"You'll be all right now," said Stephens; "you've nothing to fear." He deliberately assumed a security he was far from feeling, but it was part of the game he must play. Her little hand still lay in his; it was the first time it had ever done so; it seemed as if the firm pressure of his strong fingers must reassure this poor terrified young thing, the wild leaping of whose pulses he could feel. Her breast heaved convulsively as she strove to control her sobs; the great tear-drops gathered under her eyelids and ran down her cheeks.
"Great God!" he said, "that you should have suffered like this! But don't be afraid; we'll get you out of this all right." His voice sounded in his own ears strained and unnatural. He was trying his best to play his part by appearing cheerful and consolatory, while at that very same moment the strongest feeling in him was a burning, fierce desire to pump lead into the gang of savages who had made this tender creature suffer this agony of terror. And but for her presence he might have done it there and then. To preserve her, however, it was above all things necessary to temporise; and to preserve her must be his first thought. He must hear her own story and consult with her on his next move; but to do that he must talk in Spanish, which Mahletonkwa understood. What a pity she did not speak English, but that could not be helped. How could he manage to take her out of earshot.
"Oh, where is my father? where is Andrés?" she sobbed, in a passion of fear for the possible fate of her own people. "I heard two shots, and then I heard no more. Were they there?"
"Oh, they're all right," said the American heartily, in the very cheerfullest tones he could muster. "Don't you fret, señorita," and he patted reassuring the little hand he held in his, loosing his grip of his rifle to do so and squeezing the trusty weapon against his body with his elbow. "It was only me out there that they were shooting at; no harm done. Your father and brother are all right." Nevertheless this repetition by her of her anxious inquiries brought a disturbing idea into his head. Had she any special reason for thinking that her father and her brother were wounded or slain? Could the cacique's conjecture have been true, and had the Mexicans overtaken Mahletonkwa's band on the Mesa del Verendo and fought with them there and been beaten off? He longed to ask her about this, but he did not like to do so within hearing of the Navajos. Still, he reflected, Mahletonkwa would hardly have met him so boldly if there was fresh blood on his hands. Ah, but he might have done that to lure him into this trap; and now, behold, here he was in the wolf's lair! Thoughts raced through his mind like lightning. Then he spoke.
"Mahletonkwa, I suppose you make no objection to her coming with me now?"
"Not go," was the somewhat ominous reply; "stay here; sit down; talk."
"But I want to talk to her by herself," he said; "I suppose you won't object, then, if we go to the middle of the meadow and sit down there?"
"Not go," repeated the Indian deliberately; "yes, you can go and sit in there if you like," and he pointed to the overhanging side of the lava bed, close to which was the camp.
"He means the cave there where the water is," quickly interposed the girl, who was by this time recovering the control of her voice, though her breast still heaved convulsively.
"All right, then, certainly, let's come on there; that'll do as well," said the American with assumed ease. Still keeping her hand in his, he turned in the direction indicated, and made a move as if to start. The other Navajos rapidly exchanged some sentences in their own language.
"You must leave your rifle if you go in there," said Mahletonkwa, turning to Stephens again after listening to what they said.
"No," replied he, "certainly not. I'm no prisoner. No treachery, Mahletonkwa." He slung himself round and faced the chief, placing himself directly in front of the captive girl, as if assuming possession of her.
"No treachery," re-echoed the Indian promptly, "only"—he hesitated to say what was in his mind, but Manuelita divined it instantly.
"Their water is in the cave in a great rock-hole," she said, "and he fears you will take cover in there and then shoot at him from thence."
"No, I won't, Mahletonkwa," said Stephens at once; "I won't do that, and I hadn't ever even thought of such a thing. It was your own suggestion that I should go there. I had rather go out in the middle of the meadow where I proposed first; there's no cover out in the meadow."
"No, not there," said Mahletonkwa; "better you go on into the cave"; and following his direction they went forward together hand in hand.
Right in under the lava bed there was visible a wide, overarching cavity extending some twenty or thirty feet back and at the far end of this lay a deep natural rock-cistern full of clear dark water. It was a hidden well.
"This is their spring," said the girl, pointing to it. "These Navajos know every secret water-spring in the country."
The extraordinary quickness with which she had mastered her feelings, and now the perfectly natural tone in which she spoke, and the straightforward way in which she referred to her captors, greatly relieved the American's anxiety; had she suffered at their hands what his knowledge of the nature of Indians had led him to dread, it seemed to him that she could not have spoken of them in this unembarrassed style. She had raised her eyes to his as she uttered the words, and though they were still wet with the tears that she had shed, their glance was frank and open; there was no trace in her mien of the dull despair of irreparable wrong he remembered in the victim of the Sioux. His relief was shown by the reassured expression in his own eyes as he returned her glance, and said lightly;
"Oh yes, of course they must know them all; why, they're simply bound to know this whole country just like a book. They'd never be able to fly around in it, keeping themselves out of sight in the way they do, if they didn't."
The pair seated themselves on the rock forming the lip of the cistern. They were here out of earshot of the Indians if they did not speak loud.
"Now tell me, señorita," he began in a low voice, "how you were carried off."
She blushed and looked down. "I hardly know how to say it," she said, "it was all so quick. I had got up and gone across the patio, thinking it was near daybreak—you know there was no moon—and never dreaming of the possibility of any danger inside the house, when I was seized from behind, and gagged and bound in a moment; and then they threw a riata round me and lifted me to the top of the house, and down the outside on to a pony's back, and I was hurried off I knew not where. Oh, it was dreadful! I was gagged so that I could not even cry out, and I did not know where they were taking me or what would become of me. Oh, I was terribly frightened!" She paused, quite overcome for the moment by the recollection.
Stephens felt a passion of pity sweep through his whole being at the thought of the helpless plight of this lovely girl in the hands of enemies—such enemies! "Yes," he said soothingly, taking her hand again in his—they had unclasped hands as they sat down; "don't be afraid; you're all right now; but go on and tell me about it."
"There isn't anything to tell," she answered with a little half-laugh that was almost hysterical. "They held me on a horse, and we rode and we rode and we rode, till I was so tired that I thought I should have fainted; but," said she proudly, "I didn't faint. Then, when the daylight came, I was blindfolded with a rag—pah!"—she added with a little moue of disgust—"such a dirty rag!—I don't like these Indians,—they're not at all clean people."
Stephens could not help smiling to himself at this bit of petulance. If she had nothing worse to complain of than their lack of soap and water they could afford to smile a little now, he and she both.
"Yes," he assented with amused gravity, "they do show a most reprehensible neglect of the washtub. In fact, I don't suppose there's such a thing as a proper washboard in the whole Navajo nation."
Their eyes met again, and they both laughed, he of set purpose to raise her spirits, she because she could not help it. The awful tension of her captivity, a tension that had never ceased for a moment, not even in her fitful and broken snatches of sleep, was relaxed at last. In the presence of this brave man who had come to rescue her, confidence returned, and now the reaction of feeling was so strong that, had she let herself go, she could have laughed as wildly as a maniac. But her spirit was unbroken, and she held herself in.
"So, then, with that rag over your eyes you had no sort of idea where you were being taken to?" he said interrogatively.
"No," she answered; "how could I? Except, indeed, for the sun on my neck sometimes; that made me think we were going north or west a good deal,—at least it seemed as if we were."
"Exactly so; you were quite right," he said encouragingly; thinking to himself as he said so that she must have been a real plucky girl to have kept her head cool enough to allow her to observe things with so much accuracy. "Yes," he repeated, "that was exactly your course at first, between north and west. And about your food? What did you do? Had you anything to eat?"
"Nothing but raw dried meat," she answered, her pretty upper lip curving with disgust, "and it was so hard. My mouth aches with the pain of eating it. These savages don't know how to cook it properly; they chew it raw as they go along, generally; or if they stop and camp and make a fire, they have nothing to cook it in; they don't boil it or fry it; they don't always even pound it with a stone to make it soften, but just throw it on the coals till it is scorched, and then eat it so, all blackened and burned. Savages!" and again she made a face to express her contempt for their very rudimentary ideas of cookery. Once more their eyes met, and they both laughed again.
"I am afraid," said he with grave apology, "that I have been careless, too. I haven't brought along anything nice for you to eat. In fact, I have nothing but dried meat myself, not even a scrap of tortilla left, to say nothing of candy; I wish I'd only thought of it when I was starting, but the fact is, I came off in a hurry."
"Yes," she cried in a repentant voice, "and I've been talking about myself the whole time. Did you come with my father? Do you know where he is? How did you find us?"
"The Pueblo Indians knew of this place," he answered; "they led me here." He looked cautiously over his shoulder as he spoke, to see if there was any Navajo near trying to play the eavesdropper on them. "Your father and Don Andrés had set out with a strong party of Mexicans before me. They started within an hour after it was known that you were gone. But your father sent word of it all to me up at the pueblo, and I got some of the Indians to join me and started out, too. But we didn't come the same way as Don Andrés's party; we picked up the trail off towards the Ojo Escondido. You see, my Indians believed that the Navajos certainly were making for this place, and, in short, they led me straight here, and that's how we seem to have got in ahead of Don Andrés."
"How clever of them to guess the hiding-place!" said she. "And now, shall we go home quite quick? Perhaps we might meet my father and my brother on the way."
"I've no doubt that'll be all right now," he said confidently; "I must just fix up things with Mahletonkwa first." He paused; there was a question he could not put to her direct, and yet before treating further with the Indian he wished to feel absolutely certain whether he should deal with him as one guilty of unpardonable wrong or not. He tapped the butt of his revolver significantly with his right hand, looked her full in the face for a moment, and then with an abrupt movement he rose to his feet and turned away from her; his right hand half drew the revolver from its holster, and made a gesture as if to offer it to her behind his back, but his eyes were fixed on the group outside the cave. "Now, señorita," he said, "before I go to speak with him, tell me one thing: are you content to live? Are you content to go back in peace to your people? Or else—I guess you can understand me—here's my revolver for you; you can make an end with that, and I'll go out to those savages, and then, I swear by the wrath of God, you shall be revenged on some of them, anyhow, before I drop."
"But why?" cried she with a little shudder of surprise at him, so unexpected to her was this suggestion. "They haven't done anything bad to me. I don't want anyone to be killed. They are very ignorant, uncivilised folk, but they treated me as well as they knew. I'm sorry if I complained about the dried meat they gave me. Don't begin fighting with them, please,—not on my account. I thought you had made peace. I want to go home."
He turned and looked at her. The naïve simplicity of her language reassured him completely. "All right, señorita," he said, "I'll see that you get safe home. I'll go and arrange with Mahletonkwa now. I'm glad they treated you as well as they knew how. But say," he added, stooping over her and drawing the pistol completely out, "wouldn't you like me to leave this with you, just in case of accidents? There's always a sort of feeling of comfort in having a six-shooter handy."
"No, no," said she, making a movement with her hands as if to push the unaccustomed object away from her, "I've never had one in my life to use. I shouldn't know what to do with it at all."
Half reluctantly he returned it to its case, thinking what a difference there was between a girl like this and the average Western ranch-woman. American girls who lived on the frontier could shoot; they were more like men in that way; they were, comparatively speaking, independent; whereas this pretty creature depended solely upon him to protect her; so much the more reason, then, he argued with himself, for being cautious and diplomatic in his dealings with the Navajos now.
"Well then, señorita," he said, "you'd better stay here a few minutes longer while I go back and speak to Mahletonkwa. I guess it won't take us long to fix things."
He took her hand in his and held it for a moment. It lay there in his firm clasp with a confidingness that thrilled through him; the sensation came on him as a new discovery. "Why, this was what hands were meant for, to clasp each other." The ten long years of the unnatural divorce from womankind in which he had lived seemed to roll away as a dream. He had forgotten what a girl's hand was like; a quick impulse came on him to raise it to his lips, to clasp her in his arms and console her, only to be as quickly checked again. It would not be the fair thing; here she was relying entirely upon him for protection; it was for him to guard her, and to do no more. Anything else must wait—must wait till she was once more in safety, completely mistress of herself again. But the flood of new ideas for the future sped through his mind with lightning rapidity. In moments of danger and excitement the wheels of thought turn at a rate that seems incredible afterwards.
For one last, long minute he stood there, his hand locked in hers, looking into the deep, dark wells of her eyes. Of what joy had not his desolate past robbed him? Oh, why had he been blind to his chances all this winter, when he might have looked in her eyes like this any day; now he had found what made life worth living—and found it, perhaps, too late! Was it too late? He would see about that. With a final pressure of her gentle fingers, each one of which he seemed to feel separately pressing his in response, he turned away and strode out of the cave towards the group of Navajos in the meadow.
And who shall say what were the girl's feelings, left thus alone in the cave while her fate was being decided by the men sitting out there in the sun? Hope lifted her heart high,—hope after despair, like the blue sky after a thunderstorm, unimaginably bright, the hope of recovered freedom, of return to the longed-for hearth, of the embraces of her father and the dear ones at home. But there were fears too: after all, might not her deliverer fail yet? he had reached her,—could he rescue her? would he, single-handed, be able to prevail over these savages? Was there nothing she might do, weak woman as she was, to help him? Instinctively her fingers felt within her dress for the beads she wore, and fast flowed her prayers for his success; when she paused and looked anxiously out she saw him seated on the ground, the rifle in his lap, the Indians in their own style squatting round, and all faces grave with serious debate. It was her fate they were discussing, but it was his, too. In the intense sunlight she could mark the hard-set lines of his face; he was stubborn with the Indians about something or other; they wanted something he would not give? Why would he not give it. "Oh, give way to them," she could have cried to him. "Do let them have it—do. Only make peace, and let us return together"; peace, peace, peace, that was what she yearned for, peace and freedom! But she spoke no word, she knew that she must leave it to him, and once more she fell to her prayers.