GABRIEL HENDERSON had no feeling of security in that place "where no soldier could follow." In the day of the old Guiterrez, surrounded by simple Indians who had no thought of the Spaniard's fondness for many exits to his abode, this tunneled retreat was very well; in the day of Roberto Garvanza, who knew all about its existence, though he might not know exactly where to find it, the thing was more a trap than a mysterious place of security.
It would be a small matter, when the reinforcements from San Diego arrived, to throw a guard of soldiers around old Pablo's place and cut off every hope of escape. Though the soldiers might fail to find the exits at once, hidden as they were in the brushwood and trees, a close search under determined direction would disclose them. Two men might hold off a regiment for a while, but endurance and ammunition would not last forever.
They were poorly armed. Henderson had lost two of his pistols in the fight, Felipe's weapons were old and ineffective except at close range. There was little ammunition between them; it was unsafe to raise the inevitable suspicion that would attend the purchase of more by Pablo.
The one wise thing to do was flee into the north. If there was truth in the news that Pablo had brought, they must meet the American forces on the move toward Los Angeles. If there was nothing but the fear of the oppressors and the hope of the oppressed in the rumor, they would be able to find refuge among strong friends.
Henderson was reluctant to assume command of the little party of refugees, although Felipe had invested him with the responsibility and dignity of leader from the moment they rode away from Don Abrahan's lane together. Henderson felt that his was a case where all should have a voice, the peril of all being equal.
Two of them already stood condemned as traitors, himself as a spy. Roberto had closed the case against them; no plea would soften the judgment he had pronounced, if any among them would be so base as to plead. With a thought of each of them being in a measure responsible for his own life, and himself responsible for Helena Sprague's entirely, Gabriel called Felipe into a discussion of their situation a little while after Pablo's return from the pueblo with his news.
They were in their underground quarters, the horses, saddled and ready for instant mounting, close at hand. The heavy door that the old hidalgo of other days had closed the mouth of his tunnel with was down from its hinges now, only the acacias clustered along the crumbling adobe wall that stood a little beyond the exit, shutting out the starlight. The wind came in, fresh and sweet from the hills, moving the candle-flame, finding its way like a spy around the angles of the tunnel and compartment walls.
Felipe was tracing a map of the road to Monterey, marking its difficulties, its long windings through hills and along the coast-line.
"You see it is a very long road, Gabriel."
"Yes, it looks like there are no short cuts to liberty in this land. But the risk of the road is not as great as the risk of being trapped here."
"Besides," Felipe pressed, strong in his faith that his grandfather's tunnels would shelter and protect them as they had many refugees before them, "besides, Gabriel, we are not certain that the Americans have taken Monterey. We may look tomorrow to hear it denied. That is the way of this country."
"I've not allowed myself to expect anything but its denial, Felipe. We must go out prepared to face great dangers and run many perils, but we will be safer on the road hunted by a few soldiers, than shut here surrounded by many. Helena, what is your opinion?"
Helena had remained silent and apart, taking the place assigned to women in the affairs of the adobe dons. A woman was either a mother of a family, or a daughter designed to become a mother of a family. In the councils, plans, business and advancements of life, she had no word. Mass and confession attended to, safely marvied, a string of children at her heels, a woman's work was well begun; with her bed made in holy ground, Aqui Descansa on the cross at her head, it was well done.
In spite of the fact that Helena had gone beyond her day and a woman's prerogatives in the business that had brought her to this perilous stand, she was surprised by being called, as an equal, into the council of their fate.
"I will follow the way that you lead, Gabriel," she said in simple trust.
"That is well spoken," said Felipe hastily, quick to cover his friend's weakness in appealing to the opinion of a woman.
Helena, cruelly wrenched by the experiences so lately passed, when "death breathed in her face" as Felipe had said, was white as orange blossoms in the candlelight. She sat on a heap of hay, en, veloped in a loose dark cloak, a dark scarf over her head, the ends of it streaming down her bosom, a background for the two men who bent over the paper spread between them. It seemed that the bold spirit, the independent will, was broken in her. Anxiety strained out of her eyes; she seemed like one who sits in patient, dull suffering, counting the night hours, from whose eyes sleep has fled away.
Henderson sat on a keg that once had contained cognac, its burned brand plain to be read, the crippled wing of his hat still held gallantly up by a thorn. His face was rough and hairy, untouched by razor since the night he quitted Don Abrahan's house.
Across from him was Felipe, seated on a block of wood, the black islets of his face now almost submerged in the forest of beard that sprung thick around them. Felipe's sombrero was pushed back from his eyes, admitting the light to his face. The candle stood between them on a broken chair, drawing their strength and weakness in strong, revealing lines. A man did not consider the niceties of bodily adornment when life itself was running in frantic seeking, like a mouse shut in a room.
At one side of them the three horses loomed large in the shadow, their eyes luminous as they turned a head now and then and caught a beam of light.
Such was the picture of the refugees from Don Roberto's jealous vengeance as they considered life and death, calmly as other men and women, in happier surroundings, their hopes unclouded, considered their dinners or their amusements for the night.
"Soldiers will be here, and here," Felipe said, indicating the spots on his map, "keeping the road, Gabriel. Here, at the summit of the pass, three could hold a regiment."
"Roberto hasn't the men to spare to guard all these places, Felipe."
"You forget that Don Abrahan has raised his friends. He can gather forty or fifty men."
"From what I've seen of them, Felipe, they're not the kind that would stand sentinel at night along the road."
"The news of your brave rescue"
"Felipe! I'd have been like a gun without a bullet only for your counsel and help. It was more your success than mine."
"Not so, not so, Don Gabriel. What if the cannon had not been loaded? Ha! I was only a spark that the wind blew, falling in the right place at the right time."
"We'll not argue it over again now, Felipe," Henderson said, smiling at his friend's vehement depreciation of his part in that adventure. "Let's leave it for a contention between us when we're old. Is there no pass, no road, through these mountains called Santa Monica to the west of here?"
"There is a pass, coming down into the king's road to the north near Buena Ventura, but it is steep, long and difficult. Few travel that way. It would require two days, at least, to cross by that pass, only to come out into the arms of soldiers on the other side, I fear."
"That would be a road too slow for us, then."
"But here, sheltered as we are, soldiers may pass up and down, over our very heads, and never find us. If I did not know how the Franciscan fathers lay here, Gabriel, with eager soldiers of the republic hunting them, it would be a thing to doubt."
"Yes, but they were priests, after all, Felipe. I doubt if the hunt was made with both eyes open."
"No man but Pablo has entered this place in years, the memory of it is gone, the servants of my grandfather's day are in their graves long ago. Why, I can lead you to wine-barrels, Gabriel, that are full since my grandfather's time. Pablo is saving them in the hope that I'll step into my inheritance on a day, but that is a hope without a leaf. Do you think those barrels would have lain there full of wine if the way to them had been known?"
"It doesn't seem reasonable that they would, Felipe."
"No, it is out of all human probability to con's ider such a thing. Trust my sanctuary a day longer, then, Gabriel. Pablo has arranged for a friend to come tomorrow with news of the Americans. If they have not arrived at Monterey, if we must expect no help from that quarter, then it will be time to go."
"Very well," Gabriel agreed, "we will wait one day more." He folded Felipe's map hurriedly and put it in his pocket. "It is past ten, and my watch at the door."
There was no moon, yet in the peculiar clearness of those summer skies the stars were almost of tropical effulgence. The acacia trees, quick-growing, thick, and dark of foliage, clustered along the high adobe wall that once had enclosed the old Guiterrez' extensive grounds. Beyond the acacias, sycamore and live-oak spread in a rambling growth along the little stream, dry in summer, which drained the rainfall from the distant hills. Between these trees there stood a thick growth of smaller trees and shrubs, and beyond them the upgrown lands which once had been the tilled fields of the Guiterrez ranch. Except for large trees, this land had returned to the wilderness of its original state, no particular line being apparent now between the old fields and the virgin country.
Cattle of the neighboring drovers grazed over this territory, which varied between open pasture and tangled brush-growth for miles. Trails known to the vaqueros ran through it all, familiar to Felipe. Gabriel knew that Felipe could lead them in a confusing and entangling race against any who might pursue them, if they had alarm of the searching detail in time.
The landscape lay dark under the stars as Henderson mounted to the fallen coping of the adobe wall to look over it and listen into the shadows of the trees. The measured sawing of insect fiddlers rose and fell in the acacia grove, pulsing, with the beat that nature seemed to set for all night-singing creatures of the woods, with those whose music dimmed away into the distant bosque. One might pass along the wall within a dozen feet of their retreat, never thinking that those sought lay so near. Again, one might creep close and lay his ear to the ground, listening for footsteps, for low voices that might, in the sense of security, lift a note too high. Such a one was Simon, crafty, sneaking, fit figure for the night.
So, by the wall Henderson leaned and listened the night full of its strident cacophony, beaten in the rhythm of nature's eternal metronome. It seemed secure there, yet night gives that sense to a hunted thing, too often beguiling and perilous. And in his waiting the horned owl came into the sycamore grove to prey on the feathered creatures that reposed in the false security of the dark, his rolling voice startling them in bewilderment to blunder in confusion into his talons. The snake glided along the adobe wall, the rustle of its passing in the leaves, stealthy upon the track of fieldmouse that danced in the deep shades and felt secure; the armored beetle the cold, repellent worm—all came from the place that covered them to seize and destroy, pursue and slay the things beneath them weaker in their order, impotent in their defense. Even the moth slipped into the beehive to suck the product of the drowsing swarm; the mean to prey upon the industrious, the loathsome to swallow the beautiful, the sluggish to spread its slime to ensnare the fleet.
There was no pause in the great tragedy of nature, Henderson reflected, leaning with arms against the crumbling wall. Man swallowed man by day; snake gulped mouse by night. It was a cloying, despicable situation that a man held among these rapacious things, cursed with passions that would not let him rise above the little and the loathsome of creation that devoured their weaker kindred in the dark.
"It is one o'clock," said Felipe, coming softly behind his watching friend, a note of chiding in his voice. "You have let me sleep too long."
"I haven't noticed the passing of time, Felipe. You are welcome to the hour."
"Look at the Great Bear, sinking behind the hills like a boat that goes down in the sea," said Felipe. "It will soon be dawn."
"Yes, in two hours it—the bell!"
"Perhaps a bird"
"Twice! Pablo is"
"It must be that he turned in a dream," said Felipe, after they had stood listening for the bell to ring again, breath suspended, hearts beating low.
"I don't hear any movement around the house," Henderson whispered. "If it was the signal—unless the string parted."
"No." Felipe laid his hand on Gabriel's arm, straining to read some sound of danger in the dark. "If it comes three times"
The tinkle of the bell in the roof of the vault broke Felipe's breathless speech.
"Three! They have come!" said Henderson.
"The signal to go!" said Felipe, almost stunned by amazement. He was reluctant to believe that danger could threaten them in his ancestor's burrow. "Hear it! that is a horse sounding its nose."
"They are surrounding the house," Henderson whispered, coming down from the wall.
"They will try to force Pablo to show them the place. Simon must have read in his face that we were here."
"They'll never be able to torture it out of him," Henderson said, "but his wife might tell, to save him."
"No, she is of a piece with Pablo. They might as well build a fire against the sycamore tree expecting to make it tell. There is time for us to go. What road shall we try—the pass to the west?"
"No. We'll be safest where we're least expected, Felipe. We'll take the king's road."
"Thank God for the night!" Felipe said.