The Filibusters, Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne [best book clubs .TXT] 📗

I BELIEVE I’ve shown that the Tolpec Mountains were not a district which could be invaded against any real defence. In many places the sheer rock walls towered up five thousand feet from the hummocky foot hills, as vertical as the side of a house.

There was one large fertile valley right in the midst of this chaos of stone, and here lived a selfsupporting population of some eight or ten thousand souls. They possessed water, grain, cattle, and all other necessaries of a simple life, and by no means short of a pestilence could they be starved out of their stronghold.

By only one narrow gut of a cafion could anything living get access to this valley from the outer world, unless it had wings or the floating power of a balloon; and in all political conditions of the country the ravine was stoutly guarded. Even when Maxillo sat on the presidential throne in Dolores, the guard was still maintained in this ravine, and intercourse forbidden with the rest of the nation which called itself Sacaronducan. They paid Sacaronduca no taxes, and received from it no protection or interference. Except for the name of the thing, they were no more part of Sacaronduca than Belgium is part of France; to all intents and purposes they were an independent State to themselves.

Never in the course of history had the valley been invaded, and its inhabitants knew nothing personally of the horrors of civil war, or the mercilessness of a foreign army; and that through long security they might not grow slack and neglect the guard, there was an object lesson in the fruits of political excitement perpetually at their gates. Ever since Sacaronduca, in company with the other colonies of the New World, wrested herself from the power of Spain and set up as an independent republic, she had been in one constant simmer of revolution. The highest patriotism her chief men knew was to enrich themselves, and as a consequence life and property were perilously insecure. The climate of Sacaronduca might at times be enervating, but society was never without its excitements.

Our horses were beginning to stumble dangerously over the rocky defiles before we came into the final pass which led to this secluded glen. We were bone-weary with travel; our spirits were dulled with what we had gone through; but the sight of that stupendous cafton woke even us, prisoners though we were, to admiration. By some upheaval of nature the river which quarried out the cafion was diverted to another course. All the rock was bone dry, except here and there where some peak towering higher overhead than its fellows preserved its winter snow cap, and exuded a thin gleam of moisture.

Looking upwards, the two walls of rock seemed absolutely vertical, and the thin canal of blue sky above, though infinitely distant, appeared to float on the uppermost ridges of the stone. Underfoot the road was intolerably boulder-strewn and ungentle; there was absolutely no Invitation to the traveller; and in the gullet of the cafion, where it gave upon the valley plain, there was built a guarding wall worthy of China itself.

In the face of the wall were port-holes, each with its gun muzzle like some forbidding eye; on the battlements of the wall were other guns; and in a barrack at the further side were three companies of thirty men each, who stood an everlasting guard, watch and watch about. The wall itself was no less than sixty feet thick, the gun chambers being mere cavities in its ponderous girth. The gateway which penetrated this wall was a mere slit, so low that a man had to dismount before he could pass it, so narrow that a horse had to be stripped of its saddlebags before it could squeeze between the sides.

A stronger place it was impossible to conceive. The heights above were as unscalable as heaven, go no new attack could be made from there, and as the part of the cafton leading to it was straight for quite a couple of miles, any hostile force would be exposed to a quick shell fire of modern artillery for all this distance, and would be swept out of existence before it could come within rifle-shot.

A far-away bugle, thin and clear in the mountain air, acknowledged our coming as soon as we came in sight of this barrier, and we had the satisfaction of blundering over the next two miles of advance under a whole battery of converging muzzles. It was good practice, I suppose, to “man and arm fort ” on the smallest provocation.

We clattered up to the doorway, a score of rifles keeping us snugly covered, and a shaggy fellow showed himself at the grille of the gate, and demanded our names and business. He must have known Father Jupe as well as he knew his own brother, but there was a form to be observed, and the form was rigidly gone through. The priest kept his sardonic sentences for once in reserve; gave plain answers to plain questions; and in due time procured the opening of the gate. As we could not ride in as we were, owing to the lowness of the lintel, he got down, cast off the lashings which linked our feet beneath the horses’ bellies; and then, as we were too stiff to do it for ourselves, helped us to the ground.

One by one, in Indian rank, we hobbled in stiffly through the gateway, and then halted in this narrow cell of a passage made in the thickness of the wall. The door behind us squealed on its hinges and shut, and was made fast there by a dozen ponderous locks and through-bolts, and then the shaggy doorkeeper sung out the word of the day, and the door beyond us was opened from without, and we hobbled wearily into daylight again.

Father Jupe pulled out a long knife, and cut the lashings from our numbed wrists. ” I am sure, se�ores,” said he, ” that you will both appreciate the unwilling compliment I have paid to your powers of offence. You see I am only a poor, weak, nervous ecclesiastic, and I had to keep you tied up for the benefit of my own bare existence.”

“Don’t mention it, as far as I am concerned/’ said Carew. “As I told you, I was bound in this direction before we were interrupted by your friend without the ears and his assistants. For purposes of my own I want to help your excellent brother, Mr. Maxillo, on to his perch again. So you needn’t at all apologise, my dear fellow, for bringing me in the direction I want to go. No, Birch is the man to feel annoyed. You’re taking Birch quite in the wrong direction, and it’s very awkward for him to be away from business without leave of absence.”

The priest spread his hands deprecatingly. ” I can only hope that Sefior Birch will pardon me,’ said he, “when he remembers that it is for a lady’s advantage that his services have been enlisted. I am sure there is chivalry about el se�or Birch.”

“Tons,” said Carew. ” Look here, Jupe. Touching the lady: what’s your little game with her?”

But the priest did not choose to discuss this subject further just then. ” I only know what I have told you already,” he said. ” My brother will give you all the further details when we come to his hacienda. Come, now, let me ask you the usual American question. What do you think of our country?”

We were on our tired horses again by this time, and were leaving the grim rocky barrier behind. The level valley lay spread out before us, comely, peaceful, deliciously fertile. White villages clustered here and there amongst the fields; irrigation trenches lined the greenery with gleaming silver threads; and in the valley’s centre, like some patriarch in the midst of a flock, stood the hacienda of Maxillo. It was a huge building built four square round a courtyard. Its roofs were flat, its windows square, its walls trimly whitewashed. The sky above was blazing, but the building carried with it a look of coolness and almost a suggestion of gloom. So thick were the walls that one half of the window embrasures were filled with inky shadows. So dense were the trees sprouting up from the inner courtyard that their fringing branches overhung even the roof itself,

Carew surveyed the place with a quick interest. “It’s a pity this valley of yours is stowed away so deep in the heart of the country,” he said.

“Why?” asked the priest. ” We poor humble folk who live here find the place not intolerable as it is. It seemed to us very snug and undisturbed.”

“Quite so. I’m a practically minded man. I see the snugness; I see how difficult it is to disturb you; but I can’t help seeing also how small your opportunities are for raiding. You are too far off the big towns of Sacaronduca to levy tribute from them, even if there was anything much worth levying which there isn’t. But by Jove, if you’d got a bit of a snug port on the coast, fancy what a chance you’d have of it then. With a small fast steamboat”

“My dear Carew, I’m afraid you are hinting at piracy.”

“Well, and aren’t you pirates? What’s Maxillo but a pirate any way? What’s Briggs if you come to that? You can call it declaring war on somebody if you want to stand upon niceties, but it amounts to the same thing in the end: you only do it for what you can make.”

The priest laughed and rubbed his hands. “The valley is as God chose, and we can’t change it. And of course we may be what you say, amigo. But why not call us patriots? It’s a suaver term, and I seem to prefer it.”

“I’m sure you would,” said Carew shortly, and turned his head away to end the talk.

Children and women stared at us as we rode past the houses, men looked up and stared at us from their work in the fields. Strangers in the valley were evidently a rarity. Probably with the exception of Donna Delicia not an alien had come before their eyes in the last dozen years.

We were riding free now, and Father Jupe had put away the revolver in a pocket of his rusty cassock. If we had attempted to bolt he could not have stopped us. Indeed, it was not at all likely he would have attempted to try. We had seen for ourselves how the only passage into the valley was guarded; and as for other outlets, the grim snow-capped mountains which fenced us in seemed an open advertisement of their non-existence. There was no help for it; we were trapped securely enough this time; and we had got to do what they wanted with regard to Delicia and this marriage or take the consequences.

Slowly we drew nearer to the hacienda, and in the dense shadow of the wide portico I could see men watching us. The tired horses kept perpetually stumbling; we ourselves were so weary that