Chapter X: Sancho

Craig, taking thought, knew that the power was in him--a queer feeling that all men and women may know some time. There was something more than a signal of good fellowship in that salute the girl had given him. It was an exaltation. This was the power.

He had a general knowledge as to what part of the world Sancho Red had fled to. Not back to the arid hills of the Southwest that Joan Gracie had indexed after his name, had Sancho fled. No. But Gaspell had given information in that connection. Bud and Sancho had resolved to make a team of it. That was while they were still in prison. And Sancho had told Bud that he was too much wanted in his native Southwest to make that part of the map attractive. Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona--they all wanted Sancho. In all these States he had done murder, and possibly some other things a trifle worse.

No wonder the girl had shuddered a little when she wrote out Sancho’s record.

“I’ll have to get him next and quick,” said Craig in his heart. “The others can wait a while. They’re apt to hide out long enough for me to get to them before they increase their debt to society--and mine.”

Not so, Sancho. It made Craig, himself, shudder a little now, when he thought of what Sancho might be doing this very day, might have done already in the brief liberty that had thus far been given him.

Craig made for the Mississippi, and started south, working as a deck hand on one steamer after another, working on no one steamer long, stopping off wherever towns or new labor camps gave promise of information.

Once or twice he guessed that he was followed, but this didn’t worry him greatly. The river was a maze--a maze of wide days and unlighted nights--spread out between the frontiers of the States, each State jealous of its rights, plantation owners and steamboat men all jealous of their labor--labor scarce enough without prowling deputy sheriffs making it scarcer yet by unsolicited activity.

Perhaps there was something in that thing the newspapers had said about his being the “Napoleon of the Underworld.” There was an underworld even along these river boats--in levee saloons and dance halls, in show boats and shanty boats, on raft and barge and freight deck, wherever the vagrants of the big river assembled. And in all these places Craig found that he could be certain of both friendship and honors by the simple announcement of his name, his prison name, Three Sevens.

No one disputed him. Maybe there was that look about him that advertised the fact that here was the man who had done all that had been reported of Thomas Masters, late of San Pedro. Some one, filled with river gin, tried to dispute it one night--it was in the bar of a floating blind tiger--but they threw the heretic overboard, and Craig himself was the only one who would rescue him.

This heretic was a small man, cross-eyed, given to grinning. He was not one that Craig, or any man, would have looked to for gratitude. Perhaps he meant no gratitude. Perhaps the service he rendered Craig in return was altogether selfish.

But he told Craig about a new lumber camp over in the cypress of the bayou country where labor was so precious and scarce, and the lumber company so powerful, that the only thing a sheriff would arrest a man for, over there, was the crime of leaving the job.

“How about the Federal marshals,” asked Craig, “and the detectives and sheriffs from other States?”

“Settin’ around the company’s fence like buzzards,” said the cross-eyed man. “They know the reservation’s full of their meat--men from the chain gangs of a dozen States. The company treats ’em fine, these officers. Likes to have ’em there. Keeps the boys on the job. But, no sir! Let one of them Yankee marshals try to take a man away, company’d leave him out in the woods as quick as it’d leave an ordinary man who tried it.”

The cross-eyed man was headed for this place. As yet he didn’t say why. But he had a skiff--he called it a pirogue--and knew the way. He begged Craig to go along for company.

Craig accepted. Perhaps it was the fascination of Pahkaville that was luring Craig’s friend. The little man talked about Pahkaville. It appeared that Pahkaville was also part of the lumber company’s domain--founded complete on a mud island far out in the deep swamp of the cypress country, as a further inducement, no doubt, for labor to come and remain. For it would take more than mere sheriffs and marshals to keep men at the killing work of the cypress slashings even at high pay, without other inducements.

It was late one night, when they had drifted and paddled all one day through a forest that couldn’t have been wilder in De Soto’s day, that they got their first glimmer of the lights of Pahkaville, far off through the blue gloom of the water. A little later, there came the faint strains of music--fiddle, drum, and guitar.

“Saturday night,” said the cross-eyed man. “I reckon they’re having a ball.”

“And I reckon that’ll suit you?” said Craig.

“I reckon I won’t stop.”

“Stop now,” said Craig pointedly.

The little man sat motionless. They were on a rather broad stretch of water. There glinted through Craig’s mind the odd thought that perhaps this little man with the cross eyes was a detective after all.

“Who are you, anyway?” asked Craig softly.

“My real name is Sanders.”

“What’s your business?”

There was no use conducting a conversation like this without a show of proper authority. Craig’s hand was at his side.

“I’m a paper hanger,” said Mr. Sanders. “I had a brother who was a sheep-herder.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

There was a long pause. An owl hooted. Underneath this big sound, like fireflies under the moon, there came the tinkle and drub of the Pahkaville orchestra. It was to this accompaniment, and the even more fitting accompaniment of the silence, that the little man spoke.

“Stranger, I’ll tell you. I ain’t prying into your business. If you’re a detective, yourself, you can’t say I didn’t tell you what the company’s apt to do to detectives that try to interfere with their men. If you ain’t a detective--if you’re a man that’s had an accident----”

“How do you mean?”

“--and are a man who has shed human blood--you can’t say I didn’t tell you what a good place Pahkaville and the slashin’s are to hide out in. No offense, stranger!”

“Go on.”

“Four years ago a man killed my brother, and I started out to kill _him_. I didn’t have the nerve. Then this man got put in jail, and I laid off. But last week I heard he had broke jail and come to Pahkaville. When I saw you and heard you was lookin’ for this same man, I ’lowed I’d turn the job of gettin’ him over to you. I brought you to Pahkaville hoping you’d kill Sancho Red. I know it’s my own sacred duty, but”--his teeth began to chatter--“I’ll tell you honest, I’m skeert!”

“Well, well, well,” said Craig.

“Are you a detective?”

“Sort of.”

“And you _are_ after Sancho Red?”

“Yes.”

“Then kill him,” said Mr. Sanders, “before he kills you. Neither he nor the company’ll ever let you arrest him otherwise nohow.”

“Mr. Sanders,” said Craig, “if I take this job, or the equivalent of this job, off your hands, are you willing to help me some?”

The cross-eyed man raised his right hand in the blue gloom.

Those who knew Sancho Red best said that his mother was an Apache and his father a Mexican. His looks supported this theory of descent, granted his father was one of the big Mexicans--of which there are not a few. Sancho was big. Nor was this bigness a mere matter of height, although he was all of six feet. He was big of bone and breadth. He had stupendous shoulders. His face was big, although when you looked at it, or remembered it, you were chiefly impressed by his small, glittering eyes and the extremely wide, cruelly curved mouth.

Also like the cottonmouth snake, it was in the nature of Sancho neither to run nor to toil. His way was to bask, take things easy, with no activity outside his restless, small eyes and the restless small brain back of these eyes, until such time as a victim should come his way. Then a blow--and gluttony--and more luxurious repose.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that since coming to the secretive kingdom of the Pahkaville Lumber Company he had established a small gambling joint--with another and nimbler man to operate it, himself to rule it and take the profits.

Pahkaville was what they call wide open. There were all sorts of attractions there of a kind strong men hanker for. It was like what must have been one of those old towns of the Caribbean, when the Buccaneers were running things--all colors here and there, white and yellow, tawny and black--a sprinkling of Chinese, Malays, and Filipinos, from the Gulf Coast; Creoles, Spanish, French, and Portuguese; blond squareheads from the big woods of the North, black refugees from chain gangs and turpentine camps, white adventurers waiting for some new Skagway to call them, and men like Sancho, drawn to a place like this as are snakes to a water hole when the summer droughts begin.

Craig looked Sancho over, without himself being seen. Craig had no difficulty in lining up a job for himself. There was engineering enough for a regiment of engineers out among the big trees of that swamp--tracks to lay, cables to rig, these changing and extending from day to day as the slashings bit deeper into the wet jungle. Each night Craig came back to the spendthrift hilarity of Pahkaville, joined the crowds in the “plaza,” the town’s one public square and street. A primitive place as ever was--filled with primitive people, man and woman--and Sancho Red in his element.

Sancho’s gambling joint was an open front shed, with a faro layout at the rear. Back of this, in another shed, entirely closed, Sancho had his personal den.

“Fire would drive him out,” said Craig to himself.

But fire also might drive all Pahkaville out as well. All the buildings in it were built of raw lumber--most of it so filled with turpentine that it would have burned in a rainstorm, almost. To avoid fire, the company had long since abolished kerosene and lamps. There was electric light for all who wanted it, and arc lamps hung from the serpentine branches of the live oaks over the plaza at night.

There was not only an abundance of artificial light in this city of darkness. There was no lack of police, either--here where outlaw games and drink ran their course and outlaw men found shelter. Nights particularly, Pahkaville was patrolled by the company’s own police--men with a talent for killing, who prowled about, watchful but restless like hungry cats.

One of these men had good-naturedly relieved Craig of his gun. It was the night of Craig’s arrival. Mr. Sanders had no gun. They had left their pirogue in a creek that ran around back of the island on which Pahkaville was built.

“So no one’s apt to do any shooting around here,” said Craig.

The policeman smiled grimly. “If there’s any shootin’ to be done,” said the policeman, “the company likes to do it itself. You see, we don’t like to lose our hands.”

“Suppose a couple of the hands get unfriendly.”

“That does happen. Not often. We generally manage to keep order. We don’t like to lose our men.”

“What’s to keep them from hurting each other with razors and things?”

“Nothing! Nothing! They do get at each other, now and then, with an ax, or a cant hook, or a stick of wood. Only, we discourage it. We try to keep every one good-natured. Fellow who starts anything like that generally disappears before long.”

The policeman drifted away, lean and watchful, like a cat.

“We’ll have to be careful,” said Mr. Sanders.

“Mighty careful.”

“Even if we done somethin’ to Sancho, and they found it out----”

“They mustn’t find out,” said Craig. “The thing for you to do is to forget what you’re here for. They’ll be glad to have you work in the store. Both of us will sleep in the bunk house with the rest of the men for a while, and we’ll eat in the mess house.”

“I ain’t aimin’ to find out,” said the little man apologetically, “but what did you say was the name I’m to use in addressin’ you, sir?”

“My own name, Daniel Craig; and not ‘sir.’ We’re partners.”

The two of them fell into the life of this queer city of the woods without attracting attention. Newcomers were not rare. Nor was it in keeping with local etiquette to ask questions. The town drowsed by day, flamed into life at night with the return of the swampers.

Each night Sancho sat impassive in the back of his den, while his little black eyes flicked at all who came and went. Days, he slept and ate. He had an inordinate capacity for food and sleep. He was growing bigger.

It was in the daytime, while Sancho slept, that Craig and Mr. Sanders finally took up their quarters in a new small cabin that had been built for them beyond that of Sancho, right on the edge of the island. Close under the cabin they had moored the pirogue that had brought them here. Day by day they accumulated stores in their cabin of a kind and quantity to last them a long sojourn in the woods, once they should care to leave.

Sancho Red, himself, had not looked on this advent of a neighbor without disfavor, but he was mollified when he saw Mr. Sanders and learned that he was clerk in the company store.

He was more mollified yet, when Mr. Sanders let him know that there were nights when there was as much as ten thousand dollars in the company safe, and that he possessed the combination.

For things had been occurring to bother Sancho--things that he could not understand, things which gave him a nostalgia for the arid hills of his home range and the completer safety that the solitude of those hills promised him. It was all very well here in the crowd for a while, but his nature called for solitude, especially when he sensed this danger that he could not understand.

Twice, now, he had found the print of a bloody hand on the sack of moss he used as a pillow. There was blood on the latch of his door. Then, one night, toward dawn, when he had just fallen asleep, he was jabbed through with such ferocious pain that he jumped out of his cot sure that he had been bitten by a snake. It wasn’t that he saw when he turned on the light. It was more blood. There was blood everywhere.

There was nothing nervous about Sancho. He wasn’t even very superstitious. Even so, had he been an ordinary man in other respects, Sancho might have deserted his cabin then and gone to sleep in the company barracks. But this was the one place that Sancho did fear. To go to sleep in the presence of strangers, any one of whom might be a deadly enemy, was almost impossible; the thought gave him a shudder, anyway.

But the prodding of the blood and the pain in his cabin, and the lure of partnership with a defenseless small man in a ten-thousand-dollar job succeeded in getting Sancho--not so much like a snake now, as an overfed bull alligator--from this swamp hole of his.

Later, when new tenants came to occupy Sancho’s deserted cabin and the deserted cabin next door, on the edge of the bayou, they were to speculate on a crude tunnel, half filled with water, that connected the two shacks, and the electric-light wires that ran through this. The tunnel came up in the corner of Sancho’s cabin right where his floor cot had been. It was thus that the tunnel was found. The darky making over the cot had got an electric shock.

But meantime, other things had happened to Sancho. He had watched one night while Mr. Sanders brought the last satchel from the cabin on the edge of the bayou. It was in the deep dark, before dawn. Then the two of them had entered the pirogue, which Mr. Sanders silently rowed.

They went away across the dark waters that lay amid the cypress.

“I can kill him when I feel like it,” said Sancho to himself.

There was a touch of luxury, as fine as any Sancho had ever known, in thus letting his victim work for him--the victim helping to rob himself, helping in the murder of himself.

Sancho must have smiled in the dark. It was his sort of a joke.