Crossroads (22 page)

I
t was now that Dolores came again down the street, this time on foot. She caught the tenseness of waiting in the air—in the whispering of the little knots of men as she passed. The men turned and stared after her, and she heard them say: “Dolores…Oñate’s woman.”

“What does she know?

“Everything!”

“El Tigre’s daughter and worse than her father.”

“There’s a knife in her belt and another in her eye, lad.”

She drank in the comments. The storm was about to strike Double Bend, and she was at the center of it. It was a proud place even for the daughter of El Tigre. She had dressed for the part of Dolores, daughter of El Tigre. She had dressed to conquer the heart of Dix Van Dyck. The emerald of Oñate glowed like an evil eye on her low, broad forehead; silks curled against her cheeks, or whispered about her body as she walked; and, above all, high on her breast she felt the chill touch of the cross—the mysterious cross that would bring her fortune—and ill luck to all others.

She knew that, when she stood in her glory of silks and jewels with her hand on the little metal cross and her eyes on the eyes of Dix Van Dyck, he would have to rise and follow her. It raised a mighty tide in her heart, that picture. He would have to rise and follow her. She would lead him to Oñate and please him by showing him how
to destroy his foe in safety to himself. Then she would be his woman, and he would be her man. There would be no others on the ranges so swift and so rich and so terrible as they. A song formed in the heart of Dolores and came to her lips as a smile—a strange and stern and beautiful smile.

She came to the hotel and was told where to find Dix Van Dyck. She went up the stairs and straight toward the little upper rear verandah. But, with her hand on the knob of the screen door, she stopped and raised her head with a jerk. For what she heard was the same song that was rising within her and keeping time with the beating of her heart. It was a tune never written and a tune that had no words. It was light and faint and sweetly shrill. In her astonishment she thought at first that she had begun to sing it herself, but in a moment she was sure that the song came from the lips of another—not a song, really, but only a faint, humming croon. She flattened herself against the screen door and looked the length of the verandah.

There she saw the three. They were all seated. She saw the back of Joseph, the strong, cruel profile of Dix Van Dyck, and the full face of the girl. It was on this that her gaze centered—her cruel, hateful gaze. In her silent fury she made her mind cold and judged. The proud chin—it was not more perfectly carved than her own; the mouth—it was not more delicately curved; the nose—it was not so true and straight; the eyes—ah, there was the halting-place! For the eyes raised and turned full on Dix Van Dyck, and she saw him stiffen a little and his head almost jerk back, as though something shocked him fully in the face. She thought of her own eyes, dusky, smoky, with a promise of fire—passionate eyes, stern eyes, wildly loving eyes. But the eyes of the white girl would grow greater and greater, for she had set her eyes like a
hand on the heart of Dix Van Dyck and made him blind in turn.

The noise of guns on that night when Dix Van Dyck broke free from the jail, the flash of knives, the yells of fear and pain, and the presence of death—that had been a tragedy. But I wonder if it were as great as the tragedy of the Yaqui girl as she stood with her face pressed against the screen of the door and stared her heart out and sent it against the eyes of Jacqueline.

The humming, the croon of the white girl went on, but there was no longer that same song in the heart of Dolores. It had died. She was full of silence to the lips—cold silence, like the night. How long she stood there did not matter. Seconds, perhaps, but they had the meaning of many years. For we must always remember that the age of Dolores was more than a matter of years, and her wisdom was something more than that of the mind only. She understood, I think, what all this story means. She had merely come to a crossroads—her own striking across the path of Dix Van Dyck. There they had met and lingered for an instant at the junction of the roads. They had talked, and she had listened but had not understood. Crossroads—ah, the bitterness of it! All she could carry away from this man was the little metal cross that hung about her throat, a victory for herself and a curse to all who were dear to her.

Crossroads! The road of Dix Van Dyck led somewhere up over the hills to happiness with the eyes of the white girl like a light to lead him. And her own road carried her out into the dark. It was that which made her think of death. She had never wasted much time on thought. Meditation crushed her. But now she wanted only a quick escape from life. Her road had passed the crossing, and now she wanted to travel it to the bitter end at a stride.

With all the silks rustling about her, she turned from the screen door with the humming of the girl still living at her ear. She went down the steps, out into the street, and turned straight toward the burial grounds. The body of El Tigre lay there, and now the soul of the Yaqui turned to her kind, even as the thought of the traitor turns to his country when he comes to die. She would die on the grave of El Tigre. It was not hard to do. A stroke of the knife—the heavy, needle-pointed knife at her girdle—would sweep her from the junction of the roads and carry her, in one breathless swoop, clear to the end of her journey. Her hand was strong for such a stroke. She began to hear again, deeply within her, the singing of the small voice—a different tune now and a different cadence. It kept time, not with the flutter of her heart but with the swift padding of her noiseless feet, a regular rhythm, a death song of a Yaqui, the daughter of a chief.

The knots of men were still standing on the streets, here and there. They were increasing in number. The tenseness of waiting grew more keen, but it all meant nothing to Dolores, daughter of El Tigre. Her thoughts were far away with her father. Her course through the streets led her past the house of
Señor
Don Porfirio Maria Oñate, and here, where the gate opened in the old hedge, she paused a moment and stared curiously at the low, broad front of the building. Squat and ugly it seemed now, but she remembered how she had first entered it, not so many days ago, with a sense of power and command.

She walked on again more slowly. She was thinking of the interior of that house, the spacious rooms, the coolness, the sense of order, the pattering feet of the swift servants, their eyes of fear and hatred following her. Suddenly Dolores tilted her head and laughed softly. The sound of her own laugh startled her to a halt, and she remembered
with a sharp discomfort that she was walking toward her own death. There she paused, frowning into the night. At last she retraced her steps to the gate in the hedge and stood, listening. A shadowy form crossed the line of her vision, a guard. Another form passed.

A voice in Spanish asked: “Who is there?”

She opened the gate and stepped inside. After all, would it not be an exciting way to meet death?—alone, surrounded by the hatred of Oñate and his many men?

“It is I, Dolores, daughter of El Tigre,” she said, “and I have come to see
Señor
Oñate.”

W
ho shall say that there is not mental telepathy? There had been no sound in the coming of Dolores, daughter of El Tigre, and there had been no sound in her departure from the screen door. But, while she stood there, waiting and listening and passing down the crossroads of her life away from the fate of Dix Van Dyck, there was a heavy silence on the verandah, broken only by the light humming of the girl, Jacqueline. Scarcely had she gone when Dix Van Dyck rose to his full height and stretched himself, muscle by muscle, like a great cat that dozes by the hearth all day. When the night comes and all of the people of the house sleep, he rouses himself, stretches his muscles, and turns his yellow eyes on the darkness, ready for adventure. So it was with Dix Van Dyck, and the others rose in turn. The girl sat down again almost at once, and her hands glimmered on the arms of her chair that they were gripping hard. As for Joseph, he shook his revolver butt as though to make sure that it was loose in the sheath, then he ranged himself silently beside his great-shouldered brother.

The white teeth of Dix Van Dyck gleamed through the gathering dusk of the evening, but he said, after his smile: “This ain’t a party for a crowd. It ain’t by force of numbers that I’m going to reach Oñate, Joe. If I wanted a crowd, I could raise one in ten minutes with the boys that are waiting in the saloons and on the street corners. But they
could never rush Oñate’s house. He’s got men with rifles behind his walls. The only way he can be reached is by a soft foot. D’you see?”

“D’you want me to sit here…like a woman?” asked the boy fiercely. “Ain’t I a Van Dyck? Ain’t I your brother?”

“Thank God you are,” said the big man, “and that’s why you’re going to sit here…beside a woman, Joe. If things go wrong, she’ll need you more’n you could help me tonight. ’S that clear, Joe?”

“I s’pose it is.”

“Maybe you better get a lamp for Jack if she wants to sew some more.”

“No,” she answered, “I think I’ll just sit here and wait, Dix.”

And that was all she said, no remonstrance, no appeal. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap. Surely this was not the Jack Boone of old, whose gun spoke more often than her lips! Or perhaps she, too, had come to a crossroads, like Dolores, and was waiting to see in which way the hand on the milestone pointed.

The screen door banged after Dix Van Dyck, and his soft but heavy footfall went down the stairs. He could make his stride, at need, as silent as the padding foot of a panther. He left the hotel by the back entrance, for he dared not let himself be seen on the streets. It would have meant that he would be followed, and the escort would have proved his ruin. So he cut across the back way and slipped from the shadow of one building to the shadow of the next and loitered in the black shade of a tree—a shade cast by the dull starlight—till a pedestrian passed by. At last he lay almost prone underneath the hedge in front of Oñate’s house.

A light step passed him. He dared not turn in his narrow street covert along the base of the bushy hedge. The step went on, and paused. In the pause he breathed the
scent of irrigated soil—the stinging pungency of newly wetted sand. In the garden there was the regular whish and rattle and whisper—very light—of a circular water spray, playing upon the grass of the lawn, a cool sound, infinitely peaceful, infinitely restful. The light step returned toward him, as it would have returned if he had been discovered, and he slipped his hand down to the butt of his gun.

But the step paused again, and he heard a voice ask sharply in Spanish: “Who is there?”

Then the soft answer of Dolores, careless and low: “It is I, Dolores, daughter of El Tigre, and I have come to see
Señor
Oñate.”

There followed a mumble of astonished cursing. The message was repeated by muffled voices in the distance. Dix van Dyck, grinning to himself in the dark, crawled slowly, like a winding snake, to a hole in the hedge near the gate and passed through. He was on the inside, committed finally to the test.

Now the door of the house fell wide, and a blast of light shot down the path straight upon Dolores. She stood, a flare of color, tall and slender—like some graceful, tropical flower, and he knew what sort of a smile was on her lips. For the thousandth time Dix Van Dyck strove to read her mind. But what white man has ever succeeded in reading the mind of an Indian?

Two guards followed her to the door at which stood Manuel, grinning at the approach of Dolores like an evil spirit at the gate of a small hell. She paused beside him on the threshold, and he whispered in her ear. She snapped her fingers and passed within, shrugging her graceful shoulders. The door closed with a jarring sound—like teeth, when a morsel has been swallowed. The two guards remained on the doorstep, chattering quickly with voices of wonder.
It was this moment Dix Van Dyck chose to dart, on hands and knees, across the lawn.

“Who’s there?” rang out a sharp voice.

He flattened himself on the lawn, his head turned from the guards. For, strange as it may seem, even in the night it is easier to find a hidden man if his face is turned toward you. It is as if men can feel the challenge of eyes through the darkness. A silence fell.

“It was nothing…the swaying of that palm tree,” said one of the guards at last, and they walked out to resume their beat.

Van Dyck went on in another rush toward the house. There, he reached a corner of the wall and flattened himself again in the soft soil of the garden mold that ran around the edge of the building. What he would do next, he had no idea. The first and only thing that had filled his mind was to pass the outer line of guards. It remained to get entrance to the house. Through the door? That was guarded. Through a window? They also must be locked and guarded. How, then? It occurred to him that the whole house lay open on the patio—but was he a bird to descend on it? The roof was unguarded, surely.

He looked up. A stout old climbing vine with many twisted stems wound up the side of the house just before him and curved under the narrow edge of the eaves. The architect had placed something like eaves there as an ornament, even in that land of little rain. He must try that. Noiselessness was the first requisite of success. So he rose and flattened himself against the wall, reaching the full length of his arm above his head and gripping the twisted stems of the vine. Few men can handle their own weight with one arm, far less with such a faulty grip. It was a mighty labor, but he drew himself slowly up and up. A final jerk and his chin came on a level with his gripping right hand. He flung his left
hand high above—and barely reached the edge of the eaves.

He made his finger-hold secure, whipped up his right hand, and hung there a moment, suspended at full length. He began to swing his body from side to side like the pendulum of a clock. Once, twice, thrice, the swing increased, and with a final heave he whirled himself far to the right. His heel caught on the edge of the eaves. In an instant he lay flat and panting on the gradually sloping roof.

He lay for a moment, listening. There was a whispering of the guard below—just below him. When he peered cautiously over the edge, he made out a faint glimmer through the starlight. A revolver? No, another sound, a gurgling sound, reached him. They were drinking from a flask. He could have reached down and jerked the hats from their heads, and a perversely foolish impulse came to do it. He had to set his teeth to resist the inclination.

When they passed on, he worked his way along the edge of the eaves to the side of the house and then up, slowly, softly over the ridge of the roof and down toward the patio. There was one thought, one picture in his mind now, and that was the fat throat of
Señor
Don Porfirio Maria Oñate. He stopped his progress at a corner point from which he could overlook three quarters of the ground space below. It was very pleasant. Green things, here and there, and the blur of bright blossoms faintly illumined by paper lanterns that stirred and swung in every touch of the wind and brushed faint shadows across the bloom of the garden. A scentless garden of the semi-tropics. Brilliancy, but no perfume. It made Dix Van Dyck think of a lovely woman without heart or soul.

Now a door opened. Voices sounded. Dolores walked out into the very center of the patio like a tragic actress to the center of the stage. An armed guard stood on either side of her, holding a hand. They had torn away her
rebozo
,
and the hilt of her knife no longer glinted at her waist. She was disarmed, helpless. In the arched shadow of the opposite doorway stood
Señor
Oñate. He was nodding and grinning and rubbing his fat palms together—just as he had on the day when he had asked Dix Van Dyck for his vote.