Heart of the Sunset, Rex Beach [best fiction books of all time txt] 📗

be here, unless—It IS rather strange!"

Dave shot a swift, interrogatory glance at Panfilo's traveling companion, but Anto's face was stony, his black eyes were fixed upon the fire.

With an abrupt gesture Law flung aside the contents of his cup and strode to Panfilo's horse, which stood dejectedly with reins hanging.

"Where are you—going?" Alaire rose nervously.

It was nearly dark now; only the crests of the ridges were plain against the luminous sky; in the brushy bottom of the arroyo the shadows were deep. Alaire had no wish to be left alone with the prisoner.

With bridle-rein and carbine in his left hand, the Ranger halted, then, stooping for Anto's discarded cartridge-belt, he looped it over his saddle-horn. He vaulted easily into the seat, saying:

"I hid that mare pretty well. Your man may not be able to find her."
Then he turned his borrowed horse's head toward the brush.

Anto had squatted motionless until this moment; he had not even turned his eyes; but now, without the slightest warning, he uttered a loud call. It might have served equally well as a summons or as an alarm, but it changed the Ranger's suspicions into certainty. Dave uttered an angry exclamation, then to the startled woman he cried:

"Watch this man! He can't hurt you, for I've got his shells." To his prisoner he said, sharply: "Stay where you are! Don't move!" The next instant he had loped into the brush on the tracks of Panfilo Sanchez, spurring the tired gray pony into vigorous action.

It was an uncomfortable situation in which Alaire now found herself. Law was too suspicious, she murmured to herself; he was needlessly melodramatic; she felt exceedingly ill at ease as the pony's hoof-beats grew fainter. She was not afraid of Anto, having dealt with Mexican vaqueros for several years, yet she could not forget that he was a murderer, and she wondered what she was expected to do if he should try to escape. It was absurd to suppose that Panfilo, her own hired man, could be capable of treachery; the mere suspicion was a sort of reflection upon her.

Alaire was startled by hearing other hoof-beats now; their drumming came faint but unmistakable. Yes, there were two horses racing down the arroyo. Anto, the fugitive, rose to his feet and stared into the dusk. "Sit down!" Alaire ordered, sharply. He obeyed, muttering beneath his breath, but his head was turned as if in an effort to follow the sounds of the pursuit.

Next came the distant rattle of loosened stones—evidently one horse was being urged toward the open high ground—then the peaceful quiet evening was split by the report of Law's thirty-thirty. Another shot followed, and then a third. Both Alaire and her prisoner were on their feet, the woman shaking in every limb, the Mexican straining his eyes into the gloom and listening intently.

Soon there came a further echo of dry earth and gravel dislodged, but whether by Law's horse or by that of Sanchez was uncertain. Perhaps both men had gained the mesa.

It had all happened so quickly and so unexpectedly that Alaire felt she must be dreaming, or that there had been some idiotic mistake. She wondered if the Ranger's sudden charge had not simply frightened Panfilo into a panicky flight, and she tried to put her thoughts into words the Mexican would understand, but his answer was unintelligible. His black scowl, however, was eloquent of uncertainty and apprehension.

Alaire had begun to feel the strain of the situation and was trying to
decide what next to do, when David Law came riding out of the twilight.
He was astride the gray; behind him at the end of a lariat was Bessie
Belle, and her saddle was empty.

Mrs. Austin uttered a sharp cry.

Law dismounted and strode to the prisoner. His face was black with fury; he seemed gigantic in his rage. Without a word he raised his right hand and cuffed the Mexican to his knees. Then he leaped upon him, as a dog might pounce upon a rabbit, rolled him to his face, and twisted the fellow's arms into the small of his back. Anto cursed, he struggled, but he was like a child in the Ranger's grasp. Law knelt upon him, and with a jerk of his riata secured the fellow's wrists; rising, he set the knot with another heave that dragged the prisoner to his knees. Next he booted Anto to his feet.

"By God! I've a notion to bend a gun over your head," Law growled.
"Clever little game, wasn't it?"

"Where—? Did you—kill him?" the woman gasped.

Alaire had never beheld such a demoniac expression as Law turned upon her. The man's face was contorted, his eyes were blazing insanely, his chest was heaving, and for an instant he seemed to include her in his anger. Ignoring her inquiry, he went to his mare and ran his shaking hands over her as if in search of an injury; his questing palms covered every inch of glistening hide from forelock to withers, from shoulder to hoof, and under cover of this task he regained in some degree his self-control.

"That hombre of yours—didn't look right to me," he said, finally. Laying his cheek against Bessie Belle's neck, as a woman snuggles close to the man of her choice, he addressed the mare: "I reckon nobody is going to steal you, eh? Not if I know it. No, sir; that hombre wasn't any good, was he?"

Alaire wet her lips. "Then you—shot him?"

Law laughed grimly, almost mockingly. "Say! He must be a favorite of yours?"

"N-no! I hardly knew the fellow. But—did you?"

"I didn't say I shot him," he told her, gruffly. "I warned him first, and he turned on me—blew smoke in my face. Then he took to the brush, afoot, and—I cut down on him once more to help him along."

"He got away?"

"I reckon so."

"Oh, oh!" Alaire's tone left no doubt of her relief. "He was always a good man—"

"Good? Didn't he steal my horse? Didn't he aim to get me at the first chance and free his compadre? That's why he wanted his Winchester. Say! I reckon he—needs killin' about as much as anybody I know."

"I can't understand it." Alaire sat down weakly. "One of my men, too."

"This fellow behaved himself while I was gone, eh?" Law jerked his head in Anto's direction. "I was afraid he—he'd try something. If he had—" Such a possibility, oddly enough, seemed to choke the speaker, and the ferocity of his unfinished threat caused Mrs. Austin to look up at him curiously. There was a moment of silence, then he said, shortly: "Well, we've got a horse apiece now. Let's go."

The stars had thickened and brightened, rounding the night sky into a glittering dome. Anto, the murderer, with his ankles lashed beneath his horse's belly, rode first; next, in a sullen silence, came the Ranger, his chin upon his breast; and in the rear followed Alaire Austin.

In spite of her release from a trying predicament, the woman was scarcely more eager to go home than was the prisoner, for while Anto's trail led to a jail, hers led to Las Palmas, and there was little difference. These last two days in the open had been like a glimpse of freedom; for a time Alaire had almost lost the taste of bitter memories. It had required an effort of will to drug remembrance, but she had succeeded, and had proven her ability to forget. But now—Las Palmas! It meant the usual thing, the same endless battle between her duty and her desire. She was tired of the fight that resulted neither in victory nor defeat; she longed now, more than ever, to give up and let things take their course. Why could not women, as well as men, yield to their inclinations—drift with the current instead of breasting it until they were exhausted? There was David Law, for instance; he was utterly carefree, no duties shackled him. He had his horse, his gun, and his blanket, and they were enough; Alaire, like him, was young, her mind was eager, her body ripe, and her veins full of fire. Life must be sweet to those who were free and happy.

But the object of her envy was not so completely at peace with himself as she supposed. Even yet his mind was in a black turmoil from his recent anger, and of late, be it said, these spells of temper had given him cause for uneasiness. Then, too, there was a lie upon his lips.

Under the stars, at the break of the arroyo, three hundred yards below the water-hole, a coyote was slinking in a wide circle around the body of Panfilo Sanchez.

IV AN EVENING AT LAS PALMAS

Although the lower counties of southwest Texas are flat and badly watered, they possess a rich soil. They are favored, too, by a kindly climate, subtropic in its mildness. The days are long and bright and breezy, while night brings a drenching dew that keeps the grasses green. Of late years there have been few of those distressing droughts that gave this part of the state an evil reputation, and there has been a corresponding increase in prosperity. The Rio Grande, jaundiced, erratic as an invalid, wrings its saffron blood from the clay bluffs and gravel cañons of the hill country, but near its estuary winds quietly through a low coastal plain which the very impurities of that blood have richened. Here the river's banks are smothered in thickets of huisache, ebony, mesquite, oak, and alamo.

Railroads, those vitalizing nerve-fibers of commerce, are so scarce along this division of the border that even in this day when we boast, or lament, that we no longer have a frontier, there remain in Texas sections larger than some of our Eastern states which hear the sound of iron wheels only on their boundaries. To travel from Brownsville north along the international line one must, for several hundred miles, avail oneself of horses, mules, or motor-cars, since rail transportation is almost lacking. And on his way the traveler will traverse whole counties where the houses are jacals, where English is a foreign tongue, and where peons plow their fields with crooked sticks as did the ancient Egyptians.

That part of the state which lies below the Nueces River was for a time disputed territory, and long after Texans had given their lives to drive the Eagle of Mexico across the Rio Grande much of it remained a forbidden land. Even to-day it is alien. It is a part of our Southland, but a South different to any other that we have. Within it there are no blacks, and yet the whites number but one in twenty. The rest are swarthy, black-haired men who speak the Spanish tongue and whose citizenship is mostly a matter of form.

The stockmen, pushing ahead of the nesters and the tillers of the soil, were the first to invade the lower Rio Grande, and among these "Old Ed" Austin was a pioneer. Out of the unmapped prairie he had hewed a foothold, and there, among surroundings as Mexican as Mexico, he had laid the beginnings of his fortune.

Of "Old Ed's" early life strange stories are told; like the other cattle barons, he was hungry for land and took it where or how he could. There are tales of fertile sections bought for ten cents an acre, tales of Mexican ranchers dispossessed by mortgage, by monte, or by any means that came to hand; stories even of some, more stubborn than the rest, who refused to feed the Austin greed for land, and who remained on their farms to feed the buzzards instead. Those were crude old days; the pioneers who pushed their herds into the far pastures were lawless fellows, ruthless, acquisitive, mastered by the empire-builder's urge for acres and still more acres. They were the Reclaimers, the men who seized and held, and then seized more, concerning themselves little or not at all with the moral law as applicable to both Mexican and white, and leaving it to the second generation to justify their acts, if ever justification were required.

As other ranches grew under the hands of such unregenerate owners, so also under "Old Ed" Austin's management did Las Palmas increase and prosper. The estate took its name from a natural grove of palms in which the house was built; it comprised an expanse of rich river-land backed by miles of range where "Box A" cattle lived and bred. In his later years the old man sold much land, and some he leased; but when he handed Las Palmas to his son, "Young Ed," as a wedding