Chapter XXXI: Again in Danger

The hour was late, and Buffalo Bill sat alone in the room to which he had been shown by Ramon Periguez. The door and window were where he could see them. There was no lock on the door, but he had set a chair against it, so that the moving of the chair would attract his attention, if any one tried to get into the room there.

The great scout’s suspicions were keenly alive. A sense of peril in the air made his nerves tingle. He did not know whence the danger was to come, yet that it would come he was sure.

The attempt to drug his glass of wine, the strange behavior in other ways of the major-domo, the singular disappearance of Leon Ruiz, were of themselves enough to arouse his keenest distrust. To them he added the fact that Ruiz was a Moor, yet denied it, claiming to be a Spaniard.

“The distance ridden by Leon Ruiz must be long, as he has not yet returned,” mused the scout. He had put out his candle and sat alone in the darkness, but now he struck a match and glanced at his watch. “Past midnight! I think I’ll lie down a while.”

Cody looked at the chair against the door, and inspected the window. It was narrow and held but a loose sash, with small panes of glass. There was no way to bar it. He lay down on the bed without removing his clothes, and near his hand he placed his revolver; his face was turned toward the window. There was no moon, but the stars were bright and gave a good deal of light. The room was in heavy shadow.

It was not Buffalo Bill’s intention to fall asleep, but when an hour or more had passed without any occurrence whatever, he yielded to the feeling of drowsiness which stole over him.

As he knew afterward, he slept full three hours. Then he awoke. He heard nothing and saw nothing, yet some subtle sense told him that enemies had stolen into the room. The chair was where he had placed it by the door, and the window seemed not to have been disturbed. This made it certain that if enemies were in the room, they had gained it by some secret way.

Buffalo Bill lay quite still, though his hand stole softly to his revolver and clutched it.

When he heard nothing, he turned his head slowly to look about.

By the opposite wall he saw a dim form, whose eyes reflected the light that came in from the window, and so were made visible.

“Ramon Periguez!” was the thought of the scout. “He is in here with assassins, and they will kill me if they can. They do not intend that I shall go in search of that missing prince—which proves very conclusively that they have good reasons for wishing to stop such an investigation as I intend making. Well, we’ll see who wins or loses, Ramon Periguez, major-domo of the Porfiero Hacienda, or myself.”

With a quick motion, he threw his arm over and fired at the crouching figure. The report of the revolver was deafening, but it did not cover up the sound of the man’s fall. Then, through the thick smoke over the bed, the scout sprang up and leaped for the window.

As he did so, two revolvers spoke within the room, one of them chipping the adobe from the wall right over his head, and the other cutting a hole through the big hat the scout carried in his left hand. He gained the little window, hearing confused cries, trampling feet, and a deep groan, and went through it to the outside like a scudding rat. Then he dropped quickly to the ground.

Whoever the would-be assassins were, he had thwarted them, and wounded one of their number.

Buffalo Bill was now in the garden. He ran quickly across it, and leaped the low adobe wall that hedged it in.

Before him were the stable and the horse corral, and to the stable he hastened. Behind him, in the hacienda, he heard cries and shouts and sounds of running feet.

Dashing into the stable, where his horse should have been, he saw that it was not there. Apparently it had not been placed in the stable, or else it had later been removed from it. Nor were there any other horses in the stable, and none were in the corral.

“Left afoot!” was his thought. “They have horses, and they think they can ride me down.”

He darted out of the stable, having no desire to be caught in it and hemmed in.

As he ran along the wall and on around the wire fence of the corral, he heard footsteps in the flower garden, and then, in the faint starlight, he saw two men appear. Their voices reached him, and the voice of one he recognized as that of Ramon Periguez.

“Some other scoundrel got my bullet, eh? That is bad. I had hoped it was the major-domo. Bullets are good for a rascal of that stamp.”

Beyond the corral the scout, to his satisfaction, saw a horse hitched to a post. It bore a saddle and bridle. But a man was running toward it from the opposite side of the house. Apparently, the horse had been made ready and left there for this man’s use.

“They provided against contingencies that they hardly expected would arise,” was the scout’s thought. “They were sure they could kill me in that room. It had a secret entrance by which they came in. But they ought to have blocked up that window. A little slip like that sometimes makes all the difference in the world in one’s plans.”

Cody was running toward the horse, but the man running from the corner of the house to get to the horse had the advantage in being much nearer the animal.

The scout’s revolver came out, and he halted for one brief second.

“It’s almost discreditable to win even such a race in this manner!”

The revolver cracked, and the man tumbled to the ground with a broken leg.

“Fire upon me, and you get the next bullet through your head!” the scout shouted to him, as he reached the horse and sprang into the saddle. Bending forward, he severed the rope that held it to the post. Then he plunged the spurs into its sides, and the horse started off with great bounds, being headed straight away from the hacienda.

There were more cries and shouts in the darkness behind him, followed by the barking reports of revolvers, as the men there began to fire at the figure they beheld faintly flying onward through the gloom.

The bullets went wild, but immediately there sounded a pounding of hoofs, showing that a pursuit had begun.

Buffalo Bill bent forward on the neck of his horse, stroked its mane, and laughed quietly.

“Old fellow, it was a great favor that they left you there for me, after taking my horse! They didn’t intend it, of course. I wish you could talk, for you might be able to make some rare revelation. But I guess something.”

A thunder of hoofs dinned behind him, and cries floated to him. He drove his steed on madly for nearly an hour, and then shifted into the course he wished to pursue.

“Too bad to scorn the hospitality of Leon Ruiz and Ramon Periguez in this way, yet it seems best,” he remarked, as if speaking to the horse, which was proving itself to be a speedy animal. “And I really hadn’t concluded my investigations there! However, a few things seem to be plain.

“It is plain that Ruiz and his major-domo know much more about the strange disappearance of Prince Mogador than they would be willing to admit. It is further plain that Ruiz and that servant are Moors, and perhaps Periguez is also a Moor. Another thing is clear: My coming frightened them, and they made sudden plans to put me out of the way. That can mean nothing else but that they fear me. The wine held something worse than a sleeping potion; the powder was a poison, and if I had swallowed it I should no doubt be dead before this time. Ah, well, I am out of their clutches, and I’ll take care not to fall into them again!”

He glanced backward, listening, but he heard no sounds of his pursuers.

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