The Quest of the Four Part 37

"Bedford," he said, speaking good English, "you have been a prisoner here a long time, and no one loves captivity."

"I have not heard that any one does," replied John, taking another drink of the bad coffee.

"You cannot escape. You see the impossibility of any such attempt."

"It does not look probable, I admit. Still, few things are impossible."

De Armijo smiled, showing even white teeth. He rather liked this game of playing with the rat in the trap. So much was in favor of the cat.

"It is not a possibility with which one can reckon," he said, "and I should think that the desire to be free would be overpowering in one so young as you."

"Have you come here to make sport of me?" said John, with ominous inflection. "Because if you have I shall not answer another question."

"Not at all," said de Armijo. "I come on business. You have been here, as I said, a long time, and in that time many changes have occurred in the world."

"What changes?" asked John sharply.

"The most important of them is the growth in power of Mexico," said de Armijo smoothly. "We triumph over all our enemies."

"Do you mean that you have really retaken Texas?" asked John, with a sudden falling of the heart.

De Armijo smiled again, then lighted a cigarette and took a puff or two before he gave an answer which was really no answer at all, so far as the words themselves were concerned.

"I said that Mexico had triumphed over her enemies everywhere," he replied, "and so she has, but I give you no details. It has been the order that you know nothing. You have been contumacious and obstinate, and, free, you would be dangerous. So the world was to be closed to you, and it has been done. You know nothing of it except these four walls and the little strip of a mountain that you can see from the window there. You are as one dead."

John Bedford winced. What the Mexican said was true, and he had long known it to be true, but he did not like for de Armijo to say it to him now. His lonesomeness in his long imprisonment had been awful, but not more so than his absolute ignorance of everything beyond his four walls.

This policy with him had been pursued persistently. Old Catarina, before her departure, had not dared to tell him anything, and now the soldier who served him would not answer any question at all. He had felt at times that this would reduce him to mental incompetency, to childishness, but he had fought against it, and he had felt at other times that the isolation, instead of weakening his faculties, had sharpened them. But he replied without any show of emotion in his voice:

"What you say is true in the main, but why do you say it."

"In order to lay before you both sides of a proposition. You are practically forgotten here. You can spend the rest of your life in this cell, perish, perhaps, on the very bed where you are now sitting, but you can also release yourself. Take the oath of fealty to Mexico, become a Mexican citizen, join her army and fight her enemies. You might have a career there, you might rise."

It was a fiendish suggestion to one who knew nothing of what was pa.s.sing, and de Armijo prided himself upon his finesse. To compel brother to fight against brother would indeed be a master stroke. He did not notice the rising blood in the face before him, that had so long borne the prison pallor.

"Have you reconquered Texas?" asked John sharply.

"What has that to do with it?"

"Do you think I would join you and fight against the Texans? Do you think I would join you anyhow, after I've been fighting against you?

I'd rather rot here than do such a thing, and it seems strange that you, an officer and the governor of this castle, should make such an offer.

It's dishonest!"

Blood flashed through de Armijo's dark face, and he raised his hand in menace. John Bedford instantly struck at him with all his might, which was not great, wasted as he was by prison confinement. De Armijo stepped back a little, drew his sword, and, with the flat of it, struck the prisoner a severe blow across the forehead. John had attempted to spring forward, but twenty-five pounds of iron chain confining his ankles held him. He could not ward off the blow, and he dropped back against the cot, bleeding and unconscious.

When John Bedford recovered his senses he was lying on the cot, and it was pitch dark, save for a slender shaft of moonlight that entered at the slit, and that lay like a sword-blade across the floor. His head throbbed, and when he put his hand to it he found that it was swathed in bandages. He remembered the blow perfectly, and he moved his feet, but the chains had been taken off. They had had the grace to do that much.

He strove to rise, but he was very weak, and the throbbing in his head increased. Then he lay still for a long time, watching the moonbeam that fell across the floor. He was in a state of mind far from pleasant. To be shut up so long is inevitably to grow bitter, and to be struck down thus by de Armijo, while he was chained and helpless, was an injury to both body and mind that he could never forgive. He had nothing to do in his cell to distract his mind from grievous wrongs, and there was no chance for them to fade from his memory. His very soul rose in wrath against de Armijo.

He judged that it was far in the night, and, after lying perfectly still for about an hour, he rose from the bed. His strength had increased, and the throbbing in his head was not so painful. He staggered across the floor and put his face to the slit in the wall. The cold air, as it rushed against his eyes and cheeks, felt very good. It was spring in the lowlands, but there was snow yet on the peak behind the Castle of Montevideo, and winter had not yet wholly left the valley in which the castle itself stood. But the air was not too cold for John, whose brain at this moment was hotter than his blood.

The night was uncommonly clear. One could see almost as well as by day, and he began to look over, one by one, the little objects that his view commanded on the mountainside. He looked at every intimate friend, the various rocks, the cactus, the gully, and the dwarfed shrubs--he still wished to know whether they were pines or cedars, the problem had long annoyed him greatly. He surveyed his little landscape with great care.

It seemed to him that he saw touches of spring there, and then he was quite sure that he saw the figure of a man, dark and shadowy, but, nevertheless, a human figure, pa.s.s across the little s.p.a.ce. It was followed in a moment by a second, and then by a third. It caused him surprise and interest. His tiny landscape was steep, and he had never before seen men cross it. Hunters, or perhaps goat herders, but it was strange that they should be traveling along such a steep mountainside at such an hour.

A person under ordinary conditions would have forgotten the incident in five minutes, but this was an event in the life of the lonely captive.

Save his encounter with de Armijo, he could not recall another of so much importance in many months. He stayed at the loophole a long time, but he did not see the figures again nor anything else living. Once, about a month before, he had caught a glimpse of a deer there, and it had filled him with excitement, because to see even a deer was a great thing, but this was a greater. He remained at the loophole until the rocks began to redden with the morning sun, but his little landscape remained as it had ever been, the same rocks, the same pines or cedars--which, in Heaven's name, were they?--and the same cactus.

Then he walked slowly back to his cot. The chains were lying on the floor beside it, and he knew that, in time, they would be put on him again, but he was resolved not to abate his independence a particle.

Nor would he defer in any way to de Armijo. If he came again he would speak his opinion of him to his face, let him do what he would.

There was proud and stubborn blood in every vein of the Bedfords. John Bedford's grandfather had been one of the most noted of Kentucky's pioneers and Indian fighters, and on his mother's side, too, there was a strain of tenacious New England. By some possible chance he might be able to return de Armijo's blow. He drew the cover over his body and fell into a sleep from which he was awakened by the slovenly soldier with his breakfast. The man did not speak while John ate, and John was glad of it. He, too, had nothing to say, and he wished to be left to himself. When the man left he lay down on the cot again and slept until nearly noon. Then de Armijo came a second time. He had no apologies whatever for the manner in which he had struck down an unarmed prisoner, but was hard and sneering.

"I merely tell you," he said, "that you lost your last chance yesterday.

The offer will not be repeated."

John said not a word, but gazed at him so steadily that the Mexican's swarthy face flushed a little. He hesitated, as if he would say something, but evidently thought better of it, and went out. That night he had a fever from his wounded head and the exertion that he had made in standing so long at the loophole. He became delirious, and when he emerged from his delirium a little weazened old Indian woman was sitting by the side of his cot. She had kindly and pitying eyes, and John exclaimed, in a weak but joyous voice:

"Catarina!"

"Poor boy," she said, "I have watched you one day and one night."

"Where have you been all the time before?" he asked in the Mexican dialect that he had learned.

"I have been one of the cooks," she said. "The officers, they eat so much, tortillas, frijoles, everything, and they drink so much, mescal, pulque, wine, everything. Many busy months for Catarina, and I ask for you, but I cannot see you. They say you bad, very bad. Then they say you try to kill the governor, Captain de Armijo, but he strike you on the head with the flat of his sword to save his own life. You have fever, and at last they send me to nurse you as I did that other time."

"Do you believe, Catarina, that I tried to kill de Armijo?" asked John.

She looked about her fearfully, drew the reboso closely across her shrunken shoulders, and answered in a frightened tone as if the thick walls themselves could hear:

"How should I know? It is what they say. If I should say otherwise they would lash me with the whip, even me, old Catarina."

The captive sighed. Nothing could break the awful wall of mystery that enveloped him. Catarina even did not dare to speak, although no one but himself could possibly hear.

"You mind I smoke?" said Catarina.

"No," replied John with a wan smile. "Any lady can smoke in my presence."

She whipped out a cigarrito, lighted it with a match, held it for a moment between the middle and fore finger, then inserted it between her aged lips. She took two or three long, easy whiffs, letting the smoke come out through her nose. John had never learned to smoke, but he said to her:

"Does it do you good, Catarina?"

"Whether it does me good, I know not," replied the Indian woman, "but it gives me pleasure, so I do it. I have to tell you, Senor John, that my son, Porfirio, has returned from the north. He has been at Monterey and the country about it."

John at once was all eagerness.

"And Antonio Vaquez, the leader of the burro train?" he exclaimed. "Has he heard from him? Does he know if the letter went on beyond the Rio Grande?"

"My son Porfirio has not seen Antonio Vaquez," replied Catarina, "and so he does not know from Antonio Vaquez whether the letter has crossed the Rio Grande or not. But it is a time of change."

"De Armijo told me that."