Savage Bride

Chapter Eleven

The little narrow-gauge toy train, which had been threatening to expire for hours past during its laborious upward climb, finally gave up the ghost entirely with a single exhausted puff of steam, and this was the end of the line. The halt seemed to occur almost impromptu, in what was little better than a clearing with an open shed standing in the middle of it. Under the tin roof were numbers of bales. A few Indian women stood in the background, children strapped to their backs, looking on curiously. The rest was just close encroaching jungle wall.

Jones stood up and stepped down to the ground without further ado, the car being open on one side and the seats placed lengthwise, as in some old-fashioned summer trolley cars up north. He helped her down after him and they stood there a moment looking around them vaguely.

A man was already coming toward them with the leisurely certainty of someone who has only one train to meet and only one possible pair of passengers on that train to accost.

His skin was the regional saddle tan, but as he came into closer focus his cast of feature became more synonymous with the American origin the doctor had ascribed to him. He had on corduroy trousers and a flannel shirt, and a peculiarly shapeless felt hat that looked as though it had been endlessly waterlogged.

“Mr. Jones? I’m Mallory. Glad to see you.”

They pumped hands. There may not have been much to him, sartorially or otherwise, but Jones rather took to him at sight. He had a keenness and steadiness of eye, set deep within a perpetual and apparently ineradicable squint, that inspired confidence.

“This is my wife.”

Mallory tipped his mobile hat brim to her without elevating the crown part from his head.

To her he was obviously of less interest than their inanimate surroundings. She smiled parenthetically and went on looking absorbedly around her.

He turned his attention back to Jones again. He didn’t look like a man who felt particularly at ease with women, anyway. “Well, I guess we may as well get started. You both ride, don’t you?”

“Oh, isn’t this it here?”

Mallory smiled a little, good-naturedly. “Not anywhere near it. This is only a little better than halfway. This is still lowland country to us.” He led them over to one side, where there was a gap through the canopy of foliage. “You can see it from here.” The tilt of the ground was continually upward. “See where the line of vegetation stops, and that brown dryness starts in? That’s us. Right along the edge there.”

“Pretty far up,” Jones commented.

“Last cultivated patch out. After us, nothing.”

Jones was watching her covertly while Mallory talked to him. She was happy, he could see that. It was written all over her. Something about this whole thing pleased her. She was pleased with the scene around her, pleased with him (the way she twined herself about his arm showed that), pleased with everything. She was more like herself than she had been at any time since they’d left the boat. That was all that mattered.

He launched the thought on a sigh of doubt without noticing it himself.

Mallory whistled and a “boy” came forward bringing their horses. The designation was strictly occupational; he was probably older than either of the two men. Mallory introduced him one-sidely. “This is Pascual, from up at our place.” A flash of white teeth split Pascual’s face.

They mounted and set off single file, along a dirt track that was about the width of a single wheel rut. Pascual went first, to indicate the way, although this was hardly necessary so long as the closely knit foliage hemmed them in. Then came Mitty, then the two men considerably to the rear.

The two of them spoke in desultory snatches.

“Have many people come out to visit you like this?”

“Not often. There’s nothing to bring them here... Your wife’s, a good horsewoman.”

“Wish I could say the same for myself.”

“We’ll be able to make better time once we get up a little farther; it’s not so overgrown.”

Finally he asked Jones, “You down here on business?”

“My business is waiting for me up in Frisco. Was, I should say. We missed our ship down at Puerto, had to wait over for the next one.”

Mallory gave him a rueful look. “What do you think of Puerto?”

Jones expressively sliced his finger across his own neck.

Mallory nodded dourly, “I agree with you there. I can’t stand the place myself. Haven’t been down there in eighteen months now.”

Funny life for a white man, Jones reflected, looking him over. He wondered how long he’d been down here, but didn’t ask him.

And that was about the sum total of their conversational exchange during the entire three-hour ride.

They came into the enclosure or compound fronting the ranch house at a desultory trot, three abreast. It had grown dark some time before, but considerably later than it did down in Puerto Santo. An oxidized green glint still manifested itself along the lower reaches of the western sky, where the sun had last been, as though a powerful chemical agent had tarnished it over that way.

“We’re up higher, the evening sun stays with us longer,” Mallory mentioned.

Pascual dismounted and took charge of their horses as they followed his example.

Jones couldn’t get a very good idea of the place in the blue dusk that cloaked it. Before them he could make out a whitewashed building glimmering wanly at them, a wooden veranda running along the front of it, the green-yellow of oil lamplight peering from its open doorway and slitted window blinds. An Indian woman was making great to-do on the veranda steps, floundering about, dipping her head, and jabbering unintelligibly — evidently Mallory’s housekeeper welcoming them. Off to one side was a huddle of ramshackle structures, jacales or little lean-to huts of adobe, plaited bamboo, and even empty gasoline tins and packing cases, thatched with palm and banana fronds — evidently the workers’ quarters. Over to the other side of the main dwelling, forming the third arm of the quadrangle, was a long shedlike structure with a corrugated tin roof, part of which was used as a stable for the horses and the rest as a warehouse for storing the sacks of green coffee beans. Overhead the gorgeous mountainside stars seemed to hang low enough to touch, filling the sky like bursting white raisins.

“Come on in and find out the worst at once,” Mallory invited in that dry manner of his.

“My legs are dead up to the hips,” Jones admitted, stamping them on the ground to get them to work before he raised them to the veranda steps.

Mitty had already gone in at a little quick step, as though she owned the place, the Indian housekeeper ingratiatingly at her heels.

There was a large central room, entered directly from the veranda, which bisected the rambling, one-story structure. One wing, leading off this, was evidently Mallory’s own quarters.

“Your room is over on this side,” he said, leading them into the other wing. “We’re not very fancy up here. You understand how it is.” He opened a door to reveal a rather shadowy interior, plank-floored and timber-roofed and almost barren but for a decrepit mahogany bed and a truncated chest, topped by a twinkling oil lamp, which cast alternate rays and shafts of shadow around it like the spokes of a wheel.

“Come out when you get hungry,” Mallory said, and withdrew down the hall.

Jones looked around him, and then at her.

It was only slightly more primitive than the hotel, after all. She was taking deep breaths, as though she couldn’t get enough of the air, as though it were something pertaining to her that she had done without for a long time. Unconsciously, her head was even tilted back a little, to be able to draw upon it more freely.

He tried to turn the little wheel of the oil lamp, to bring it up higher. He turned it the wrong way first, and it nearly went out altogether. Then he corrected himself, and brightened it the way he wanted to. The spokes of shadow lessened and the rays widened. Her face came into view more clearly. Her eyes were liquidly vivacious; that lackluster quality that had clouded them so often down on the coast was gone. And her face itself wore that most infrequent of all its expressions, which he had so seldom seen on it before now: She was smiling.

“How’s this?” he said. “Better?”

“Better. Much better.”

He didn’t mean the oil lamp, and he could tell she didn’t either.

Maybe I took the curse out of it, he thought.