PART THREE (continued 2)

Presently, however, he roused again at the battering clank of a train of trucks backing in upon the truck in which he was lying. He roused enough to hear voices and the clank of chain, with the thought that they were doing something with a steam winch, he could not care what. He drowsed off at once into the deeps of sleep into which none but harvesters and sailors ever sink. In his sleep, he became conscious of vibration, as though he were in a berth above the engines in some small steamer under way. It was soothing, or at least not unpleasant, to his mood of feverish drowsiness, to be shaken thus, perhaps he slept the better for it.

For some hours he slept. Gradually, as he came to himself, he found himself listening in his sleep for the bell, so that he might know how much of his watch remained to him. The bell did not strike, though he hearkened after it. He felt cold, and was aware that sprays were hitting the side of the deck-housecontinually.

Then, punctually at the “one bell,” at the moment at which he would have been called, he roused up wide awake with the knowledge that something was very wrong indeed.

He was accustomed to turning out and being on deck within a minute. He roused up now with one heave, weak, stiff and aching as he was, ready for action. He came to himself, remembering all the events of the night before, and at once took stock of things. He was in the truck, which was jolting along a bad line at about fifteen miles an hour. It was daylight, yet all dim with storm. The hitting on the truck which he had taken to be sprays on the deckhouse was sand, pelting in from the desert. The floor of the truck was covered with a fine layer of sand. A pelt of sand flew over the side of the car continually. As he stood shakily up to see where he was, the sand blew into his eyes, hair and mouth, down his neck, into his clothes, into his lungs. It came on a cold wind in little dry particular pellets. Hard snow coming in a gale has a similar power of annoying and confusing; this had a power beyond snow, of maddening. It stung like hard snow, but after it had stung it did not melt, it remained as grit where it had fallen, in the clothes, the eyes or the mouth.

He could see, perhaps, sixty yards to windward and a hundred yards to leeward of his truck, which seemed to be somewhere towards the end of a goods or freight train. The train was going along a waterless land which was sometimes a scrub of chaparral and mezquite and sometimes a desert, with cactus and prickly pear. Over all this expanse the accursed norther came down like a devil pelting sand, never in any great volume, but in a drift which never ceased. Sard noticed that the side of the next truck to his had already had a kind of polish given to it by the never-ceasing pitting of the pellets.

He knew that the “norther” being as cold as it was, must be blowing from within three points of north. This gave him the train’s course as roughly north-west. The sort of glow in the sky, which marked where the sun would be, as well as his own sense of time, always very acute, showed him that it was about eight o’clock in the morning. Reckoning that the train had picked up his trucks between three and four o’clock, he judged that he had been carried some sixty or seventy miles into the desert of Tloatlucan, and that the next stop would be fifty miles further on, in the foothills beyond the desert, where the railway began its climb into the Sierra.

Doug and his brother smugglers had of course gone with their freight on the other fork of the railway far to the west. Looking about in the sand on the floor of the truck, Sard found a hook-pot half full of cold cazuela and two of the small loaves stuffed with sausage. He was glad of these, in spite of their being gritty with sand. When he had breakfasted, he felt more like himself.

As he could neither stop the train nor get out of it he went on with it, wondering how soon he would be able to return. And as he wondered, he took stock of his equipment. He was dressed in a pair of old serge trousers belonging to Doug, a pair of slippers which had been cut down from bluchers, an old flannel shirt, as clean and soft as lint, a blue dungaree jacket, blackened with stains of dried oil, plainly the gift of one of the launch-men, and a tam-o’-shanter working-cap, wanting the topknot, which had once belonged to a sailor in the French battleship Suffren. He had his own belt and knife, an old blue handkerchief printed with the legend “A present from Bradford,” a paper collar, one sock and one stocking. His own wet clothes, which he had put in the truck, were gone. His watch, his money, penknife, key-ring and “pocket tool chest,” a little appliance containing a marler, screwdriver, nipper, spanner and corkscrew, were all gone. He had put them into the pocket of the dungaree jacket, when he had changed his clothes, but they were gone. He had nothing but the clothes in which he stood, his sheath-knife and a little brown pocket-case which contained a few pulpy visiting cards, some stamps ruined by the wet, a few matches, and three crushed xicale flowers.

He had lost his job, his passage, his clothes, his possessions, his identity. He was being carried across the desert into the heart of a continent. What he was to do when he left the train, in order to get back to Las Palomas, was not very clear.

“After all,” he said, “there will be someone at the way-station who will let me have a passage back in a truck. When once I am there, I can get along.”

The events of the night before seemed to belong to a past life or to another man. He rose up again to take stock of his whereabouts and to see if he could see a train-hand. He saw the trucks forging and jolting ahead. Beyond the trucks, both in front and behind, were the high, closed, yellow, wooden Occidental freight-cars, marked with capacity marks in dull red. The train lurched and jangled along the desert in a ceaseless pelt of sand. The sand was merciless and pitiless, a little and a little and a little. The chaparral bowed a little to it, the cactus seemed to put back its ears. Everything was dry with it, gritty, cracked, burnished. The persistence of its small annoyance told on all things. As the dropping of water wears the stone, so the pelting of the sand wore the spirit. Sard remembered what he had heard of these northers: how the children are kept from school lest they should mutiny, and how men, maddened by that insistent patting, will strike and kill. The thought crossed his mind that if he had to walk back along the track in that pelting, that annoyance of the tiny hands pat-pat-patting on face and hands would be soon unbearable. Even there, sheltered in the truck, it came pat-pat-patting, flying like a little dry-shot over the sides, filtering up through cracks in the bottom, and dancing there, like grains in a spring, till they were flung away. From time to time the dry, quiet pat-pat-patting deepened to a noise of water, with a roaring and a swish, into which the train joggled, lurched, jangled and clanked, and at last seemed to tread down and over-roar.

He had plenty of thoughts to worry him. First of these was disappointment that he had not seen “Her,” as he had hoped, the night before; next to this came rage at missing his passage; then came anxiety for that brother and sister in Los Xicales; what had happened to them? Lastly, from somewhere in the background of his mind, the thought came that it might not be easy to rejoin the Pathfinder. It was going to be a good deal more difficult than he supposed.

“Hi, ya!”

The yell of “Hi, ya” was repeated from somewhere ahead. It was a shout or hail loud enough to be heard above the noise of the train and of the storm. It was addressed to him.

He stood up, screening his eyes from the sand. There, on the top of the freight-car nearest to the trucks, a train-hand lay. He seemed annoyed at Sard’s presence. He yelled at him and motioned to him to get out of the truck. He was a hard-looking man with a swollen face and a kind of vindictive energy. He lay crouched on the freight-car, hanging on with his left hand to the iron rail on the car-roof. In his right hand he had a long club, like a baseball club, which had a leather wrist-thong. He shook this club at Sard and motioned to him with it, that he should get out of the car. He also yelled at Sard in Spanish to ask what he was doing on the train and to tell him to get out of it. As he seemed to be an unreasonable man, Sard smiled at him and resumed his seat. The man crept a little nearer, perhaps to make certain that Sard was alone, and shouted:

“I’ll have you out of it before long, my white-faced Luterano with the pip!”

“Will you have me out of it by force, or by your sweet persuasion?” Sard asked him.

“You will see.”

“That will be something to look forward to.”

“You wait.”

“I am waiting.”

The man crept a foot nearer, spat towards Sard (not very successfully against the norther) and called him some filthy names.

“I will open your bag,” he said, “with my knife, which is used to opening the bags of Englishmen. I will see whether it is true that Englishmen have the tripes of cats, as it is said.”

“It is quite true,” Sard answered. “They have. May I ask if you are in love?”

“I will soon teach you.”

“What does your lady love in you; your appearance or your breeding?”

The man champed with his teeth, bit and worried his thumb as though he were a dog and it a bone, and as it were jerked the worry at Sard. It is a passionate gesture which looks more effective than it sounds. Sard smiled at him. Sard was slightly to windward of the man and could speak to him without effort with the certainty of being heard.

“You will get blood-poisoning,” he said, “if you bite your thumb with those teeth.”

The man seemed to focus into a pair of flaming eyes; the balls of the eyes rolled upwards so as to leave nothing but glaring yellow, then they rolled down in a frenzy. He opened his mouth, grinned with clenched teeth, hissed like a snake and howled like a hyæna. He spat thrice at Sard, nodded at him, and then retreated along the freight-car top out of sight. Sard noticed then that another train-hand was watching him from the nearest freight-car to the rear of him. This man did not speak, and did not meet his eyes. When Sard looked at him the man dropped his eyelids and seemed to be looking at the ground, but in another instant he was watching again and making a motion that Sard should leave the cars. Sard could not see him so clearly as he had seen the other man, but he made out a look of shiftiness and hardness, a mixture of prison and the boxing-ring, yet tanned, as it were, or coloured with the fineness of endurance. A sort of glimmer of high quality showed in the pitiless evil mug, as in the faces of old soldiers, with bad records, who have been through great campaigns. Sard judged that this man was not an Occidental. There was a look of English or American about him. Then he did not speak nor threaten: he used neither curse nor club, only watched. Presently he caught Sard’s eyes and undoubtedly made the motion that Sard should leave the cars.

“Beat it, kid,” the man cried.

This seemed so unreasonable that Sard paid no heed to him: he looked the other way.

“Beat it,” the man cried. “Pasea.”

Sard looked at him; then looked away.

“Hell and Maria,” the man said, “if you ain’t got a gall!”

Perhaps in normal runs the train-hands on that freighter foregathered for talk, drink or cards in the after-car. Perhaps the three trucks in the middle of the train made the journey impossible on this occasion, or it may be that Sard, the unknown man sitting in the truck, with the look of one able to guard himself, made them think the norther not worth the facing. They did not attempt the journey. The train pounded and jangled on across the desert, in the ceaseless pelting and pitting of the sand. The train presently reached a part of the desert where the wind for some reason had more scope. Perhaps the line there crossed the mouth of some great gut in the distant Sierra. The wind suddenly rose in strength and voice, lifting the sand so that it looked like a smoke into which the train had to butt. “Ai, ai!” it cried, just as it cries in rigging, while the sand came over like sprays. Sard kept well ducked down under a tarpaulin. When he looked up from his place towards his left, he sometimes saw the train-hand watching him. Whenever their eyes met, the train-hand motioned to him to leave the cars. Presently the train-hand grew weary of such foolishness: he shouted something which Sard could not hear, and then beat his way aft, out of sight.

Sard knew enough about the train-hands on these freighters to be sure of evil from them. Hoboes had killed so many train-hands that now the train crews always carried clubs, which they used on any hoboes who were unable to pay their way or to defend themselves. Sard had no doubts about being able to defend himself, but that evil face abaft-all made him wonder how he was to get back across the desert to Las Palomas. How would he fare, he wondered, if the train-hands on the returning train were that sort of men? He realised that he was not now Sard Harker, the mate of a crack ship, but a ragged-looking rough-neck, dirty and unshaven, who would get “the hoboes’ deal, a bat on the head and six months’ road-gang.” He began to have misgivings about his future.

For another two hours the train ran on across the storm. It was running away from the storm, all the time, so that the violence of the wind and the annoyance of the sand both abated. Presently the sand ceased to pelt, the train ran out into the sun, leaving behind it a cloud of sand-coloured storm, stretching up into the heaven, where it smoked like sulphur fumes.

Now on both hands in a winking bright light was the desert of the Indios Salvajes with the Sierra of the Holy Ghost beyond. After the misery of the night and the nuisance of the storm, the beauty of the wilderness was overwhelming. It lay in a half-circle, stretching for ninety miles under the spine of the Sierra. It was all shining, vast, mysterious, lonely beyond belief, empty of any life that was not poisonous and spined and savage. There were patches of chaparral, a few mezquite trees, a few giant cactuses. The most of it was empty shining sand, many-coloured, flitting, sometimes danced over by eddies. Rocks of violent colours rose out of it like the bones of dead beasts. Parts of it seemed to be alive and thinking, other parts of it seemed dead from old time, all parts of it drew Sard like a temptation.

He knelt on his tarpaulin to stare at it. He had known the desert of the sea for a good many years. There men exist by effort and strength, pitting their worth against it day by day. This was the desert of the land, which calls men, not to try their worth, but to consider their nature and their source, and to let all their effort and their strength be absorbed in that contemplation.

He felt power come into him from that vast expanse which bore no life, or almost none, that was not deadly, yet had absorbed for centuries, unshielded, the energy of the sun in his strength.

At about midday the train, which had been running in sight of the Sierra, passed so close under the foothills that Sard lost sight of them. He was feeling rested and well: his leg was still numb, but fit for use. He looked ahead along the line. There in an opening of the foothills a couple of miles away were the houses of a settlement. They were adobe houses, some of them limewashed, under a roll of foothill which bore the marks of silver-mining. There was a white church with a red-tiled campanile pierced in the Mission fashion for three bells. Sard could see that there was a station here. Something made him look back suddenly behind him. He was not in any danger, but from his perch in the after-car the hard-faced man was watching him.

“Beat it, kid,” the man shouted. “Beat it like hell.” He signed to Sard to leap from the car on the desert side. “Kid,” he cried, “this ain’t no kid glove foolishness. You wanna beat it just like smoke.”

Unfortunately, Sard had heard of men shot while trying to “beat it” from a freight-car. He did not want to beat it, but to explain his presence and get a lift back to the coast. Besides, with one leg numb from poison, it was not easy to beat it while the train was moving. The train-hand shook his head much as Pilate washed his hands; he moved aft along the cars out of sight again.

The Occidental train-hand, who had promised to look at his tripes, reappeared for an instant to make sure that he was still there. He showed his teeth at Sard and made a motion of cutting open a waistcoat with the upward sweep of one hand. The train slackened speed so that Sard could hear the clanging of the bell on the engine. Looking out, he could see the population of the town sauntering to the station to watch the train come to a stop. She curved in to the platform, which had been made there some years before for a President’s visit. Only the engine and one car could draw to the platform at one time. On the end of the station building the name of the place, Tlotoatin, was painted on a plank. The train stopped.

As she stopped, Sard laid hold of the truck side to swing himself out. At that instant, the train jerked forward and then backwards violently, so that he was pitched down into his truck. He was out of the train just three seconds after the train-hands.

To his surprise, neither of these men made any movement towards him: they stood watching, while a squad of soldiers followed their officers out of the rear cars. The officers and men wore the grey uniforms and green tejada-de-burro caps of the Nacionales. The officers plainly knew of Sard’s presence on the train. They came straight towards him with drawn revolvers in their hands. One of the officers was an elderly captain, fat, pompous, slow-witted, and with a face like a slab of something: the other was a little thin dapper lieutenant, with legs like pipestems cased in tight patent-leather boots to the knees. Sard knew at once that these men were coming back to barracks after being escort to a consignment of silver from the mines. He saluted the officers, who did not return his salute: on the contrary, they seemed indignant at his saluting. A couple of soldiers covered Sard with their rifles.

“Who are you?” the captain asked.

Sard told him.

“So. You speak Spanish. What are you doing on the line?”

Sard told him.

“A likely story, eh, lieutenant?”

“Very likely, my captain.”

“You know the law against trespass on the line?”

“No, captain,” Sard said.

“That is false,” the captain answered; “since you know Spanish, you must know it.”

“I am English, and do not,” Sard said.

“That is false,” the captain answered. “You are not English. You are French. Your cap proves it. You are a deserter from the French ship which called here.”

“If there be any English or Scotchman here,” Sard said, “or any American, I can prove that I am English.”

“We desire no proof, since we need none. You were on the line, that suffices; without papers, which clinches it. You are arrested.”

“You had better not arrest me,” Sard said; “in spite of my clothes, I am an officer, equal in rank to yourself.”

“Enough words,” the captain said.

“By many, too many words,” the lieutenant said.

“At least,” Sard said, “you can telegraph to the British Consul at Las Palomas about me, or send me to him.”

“It is not for you to prescribe our course of action,” the captain said. “You are arrested. Your case will have every consideration. Meanwhile, to the barracks.”

“To the barracks: march,” the lieutenant added.

If he had resisted, perhaps if he had said another word, they would have shot him and pitched him down a disused working. Sard knew that the silver escorts were apt to shoot to save trouble. He judged it best to submit. “They are cross from the sandstorm,” he thought; “soon they will have lunched; then they will listen to reason; or I can get word to some Englishman, or to the Consul.” Like all sailors, he had the utmost contempt for soldiers; to be jailed by soldiers was a bitter experience.

The guards fell in on each side of him; two men came behind him with fixed bayonets; the officers brought up the rear with drawn revolvers; the captain called “March!” As they set out, the Occidental train-hand darted two steps forward and crouched to screech some insults. He mocked, showed his teeth and jeered at Sard, making again the gesture of the stomach-ripper. “You get him,” he screeched in English, “you get-a your bag cut. A te te . . . ucho!”

Just a couple of paces beyond this screamer, the other train-hand stood, twirling his club as though puzzled. He was looking hard at Sard with a face made of broken commandments: Sard expected a bat on the head from him as he passed. He did not get it: the man dropped his eyes as before, and spat sideways as though dismissing the thought of Sard. They passed out of the station enclosure to the town, which was crowded with inhabitants, who had either come to see the train or were now coming to see “the bandit.” Most of the citizens were mestizos or Indios. Sard looked in vain for an American or English face. He heard the comments passed upon him.

“An English bandit who robbed the silver train.”

“That a white so sickly should have so much blood!”

“Ha, dirty thief, to the gallows!”

“Ho, Englishman, it is not so easy to rob our silver: we are not your Africans from whom you may rob gold.”

“Englishman, the garota: cluck-cluck!”

“They say he killed seven before being taken.”

“He? An Englishman? They were asleep, covered in their blankets. He stabbed them sleeping.”

“Hear you, he killed seven, sleeping.”

“Let them kill him, then. We have enough of these whites at our doors without Englishmen.”

The barracks were close to the station. The party marched into the patio of the barrack buildings: the heavy maruca-wood gates were closed behind them. The place looked as dingy as a prison and as mean as a workhouse: it smelt like a cesspool. One end of it, the men’s end, was two storeys high and covered with scaling plaster, the sides were one storey adobe buildings which had been limewashed once since they were built. The left side of the square seemed to be officers’ quarters, for it was screened by a verandah. On the side opposite to it were stables, kitchens, and a sort of barton where two charrucas were housed.

“You will be imprisoned till you can give an account of yourself,” the lieutenant said. “Take him to the cells, you men.”

“I am perfectly ready to go to the cells,” Sard said, “but I wish to let the English of this town know that I am here.”

“This is not England,” the lieutenant said, “but the Occidental Republic, where the English, the Irish, and other accursed gringos have no voice, save when they mew like cats for the charity of our leavings. Your presence shall be explained to such English as may be here. The brothel-keeper is English and the town-scavenger Irish. There is also a Scotchman in the road-gang for murder. Such are the places of your race among the Occidentales.”

“We do the things most needed,” Sard answered. “Next to begetting a new race.”

“For half a peseta I would blow your brains out.”

“Any Occidental would do murder for half a peseta.”

“You will find, my dog, that we do justice for nothing.”

“So America thinks.”

The lieutenant whirled right round upon his heel, a complete circle. He gurgled in his throat, thrust his revolver-butt into his mouth and bit it, so that marks showed upon the wood. His face turned black with rage: he stamped with his feet so that Sard expected his little brittle pipestems to snap.

“Remove him to the cells,” he said, as soon as he could speak.

“I am going to the cells,” Sard said. “Remember that you have been warned that you are jailing an officer and will be held responsible.” He turned his back upon the lieutenant and followed a corporal through the barton to a yard beyond. In this yard, which was fenced with a high adobe wall, tiled at the top, were the cells. The corporal unlocked the door of one of the cells and motioned to Sard to enter. Sard cast a glance about the yard. He noticed all down the western wall a line of bullet-marks about breast-high. He had seen similar marks on walls in Santa Barbara: they marked executions.

“Enter, then,” the corporal said. The cell was dirty, but the dirt was old dirt.

“Look,” Sard said, pausing at the door. “Will you, or one of your men, send word to the engineers of the mines that I, an Englishman, am in the cells here?”

“Assuredly.”

“At once, can you go or send at once?”

“Assuredly.”

“I will see that you are rewarded.”

“Assuredly.”

“Send to the chief English or Scotch engineer at the chief mine.”

“Assuredly,” the corporal said. “Meanwhile, enter.”

Sard entered and was locked in. The corporal opened the grating in the door and said, “How am I to be rewarded for this sending to the engineers?”

“You shall be rewarded when they come.”

“Who will reward me?” the corporal asked; “will it be yourself or the engineers?”

“It will be myself.”

“Truly, then,” the corporal said, “since it will be you who will reward me, when the work is done, it must be you who shall make it worth my while to do it. How much then? A hundred pesetas?”

“Not a penny piece,” Sard said, “till the engineers are here. Then indeed you shall be rewarded.”

“There is a very wise proverb,” the corporal said, “ ‘Paid first never grieves.’ And yet another proverb says, ‘Will-pay is a fine bird, but cash-down sings.’ ”

“There is yet another proverb,” Sard answered, “ ‘The fed hound never hunts,’ and another still, ‘Penny-pouched is promise-broken.’ ”

“These are English proverbs,” the corporal said, “and do not concern me. Show me at least the colour of your money, or no message will go.”

“There is another proverb,” Sard said, “which says, ‘Grudging greed gets not.’ ”

“Adios,” the corporal said, “grudging greed will get no food nor drink; no message to any engineer; nor blanket at night, if blanket be needed.” He slipped the shutter across the grating and moved across the yard, back into the barton, leaving Sard alone. The cell was empty of any furniture. It measured about seven feet each way. Its roof sloped down from about eight feet at the door to six feet at the back. The floor was earth, the walls adobe, the roof ceiled with plaster, European fashion, against tarantulas. The cell was lit by the omission of one block of adobe just under the eaves at the back. Sard could just see out of this hole by standing on tiptoe. He saw a patch of sandy soil which had been channelled and pitted by people wanting sand; rats were humping about in this among refuse tipped there from the barracks. Beyond the sandy strip and distant about 120 yards was the railway, with its platform, water tank, fuel heap, and the legend

Tlotoatin.

Beyond this was the desert reaching to infinity, where violet rocks gleaming with snow merged into the shimmer of the sky.

The shutter of his door was pulled back: a private soldier peered at him through the bars.

“See,” he said, “you want a message taken to an engineer?”

“Yes,” Sard said.

“Which engineer?”

“Any English engineer. There must be some.”

“Yes. There is one, Mason, at Chicuna Mine.”

“Can you go to him? Will you go?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell him of me and ask him to come here?”

“Yes. Listen. That corporal is a fool. He is put on to ask money by the lieutenant.”

“Indeed.”

“He is a greedy one, the lieutenant. But one who will squeeze his feet will bleed his mother, as we say. And to ask money of one whom God has afflicted . . .”

“You, who ask no money, shall be well rewarded.”

“I ask no reward,” the man said. “God forbid that I should make profit from distress. One thing only I would ask: that you would lend me your coat, so that I could leave the barracks, since in uniform it is forbidden.”

“Truly I will do that,” Sard said.

“If you will pass it through the bars,” the man said, “then I will put it on and hurry to the Chicuna Mine, so as to be there before the whistle blows. It will blow for dinner and siesta in a few minutes now.”

Sard knew that the siesta hour must be very near and that the moment was propitious for the finding of a fellow-countryman. He had only been a few minutes in prison, but already the thought of being locked up through the siesta when he might be outside made him anxious for the engineer to be there.

“Give to the engineer this card,” he said, “and urge him hither at once; any engineer who speaks my tongue.”

“There is a penalty,” the man said, “if we are caught outside the gates in uniform.”

“What penalty?”

“That of the thumbs.”

“Still, in this coat,” Sard said, “you could surely pass out unobserved?”

“They will not catch me,” the man said; “and if they do (though they will not), it will be well worth while, since to help the afflicted can never be a sin. This will I always maintain.”

“Surely rightly,” Sard said, stripping off the old and oily jacket. “But here is the disguise for you; this coat. You had better take the cap as well.”

Sard could just make out that some other soldiers were in the yard not very far away.

“Is it safe?” he asked. “There are men there who may see you take the coat. Will they betray you, if they see you?”

“Never,” the man answered. “They are my brothers, set there to watch for the corporal.”

“Take then the coat and cap.”

The soldier cast a glance about him, to see if it were safe to take them; then he slipped them through the bars and under his coat. “Wait yet, one moment,” he said; “should you desire food or drink, I would buy some, if you would give the penny. I mention this, because otherwise you will have neither food nor drink.”

“Thank you, I need neither food nor drink,” Sard said, “but only the engineer, as soon as you can bring him.”

“Right, Excellency,” the man said. “And now it will be necessary that I close the shutter.”

“Right,” Sard said. “And thank you.”

The man closed the shutter. “I will start straight away,” he said.

Sard heard him move away to the other soldiers who were standing in the shade of the wall.

“I have the coat,” he said proudly to his comrades. “And not only that, he said, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ I had asked for the coat as a disguise, thinking it the limit that I could ask, when, lo, he himself says, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ ”

There came a roar of laughter from the soldiers.

“Cap and coat too?”

“Yes; and it was he himself who said, ‘You had better take the cap as well.’ And I had not thought of the cap. Never once should I have dreamed of it. But he himself thrust it on me, ‘Take the cap as well, O take the cap as well.’ ‘I beseech you,’ he said to me, ‘take the cap as well.’ ”

“It is a French cap, Martin,” one of the soldiers said. “The Little Twig-Legs remarked of it, that it is a French cap. Thus we have the Paris fashions at Tlotoatin.”

“Mind” (another said) “that the French cap do not bring within itself the French crown.”

“This Englishman is more innocent than Joseph.”

“Wait, Martin,” one of the men said; “did not this Englishman offer you money?”

“Money? Why, he has no money. I, who watched his face, know well that he has no money.”

“No money and no coat and no cap.”

“Stay yet,” one objected. “He handed you paper, as I myself observed. Was not that money?”

“It was this, which I was to give to an engineer.”

“What engineer?”

“One Mason, of the Chicuna Mine: such being the names which came into my head. He asked, ‘Is there an English engineer?’ ‘Truly,’ I said, following my inspiration, ‘there is Mason of the Chicuna Mine.’ ‘Give him this, then,’ he said.”

“What is it?”

“I know not. Writing. He had several like it.”

“Is it English money?”

“No. The English use only gold.”

“Accursed Lutherans, and that they steal!”

“I think that the writing is the symbol of a secret society to which all these dogs belong,” one of the soldiers said. “These symbols they pass to each other by messengers to give warning of their accursednesses.”

“Tear it up then.”

“Meanwhile,” Martin said, “I will with this coat and this cap to Eustaphia; madre de las putas that she is, even she will assuredly give me one twenty-five for them.”

“They are old,” a soldier objected. “She will not give one twenty-five, but one five, or one ten, not a Portuguese milrei more.”

“One five or one ten. They are of European weaving and will last for many lives. But to market.”

As the soldier passed Sard’s door, to market the coat and cap, he called out, with a fair imitation of Sard’s voice and accent:

“Take then the coat and cap. You had better take the cap as well.”

As a blow, which would have been pleasanter than an answer, was impossible, Sard kept silent, though his thoughts were bitter. In about ten minutes, Martin returned triumphantly. He passed close to the cell-door, so that Sard not only heard him but smelt the fragrant reek of the hot tamales and annis brandy, which he had bought with the spoils.

“See,” he said, “she being glad with brandy gave me one-forty.”

“One-forty; is it possible?”

“Let us, then, into our room, away from corporal and Little Twig-Legs.”

“Stay yet,” one soldier said. “Shall we not give a tamale and a tot of brandy to this Englishman?”

“He has refused it,” Martin answered. “He refused it with scorn, almost with insult. ‘I need neither food nor drink,’ he said, ‘only the engineer, who is my sole passion, now that my wife has fled with the lodger.’ ”

Sard would have been very glad of a tamale and a drink of water, but neither was offered. The men moved off and closed a door behind them. Soon after that, the hooter-whistles blew at three different mines. A trumpeter, taking the time from them, blew a call in the patio of the barracks. For a few minutes Sard could hear the shuffling of many feet, hurrying to those calls to dinner and siesta. “No one will come to me now,” Sard said, “for three hours. I am locked in till they choose to remember me, and nobody who knows me knows where I am.” He tried the door, which was locked, as well as barred across: the upper and lower panels of it were metalled. He tried the walls: they were made of a kind of adobe which had been furnace-burnt: they were brick. The roof he could not easily reach, except at the back of the cell. The floor was of clay which had been puddled and beetled.

Of all these four barriers, the floor seemed to him to be the most easy to remove. He hung the handkerchief, “A present from Bradford,” over the grating in the door, lest some spy should pull back the shutter. When he had done this, he knelt down close to the back of the cell, took out his knife and began to dig bare the lowest courses of adobe.

His knife had been given to him years before as a keepsake by his second in the port main; it had been with him in his first voyage in the Venturer, and ever since, in all his sea-going. It had not been taken from him by the soldiers, because they had not expected that any man would carry a weapon where a sailor carries his knife. They had tapped his side, breast and hip pockets, but not the middle of his back. The knife was of the common type of sailors’ sheath-knife. He had cut nicks on the handle, a nick for every passage completed between port and port; thirty-six nicks altogether. The sheath was not the original sheath, but a gift from a sailor called Panther Jack, who had made it for him in the Pathfinder out of an old boot. The knife-blade was worn away to a thin crescent of steel by repeated sharpenings at the grindstone. It was as good a knife as a man might hope for in work aloft, cutting stops or ropes’ ends, but it was the poorest kind of trowel. In his eagerness, he put too much weight upon it and snapped the blade across about an inch from the handle.

He was disheartened by this, but continued to scrape till he discovered that the pounded clay on the floor had been laid on a spread of pebbles set in mortar. The mortar was queer stuff, very hard near the pebbles, but soft between them. It took Sard one hour to clear out three pebbles. Under the third was an iron bolt, or nail, the length and weight of a marline-spike. It had been bent a little. In its day it had had a good deal of battering. It was rusty, but very well fitted to be a punch to drift out other pebbles. Using a pebble as a mallet, Sard was making good progress when a low voice called him:

“Kid!”

“Who’s there?” he asked.

“Say, Kid, don’t make any noise, but come right up to the hole there.”

Sard came cautiously, half expecting a missile through the hole. He saw that the hole was blocked by a man’s face, which so shut out the light that he could not recognise it.

“Say, Kid.”

The face swung away from the hole, for the stone on which the man was standing slipped a little. Sard recognised the ugly-looking train-hand who had watched him from the after-car.

“Say, Kid,” the man repeated, as he clawed back into position, “you wanna get quit of here, or you’ll line the cold-meat cart.”

“I’m trying to get quit,” Sard said.

“Well, you wanna try pretty dam’ hard. You was on the silver line and you ain’t got any plunks, I guess.”

“No.”

“Well, you wanna get out before sundown, sport. These silver-escort guys, they’ll keep a man till sundown, to see if he’ll pay to be let out. If he can’t, they bring him into the yard ‘for exercise’ and shoot him full of holes. If any question’s asked, they say they shot him while he was trying to escape. What the hell did you stay on the train for till she pulled up? I gave you the flag to beat it, and you put your dam’ hoof right on it.”

“I thought you were going to shoot me,” Sard said. “Anyhow, I could not have jumped from the train, because my leg is queer.”

“Hell!” the man said. “You ain’t got ten plunks?”

“No.”

“I mean, sewed away anywheres, against an emergency?”

“I haven’t a penny.”

“Because if you have ten plunks, you’re up against your emergency, don’t you make any mistake.”

“I haven’t a farthing.”

“Hell!” the man said, “I was cleaned out at pinochle myself, only last night, by that dam’ Dutchman. Hell!” He climbed from his perch, readjusted his foothold and clambered back.

“Dam’ that Dutchman’s soul and that dam’ Las Palomas Pilsener.” He seemed to be busy with his hands and eyes: soon he spoke again.

“Say, Kid, you gotta get out-a here. Watch-a doing? Digging?”

“Yes.”

“Is the roof ceiled inside? I see it is. Hold on, then, till I have a try.”

Sard heard him heave himself up on to the roof, where he seemed to lie prone, working busily, with very little noise, for ten minutes. It was still siesta time, but Sard judged that someone in the barracks might see or hear at any moment. Mutterings, mainly curses, came from the man on the roof, with the scraping and raking of tiles. For all the attempt to keep quiet, a good deal of force was being used; soon pieces of tile went slithering down the roof with what seemed to Sard a devilish tumult. Then the man seemed to get a purchase on a key-tile and wrench it this way and that, with the noise of a riveter’s yard. Sard felt that any sleeper within a hundred yards must be roused by the racket. Worse followed, for the tile broke; some of it flew off into the yard and smashed upon a stone, the rest bounced on the roof and then slithered down it and off it: the train-hand cursed it and its parents.

One of the soldiers, who had been sleeping in the barton, came into the yard, looked about him, saw the man on the roof and challenged.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m mending this dam’ roof. Remediando this dam’ teja.”

“Who told you to mend the roof?”

“The capataz and also the teniente.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes, my brave, it is true. Go you and ask them if you don’t believe me.”

“What do you say?”

“Go you and ask them, if you do not believe.”

“They did not say so to me, that the roof should be mended.”

“See here, brother: they said so to me. Do you get that? To me, that is me here, they dicoed that I should mend this dam’ roof; and I’m mending it; and when it’s ended, you can have the dam’ bits to scratch with.”

“Bueno,” the man said, after a pause. “Esta bueno.”

“I guess it is bueno,” the train-hand muttered. “It’s pretty dam’ bueno, if you ask me.”

He went on working. Having cleared away two tiles, his task was easier, because he could get at the pegs in the heads of the course below them. He cracked each tile at the peg by a smart tap, then shook it clear and piled it to one side. Presently he wrenched a couple of laths away, beat violently downwards with them and knocked a foot of the ceiling into Sard’s cell. He had begun his work with some precautions against noise: he now took none. A second soldier came yawning out of the barton. He stood staring with his mate at the breaking of the tiles.

“What is he doing?” he asked.

“Mending the roof.”

“Verdad?”

“Verdad.”

“See here now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “can you ketch aholt of these laths and give a swig down on them?”

“Yes.”

“He is talking to the prisoner,” the second soldier said to his comrade. “He ought not to talk to the prisoner.”

“Assuredly he ought not.”

“And what was I saying to the prisoner?” the train-hand answered. “The prisoner was talking to me. He was complaining that I broke his siesta.” He bent his head down, as though speaking to Sard. “You say you’ll complain at having your siesta broken; complain to the capataz. You’ll complain hell. I’m doing my duty in mending this roof.” Then under his breath he added in English: “Two more swigs like that and she’ll make hell-gate on the flood. Heave, Kid, you can git more purchase on it than I can.”

Sard could get purchase on it, by leaping up, catching at a lath or at the plaster, and tearing it down by his weight. The noise of the wreckage falling into the cell gave the two soldiers some uneasiness. They looked at each other at each fall, with comments.

“He is making much mess.”

“Assuredly.”

“Do you think that it is all right? What?”

“That is what I ask.”

“I heard no word of the mending of this roof.”

“Nor I.”

“I half think that I ought to report it.”

“Such is half my thought also.”

“Assuredly, if aught should happen that should not . . .”

“Then, indeed . . .”

“Suppose, then, that you acquaint the corporal . . .”

“Yes; but if all be truly well, if the roof be entitled to this mending, then shall we be like him who, fearing the burglar, shot the priest.”

“If it be not so entitled, on the other hand, what then?”

“Then, indeed . . .”

The train-hand judged that this conversation had reached a danger-point. He started a counter-topic.

“My aunt hell,” he cried.

“What is it?” the soldiers asked.

“Good Sarah, watch the devils.”

“Watch what?”

“Say,” the train-hand said, in an excited tone, “Pronto now, where does this ceiling end? At each end of the building, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but why, what has happened?”

“Get you within doors, then; one at each end; quick now; take sticks. Do as I tell you; quickly.”

“Yes, yes; here are sticks; what are we to do?”

“Into the building, one at each end, quickly now. It is rattlesnakes curled up here, twenty at least. Get in. I’ll drive them down to you. There is a reward, half a peseta a rattle. One at each end, now. And watch. I’ll drive them down to you.”

“Watch where?”

“Where shall we watch?”

“At the ventilators. Quick, quick, or they’ll be gone. Get down and kill them as they crawl out. It will be ten pesetas each.”

The men did not know where to go, but realised that they were to be indoors, watching the ventilators. They had picked up laths from a bundle lying against a wall. After a half a minute of confusion, turning this way and that, they did as they were bidden, they ran indoors, one at each end of the building.

“Shut the doors behind you,” the train-hand cried, “or they’ll be out into the yard.”

The doors were slammed to.

“Now,” the train-hand said to Sard, “now, Kid, hump yourself. Get a holt of this rafter and out, pretty P.D.Q.”

Sard leaped to the rafter, caught it, drew himself up to it, got an arm over it, got his head above the roof and saw the station and the desert, both beautiful with freedom. The train-hand gripped him by the belt and hove upon him. With a wrestle and a struggle he got his other arm over a rafter, then his knees; he was on the roof top.

“Beat it, Kid, like hell,” the train-hand said. “Here’s Twig-Legs.”

Sard just saw that someone was entering the yard from the barton. He did not stay to see who it was, but shot himself off the roof into the waste with one heave. He swerved to his left under cover of the barrack wall and “beat it” as his helper had bade. His helper hurled bits of tile into Twig-Legs’ face, then flung himself off the roof and “beat it” in the other direction.

Sard turned at the angle of the barracks into a sandy street of adobe houses, some of which had white canvas screens spread across their stoops. The street was like a street of the dead in the siesta. A few dogs, the exact colour of the sand, lay in the sun as though killed by a pestilence. Sard dodged their bodies, darted down a lane to the right, and found himself barred by a wall, which was topped by spikes. He got hold of a spike, swung himself up and scrambled over, into a graveyard in which the dead seemed to be coming out of their graves.

The rats and dogs snarled at him as he crossed the graveyard, the skulls looked out at him, the hands clutched at him. He went across the graveyard and out of it, by a gap where the wall had fallen, into a lane. He turned to his left, ran along the lane for about fifty yards and turned sharply to his right into a street of detached houses, some of which had palms growing in boxes at their gates. He walked along this street for a little way, listening for pursuers but hearing none.

“I must find out if they’re after that train-hand,” he said; “I must find that train-hand and thank him.”

He listened intently, expecting to hear a tumult at the barracks, but all was still there. He brushed the plaster and tile dust from his clothes. He regretted that he had no hat: not even “A present from Bradford,” which he had left screening the shutter on the door of his cell. He remembered suddenly three cases of murderers arrested from having lost their hats at the scene of their crimes. He remembered another case, from the time of the Terror in Paris, of a man saved from the guillotine by having a hat thrust suddenly upon his head, while he waited his turn in the dusk and rain at the place of execution. When his turn came at the end of the batch, he was judged to be one of the spectators and passed by.

“I’m suspect without a hat,” he thought, “and I am also guilty of train-trespass and prison-breaking. But I’m not going to beat it from here till I know whether that man has beaten it.”

He turned to his left, walked along another sandy road of silent adobe houses and sleeping dogs, and soon reached a road which he recognised. Far down it, a quarter of a mile away, on the left, was the barrack entrance, with its flag-pole, bearing the green-grey-blue tricolour of the Occidental Republic. Opposite Sard, as he stopped to reconnoitre, was a pulperia, with a hoarding on its roof. It was this hoarding which was familiar; he had noticed it while he was being led to the barracks; it bore a legend which he could now read, in translation:

Palace of Pleasure.

Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5¢.

Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.

Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.

“Beans, beer and a bed,” Sard thought, “how good those things are, and how lucky they are who can afford them. Well is it called a palace of pleasure, if that is the kind of life they live here. I begin to understand the phrase now: ‘he hasn’t got a bean.’ And at this time yesterday I was mate of a crack ship.”

From a mine to the westward from him there came the blare of a hooter, giving warning that siesta was nearly ended. Other hooters took up the blast, till the place rang with echoes coming back from the hills. Now from some of the houses workers came half awake, like sailors coming on deck, buttoning their shirts. They went slouching off towards the mines, rubbing their eyes.

A man came yawning from the door of the Palace of Pleasure. He had a straw-broom in one hand with which he pretended to sweep the doorstep. Half his face was covered with one hand as he yawned. It was the train-hand.

“Say, Kid,” he said, “step inside here.”

He stepped inside and shook the man’s hand and thanked him.

“Aw, come off,” the man said, shutting the door. “Come in here.” He led the way by a dark passage past a flight of stairs. Sard heard the rustle of skirts and smelt scent; looking up suddenly, he saw the heads of two women looking over the stair-rail on the landing above. One of them coquettishly sucked her cigarette to a glow as he passed, so that he might see her face the better.

The man opened a door into a room which had a bar at one side of it, and a long table, with benches, at the other. The bar was closed by a grating. Two men were asleep on the benches with their heads drooped on their outstretched arms; they were breathing heavily from purple faces: “Feeling their siesta doing them good,” the train-hand called it. A third man, powerfully built, with a mottled olive face, brass earrings and a purple neckerchief, was sitting at the table eating with his knife. He had a small slab of something pale upon a dish in front of him. He shovelled flakes of this on to his knife-blade and then shovelled them into his mouth. He was a noisy as well as an untidy eater, being still a little in drink. He seemed displeased at the entrance of Sard: he dug his knife-point twice into the table, as though into someone’s body, and he said nothing, which was unusual in a land where all at least offer to share their food and drink with the newcomer.

The train-hand took Sard to the end of the table away from the other three and sat him down.

“Say, Kid,” he said, “you wanna beat it right out-a here.”

“How about you?” Sard asked.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You broke prison. You helped me to escape. You flung a tile at the officer, and some of those men must have recognised you, since they came in on the train with you.”

“I’m not lying awake any,” the man said. “I’m one of the boys. But you ain’t. What in hell you doing here? That’s what gets me.”

Sard told him.

“Where you wanna get to?”

“Las Palomas.”

“How’re you going to get?”

“Could I get a ride on a freight-car?”

“No, sir. The only freight-cars from here is silver cars. There’s not much these ’Tale guys mind, but they mind their silver. You’d be shot, sure as hell.”

“Could I get a job on the train, shovelling coal?”

“Nit.”

“Why not?” Sard asked.

“Cut the train right out of your thought,” the man said. “The freight-cars ain’t going to be healthy to you. My mate Antonio will remember you.”

“Very well, then; I’ll walk along the line.”

“Hell, Kid,” the man said, “it’s a hundred and seven miles, desert all the way; and anyone seeing you on the silver line would shoot you sure as hell.”

“What am I to do then?”

“You could get a job in the Chicuna mine, sinking the new shaft. But I guess you’d have to stay a fortnight, before you touched your wad: they always hold back the first week. After that you could go in on the cars to Las Palomas. No, you couldn’t neither. You’d have to stay another week, or six days. They ain’t only but one train a week. They call her the Flying Fornicator or the Hop to Whoredom. I guess she’s about rightly christened.”

“I can’t wait,” Sard said, “I must start back right away. I’ll walk it. If I can’t walk along the line, I’ll shape a course of my own across the desert.”

“Watcha going to eat? Watcha going to drink? Kid, you can’t do it. Besides there’s snakes in the desert. Even the Jackarillers didn’t cross the desert from here. No, Kid; cut it right out; and go up to the Chicuna to-morrow before the whistle. It will be the quickest in the end. Here’s the boss; he’ll tell you the same.”

The boss came in with a demijohn and funnel; he had been doctoring cider with red pepper to serve as whisky for the later drinks of the evening. He was a very tall, fair-haired, sandy-moustached man, with a cold and evil blue eye. He carried a gun in front as well as one in a hip pocket. He nodded at the train-hand and cast an eye over Sard. He was in the business which brings men much into touch with the broken. He summed up Sard at once as being “on his uppers,” or penniless.

“Pitch,” the train-hand called. “ ’Low me to introduce my friend. What did you say your name was, Kid?”

“Harker.”

“Mr. Harker. Mr. Pitch Hanssen.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Pitch said: he did not look it. He put down his demijohn and funnel upon the bar, and stood there, looking at the company.

“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “Mr. Harker wants to get to Las Palomas. He ain’t got too much money; so I say he’d better put in a fortnight at the Chicuna. What do you say, Pitch?”

“He wants to get to Las Palomas?”

“Yes, or the coast,” Sard said.

“I guess you’d better inform yourself, sir,” Pitch said. “There’s only two ways of getting to a place; you know that as well as I do.”

“Pitch,” the train-hand said, “this gentleman’s a friend of mine.”

“If he’d like to order anything,” Pitch said, “he’ll be a friend of mine. But if he ain’t got any dough, or is the dead-broke bum I take him to be, I’ll ask him to take a walk. This is a place for men who can pay their way and can afford hats. Are you going to order, Alonzo?”

“Yes,” Sard said. “I am.”

Although his leg was numb from the poison, he could still move like an athlete. He slid from his bench to the landlord in one motion.

“I’m going to order you to mind how you talk to me.”

“Order me hell,” Pitch said. “You’d best order yourself a hat, you low-down hobo. Or order yourself a shave, while you’re at it. And now take a walk to some place where you can buy. Get out of it.”

He did not pull a gun, probably his guns were not loaded, but he poked up his left at Sard’s face as Sard had expected he would. Sard on the instant cross-countered with his right to the point. Pitch slithered sideways along the bar, fell, rolled over on the floor and lay quiet.

“Carai!” screamed the man with brass earrings, “Hijo de la gran puta. You dog-assassin of English!” He flung his knife at Sard with the backward flick from the wrist which “takes a year to learn,” so the bad men say. Had he flung the knife before screaming, Sard would have had the point through his throat, but the scream warned him; he had time to dodge. The knife stuck in the bar. Sard pulled it out. The two men at the table woke up. “Rough house,” one of them said.

“Cut out your dam’ row and let us sleep,” the other said.

“Carai, carai, carai,” cried the man with brass earrings. “I’ll give you dog-assassin with the bottle.” He came across the table at Sard with a bottle, knocking over one of the sleepers as well as a bench. Floundering in this wreck, he himself fell, cursing. There came a scurry of swift yet heavy steps on the floor above.

“Beat it, Kid,” the train-hand cried to Sard. “Here’s the missus.” He held the door open for Sard, who slipped through it to the front door, which was already open. He was moving swiftly, but had a glimpse as he fled of a monstrous woman, with an inflamed and frowsy face, who was floundering downstairs to him, calling him to stop. Something cracked the woodwork of the door to his left and something banged to his right: the woman was shooting at him.

He reached the street, turned sharply, ran round the house, scrambled over a low wall into an enclosure, and ran along it, while the pursuit grew loud behind him. At the end of the enclosure there was a wall, which he climbed. As he climbed it, there came cries of “There he is!” and bullets struck the wall and the earth beneath it. He dropped into a second enclosure. At the end of the enclosure there was a house, at the door of which a man lay in a chair taking his siesta with a gun upon his knees. The man woke up as Sard reached him, and at the same instant the pursuers reached the enclosure wall and opened fire. Sard slipped past the man in the chair into the house. He said, “Excuse me,” as he passed, and slammed the door behind him. There was a door on his left; a woman opened it, asking him, in Spanish, what was the matter. He said, “It is the washing, Madam,” and slipped past her and up the flight of stairs. On the upper floor were three children, who screamed when they saw him. He called out to them, in Spanish, that their mother was bringing them some sweets.

He tried a door, which was locked, and another door, which opened into a shuttered room; he then ran up the next floor. There was a door opposite the top of the stairs. He opened it, and found a young man lying on the bed, taking his siesta. The young man’s slouch hat was on the floor; Sard picked it up and put it on. There was no sash to the window of that room, but closed, green, jalousied shutters. He unhooked them, took a hurried look out, and found to his great joy that there was a fire-escape. He went down it, hand over hand, and reached the ground as the young man looked out, and asked him what in the blazes he was doing. He did not stop to answer, for he was collared, on the instant, by the man who had been sleeping in the chair. Sard back-heeled him, sent him flying and reached the garden gate, just as the woman and the three children came out of the door with a couple of dogs.

He got out of the garden gate with the dogs at his heels, and ran along the road, hearing the pursuit increase, as the men from the Palace of Pleasure joined in. He turned to his right, then sharp to his left, then again to his right, the dogs following him and joined now by three or four pariahs, which had been sleeping in the sand. The last turn that he made was into a blind alley. There was a wall at the end of it, overhung with trees. He leapt for a branch, but the branch broke in his hand, and he came down into the midst of the dogs. He sent them flying with a few blows, scrambled up the wall and down on to the other side. On the other side there was a woman sitting in a rocking-chair, knitting. “For the land’s sake,” she said, “for the land’s sake, young man, this ain’t no right of way. Go back the way you came.”

“I’m going back,” he said, and ran on.

“George! George!” the woman cried, “get your gun quick; there’s a rough-neck come through the garden.”

Somebody inside the house answered, “What’s that you say, Anna?”

Sard called to the man, “There’s a rough-neck murdered Mr. Davis; I’ve got to break it to the widow.”

“Stop him, George,” the woman said.

The man tried to stop him, and got one on the jaw which he remembered for a long time.

Sard got out into a road which led quite clear of the houses into the wilderness of the foothills. There was a sort of trail leading up the hill, through a sparsely-grown jungle of brushwood. He took his chance of snakes and dodged into the brush and zigzagged through it, keeping uphill all the time. At the top of the cañon, half a mile from the town, he stopped for a moment, but he heard people as well as dogs, so he set off downhill into a gully.

At the foot of the gully there were great rocks among which a little river ran. He ran upstream in the water for about a hundred yards, so as to puzzle the dogs, and then scrambled out of the water up a great rock. At the top of the rock there was a recess filled with dry sand and screened by boulders. In the sand were the fresh footprints of a wild cat, but Sard judged that wild cats are less dangerous than men, and flung himself down to get his breath.

In a couple of minutes he heard the dogs at the water, and the voices of men, encouraging the dogs to hunt. He judged that there were at least eight men up with the hounds, and others joined them. He could hear their conversation as they walked up and down, and poked among the rocks.

“He’s the silver bandit who broke gaol at the barracks this afternoon.”

Another said, “He nearly killed Hanssen at the Palace.”

Another said, “Mother Hanssen reckon she hit him with one of her shots; leastways there was blood under that wall.”

Another said, “He took to the water all right, but these dogs don’t seem to get the scent any.”

Another said, “Well, he must have gone upstream, because if he’d gone downstream, they would have got him.”

Another said, “He can’t have much breath left in him, the clip he has been going. Like as not he’s got in among these rocks here; maybe he’s listening all the time we’re talking.”

Another said, “The hell he ain’t got much breath! He goes over the darned ground like a darned cyclone.”

Another said, “Come, Peppy; come, Toto; I’ll just take this couple of dogs up along this further bank, and you get on upstream and see if we can’t pick up where he’s landed.”

A voice came from amongst the bushes: “Say, boys, did you get him yet?”

They said, “No, we ain’t got him yet, but we guess we’re going to get him.”

“I guess I’m going to get him too,” the voice said. “He come into my room, when I was having a lay down, and sneaked my hat right off of my pillow.”

“Well, come on,” said another, “and we’ll get him and the hat.”

They went splashing up the stream, and then presently all the dogs burst into a frenzy of barking. He heard cries of “They’re on to him! Come on, boys, they’re on to him; he can’t only be but a little ways ahead.”

Sard heard the hunt pass upstream and gradually grow fainter towards the head of the gully. He lay still for about half an hour. He heard some shouts and presently the footsteps of men returning, some distance up the stream.

“It’s very odd where he’s got away to,” one of them said.

Another said, “It’s my belief he never got away, but just lay quiet somewheres. Back in town is the place to look for him, if you ask me.”

Another said, “That’s right. You know that time the dogs went on like they was crazy; it’s my belief they was on a panther, not on a man at all. It was somewheres around here we lost him, and it’s somewhere around here we’d find him again.”

“Well, the scent’s cold now,” another said; “and not only that, the dogs has forgotten what he smelled like. Besides, the trail’s been all trodden out. We’d best get back to town.”

“Well, I ain’t going back to town,” said the young man, “not without my hat I ain’t.”

“Well,” another said, “no one seems to me to be able to describe the fellow. You saw him, kid; what was he like?”

“I wasn’t only half awake,” the boy said. “He was a great big fellow, an ugly fellow, and Pop says he was a big fellow; and he ain’t got no coat, only just pants and a shirt.”

A man said, “Well, kid, even if he were to spring up right among us now, I guess you couldn’t say it was him. Maybe he’s gone downstream after all.”

“Well, I guess I’m going to get my hat,” the boy said; “no cheap skate ain’t going to pinch my hat and get away with it.”

“That’s right, kid,” said a man, “you get him, and when you get him, soak him good.”

They moved away downstream all together, beating with their sticks as they went, to scare the snakes. Presently they were out of earshot, down the stream. Sard lay very still, waiting for darkness. He heard the hooters from the mines blowing for six o’clock. The light by this time was going from the river-bed, but from where he lay he could see the brush shining in the sun at the top of the cañon. He was very weary of lying still. He said to himself, “They’ve gone, it’ll be safe to move, I might be starting now.”

He was on the very point of rising from where he lay, when a rifle was suddenly fired, not twenty yards from him, on the other side of the river. It was a repeating rifle, followed by a second shot an instant later. He heard something snarl, and a man’s voice cried, “Got you, you son of a gun!”

Another voice said, “Well, was she a painter?”

The other said, “No, a wild cat, and she’s got her nest hereabouts. Maybe we could find the kittens. She’s got her nest somewhere among them rocks, the other side of the water. I see’d her little tracks, where she’s hopped from stone to stone, so as not to get her feet wet. See here.”

“What’s she carrying?” said one of the men. “Is it a rabbit?”

“Not it; it’s a woodchuck, I guess.”

“Are you sure she’s dead,” said one man. “I’ve known ’em to play dead, so as to get a bit of their own back.”

“She’s dead,” said the other. “See here. Pretty poor, too; skin’s no good, but I guess I’ll take her along. If we’d got dogs, we’d have them kittens out. See here, the tracks lead this way. Here’s the place she crossed. My, that’s a pretty good lep! But where did she go, after this? That darned bunch this afternoon have trodden out all the signs. She’s gone somewhere up them rocks, and it’s in among there, most likely. If you’ll give me a leg up, I’ll go up and have a look round.”

“Hold on a minute,” said the other; “it ain’t too light down here. I guess I’m not going to poke around in any cavern when this cat’s mate may be about. The toms are as bad as the shes, and if it’s up there laying for us, I’d guess we should know it. We’ll come around in the morning and bring a couple of dogs.”

“Now come on, man,” said the other; “the tom’ll have hidden the kittens to-morrow morning. Finish the job, now we’re at it. Give me a leg up.”

“I guess I won’t,” said the other. “These cats blinded old ’Lije Goldschmidt. He went after ’em into a place where he couldn’t see, and they fair tore his face off him.”

“Funk!” said the other man.

“I guess I am a funk,” said his friend; “but I don’t want to sit at any street corner holding a tin pan for pennies, the way old ’Lije done, for the rest of my days. But I’ll come along to-morrow morning, and I’ll bring a shot-gun, which is a sight more use than the thing you’re using.”

“Well, if you don’t care to come,” said the other man, “I’ll do it alone. You take my rifle and hand it up to me when I’m up.”

“No,” his friend said, “I ain’t going to be a party to no such foolishness. If you want to get your eyes clawed out, you can. Even if you got your rifle up there, you couldn’t see to shoot. It’s just darned foolishness, and I’m not going to stand for it. We’ve got the she, after waiting long enough, and the whistle’s been gone this half-hour. Take what we’ve got and come on, and we’ll come again in the morning.”

The other man growled a little at his friend, but, at last, picked up the dead cat and turned homewards up the gully. They stopped every now and then to complain of the steepness of the climb, then their voices ceased to sound.

It was fast falling dark and the stars were already bright above the gully. Sard cautiously rose, wondering whether the cat’s mate were thereabouts. He was very stiff from lying still. It was cold down there among the rocks and he was faint from want of food. He scrambled down to the water and drank. After groping about for a little while, he found the woodchuck, which he brought along.

He scrambled up the cañon on the side away from the town. It was very steep, the scrub was full of prickles. Presently he reached the top and saw a wilderness of scrubby foothills stretching away for miles, as it seemed, into the Sierra. Behind him, whenever he turned, he could see the lights of the town, and hear the dull thumping of the machinery and the noise of the band playing in the Plaza. On his right was a vast sea of ghostly paleness stretching away for hundreds of miles into the sky, where crimson faded into a kind of green. In the green, here and there, the tops of mountains made jagged marks. The stars were bright in the heaven. He looked up to the eastward stars, with the thought that by rights he should be in his ship, watching these stars, four degrees to the eastward from where he was. He realised that there was no reaching the coast by the railway line.

“I’ll go eastwards,” he said. “Among these foothills there must be some trail by which I can reach the coast.”

He had seven matches remaining to him. By the help of two of these he contrived a little fire, at which he cooked the woodchuck, by toasting collops of it upon skewers. It was not as juicy as rabbit, nor so rank as ferret, but something between the two. He saved some of it for breakfast next morning. Then taking his bearings from the stars he set out to walk to the coast. He knew the trend of the coast from the charts; it was all in his favour. If Las Palomas were one hundred and seven miles from him, he reckoned that he might reach the port of San Agostino in ninety miles. He judged that he might do it in four days.

At the end of two hours of walking, he entered a sheltered valley in a high state of cultivation. He burst through bushes into a track, which led, presently, to a settlement, where the people were already asleep. He could see the little grey-tiled houses scattered, at intervals, among orchards. Dogs barked at his approach. The smell of oranges came to him on a warm breath of wind. He found himself walking between two orange fields. He could see great globes of the fruit among the dark and shining leaves. Some oranges had fallen and lay beneath the trees. He took some and ate them, skin and all, as he walked. At the end of the village or community, the fruit was thicker on the trees, and he was planning to step into one of the orchards to take some oranges when two men with guns stepped from underneath the trees, and called to him to stop.

“What are you doing here?” they said. One was a European fruit-farmer, the other a native servant.

“I’m walking through,” said Sard.

“Walking through? Where to?”

“San Agostino.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the coast,” he said.

“On the coast? How do you expect to make the coast from here?”

“Walk there,” Sard said.

“Walk? Hell!” said the farmer, “you’ve come along orange-pinching. You walk to hell clean out of here, or you’ll get lead into you so mighty darned quick, that you’ll think a cyclone’s struck you. Now get out, and don’t stop to pick no flowers till you’re past the end of my plantation.”

Sard walked on along the trail; the two men followed him at a distance of about a dozen yards, until he was clear of the plantation. The trail led on uphill out of the valley. It seemed to go on interminably, winding up the foothills, but remaining a track, apparently a good deal used. At about eleven o’clock that night the track swerved to the left towards a northern valley, which Sard judged to be useless to him. A sort of track or trail led on in his direction. Though he did not know it, the track was one made in the course of centuries by animals going to drink at the brook below. He followed it for about half an hour and then came out on a lonely hillside, from which he could see no sign of human habitation except the glare in the sky above the mining town, now many miles away. He could see little but mountains, most of them covered either with scrub or with pine trees. A kind of ghostly glimmer stood out into the sky in front, from those peaks of the Sierra which ran into the snow. In the sandy soil among the sage brush all round him there were little scurryings and squeakings from the gophers. Far away, he could not tell how far, it might have been miles away, he heard the howling of solitary wolves, a noise more uncanny than the crying of owls and more melancholy than lamentation.

High up there, in the foothills, the wind never ceased. It stirred the sage brush continually so that the whole hillside seemed filled with footsteps and the noise of people pushing through the brush. He could go no further for that night, but scooped himself a place in the sand in a sheltered nook of the hill, out of the wind. There he covered himself up and slept.

All through the next day he held on across the foothills through the sparse-growing sage. He was already in the wilderness, for the hills were waterless even so soon after the rains. He saw no sign of man all through that day, except once, when he had a view of the desert far below with a train, trailing under smoke, going to the west. As he was still fresh, he resolved to march without food this day: this resolve he kept. He found no water anywhere until towards the evening, when he struck an animal trail which led him to a dripping rock. In the pan of water below the rock the carrion of a wolf lay. He stayed at the rock to catch the drippings till his thirst was assuaged: then feeling like a new man, he went on till he could go no further. This was a good day compared with what followed. He made good some twenty miles of his course. He slept on the ground where he stopped; but slept ill owing to annoyance from the ticks.

After some hours he rose up as a sailor will, knowing that his watch was at an end. It was about a quarter to four. He felt uneasy, and sitting up in his shelter, he heard horsemen close to him. He heard the muttering of voices and horses wrenching at the brush. After listening intently, he decided that what he heard was neither men nor horses, but some other thing, he could not tell what. He remembered now that some six weeks before, on board the Pathfinder, he had talked with an Occidental, who had come on board on ship’s business, about these very mountainous tracks in which he was wandering. He remembered that the man had said, “No one goes there, even to prospect for metals. They are bad places where bad things happen.” He remembered, too, stray bits of talk or of reading about these mountains, how nobody really knew them, except a body of men known as the Jacarillos, a tribe of most savage desert Indians, to whom all the most savage of the native bandits fled. These men, alone, were supposed to live in the Sierra, and when Sard sat up in the cold morning, hearing that muttering all around him in the dark, he judged that a war-party of the Jacarillos was passing that way.

Then he thought that that could not be so, because no frontiersman, and certainly no desert Indian, would speak when on a war-party, except by signs. There was something there that he did not understand. He crept very cautiously towards the noise, and presently was able to peer between boulders, at the hillside whence the noise came. It was not perfect darkness; he could see an open space where the brush was low. In this space, moving about exactly as though they had dropped something, which they were trying to pick up or hoping to find, were some gigantic men. One of them was standing not far from him. He was not very tall, less tall, perhaps, than Sard himself, but in bulk and bigness like a gorilla. They were going slowly over the ground in a suspicious way, muttering to each other. They were uneasy about something for which they were looking. Sard felt that they knew that he was there, and that they were looking for him. Then he felt that though they were men, they wanted some of the senses of men; they were like some race of men born blind, who felt for their enemies by some sense which men no longer have. They went very slowly over the ground across which he had certainly passed some hours before. They seemed to feel the ground and lift samples of it, then they muttered remarks about the samples. One of them, away to the right, the one furthest from Sard, seemed to be the captain. When this man reached the point where Sard had stumbled on his way to his lair, he paused and felt the ground and gave a little cry, at which all the others hurried to him. Sard could hear their mutterings and a discussion going on among them. Evidently they had come upon his trail and were puzzled about it.

For a few moments the thought of dealing with a race of giants was unnerving. He saw how such a race could live in that land in the great caves of the limestone, coming out only at night into the wilder places of the hills, taking their prey and going back before dawn. Then he thought, “They cannot be men, they must be bears. But if they are bears, it won’t be any better. They can only be grizzly bears who attack any man on sight.”

He kept still as a mouse for half an hour, while the bears loitered about and muttered among themselves and rummaged in the earth and seemed to find food, though he couldn’t think what. One of them came lumbering quite close to where he crouched. He saw him stand and look up at the stars, in an attitude exactly like that of one of the seamen in the Pathfinder, at the wheel. While he was standing thus, he seemed to be conscious of some scent that was not usual. Sard could see his head tip up and down in an attempt to get the stray wafts, to give some certain evidence, one way or the other. He moved away a little and repeated the process, and then moved back, moving with his head exactly like a questing hound and peering sometimes in Sard’s direction, yet not seeing him. At last he seemed to be satisfied, and went shambling off to his fellows. They moved off into the thickets and he saw them no more.

When he felt that they were out of earshot and smell of him, he turned his back upon that place and went on through the scrub up a hill that went up and up, yet never came to any summit. He must have walked for about two hours when he stopped suddenly, hearing a woman singing. It sounded like an Indian woman with a very sweet voice, singing one of the tuneless Indian songs. A little listening showed him that it was not a woman, but a little hidden spring of water, gurgling from a pipe to a trough. The air came with a waft of sweetness upon his face, as of azaleas in blossom and oranges in fruit growing together in a thicket.

He said, “There’s a house here.” He called aloud in Spanish, “Is anybody there? I am a friend. Is anybody there?” In front of him he could see this thicket, which smelled so sweet, all starred either with blossoms or with fruits. He knew from the look and feel of the place that it had been made by good people and was good, and that the people were there, watching him, to see what he would do.

“I am not armed,” he said. “I am an English sailor going to the coast. Don’t turn your dogs at me, but let me have shelter.”

Nobody answered, but he felt quite certain that the thicket was full of people looking at him.

He said, “Don’t shoot. You see I put my hands up. I am alone.”

He went forward to the thicket and there saw that there was no one, only a profusion of creeping flowers that looked at him like eyes, out of the darkness of the hedge. It must have been years since anybody had lived there. The hedge, which had been planted, had gone back to jungle. He walked round it till he came to what had been the gate. There he could see within a little ruined chapel with one bell. As he came through the gateway in the first of the dusk, a bird, perhaps an owl, which had been perched beneath the bell, flew out with a cry. Her wings struck the bell, which jangled a little. It was exactly as though Sard had rung the door-bell. He drew his breath and stood still in the court, wondering who would answer the bell.

It was still not more than twilight, but birds were stirring in the scrub, and colours could be seen. Some blue birds with orange breasts came wavering down among the bushes, tore a few petals apart, from wantonness, and flew on, talking to each other.

Sard stepped across the courtyard and looked in at the deserted chapel’s western door. It must have been built very soon after the Conquest. It had been deserted for perhaps half a century, which in that dry climate had not been enough to destroy it. The roof had gone, except over the altar. From the wall-plate of the falling roof great strings of flowers hung. Many flowers and grasses had sprouted among the stones. Just over the altar a bough had thrust through the wall, and had blossomed there with a white clustered blossom which smelled sweeter than honeycomb. The wall above the altar had once been painted in fresco. Most of the paintings were now gone, but Sard saw, as it were, the heads of men, eagerly looking upward. To right and to left of the door within the enclosure there were marks in the earth which showed where the mission huts had once stood. But monks, converts, mission, and the very memory of their dealings were utterly gone. Sard might well have been the first man to have stood there, since the mission ended. It ended in pestilence, he thought; nobody was left alive here for the mission to save. He judged that the pestilence which had destroyed the mission might still be there, in the air, the earth, the water. Yet the place seemed good, it was unvisited, it seemed sheltered, and there were no scorpions nor snakes.

He lay down in the shelter of the altar, and instantly fell asleep. He had not slept long before he became aware that somebody was calling him by name from infinitely far away, in a voice which was familiar and yet strange. The voice called, “Harker! Sard Harker! Sard!” from a distance so great that it seemed like another continent. He knew, in his sleep, that the voice wanted him to wake. He woke and sat up and found it still twilight there in the chapel, with the stars not yet gone from the hole in the roof. No one was calling, the blue birds were back again, tearing the blossoms, no call had disturbed them. He thought, “I wonder whose voice that was. I seem to know the voice”; and while he wondered, he fell asleep.

In his sleep he saw the owner of the voice, a boy called Peter Maxwell, who had been dead eleven years. He saw Peter, not as he had ever known him, but eager, like the faces in the fresco. He knew that Peter had some message for him, yet could not say it, having no longer any human tongue or any use for human thought. He saw Peter leaning out of the altar wall from the place where the branch was blossoming. Peter was stretching out his right hand to him, but what he wanted he could not tell. He cried out, “Peter, old man, is that you?” and in his gladness at seeing Peter so near, he woke up and saw the blossoming branch shaking, as though someone had brushed it by. It was daylight but not sunlight as he rose up. No one was there, no one had been there; the birds were still tearing the blossoms, uttering little cries. No man could have been within a mile of them, probably no human being was within ten miles, and yet he expected to see Peter Maxwell.

“Peter,” he said, “Peter.”

When he saw that there was no Peter, he thought, “That was a strange dream. Peter Maxwell has been dead since 1886. He died of yellow fever in the Cliomene. Yet that was Peter in my dream.”

He walked round the little enclosure. There was nothing to alarm him, except the sense that he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He was weary from his tramp and his hard day. He returned to the chapel and presently slept again. This time he slept for some hours, but towards noon, at about the time when his watch would be drawing to an end, he was aware that a trumpet was being blown and that armed figures were there, wanting him to go. With a little effort he cleared his eyes, so that he could see these figures. There were three: two women and a man. The man was standing between the women and raised above them. He was standing on the altar blowing a blast upon the trumpet, and the notes of the trumpet came out like flames, so that Sard could see them as well as hear them. The women were looking at him with faces so calm that they could not have been mortal, yet when they saw that he saw them, their faces became alive and incredibly eager. They both turned to him and bent to raise him, and with their free hands they pointed at the trumpeter, who shone in all his being and pointed the way to go, and blew upon his trumpet a blast like a cock-crow: “Get you gone out of here, get you gone out of here!”

In his dream Sard called to the trumpeter: “What is it, Peter, what is it? What is it, you great spirits?”

But the women faded from him, Peter faded from him into the wall, but he could still see the shining trumpet and notes like flakes of fire failing all around him. The trumpet dwindled slowly and resolved itself into the blossoming branch that had grown through a crack in the wall. The figures were gone, the fiery notes had vanished, only as Sard stood up he smelled very faintly a smell of burning. He walked to the altar and felt along the wall. It was a wall of perishing plaster. No one had been there. He went out into the enclosure, and as he passed through the door, he smelled again the smell of burning. “Get you gone out of here,” he repeated. “Get you gone out of here! What is that smell of burning?”

Once long before, far out at sea in the Pacific, he had smelled a smell of burning during the night-watch and had reported it to his mate. The mate said, “Yes, you often smell that here, at this season of the year. They are burning the scrub on the mountains four hundred miles away.” He thought of that remark now. Looking out of the enclosure at the thickets beyond, he saw a faint trail of smoke curling among some dwarf oaks.

“I believe this scrub’s on fire,” he said. “I’d better get me gone out of here, or I’ll be burnt like a rat in a trap.”

As near as he could judge, the wind was blowing from the north-west, and his course was to the east of north. If the scrub were on fire, as he supposed, he would have to get across its path. He left the enclosure of the ruined chapel and set off further up the hill to a clear space among the scrub, where he could see. The foothill on which he stood looked like a moraine across the track of some ancient glacier. From the top of it he could look right up the valley down which the glacier may once have flowed. The wind was blowing straight down this valley, driving a line of fire behind a wall of smoke, which was beaten down below the tops of the dwarf oaks. Suckers and snakes of flame ran out along the sides of the valley and over its summit. From time to time these suckers seemed to die out, but others always leaped up in front of them. It was advancing in a ragged line, coming pretty fast, with a crackling, hissing, sighing noise that sounded very terrible. Sard judged that it might be, at the furthest, a mile from him. It died down and glittered up like a living thing. At that distance it did not look like a raging fire, but it was laying all things dead behind it.