Chapter 21
Fiesta Day
Dade, rolling over in bed and at the same moment opening his eyes reluctantly upon the new day, that he hated, beheld Jack half-dressed and shaving his left jaw, and looking as if he were committing murder upon an enemy. Dade watched him idly; he could afford the luxury of idleness that morning; for rodeo was over, and he was lying between linen sheets on a real bed, under a roof other than the branches of a tree; and if his mind had rested as easily as his body, he would have been almost happy.
But this was the day of the fiesta; and with the remembrance of that vital fact came a realization that on this day the Picardo ranch would be the Mecca toward which all California was making pilgrimage; and, he feared, the battle-ground of the warring interests and prejudices of the pilgrims themselves.
Dade listened to the voices shouting orders and greetings without as the vaqueros hurried here and there in excited preparations for the event. He judged that not another man in the valley was in bed at that moment, unless sickness held him there; and for that very reason he pulled a blanket snugger about his ears and tried to make himself believe that he was enjoying to the full his laziness. He had earned it; and last night had been the first one of deep, unbroken sleep that he had had since that moonlit night when Manuel and Valencia rode in haste to meet this surly-browed fellow before him.
Jack did not wipe off the scowl with the lather, and Dade began to observe him more critically; which he had not before had an opportunity to do, for the reason that Jack had not returned to the ranch the night before until Dade was in bed and asleep.
“Say, you don’t want to let the fellows outside see you looking like that,” he remarked, when Jack had yanked a horn comb through his red-brown mop of hair as if he were hoeing corn.
“Why?” Jack turned on him truculently.
“Well, you look a whole lot like a man that expects a licking. And I don’t see any excuse for that; you’re sure to win, old man. I’d bet my last shirt on that.” Which was Dade’s method of wiping off the scowl.
“Say, Dade,” Jack began irrelevantly, “I’m going to use Surry. You don’t mind, do you? He’s the best horse I ever threw a rope off from, without any exceptions. I’ve been training him up a little, and I tell you what, Surry’s going to have a lot to do with that duel.”
Dade sat up in bed as if he had been pulled up. “Jack, are you going to make it a sure-enough duel?” he asked anxiously.
“Why?” Jack’s eyes hardened perceptibly. “That’s what José wants.”
“Do you want it?” Dade scowled absent-mindedly at the wall, felt the prick of an unpleasant thought, and glanced sharply at Jack.
“Say, I feel sorry for José,” he began straightforwardly. “As a man, I’d like him fine, if he’d let me. And, Jack, you’ve got everything coming your way, and—well, seems like you might go easy on this fight, no matter what José wants. He’s crazy jealous, of course—but you want to recollect that he has plenty of cause. You’ve stepped in between him and a girl he’s known all his life. They were practically engaged, before—”
“I don’t know as José’s love affairs interest me,” put in Jack harshly. “Do you care if I use Surry? I kinda took it for granted it would be all right, so I went ahead and trained him so I can bank on him in a pinch.”
“Of course you can use him.” That Dade’s hesitation did not cover more than a few seconds was proof of his absolute loyalty to Jack. Not another man living could have used Surry in a struggle such as that would be; a struggle where the danger was not all for the rider, but must be shared equally by the horse. Indeed, Dade himself would not have ridden him in such a contest, because his anxiety lest Surry should be hurt would have crippled his own dexterity. But Jack wanted to ride Surry, and Dade’s lips smiled consent to the sacrifice.
“All right, then. That horse is sure a wonder, Dade. Sensible? You never saw anything like it! I never saw a horse so sensitive to—well, I suppose it’s muscular reactions that I’m unconscious of. I’ve tried him out without a bridle on him; and, Dade, I can sit perfectly still in the saddle, and he’ll turn wherever I make up my mind to go! Fact. You try it yourself, next time you ride him. So I’ve cultivated that faculty of his, this last month.
“And besides, I’ve got him trained to dodge a rope every time. Had Diego go out with me and try to lasso me, you know. I had one devil of a time with the Injun, too, to make him disrespectful enough to throw a rope at me. But Surry took to it like a she-bear to honey, and he’s got so he can gauge distances to a hair, now, and dodge it every pass. I’m going to ride him to-day with a hackamore; and you watch him perform, old man! I can turn him on a tin plate, just with pressing my knees. That horse will—”
“Say, you’re stealing my thunder,” drawled Dade, grinning. “That’s my privilege, to sing Surry’s praises. Haven’t I told you, right along, that he’s a wonder?”
“Well, you told the truth for once in your life, anyway. Get up, you lazy devil, and come out and take a look at him. I’m going to have Diego give him a bath, soon as the sun gets hot enough. I’ve got a color scheme that will make these natives bug their eyes out! And Surry’s got to be considerably whiter than snow—”
“Huh!” Dade was watching him closely while he listened. For all Jack’s exuberance of speech, there was the hard look in his eyes still; and there was a line between his eyebrows which Dade had never noticed there before, except as a temporary symptom of anger. He had, Dade remembered, failed to make any statement of his intentions toward José; which was not like Jack, who was prone to speak impulsively and bluntly his mind. Also, it occurred to Dade that he had not once mentioned Teresita, although, before the rodeo his talk had been colored with references to the girl.
“Oh, how’s the señorita, by the way?” Dade asked deliberately.
“All right,” returned Jack promptly, with a rising inflection, “Are you going to get up, or shall I haul you out by the heels?”
Dade, observing an evasion of that subject also, did some hard thinking while he obediently pulled on his clothes. But he said not a word more about the duel, or José’s love-tragedy, or Teresita.
Since the first flush of dawn the dismal squeal of wooden-wheeled ox-carts had hushed the bird songs all up and down El Camino Real, and the popping of the drivers’ lashes, which punctuated their objurgations to the shambling oxen, told eloquently of haste. Within canopies formed of gay, patchwork quilts and gayer serapes, heavy-jowled, swarthy señoras lurched resignedly with the jolting of the carts, and between whiles counseled restive señoritas upon the subject of deportment or gossiped idly of those whom they expected to meet at the fiesta.
The Picardo hacienda was fairly wiped clean of its, comfortable home-atmosphere, so immaculate was it and so plainly held ready for ceremonious festivities. The señora herself went about with a linen dust-cloth in her hand, and scolded because the smoke from the fires which the peons had tended all night in the barbecue pits was borne straight toward the house by the tricksy west wind, and left cinders and grime upon windows closed against it. The patio was swept clean of dust and footprints, and the peons scarce dared to cross it in their scurrying errands hither and thither.
In the orchard many caballeros fresh from the rodeo were camped, their waiting-time spent chiefly in talking of the thing they meant to do or hoped to see, while they polished spur-shanks and bridle trimmings.
Horses were being groomed painstakingly at the corrals, and there was always a group around the bear-pen where the two cubs whimpered, and the gaunt mother rolled wicked, little, bloodshot eyes at those who watched and dropped pebbles upon her outraged nose and like cowards remained always beyond her reach.
In the small corral near by, the bulls bellowed hoarsely at the scent of their grizzly neighbor and tossed dirt menacingly over their backs; while above them the rude tiers of seats waited emptily for the yelling humans who would crowd them later. Beyond, under a great, wide-spreading live oak near the roasting pits, three fat young steers swung by their heels from a horizontal limb, ready for the huge gridirons that stood leaning against the trunk behind them. Indeed, the heads of those same steers were even then roasting in their hide in the smaller pit of their own, where the ashes were still warm, though the fire had been drawn over-night.
The sun was not more than two hours high when Don Andres himself appeared in his gala dress upon the veranda, to greet in flowery Spanish the first arrivals among his guests. The señora, he explained courteously, was still occupied, and the señorita, he averred fondly, was sleeping still, because there would be no further opportunity to sleep for many hours; but his house and all that he had was half theirs, and they would honor him most by entering into their possessions.
Whereupon the señoras and the señoritas settled themselves in comfortable chairs and waited, and inspected the house of this lord of the valley, whose luxury was something to envy. Some of those señoras walked upon bare, earthen floors when they were at home, and their black eyes rested hungrily upon the polished, dark wood beneath their feet, and upon the rugs that had come from Spain along with the paintings upon the walls. They looked, and craned, and murmured comments until the señora appeared, a little breathless and warm from her last conference with Margarita in the kitchen, and turned their tongues upon the festival.
Dade was just finishing the rite of shaving, and thinking the while that he would give all that he possessed, including Surry, if he could whisk Jack and himself to the cool, pine slope in the Sierras where was their mine. Every day of waiting and gossiping over the duel had but fostered the feeling of antagonism among the men of the valley, and whatever might be the outcome of that encounter, Dade could see no hope of avoiding an open clash between the partisans of the two combatants. Valencia and Pancho and two or three others of the Picardo vaqueros, who hated Manuel—and therefore had no love for José—would be more than likely to side with him and Jack, though he honestly wished that they would not; for the more friends they had when the test was made, the greater would be the disturbance, especially since there would be wine for all; and wine never yet served to cool a temper or lull excitement.
Without in the least realizing it, Dade’s face while he shaved wore a scowl quite as pronounced as the one that had called his attention to Jack’s mood. And, more significant, he had no sooner finished than he looked into his little box of pistol caps to see how many he had left, and inspected the pistol as well; for the law of self-preservation strikes deeper than most emotions, and his life had mostly been lived where men must frequently fight for the right to live; and in such surroundings the fighting instinct wakes at the first hint of antagonism.
“My riata’s gone!” announced Jack breathlessly, bursting into the room at that moment as if he expected to find the thief there. “I left it on my saddle last night, and now—”
“And that was a fool thing to do, I must say!” commented Dade, startled into harshness. He slid the pistol into its holster and buckled the belt around his muscular body with fingers that moved briskly. “Well, my riata’s no slouch—you can use it. You’ve used it before.”
“I don’t want yours. I’ve got used to my own. I know to an inch just where it will land—oh, damn the luck—It was some of those fellows camped by the orchard, and when I find out which—”
“Keep your head on, anyway,” advised Dade more equably. “Your nerves must be pretty well frazzled. If you let a little thing like this upset you, how do you expect—”
“It ain’t a little thing!” gritted Jack, loading his pistols hurriedly. “That six-strand riata has got a different feel, a different weight—oh, you know it’s going to make all the difference in the world when I get out there with José. Whoever took it knew what it meant, all right! Some one—”
“Where’s Surry?” A sudden fear sent Dade hurrying to the door. “By the Lord Harry, if they’ve hurt Surry—” He jerked the door open and went out, Jack hard upon his heels.
“I didn’t think of that,” Jack confessed on the way to the stable, and got a look of intense disgust from Dade, which he mitigated somewhat by his next remark. “Diego was to sleep in the stall last night.”
“Oh.” Dade slackened his pace a bit. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I think,” retorted Jack, grinning a little, “somebody else’s nerves are kinda frazzled, too. I don’t want you to begin worrying over my affairs, Dade. I’m not,” he asserted with unconvincing emphasis. “But all the same, I’d like to get my fingers on the fellow that took my riata!”
Since he formulated that wish after he reached the doorway of the roomy box-stall where Surry was housed, he faced a badly scared peon as the door swung open.
“Señor—I—pardon, Señor! But I feared that harm might come to the riata in the night. There are many guests, Señor, who speak ill of gringos, and I heard a whisper—”
Jack, gripping Diego by the shoulders, halted his nervous explanations. “What about the riata?” he cried. “Do you know where it is?”
“Sí, Señor. Me, I took it from the señor’s saddle, for I feared harm would be done if it were left there to tempt those who would laugh to see the señor dragged to the death to-day. Señor, that is José’s purpose; from a San Vincente vaquero I heard—and he had it from the lips of Manuel. José will lasso the señor, and the horse will run away with José, and the señor will be killed. Ah, Señor!—José’s skill is great; and Manuel swears that now he will truly fight like a demon, because the prayers of the señorita go with José. Her glove she sent him for a token—Manuel swears that it is so, and a message that he is to kill thee, Señor!”
“But my riata?” To Diego’s amazement, his blue-eyed god seemed not in the least disturbed, either by plot or gossip.
“Ah, the riata! Last night I greased it well, Señor, so that to-day it would be soft. And this morning at daybreak I stretched it here in the stall and rubbed it until it shone. Now it is here, Señor, where no knife-point can steal into it and cunningly cut the strands that are hidden, so that the señor would not observe and would place faith upon it and be betrayed.” Diego lifted his loose, linen shirt and disclosed the riata coiled about his middle.
The eyes of his god, when they rested upon the brown body wrapped round and round with the rawhide on which his life would later hang, were softer than they had been since he had craved the kiss that had been denied him, many hours before. It was only the blind worship and the loyalty of a peon whose feet were bare, whose hands were calloused with labor, whose face was seamed with the harshness of his serfdom. Only a peon’s loyalty; but something hard and bitter and reckless, something that might have proved a more serious handicap than a strange riata, dropped away from Jack’s mood and left him very nearly his normal self. It was as if the warmth of the rawhide struck through the chill which Teresita’s unreasoning spite had brought to the heart of him, and left there a little glow.
“Gracias, Diego,” he said, and smiled in the way that made one love him. “Let it stay until I have need of it. It will surely fly true, to-day, since it has been warmed thus by thy friendship.”
From an impulse of careless kindness he said it, even though he had been touched by the peon’s anxiety for his welfare. But Diego’s heart was near to bursting with gratitude and pride; those last two words—he would not have exchanged the memory of them for the gold medal itself. That his blue-eyed god should address him, a mere peon, as “thy,” the endearing, intimate pronoun kept for one’s friends! The tears stood in Diego’s black eyes when he heard; and Diego was no weakling, but a straight-backed stoic of an Indian, who stood almost as tall as the Señor Jack himself and who could throw a full-grown steer to the ground by twisting its head. He bowed low and turned to fumble the sweet, dried grasses in Surry’s manger; and beneath his coarse shirt the feel of the rawhide was sweeter than the embrace of a loved woman.
“You want to take mighty good care of this little nag of mine,” Dade observed irrelevantly, his fingers combing wistfully the crinkly mane. “There’ll never be another like him in this world. And if there was, it wouldn’t be him.”
“I reckon it’s asking a good deal of you, to think of using him at all.” For the first time Jack became conscious of his selfishness. “I won’t, Dade, if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“Don’t be a blamed idiot. You know I want you to go ahead and use him; only—I’d hate to see him hurt.”
To Dade the words seemed to be wrenched from the very fibers of his friendship. He loved that horse more than he had ever believed he could love an animal; and he was mentally sacrificing him to Jack’s need.
Jack went up and rubbed Surry’s nose playfully; and it cost Dade a jealous twinge to see how the horse responded to the touch.
“He won’t get hurt. I’ve taught him how to take care of himself; haven’t I, Diego?” And he put the statement into Spanish, so that the peon could understand.
“Sí, he will never let the riata touch him, Señor. Truly, it is well that he will come at the call, for otherwise he would never again he caught!” Diego grinned, checked himself on the verge of venturing another comment, and tilted his head sidewise instead, his ears perked toward the medley of fiesta sounds outside.
“Listen, Señors! That is not the squeal of carts alone, which I hear. It is the carriage that has wheels made of little sticks, that chatters much when it moves. Americanos are coming, Señors.”
“Americanos!” Dade glanced quickly at Jack, mutely questioning. “I wonder if—” He gave Surry a hasty, farewell slap on the shoulder and went out into the sunshine and the clamor of voices and laughter, with the creaking of carts threaded through it all. The faint, unmistakable rattle of a wagon driven rapidly, came towards them. While they stood listening, came also a confused jumble of voices emitting sounds which the two guessed were intended for a song. A little later, above the high-pitched rattle of the wagon wheels, they heard the raucous, long-drawn “Yank-ee doo-oo-dle da-a-andy!” which confirmed their suspicions and identified the comers as gringos beyond a doubt.
“Must be a crowd from San Francisco,” said Jack needlessly. “I wrote and told Bill about the fiesta, when I sent up after some clothes. I told him to come down and take it in—and I guess he’s coming.”
Bill was; and he was coming largely, emphatically, and vaingloriously. He had a wagon well loaded with his more intimate friends, including Jim. He had a following of half his Committee of Vigilance and all the men of like caliber who could find a horse or a mule to straddle. Even the Roman-nosed buckskin of sinister history was in the van of the procession that came charging up the slope with all the speed it could muster after the journey from the town on the tip of the peninsula.
In the wagon were a drum, two fifes, a cornet, and much confusion of voices. Bill, enthroned upon the front seat beside the driver of the four-horse team, waved both arms exuberantly and started the song all over again, so that they had to sing very fast indeed in order to finish by the time they swung up to the patio and stopped.
Bill scrambled awkwardly down over the wheel and gripped the hands of those two whose faces welcomed him without words. “Well, we got here,” he announced, including the whole cavalcade with one sweeping gesture. “Started before daylight, too, so we wouldn’t miss none of the doings.” He tilted his head toward Dade’s ear and jerked his thumb towards the wagon. “Say! I brought the boys along, in case—” His left eyelid lowered lazily and flew up again into its normal position as Don Andres, his sombrero in his hand, came towards them across the patio, smiling a dignified welcome.
Dade spoke not a word in reply, but his eyes brightened wonderfully. There was still the element of danger, and on a larger scale than ever. But it was heartening to have Bill Wilson’s capable self to stand beside him. Bill could handle turbulent crowds better than any man Dade had ever seen.
They lingered, greeting acquaintances here and there among the arrivals, until Bill was at liberty again.
“Got any greaser here that can talk white man’s talk, and you can trust?” was Bill’s mild way of indicating his need of an interpreter, when the fiesta crowd had grown to the proportions of a multitude that buzzed like giant bees in a tree of ripe figs.
“Why? What do you want of one? Valencia will help you out, I guess.” Dade’s hesitation was born of inattention rather than reluctance. He was watching the gesticulating groups of Californians as a gambler watches the faces of his opponents, and the little weather-signs did not reassure him.
“Well, there’s good money to be picked out of this crowd,” said Bill, pushing his hands deep into his pockets. “I can’t understand their lingo, but faces talk one language; and I don’t care what’s the color of the skin. I’ve been reading what’s wrote in their eyes and around their mouths. I can get big odds on Jack, here, if I can find somebody to talk for me. How about it, Jack? I’ve heard some say there’s more than the gold medal and a horse up on this lariat game. I’ve heard some say you two have put your necks in the jack-pot. On the quiet, what do you reckon you’re going to do to the greaser?”
Jack shifted his glance to Dade’s face, tense with anxiety while he waited. He looked out over the slope dotted thickly with people, laughed briefly and mirthlessly, and then looked full at Bill.
“I reckon I’m going to kill him,” he said very quietly.
Big Bill stared. “Say! I’m glad I ain’t the greaser,” he said dryly, answering a certain something in Jack’s eyes and around his lips. Bill had heard men threaten death, before now; but he did not think of this as a threat. To him it seemed a sentence of death.
“Jack, you’ll be sorry for it,” warned Dade under his breath. “Don’t go and—”
“I don’t want to hear any remarks on the subject.” Never in all the years of their friendship had Jack spoken to him in so harsh a tone. “God Almighty couldn’t talk me out of it. I’m going to kill him. Let it go at that.” He turned abruptly and walked away to the stable, and the two stood perfectly still and watched him out of sight.
“He’ll do it, too,” said Dade distressfully. “There’s something in this I don’t understand—but he’ll do it.”