_ CHAPTER IV. GENTLEMAN GEOFF PASSES THE DEAL
With the departure of Kearn Thode on his mission Gentleman Geoff sank into a stupor from which all Billie's efforts failed to arouse him. She glanced at the little watch on her wrist. Twenty minutes past four! One hour for the massive door to hold against those crashing blows which seemed beating upon her brain. One hour for the young engineer to ride ten miles on an already jaded horse, provided he had succeeded in making his perilous start, and bring the Carranzistas to the rescue!
The din of the volley which had greeted him from the pickets could not reach her ears above the roar of conflict surrounding her, much less the receding hoof-beats of his mount. From the moment of his passing into the darkness of the patio the girl could only wait, but her spirit was staunch and unflagging. He would win through! He would return in time!
At her order, two mozos had dragged a couch from an inner room and the insensible body of Gentleman Geoff was placed upon it. Billie bound the hideous gaping wound and forced a few drops of brandy between the set lips, but he only moaned faintly and drifted into a deeper oblivion.
Twenty-five minutes of five! Unless he were lying stark and still in the plaza, Thode must be well upon his way.
But Billie had no time to nurse her suspense; she could not even linger by her father's side, for there was grim and urgent work for her hands, and one by one the women crept out from behind the comparative safety of the bar and joined her. Barely a man of all those who had thronged the gambling-rooms remained unscathed, and the cries of the wounded rang in her ears with piteous insistence.
As she passed from one fallen man to another, heedless of her own exposure to stray bullets, administering brandy and water, improvising rude bandages and comforting as best she might, one thought echoed like a chant through her brain, solemn with its intensity. He would come. Her head seemed bursting with each reverberating crash of the battering-ram and her heart pulsed time to the slow march of the interminable hour, but the thought remained. He would come.
Ten minutes to five. Thode must have reached the barracks at the refinery by now, unless---- She set her small teeth firmly. Half of the hour had passed, but already the door was sagging with each renewed assault and the bolts were snapping beneath the strain. She dared not look again toward that last failing defense, dared not consult the little watch lest her self-control, her very reason give way. He would come, of course, but would he be in time?
All at once the hammering strokes ceased and the rattle of rifle fire died out in a desultory spatter as stray bullets impinged against the stout adobe wall.
Jim Baggott from his perch upon a heap of chairs before the window called out in amazement:
"They've drawn back clear across the road! Reckon they've given it up as a bad job at last! The dawn's almost here."
"Don't fool yourself!" A burly gang foreman rested his rifle against the wall and seized avidly upon the dipper of water held out to him by one of the women. "Thanks, ma'am.--Maybe they're just taking a breathing spell, but it's my opinion they're planning some new devilment. Alvarez knows that once that door's down----"
He glanced toward the woman and the sentence ended in a shrug.
"What's the matter with Geoff?" Baggott for the first time had noted the inert form stretched upon the couch.
"Dad's hit," Billie responded simply.
"Is he bad?" The foreman's tone was hushed.
"I'm afraid so. He's dreadfully cold; he's--he's bleeding internally, I think. Perhaps, if a surgeon comes in time----"
"A what?" Baggott exploded. "Gosh almighty, where's a surgeon coming from?"
"From the barracks," explained Billie, naively. "Mr. Thode's gone for the troops."
"When? How? What do you think of that young---- Hurrah!"
The eager questions from a dozen throats ended in a husky cheer, but it died as swiftly as it was born. From across the road a huge dark blur had detached itself and was moving forward stealthily to the attack. The fusillade of shots recommenced, but a groan had started and spread among the watchers at the windows.
"What is it?" Billie's tone was still steady, but a chill had crept into her veins.
"They've got a new battering-ram; looks like a telegraph pole! No door could hold against it," Baggott muttered. "It's all up with us now!"
The rifles popped valiantly, but a thunderous impact fairly rocked the house, and, fascinated, Billie watched the door bulge toward her, then spring back into place as the topmost bolt snapped like a knife-blade. One more onslaught, perhaps two----
Billie's hand closed on her revolver and she moved instinctively closer to her father's couch. Then all at once she threw up her head, and her voice rang out.
"Hark! What is that? Don't you hear it?"
None heeded as she stood with every muscle and nerve tense, straining her ears. The night was no longer dark and a faint rosy light seeping in at an easterly window reddened the glow of the swinging oil lamps and transfigured her drawn blanched face. What sound, distant and far away, had been borne to her on the wind of the dawn?
Again the giant battering-ram stove at the door and the middle bolt crashed. The flimsy impromptu barricade toppled, then swayed back into place and a shuddering sigh went up from the handful of white-faced men. One more drive, and the end would come.
The other women had huddled again behind the bar, but Billie still stood with uplifted face. And now she was smiling! Swift and sure the rhythmic echo of galloping hoofs reached her consciousness and even as the third shock came and the door crashed inward carrying the barricade with it, a ringing shout burst upon the air and the staccato rattle of a machine-gun sounded the final note in the symphony of battle.
The ragged, wild-eyed horde, sweeping in at the shattered doorway, brought up standing, then turned madly and scattered like chaff. In their stead, through the aperture leaped a tall, unrecognizable figure caked with dust and clotted blood which reeled to the couch and collapsed beside it, labored breath hissing from tortured lungs and blood-shot eyes filmed with exhaustion.
Outside, the tide of conflict raged up and down the street and swept out over the plaza, but neither the girl nor the man at her feet could hear it.
"You made it! Dad said you would play to win!" There was a new note of which she was herself unconscious in Billie's tones, and she added softly, "You were just bound and determined to take care of me right from the start! Weren't you, Mr. Duenna?"
The new day dawned and quiet was once more restored to Limasito. Those of the bandits who escaped swift justice had fled toward the distant hills with the troops in full pursuit and the plaza was a humming hive of survivors, augmented, as the tidings spread, by all the countryside.
The dismantled Blue Chip had been turned into a temporary hospital and the wounded lay in rows upon the tables and hastily improvised cots, but Gentleman Geoff was not among them.
He had been moved by his own wish out to a shady corner of the patio where he lay with a quiet, whimsical smile lifting the drooped ends of his mustache and his genial eyes, with a curious questioning look in their depths, stared straight before him.
Billie, huddled on the ground, her head pillowed against the side of his cot, slumbered deeply, and Gentleman Geoff's slim, delicate fingers touched her hair in a wistful caress. On a nearby bench Thode, bathed and freshly bandaged, slept also. Jim Baggott had tried in vain to drag him back to the hotel, for the young engineer had read a mute desire in the dying man's glance and refused to leave his side.
The army surgeon had done his best, but the end was near and only the superb vitality of the old gambler glowed still, like a living spark. Now and then the surgeon paused in his busy round within to glance speculatively from the doorway and each time Gentleman Geoff nodded reassuringly to him. Not yet!
The blaze of noon subsided, and as the shadows lengthened in the patio, Billie stirred, and Thode stretched and opened his eyes.
"Oh, Dad, I must have fallen asleep!" The girl's tones were filled with contrition. "Do you want anything? Is the pain very bad?"
It seemed to her that a shadow had crept into her father's eyes, but his faint voice was steady.
"No, Billie. No pain--just tired. Has young Thode gone home?"
"No, Sir, I'm here." He came eagerly forward. "Is there anything you want me to do?"
"Only shake hands with me. You rode well, last night. I reckoned Perry Larkin knew a man when he saw one, but he didn't know all that was in you. Billie, girl, go ask the Doc if I can have a drink or a little shot to pull me together." As the girl flew to do his bidding, Gentleman Geoff's thin fingers tightened their grip. "Thode, the boys will all stand by her and play square, but I'm leaving her alone. She isn't their kind; she doesn't know it, nobody does, but my little girl's of different blood. There's no one around here in her class, except you. Kind of--look out for her, will you?"
"I will, Sir." Thode's voice shook with the fervor of his vow. "You want her away from Limasito, from this environment? I have a sister up North----"
"That's what I mean." A spasm of pain contorted the pallid face and he went on hurriedly as if fearful of the inevitable interruption. "I couldn't take her myself and couldn't part from her, but the life hasn't been right for her, though I did all I could. She's a lady and she must go back to her own. I'd like to myself, for an hour, now. That's a Harvard seal on your cigarette-case, if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Thode."
Thode leaned forward, a sudden exclamation half halted on his lips.
Gentleman Geoff nodded slowly.
"Name Rendell," he said. "Class of '84. I haven't mentioned it this quarter of a century and I'm going to ask you to forget it now, but--you'll do what you can for my girl?"
"On my honor, Sir," Thode reaffirmed solemnly. "It is a sacred charge."
"Jim Baggott will sell out the Blue Chip and give her the proceeds. It ought to bring her a comfortable sum and the bank deposits are in her name already. I'm not afraid she will throw it away; she has a level head on her young shoulders, but I want to be sure she will have the best of everything; all that she has missed. You'll see to it?"
The reappearance of the doctor precluded other answer on Thode's part than a long hearty handclasp, but Gentleman Geoff understood.
Later his vigilant mind wandered and the watchers averted their faces.
"Best I could for her, Vi! Kept her like you--clean and true and God-Almighty sweet! Never knew--not my own. . . ."
Still later, when the sun like a glowing ball of fire had sunk beneath the wall of the patio, his lips moved again.
"Tell the boys I'm not cashing in--just passing this deal. I'm in on the next one. . . . Billie . . . square, always----"
"I'm here, Dad!" The girl's voice choked with sobs breathed close to his ear, but Gentleman Geoff did not hear. He had slipped into the silence.
In the days that followed, Kearn Thode pondered long and deeply upon his trust. The arrangement with his sister would be an easy matter to adjust, he knew, but the immediate task confronting him was more difficult of solution. The suggestion of a guardian thrust upon her would meet with scant complacency in the girl's independent spirit and secretly he quailed before the thought of her displeasure. Her comrades of a lifetime, the rough, staunch men of Limasito, might well resent the intrusion of a stranger, an alien, into what was evidently to them a family affair; still less would they be able to understand and appreciate the fact that Billie belonged to another world than theirs.
He decided at length to lay the matter before her frankly in detail, eliminating only the admission of Gentleman Geoff's identity. He respected the dead man's confidence, but it only precipitated him into a fresh quandary.
Billie's naive surprise when the question of her surname arose brought the matter to a crisis in his mind.
"Why, I'm just 'Billie,' I suppose," she had stammered. "I--I never heard any other name. Do I have to have one?"
Jim Baggott settled the matter, for the moment at least.
"You do not!" he announced, with emphasis. "Not around here, anyway. You were Gentleman Geoff's Billie and that's name enough for us. When you do need a handle to it, I reckon there ain't any law 'gainst you pickin' out one to suit yourself."
Baggott was the chief executor of the late gambler and mightily puffed up with the pride and dignity of his office. Gentleman Geoff's private papers were few and carefully indited, their instructions unmistakably clear. Under them, Baggott sold the Blue Chip scrupulously to the highest bidder, although it broke his heart to see Limasito's proudest institution pass into the hands of a Tampico syndicate. He placed the two hundred thousand, American, which the establishment brought, unreservedly to Billie's account.
"If you ain't of age, nobody knows the difference," he announced. "Gentleman Geoff left word it was to go 'to my daughter, known as Billie,' and there you are. The money's your'n, and it's up to you to do what you like with it."
Bewildered and numb in her first contact with poignant grief, the girl had taken up her temporary abode at Henry Bailey's fruit ranch, a mile or two out on the Calle Rivera, where his buxom wife, Sallie, mothered her to her heart's content.
Thode rode out each day to see her, but a new inexplicable shyness in Billie's attitude toward him made his task still more difficult and he deferred the question of her future in sheer funk. The magnitude of her fortune, too, was a stumbling-block. The girl knew nothing of him save what intuition had taught her. What if she assumed that his object were to gain control of her estate? The thought maddened him into action at length and one day as they cantered slowly back from a visit to the little Jose, he forced the issue.
"Billie, have you thought of the future, of what you will do?" he asked.
"Oh, yes." The reply was prompt and decisive. "I can't tell you, Mr. Thode, or anyone, but I've got something to do, something big, and I've made up my mind to see it through. It's just as much an inheritance from Dad as the money and I mean to let nothing stand in my way."
There was a grim earnestness in her tone which made him glance curiously at her.
"You are sure you can't tell me, and let me help, whatever it is?" he asked gently.
Billie shook her head.
"It's my job. I'll have my work cut out for me, I expect, but nobody else can share it. I've got to play a lone hand, but when it's over, I--I don't know. I haven't made any plans beyond that."
"But surely you don't intend to remain here in Limasito all your life?"
"Why not?" She shot a swift glance at him. "It was good enough for Dad."
"But not for you. That's the point. I--I had a talk with your father just before he died, and he wants you to go away; to travel and study and mingle with people of your own kind."
"Aren't these my kind?" Hot loyalty blazed in her tone. "They're all the friends I have in the world, the folks right here in Limasito, and all I want! What would I do among a lot of city people; stuck-up snobs who don't know I'm alive? I wouldn't even know how to talk to them, or what fork to eat with, and what's more, I wouldn't care. Why, I haven't even got a second name! 'Gentleman Geoff's Billie' would look well in the society papers, wouldn't it? No, thanks! I'll stick to the folks I know and--and care for!"
"But they're not all snobs, Billie, just because some of their ways are different from yours. I have a sister who can play a stiff game of poker and ride as well as you. Edna spends most of her time out in the open, and nothing feazes her. You would get on beautifully with her and I thought perhaps you would let me take you to her, sometime."
Billie was silent. She was staring straight ahead of her, into the vista above her pinto's ears, and had Thode looked at her he would have seen a quick flush mantle her face, but he was occupied by his own problem.
"You are different, you know, from the people about here; or anywhere else for that matter, Billie. I--I've never met a girl like you, so brave and true and wonderful! I want to take you away from all this and show you how different the world can be. What does it matter about your name? You are you, and that's all that counts. Everyone will love you, they couldn't help it!----" He rushed on heedlessly, oblivious to any ulterior construction which might be put upon his words, intent only on assuring her of her welcome in the place which her father had said was her rightful one, and in convincing her of his disinterested friendship.
"I told your father that if you were willing I would gladly take you to my sister, and we would all do our best to make you happy." He reddened, in his turn. "Please, don't misunderstand; no one will ever attempt to advise or suggest anything concerning the disposal of your fortune, it is only that you must have, as your father said, the best of everything; all that you have missed."
"Oh, don't talk of the money, please!" She stopped him with a swift gesture. "I do understand, but I--I don't want to say anything now. Maybe you'll change your mind. You were shocked, you remember, when I told you Dad ran the Blue Chip, and you might be sorry you--you tried to make your sister friends with a gambler's daughter, without a family name. Besides, I've got a trust to perform, don't forget that. When it's finished, perhaps--but let's wait until then."
He was well content to acquiesce, relieved that she had taken his suggestion in good faith without impugning his motive. Had he dreamed of the meaning she had read into his offer, his awakening would have been illuminating.
On the following day Billie put her newly acquired wealth to its first use. She cantered away from the Casa de Limas on her pinto without taking the Baileys into her confidence, and at sundown careened in at the gate in a battered touring car, the bewildered pony following on a rope behind.
"Land alive!" Sallie ran out in the yard with Chevalita, the criada, at her heels. "I didn't know you could run an automobile, Billie!"
"I couldn't this morning," Billie responded through set lips as she grazed the hitching-post and came to a stop with a grinding jerk which all but precipitated her through the cracked wind shield. "I've got to get the hang of this in a couple of days or die trying. I'm going on a little trip."
"Where to?" Sallie circled slowly around the dilapidated vehicle. "Don't look as if this would carry you very far. Where on earth did you get it?"
"It was poor Rufe Terwilliger's." The girl answered the last question first. "I bought it from Mrs. Terwilliger for three hundred dollars. Ben Hallock has got some tires to fit it that he'll let me have and if the engine will only last for about four hundred miles I don't care what happens to it after that."
"'Four hundred miles!'" repeated Sallie. "What have you taken into your head now? There's nothing within four hundred miles o' Limasito!"
Billie regarded her with an enigmatic smile.
"There's a dream to bring true!" she said slowly. "That is Tia Juana's; she's going with me. And there's a start to be made on something I've set out to do, and this journey is the first step of the way. No one must go with me but Tia Juana, no one must even know where I have gone. Someone owes me a debt, Sallie, and they're going to pay!"
There was a grim note in her quiet tones which boded ill for the debtor, and Sallie hastily changed the subject.
"And Mr. Thode? What'll I tell him? Does he know?"
"Not where I'm going, but you can say that I've made the first move in the game I'm playing; I've started on what I've got to do. He'll know what I mean. I can't tell you or anyone, Sallie, because I want to see it through alone."
When next Thode rode up to the Casa de Limas, Sallie met him with strange news.
"She's gone. Went off this morning in a car she bought from Rufe Terwilliger's widow, and she bundled old Tia Juana along with her. She said to tell you she'd made a start on what she had to do, and you would understand."
But Kearn Thode didn't. What was this trust, this unknown inheritance from Gentleman Geoff? There had been an ominous note in her voice when she spoke of it, and he remembered what the gambler had told him of her eye-for-an-eye creed of retributive justice. In her splendid, reckless courage could she have pitted herself against El Negrito, the bandit of the hills? _