Steve Yeager Part 16

The seventeen-year-old sentry was still doing duty outside the prison.

At sight of Culvera he stopped rolling a cigarette to s.n.a.t.c.h up his rifle and fling a challenge at him.

"How is it that you have let your prisoner escape?" demanded the officer in Spanish after he had given the countersign.

"Escape? No, senor. Listen. Do you not hear him move?" replied in the boy in the same tongue. "I think the Gringo is having a fit. For ten--twenty--minutes he has beat on the floor and kicked at the walls.

To die at daybreak is not to his liking."

"Mil diablos! I tell you I saw him ride away. It is some one else in there."

"Some one else! But, no--that is impossible. Who else could it be?" As he asked the question the boy's jaw fell slack. A horrible suspicion pushed itself into his mind.

"Estupido!" he continued in growing terror. "Can it be--the general?"

"We shall see."

Culvera stepped to the door. It was locked and the key gone. He called aloud. His only answer was a strange, m.u.f.fled sound like a groan and the beating of feet upon the floor.

With the b.u.t.t of the sentry's rifle he hammered in the door at the lock and by exerting all his strength forced the fastening. Lying in the middle of the room, bound hand and foot, with his furious face upturned to the moonlight, was Gabriel Pasquale. Culvera asked no foolish questions, wasted no time. Kneeling beside his superior officer, he cut the handkerchief that gagged him and the ropes that tied his limbs.

Together Ramon and the guard lifted him to his feet and held him for a moment until his legs regained their power.

"What devil has done this outrage?" asked Ramon.

For a time Pasquale could only swallow and grunt. When the power of speech returned, he broke into fierce and terrible maledictions. His lieutenant listened in silence, extreme concern in his respectful face, an unholy amus.e.m.e.nt bubbling up behind the deferential exterior.

"Then it was the Gringo?" he asked when his chief ran out of breath and for the moment ceased cursing.

The insurgent leader went off into another explosion of rage. He would cut his heart out while the American devil was still alive. He would stake him out on the desert to broil to death beneath a Mexican sun.

Culvera showed the hat that he had punctured with his bullet. "Thus near I came to avenging you, general. See! One inch lower and I would have taken off the top of his head. Already Fuentes is pursuing him. Perhaps this Yeager may be dragged back to justice."

Culvera asked no questions as to why the general was alone with a condemned man at such an hour nor as to how the American had succeeded in overpowering him. He understood that his chief's wounded vanity was torturing the man enough to render curiosity unsafe. But the boyish sentry did not know this. He ventured on a sympathetic question.

"But, senor, Your Excellency, how did this Gringo devil, who was unarmed, take away your revolver and tie you?"

Pasquale, teeth clenched, whirled upon him. "You--dog of a peon--let your prisoner walk away without a challenge and then dare to question _me_!"

The old soldier's fist shot out like a pile-driver. The blow lifted the boy from his feet and flung him like a sack of meal against the wall.

His body hung there a moment, then dropped to the ground. A faint groan was the only sound that showed he was not unconscious.

The general strode from the room, Culvera at his heels. The brown mask of his face told no stories of how the younger man was enjoying himself.

Before he slept, Ramon had one more pleasant task before him. He roused Harrison to tell him the news. He sat smiling on the foot of the bed, his eyes mocking the startled face of the prizefighter.

"I come to bring you good news, senor," he jeered. "Your countryman has escaped."

Harrison sat up in bed. "What's that? Escaped, did you say? Where to?"

The Mexican swept one arm around airily. "How should I know? He's gone--broke out. He's taken a horse with him."

"A horse!" repeated Harrison stupidly.

"Just so--a horse. To ride upon, doubtless, since he was in somewhat of a hurry. Odd that a horse happened to be waiting saddled for him at two in the morning. Not so?"

The American groped toward the point. "You mean--that he had friends, that some one helped him to get away?"

The other man shrugged his shoulders. "Do I? Quien sabe? Anyhow, he's gone. Must be very disappointing to you, since you had promised yourself to see his translation to heaven at sunrise."

Harrison expressed himself bitterly in language emphatic and profane.

Meanwhile Culvera smiled pleasantly and sympathetically. "You run Pasquale a close second. He cursed the roof off when he found breath."

"I'm not through with Yeager yet. Believe _me_, he'll have one heluvatime before I'm done," boasted the prizefighter savagely.

"You're still in entire accord with the chief. Yet our friend the Gringo rides away in safety and laughs at you both. Ramon Culvera takes his hat off to Senor Yeager. He has played a winning game with courage and brains."

"I beat his fool head off when he joined the Lunar Company--the very day he joined. When I meet up with him again, I'll repeat," Harrison bragged, hammering the pillow with his clenched fist.

The Mexican looked politely incredulous. "Maybeso. This I say only.

Yeager has played one game with Pasquale, one with you, and one with me.

He comes out best each time. Of a sureness he is a strong man, wise, cool, resourceful. Is it not so?"

The prizefighter sputtered with wounded vanity. "Him! The b.o.o.b's nothing but a lucky guy. You'd ought to 'a' seen him after I fixed his map that first day. Down and out he was, take my word for it."

"If Senor Harrison says so," a.s.sented Culvera with polite mockery. "But as you say, he laughs best who laughs last. And that reminds me. He left a note to be forwarded a friend. Pasquale was too crazy mad to see it, so I put it in my pocket."

He handed to the other man the note Steve had written for Threewit. The prizefighter read it in the dim light laboriously.

"It was written, you perceive, before Pasquale shoved his big head into a trap and gave him a chance to escape," explained the insurgent officer.

As Harrison read, certain phases of the situation arranged themselves before his dull mind. He was acutely disappointed at the escape of his enemy, since it was not likely the man would ever be caught again so neatly. But now he forced himself to look beyond this to the consequences. Yeager would tell all he knew when he reached Los Robles.

With the troopers warned against him Harrison knew he could no longer move to and fro as freely on the American side. The very fact that he was a suspect would greatly hamper his dealings. The Seymours would probably turn against him for betraying the man who had risked his life to save Phil from the effects of his folly. And what about Ruth? He knew he held her by fear of trouble to Phil and by means of a sort of magnetic clamp he had always imposed upon her will. Would she throw him over now after she heard the story of the cowpuncher?

His eyes were still fastened sulkily on the note while he was slowly realizing these things. One line seemed to stand out from the rest.

_Bust up that marriage if you can._

Harrison ground his teeth with impotent rage. This range-rider always had interfered with his affairs from the first moment he had met him. If ever he got the chance again to stamp him out--! The strong fingers of the man worked with the nervous longing to tighten on the throat of the gay youth who had worsted him in the duel the prizefighter had forced upon him. The cowpuncher had introduced himself by knocking him down. A few hours later he had turned a bruised and bleeding face up to him and laughed without fear as if it were of no consequence.

Yeager had stolen from him his reputation as a daring rider and a good shot. He had driven him from the Lunar Company. Now he was going back to spoil his plans for making money by rustling American stock and sending contraband goods across the line. Not only that; he was going to take from him the girl he was engaged to marry.

"By G.o.d! I'll give him a run for it," the prizefighter announced savagely and suddenly.

"For what?" asked Culvera maliciously.

"My business," retorted Harrison harshly, reaching for his clothes.

Half an hour later he was galloping toward the north. If he could reach Los Robles before Yeager did, he would turn a trick that would still leave the odds in his favor.