The Treasure of Pearls: A Romance of Adventures in California. Gustave Aimard
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young female form beside the dead Mexican, and don Benito's weak condition.
Indeed, the latter, instead of carrying out his implied threat, tottered back and leaned against the cottonwood, just under one arrow, and with the other shattered shaft bristling at his shoulder.
The red man chose to interpret this movement as a flattery for his warlike appearance, for he smiled contentedly, and, drawing his long knife, cried holding up three fingers of his left hand:
"La Garra de Rapina – the Claw of Rapine – will now take his harvest for thrice five days' toil."
Benito sought to summon his failing powers, but a mist seemed to spring up and becloud his gaze, through which he less and less clearly saw the Indian's slow and cruel approach. Nevertheless, he was about to make a snatch at hazard for the steel that rose over his bosom, when a flash of fire from a gun so near that he almost saw the hither extremity blind the redskin, preceded a shot that crashed through the latter's skull. Benito, unable to check his own leap, received the dead yet convulsed body in his arms, and the shock hurled him to the ground. Neither rose! One was dead; the other within an ace of the same impassable portals. It seemed to him, as he lost consciousness, that there was a struggle in the brush.
When Benito reopened his eyes he believed all had been a dream, but, on gazing anxiously about him, he saw the dead Indian by his side. Above him, too, when he rose on his knees by an effort, the two silent witnesses of his miraculous deliverance were still recumbent.
No trace of another living soul; nevertheless, the Indian's weapons had all disappeared.
Suddenly, as he lifted himself to his feet, aching all over as if he had been bastinadoed on every accessible place, he heard Dolores moan. She was animated by the acute racking of hunger.
He gasped, "Food! Food for her!" and reeled to the greenest spot, where he began to tear up the earth with his nails. At length he dislodged a little stem of yucca, the somewhat tasty root which yields a species of maniac.
When he returned to the tree, Dolores, horrified at seeing her father's blood, had fallen off the tree top, rather than climbed down, and was too insensible to hear his appeals. He dragged the Indian's body partly aside, for to do so wholly was too weighty a task, and heaped leaves over the other portion. He placed the root in Dolores' passive hands, and was about to repeat his hoarse babble of hope, which he did not feel at heart, when abruptly the arrow wound in his shoulder gave a sharp, deep, scorching sensation, which filled him from head to sole with fever and awe.
"Oh, heavens!" he groaned. "The arrow was poisoned! I shall die in madness! I shall, perhaps, tear her, my dear Dolores, in my blind, ungovernable rage!"
So feels the man whom hydrophobia has seized upon, as the latest promptings of reason bid him hie aloof from his endangered fellows.
Benito laid his glances about him wildly; his recently dull eyes blazed till his very features, already earthy, lit up, and he howled;
"Welcome, death! But anywhere save here!"
He trampled on the Indian corpse in his flight, and plunged into the thorns as if bent on rending himself to shreds. He must have rushed madly on for half an hour, the venom firing his thinned blood till his veins ran flames, but as the wound on his left side affected that portion of the frame disproportionately, he described a circle, and in the end had almost returned to the spot where Dolores still rested in a swoon.
At last, stumbling, groping, he fell, only to crawl a little way, then, a slight mound opposing his hands and knees, he rolled upon it. His head appeared to have been cleared by the Mazeppa-like course, and he was, at least, conscious of the raised grass reminding him of a funeral mound.
"A grave!" he breathed, dashing the sweat out of his eyes, "Yes, a grave here will the last of the Bustamentes die!"
He stretched out at full length, he folded his arms, one of them palsied already, and was beginning to pray, when his tone changed to joy, or at least, profound hopefulness. He fell over on his side, then rose to his knees, ran his band over the mound eagerly, and cried:
"God of mercy, deceive me not! The grave I coveted, is it not a cache? Thank God!"
CHAPTER III.
THE PIRATE'S BEQUEST
The wanderer whose careless progress through the brake sufficiently clearly revealed that he was a stranger of a bold heart and contempt for customs different from his own, was, in fact, one of those Englishmen who seem born to illustrate, in the nature of exceptions, the formal character of his race.
Left an orphan in the fetters of a trustee who forgot he had ever been young, and showed no sympathy with his charge, George Frederick Gladsden had broken his bondage and run away from school at the age of twelve. Reaching a Scotch port, after a long tramp, he shipped as boy on a herring fisher, and so made his novitiate with Neptune. After that initiation, very severe, he chose to become a sailor of that irregular kind which is known as the pier head jumping. That is to say, instead of duly entering on a vessel and book at the office in broad daylight, "George" would lounge on the wharf till the very moment of her casting off. Then, of course, the captain is happy to take anybody in the least nautical or even able-bodied, who offers himself in lieu of one of the regularly engaged mariners detained by accident, debt, or drink. By this means Gladsden's trustee and kinsfolk could never prevent him going wheresoever he willed, and it pleased this briny Arab to keep his whereabouts a mystery, though, to amuse himself and annoy his guardian, he would send him a letter from some dreadfully out-of-the-way port, just to show he did exist, and to prevent the estate being locked up or diverted under the law.
Meanwhile, the young roaming Englishman became so thorough a proficient in the honourable calling, and had so much courage and intelligence that, even in the merchant service, where the prizes are few and hotly fought for, he must have obtained a supportable, if not a brilliant position.
Unfortunately for himself he had an execrably fitful head, and was the declared foe of Draconian discipline. If there had been pirates on the seas he might even have joined them, only then to have enjoyed a delightful existence of "Jack his own master."
Quarrelling with his latest skipper, a seal hunter, on the Lower Californian coast, that Spaniard, rather alarmed at the turbulent mate, was relieved when he accepted the offer of an Hermosillo planter to become his manager, and not only broke the engagement between them, but presented Gladsden with some dollars and his gun on their parting. The Englishman promised well up in the country, but the fowl in the swamp allured him into hunting trips with some Indians, and he turned such a vagabond that the indolent Sonoran came to the conclusion that, as the skipper of the seal fur cruiser had warned him, he had contracted with a maniac.
One day, Gladsden and the Indians, turning their backs on the San Miguel swamps, wandered off, the Englishman cared not whither. His dusky comrades were soon displeased by his careless march, and a little later, disgusted by his even resenting their counsels for him to take precautions, since, not only were there other Indians "out," but one of the most notorious salteadores who had ever troubled any part of unquiet Mexico was overawing the whole of the tract between the San Miguel and the San José. To which the mad Englishman replied, with a calmness which startled the red men, though masters of self-repression, that such daring traits aroused in him a lively curiosity, and the strongest desire to face this very famous Matasiete, "the Slayer of Seven," the terror of Sonora.
Seeing this obstinacy, our sly Yaquis solved the perplexity by abandoning their burr one morning whilst he was still sleeping, and leaving him only his gun and what powder and ball he carried. His horse and other property they removed with them lest, in his folly, he should only turn the valuables over to the redskins not of their tribe, or the Mexican depredators.
For all of his maritime knowledge which helps the student of sky and weather on land, Gladsden was in a quandary when thus thrown on his own devices. As, however, he never wrangled with himself, he took up his solitary march without any self-communing, and followed the impulse of the moment.
Fortunately, game never failed him, and though the only flavouring was gunpowder, the fare had not palled upon him up to his coming within our circle of vision.
He was "loping" along, very like