Saint Errant (14 page)

“Lai fatto molto bene,” said the old man gruffly. “I thought we should meet here.”

For a moment even Simon was startled. “You guessed, did you?”

“I knew that Amadeo could never have been so stupid as to try anything like that immediately after you had shown him up. And the hunting trip that left him alone for nearly four hours was your idea. Also you knew that I had no money, so I knew that I had nothing to fear from you. Where is Lucia?”

“She went and hid in the woodshed as I told her to,” answered the Saint shamelessly. “I told her to slip out as soon as it was dark and come along here. You’ll probably find her a little way along the road. But if you knew, why did you help me?”

“I did not see why that Amadeo should have so much money,” said Intuccio calmly. “You will be content with half?”

Simon laughed softly.

“From the very beginning,” he said, “I always meant you to have three quarters.”

Intuccio took out the money and divided it.

“Do we go back?” he asked.

“I think we shall have to make some ingenious explanations,” said the Saint. “If Lucia says it was Amadeo, he will probably be lynched. As far as I’m concerned, the probability leaves me unmoved, but since he’s still your cousin you may feel differently. If she says it was me, I’m not likely to have such a good time either. Perhaps she had better invent somebody.”

“Let us decide about that on the way,” agreed Salvatore Intuccio; and they walked on, arm in arm.

VI. Teresa
“BANDITS?” said Seńor Copas. He shrugged. “Si, hay siempre bandidos. The Government will never catch them all. Here in Mexico they are a tradition of the country.”

He looked again at the girl in the dark hat, appreciatively, because she was worth looking at, and he was a true Latin, and there was still romance in the heart that beat above his rounded abdomen.

He chuckled uncertainly, ignoring the other customers who were sitting in various degrees of patience behind their empty plates, and said: “But the seńorita has nothing to fear. She is not going into the wilds.”

“But I want to go into the wilds,” she said.

Her voice was low and soft and musical, matching the quiet symmetry of her face and the repose of her hands. She was smart without exaggeration. She was Fifth Avenue with none of its brittle hardness, incongruously transported to that stand still Mexican village, and yet contriving not to seem out of place. To Seńor Copas she was a miracle.

To Simon Templar she was a quickening of interest and a hint of adventure that might lead anywhere or. nowhere. His eye for charm was no slower than that of Seńor Copas, but there was more in it than that.

To Simon Templar, who had been called the most audacious bandit of the twentieth century, the subject was always new and fascinating. And he had an impish sense of humor which couldn’t resist the thought of what the other members of the audience would have said and done if they had known that the man who was listening to their conversation about bandits was the notorious Saint himself.

“Are you more interested, in the wilds or the bandits?” he asked, in Spanish as native as her own.

She turned to him with friendly brown eyes in which there was a trace of subtle mockery.

“I’m not particular.”

“No es posible,” said Seńor Copas firmly, as he dragged him self away to his kitchen.

“He doesn’t seem to like the idea,” said the Saint.

He was sitting beside her, at the communal table which half filled the dining room of the hotel. She broke a roll with her graceful, leisurely moving hands. He saw that her fingers were slender and tapering, delicately manicured, and one of them wore a wedding ring.

Fifth Avenue in the Fonda de la Quinta, in the shadow of the Sierra Madre, in the state of Durango in Old Mexico, which was a very different place.

“You know a lot about this country?” she asked.

“I’ve been here before.”

“Do you know the mountains?”

“Fairly well.”

“Do you know the bandits too?”

The Saint gazed at her with precarious gravity. He looked like a man who would obviously be on visiting terms with bandits. He looked rather like a bandit himself, in a debonair and reckless sort of way, with his alert tanned face and clean-cut fighting mouth and the unscrupulous gay twinkle in his blue eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “Once upon a time I was walking between San Miguel and Gajo, two villages not far from here. I saw from my map that the road led around in a great horseshoe, but they told me at an inn that there was a short cut, straight across, down into the canyon and up the other side. I climbed down something like the side of a precipice for hours-the path was all great loose stones, and presently one of them turned under my foot and I took a spill and sprained my ankle. When I got to the bottom I was done in. I couldn’t move another step, particularly climbing. I hadn’t any food, but there was a stream running through the bottom of the canyon, so I had water. I could only hope that someone else would try that short cut and find me. … At the end of the third day a man did find me, and he looked like one of your bandits if anyone ever did. He did what he could for me, gave me food from his pack-bread and sausage and cheese-and then he said he would go on to San Miguel and send help for me. He could have taken everything I had, but he didn’t. He was insulted when I offered to pay him. ‘I am not a beggar,’ he said, and I’ve never seen anything so haughty in my life- ‘I am El Rojo.’”

“Then why is Seńor Copas so frightened?”

“They’re all frightened of El Rojo.”

Her finely penciled brows drew together.

“El Rojo?” she said. “Who is El Rojo?”

“The greatest bandit since Villa. They’re all scared because there’s a rumor that he’s in the district. You ought to be scared, too. They’re all offended if you aren’t scared of El Rojo… . He really is a great character, though. I remember once the Government decided it was time that something drastic was done about him. They sent out half the Mexican army to round him up. It was the funniest thing I ever heard of, but you have to know the country to see the joke.”

“They didn’t catch him?”

The Saint chuckled.

“One man who knew the country could laugh at three armies.”

For a little while the girl was wrapped in an unapproachable solitude of thought. Then she turned to the Saint again.

“Seńor,” she said, “do you think you could help me find El Rojo?”

Even south of the border, he was still a Saint errant, or per haps a sucker for adventure. He said: “I could try.”

They rode out on the dazzling stone track that winds beside the river-a track which was nothing more than the marks that centuries of solitary feet had left on the riot of tumbled boulders from which the hills rose up.

The Saint lounged in the saddle, relaxed like a vaquero, let ting his mount pick its own way over the broken rock. His mind went back to the cafe where they had sat together over coffee, after lunch, and he had said to her: “Either you must be a journalist looking for an unusual interview, or you want to be kidnapped by El Rojo for publicity, or you’ve been reading too many romantic stories and you think you could fall in love with him.”

She had only smiled in her quiet way, inscrutable in spite of its friendliness, and said: “No, seńor-you are wrong in all your guesses. I am looking for my husband.”

The Saint’s brows slanted quizzically.

“You mean you are Seńora Rojo?”

“Oh, no. I am Seńora Alvarez de Quevedo. Teresa Alvarez.”

Then she looked at him, quickly and clearly, as if she had made up her mind about something.

“The last time I heard of my husband, he was at the Fonda de la Quinta,” she said. “That was two years ago. He wrote to me that he was going into the mountains. He liked to do things like that, to climb mountains and sleep under the stars and be a man alone, sometimes-it is curious, for he was very much a city man. … I never heard of him again. He said he was going to climb the Gran Seńo. I remembered, when I heard the name, that I had read of El Rojo in the news papers about that time. And it seemed to me, when I heard you speak of El Rojo, that perhaps El Rojo was the answer.” “If it was El Rojo,” said the Saint quietly, “I don’t think it would help you to find him now.” Her eyes were still an enigma.

“Even so,” she said, “it would be something to know.” “But you’ve waited two years-” “Yes,” she said softly. “I have waited two years.” She had told him no more than that, and he had known that she did not wish to say any more, but it had been enough to send him off on that quixotic wild-goose chase.

He had been leading the way for two hours, but presently, where the trail broadened for a short distance, she brought her horse up beside his, and they rode knee to knee.

“I wonder why you should do this for me,” she said. He shrugged. “Why did you ask me?”

“It was an impulse.” She moved her hands puzzledly. “I don’t know. I suppose you have the air of a man who is used to being asked impossible things. You look as if you would do them.”

“I do,” said the Saint modestly.

It was his own answer, too. She was a damsel in distress- and no damsel in distress had ever called on the Saint in vain. And she was beautiful, also, which was a very desirable asset to damsels in distress. And about her there was a mystery, which to Simon Templar was the trumpet call of adventure.

In the late afternoon, at one of the bends in the trail where it dipped to the level of the river, the Saint reined in his horse and dismounted at the water’s edge. “Are we there?” she said. “No. But we’re leaving the river.”

He scooped water up in his hands and drank, and splashed it over his face. It was numbingly cold, but it steamed off his arms in the hot dry air. She knelt down and drank beside him, and then sat back on her heels and looked up at the hills that hemmed them in.

A kind of shy happiness lighted her eyes, almost uncertainly, as if it had not been there for a long time and felt itself a stranger.

“I understand now,” she said. “I understand why Gaspar loved all this, in spite of what he was. If only he could have been content with it…”

“You were not happy?” said the Saint gently.

She looked at him.

“No, seńor. I have not been happy for so long that I am afraid.”

She got up quickly and put her foot in the stirrup. He helped her to mount, and swung into his own saddle. They set off across the shallow stream, the horses picked their way delicately between the boulders.

On the far side, they climbed, following a trail so faint that she could not see it all, but the Saint rarely hesitated. Presently the trees were thicker, and over the skyline loomed the real summit of the hill they were climbing. The valley was swallowed up in darkness, and up there where the Saint turned his horse across the slope the brief subtropical twilight was fading.

Simon Templar lighted a cigarette as he rode, and he had barely taken the first puff of smoke into his lungs when a man stepped from behind a tree with a rifle leveled and broke the stillness of the evening with a curt: “Manos arriba!”

The Saint turned his head with a smile.

“You’ve got what you wanted,” he said to Teresa Alvarez. “May I present El Rojo?”

The introduction was almost superfluous, for the red mask from which El Rojo took his name, which covered his face from the brim of his sombrero down to his stubble-bearded chin, was sufficient identification. Watching the girl, Simon saw no sign of fear as the bandit came forward. Her face was pale, but she sat straight-backed on her horse and gazed at him with an unexpected eagerness in her eyes. Simon turned back to El Rojo.

“Quén tál, amigo?” he murmured genially. , The bandit stared at him unresponsively.

“Baje usted,” he ordered gruffly. He glanced at the girl. “You too-get down.”

His eyes, after that glance, remained fixed on her, even after she was down from the saddle and standing by the horse’s head. The Saint wondered for the first time whether he might not have let his zest for adventure override his common sense when he deliberately led her into the stronghold of an outlawed and desperate man.

El Rojo turned back to him.

“The seńorita,” he said, “will tie your hands behind you.”

He dragged a length of cord from his pocket and threw it across the space between them. The girl looked at it coldly.

“Go on,” said the Saint, “Do what the nice gentleman tells you. It’s part of the act.”

He could take care of such minor details when the time came, but for the present there was a mystery with which he was more preoccupied.

When the Saint’s hands had been tied, El Rojo pointed his rifle.

“The seńorita will lead the way,” he said. “You will follow, and I shall direct you from behind. You would be wise not to try and run away.”

He watched them file past him, and from the sounds that followed, the Saint deduced that El Rojo had taken the horses by their bridles and was towing them after him as he brought up the rear.

As they moved roughly parallel with the valley, the slope on their right became steeper and steeper until it was simply a precipice, and the rocks on their left towered bleaker and higher, and they were walking along a narrow ledge with the shadow of one cliff over them and another cliff falling away from their feet into a void of darkness. The path wound snake-like around the fissures and buttresses into which the precipice was sculptured, and presently, rounding one of those natural breastworks, they found themselves at a place where the path widened suddenly to become a natural balcony about twenty feet long and twelve feet deep-and then stopped. A natural wall of rock screened it from sight of the valley or the hills on the other side.

El Rojo followed them into the niche, leading the two horses, which he tied up to an iron ring by the mouth of a cave that opened in the rock wall at the end.

There was a dull glow of embers close by the mouth of the cave. The bandit stirred them with his foot, and threw on a couple of mesquite logs.

“Perhaps you are hungry,” said El Rojo. “I have little to offer my guests, but you are welcome to what there is.”