University of Virginia Library

34. CHAPTER XXXIV.

The chase after the spare mules carried Texas Smith several miles from the
scene of the ambush, so that when he at last caught the frightened beasts, he decided
not to go back and cut Thurstane's throat, but to set off at once westward
and put himself by morning well on the road to California.

Meanwhile the two muleteers continued their flight at full gallop, and eventually
plunged into camp with a breathless story to the effect that Apaches had
attacked them, captured the spare mules, and killed the lieutenant. Coronado,
no more able to sleep than Satan, was the first to hear their tale.

“Apaches!” he said, surprised and incredulous. Then, guessing at what
had happened, he immediately added, “Those devils again! We must push on,
the moment we can see.”

Apaches! It was a capital idea. He had an excuse now for hurrying away
from a spot which he had stained with murder. If any one demanded that
Thurstane's body should be sought for, or that those incumbrances Glover and
Sweeny should be rescued, he could respond, Apaches! Apaches! He gave
orders to commence preparations for moving at the first dawn.

He expected and feared that Clara would oppose the advance in some trying
way. But one of the fugitives relieved him by blurting out the death of Thurstane,
and sending her into spasms of alternate hysterics and fainting which
lasted for hours. Lying in a wagon, her head in the lap of Mrs. Stanley, a sick,
very sick, dangerously sick girl, she was jolted along as easily as a corpse.

Coronado rode almost constantly beside her wagon, inquiring about her
every few minutes, his face changing with contradictory emotions, wishing she
would die and hoping she would live, loving and hating her in the same breath.
Whenever she came to herself and recognized him, she put out her hands and
implored, “Oh, Coronado, take me back there!”

“Apaches!” growled Coronado, and spurred away repeating his lie to himself,
“Apaches! Apaches!”

Then he checked his horse and rode anew to her side, hoping that he might
be able to reason with her.

“Oh, take me back!” was all the response he could obtain. “Take me
back and let me die there.”

“Would you have us all die?” he shouted—“like Pepita!”

“Don't scold her,” begged Aunt Maria, who was sobbing like a child. “She
doesn't know what she is asking.”

But Clara knew too much; at the word Pepita she guessed the torture
scene; and then it came into her mind that Thurstane might be even now at
the stake. She immediately broke into screams, which ended in convulsions
and a long fit of insensibility.

“It is killing her,” wailed Aunt Maria. “Oh, my child! my child!”

Coronado spurred at full speed for a mile, muttering to the desert, “Let it
kill her! let it!”

At last he halted for the train to overtake him, glanced anxiously at Clara's

wagon, saw that Mrs. Stanley was still bending over her, guessed that she was
still alive, drew a sigh of relief, and rode on alone.

“Oh, this love-making!” sighed Aunt Maria scores of times, for she had at
last learned of the engagement. “When will my sex get over the weakness? It
kills them, and they like it.”

That night Clara could not sleep, and kept Coronado awake with her moanings.
All the next day she lay in a semi-unconsciousness which was partly
lethargy and partly fever. It was well; at all events he could bear it so—bear
it better than when she was crying and praying for death. The next night she
fell into such a long silence of slumber that he came repeatedly to her wagon to
hearken if she still breathed. Youth and a strong constitution were waging a
doubtful battle to rescue her from the despair which threatened to rob her of
either life or reason.

So the journey continued. Henceforward the trail followed Bill Williams's
river to the Colorado, tracked that stream northward to the Mohave valley,
and, crossing there, took the line of the Mohave river toward California. It
was a prodigious pilgrimage still, and far from being a safe one. The Mohaves,
one of the tallest and bravest races known, from six feet to six and a half in
height, fighting hand to hand with short clubs, were not perfectly sure to be
friendly. Coronado felt that, if ever he got his wife and his fortune, he should
have earned them. He was resolute, however; there was no flinching yet in
this versatile, yet obstinate nature; he was as wicked and as enduring as a
Pizarro.

We will not make the journey; we must suppose it. Weeks after the
desert had for a second time engulfed Thurstane, a coasting schooner from
Santa Barbara entered the Bay of San Francisco, having on board Clara, Mrs.
Stanley, and Coronado.

The latter is on deck now, smoking his eternal cigarito without knowing it,
and looking at the superb scenery without seeing it. A landscape mirrored in
the eye of a horse has about as much effect on the brain within as a landscape
mirrored in the eye of Coronado. He is a Latin; he has a fine ear for music,
and he would delight in museums of painting and sculpture; but he has none
of the passion of the sad, grave, imaginative Anglican race for nature. Mountains,
deserts, seas, and storms are to him obstacles and hardships. He has no
more taste for them than had Ulysses.

He has agonized with sea-sickness during the voyage, and this is the first
day that he has found tolerable. Once more he is able to eat and stand up;
able to think, devise, resolve, and execute; able, in short, to be Coronado. Look
at the little, sunburnt, sinewy, earnest, enduring man; study his diplomatic
countenance, serious and yet courteous, full of gravity and yet ready for gayety;
notice his ready smile and gracious wave of the hand as he salutes the skipper.
He has been through horrors; he has fought a tremendous fight of passion,
crime, and peril; yet he scarcely shows a sign of it. There is some such lasting
stuff in him as goes to make the Bolivars, Francias, and Lopez, the restless and
indefatigable agitators of the Spanish-American communities. You cannot help
sympathizing with him somewhat, because of his energy and bottom. You are
tempted to say that he deserves to win.

He has made some progress in his conspiracy to entrap love and a fortune.
It must be understood that the two muleteers persisted in their story concerning
Apaches, and that consequently Clara has come to think of Thurstane as
dead. Meantime Coronado, after the first two days of wild excitement, has conducted

himself with rare intelligence, never alarming her with talk of love,
always courteous, kind, and useful. Little by little he has worn away her suspicions
that he planned murder, and her only remaining anger against him is
because he did not attempt to search for Thurstane; but even for that she is
obliged to see some excuse in the terrible word “Apaches.”

“I have had no thought but for her safety,” Coronado often said to Mrs.
Stanley, who as often repeated the words to Clara. “I have made mistakes,” he
would go on. “The San Juan journey was one. I will not even plead Garcia's
instructions to excuse it. But our circumstances have been terrible. Who could
always take the right step amid such trials? All I ask is charity. If humility
deserves mercy, I deserve it.”

Coronado even schooled himself into expressing sympathy with Clara for the
loss of Thurstane. He spoke of him as her affianced, eulogized his character,
admitted that he had not formerly done him justice, hinting that this blindness
had sprung from jealousy, and so alluded to his own affection. These things he
said at first to Aunt Maria, and she, his steady partisan, repeated them to Clara,
until at last the girl could bear to hear them from Coronado. Sympathy! the
bleeding heart must have it; it will accept this balm from almost any hand, and
it will pay for it in gratitude and trust.

Thus in two months from the disappearance of Thurstane his rival had begun
to hope that he was supplanting him. Of course he had given up all thought of
carrying out the horrible plan with which he had started from Santa Fé. Indeed,
he began to have a horror of Garcia, as a man who had set him on a
wrong track and nearly brought him into folly and ruin. One might say that
Satan was in a state of mind to rebuke sin.

Let us now glance at Clara. She is seated beside Aunt Maria on the quarter-deck
of the schooner. Her troubles have changed her; only eighteen years
old, she has the air of twenty-four; her once rounded face is thin, and her childlike
sweetness has become tender gravity. When she entered on this journey
she resembled the girl faces of Greuze; now she is sometimes a mater amabilis,
and sometimes a mater dolorosa; for her grief has been to her as a maternity.
The great change, so far from diminishing her beauty, has made her seem more
fascinating and nobler. Her countenance has had a new birth, and exhibits a
more perfect soul.

We have hitherto had little more than a superficial view of the characters of
our people. Events, incidents, adventures, and even landscapes have been the
leading personages of the story, and have been to its human individualities what
the Olympian gods are to Greek and Trojan heroes in the Iliad. Just as Jove
or Neptune rules or thwarts Agamemnon and Achilles, so the monstrous circumstances
of the desert have overborne, dwarfed, and blurred these travellers. It
is only now, when they have escaped from the dii majores, and have become for
a brief period tranquil free agents, that we can see them as they are. Even yet
they are not altogether untrammelled. Man is never quite himself; he is always
under some external influence, past or present; he is always being governed,
if not being created.

Clara, born anew of trouble, is admirable. There is a sweet, sedate, and almost
solemn womanliness about her, which even overawes Mrs. Stanley, conscious
of aunthood and strongmindedness, and insisting upon it that her niece
is “a mere child.” It is a great victory to gain over a lady who has that sort of
self-confidence that if she had been a sunflower and obliged to turn toward the
sun for life, she would yet have believed that it was she who made him shine.

When Clara decides a matter Mrs. Stanley, while still mentally saying “Young
thing,” feels nevertheless that her own decision has been uttered. And in every
successive resistance she is overcome the easier, for habit is a conqueror.

They have just had a discussion. Aunt Maria wants Clara to stand on her
dignity in a hotel until old Muñoz goes down on his marrow-bones, makes her a
handsome allowance, and agrees to leave her at least half his fortune. Clara's
reply is substantially, “He is my grandfather and the proper head of my family.
I think I ought to go straight to him and say, Grandfather, here I am.”

Beaten by this gentle conscientiousness, Aunt Maria endeavored to appeal
the matter to Coronado.

“I am so glad to see you enjoying your cigarito once more,” she called to
him with as sweet a smile as if she didn't hate tobacco.

He left his smoking retreat amidships, took off his hat with a sort of airy
gravity, and approached them.

“Mr. Coronado, where do you propose to take us when we reach land?”
asked Aunt Maria.

“We will, if you please, go direct to my excellent relative's,” was the reply.

Aunt Maria held her head straight up, as if stiff-neckedly refusing to go there,
but made no opposition.

Coronado had meditated everything and decided everything. It would not
do to go to a hotel, because that might lead to a suspicion that he knew all the
while about the death of Muñoz. His plan was to drive at once to the old man's
place, demand him as if he expected to see him, express proper surprise and
grief over the funereal response, put the estate as soon as possible into Clara's
hands, become her man of affairs and trusted friend, and so climb to be her husband.
He was anxious; during all his perils in the desert he had never been
more so; but he bore the situation heroically, as he could bear; his face revealed
nothing but its outside—a smile.

“My dear cousin,” he presently said, “when I once fairly set you down in
your home, you will owe me, in spite of all my blunders, a word of thanks.”

“Coronado, I shall owe you more than I ever can repay,” she replied frankly,
without remembering that he wanted to marry her. The next instant she remembered
it, and her face showed the first blush that had tinted it for two
months. He saw the significant color, and turned away to conceal a joy which
might have been perilous had she observed it.

Immediately on landing he proceeded to carry out his programme. He took
a hack, drove the ladies direct to the house of Muñoz, and there went decorously
through the form of learning that the old man was dead. Then, consoling
the sorrowful and anxious Clara, he hurried to the best hotel in the city and
made arrangements for what he meant should be an impressive scene, the announcement
of her fortune. He secured fine rooms for the ladies, and ordered
them a handsome lunch, with wine, etc., all without regard to expense. The girl
must be perfectly comfortable and under a sense of all sorts of obligations to him
when she received his coup de théâtre.

He was not so preoccupied but that he quarrelled with his coachman about
the hack hire and dismissed him with some disagreeable epithets in Spanish.
Next he took a saddle-horse, as being the cheapest conveyance attainable, and
cantered off to find the executors of Muñoz, enjoying heartily such stares of admiration
as he got for his splendid riding. In an hour he returned, found the
ladies in their freshest dresses, and complimented them suitably. At this very
moment his anguish of anxiety and suspense was terrible. When Clara should

earn that she was a millionaire, what would she do? Would she throw off the
air of friendliness which she had lately worn, and scout him as one whom she
had long known as a scoundrel? Would all his plots, his labors, his perils, and
his love prove in one moment to have been in vain? As he stood there smiling
and flattering, he was on the cross.

“But I am talking trifles,” he said at last, fairly catching his breath. “Can
you guess why I do it? I am prolonging a moment of intense pleasure.”

Such was his control over himself that he looked really benign and noble as
he drew from his pocket a copy of the will and held it out toward Clara.

“My dear cousin,” he murmured, his dark eyes searching her face with intense
anxiety, “you cannot imagine my joy in announcing to you that you are
the sole heir of the good Pedro Muñoz.”