Overland. John William De Forest
to Mrs. Stanley, he whispered, "My uncle is almost broken down with this parting."
"Excellent creature!" murmured Aunt Maria, surveying the old toad with warm sympathy. "What a pity he has lost one eye! It quite injures the benevolent expression of his face."
Although Garcia was very distantly connected with Clara, she gave him the title of uncle.
"How is this, my uncle?" she said, gaily. "You send your merchandise trains through Bernalillo, and you send me through Santa Anna and Rio Arriba."
Garcia, cowed and confounded, made no reply that was comprehensible.
"It is a newly discovered route," put in Coronado, "lately found to be easier and safer than the old one. Two hundred and fifty years in learning the fact, Mrs. Stanley! Just as we were two hundred and fifty years without discovering the gold of California."
"Ah!" said Clara. Absent since her childhood from New Mexico, she knew little about its geography, and could be easily deceived.
After a while Thurstane entered, out of breath and red with haste. He had stolen ten minutes from his accounts and stores to bring Miss Van Diemen a piece of information which was to him important and distressing.
"I fear that I shall not be able to go with you," he said. "I have received orders to wait for a sergeant and three recruits who have been assigned to my company. The messenger reports that they are on the march from Fort Bent with an emigrant train, and will not be here for a week. It annoys me horribly, Miss Van Diemen. I thought I saw my way clear to be of your party. I assure you I earnestly desired it. This route—I am afraid of it—I wanted to be with you."
"To protect me?" queried Clara, her face lighting up with a grateful smile, so innocent and frank was she. Then she turned grave, again, and added, "I am sorry."
Thankful for these last words, but nevertheless quite miserable, the youngster worshipped her and trembled for her.
This conversation had been carried on in a quiet tone, so that the others of the party had not overheard it, not even the watchful Coronado.
"It is too unfortunate," said Clara, turning to them, "Lieutenant Thurstane cannot go with us."
Garcia and Coronado exchanged a look which said, "Thank—the devil!"
CHAPTER IV.
The next day brought news of an obstacle to the march of the wagon train through Santa Anna and Rio Arriba.
It was reported that the audacious and savage Apache chieftain, Manga Colorada, or Red Sleeve, under pretence of wanting to make a treaty with the Americans, had approached within sixty miles of Santa Fé to the west, and camped there, on the route to the San Juan country, not making treaties at all, but simply making hot beefsteaks out of Mexican cattle and cold carcasses out of Mexican rancheros.
"We shall have to get those fellows off that trail and put them across the Bernalillo route," said Coronado to Garcia.
"The pigs! the dogs! the wicked beasts! the devils!" barked the old man, dancing about the room in a rage. After a while he dropped breathless into a chair and looked eagerly at his nephew for help.
"It will cost at least another thousand," observed the younger man.
"You have had two thousand," shuddered Garcia. "You were to do the whole accursed job with that."
"I did not count on Manga Colorada. Besides, I have given a thousand to our little cousin. I must keep a thousand to meet the chances that may come. There are men to be bribed."
Garcia groaned, hesitated, decided, went to some hoard which he had put aside for great needs, counted out a hundred American eagles, toyed with them, wept over them, and brought them to Coronado.
"Will that do?" he asked. "It must do. There is no more."
"I will try with that," said the nephew. "Now let me have a few good men and your best horses. I want to see them all before I trust myself with them."
Coronado felt himself in a position to dictate, and it was curious to see how quick he put on magisterial airs; he was one of those who enjoy authority, though little and brief.
"Accursed beast!" thought Garcia, who did not dare just now to break out with his "pig, dog," etc. "He wants me to pay everything. The thousand ought to be enough for men and horses and all. Why not poison the girl at once, and save all this money? If he had the spirit of a man! O Madre de Dios! Madre de Dios! What extremities! what extremities!"
But Garcia was like a good many of us; his thoughts were worse than his deeds and words. While he was cogitating thus savagely, he was saying aloud, "My son, my dear Carlos, come and choose for yourself."
Turning into the court of the house, they strolled through a medley of wagons, mules, horses, merchandise, muleteers, teamsters, idlers, white men and Indians. Coronado soon picked out a couple of rancheros whom he knew as capital riders, fair marksmen, faithful and intelligent. Next his eye fell upon a man in Mexican clothing, almost as dark and dirty too as the ordinary Mexican, but whose height, size, insolence of carriage, and ferocity of expression marked him as of another and more pugnacious, more imperial race.
"You are an American," said Coronado, in his civil manner, for he had two manners as opposite as the poles.
"I be," replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish warrior might have stared at an effeminate and diminutive Roman.
"May I ask what your name is?"
"Some folks call me Texas Smith."
Coronado shifted uneasily on his feet, as a man might shift in presence of a tiger, who, as he feared, was insufficiently chained. He was face to face with a fellow who was as much the terror of the table-land, from the borders of Texas to California, as if he had been an Apache chief.
This noted desperado, although not more than twenty-six or seven years old, had the horrible fame of a score of murders. His appearance mated well with his frightful history and reputation. His intensely black eyes, blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity. It was more ferocious than the merely brutal glare of a tiger; it was an intentional malignity, super-beastly and sub-human. They were eyes which no other man ever looked into and afterward forgot. His sunburnt, sallow, haggard, ghastly face, stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final touches to this countenance of a cougar.
"He is my man," whispered Garcia to Coronado. "I have hired him for the great adventure. Sixty piastres a month. Why not take him with you to-day?"
Coronado gave another glance at the gladiator and meditated. Should he trust this beast of a Texan to guard him against those other beasts, the Apaches? Well, he could die but once; this whole affair was detestably risky; he must not lose time in shuddering over the first steps.
"Mr. Smith," he said, "very glad to know that you are with us. Can you start in an hour for the camp of Manga Colorada? Sixty miles there. We must be back by to-morrow night. It would be best not to say where we are going."
Texas Smith nodded, turned abruptly on the huge heels of his Mexican boots, stalked to where his horse was fastened, and began to saddle him.
"My dear uncle, why didn't you hire the devil?" whispered Coronado as he stared after the cutthroat.
"Get yourself ready, my nephew," was Garcia's reply. "I will see to the men and horses."
In an hour the expedition