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The picture was appalling; and, adding to its awful impression, black clouds were at the moment rolling over the valley, and swathing the mountains in their opaque masses. The lightning jetted from peak to peak, followed by short claps of close and deafening thunder. "Bring up the atajo!" shouted Seguin, as he descended the ladder with his daughter.
"God of heaven! what can it mean?" cried he, with a choking voice; but, without waiting to answer himself, he lanced the flanks of his horse till the animal shot off like an arrow. The intervening ground was passed; and, flinging himself from the saddle, the cibolero rushed through the cactus-fence. The atajo soon after came up.
Come! to your horses! On with the atajo! I will keep my word with you at the pass. Mount! my brave fellows, mount!" The last speech was uttered in a tone of reconciliation; but it needed not that to quicken the movements of the hunters. They knew too well their own danger.
The mules, too, were rigged in a different manner, each having the regular alpareja, or pack-saddle, with the broad apishamores breeched upon its hips; while the spoils, no longer in loose, carelessly tied-up bundles, were made up into neat packs, as goods in regular transportation by an atajo. The two men who conducted them had altogether a changed appearance.
To this generation, barring a few officers who have served against the Indians on the plains and in the mountains, a pack-mule train would be as great a curiosity as the hairy mammoth. In the following particulars I have taken as a model the genuine Mexican pack-train or atajo, as it was called in their Spanish dialect, always used in the early days of the Santa Fe trade.
It was the track of the trapper's knife where he had wiped it! We entered the woods, and followed the Indian trail up stream. We hurried forward as fast as the atajo could be driven. A scramble of five miles brought us to the eastern end of the valley. Here the sierras impinged upon the river, forming a canon.
"No," muttered he to himself; "I will stay by the atajo. I will better enjoy the triumph. We shall all march up in line, and halt in front of the rancho. They will think I have some stranger with me, to whom belong the mules! When I announce them as my own they will fancy that I have turned Indian, and made a raid on the southern provinces, with my stout retainers. Ha! ha! ha!"
An hour after sunrise we overtook the atajo, near the base of the snow mountain. We halted in the mountain pass; and, after a short while spent in cooking and eating breakfast, continued our journey across the sierra. The road led through a dry ravine, into an open plain that stretched east and south beyond the reach of our vision. It was a desert.
These formed an atajo or pack-train, guided and driven by the two beardless men of the party, who seemed to understand mule driving as thoroughly as if they had been trained to the calling of the arriero; and perhaps so had they been. The other two took no trouble with the pack-animals, but rode on in front, conversing sans souci, and in a somewhat jocular vein.
They could have sustained the attack among the houses, but it would only have been until the return of the main tribe, when they knew that every life would be taken. To make a stand at the town would be madness, and was not thought of. In a moment we were in our saddles; and the atajo, strung out with the captives and provisions, was hurrying off toward the woods.
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