The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

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His judges were not impressed. They believed him to be acting. He was
one of the D'Acostas; Juan's brother, Ferdinand's son--a hornet. Not the
same type of hornet, but for that very reason, perhaps, the more to be
feared. "When he finds," said the colonel who presided, "that he is to
be shot beyond peradventure he will turn stoic like the others, you'll
see. Even now he is probably laughing at us for being moved by his
blubberings and entreaties. He wants to get away from us at any price.
That's all. He wants a chance to sting us again. And that chance he
will not get."

Oddly enough, the coward did turn stoic the moment he was formally
condemned. But it was physical exhaustion as much as anything else; a
sudden numbing of the senses, a kind of hideous hypnotism upon him by
the idea of death. It lasted the better part of an hour. Then, alone in
his cell, he hurled himself against the walls, screaming, or cowered
upon the stone floor, pooling it with tears, sobbing horribly with his
whole body, going now and again into convulsions of nausea. These
actions were attributed by his guard to demoniacal rage, but not to
fear. He thus fought blindly against the unfightable until about four in
the afternoon, when exhaustion once more put a quietus upon him. It was
then that his mother, having taken counsel at last with her patriot
soul, visited him.

She had succeeded, not without difficulty, in gaining permission. It was
not every mother who could manage a last interview with a condemned son.
But she had bribed the colonel. She had given him in silver the savings
of a lifetime.

The old woman sat down by her son and took his hand in hers. Then the
door of the cell was closed upon them and locked. Manuel turned and
collapsed against his mother's breast.

"It's all right, Manuel," she said in her quiet, cheerful voice. "I've
seen the colonel."

Manuel looked up quickly, a glint of hope in his rodent eyes.

"What do you mean?" he said. His voice was hoarse. His mother bit her
lips, for the hoarseness told her that her son had been screaming with
fear. In that moment she almost hated him. But she controlled herself.
She looked at him sidewise.

"The colonel tells me that you have offered to serve Spain if he will
give you your life?"

This was a shrewd guess. She waited for Manuel's answer, not even hoping
that it would be in the negative. She knew him through and through.

"Well," he choked, "it wouldn't do."

"That's where you are wrong, my son," she said. "The colonel, on the
contrary, believes he can make use of you. He is going to let you
go free."

Manuel could not believe his ears, it seemed. He kept croaking "What?"
in his hoarse voice, his face brightening with each reiteration.

"But," she went on, "he does not wish this to be known to the Cubans.
You see, if they knew that you had been allowed to go free it would
counteract your usefulness, wouldn't it?"

"Yes--but--"

"Listen to me. Everything is to proceed as ordered and according to army
regulations except one thing. The rifles which are to be fired at you
will be loaded with blank cartridges. When the squad fires you must fall
as if--as if you were dead. Then you will be put in a coffin and
brought to me for burial. Then you will come to life. That is all."

She smiled into her son's face with a great gladness and patted his
hands.

"Afterward," she said, "you will grow a beard and generally disguise
yourself. It is thus that the colonel thinks he can best make use of
your knowledge and cleverness. And, of course, at the first opportunity
you will give the colonel the slip and once more take your place in the
patriot army."

"Of course," said Manuel; "I never meant to do what I pretended I
would."

"Of course not!" said his mother.

"But--"

"But what?"

"I don't see the necessity of having a mock execution. It's not nice to
have a lot of blank cartridges go off in your face."

"Nice!" The old woman sprang to her feet. She shook her finger in his
face. "Nice! Haven't you any shred of courage in your great, hulking
body? I don't believe you'll even face blank cartridges like a man--I
believe you'll scream and blubber and be a shame to us all. You disgust
me!" She spat on the floor. "Here I come to tell you that you are to be
spared, and you're afraid to death of the means by which you are to go
free. Why, I'd stand up to blank cartridges all day without turning a
hair--or to bullets, for that matter--at two hundred metres, where I
knew none of those Spanish idiots could hit me except by accident. I
wouldn't expect you to play the man at a real execution or at anything
real, but surely you can pull yourself together enough to play the man
at a mock execution. What a chance! You can leave a reputation as great
as your brother's--greater, even; you could crack jokes and burst out
laughing just when they go to fire--"

Then, as suddenly as she had flown into a passion, she burst into tears
and flung her arms about her boy and clung to him and mothered him until
in the depths of his surly, craven heart he was touched and
strengthened.

"Don't be afraid for me, mother," he said. "I do not like even the blank
cartridges, God forgive me; but I shall not shame you."

She kissed him again and again and laughed and cried. And when the guard
opened the door and said that the time was up she patted her boy upon
the cheeks and shoulders and smiled bravely into his face. Then she
left him.

The execution of Manuel D'Acosta was not less inspiring to the patriotic
heart than that of his brother Juan. And who knows but that it may have
been as difficult an act of control for the former to face the blank
cartridges as for the latter to stand up to those loaded with ball? Like
Juan, Manuel stood against the wall with a cigarette between his lips.
Like Juan, he sought out his mother's face among the spectators and
smiled at her bravely. He did not stand so modestly, so gentlemanly as
Juan had done, but with a touch of bravado, an occasional
half-swaggering swing from the hips, an upward tilt of the chin.

"I told you he would turn stoic," the colonel whispered to one of the
officers who had taken part in the trial. "I know these Cubans."

It was all very edifying. Like Juan, Manuel spat out his cigarette when
it had burned too short. But, unlike Juan, he made no dying speech. He
felt that he was still too hoarse to be effective. Instead, at the
command, "Aim!" he burst out laughing, as if in derision of the
well-known lack of markmanship which prevailed among the Spaniards.

He was nearly torn in two.

Those who lifted him into his coffin noticed that the expression upon
his face was one of blank astonishment, as if the beyond had contained
an immeasurable surprise for him.

His mother took a certain comfort from the manner of his dying, but it
was the memory of her other boy that really enabled her to live out her
life without going mad.

"MA'AM?"

In most affairs, except those which related to his matrimonial ventures,
Marcus Antonius Saterlee was a patient man. On three occasions "an
ardent temperament and the heart of a dove," as he himself had expressed
it, had corralled a wife in worship and tenderness within his house. The
first had been the love of his childhood; the wooing of the second had
lasted but six weeks; that of the third but three. He rejoiced in the
fact that he had been a good husband to three good women. He lamented
that all were dead. Now and then he squirmed his bull head around on his
bull body, and glanced across the aisle at the showy woman who was
daintily picking a chicken wing. He himself was not toying with
beefsteak, boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, lima, and string
beans. He was eating them. Each time he looked at the lady he muttered
something to his heart of a dove:

"Flighty. Too slight. Stuck on herself. Pin-head," etc.

With his food Saterlee was not patient. He dispensed with mastication.
Neither was he patient of other people's matrimonial ventures. And, in
particular, that contemplated and threatened by his son and heir was
moving him across three hundred miles of inundated country as fast as a
train could carry him. His son had written:

"DEAREST DAD--I've found Dorothy again. She's at Carcasonne. They
thought her lungs were bad, but they aren't. We're going to be married a
week from to-day--next Friday--at nine A.M. This marriage is going to
take place, Daddy dear. You can't prevent it. I write this so's to be on
the square. I'm inviting you to the wedding. I'll be hurt if you don't
show up. What if Dorothy's mother _is_ an actress and has been divorced
twice? You've been a marrying man yourself, Dad. Dorothy is all darling
from head to foot. But I love you, too, Daddy, and if you can't see it
my way, why, God bless and keep you just the same."

JIM.

I can't deny that Marcus Antonius Saterlee was touched by his son's
epistle. But he was not moved out of reason.

"The girl's mother," he said to himself, "is a painted, divorced jade."
And he thought with pleasure of the faith, patience, and rectitude of
the three gentle companions whom he had successively married and buried.
"There was never any divorce in the Saterlee blood," he had prided
himself. "Man or woman, we stick by our choice till he or she" (he was
usually precise) "turns up his or her toes. Not till then do we think of
anybody else. But then we do, because it is not good to live alone,
especially in a small community in Southern California."

He glanced once more at the showy lady across the aisle. She had
finished her chicken wing, and was dipping her fingers in a finger-bowl,
thus displaying to sparkling advantage a number of handsome rings.

"My boy's girl's mother a painted actress," he muttered as he looked.
"Not if I know it." And then he muttered: "_You'd_ look like an actress
if you was painted."

Though the words can not have been distinguished, the sounds were
audible.

"Sir?" said the lady, stiffly but courteously.

"Nothing, Ma'am," muttered Mark Anthony, much abashed. "I'm surprised to
see so much water in this arid corner of the world, where I have often
suffered for want of it. I must have been talking to myself to that
effect. I hope you will excuse me."

The lady looked out of the window--not hers, but Saterlee's.

"It does look," she said, "as if the waters had divorced themselves from
the bed of ocean."

She delivered this in a quick but telling voice. Saterlee was shocked at
the comparison.

"I suppose," she continued, "we may attribute those constant and tedious
delays to which we have been subjected all day to the premature melting
of snow in the fastnesses of the Sierras?"

This phrase did not shock Saterlee. He was amazed by the power of memory
which it proved. For three hours earlier he had read a close paraphrase
of it in a copy of the Tomb City _Picayune_ which he had bought at
that city.

The train ran slower and slower, and out on to a shallow embankment.

"Do you think we shall ever get anywhere?" queried the lady.

"Not when we expect to, Ma'am," said Saterlee. He began to scrub his
strong mouth with his napkin, lest he should return to the smoker with
stains of boiled eggs upon him.

The train gave a jolt. And then, very quietly, the dining-car rolled
over on its side down the embankment. There was a subdued smashing of
china and glass. A clergyman at one of the rear tables quietly remarked,
"Washout," and Saterlee, who had not forgotten the days when he had
learned to fall from a bucking bronco, relaxed his great muscles and
swore roundly, sonorously, and at great length. The car came to rest at
the bottom of the embankment, less on its side than on its top. For a
moment--or so it seemed--all was perfectly quiet. Then (at one and the
same moment) a lady in the extreme front of the diner was heard
exclaiming faintly: "You're pinching me," and out of the tail of his
eye Saterlee saw the showy lady across the aisle descending upon him
through the air. She was accompanied by the hook and leg table upon
which she had made her delicate meal, and all its appurtenances,
including ice-water and a wide open jar of very thin mustard.

"Thank you," she murmured, as her impact drove most of the breath out of
Saterlee's bull body. "How strong you are!"

"When you are rested, Ma'am," said he, with extreme punctiliousness, "I
think we may leave the car by climbing over the sides of the seats on
this side. Perhaps you can manage to let me pass you in case the door is
jammed. I could open it."

He preceded her over and over the sides of the seats, opened the car
door, which was not jammed, and helped her to the ground. And then, his
heart of a parent having wakened to the situation, he forgot her and
forsook her. He pulled a time-table from his pocket; he consulted a
mile-post, which had had the good sense to stop opposite the end of the
car from which he had alighted. It was forty miles to Carcasonne--and
only two to Grub City--a lovely city of the plain, consisting of one
corrugated-iron saloon. He remembered to have seen it--with its great
misleading sign, upon which were emblazoned the noble words:
"Life-Saving Station."

"Grub City--hire buggy--drive Carcasonne," he muttered, and without a
glance at the train which had betrayed him, or at the lady who had
fallen upon him, so to speak, out of the skies, he moved forward with
great strides, leaped a puddle, regained the embankment, and hastened
along the ties, skipping every other one.

II

Progress is wonderful in the Far West. Since he had last seen it only a
year had passed, and yet the lovely city of Grub had doubled its size.
It now consisted of two saloons: the old "Life-Saving Station" and the
new "Like Father Used to Take." The proprietor of the new saloon was the
old saloon-keeper's son-in-law, and these, with their flourishing and,
no doubt, amiable families, were socially gathered on the shady side of
the Life-Saving Station. The shade was much the same sort that is
furnished by trees in more favored localities, and the population of
Grub City was enjoying itself. The rival wives, mother and daughter,
ample, rosy women, were busy stitching baby clothes. Children already
arrived were playing with a soap-box and choice pebbles and a tin mug at
keeping saloon. A sunburned-haired, flaming maiden of sixteen was at
work upon a dress of white muslin, and a young man of eighteen, brother
by his looks to the younger saloon-keeper, heartily feasted a pair of
honest blue eyes upon her plump hands as they came and went with the
needle. It looked as if another year might see a third saloon in
Grub City.

Saterlee approached the group, some of whose elders had been watching
and discussing his approach.

"Do any of you own a boat?" he asked.

"Train D-railed?" queried the proprietor of the Life-Saving Station, "or
was you just out for a walk?"

The family and family-in-law laughed appreciatively.

"The train put to sea in a washout," said Saterlee, "and all the
passengers were drowned."

"Where you want to git?" asked the proprietor.

"Carcasonne," said Saterlee. "Not the junction--the resort."

"Well," said the proprietor, "there's just one horse and just one trap
in Grub City, and they ain't for hire."

Again the united families laughed appreciatively. It was evident that a
prophet is not always without honor in his own land.

"We've no use for them," said the great man, with the noble abandoning
gesture of a Spanish grandee about to present a horse to a man
travelling by canoe. And he added: "So they're for sale. Now what do you
think they'd be worth to you?"

All the honest blue eyes, and there were no other colors, widened upon
Saterlee.

"Fifty dollars," he said, as one accustomed to business.

It was then that a panting, female voice was raised behind him. "Sixty
dollars!"

His showy acquaintance of the dining-car had followed him along the ties
as fast as she could, and was just come up.

"I thought you two was a trust," commented the proprietor's wife,
pausing with her needle in the air. "But it seems you ain't even a
community of interests."

"Seventy dollars," said Saterlee quietly.

The lady advanced to his side, counting the change in her purse.

"Seventy-six dollars and eighty-five cents," she said.

"Eighty dollars," said Saterlee.

"Oh!" cried the lady, "seventy-six eighty-five is every cent I've got
with me--and you're no gentleman to bid higher."

"Eighty," repeated Saterlee.

"Eighty dollars," said the son-in-law, "for a horse and buggy that a
man's never seen is too good to be true."

"They are yours, sir," said the father-in-law, and he turned to his
daughter's husband. "Is that horse in your cellar or in mine?" he asked.
"I ain't set eyes on her since February."

The son-in-law, sent to fetch the horse, first paused at the cellar
door of the Life-Saving Station, then, with a shake of the head and an
"I remember _now_" expression, he approached and entered the subterrene
of his own house and business, and disappeared, saying: "Whoa, there!
Steady you!"

Saterlee turned quietly to the angry and tearful vision whom he had so
callously outbid.

"Ma'am," he said, "if we come to my stop first or thereabouts, the buggy
is yours to go on with. If we reach yours first, it's mine."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, her face brightening, "how good you are. But you'll
let me go halves on the purchase money."

"If I appeared rude just now," he said, "it was to save a lady's pocket.
Now then, you've wet them high-heeled shoes. Wherever you're going, it's
a long drive. Let's go inside and dry our feet while they're hitching
up. Which is your house?"

The proprietor of the Life-Saving Station indicated that building with
his thumb, and told his daughter of the white muslin dress to kindle a
fire in the stove. She slid her future wedding finery into a large paper
bag, and entered the saloon by the "Family Entrance," ardently followed
by her future husband.

The proprietor, Saterlee, and the showy lady followed more slowly,
discussing roads.

"Now," said Saterlee, "if you're going further than Carcasonne
Junction, I'll get off there. And either I'll walk to the hotel or hire
another trap."

"Why!" exclaimed the lady, "are you bound for Carcasonne House? So am
I."

"In that case," said Saterlee elegantly, "we'll go the whole hog
together."

"Quite so," said the lady primly.

"You'd ought to make Carcasonne House by midnight," said the proprietor.
"Put your feet up on that there stove."

"Heavens!" exclaimed the lady. "And if we don't make it by midnight?"

"We will by one or two o'clock."

The lady became very grave.

"Of course," she said, "it can't be helped. But it would be ever so much
nicer if we could get in before midnight."

"I take your point, Ma'am," said Saterlee. "Before midnight is
just a buggy ride--after midnight means being out all night
together. I feel for you, Ma'am, but I'm dinged if I see how
we can help ourselves. It's five now." He counted on his fingers:
"six--seven--eight--nine--ten--'leven--twelve--seven hours--seven into
forty--five and five-sevenths.... Ma'am," he said, "I can promise
nothing. It's all up to the horse."

"Of course," said the lady, "it doesn't really matter. But," and she
spoke a little bitterly, "several times in my life my actions and my
motives have been open to misconstruction, and they have been
misconstrued. I have suffered, sir, much."

"Well, Ma'am," said Saterlee, "my reputation as a married man and a
father of many children is mixed up in this, too. If we are in late--or
out late rather--and there's any talk--I guess I can quiet some of it. I
rather guess I can."

He rose to his feet, a vast, round, deep man, glowing with health and
energy.

"I once quieted a bull, Ma'am," said he, "by the horns. I would a held
him till help came if one of the horns hadn't come off, and he
ran away."

The proprietor entered the conversation with an insinuating wedge of a
voice.

"I don't like to mind other folks' business," he said, "but if the lady
is fretting about bein' out all night with a total stranger, I feel it
my dooty to remark that in Grub City there is a justice of the peace."
He bowed and made a gesture which either indicated his whole person, or
that smug and bulging portion of it to which the gesture was more
directly applied.

Saterlee and the lady did not look at each other and laugh. They were
painfully embarrassed.

"Nothing like a sound splice," suggested the Justice, still hopeful of
being helpful. "Failing that, you've a long row to hoe, and I suggest a
life saver for the gent and a nip o' the same for the lady. I'd like you
to see the bar," he added. "Mine is the show place of this here
city--mirrors--peacock feathers--Ariadne in the nood--cash register--and
everything hunky-dunk."

"We'll go you," said Saterlee. "At any rate, I will."

"Oh, I must see, too," said the lady, and both were relieved at the turn
which the conversation had taken.

The proprietor removed the cheese-cloth fly protector from the
two-by-three mirror over the bar, slipped a white jacket over his blue
shirt, and rubbed his hands together invitingly, as if washing them.

"What's your pleasure, gents?" said he.

As the lady approached the bar she stumbled. Saterlee caught her by the
elbow.

"That rail down there," he said, "ain't to trip over. It's to rest your
foot on. So." He showed her. With the first sign of humor that she had
shown, the lady suddenly and very capitally mimicked his attitude. And
in a tough voice (really an excellent piece of acting): "What's yours,
kid?" she said. And then blushed to the eyes, and was very much ashamed
of herself. But Saterlee and the bartender were delighted. They roared
with laughter.

"Next thing," said the bartender, "she'll pull a gun and shoot up the
place."

Saterlee said: "Rye."

"I want to be in it," said the lady. "Can you make me something that
looks like a drink, and isn't?"

"Scotch," said the proprietor without hesitation.

"No--no," she said, "Water and coloring matter."

She was fitted finally with a pony of water containing a few drops of
Spanish Red and an olive.

The three touched glasses and wished each other luck all around.
Saterlee paid eighty dollars and some change across the bar. But the
proprietor pushed back the change.

"The drinks," he said grandly, "was on the house."

III

The united families bade them farewell, and Saterlee brought down the
whip sharply upon the bony flank of the old horse which he had bought.
But not for a whole minute did the sensation caused by the whip appear
to travel to the ancient mare's brain. Not till reaching a deep puddle
did she seem suddenly aware of the fact that she had been whipped. Then,
however, she rushed through the puddle, covering Saterlee and the lady
with mud, and having reached the other side, fell once more into a
halting walk.

The lady was tightly wedged between Saterlee and the side of the buggy.
Every now and then Saterlee made a tremendous effort to make himself
narrower, but it was no use.

"If you begin to get numb," he said, "tell me, and I'll get out and walk
a spell.... How clear the air is! Seems as if you could stretch out your
hand and touch the mountains. Do you see that shadow half way up--on the
left--about three feet off? Carcasonne House is somewhere in that
shadow. And it's forty miles away."

Once more the road ran under a shallow of water. And once more the old
mare remembered that she had been whipped, and made a rush for it. Fresh
mud was added to that which had already dried upon them by the dry
miracle of the air.

"She'd ought to have been a motor-boat," said Saterlee, the mud which
had entered his mouth gritting unpleasantly between his teeth. "Last
year there was _one_ spring hole _somewhere_ in these parts--this year
it's all lakes and rivers--never was such rains before in the memory of
man. Wonder what Gila River's doing?"

"What is Gila River?" she asked.

"It's a sand gully," he said, "that winds down from the mountains, and
out across the plain, like a sure enough river. Only there's no water in
it, only a damp spot here and there. But I was thinking that maybe it'll
be going some now. We ought to strike it before dark."

The mare rushed through another puddle.

The lady laughed. "Please don't bother to hold her," she said; "I don't
mind--now."

"I guess your dress ain't really hurt," commented Saterlee. "I remember
my old woman--Anna--had a brown silk that got a mud bath, and came
through all right."

"This is an old rag, anyway," said the showy lady, who was still showy
in spite of a wart-like knot of dried mud on the end of her nose. And
she glanced at her spattered but graceful and expensive white linen and
hand-embroidered dress.

"Well, I can see one thing," said Saterlee, "that you've made up your
mind to go through this experience like a good sport. I wish I didn't
have to take up so much room."

"Never mind," she said, "I like to think that I could go to sleep
without danger of falling out."

"That's so--that's so," said Saterlee. "Maybe it's just as well we're
something of a tight fit."

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