A MILE beyond the milldam Juan left the trail that ran far back into the mountains to the grazing ground of San Feliciano Canyon, the road that Padre Ignacio had taken in his belief that Don Geronimo's captors had gone that way. Here Juan turned to the eastward, striking a direct course for the place where Cristóbal waited his return.
He stopped here a little while, turning in his saddle for a last look at the mission which, he felt in the sorrow of his banishment, he should see no more. He was close by the mountains now; a little while and the canyon would swallow him. With the last sight of San Fernando, since he was not to go by way of San Gabriel now, his eyes would not rest on the dwelling-place of civilized man again in more than two thousand miles.
Juan considered all this with melancholy spirit, more in the sad depression of a man leaving home than one setting his foot forward to it. He had blown like a seed on the wind into this serene valley, where he had taken deep root in the friendly soil. Warm hearts were there behind him; perhaps it was too much to expect of human fidelity to even hope that he might find all unchanged on his return. That day was far away, so dim and indefinite, so hopeless and so vague, that it could not be fixed in the imagination.
He turned from San Fernando with a sigh, to take up his unwilling road. He knew then how Boabdil felt on leaving the white city of Granada, turning from his last sight of his ancestral roof from the distant heights, never to return again. The swallow might come back to the turrets, the dove to her nest in the lemon tree, but a defeated and broken king could feel no more the quickening joy of home-coming. Sorrow with hope is to be borne; the heart breaks in the void of despair. The lash of Don Geronimo was driving him away, as it had driven happiness and contentment from the lives of the poor neophytes of San Fernando.
Juan rode on, his thoughts behind him, with so little heart in his enterprise that he was careless of his bridle reins, and almost unseated when his horse shied and bounded with sudden start away from something among the bushes. Juan only glimpsed it, a dark small something lying close beside a clump of tall purple sage, but he knew from the animal's alarm that it was something that belonged to and had been handled lately by man. He turned back to investigate, to discover a black hat lying in the trampled trail of several horses which had passed that way only a little while before.
Plain as the tracks of the horses were in the loose earth, Juan had crossed the trail without marking them, absorbed as he had been in his own affairs. Don Geronimo's peril had been put into the background of his thoughts. Here he read, as plainly as from a printed page, something that brought it to the front again with sudden rush. There was no mistaking Don Geronimo's hat with its broad band of silver cloth; there was not another like it at San Fernando. While Padre Ignacio pressed northward into the wooded canyon, Don Geronimo's captors were headed to the south, striking for the mountains called Santa Monica, on the farther side of the broad valley, which rose higher as they reached toward the sea.
Yet it might be that Padre Ignacio had seen this divergence from the expected, and had followed. Juan dismounted for a closer examination of the ground in the open places where the shadows of the bushes did not interfere. There was no mule-track to be found. If Padre Ignacio had come after the horsemen, the distinctive footprint of his animal would have been seen without trouble. It was but a little way back to the road which these vengeful young men had followed from the mission; Juan back-tracked them, bent on learning beyond any doubt that Padre Ignacio had gone on to the north. If mule-tracks anywhere between there and the beaten road these riders had left proved that Padre Ignacio had picked up the trail, then Juan would have no further duty in the matter, let his misgivings be what they might.
But there was no track of unshod mule in the hoof-torn soft earth. In the dusty main road, white as a trickle of flour over the thirsty land, Juan found the mule's tracks. Padre Ignacio had ridden in haste; it was written there in the dust. Straight on to the north he had gone, unseeing in his fixed belief that those whom he sought continued on before him.
With this discovery, Juan dismounted. He hastily took his sack of provisions from the cantle of his saddle, wrapped his long grey cloak around it and placed it in the branches of a sturdy live-oak tree that stood beside the road. He debated with himself briefly on the question of his firearms, deciding that they must be left behind. Padre Ignacio had missed the object of his quest; he would ride far into the mountains before discovering his mistake. Juan had no doubt of his own duty in this situation; Don Geronimo's hat, dropped unseen by his captors, or carelessly passed as it flew off in his headlong ride, had appealed with tragic eloquence. Yet Don Geronimo's enemies were Juan's friends; he could not pursue them armed.
Two hours before dawn the morning fog blew in from the sea, muffling the moon like a lady's face behind her mantilla, dimming at first, speedily obscuring altogether, the light that had been Juan's guidance in following the vaqueros' trail. He groped along in the grey mistiness, leading his horse, bending low, sometimes feeling the ground for the tracks, only to lose the trail in a cluttered confusion ef hoofprints where a herd of cattle had drifted across it. He waited there, impatient of the delay, his back against the trunk of a tree, while the fog came rolling in, cloud on cloud, the slight breath that carried it damp upon his face.
Juan felt, when morning came as pale and uncertain as light through muddy water, that this delay had eaten up Don Geronimo's doubtful chance of ever returning to San Fernando alive. He did not care so much on Don Geronimo's account; considered from that corner of the situation he was not moved by any sharp twitchings of sympathy. When one thought of Padre Ignacio and Doña Magdalena, it was another thing. Don Geronimo was a cold and cruel man, yet singularly devoted to the cause of the padres, honest and loyal according to his severe accounting of discipline and service in the name of Our Señor. Considered from the appraisement of his worth as a true and faithful servant, harsh only as he believed it necessary, cruel only in the age-old oppression of master over slave, not singular in that respect to hundreds of men in Juan's own Virginia and Kentucky; considered in this light, Don Geronimo probably was worth saving for himself.
If he could deliver Don Geronimo from the vengeance of the young men and see him faced again safely toward San Fernando, he could turn to his own banishment with a lighter heart, knowing that the blessing of Padre Ignacio and Doña Magdalena would follow him, multiplied by a thousand gratitudes. There was no selfish thought in his breast of winning absolution, of quieting the feud between him and Don Geronimo, or gaining a revocation of the edict which sent him forth like one disowned.
The trail led across the little river which came down from San Fernando, several miles below the mission. From that point it bore toward the pass leading across into the valley of San Gabriel, but a considerable distance to the eastward of the king's road which Juan had traversed with Padre Mateo on the journey to the harbor to fetch Gertudis Sinova. It was plain going here; the mayordomo's captors were carrying him toward a mountain that flanked the pass on the east.
This mountain rose out of the valley abruptly, without the gradation of preliminary hills, almost precipitous on the side which Juan was approaching. It was an ill-shaped eminence, its sides dark with the greenery of laurel and sage and chaparral, its summit divided into two knobs, standing perhaps half a mile apart. These topmost heights were rocky and bare, although almost daily refreshed by the fogs which swathed the valley at this time of the year, drenching tree and shrub with their distillations, keeping the northern slopes of the mountains green.
Juan drew rein as he came clear of the tall, wide-spreading oaks which grew in luxuriance close against the foot of this mountain, standing in a little open space from which he had a clear view of the forbidding dark mountain's double hump. The rising sun was routing the fog out of the valley; the shrubbery around him was dripping as from a shower. The summit of the mountain was sharp against the clear sky, stalks of yucca, from which the bloom had long since withered, standing like spears out of the barrens and ledges from which they grew. On the summit of the eastern peak a horse was standing; Juan could see its head lifted above the shrubs which hemmed the little rocky islet of the top. It was unmistakably plain, although it must have been more than a mile away, in a straight line.
Juan could not see anything of the animal but the head and neck, lifted in the posture of sharp attention, as if the creature had caught an alarm, or stood watching the movement of something on the opposite slope. As the trail of those whom he sought led on into a canyon that promised to offer a way to the summit, Juan had no doubt that this horse was from San Fernando, and that the others, and their riders, with the unhappy Don Geronimo, were close by.
There was no road, no trace or mark of any way frequented by man, in the canyon through which Juan followed the track of those who bore Don Geronimo to the reckoning of his cruel years. Here the riders had been forced to scatter, each finding a way for himself through the close-grown thickets of chaparral. It was slow going; more than an hour of winding and forging through the rough tangle, where harsh branch and bramble laid hold of every fold and wrinkle in a man's garment and sought to hold him back, brought Juan only fairly into the shadow of the mountain, the base of which the trail of those he followed was rounding, while it mounted always on an oblique course that was making for the top.
The sun was three hours high when Juan mounted out of the canyon and stood on the western shoulder of the mountain, in a meadow now yellow with the dry stalks of wild oats, which a few months ago was a green pasture. From this point he could not see the peak toward which he was directing his efforts, although he was confirmed in his conclusion that this knob, the highest point of the mountain, had been the vaqueros' objective. Their trail continued on, angling sharply up the mountain-side, appallingly steep here, and grown over with a tangle of low shrubs which seemed almost impenetrable.
A little below the level on which he stood, ahead of him a considerable distance, a brushwood fire was burning. Juan could not see the blaze, only the tall pillar of vaporous smoke, yellowish-white with a tint of green, such as the woodsman at once knows is fed by living vegetation. A slow and languid fire, Juan thought; doubtless in the clearing of some settler, who heaped it with green boughs. He went on, uneasy to be riding on that slope, steep as a house roof, where a stumble might send horse and man rolling down among the scraggled bushes, none of which seemed strong enough to offer much of a lodgment.
The horse that Sebastian Alvitre had ridden in his outlawed days was well accustomed to that kind of work. He went about it with surprising security and quickness of foot, although the labor of it was heavy. Juan was nothing extraordinary as a rider, knowing little about easing or sparing his mount in such a pressure as this, yet his sympathies were keen and his heart tender, to such a degree, in fact, that he drew up and dismounted as the passage grew steeper, with the intention of hitching the horse to a shrub and going afoot the remainder of the way.
He was astonished at this point to notice the growth of the fire, which had spread from its place of beginning in the half hour that he had been toiling up the slope, to a long front which was girding the mountain. It was still too far away to give him much concern; it must eat its way through the green brush, tall and dense below him, thicker and greener a little way ahead. But it was making a tremendous smoke, and the outrunning spread of it was mystifying.
It might be that the Indians not attached to the mission—a tribe lived there in the vicinity of the pass, he knew—were setting the fire to drive out rabbits, according to their custom at that time of the year, as Padre Mateo had told him. It seemed an unlikely place for such a sport, yet it was certain that somebody was extending the fire line. There was little wind; the smoke rose high, so dense that the view of the distant San Gabriel valley was cut off. All the world visible to Juan was that grey-green mountain-side between the fire and the top.
If the wind should rise, the blaze might run up the mountain to that point before he could explore the top and return, although it seemed unlikely that fire could find a foothold among the melancholy greenery of that slope. Again, he might need the horse to follow the trail, in case Don Geronimo's captors had crossed the summit and gone on. He did not believe this to be the case; they had struck for the mountain top with definite intention, perhaps associated with some tradition of sacrifice or vengeance, or celebration of victory such as they doubtless considered this to be over their persecutor, the mayordomo of San Fernando.
Leading the horse, Juan scrambled on, the beast lumbering after him in the peculiarly ungainly heaves and jumps by which a horse takes a steep. This was an uncomfortable proceeding at a man's heels, with only the length of the reins between. Juan pulled up after a little of it, considering what was to be done, blowing from the exertion, and the heat of the morning sun concentrated on the mountain-side.
And more than the heat of the sun. The fire had grown almost past belief in these few minutes. There was a pitchy blackness in the smoke close to the ground, and glimpses through it of fire that leaped like spume of breaking seas. The wind was beginning to stir, called up by the heat; it flattened the smoke against the mountain, and bent the points of flame down to catch the tops of those stolid, harsh-leaved shrubs, the names of which Juan did not know, but the nature of which now became appallingly apparent. Each leaf, each somnolent, scraggly shrub, became a torch at the touch of fire. They were full of resinous substances, and strange oils, the perfume of their burning sweet as incense before the altar.
Juan looked anxiously toward the mountain top, not far away, but circled with a band of vigorous shrubs as though some ooze of water came out of the rocks to gladden their roots. The steepest part of it lay ahead of him. But it was evident that those whom he trailed had ridden up it; he could do no less.
The horse was uneasy; Juan felt it tremble as he put foot in the stirrup. Eager to be away out of the march of that panic-striking thing that crunched dry branches and roared in green boughs, the creature lunged and lurched up the steep. In a breath the smoke had become as thick as the morning fog, and hotter than the noontime sun of San Fernando. Still Juan was not anxious over his own situation. The top of the peak for which he was bound had appeared rocky and bare from a distance; the fire would fall at its edges; there he could wait until it had stripped the mountain and died out, as it must do quickly, urged on by the growing wind.
It had grown to be a gale of fire on the mountain-side before Juan reached the summit, the wind from it so hot that the skin puckered and drew, and the eyeballs burned in dry sockets. All the surface moisture evaporated out of a man at the touch of that fiery hurricane, which whistled through the greasewood, sowing smoking twigs for the hasty harvest of flame.
Juan's great concern had come suddenly to center on himself. Grave peril had leaped up out of that lazy cloud of brushwood smoke, beside which Don Geronimo's was scarcely greater. Across the ridge of the mountain Juan believed he would be safe from this driving storm of fire, which he calculated would spend itself for want of fuel when it reached the top. Don Geronimo's captors would have fled to safety; there would be nobody on the mountain top for him to rescue but himself, and from the way things looked and felt at that moment, he would have quite enough to do to accomplish that.
The fire was more than half way up the mountain when Juan's horse scrambled up the last steep to the top. Looking back, Juan saw the forerunning surge of flame leaping from bush to bush, thicket to thicket, in a wild, avid, happy madness, a greedy delight of destruction, it seemed. Far below as the smoke broke for an instant and showed him the yellow-brown meadow of wild oats, he saw a man running with a brand of fire. It was only a glimpse, sharp, clear, distinct; the trailing torch dragging in the grass as the man ran, the quick-springing flame that followed.
There was no security on the summit at that point. Here the long ridge of the mountain ran between the two humps, only a few yards in width, clothed over with a dense growth of sage and dwarfed laurel, the cedar-green of rank greasewood clumped here and there, every plume of it primed with its inflammable oils, waiting to vanish in a whistling roar at the first touch of flame. Juan pushed across the ridge, thinking to ride down out of that withering blast of fire, knowing that it could not run down this lee side as rapidly as it had pursued him upward on the slope at his back.
His hope was cut off by a drop almost perpendicular. Not a ledge, but a brush-grown steep, so tangled with interlacing growth that a stone scarcely could have rolled down, it appeared. Juan hastened on to the peak where he had seen the horse. The vaqueros would have gone at the first sight of fire; it was his hope that he might follow their trail to safety.
What had appeared a barren spot from the valley, here proved to be some sort of winter-growing plant that had matured and turned brown. It stood thick on the slope of the peak, kindling spread ready for the advancing fire. At the summit there was a small clear space, indeed, and here lay rocks red from the passing of old fires, which had streamed across them on such a wind as this. Here Juan paused a moment. The horse that he had seen must have been on this point; from here the trail that he must follow led away.
Juan could not discover any tracks from the saddle, his eyes parched by the searing wind and smoke. He dismounted, sheltering himself in the lee of his horse. There they had passed; the hoofprints were dim in the hard earth. On again, on foot, pressing close against his horse's side, almost strangled, his windpipe a streak of fire. Over the summit he plunged down into a jungle of greasewood, which grew there taller than he ever had seen it, at least twice the height of a man.
Here the hot blast of wind was broken by the thickets, the smoke was not so stifling and dense. Juan paused to breathe a moment, gasping, spent. He moistened his finger-tip in his mouth and rubbed his burning eyes, searching again for trace of the passage the others had made through the thicket.
A horse was standing almost within arm's length of him. It was tied to a stout mountain sumac by bridle reins, and lariat around its neck, hopelessly fastened in the track of the approaching fire. On the ground beside it lay the saddle it had worn, and the sheepskin that had been used for a pad; on its back there was bound another burden, as terrible to see as ever shocked the eyes of man.