DON GERONIMO had been beaten hideously. He lay bound to the back of his horse, his face against its neck, as he evidently had been placed to receive the punishment that had been applied by unsparing hands. Yet not altogether unsparing, for Don Geronimo still lived, although he had not been spared in mercy, but in calculative cruelty, that he might be conscious of the end most dreaded by all living things.
It seemed that a thousand blows had fallen on his back, stripped naked to the waist. He was a pulp of purple, horribly gashed flesh. Blood from his wounds had drenched the horse's sides and stained the dry earth which had drunk it greedily. His castigators had calculated nicely the load of torture the human frame could bear. When Don Geronimo had fainted from the pain, Juan gathered from the evidence at hand, they had drenched his head with water to bring him back to life. His hair was still wet; he lay bound so tightly, hands clasping the horse's neck, feet drawn under its girth, that he could move nothing but his eyes, even if the strength for greater effort had endured for him to command.
Juan was so shaken by the disturbing sight that he stood for a moment inactive.
"Don Geronimo, Don Geronimo!" he said, his compassion so deep that it must have assured a man even on the threshold of death.
Don Geronimo could not move his head to see who it was that spoke in pity; he could only roll his eye, even that slight exertion seeming to rend his soul with pain. He did not speak; his great agony had not left him even a groan. Juan cut his bonds and lifted him from the horse, believing him on the verge of death. Don Geronimo lay limp in Juan's arms, staring without sense or thought, it appeared, into his face. His throat constricted, his jaw sagged. Juan believed the door opened to let his soul step out into the mystery.
"I am a dead man, Juan," Don Geronimo said, his voice a husky whisper. "Save yourself from the fire—go!"
"Can you ride, Don Geronimo?"
"I can only die," Don Geronimo answered, bitter for his own weakness, it seemed. "The fire-is near—ride, Juan, ride for your life! Mine is done."
He sank to the ground, closing his eyes, the last of his strength consumed in these words. Juan threw the sheepskin on the horse, lifted Don Geronimo to it in the position he had lain before, and bound him there. The horse was restive; it braced its legs and tugged to break loose, snorting in fear of the fire.
The creature's sudden panic struck Juan's horse like a contagion. Until that moment it had stood where Juan had dropped the reins, confident in the wisdom of its master, unshaken in the menace of the fiery storm from which, left to its own resources, it would have fled. Juan sprang to secure it to a shrub; it reared as he reached for the dangling reins, snorted a blast of terror, dashed way in thebrush. Juan ran after it, his reason dispersed almost as completely as the horse's by this sudden calamity. The roar of the fire drowned his voice; the horse was lost to sight in the swirl of driving smoke.
Don Geronimo appeared to be unconscious, lying nerveless as the dead with closed eyes and sagging head. Juan twisted the bridle reins around his hand and plunged off in the direction his own horse had gone, the frantic creature that carried Don Geronimo struggling to pass him and tear free. It required all his strength to hold the horse, which dashed through the thick brushwood dragging him after. A branch took his hat; he had neither time nor power to stop and recover it, but he was assured by the determination of the horse to go in that direction that a way to safety lay ahead.
This was a false hope, as proved in a moment when his own horse came running wildly back. Juan called to it, tried to throw himself in front of it and stop it. The mad creature swerved, and broke past him with a crash in the tangled brushwood, and was gone.
Juan turned to follow it, knowing that fire must have cut off its escape. He must go back along the ridge toward the western point, looking for an opening, let it be never so steep and the chance of passing it never so desperate, that would let them down the northern side of the mountain to the security of the valley. The barring brushwood limbs tore Don Geronimo's wounds. Whether he was conscious of this added torture Juan did not know, but he was assured by the flow of blood that Don Geronimo was still alive. He tore off his jacket and struggled with the crazy horse while he fastened it over Don Geronimo's bleeding back. On again, retracing the way he had come.
A blast of hot wind struck him as he left the shelter of the greasewood thicket, staggering him, setting him back momentarily blinded and gasping. It was a breaker of fire, a surge of stifling smoke streaked with flying points of flame. Close on his heels this outrunning wave of fire caught the greasewood jungle, leaping high, rolling a sudden burst of black smoke as from a broadside of cannon-shots.
Juan bent against the hurricane that swept the mountain top, struggling blindly on, the horse singularly passive beside him. Its panic seemed to have given way to a trembling paralysis of fear, in which it realized that a greater intelligence would guide it through the wild sowing of fire. Juan felt the skin of his face tighten, the hiss of fire as it crinkled his hair. The horse was singed. Don Geronimo's beard was smoking as Juan pressed against him to break the fire from his face.
Across the top the fire was farther down the slope. Here the air was clearer, although little brands were setting the brown vegetation that not long ago had been a mass of yellow bloom. Now it was to bloom in a more ardent hue, and sing with a sharp piping as the red surge laid it low in a breath.
Juan's horse came galloping back from its frantic seeking to the westward, its hide singed bare in spots, its saddle leather smoking, the stirrups thrashing its sides in wild spurring on this desperate race.
The mad creature wheeled as it faced the turmoil of fire from the burning flowers, to rush to the northern slope, where it paused, its forelegs thrust out stiffly to check its plunge over the rim. Juan made another vain effort to catch the beast, which burst away at his approach. Back and forth in the short clear space of the mountain ridge the wild thing galloped, rushing in eager seeking to the north slope again. A moment it scrambled there, forefeet over the edge, then plunged out of sight.
Had it found a way down, a desperate, perilous way? Juan hurried to the spot to see. The horse was rolling down the steep, crashing through brushwood, dashing over sharp ledges, trailing a frightful way that living man could not follow. On again, the horse that carried Don Geronimo humping its back as if it faced a wintry storm, its nose close to the ground, shrinking as near Juan as it could press, companion indeed of his miserable situation.
Juan felt that this mangled ending his horse had made would be happy in comparison with the thing he faced, but it could be reserved as the final choice between the two. A little way beyond where his horse ended its torture in the desperate chance that failed, a canyon scarred the southern side of the mountain. The draft of this place was like a chimney, the roar of the fire in it equal to a cataract. Glimpses that he caught beyond that point gave Juan the hope that his way to life might be found on that side of the mountain, even in the face of the fire.
The horse hung back when they came to the head of the canyon, where a cloud of fiery smoke rushed across the mountain ridge as from a bellows. Juan stripped off his outer shirt, wrapped it around Don Geronimo's head and face, held his breath, crouched low and plunged into it, dragging the horse after him. This furnace blast was not more than twenty yards across, perhaps, but it was almost a sheet of flame. Only the tremendous draft, which shot the blaze high, gave them a passage with a scorched remnant of life.
The shirt around Don Geronimo's head was blazing when they burst through to the comparative clearness beyond the canyon; his beard crumbled under Juan's hand as he tore the cloth away. The sheepskin was burning, Don Geronimo's nether clothing, all that he wore, smoked in many spots. Juan crushed the fire out in his hands, blistering fingers and palms. His own raiment was picked with a score of spreading fire-spots. He rolled on the ground to smother them, the bridle reins turned securely around his arm.
He staggered up, and on a little way, pausing to drag his hands over his face, in which there was a harsh feeling of incineration. His eyebrows and lashes were gone, the beard below his temples was only hard stumps; when he touched his hair it broke like glass and vanished. But he breathed again, he stood erect, and hope unfolded at his feet.
Here the side of the mountain was mangy and almost bare. Below him the burned patch of wild oats lay black; a weak line of fire was clambering up the slope, leaping on the wind from bush to bush, clump to clump. If he could pass the thicker fringe of bushes along the ridge before the fire had sprung that high, he could continue down without more risk. It was steep going, the horse, almost blinded by the last dash, stumbled insecurely after him. Whether Don Geronimo still lived, he did not know.
How viciously those unlikely shrubs blazed! What a torch sprung out of every drab grey sage! Juan met the line of fire where yucca stalks stood among stunted gray sage not much higher than his knees, sparse and sad and drouth-cursed, but more eager to burn, it seemed, for its very insignificance. The fire sprang from these sage-clumps into his face in vicious gusts, and the horse, unable to stand the charge, turned to lumber up the mountain.
Juan stopped the beast after a doubly perilous struggle on the precarious slope, and stood bending over Don Geronimo, shielding him with his body from the fire. It was only a gust; in a moment it had stripped the leaves from the miserable shrubs and roared on like a little whirlwind on a summer day. They passed through this without much damage, and went on down among the black, smoking sticks of laurel and gnarled sage and grey-green clumps of spiked yucca, which looked little worse for the passing of the quick-leaping line of fire.
Juan found the spring in the pass called Cahuenga, where they had spread their dinner the day he rode as guard to Gertrudis Sinova. There he bathed Don Geronimo's wounds, grateful to find him breathing strongly, testimony of the strength of the indomitable race to which he belonged. Juan feared the mayordomo might die without surgical attention, such as Padre Ignacio could give him, if left there by the roadside long. He considered going on with him, cruel as it would be to Don Geronimo to bind him to the horse again, his excoriated back to the sun.
Juan himself was in poor case for traveling. Although he had closed his eyes against the fire in his long dash through it on the ridge, all but a little crevice to give himself a dim guidance, his blistered forehead and cheeks were puffing out of all human semblance, threatening soon to eclipse his sight entirely, A blind man and an unconscious man would be but a poor pair of traveling companions for the fifteen miles or more between there and San Fernando.
This was the king's road, a highway much frequented. Perhaps the soldiers might pass that way, or some traveler who would hurry on to San Fernando and send help. The wisest thing was to wait at the spring, where the blessing of cold water was to be enjoyed by stretching out the arm.
Don Geronimo had not suffered from the fire as much as Juan. Aside from the shortening of his beard, his face bore little mark of the flames. Juan had spread the sheepskin and his scorched jacket for Don Geronimo's bed beside the spring. He dipped water in his hands and poured it over his bruised, galled back, entreating life by his gentle ministrations to remain in the citadel that had been so sorely battered.
Juan's labor was rewarded in a little while; Don Geronimo sighed, opened his eyes, tried to speak. Juan poured water on his lips, lifted him to lean against his shoulder while he offered water in his cupped hand. Don Geronimo drank thirstily, the draught seeming to restore his wasted blood.
"So I live," he said, his voice hoarse and low. "They would have burned me, they left me with a taunt to set the fire."
"Spare yourself, Don Geronimo," Juan cautioned. "I think I hear a cart; you will need your strength for the long ride home."
Fabio Dominguez, the rancher of the San Pedro road, was on his way to San Fernando that morning to buy flour. He had rested the night in the Pueblo de Los Angeles, and was making a merry clatter as he came up through the pass with four stout mules to his high-wheeled cart, singing a bit of song now and then, happy that Sebastian Alvitre had quit the road for a safer method of freebooting, leaving honest men to go their way untroubled.
Dominguez was not concerned with the burning mountain, that being a sight common enough in his experience. So long as the fire did not block his road he gave it little thought, but his eyes were like peeled eggs at the sight of the two battered, disfigured men beside the spring.
"What is this, in God's name!" said Dominguez, standing on the footboard of his cart, his long whip looped in his hand.
"There is a gentleman here who has met a sad misfortune," Juan explained. "If you will carry him to San Fernando, you will be rewarded."
"I am on my way to San Fernando," said Dominguez, coming down cautiously out of the cart, as if wary of some trick. "Who is he you want me to take,—God save me! what is the matter with his back?"
"It is I, Geronimo Lozano. You will lose nothing, Dominguez, in this."
Dominguez came nearer, bending over Don Geronimo, still with the quick-set way about him of a creature ready to spring and run away. Weak as Don Geronimo's voice was, Dominguez had heard it perfectly, yet he was not convinced.
"Don Geronimo? It is a strange thing," he said.
"He has met a strange adventure, such as only Don Geronimo could pass through and live. Help me break some boughs to make a springy bed for him in the bottom of your cart. We will cover them with your sacks, there will be others to replace them at the mission."
"And who are you?" Dominguez asked, his best foot set to spring back into the cart at the first false start.
"It is another thing," Juan returned, coldly.
"Are you of the mission?"
"I am not of the mission."
"Well, you are a thing to make a man forget his dinner!" Dominguez declared. "Have you come through the fire on the mountain?"
"We have. At San Fernando Don Geronimo will tell you what there is for your ears to hear. Assist me; let us be quick."
While Don Geronimo's strength was little more than a shred when they lifted him to the cart and stretched him on the springy couch of boughs, he held himself braced on his elbow a moment, and took Juan's hand.
"Don Juan, you have suffered much for an unworthy man," he said. "I pray for a happier day to requite you."
"It is nothing," said Juan. "Dominguez, will you lend me a jacket? I cannot promise to return it, or to pay you for it soon. Don Geronimo will be my surety."
"I have but the one, and this cloak, with me," Dominguez said, very doubtfully. "A man hesitates"
"A meal sack, then," Juan said, impatiently.
"That is very well," Dominguez agreed, relieved by the easy bargain. "Here is a big one—now, a little minute and I will make you a shirt and a coat in one."
He cut a slit for the head to pass in the bottom, slits for the arms, and handed it to Juan with a laugh.
"I will not need surety for that," he said, "but when we get to San Fernando I will expect a good one in exchange."
"All will be well with you now, Don Geronimo," Juan assured him, bending cver the mayordomo in his ridiculous smock. It was little wonder that Dominguez had not recognized him; it is a question whether Padre Ignacio himself would have done better at that moment.
"You will sit in the cart. Turn the horse loose to follow if it will," Don Geronimo said.
"I have lost my own horse; this one I shall need for the journey that lies ahead of me."
"You are not going with me to San Fernando?"
"It cannot be, Don Geronimo."
"Ah, I remember!" said Don Geronimo, his words a groan. "But that is the past; it is forgotten."
"That horse is only good for the wolves," Dominguez announced, after looking the creature over. "He is blind, the eyes have been burned out of him. If you have far to go, my friend, I'd advise you to get another one. See!"
Dominguez struck at the horse, close before its eyes. It stood quite unconscious of the menace of his hand.
"It is true," Juan admitted.
"Yes, and you are little better off," Dominguez declared, a rough sort of pity in his manner. "Jump in now, little man, and I'll land you in San Fernando in three hours."
Juan was reluctant to go in the cart, but there was no other way. He feared that it would appear to those at San Fernando that he was making capital out of such service as he had given Don Geronimo in his hour of peril, a thing that bent down his spirit and humbled his soul to contemplate.
"The misfortune of my situation, Don Geronimo, forces me to do a thing that my manhood revolts against," he said.
Dominguez heard this with amazement, turning on the seat of his cart to look at Juan, standing by the tail-board in such woeful plight that it would seem a blessing, rather than an indignity, to be offered a ride in a cart.
"Don Juan Mealsack, you are a strange animal," he said. "In with you, now, and arrange the canvas to break the sun from Don Geronimo."
"In God's name, Dominguez, drive fast!" Don Geronimo groaned, lying face downward on his bed of boughs.
Juan was concerned gravely over his own condition. His heavy undergarment had protected his arms and chest, but his neck and face's eemed cooked, puffed in places with dropsical distensions, skinless and raw in others, a most miserable and tortuous plight. His hands were in no better case; his legs were scorched and blistered in spots where his pantaloons had burned through. These things he could have borne with no more than a passing concern, as indeed they were secondary to the injury his eyes had suffered. But the thought that he might lose his vision was a terrifying one which made his courage falter in a sweat of dreadful apprehension.
Don Geronimo did not know, Dominguez had not understood, that Juan had seen but dimly when he broke the leafy tips of branches from oak and sycamore for the mayordomo's bed; or that this obscuration grew with alarming rapidity, as an eclipse seems to rush to its climax. The inflammation was mounting in pulsating pangs that pierced his brain like exploring instruments in a cruel surgeon's hands. When they left the shadow of the oaks around the spring and entered the glaring sun on the white road, the canvas cover of Dominguez' cart seemed a poor shelter against the piercing rays.
Juan sat with hands pressed to his burning eyeballs, not even a tear left in the seared founts to mitigate the deep-striking agony. He had no spare garment to wet in the spring and carry with him; his jacket, rough as it was, he had drenched at the last moment and spread over Don Geronimo's back. He could do no more than close his burned lids tightly, bow his head in the shade of Dominguez' canvas, hold back his groans and hope all was not lost of the most precious sense that comes from the mysterious Source.
Dominguez drove fast where the road would permit, and in the main it was smooth, the wheel-jolt cushioned by thick dust. If Don Geronimo's sufferings were increased by the motions of the cart, those who shared it with him were not enlightened by so much as a groan. Fast as they traveled, it was nearer four hours than three before they reached San Fernando. Juan heard the midday bell striking before they stopped at the gate.
"What is this?" said Dominguez, impatiently. "The gate is closed. A man would think the padres were afraid of an insurrection. So it is you, Padre Mateo that is warder today?"
"Drive in, Dominguez," Juan heard Padre Mateo direct.
"Here are the two most sorrowful men that I ever have seen in my days," said Dominguez, coming to the end of the cart the moment it stopped in the court. "You will need help, Padre Mateo, to get one of them to his bed."
"What is this?" Padre Mateo demanded, his head thrust in the cart-end.
"It is I, Geronimo Lozano, and the man who has delivered me from death," Don Geronimo was quick to answer in voice surprisingly strong. Juan, hands pressed to his burning eyes, felt the movement as Don Geronimo struggled to lift his head.
"And who, in God's name is he?" Padre Mateo asked, shocked by the sight of so much misery as the two presented.
"It is Juan Molinero, God's blessing on his head!" Don Geronimo replied.
"Come down, Juan—come down," Padre Mateo said.
"Assist Don Geronimo, his need is greater than mine," Juan returned.
Padre Mateo called to some who stood in wondering silence near at hand, with directions for carrying Don Geronimo to his house. Doña Magdalena ran to meet them; Juan heard her sharp cry of piteous dismay.
"Now, Juan, let us see to you," Padre Mateo said, again at the tail of the cart. "Why, you shrink there like a man ashamed! Come down—here is my hand. See where Gertrudis is running to greet you, quick as the dawn."
"Padre Mateo," Juan said, uncovering his hideously distorted features. "I shall never look upon her face again. I am blind!"