The Black Rider Read Online Free Page B

only one master?”
    “Señor
, you have spoken!”
    “Not even if I assign you to another by express command?”
    “Not even then,
señor”
    “God!” thundered the Spaniard. “There is a hangman and a rope for disobedient slaves!”
    “Señor”
said Taki, “death is half a second; but every day of slavery is a century of hell!”
    “Ten thousand devils!” said Torreño. “He talks like a fool.”
    “Or a philosopher,” said the girl, “and still more…like a brave man!”
    “But are you not,” said Torreño, “at this moment in my service?”
    “For another fortnight, only.”
    “What?”
    “It is true.”
    “Taki, are you mad?”
    “No,
señor”
    “I employ no man except when he is bought or hired for life.”
    “To me, however, you made an exception.”
    “In what manner? Have I ever seen you before?”
    “There was a crossing of a river,” said the other. “A dozen men were riding after one Indian. They shot his horse. He swam the river. They followed, swimming theirhorses. He killed the first man ashore with his knife, took his horse, and rode on. But the horse was tired. The others behind him gained. He was not ten minutes from death by fire,
señor
, when he saw you and your party and rode to you and
    “I remember, I remember!” cried Torreño, clapping his hands together. “It is all as clear as the ringing of a bell! I remember it all! You came to us with Pedro Marva and his hired fighters raging and foaming behind you. I put in between. They were very hot, but not so hot that they did not know me. Ha?”
    “They knew you,
señor,”
said the Indian gravely.
    Don Carlos was gaping at this story; but
Señorita
Lucia flushed and bit her lip.
    “They knew me,” went on Torreño, “and when I told them that they could not have the man…because his riding pleased me…they turned around and went off, cursing. However, I paid Marva for his dead man…and all was well!”
    “It’s true…it is very true,” said the Indian.
    “You paid for the life of a man? A white man?” asked the girl.
    “All things have a price…in this country,” said the Spaniard.
    She did not answer, but she looked around her on the bald, vast sweep of plain and mountain. She looked up, and there were tiny, circling dots which ruled the sky—the buzzards. And she shuddered a very little.
    “But how,” said the Spaniard, “are you to be in my service only a fortnight longer? I remember it all. You were to serve me until you had paid for the price of the man. And twelve hundred pesos could not be worked out in ten lives of a shepherd. How have you made the money?”
    “There are more than eleven hundred pesos,” saidthe Navajo, “already in the hands of your treasurer. He has kept the account. I have the rest to pay in soon.”
    “Rascal!” said the Spaniard. “You have not been in my service for six months.”
    “Señor
, there are ways of making money, even for a poor shepherd.”
    “Who leaves his sheep?”
    “Only at night, when a friend will come to watch them.”
    “Ah? Ah? You are a worker by night, Taki? And what do you find at night?”
    “There was a great rider of the roads. There was a Captain Sandoval….”
    “He was killed three months ago. What of him? I was away.”
    “There was a reward on his head.”
    “Of five hundred pesos. Yes.”
    “The reward was paid to me,
señor!”
    “The devil fly off with me! The terrible Sandoval…and one Indian killed him? How in the name of heaven?”
    The Indian turned. His hand flashed back and forward. A line of light left it and went out in the trunk of a narrow sapling, which shivered with the shock. There stood the knife, buried to the hilt in the hard wood.
    “Name of heaven!” whispered Don Carlos, and touched his heart, as though just there he felt the resistless death slide in.
    “Ah?” said Torreño. “It was in that way?”
    “It was in that way.”
    “And he did not touch you?”
    “His pistol bullet just touched my