Chapter XXXIII: A Strange Message

As Buffalo Bill glanced round again, he began to look for tracks in the soil. He saw only his own, and those of Periguez, which came from the opposite direction.

“In following these I can perhaps find the men who were with him,” was his thought. “They may be scattered now, but if he had followers, or companions, he left them at some point, certainly; and by pursuing his tracks the trail of the other men can be picked up. Yet I should not care to go on without my horse; and if I rode while following these tracks the risk of being seen would be great. I should like to know who was with him, but it may not be worth my while.”

He was carrying the gold-handled dagger in his hand. It slipped from his fingers, as he held it carelessly, and struck with a sharp click on a stone at his feet. He stared down at it with a gasping cry.

Small wonder that he did so; what he saw was enough to make him gasp and stare.

The fall on the stone had released some hidden spring in the dagger’s handle, and it had opened. Within the cavity a twisted something was seen resembling paper.

With a quick motion the scout caught up the dagger, looked at the heavy handle, which had been so deceptive, and then began to untwist what at first sight appeared to be a roll of paper. He saw that it really was not paper, but the fine inner, fibrous bark of a tree. Letters were traced on it with the leaden end of a bullet or cartridge. The writing was in Spanish, but he was able to read it:

“My name is Leon Ruiz. I have been made suddenly a prisoner.
Where I am I do not know, but my prison is a large adobe
house, on a hill, and mountains are all around me. Whoever
finds this——”

The message broke off abruptly.

Buffalo Bill read it over and over again, as if he could not convince himself that he read aright.

It was in the highest degree mystifying.

In the first place, it gave the name of the writer as Leon Ruiz, who was the Moorishlike proprietor of the Porfiero Hacienda, and who, after welcoming Buffalo Bill, had disappeared so strangely, instead of returning to take supper with him.

In the second place, Ruiz had apparently returned to the hacienda in the night, or certainly after the supper hour, for it was after supper that Buffalo Bill had the second time seen the dagger of gold among the ore specimens on the hanging shelves.

If Ruiz had so returned—and it seemed he must have done so, or he could not have gained possession of the dagger—why had he not made his presence known?

The answer to that might be, the scout suspected, that Ruiz and Periguez were enemies. If that were true, Ruiz might have fled from the hacienda to escape sudden vengeance, and might have returned in the darkness to get certain articles, taking among other things this dagger, yet had been afraid to try to see the scout.

According to the writing, he was now a prisoner in a big adobe building located on a certain hill, with mountains surrounding it.

Buffalo Bill was fairly familiar with that portion of New Mexico, and he remembered that the only large adobe building answering to that description, of which he had knowledge, was the Perditas Hacienda, on a high hill near the Perditas River.

That hacienda was mountain girt, but it was distant a number of miles from the Porfiero Hacienda, so distant that hard riding would have been required to convey Ruiz to it in the time that had elapsed. Yet it could have been done.

“But if he is a prisoner where he says he is, how did the dagger get here?” the scout asked, looking up as if questioning the air from which apparently it had come. “And why did Ruiz not finish his letter?”

Though the letters scrawled on the back with the end of a bullet were large, there was yet enough space remaining on the bark to have written several words more. There was no apparent reason why the message should have been left unfinished.

The more the scout thought of it, the more puzzled he grew. Finally he replaced the letter in the handle of the dagger, for safe-keeping, and, after an examination of the hidden spring, now to be seen, he closed the handle.

It shut with a sharp click, and after it had been closed it seemed perfectly solid, with nothing to show that it was hollow. And its weight added to that appearance of solidity.

“Those old Spaniards, or Moors, or whoever made this dagger, were experts at their trade,” was the scout’s thought, and then he turned to the body of Ramon Periguez, which still lay just as it had fallen.

Wondering if there could be anything in the dead man’s pockets that would throw any light on this mystery, or perhaps the singular disappearance of Prince Mogador, Buffalo Bill put his hand into the inner pocket of the man’s jacket.

Periguez had been his enemy—had sought his life and Periguez’s scoundrelly companions, the scout believed, were somewhere near. Therefore, Buffalo Bill felt justified in securing even in this way any information he could.

As he thus stooped over the body of Periguez, a rifle cracked some distance away, and the scout dropped downward with a limp motion, falling across the body of the dead man.

Three men in Mexican costume sprang out of some bushes at the point from which the rifle had been fired, and came running toward the fallen scout.

One of them was the servant who, dressed in white, had waited at the supper table the previous evening at the Porfiero Hacienda. This rascal carried a rifle from which smoke still curled, and it was plain that he had fired the murderous shot.

“He is dead!” said this man, as they reached the scout.

To all appearance he was right in his conjecture, for Buffalo Bill lay in a limp heap upon Periguez’s body. Yet his right hand still clutched the dagger.

“Shot him in the head! See? There flows the blood!”

Blood trickled down over the scout’s face, and there was a bullet hole in his hat.

One of the other men saw the dagger of gold, and greeted the sight with an exclamation of astonishment.

“See?” he fairly screeched. He held up the dagger. “See? The dagger of Leon Ruiz!”

They looked at it, with many ejaculations.

“The very dagger, taken by this American robber from the hacienda. And with it he killed Ramon Periguez.”

“Aye, it is so! He stole the dagger from the hacienda, and killed Periguez with it!”

“Aye! But he is dead now. Señor Gomez, your eye was true and your bullet a good one. You sent his cowardly soul to the pit in a quick way, and may it burn there forever!”

But at this juncture Buffalo Bill began to stir.

Though it had hurled him into sudden and complete unconsciousness, the bullet from the rifle of Gomez had merely scraped along his skull, cut the skin open, and produced a free flow of blood, yet had made no more than a superficial wound. It was the concussion which had dropped the scout in a senseless heap across the body.

“The rascal still lives!” Gomez ejaculated, and, bending over to look, he lifted the gold dagger as if he thought of driving it to the scout’s heart in order to finish him.

Buffalo Bill’s eyes fluttered open, but closed again, for consciousness was but returning.

“Ah, he is rousing!” said another of the three men. “We will question him about this murder, if he comes back to life for a while.”

“He may not be mortally hurt,” said the third man.

“If he is not,” said the other, “I have here a medicine that will finish him!”

He touched significantly the protruding handle of his knife.

Gomez was still bending above the scout, watching his struggling return from the land of insensibility.

“Manuel,” he said, without looking round, “bring the lariat from my horse, that we may bind this devil. He is not so badly hurt, mayhap. We will tie him.”

Manuel started off at a run. When he came back he was riding one horse and leading two others. He approached at a gallop, drew up with a thunder of hoofs, and leaped down with a spectacular flourish, swinging the lariat he had procured. Evidently Manuel was a rascal of theatrical tendencies. He threw the lariat to Gomez, who, with deft loopings and turns, together with some quickly made knots, soon had the scout bound hand and foot.

“Help me to turn him,” he said, “and we will pass the lariat round his body and arms.”

“He will think the foul fiend has him sure enough,” declared one of the men with a laugh, as the rope was wrapped round and round the scout’s body.

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