Little lost lambs, p.41
Little Lost Lambs, page 41
Beyond the thicket Steve turned aside into a grove where they blundered into trees and stumbled over roots. Coming again into the moonlight the boy saw that they were near the knoll where they had pitched their camp.
“Go for it, Brantie,” he cried, “and wait for me when you get there. Take this.”
He pushed his rifle into the hands of the ethnologist and sped to where the form of Chai Bala lay on the grass some distance away.
Chapter VII
STEVE could make better time now that he was freed of his feebler companion and the heavy rifle at the same time. Only those who haven’t tried to do so think it is an easy matter to run with a service rifle in hand.
Gaining the girl’s side and without waiting to see if she was hurt, shamming or dead, he caught her up and began to trot toward the rocky knoll that glimmered invitingly—deceitfully near in the waning moonlight. His shadow, distorted, capered in front of him. His breath came in long pants.
On one side several Kuramas had emerged from a gully and were moving toward him. Behind him came the soft footfalls of horsehide boots on grass. Steve stumbled and staggered, wishing that he had not been fool enough to turn aside for the Kirghiz girl. His back prickled ominously when he thought of the strangling veil that had clung to his face. If they should reach him he would be too weak to fight.
Crack! A flash came from the knoll almost in his eyes. A bullet thudded into earth somewhere behind him. A second shot from Brant’s weapon almost took some hair from Steve’s head.
He ducked and winced praying that the ethnologist’s wild marksmanship would not be his end. A third shot, however left him unscathed and ended for the time being the pursuit.
Steve dumped Chai Bala to the ground inside the barrier of rocks and retrieved his weapon from Brant. The girl stood up immediately, and he saw that her cheek was bruised and bloodied by Grierson’s blow. Apparently she was not hurt otherwise, as she began speaking to Brant.
“She says,” whispered the latter, “that we must go away. The shooting will bring other Kuramas who will surround us and stop our breath. When she followed you from the loess region she came up another way, by a brook where the camel didn’t want to go.”
“What about Grierson?”
“Chai Bala says his breath will soon be stopped and we can’t help it. She’s rather glad of that, I fancy, and afraid we will try to join him. How do you feel? Can you breathe all right?”
“Sure. I guess her gag helped me to.” Steve was gazing alertly about the valley noting that the moon was almost down. It gleamed pallidly on the great snow peaks overhead and reflected itself in a wraith-like ghost on the lake. The Kuramas seemed to have gone into hiding, evidently waiting for darkness. “Why did she follow us?” he asked.
“Why, she wanted to keep you from having your breath stopped. When she found the grave by the loess mound she thought at first that Grierson had shot you. After digging up Kottek Ali enough to recognize him she saw that she was mistaken and carried on, camel and all. When the fighting began, she tried to get to you to tell you about her way out.”
Chai Bala, conscious that she was being talked about, beamed at Steve shyly.
“You come,” she repeated.
The two men decided that flight was their best chance. Very soon they would be hemmed in and the rifle would be scant protection in the dark. Chai Bala was able to walk and she guided them down the rear of the knoll, where they were in shadow, to the spot where Steve had first seen her camel.
There she waited a moment, listening, and shook her head. The men had heard nothing, but the girl made them take hands and Steve take her own hand. Whereupon she began to thread her way between outcroppings of rock, down a steep descent.
After an interval she paused and stooped, tugging at some object on the ground. While they watched, she dislodged a small boulder and sent it rolling downhill. Gaining momentum, it began to rattle through brush and crash over rocks.
“You come,” whispered Chai Bala.
She turned aside and began to run, silently, under some trees. Once or twice she stopped to allow a vague figure to pass in front of them or behind. Attracted by the sound of the falling boulder, the Kuramas were gathering at the spot they had left, calling to each other in guttural, chuckling notes.
Accustomed to the night, as a white man is accustomed to houses and streets and electric lights, she could find her way about with uncanny facility and seemed never to lose her sense of direction. Brant was entirely at sea as to where they were going and Steve was little better.
In front of them a rushing murmur grew to a mutter and to a low thunder. They saw the white of falling water and came out of the trees at the foot of a waterfall.
Keeping to the side of the stream, Chai Bala struck down the mountain slope, the water drowning whatever noise they made. It was quite dark now but the gray strip of water served to guide them.
Exhorted by the girl, Steve and Brant stumbled on wearily until the sky in front of them turned to salmon-pink and then to crimson. Birds made the brush around them alive with song, a fresh wind struck in their drenched faces.
“Listen!”Steve paused and Brant bumped into him. Far to one side of them came the crack of a rifle repeated at intervals. They pressed on, snatching a drink now and then from the stream.
All at once the reports came more quickly, with a blunter, deeper note.
“Grierson’s using his automatic. God help him when he comes to reload,” remarked Brant.
They strained their ears for the sound of fresh shooting. Nothing broke the silence of the Alai. After a hall hour had passed, Steve glanced questioningly at Brant’s haggard face, dimly to be seen now, in the half light of dawn.
Brant nodded. “I’m afraid we won’t see Grierson again, my boy.”
As it happened, he was wrong.
WHEN the sun was higher that day and they were passing through the red loess region under the timber line, Chai Bala was forced to climb a high ridge to get an idea of the lay of the land before them. For hours they had been passing from gully to gully, identical in formation and coloring. They were very weak by now and infuriated with thirst caused by the fine, red dust. But Chai Bala, knowing the danger of being tracked in the sandy clay, would not stop.
The girl had barely climbed to the summit of the ridge when she paused and touched Steve. A half mile away on one side was the canyon where they had camped coming up. He recognized the dome-like mound and the willow grove.
Brant unshipped the field glasses that he had retrieved the night before from their belongings. With the glasses Steve could make out what the sharper eyes of Chai Bala had already seen—a crowd of men walking slowly down the gorge.
At the head of the men went Grierson, his clothing mud-stained and red, without his rifle. He staggered and stumbled, his hands pressed to his face. It seemed to Steve that his face was the color of gold.
Behind the mine owner came a horde of Kuramas, making no effort to molest him, but, apparently, watching him.
Grierson staggered once more and sank to his knees. Then he rolled over on his face and moved no more.
“He’s mighty sick, or dead,” said Steve to Brant, describing what he had seen. “If he was another man, we might have to try for his body.”
“Eventually, we will,” Brant nodded, blinking reddened eyes. “I will know where to look for it.” He turned away with a sigh. “Come we must get away from here, Steve—if we can. Grierson is dead.”
“The same as Kottek Ali. But how?”
“His breath has been stopped by gold leaf. It is a custom known to the ancient Chinese who studied ways of dying easily, without disfigurement. A few tissues of gold leaf inserted in a man’s throat produces either death by strangulation as in Kottek Ali’s case, or—if introduced in smaller portions during sleep—slow intestinal poisoning. That, I fear, was the fate of Mirnoff.”
Steve stared at his friend. “Then one of the Kuramas entered the tomb there in the canyon and Kottek Ali—”
“Inhaled gold leaf into his larynx. We looked everywhere for an injury but into his throat.”
“Let’s go,” said Steve. They followed Chai Bala through the heat-ridden expanse of the loess until Brant declared his knees were giving out. Then the boy and Chai Bala who seemed tireless as an animal, supported him between them.
“Say,” muttered the boy whose thoughts were racing in haphazard fashion, “how did you come to guess it was gold leaf the Kuramas were using? You hadn’t guessed it yesterday.”
Brant gave a hoarse chuckle.
“If you had a mirror, Steve, you would not ask that.” Reaching up, the ethnologist pulled a strip of gold tissue off the boy’s cheek, and held it for him to see. “You’re covered with it, over the head, but none got in your mouth. Chai Bala seemed to know what was going to happen to us when she tied you up.”
THAT afternoon riders from the Kirghiz village who had been sent out by the chieftain to look for his daughter, sighted three stumbling figures covered with red dust moving down a gully toward the steppe.
The tallest of the figures had a brown face streaked with gold and was carrying on his back the thin form of an old man. Whereat the riders, recognizing the handiwork of the Kuramas, would have fled if they had not seen that Chai Bala was the third of the party.
Steve and Brant, as soon as they reached the village of the nomads, turned in and slept for thirty hours. When they were able to eat and ask questions they learned that Grierson’s men had left the Kirghiz the day the white men went up into the mountains. The beg had honestly enough kept the remainder of the baggage that was in his care until he could learn for certain that Grierson and the others were dead.
“Apparently Grierson’s men had no doubt he would never come back,” remarked Brant who was busy writing up his notebook. Later on he read one or two of the pages aloud to Steve:
Coupled with a knowledge of the preparation of gold-leaf and the mummy statues, certain traits stamp the Kuramas as undoubted descendants of the elder Tartar dynasties, as that great explorer Vladimir Mirnoff believed. I was deceived briefly by the existence of an Aryan mummy-statue in the outermost tomb; but this was clearly placed there by the Kuramas to warn or to frighten off intruders. I greatly fear that, in this same tomb the mummified body of a certain Aryan, John Grierson, has been placed. If so, it may be recognized by its blond hair, great stature, and a coating of gold-leaf upon the inner throat.
BEFORE they left, Steve took Chai Bala aside and put the fine pair of field glasses in her hand. Her eyes, which had been somewhat tearful at prospect of the boy’s departure, brightened at the priceless gift.
“You buy another white camel, see?” Steve urged her. “Camel—savvy—white. You buy one with them.” He pointed to the glasses.
Whether she understood or not Chai Bala nodded vigorously. Indicating the horses that her father was lending the two white men she drew upon her three words of English.
“Me come—you come?”
“No,” said Steve hastily. “You’re a good sport, Chai Bala—darned if you aren’t!”
She had dropped to the ground weeping. Steve, feeling very uncomfortable patted her shoulder and went away. Some distance from the camp he reined in his horse to wave good-bye.
Chai Bala was standing outside the tents, tiny beside the big form of her father. She was gazing after them through the field, glasses turned wrong end first.
TWO black rocks rising out of the sea. And the sea, here on the under side of the world, is never still. Nor is the wind ever still; and seldom does the sun—far to the north—break through the gray clouds.
These two rocks are the Evangelistas. They are the twin evil sentinels at the Pacific entrance of Magellan Strait down at the bottom of South America.
To the east of the Evangelistas, close at hand, are the rocky islands that fringe Magellan Strait. To the west, the Pacific.
The sea is gray, the fogs are gray. The gray curtain of rain shuts in the Evangelistas and the lighthouse that stands on one of the rocks.
When food is brought to the keepers of the light it is hauled up by a rope when the weather is fair and a whaleboat can approach the rock. Once the vessel bringing supplies to the Evangelistas waited forty days for fair weather.
So you understand that the Evangelistas are very much like a prison and the keepers of the light are the prisoners.
"The Good Book says," John Bruce repeats, "that God, when He made the world, separated the water from the land; but when He did that He must have forgot Tierra del Fuego."
It was the holiday season in the upper world—which means late spring in Magellan Strait—when Dave Thornton, citizen of New York City, approached the bar in one of the water-front saloons of Punta Arenas.
Punta Arenas, sometimes called the Jumping Off Place, was enjoying its holiday season. It was carnival time. A dancing floor had been installed in the saloon; a phonograph jangled merrily.
There were two reasons for celebration in Punta Arenas. The gold fever was running high; conquistadors had washed the metal by hand from the coastal barranca, and found it rich indeed. This had brought Dave Thornton to Punta, Also, a party of Norwegian scientists had come to study the strait. Women, hearing of the gold fever, had come hastily by steamer from Buenos Aires and Valparaiso. These women were mestizos, for the most part: but many were half-castes of Paris and Rio, handsome women, well dressed, for Punta had its rich men.
Some of them had been on the steamer that brought Dave Thornton and the celebrated Norwegians; they had not looked at him, except perhaps curiously. For one thing, he was palpably penniless: and in his sharp, young face was the wisdom of the world that lives by its wits.
"I want," said Dave Thornton to the negro behind the bar, "one job, Smoke. Know of any?"
A Jamaica black has a sense of dignity and is not accustomed to being addressed as Smoke.
"Hi sye," retorted the negro shrilly, "what a little man hit is, to be sure!"
Sheer surprise held Thornton's resentment in abeyance. As a stowaway on a British freighter he had come into conflict with unknown types; but he had never heard a negro talk like a Cockney.
"If you're twins," he grinned, "where's the other one?"
The barkeep was not much older than Dave. "Hi'm a Jamaica gentleman, sah!"
A negro would always rather chuckle than quarrel. A glance into Dave's alert, gray eyes rendered the black prudent. He smiled back, and before the evening was far advanced the two were friends. Jamaica admitted that jobs were plentiful, and Dave had visions of becoming personal assistant to a conquistador at one of the claims.
Contemptuously the young American surveyed the mob of Chinamen, Italians, Poles, and Kanakas, and the violently painted mestizos in the place. These folk were not what he sought; yet the night was passing, and he had urgent need of a bed.
At this point Dave perceived a rear room and, through half-drawn curtains, four men seated about a table.
Money was stacked on the table.
Dave walked to the door, and as he did so the barkeep, who was busy for the moment, called to him sharply. But the boy stepped noiselessly inside: straightway three of the four looked up. Dave recognized the glance. He had often indulged in craps in vacant lots of a Sunday.
Yet there was no law against gambling in Punta. In fact, there were very few laws at all in those days. A man's pasts his own affair.
Dave's lean face was wistful and guileless. So two of the four poker-players did not suspect that the boy who watched them from a near-by box had noticed that they dealt often from the bottom of the pack.
He was far too wise to comment on this fact. Once he had spoken unwisely during a fo'c's'le game, and had limped for a week from a lascar's knife-thrust. Dave duly noted that the two—Spiggotty swells, he classified the colorfully dressed, dark-faced Chileans—who dealt from the bottom of the pack were winning. They answered to the names of Manuel and Pedro. One of the others, an Englishman with a turkey-red face, who was addressed politely as Señor Juan, was deeper in drink and was fast losing the pile of tiny gold nuggets that had been in front of him.
It was the fourth man who spoke to Dave.
"You are looking for a job? You said so, yes?"
Dave surveyed him. He was Dom Calbuco, an elderly Portuguese. He had friendly black eyes and well-kept hands. His careless play showed that it meant little to him to lose.
Dave reflected that Calbuco must have heard him talking to the barkeep.
"Maybe," he admitted. "I'd like to get out to the gold fields."
Calbuco tossed, faces downs, three queens into the discard. Now, Dave had seen that Señor Juan, the Englishman, who took the pot, had held a lonely pair of tens. It struck him as curious; but his mind was intent on Calbuco's offer.
"Certainly," the Portuguese agreed. "I need a watchman—a guard. I will pay well." His black eyes scanned the young American appraisingly. "Ten pounds a month, when your job is ended. You can handle a revolver. You have one, yes?"
Dave carried an old Colt that he had bought after the painful experience with the lascar's knife. He had been raised among the gangs of the lower West Side, in New York, and fighting had been perforce a part of his education.
So it was agreed that Dave was to work for Calbuco for one month. For this he was to receive fifty dollars, gold. He would leave Punta on a coastal steamer for the place on the morrow at sunup. Meanwhile he could sleep on the vessel.
"You're sure it's out on a mining claim, Mr, Calbuco?" he insisted warily.
Calbuco smiled indulgently.
"A landmark, Thornton. Every one in the strait is bound for it."
When the game broke up the three others went out, Calbuco nodding cordially to Dave; but Mr. John remained slumped in his chair. He had lost a good deal to the two Chileans, and Calbuco had advanced him some money to make his settlement.
