Doom Canyon/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
The boast of Lobo that he feared nothing on this earth and believed in nothing concerning the next was, in the main, true. His conscience, whatever there may have been of it at birth, had been warped and atrophied, its voice set aside for the louder call of his lusts and appetites, which he indulged to their top bent.
Being a man of great strength, of fierce quickness of action, of undoubted courage when compared with his associates, he soon became a sort of leader among them and in that commonwealth of criminals, gathered together in Three Corners, went to the greatest possible depths of villainy to create a constant envy and admiration of his prowess as the biggest and most daring miscreant of them all. He made a sort of frolic of his wickedness, stimulating his own evil instincts to think up such revels as might make him the terror of the countryside and inspire his own followers with the idea that he was the only real devil existent.
“We can make a better hell than the one they rant about, any day,” he said. “And a better heaven, for that matter.”
There was within him, however, the undying nucleus of a soul that still distinguished right from wrong, however feeble its promptings had become, however he smothered its with debauchery. It took the form of superstition, of various premonitions that certain things would bring him bad luck, though he did not recognize such misfortune as only another form of punishment that threatened his continued misdeeds.
His powerful frame had withstood all the orgies, public and private, that he continually devised and carried out, but he had reactions from them that he did not attribute to that cause. Despite himself, carousals palled upon him, women no longer intrigued him, the flinging of his gold on bars and layouts, and the fawning of others, half servile, half mocking when they cheated him—as he knew they did—soured him.
From a purposeful bully, deliberately overtopping and overmastering his men by bursts of fury, he grew moody and irritable. Small things caused great friction, he lost sleep, magnified all setbacks and losses, and found that liquor no longer gave him the roaring reactions that once led him into excesses which even the most casehardened of his pack talked of in whispers.
Only one man had he met who had made his own glance falter, and that was Strong, the cowboy, who had become the partner of Bramley after the death of Gardner, who had stood and outfaced him when Lobo's own guns were drawn. The thought that he had backed down from a second killing that night came upon him in a sort of blind fury when he could not sleep, sodden though the rest were with liquor.
It was this that had caused him to send the raid out after Strong and Bramley. The latter had been killed, but the former had not only escaped, but had shot down three of his own men and put the rest to rout. His rage over the account given him had left the other members of that ambuscade a trifle sullen.
From the night of the killing of Gardner, Lobo believed that things had gone wrong with him. It was bad luck, he told himself, to shed blood in the place where you were going to gamble, but he had done no better elsewhere that night. Superstition hinted that it was bad luck to kill the husband of the woman he had taken by force and who had killed herself.
Ghosts and spirits he laughed at, but sometimes, of late, the laugh rang hollow even in his own ears. He began to have visions of a woman's figure in clothes tightly molded to her body by the torrent in which she swirled, with her eyes glassy and wide open, fixed upon him, not with reproach, or even threat, but with an awful stare that penetrated his own closed eyelids. Nor could he be always certain whether he saw this phantom when asleep or awake. Sometimes, he felt certain that he was wide awake and watched it fading away until nothing was left but the staring eyes, blankly accusing.
Beyond doubt he drank enough to bring on a species of delirium, but it always assumed the same form, and he drank deeper to banish it from the sleep that was never sound, from which he often started with face dripping in a clammy sweat, his nerves disordered. At times his hand shook slightly, and he suspected that others noticed it, that they talked about him as of a man whose luck had forsaken him.
He lost big amounts to Sprague and others, the ambuscade had resulted in disaster, this last run of Chinese had been only half successful, and his Mexican colleagues had warned him that it must be discontinued for a time, that there were indications of spies, that they might find it more profitable to make arrangements for a better crossing. Infuriated, he had threatened them, and they had shrugged their shoulders. The Chinese were landed in the Gulf of California on Mexican soil. Their alliance was absolutely necessary to him while they could get along without Lobo. There were other borderers who could act with them.
Without funds, he felt his hold slipping on his men, but he hated to strike out elsewhere. Doom Cañon, with its haunted reputation, with its almost impregnable entrance, the exit back of the waterfall, the open, parklike space beyond the cave whence the creek issued, was almost impossible to duplicate. To leave was to acknowledge defeat, as he saw it, and his pride would not permit.
He had sworn to get rid of Strong after this last run, and after one other deed had been carried out, through which he hoped by blacker villainies to blot out the visions of the drowned woman with her staring eyes, whirling through the coil of seething waters. His men he still dominated, could still steep in liquor with promises of greater loot.
There was the letter that the dead woman had carried in her gown, together with a silver print of the writer, the likeness of a young girl whose face conveyed an almost startling impression of innocence coupled with vitality. It was the somewhat crude result of an itinerant photographer's camera, but even the operator's lack of artistry and the cheap process could not rob the subject of its charm.
It was a constant irritant to Lobo. It spurred him to outdo crime with further evil, and to-night his plans had succeeded: he had the girl, the sister of Gardner's wife, in his power. At least he could work his will upon her.
If he had known how she was regarded by Strong, if he had guessed how she, even in this hour of peril and despair, remembered the stalwart man whose glance had met and mingled with hers, he would not have forborne to carry out his vicious determinations. Nor did he dream that Strong had tracked his raiders to the ravine, had found the tarnished brass button of a coolie's blouse, was even now with Hurley and the three Mexicans coming on through fissured passages while a United States marshal and a posse rode hard to the cañon's mouth and, at the post, “boots and saddles” was sounding.
He considered himself still omnipotent, save for the one hardly acknowledged crevice in the black armor of his villainy, pierced but by one type of weapon—the hardy look of Strong, the staring eyes of the drowned woman, and now the serene fearlessness of the glance of the girl who stood before him as he lolled, stroking his glossy beard, in the chair of the shack he had built for his own quarters in the inner, hidden glade, the existence of which Hurley, with his knowledge of the mysteries of the great Mogollon mesa, had suspected in this lesser, water-swept formation.
He had threatened her with the loss of all she held dearest, he had taunted her with the fact that her sister was dead, her brother-in-law in the same grave and still, though the agony and sorrow of the shock showed in her drawn face and pallid lips, her glance was unfaltering.
She was not afraid. The beast in him was held back, for all its promptings, by her lack of fear.
She told him so, and her low voice was steady.
“You can do horrible things to me,” she said, “because you are stronger, because you are evil, but your sin cannot prosper, any more than the night can keep away the sun. I am not afraid of you. There is a hell for men like you, and I think you are very close to it.” Her eyes, so like those of the drowned woman, made his own flicker—even as Strong's had made them.
“I'll make you flinch,” he said. “I'll make you beg for mercy.”
“You cannot make me beg. All you can do is to kill me—unless I can kill myself!” His eyes flinched again, as if the eyeballs twitched. He could feel the pupils contracting. Why did she say she would kill herself? The other one had done that, and he could not get rid of her.
“You can burn wood,” she said, “but the smoke goes up—to Heaven.”
He laughed at that with an effort—it was an effort—at derision, and drank to the bottom of the glass of whisky he had beside him. It had no more effect than water. It did not even warm him, and he felt cold.
“Heaven? When you get thar you tell 'em about me.”
“They know already. Just as they know your punishment. You are only a coward!”
The scorn, the desperate scorn in her voice, for her body was beginning to fail her—as she summoned all its forces to support her will, stung him. There was a boisterous shout of laughter outside where his men were gambling round a blazing fire.
“They're playin' for gold out thar,” he said. “I'll give 'em a better stake to gamble for. You!”
He swept her into his arms, his beard, reeking of tobacco and whisky fumes, for all its luster, blinding, half smothering her as he strode out into the night, shouting to his men.