GABRIEL HENDERSON often had speculated on the purpose of that barred embrasure high in the side of the warehouse wall. It was little more than a slit in the blank face of the ugly brown adobe, perhaps eight or nine inches deep and twice as wide. Heavy oak sills held the strong bars securely; a strong oak plank inside them closed the slight vent, or whatever it was designed to be.
The place must be the repository of something of extraordinary value, he had supposed. In all his duties about the warehouse, none of them ever had brought him into the room of this barred window. He often thought of inquiring of Don Felipe the purpose of it. Now he had been enlightened without inquiry.
It was the cell of Don Abrahan's private prison, the penitential place where the wills of strong men who rose at times in defiance of the patron's authority were broken. And if not their spirits, then their bodies. Don Abrahan's father had built it, and employed it in his day. Many a man's life had gone out in the torture of starvation and thirst within those thick, brown walls, the heavy plank locked at the barred slit to sequester even his dying groan.
Don Felipe had come with the key to open this prison at his young master's command, and there they had left Henderson, hands bound as they had taken him from the horse. Felipe had the consideration to command Simon, whose reach was long, to unlock the slab that closed the slit of window and admit a breath of new air. In the little light left of that sad day, Henderson was able presently to see the space that contained him.
The cell was about eight feet long and half as wide, the ceiling at least twice the height of Henderson's body above his head. The floor was earth; there was not even a straw in the place to contribute to the comfort of one whose misfortunes brought him within the embrace of its high, blank walls.
Henderson's arms pained him cruelly, for Roberto had ordered his ropes drawn hard that morning after they had freed his hands for a little while to let him eat and drink. Since then he had not been refreshed. He was suffering from thirst, which asserted itself above the turmoil of his thoughts, although hunger had no place in the anxiety of his situation. John Toberman's fate stood before him as a forecast of his own.
Long after nightfall Simon came, bringing a candle and food. He released Henderson's hands, laughing over his numbed efforts to lift the pitcher of water to his lips, offering no assistance. Compassion was not in him, nor his kind. Simon stood with his back to the door while Henderson chafed his hands, much diverted to see that the congested blood had distended and burst the sailor's seahardened skin.
"Fat," Simon directed. "Don't sit here all night rubbing your hands like an old woman over a charcoal pot. A man has to get to his bed. I wouldn't have brought you so much as a bean if Don Roberto hadn't given sharp orders to feed you well. He wants you to have strength for tomorrow. A man suffers more if he is strong. Eat, curse you in the seven places!"
Simon opened the door to kick through a heap of straw when he saw the prisoner engage himself with the earthen pot of beans.
"Here, Don Gabriel," he said in mockery, "here comes your bed. It is more than many a poor peon has this night to lay his bones on—sweet straw that has not been even picked over by the mules. Well, Don Roberto is kinder to you than I would be—kinder than Santana is to the Yankees he catches along the Rio Grande. They say he burns them, fat scoundrels that they are, to light his camp at night."
Henderson did not grant Simon the satisfaction of so much as a word, although he contrasted the fellow's present ferocity with the friendliness of the past, thinking how quickly tyranny will grow into a rank, foul thing from a so insignificant seed. Simon closed the door after shutting an inner grated barrier that swung back against the wall, then opened it again, candle in hand, as if to refresh himself by the sight of the chequered shadows on the prison floor.
"Don Roberto has made me your keeper, in due reward for my bravery in catching you alone, with only my naked arm," he said. "Sleep, then, Don Gabriel, Don Marinero, Don Yankee, happy to know that you are watched over by a man who is as strong and as vigilant as an angel. An ant could not pass me where I lie outside your door. And tomorrow, tomorrow!"
Simon made his appearance early next morning, bringing a plentiful breakfast. He did not stay to gossip, or to take away the few dishes. He was bristling with excitement as he pushed the board upon which he had carried the breakfast from the kitchen beneath the inner barred door.
"There is the devil to pay around this place today," he said. He locked the thick oak door and hurried off. Henderson heard him running through the empty room beyond.
Henderson had noted an unusual commotion around the patron's dwelling for that early hour. Horses had been ridden into the courtyard, where they stood stamping off the flies which clustered on their legs. After a time they had been ridden out again, rapidly. There had been much passing to and from between the patron's mansion and the direction of Don Felipe's office, the stables, the houses of the laborers on the estate; much talking when men met and paused, voices pitched in the undertone of guarded excitement.
Henderson had not been able to clamber up the crumbling adobe to lift his eyes to the little window. But buried as he was behind four feet of adobe wall, the pulsation of the excitement without came to him. Something of importance had happened, or was threatening, at Don Abrahan's house that day.
Shortly after Simon's brief visit things began to assume an extraordinary quietude in the courtyard. Henderson heard the servants come and go, their feet sounding faster than their common pace. Sometimes they stopped under his window, voices lowered as men hush them when they speak of the dying or the dead.
Henderson believed only one thing could account for such an atmosphere of flurry and fear. News must have come of the arrival of the United States warships at Monterey. Toberman had expected them; the outbreak of war between the two nations would simplify their course, set aside and make unnecessary whatever pretext the friends of annexation had evolved for their action. If the ships had come, Don Abrahan would be thinking some serious things about John Toberman that morning.
Simon returned to take away the breakfast dishes after the sun had found the little slit in the wall and mounted on, withdrawing its strong illumination, which served only to reveal the hopelessness and misery of that cramped place with more distressing distinctness. It was better without the sun.
"So you have eaten everything, like a dog," said Simon, viewing the cleaned dishes. "It is a good thing for me that you have found heart to eat, Mr. Gabriel, for Roberto would blame me with having licked your dishes myself if you happened to faint at the whipping-post when he puts the sharp rawhide to your back this afternoon. There will be no dinner; that is Don Roberto's order. Maybe just a little pinch of hunger helps a man suffer, as long as he is strong in the legs to stand. Will you smoke, Mr. Gabriel?"
"I would smoke, Simon, if I had some tobacco," Gabriel replied, no more feeling apparent in his tone against this overbearing, vain, bragging creature than if their former relations had not been changed.
"Your pipe, your watch and your money I put back in your pockets at Don Roberto's order," Simon regretfully confessed. "If you have lost them on the way it is not my fault, although I told Roberto you would do it. But we were not robbing you, he said; it must never be charged against him that he stooped to rob a runaway low Yankee who carried hides on his head to a ship."
"I didn't lose them, Simon. Have you some tobacco there?"
"Yes. If you will promise me not to set fire to the straw and strangle yourself on smoke to cheat Roberto out of his revenge for the blow you gave him, I'll let you have it, with fire to set it going in your pipe."
"I promise you, Simon."
Simon passed tobacco through the bars of the door. As for fire, he never was without it on the tip of his cigarette. This he supplied when Henderson had filled his pipe.
"The olla, Gabriel," he requested, pointing to the jar of heavy earthenware that stood out of his reach.
"Permit me to keep it, Simon. If I am not to have anything more to eat, permit me to drink, at least."
"Oh, very well."
Simon was in no hurry now. The flurry of excitement that had moved his languid limbs in such unexampled haste a few hours past had calmed. He stood leaning against the thick wall between the outer and inner doors of the cell, his eyes half closed in the comfortable contemplation of his own importance and of the things he knew.
"But what use is a watch to a dead man?" he inquired.
He turned, blowing a long trail of smoke from his nostrils, his eyes drawn a bit closer, as if to ponder his own question in judicial astuteness.
"Very little, Simon."
"And money—can a dead man spend money?"
"I never heard of one doing it."
"Nor I," Simon agreed.
There seemed to be no personal allusion in these philosophical speculations. Simon appeared to be far from the desire of a watch or money for himself. He stood with shoulders against the wall, lounging easily, chin lifted, cigarette drooping in his mouth. It seemed, rather, as if he had seen watch and money take flight like a covey of quail, and followed their course to see where they would light.
"Don Roberto has had old Vincente nail a crosspiece to the whipping-post, to stretch you out like they spread the thief on the cross beside Our Señor," Simon told him. "He is going to flog you there this afternoon. He will never stop, when he sees the blood spring, till you hang dead in the ropes. Jesus! it will be a sight to see!"
Henderson was standing by, smoking calmly. Simon glanced at him slyly, turning his eyeballs between the thin slits of his lids, his head held as before. Smoke was trickling out of his nostrils and mouth, as if he bled in fiery compassion over the cruelty he had pictured.
"Don Roberto is a man of fine humor," Simon continued, turning now to look at Henderson squarely, smiling as a man smiles when he approaches a pleasant thing.
"You know him better than I do," Henderson said, feeling that Simon's generosity in picturing the experience in store for him merited some encouragement.
"Yes. When he was a boy his great pleasure was to tie little frogs, and even little cats, by strings and hold them in the blaze until they slowly died. It was the great enjoyment of his tender years. Many times I have sat by and laughed to see the sweet pleasure of his little face as the foolish creatures squirmed. You should see a little frog tied by the leg and held in the blaze, Gabriel. It is amazing the life there is in such a contemptible thing."
Henderson was considering himself through all this talk by Simon. He did not doubt that the fellow was telling the truth about Roberto's vicious plans for revenge. He determined that Roberto never should lay lash to his back while he lived to lift a hand to fight. They might kill him in the struggle to drag him to Roberto's cross, but Roberto never should humiliate and degrade his living body. It might be there in the cell when they came to take him out to his chastisement, it might be in the open under the sky, but there would be a fight that they would remember and respect him for all their days. That he vowed.
"Yes, the devil has been to pay around this place today," Simon said, jumping off the subject of Roberto's fine humor as abruptly as he had begun it. "The governor has been here, demanding this wild Yankee girl, Helena Sprague, to be locked in jail at the pueblo and tried for treason against her country. Seven doctors! how Don Abrahan defied him to his face."
"If she is a Yankee she can't be a traitor to Mexico," Henderson said, ready now to talk to any length and draw from Simon everything he knew. It was the first word he had heard of the accusation of treason against Helena. It startled him with a greater concern for her safety than for his own.
"Yankee in blood and heart only, Gabriel. Her father was a citizen, like that old lizard Toberman, and Toberman was a traitor. They say this Helena plotted with Toberman to deliver the country to the Yankees—as if there were Yankees enough in the world to take it out of our hands!"
"Have they arrested her? Is she here?"
"She is here, with that little fat hen Doña Carlota. There, if you could lift yourself up to the window, you could see the one that this red-headed traitor looks through upon the sun that they say will soon stop shining for her eyes."
"Don Abrahan's prisoner, not the State's? That seems a strange situation."
Henderson turned this thought aloud, hardly considering the presence of Simon. But Simon, sharp in more ways than one, had made observations of his own.
"Don Abrahan wishes her to sign a certain little paper," he said. "My Josefa listened yesterday outside the door and heard. I tell you this, for it is all right to tell a dead man anything, and you are the same as a dead man, Gabriel."
"Certainly, Simon. A little paper, you said?"
"Don Abrahan promised her if she would sign this trifling deed to her lands and all that she owns, he would give her another certain little paper that speaks the proof of her plotting with the Yankees, and she would go free. Simple; yes. My little Josefa heard it all."
"Very simple," said Henderson. "And because the governor has no proof against her, Don Abrahan defies him."
"That is the great joke of the whole thing," said Simon, with keen relish in telling it, although to one who was the same as dead. "Last night somebody entered the patron's office and stole this evidence. The governor declares a patriot delivered it to him. I'd like to have been that patriot! I'll bet he got a hatful of gold."
"But Don Abrahan defied him, in spite of the paper?" Henderson was grateful to Don Abrahan for once, and genuine in his admiration of his courage, though self-interest had moved the patron to this defense.
"You could hear him roar as loud as a jackass. The heart of every man on the ranch stood still to hear Don Abrahan roar, and the pale governor threatened to send soldiers and burn down the mansion. And so the governor went back to the pueblo to get his soldiers, and Don Abrahan went after him to stop them. It is known that Don Abrahan holds his hand over General Verdugo like a little chick. No, Gabriel, the soldiers will not come."
"Who was the patriot that stole the paper? Who would know about it?" Henderson wondered.
There was something in Simon's face when he spoke of that trick which seemed more than the hint of knowledge unrevealed. Henderson believed if he could get this out of Simon, grown friendly and loquacious in the hope of coming into his prisoner's watch and money, it might be a lever to lift him out of his own desperate condition. He seemed abstractedly to draw the three gold coins that he possessed out of his pocket, to shuffle them aimlessly in his fingers in the way of one whose thoughts overshadow his actions.
"It is a mystery as thick as a fog," Simon declared. His eyes shifted to follow the quick-shuffled gold pieces; he turned in his deep interest and stood holding the bars of the door.
"It was somebody in Don Abrahan's own house," said Henderson, speaking with more certainty than guess. "Here, Simon. What good is money to a dead man? You were right."
Henderson dropped a ten-dollar piece into Simon's hand. Simon's face was close to the bars, his nose almost between them.
"And what good is knowing things that must soon pass out of him like water out of a broken olla?" Simon asked.
"What harm, then? Who was it that robbed Don Abrahan last night, Simon?"
Henderson dropped the two remaining gold-pieces from one hand to the other, and back again, as if he cooled them to put them in his pocket.
"There was a talk last night under a window," said Simon, pressing his face to the bars. "I was behind the pepper tree, where no man was thought to be. I heard."
Henderson reached out his hand, the two gold-pieces between his fingers like a man about to plant a seed. Simon's hand came through the bars, palm upward, as thirsty for what hung over it as autumn vegas for rain. Henderson seemed wrapped in an obscuring cloud of thought. He did not plant the seed of man's undoing in this yearning, fecund soil.
"I heard a man offer liberty for a fool girl's heart," Simon said. His hand came through a little farther; still the planting of gold was withheld. "And I heard a fool girl refuse to accept it unless your prison door was opened and you were permitted to go to your people. Then I heard a dagger strike on a bar of iron at a window, and there were curses in a man's throat. 'You love him too much!' he said. And that was all I heard. What will jealousy drive a man to do, Don Gabriel? You are wise in the books. Have I said enough?"
"You have said enough, Simon."
Henderson dropped the gold coins, but, due to his abstraction, as it seemed, they missed Simon's hand and fell softly among the straw that had been the prisoner's bed. Henderson made apology, stooping to recover the money, stirring the straw with vexed exclamations, scattering it impatiently about.
"The devil take them!" he said. "Strange how completely they have disappeared."
"Wait, I'll help you. If you stir it up too much they will never be found till the straw is burned."
Simon unlocked the door, caution and prudence alike as nothing to him in the scent of money that had so contrarily eluded his hand. He thrust head and shoulders into the cell, bending low to rake the straw with his long fingers. Henderson, stooping near, not a foot between their shoulders, snatched the heavy water pitcher and struck Simon senseless to the ground.