In the Dark
THE girl dropped noiselessly back to the ground. Fear had struck her this time, and she spilled loosely against the side of Brender, shuddering.
“Who’s there?” bawled the voice outside the gate.
In spite of fear, she managed to whisper:
“Alonso Santos!”
“Alonso Santos,” said Brender. “To test the lock of the gate.”
“Señor Santos?” exclaimed the guard outside. “I should never have known your voice. Will you open the gate and speak to me, señor?”
“Stand your guard,” said Brender, deepening his voice a little. “Keep your eyes open and your wits about you. I have other things to do than waste time.”
He heard the other muttering some sort of protest, for it seemed that the second voice of Brender had been no more like the accents of Santos than his first speech. In the meantime, he was stealing back under the arcade with the girl.
He had to keep an arm around her. Sickening fear made her waver and stumble as she walked.
When they were deep in the shadow he took the softness of her chin between thumb and forefinger and gave it such pressure that he felt the sharp edge of the bone beneath that velvet of flesh. She gasped at the pain, and he dropped his hand. She had thrown her head back to escape from the torment, and she kept it back now, staring at him. The shuddering of her body had stopped.
“It’s your happiness and my life,” said Brender in a murmur. “If you fail yourself now, you fail both of us.”
“Go on by yourself,” she said. “I’m better now, but I can’t trust myself. I may give way. I’m afraid when the test comes that I’ll crumble inside, as I did just now. Go on and get yourself out of trouble. Because if they find you, they’ll murder you instantly! There’s no mercy in them. I mean wealth to them if they can force me south over the border. They’d blot out twenty men to take me back, and they’d kill you like a dog. Go, go!”
“You’re over the panic now,” he told her. “Grit your teeth. You’ve got to come through with me.”
“I’ll wilt again, as I did just now,” she gasped. “When I heard the voice of him, everything went to pieces in me. Go by yourself. God bless you! I’m not worth the saving.”
He looked desperately away from her. What he saw was printed forever in his mind, though the picture of the moon-whitened face of the hotel on one side and the black wall on the other, with blacker windows let into it meant nothing to him. Beyond, there was the night blue of the sky, washed by moonlight, and one yellow planet swimming in it. He saw that picture while he thought of the next chance. There was a corner door, he remembered, that opened off the patio and led through a crooked hallway back to the stable. In the stable they could get horses, saddles — and then away!
Once clear of this little green paradise in the middle of the desert, with horses galloping, with this girl beside him, the most blasting heat on the widest alkali waste would be a heaven to him.
And still she was telling him to go, urging him away with her hands.
He took her by both wrists.
“We give them the slip together, or we’re caught together,” he said. “You understand? Quick, now, and come with me! There’s only one end for the two of us!”
The next moment she was running beside him around the shadowy arcade, their feet whispering over the tiles. And as she ran, he saw that her hands were balled into small, tight fists. But the weakness had gone out of her, and her step was full of springing lightness.
They came to the corner door, where he paused and tried the knob. It stuck. He pressed with the weight of his shoulder and heard the bolt of the lock clink lightly against metal. That way was closed to them!
Should they try to climb the wall to the window above and so work through the house to a different exit?
The thought seemed impossible.
He tested the next window. It resisted his effort to raise it. He stepped back with a faint groan. And he heard the girl say:
“Are you trapped? Is there no way out? Are you lost?”
If he smashed in the window-pane, turned the catch, perhaps they could run through the room, get into the crooked hallway, and so to the stable — and the first step toward freedom. His mind was beginning to blur. The terrible cold mist of fear began to draw into his lungs with every breath he took. Hardly knowing what he did, he tried the window again with all his might.
It yielded suddenly! It made a deep, grunting noise, like that of a startled pig. And a moment later he had worked it up and was helping the girl through into the thick blackness of the interior.
He joined her there. The warm, stale air closed about him like imprisoning hands. He had made another step toward freedom and escape, with her, but still the goal seemed to be at a great distance away.
He lighted a match. The light that spurted out of the shielding hollow of his hands struck the wall, trailed across a bed, a table, two chairs, and then glinted on the knob of a door.
It was not locked and it opened on thick blackness. With the last of the light on the match he discovered the narrow, winding corridor which, he knew, led to the stable. And now, for the first time, he felt real hope.
“We’re almost to horses — almost at the door of escape!” he told the girl. “Now, soft and steady. Not a whisper. We’ll soon be there. Keep hold on my coat. Walk right behind me!”
He started through the darkness, stretching out his hands so that he was in touch with the walls on either side, and at his back was the hand of the girl, as she followed. Yet he almost struck his forehead heavily against the door that ended the corridor.
This, in turn, was unlocked, and when he pushed it open, the pungent stable odor came up to his nostrils, mixed with the sweetness of well-cured hay. Some of the horses had not finished with their well-filled mangers, and he could hear the whispering sound as the hay was gathered under their lips, and the steady, rhythmical grinding of the great jaws.
Peace, surety came flooding over Brender’s soul.
A few moments more, and they would be in the open, racing side by side toward freedom!
One lantern was burning. Its wick was turned so low that it made all the interior of the big stable look like a shapeless mass of shadows, but he knew the way to his mare, and found Chinook at once, with her saddle hung up on the peg behind her.
“Go to the door — that one yonder,” he whispered to the girl. “Go like a snake in grass, because it may be guarded. If you find any one, come back to me. If you don’t find any one, wait there, and I’ll bring on the horses. Quickly!”
She was gone, instantly fading out, then looming again, dimly, against the moonlight that filled in the square of the open door.
He saddled the mare and bridled her. Near by he saw a big, rangy animal. He could not venture on lighting a candle, but with his wise hands, in the darkness, he read the slope of the shoulders, and got the hard, clean feel of the bone in the cannon.
That horse he saddled for the girl, untied the pair, and led them cautiously back down the aisle between the stalls. She had not returned, and therefore the way was clear.
Stepping into the doorway, he was amazed that she was not standing there!
“Rose!” he whispered. “Rose?”
Something whispered in the air just behind him. Chinook threw up her head with a grunt. And as he turned about, he saw the shadow of a man’s form in the darkness, and the shadowy loom of the blow that was aimed at his head. It came home. A wave of fire burst across his brain, and he fell on his face.