“And I am his servant, his secretary of war, Juan Ayala. It is with pleasure that we bring you the protection of the army. We shall maintain order and the sanctity of property rights!”
They marched into the cool dimness of the ’dobe. Outside, the men waited expectantly. There was no impatience. They understood the procedure. All in good time.
The three white men made known their names, saw that their visitors were seated. Dan Harder continued to clamp his knee between his huge hands. Vincent Shaffer ran his hands surreptitiously under the blanket to make sure that his precious brass shells were still there.
They betrayed him with a light rattle and the keen eyes of Juan Ayala sought his own. The hand came swiftly away and Shaffer fidgeted nervously.
“Señores,” proclaimed Ayala, “these are times filled with trouble. Because certain ragged bands of roving troops, claiming to be Federal soldiers, do not recognize the authority of Señor Huerta Hidalgo Martinez, we have skirmishes. Because of these skirmishes the irregular troops have turned bandits and have brought a reign of terror to the country.
“But our loyal men have brought safety. You should be grateful. I understand you have munitions of war here. There are cartridges, guns, pistols, even a machine gun. It is so?”
Shaffer flecked his pale lips with a pink tongue.
Robert Standish nodded expressionlessly.
“We have ammunition for our own protection,” he agreed.
Juan Ayala’s face fairly beamed.
“And now, since we are here,” he exclaimed, throwing out his arms in an inclusive gesture, “you have no further need for them!”
Huerta Hidalgo Martinez sat heavily, his face slumbering beneath massive inertia of the mind. Like the troops he, too, was familiar with the necessary preliminaries. Only his reddish-brown eyes flickered about the interior of the building. Those eyes still contained their burning loot hunger.
Robert Standish spoke swiftly in English to his two associates.
“You see what they’re driving at,” he said.
“Does he understand English?” chattered Shaffer.
Standish made a slight gesture with his palms.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll find out.”
Then, still speaking English, he raised his voice and spoke more slowly.
“I don’t like the looks of either of them. They are crooks, bandits of the lowest stamp. The men are murderers.”
Vincent Shaffer shivered, stretched forth a hand toward the rifle.
But neither the supreme dictator nor his secretary of war so much as batted an eyelash. Ayala turned inquiring eyes from one man to another.
“No,” said Standish, “he doesn’t understand English.”
“What if he had?” asked Shaffer.
“He’d have ordered our execution as traitors,” Standish said calmly.
Shaffer shivered into silence.
“And so, señores,” went on Ayala, “now that you have no use for your weapons and since our glorious army has such dire need, we know that your patriotism will be stirred and that you will make us a gift of them, taking in exchange our order upon the Mexican treasury.”
Shaffer groaned audibly.
Standish turned to his companions.
“What do you say, boys? After all, you’ve more at stake than I have — you’re younger. Shall we give in, or stick it out?”
Dan Harder answered the question, his knee still clasped between his huge hands.
“See ’em in hell first. You give the signal when to start things. Pick the leader. I’m goin’ to take this little bandbox apart an’ see what makes ’m tick.”
“No, no,” chattered Shaffer. “It would be folly. The men outside have their rifles ready to pour forth a volley through the door. There’s been some signal. I can see them from where I’m sitting.”
“Perhaps,” said Standish, “they’ll move on and leave us when they’ve stripped us clean. Oh, they’ll do that all right. One way is certain death. The other way we stand a chance. I don’t care much about life. I don’t care a bit about our possessions. What I do care about is the mine.”
There followed a silence. Then Standish spoke in Spanish.
“There is merit in what you say. You will give us a receipt, of course.”
The cunning face of Ayala lit with pleasure.
“Of course, señores,” he said, and barked a swift order.
Three men flung from their horses and came running into the room. The balance of the raiders sat upon their horses.
The gun was the first to be sent out. Then came the revolvers, and then Ayala himself jerked back the blanket. The men piled the cartridges upon the blanket and took blanket and all.
“You have other weapons concealed,” said Ayala, once he was assured the room was emptied of firearms.
It was too late then to change front, but Standish tried it.
“Only such weapons as may be scattered about and forgotten. Not more than two pistols in all. These would be trouble to find, and they would make no difference to your army. We must insist upon keeping those.”
“But,” purred Ayala, “the enemy might come. Then you would give them the other guns and that would be a big mistake.”
Vincent Shaffer answered the accusation, speaking in swift Spanish.
“Oh, but we would never, never give aid to the enemies of Huerta Hidalgo Martinez.”
Ayala’s dark, luminous eyes shifted to him with a mocking twinkle.
“Ah, but señor, you have already. But ten minutes before we rode up. He was an enemy fleeing for the pass on a horse. When our men surprised him he had in his belt shiny cartridges, which had not been worn long in the belt. They came fresh from a box!”
Shaffer drew a sleeve across his perspiring forehead.
“A spy. I thought so,” was Harder’s brief comment in English.
Once more Ayala barked a command.
The men darted to the corner, dug through the mud plaster, disclosed the secret hiding place, took out the machine gun, the extra case of pistols, the ammunition that had been stored against such an emergency as this.
“Spied again,” muttered Standish in soft English, as casually as though he had been commenting on the weather. “That cleans us out.”
Ayala wrote out a receipt in which he specified only a general quantity of munitions. He gave an order on the treasury of Mexico and passed the paper to the dictator.
The dictator touched the pencil with his blunt fingers. Ayala signed the name while the finger tip rested upon the pencil.
“Señores, it is done!
“And now how about our brave men? Surely you have provisions? You wish to welcome your deliverers. See, we have saved you from the dangers of the revolutionists! You are safe! Our men protect you. They must be fed!”
This time he did not wait for consent.
He barked an order to the men, and instantly every one was out of the saddle, scurrying about like so many leaves blown before an autumn wind, each helping himself. They scuttled into the cook-shack, through the bunk house, into the smelting room, through the little mill. Such things as they wanted they took.
Ayala looked about him with smiling eyes.
Huerta Hidalgo Martinez remained in stolid indifference of posture, but his burning eyes still retained their loot-hunger. Such mind as he possessed had been educated above the simple emotions of his followers. He knew that the mine was a thousand times more valuable than anything that was on the ground, ten thousand times more valuable than such loot as his men could secure. The mine, then, was the loot of the leader.
But his time was not yet. Like the men who had waited without, listening to the hum of voices within, patiently waiting for the preliminaries to get over with, the dictator sat heavily in the swivel chair, waiting for his smiling secretary of war to arrange the still further preliminaries that would give him the mine.