it was tea time at the circle k ranch. but no one was enjoying the hour of rest. kirby sat on the couch and abstractedly ate slice after slice of thin bread and butter, without speaking. mrs. kirby made shift to darn the bunch of stockings beside her, but her whole attention was strained to listening. the children did not understand, though they felt the general uneasiness, and whispered together as they looked at the pictures in the illustrated paper, months old.
kirby's assistants, the two young englishmen, had not come back when they were due. one had gone to the mail station in the valley, three days before, and he should have returned at noon, at the furthest limit. by three o'clock, the other had jumped on a horse and gone out to look for him. and now, one was lying in the road five miles from the ranch, with an arrow through his eye. the other, a mile nearer home, was propped against a pine trunk, so that the ragged hole beneath his shoulder blade, where a barb had been torn out, did not show. his wide eyes, upon the lid of one of which the blood from a head wound had clotted, looked up sightless through the branches, at a patch of blue sky. their end had been a common[pg 123] enough one, and had come to them both without a moment of warning.
at noon that day a cow-boy had ridden from the hills with a rumor that victorio's people were about. but kirby had kept it from his wife. it might not be true. and even if it were, the danger was really small. with the hands and the two englishmen, the quadrangle of log cabins, well stocked with food and ammunition, could withstand any attack. it had been built and planned to that end.
the silence, cut by the nervous whispering of the children, became unendurable. "are you very uneasy about them?" mrs. kirby asked.
"it's not so much that," he evaded, getting up to put a lump of sugar he did not need into his tea, "it's not so much that as it is the everlasting strain of fighting the hands. it would be easier to meet an open rebellion than it is to battle against their sullen ugliness."
mrs. kirby could understand that very well. she had the same thing to oppose day after day with the woman, and of late it had been more marked.
out in the corral the cow-boy was holding forth. the men had stopped work on the instant that kirby had turned his back. if kirby could loll on soft cushions and drink tea, as free-born americans and free-souled irishmen they might do the same. "it's all right," said the cow-boy, with a running accompaniment of profanity, as he cleaned his brutal mexican bit. "johnny bull don't have to believe in it if he don't like. but all the same, i seen a feller over here[pg 124] to the 3 c range, and he told me he seen the military camped over to san tomaso a week ago, and that there was a lot of stock, hundred head or so, run off from the settlements. you see, them apaches is making for the southern chiricahuas over in sonora to join the mexican apaches, and they're going to come this here way. you see!" and he rubbed at the rust vigorously with a piece of soft rawhide.
the woman joined her voice. she had a meat cleaver in her hand, and there was blood on her apron where she had wiped the roast she was now leaving to burn in the stove. "like as not we'll all be massacred. i told bill to get off this place two weeks ago, and he's such an infernal loafer he couldn't make up his mind to move hisself." she flourished her cleaver toward the big texan, her husband, who balanced on the tongue of a wagon, his hands in his pockets, smiling ruefully and apologetically, and chewing with an ardor he never put to any other work. "we been here four years now," she went on raspingly, "and if you all feel like staying here to be treated like slaves by these john bulls, you can do it. but you bet i know when i've got enough. to-morrow i quits." her jaws snapped shut, and she stood glaring at them defiantly.
the words of a woman in a community where women are few carry almost the weight of inspiration. be she never so hideous or so vile, she is in some measure a deborah, and the more yet, if she be moved to the lust and love of revenge of the prophetess who sang[pg 125] in the frenzy of blood drunkenness, "blessed above women shall jael the wife of heber, the kenite, be. blessed shall she be above women in the tent."
the declaration of independence roused the screeching eagle of freedom in the breasts of all the white men. with the mexicans it was a slightly different sentiment. at best they could never be relied upon for steady service. a couple of months' pay in their pockets, and they must rest them for at least six. it is always to be taken into consideration when they are hired. they had been paid only the day before. and, moreover, the greaser follows the gringo's lead easily—to his undoing.
the murmurs in the corral rose louder. it was not that kirby and his partners underpaid, underfed, or overworked the american citizens. it was that their language was decent and moderate; and the lash of the slave driver would have stung less than the sight of the black coats and the seven o'clock dinner. in the midst of white savages and red, the four clung to the forms of civilization with that dogged persistence in the unessential, that worship of the memory of a forsaken home, for which the englishman, time and again, lays down his life without hesitation. that was the grievance.
while kirby went through the oppressive rite of afternoon tea within the slant-roofed log cabin, and tried to hide from his wife the fear which grew as the shadows lengthened across the clearing out in the corral, the men had reached open mutiny. the smouldering sullenness[pg 126] had at last burst into flaming defiance, blown by the gale of the woman's wrath.
after he had had his tea kirby got up, went out to the corral, and called to one of the men, who hesitated for a moment, then slouched over, kicking with his heavy booted toe as he passed at the hocks of a horse in one of the stalls. kirby saw him do it, but he checked his wrath. he had learned to put up with many things. "don't you think," he suggested, "that it might be a good idea for you and some other man to ride down the road a bit—"
the man interrupted, "i ain't going daown the road, nor anywheres else before supper—nor after supper neither, if i don't feel like it." he was bold enough in speech, but his eyes dropped before kirby's indignant ones.
it was a fatal want of tact perhaps, characteristic of the race, but then the characteristic is so fine. "you will do whatever i tell you to do," the voice was low and strained, but not wavering. it reached the group by the harness-room door.
with one accord they strode forward to the support of their somewhat browbeaten brother. what they would do was exactly as they pleased, they told the tyrant. they shook their fists in his face. it was all in the brutal speech of the frontier, mingled with the liquid ripple of argot spanish, and its vicious, musical oaths. the deep voice of the woman carried above everything, less decent than the men. it was a storm of injury.
[pg 127]
kirby was without fear, but he was also without redress. he turned from them, his face contracted with the pain of his impotence, and walked back to the house. "i could order them off the ranch to-night," he told his wife, as he dropped on a chair, and taking up the hearth brush made a feint of sweeping two or three cinders from the floor; "but it's ten to one they wouldn't go and it would weaken my authority—not that i have any, to be sure—and besides," he flung down the brush desperately and turned to her, "i didn't want to tell you before, but there is a pretty straight rumor that victorio's band, or a part of it, is in these hills. we may need the men at any time." neither spoke of the two who should have been back hours ago. the night closed slowly down.
the texan woman went back to the kitchen and finished cooking the supper for the hands—a charred sort of saturnalian feast. "she can git her own dinner if she wants to," she proclaimed, and was answered by a chorus of approval.
while the men sat at the long table, shovelling in with knife and three-pronged fork the food of the master their pride forbade them to serve, a horse came at a run, up to the quadrangle, and a cow-boy rushed into the open doorway. "apaches!" he gasped, clutching at the lintel, wild-eyed, "apaches!"
they sprang up, with a clatter of dishes and overturning of benches and a simultaneous cry of "whereabouts?"
he had seen a large band heading for the ranch, and[pg 128] had found a dead white man on the north road, he said, and he gesticulated madly, his voice choked with terror.
had it been all arranged, planned, and rehearsed for months beforehand, the action could not have been more united. they crowded past him out of the door and ran for the corrals, and each dragged a horse or a mule from the stalls, flinging on a halter or rope or bridle, whatever came to hand, from the walls of the harness room.
but there was more stock than was needed.
"turn the rest loose," cried the woman, and set the example herself.
kirby, hurrying from the house to learn the cause of the new uproar, was all but knocked down and trodden under the hoofs of all his stock, driven from the enclosure with cracking of whips and with stones. then a dozen ridden horses crowded over the dropped bars, the woman in the lead astride, as were the men.
"what is this?" he shouted, grabbing at a halter-shank and clinging to it until a knife slashed down on his wrist.
"apaches on the north road," they called back; and the woman screamed above it all a devilish farewell, "better have 'em to dinner in claw-hammer coats."
it was a sheer waste of good ammunition, and it might serve as a signal to the indians as well; kirby knew it, and yet he emptied his six-shooter into the deep shadows of the trees where they had vanished, toward the south.
then he ran into the corral, and, snatching up a [pg 129]lantern from the harness room, looked around. it was empty. there was only a pack-burro wandering loose and nosing at the grains in the mangers.
he turned and went back to the cabin, where his wife stood at the door, with the children clinging to her. from down the north road there came a blood-freezing yell, and a shot, reverberating, rattling from hill to hill, muffling into silence among the crowding pines.
as he shut the door and bolted it with the great iron rods, there tore into the clearing a score of vague, savage figures. it looked, when he saw it for an instant, as he put up the wooden blinds, like some phantom dance of the devils of the mountains, so silent they were, with their unshod ponies, so quick moving. and then a short silence was broken by cries and shots, the pinge of bullets, and the whizz of arrows.
there were two rooms to the cabin where they were, the big sitting room and the small bedchamber beyond. kirby went into the bedroom and came out with two rifles and a revolver. he put the revolver into his wife's hands. "i'll do my best, you know, dear. but if i'm done for, if there is no hope for you and the children, use it," he said. and added, "you understand?"
of a truth she understood only too well, that death with a bullet through the brain could be a tender mercy.
"not until there is no hope," he impressed, as he put the barrel of his rifle through a knot hole and fired at random.
[pg 130]
she reloaded for him, and fired from time to time herself, and he moved from the little round hole in the wall to one in the window blind, in the feeble, the faithless hope that the indians might perhaps be deceived, might fancy that there was more than the one forsaken man fighting with unavailing courage for the quiet woman who stayed close by his side, and for the two children, huddled whimpering in one corner, their little trembling arms clasped round each other's necks.
twenty, yes ten, of those who, as the sound of the firing reached their ears, were making off at a run down the south road for the settlement in the valley, could have saved the fair-haired children and the young mother, who helped in the fruitless fight without a plaint of fear. ten men could have done it, could have done it easily; but not one man. and kirby knew it now, as the light of flames began to show through the chinks of the logs, and the weight of heavy bodies thudded against the door.
it was a strong door, built of great thick boards and barred with iron, but it must surely cede before fire and the blows. it wrenched on its huge hinges.
kirby set down his gun and turned to his wife, holding out his arms. she went to him and he kissed her on the forehead and the lips, in farewell. "good-by," he said; "now take the children in there."
no need to tell her that her courage must not falter at that last moment, which would soon come. he knew it, as he looked straight into those steadfast, loving[pg 131] eyes. she clung to his hand and stooped and kissed it, too; then she went to the children and took them, quivering and crying, into the other room, and closed the dividing door.
kirby, with a revolver in each hand, placed himself before it. it would avail nothing. but a man must needs fight to the end. and the end was now.
there was a stronger blow at the door, as of a log used by way of a ram. it gave, swayed, and fell crashing in, and the big room swarmed with screaming fiends, their eyes gleaming wildly in the light of the burning hay and the branches piled against the cabin, as they waved their arms over their feathered heads.
the one man at bay whirled round twice, with a bullet in his heart and an arrow through his neck. "now!" he made one fierce effort to cry, as he staggered again and dropped on his face, to be trampled under forty feet.
it was the signal to the woman in that other room behind the locked door, and above all the demoniacal sounds it reached her. only an instant she hesitated, until that door, too, began to give. then a cold muzzle of steel found, in the darkness, two little struggling, dodging faces—and left them marred. and once again the trigger was unflinchingly pulled, as greedy arms reached out to catch the white, woman's figure that staggered and fell.
* * * * * * * *
cairness and landor and a detachment of troops that had ridden hard all through the night, following an[pg 132] appalling trail, but coming too late after all, found them so in the early dawn.
there was a mutilated thing that had once been a man's body on the floor in the half-burned log cabin. and in another room lay two children, whose smooth, baby foreheads were marked, each with a round violet-edged hole. beside them was their mother, with her face turned to the rough boards—mercifully. for there had been no time to choose the placing of that last shot, and it had disfigured cruelly as it did its certain work.
