peruvian tree, the war palm letting its resinous gum slowly ooze forth
to capture the silly moths, and even young snakes and lizards which
squirmed on the hardening gum like a platter of Palissy ware abruptly
galvanised into life.

These adventurers insinuated themselves through this tangle unseen and,
perhaps, unsuspected by one another, all tending to the same point,
probably the same rendezvous. A marked devil-may-care spirit, which
tempered the caution of men brought up in the desert, betokened that
they were master of the woods hereabouts, or, at least, only recognised
the Indian rovers as their contesting fellow tenants.

Elsewhere, a blundering stranger, of a fairness which startled the
pronghorn antelopes as much as a superstitious man would be at seeing a
sheeted form at midnight, tramped desperately as one who felt lost, but
nervously feared to delay whilst there was daylight, over the immense
spreads of dahlias, flaunting flowers each full of as much honey as
Hercules would care to drain at a draught, whiter than Chimborazo’s
snow, or ruddier than the tiger lily’s blood splashes; through thick
creepers which withered with the pressing circulation of boiling sap
like vegetable serpents around the trees, from which gorged reptiles,
not unlike these growing cords themselves, dangled, and now and then
half curled up, startling with his inexpert foot (in a boot cut and
torn by the bramble and splinters of the ironwood and lignum vitae
shattered in the _tornado_–a “twister,” indeed)–animals of all sizes
and species, which leaped, flew, floundered, and crept aloof in the
chaos not unpierceable to them: forms on two, four, countless feet,
with long, broad, ample, or tiny wings, singing, calling, yelling,
howling up and down a scale of incredible extent, now softly seducing
the astray to follow, now taunting him and screaming for him to
forbear. If he were not maddened, he must have had a heart of steel.

Elsewhere still, a man was riding on a horse whose harness and
trappings smelt so strongly of the stable, that is, of human slavery,
that it alarmed the stupid, mournful-eyed bisons, the alligator as he
basked in the caking mire, the hideous iguana slothfully ascending
a wind cast trunk, that maneless lion the cougar, the panthers and
jaguars too lazy or too glutted with the night’s raid to follow the
prey, the honey bear warily sniffing the flower which harboured a bee,
the sullen grizzly who looked out of a hilly den amazed at so impudent
an invader. Upon this horse, whose Spanish descent and state of born
thraldom was resented by the angry neigh of his never-lassoed brethren,
proudly careering in unnumbered _manadas_ upon endless courses, this
man was resolutely progressing, ruthlessly severing vines and floral
clumps with a splendid old broadsword, cool as only a Mexican can
remain in a felt sombrero and a voluminous blanket cloak; charging and
crushing, unless they quickened their retreat, the venomous cotejo, the
green lizard, the basilisk and tiny, yet awful, coral snakes, and never
swerving, though the tongue could almost attain what was unmuffled
of his face, the monstrous anaconda and its long, spotted kinsfolk.
This mounted Mexican took a line, not so straight as the footmen
were pursuing, which would bring him to the spot whither they were
converging.

Imagining that the one of the wayfarers who evinced an ignorance of
prairie life which made his existence each moment a greater miracle,
and that the horseman who, on the contrary, rode on as sturdily as a
postboy in a well-worn road, formed two sides of a triangle of which
the evident destination of the rider and the other Mexicans was the
final end, in about the centre of this fancied space, other human
objects of interest were visible to our aerial observer.

Toilsomely marching, one or the other of two men supporting alternately
the young girl who, singularly enough, was their companion in this
wilderness, the new trio formed a group which fluttered the almost
never-so-startled feathered inhabitants of that grove; curassows,
tanagers, noisy loros, hummingbirds as small as flies, hunting flies
as large as themselves, toucans that seemed overburdened with their
ultraliberal beaks, wood pigeons, fiery flamingoes, in striking
contrast with the black swans that clattered in the cane brake.

Behind them, in calm, contented chase, easy and active as the pretty
gray squirrels, which alone took the alarm and sprang away when he
noiselessly appeared, a shining copper-skinned Indian, with robust
limbs and graceful gait, an eye to charm and to command, moved like
a king who scorned to set his guards to punish the intruder, on his
domains, but stalked savagely onward to chastise them himself. The
plentiful scalp locks that fringed his leggings showed that he had left
many a skeleton of the paleface to bleach in the torrid sun, and that
the sex, the youth and the beauty of the gentle companion of the two
whites on whose track he so placidly proceeded, would not spare her a
single pang, far less obtain her immunity. On his Apollo-like bosom
was tattooed, in sepia and vermilion, a rattlesnake, the emblem not
merely of a tribe, but the sect of a tribe, the ring within the circle;
he belonged to the select band of the Southern Apaches, the Poison
Hatchets, initiated in the compounding of deadly salves and potent
potions, to cure the victim of which the united faculties of Europe
would be baffled. No doubt those arrows, of which the feathers bristled
in a full quiver, and his other weapons, were anointed with that venom
which makes such Indians shunned by all the prairie rovers.

Such was the panorama, sublime, enthralling and fearsome, and the
puppets which are presented to our imaginary gazer.

Leaving him to dissolve into the air whence we evolved him, we descend
to terra firma near the last party to which we directed attention.

The sun was at its zenith, which fact rendered the animation of so many
persons the more remarkable, since few are afoot in the heat of the day
in those regions.

Suddenly, with a slight hiss as of a living snake, an arrow sped
unerringly through a tuft of liquid embers, and laid low, after
one brief spasm of death, a huge dog which seemed a mongrel of
Newfoundlander and a wild wolf.

Shortly afterwards the branches which masked the poor animal’s
stiffening body (on which the greedy flies began already to settle,
and towards which the tumblebugs were scrambling in their amazing
instinct), were parted by a trembling hand, and a white man
of Spanish-American extraction, showed his face streaming with
perspiration and impressed with terror and despair, to which, at the
discovery, was immediately added a profound sorrow.

“Snakebit! That is what detained Fracasador (the Breaker into Bits).
Come, arouse thee, good dog!” he said in Spanish, but instantly
perceiving the tip of the arrow shaft buried almost wholly in the broad
chest, he uttered a sigh of deep consternation, and added–

“Again the dart of death! We are still pursued by that remorseless
fiend.”

Fracasador was certainly dead.

“After our horses, the dog! After the dog, ourselves! Brave Benito!
Poor Dolores, my poor child!”

He started, as the bushes rustled, but it was not an enemy who
appeared. It was the young woman whom he had named, and a youth in his
two-and-twentieth year at the farthest.

Benito was tall, well and stoutly built; his form even stylish, his
features fine and regular; his complexion seemed rather pale for a
native, from his silky hair, which came down disorderly on his square
shoulders, being of a jet black. Intelligence and unconquerable daring
shone in his large black eyes. On his visage sat a seldom seen blending
of courage, fidelity and frankness. In short, one of those men who win
at first sight, and can be trusted to the last.

Though his costume, reduced by the dilapidation of the thorns,
consisted of linen trousers caught in at the waist by a red China
crape _faja_ or sash, and a coarse “hickory” shirt, he resembled a
disguised prince, so much ease and distinction abounded in his bearing.
But, for that matter, throughout Spanish-America, it is impossible to
distinguish a noble from a common man, for they all express themselves
with the same elegance, employ language quite as nicely chosen, and
have equally courteous manners.

The girl whom he supported, almost carried in fact, was sleeping
without being fully unconscious, as happens to soldiers on a forced
march. Dolores was not over sixteen. Her beauty was exceptional, and
her modesty made her low melodious voice falter when she spoke. She was
graceful and dainty as an Andalusian. The profile so strongly resembled
that of the man who was leaning over the slain dog that it did not
require the remembrance that he had spoken of her as his child, for one
to believe that he had father and daughter under his ken.

“Don’t wake her!” said the elder man, with a quick wave of the hand
to quell the other’s surprise. “Let her not see the poor faithful
hound, Benito. And keep yourself, as I do, before her as a shield. The
cowardly foe to whom we owe the loss of our horses, our arms, and now
our loyal comrade is lurking in the thicket, may even–Oh, Holy Mother,
that should protect us from the heathen!–be this instant taking aim at
our poor, dear Dolores, with another missile from his accursed quiver.”

“The villain!” cried Benito, darting a furious glance around. “Luckily,
she sleeps, Don José.”

Indeed the elder Mexican could take the girl without awakening her out
of the other’s arms, and, after a long kiss on her pure forehead, bear
her away from the dog’s proximity into a covert where he laid her upon
the grass with precaution.

“Thank heaven for this sleep,” said he, “it will make her temporarily
oblivious of her hunger.”

Benito had taken the other’s zarapé which he spread over the girl. That
blanket was their only appendage; beside the scanty covering which the
three wore, weapons, water bottle and food container, they had none.
A critical position this for the small party, weaponless and foodless
in the waste! A disarmed man is reckoned as dead in such a wild!
Struggling is impossible against the incalculable foes that either
crush a solitary adventurer by their mass, or deputize, so to say, some
such executioner as he whom we saw to have slain the dog, and we hear
to have rid the three Mexicans of their horses and equipments. The
story of how this deprivation came about is short and lamentable.