Somewhere south in Sonora

Day was actually breaking clearer. Mamie was dancing at her tether across the patio. The recent sound of guns had not been to her liking, nor certain odors which now moved in the air. The firing squad had gathered at the cistern. The men were drinking water and lighting cigarettes, talking jerkily with laughter. The sudden surge of pity which Elbert knew was for them, not for the others.... That was his day of quiet waiting. The sun rose and steadily shone; such was a fact of continual amazement. The hours didn’t drag, because his thoughts were out of himself so much of the time. He would finally feel an ache in his body and rouse from the deeps of contemplation to find that he had sat in one position for an hour or more. Queerly enough, he couldn’t take his own predicament so seriously as last night.

Of course, he wouldn’t give up. He would see his Sonora job through, but for the time, practically all sense of personal danger had eased away. Cordano’s little infantry garrison was merely holding him until his case was straightened out. Perhaps the officer in charge had telegraphed North to verify his papers. Sooner or later he would be out of this, and if they sent him back to the States, he would return when possible and start in all over again.

Noon, afternoon. Captain Ramon appeared, commiserated with him, but announced that four more of Monte Vallejo’s men were being brought in. Elbert saw the prisoners enter at nightfall, and once more, for an hour or two in the evening, the prison cells were unlocked, and after that the silence again, the lone American’s last thought that there would be another death party at dawn....

He was ripped out of sleep by a full-powered neigh from Mamie. He sat up—moonlight whiter than ever upon the empty patio. Faintly he could see the mare standing in the thin shadows—that high-held listening head—the arch of her crest. He heard a horse answer from a distance, probably from the picket-line of the rurales across the town. A sentry walking past, back and forth across the entrance to the arch, paused, but resumed his pacing again.

Now, slowly, on the low roof of the cells opposite, a human figure lifted—then another. Mamie nickered; the figures flattened again. This time horses answered from both sides of the town. The sentry was slower to resume his pacing.

Elbert rubbed his eyes. The two figures on hands and knees were now moving cautiously forward on the roof of the cells toward the arch. They came to halt, as the sentry approached below. Slow seconds, Mamie dancing nervously back and forth on her tether. From one of the cells came a low grumbling at the disturbance she made—then the launching of the nearer and shorter figure from the roof, to the shoulders of the sentry, as the latter reached the turning-point of his post below.

Hardly a scream. The sentry was stretched upon the turf; the other rising from it. The second and taller stranger, meanwhile, had dropped down from the roof and vanished under the arch. Sleepy voices from the cells; a hissing command to silence; the name of Monte Vallejo spoken—another demand for silence in a tone of suppressed fury.

And now the taller of the two strangers reappeared from under the arch, leading by the hand a second sentry, who proved to have in his hands the keys of the cells. The name of Monte Vallejo seemed on every lip. Some of the prisoners in the cells appeared to know the two who had come, but kept repeating that Monte Vallejo was dead. Could it be possible that these two strangers had not heard? With this question in his brain, Elbert began to realize that the two who had come over the roof were of Vallejo’s band—on a long chance to rescue their chief.

The soldier with the keys was now being forced to unlock the cells, and the way of this forcing by the tall bandit, began to fascinate Elbert in spite of his own suffocating tension. No savagery about it; the voice was cool, hasteless. Lilt and leisure in his words, as he forced the sentry from cell to cell, twirling a gun on his first finger. ‘He could fan it, too—’ an old sentence of Bob Leadley’s flashed through Elbert’s brain. The shorter bandit now hurried up, breathlessly reiterating the fact of Monte Vallejo’s death.

‘So I hear,’ said the tall one, ‘but we can turn loose the boys still alive, can’t we?’

‘But the soldiers are awaking, Señor—’

‘I locked the door to the barracks,’ coolly answered the other. ‘Cordano’s men will have to get down into the street from the upper windows.... We can’t leave these men while we’re at it. Tell everybody to be quiet.... Pronto, hombre,’ he added lightly to the soldier with the keys.

Sounds of the soldiers’ arousing was heard from the upper floor of el cuartel facing the street.

‘Pronto, hombre—’ the tall bandit repeated. ‘We’ll fight our way to the horses—’

Elbert in the dark of the cell was folding his blankets in a distracted way, fascinated at the same time by that easy flowing voice of the tall one. He was drawing on his boots—the keys sounding nearer. Another of Mamie’s nasal protests reached his ears. Would they take her? The thought actually weakened him—hardly a chance for men of Monte Vallejo to miss one of her kind in the moonlight. And now, standing at the bars of his own cell door—the tall one—that voice, the sentry beside him with the keys, wailing:

‘No bantit aqui, Señor,—esta ’Mericano. Caballero ’Mericano—’

‘American?’ queried the bandit in English. ‘Oh, I say, in there—is that right?’

Elbert cleared his voice: ‘That you, Bart?’

‘What the hell—?’ same genial tone.

‘Yes, I am American. I come from your father—’

‘Open, hombre!’ the command now, and, ‘I don’t know you. You’re a lot safer where you are, but I’m letting you out.’

‘I came down for you. I’ve got a horse—’

Banging was now heard at the lower door to the barracks.

‘You’ll have to saddle fast. The soldiers are sure coming-to, but they can only get out the upper windows.’

For just a second, as the cell door swung, Elbert saw the lift of a dark face—a glitter to the laugh, that low, easy flowing tone; then he was running across the moonlit patio—saddle-blankets over his left arm, saddle itself trailing from his right hand, a call on his lips for the mare to stand round. The blankets fell in place; cinches came to hand. Mamie’s clean warm mouth closed over the bit, her ears wiggled straight in the head stall. Still, Elbert was the last man out of the patio, Bart standing in the street, covering the flight of his men. Shots rained down from the windows of the second floor of the barracks. A few of Cordano’s soldiers had already dropped down to the street; others were crashing at the lower door which Bart had locked.

‘The horses are in the hollow back of the quarters!’ he yelled in Mexican.

The hand of one soldier reached up to Mamie’s bridle-rein, but Bart’s pistol-butt thudded upon the bone. Even in the tumult, Elbert saw that nothing escaped Bart—that he was marvelously on the job, but cool.

‘Follow the others, stranger!’ he called now. ‘I didn’t catch your name!’

‘Get up here behind me, don’t you want to?’ Elbert answered above the din.

‘Thanks, no. It’s only a little ways to the horses.’

The dark laughing face was upturned again for an instant, and at this moment, from beyond the plaza across the town, came the first trumpet call of the rurales.

A rush past the small closed huts of Arecibo, women’s voices uttering prayers—guttural tones of frightened men—the signal from the hollow, where other horses were waiting. Elbert saw their pricked ears in the whitish light—nine or ten horses apparently, three men in charge. The released prisoners mounted at random, but Bart cleared from the tangle on a leaping wheeling mount that looked ashen-colored in the moonlight. A cracking of rifles from behind, the soldiers now having broken out the lower door. The rurales quartered across the town, couldn’t have gained the road so soon. Mamie had forged to the lead; at least, she was now abreast with the hound-bodied runner Bart sat.

‘That’s some horse you’re sittin’, Mister!’ the big fellow called. ‘Some more to her, too—she just can’t help it, can she? And handles with a light hand!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Elbert.

He felt the strangest lift in his chest—Mamie beneath, Bart and the ashen runner at his side—a sorrel, to show that color in the moonlight—scatter of shots from behind, the deep whimsical voice again from his side:

‘I say, amigo mio—did you hold up a race-track special, too? They tell me I’m riding a stake-horse—old Mallet-head, here—but your mare isn’t asking any odds!’

‘She belonged to your father,’ Elbert answered throatily.