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diff --git a/old/40600-0.txt b/old/40600-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f30b4e2..0000000 --- a/old/40600-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13681 +0,0 @@ - OVER THE BORDER - - - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost -no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - - -Title: Over the Border - -Author: Herman Whitaker - -Release Date: August 27, 2012 [EBook #40600] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net. - - - - - - OVER THE BORDER - - - A NOVEL - - BY - - - HERMAN WHITAKER - - - AUTHOR OF “THE SETTLER,” “THE PLANTER,” “THE PROBATIONER,” Etc. - - - NEW YORK - GROSSET & DUNLAP - PUBLISHERS - - Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers - - - - - Books by HERMAN WHITAKER - - - OVER THE BORDER - THE PROBATIONER - THE SETTLER - THE PLANTER - THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA - CROSS TRAILS - - - HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK - Established 1817 - - - Over The Border - Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers - - - Printed in the United States of America - Published May, 1917 - - - - - TO - Jack London - IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP - - - - -[Illustration: GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS] - - - - -Contents - - - I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - II: OVER THE BORDER - III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - V: THE “HACIENDA OF THE TREES” - VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - VIII: “THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS” - IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - X: WANTED—A HUSBAND - XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT - XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT—IN SEVERAL WAYS - XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE—AND IS “DOGGED,” IN TURN, BY LEE - XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT— - XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY - XIX: A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES - XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - XXVIII: A “REQUISITION” - XXIX: TEMPTATION - XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - XXXI: “BRAINS WIN” - XXXII: TRAVAIL - XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - XXXIV: ---------------------? - XXXV: WHY? - XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—” - XXXVII: THE THREE—AGAIN - XXXVIII: FIRE - XXXIX: “VENGEANCE IS MINE” - XL: SLIVER “MAKES GOOD” - XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE” - XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - - - -I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - - -The Three had chosen their lair wisely. - -In the picturesque Spanish phrase, it “situated itself” midway of the -desert, the great Mexican desert that is more varied in its heated -monotony than a land of woods and fields and streams. Here it runs to -sparse grass land under upland _piñon_; there spreads over wide, clean -sands that reflect like burnished brass the intolerable glare of the -sun. Now it marches for leagues with the yuccas that fling crazed arms -and shrunken limbs like posturing dwarfs; again it is dotted with lonely -_mesas_, monolithic masses that raise orange and vermilion facades out -of a violet mirage. A magic land it is, made out of shattered rainbows, -girded with crimson-and-gold mountains that wear around their high -foreheads cooling bandages of snow; a land of deathless calms, cyclonic -storms, torrential rains, peopled only by the vultures that wheel -against the sky and the little golden dust-whorls which dance together -over its heated face. A country where dwells the very spirit of romance; -of which anything might be predicted and come to pass; therefore, as -before said, the very place for a lair. - -Secondly, the Three had shown a nice discrimination in the selection of -a site. Its capacities in the way of offense and defense would have -earned the instant commendation of a medieval baron, Mexican bandit, -revolutionist, or “movie” director in search of an ideal robber’s roost. -Years ago a Yankee “prospector” with more faith than sense and money -enough to have left prospecting severely alone, had kept a raft of -_peones_ busy for the better part of two years ripping the heart out of -a mountain-top in a feverish search for fabulous gold. Rumors that still -linger in Sonora _jacales_ tell that the _gringo_ worked under the -direction of the spirits—or a spiritualist, which may or may not be -quite the same. The results—to wit, a huge gap in the mountain and an -abandoned adobe powder house, now serving as a residence for the Three -Bad Men—seem to favor the rumor. Spirits were never good miners. But -that is neither here nor there, the Three concerning themselves only -with the natural fortifications they thus inherited. - -The adobe stood well back in a semicircular gap, protected on three -sides by the curving walls of the excavation. Behind them, the mountain -dropped almost a thousand feet sheer, and the level bench in front of -the house could only be gained by a narrow path that fell like a yellow -snake down the steep slopes into thick chaparral. From its edge one -overlooked the vast reaches of the central Sonora desert, an ashen sea -of sage and mimosa shored in by far mountains that loomed dusky purple -or stood out stark yellow as they happened to lie to the sun. Since the -Yankee went back on his “controls,” or they on him, a _sahuaro_ cactus -had raised its fluted barrel within the excavation, captaining a squad -of dwarf yuccas that poked grotesque arms in pathetic entreaty out of -the rubble. To these natural improvements the Three had added a -_ramada_, broad porch of poles and cornstalks, in the shade of which -they took their ease one hot nooning, two playing _pedro_ at a rough -wooden table while the third dozed and nodded with stool tilted back -against the adobe wall. - -It did not require more than a cursory glance to know the Three for -members of that sad colony which is doomed by its past to remain on the -wrong side of the Mexican border. Beginning with Sliver Smith, the -sleeper; his drowsy lids hid blue eyes that were hard as chips of agate -and exactly fitted his reckless face. Just now sleep had softened its -lines and brought a certain underlying good-nature. But for the mouth -and deep creases down each side of the nose, which bespoke passions -violent and unrestrained, one would have put him down now for that which -he had been—a cowman from the New Mexican ranges. - -The other two, however, really looked the “bad man.” “Bull” Perrin, the -biggest and eldest, might have been especially cast by nature for the -part. Big, burly, black-visaged, and heavy-jowled, excessive drinking -had dyed his face out of all relation to the creamy skin the gods had -given him. The hot brown eyes under straight bushy brows bespoke a -cyclonic temper. But though Bull conveyed the impression of an “ugly -customer” at first sight, a physiognomist would have picked Jake Evers, -his partner, as a far more dangerous man. The cold, bleak sparks of eyes -in his lean, lantern-jawed face scintillated with cunning. But for a -certain humor that lurked about the corners of his mouth, his face would -have been utterly repulsive. - -Yet after granting their “badness,” there was about them no taint of the -mean, rat-like wickedness of the city criminal. Their composite was of -strong impulses, misdirected forces gone to waste, of men cast by birth -in a wrong age. In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their -strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in -the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned -toad in the sand at Bull’s feet, as much as the lizard that coursed -swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper’s head; as much as the -_sahuaro_ and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold -glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that—horses and cattle not -being in question—they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter -of its best traditions. - -Looking at Bull and Jake as they sat at play, the former might be -likened to a grizzly; the latter to a tiger, alert, stealthy, cunning, -ferocious; qualities which sprang into evidence with startling -suddenness when a shrill burst of woman’s scolding presently disrupted -the heated silence. - -Apparently the noise issued from a white cloud that hid the doorway; but -as this settled and cleared away, a buxom slattern of a Mexican girl -stood revealed. While flicking out the last dust of flour from an empty -sack she bitterly reviled the Three. Though delivered in Spanish, the -substance of her complaint was international and goes easily into -English. - -“Flojos! Lazy ones! how shall one cook without flour? The coffee, too, -is gone—and the sugar. Of lard or grease there is not a smear for the -pan. You must go forth, to-day.” - -This was merely the text. While she enlarged thereon with copious -illustrations to prove their worthlessness as providers, the two men at -the table proceeded quietly with their play. It was the third that -finally interrupted the harangue with the irascibility of one aroused -from pleasant sleep. - -“Shut up, Dove!” - -In its literal sense the word stands for the most innocent of birds. But -she chose to take the opposite meaning of the sarcastic Spanish. - -“Si, señor! I am that or I should not be here now, cooking for three -beasts.” After a comparison between them and the lower animals that -greatly favored the latter, she ran on with increasing heat: - -“‘Dove,’ indeed? Then where is my price? Where are they, the fine -clothes, the silks and satins and linen, the jewelry and laces you were -to gain for me? Was it by this I was bought?” She held out her dirty -black skirt. “I, that might be now sitting in the cantina of Ignacio -Flores at Las Bocas, selling aguardiente and anisette to his custom? Si, -señores, _where are they_, the velvets, ribands, and neck chains? I—” - -It was at this point that Jake displayed his quality. Swinging swiftly -around, he threw his knife, so hard and quickly that it stuck quivering -in the door lintel close to the girl’s throat before she had time to -close her mouth. - -“Here! don’t be so careless.” Bull’s bushy brows drew down over his -burning eyes in quick reproof. But his next remark proved that the -interference was not based on altruism. “If you croak her, who’s to do -the cooking? Any corn left, Rosa?” - -Whereas Sliver’s rude interruption had merely stimulated her tongue; -whereas, also, she had stuck out that member at Jake the instant she -made sure the knife had missed, she now caught her breath with a little, -frightened gulp. “Si, señor.” - -“Then make some tortillas and serve them along with the jerky,” he -called after her. “And bring us out a drink.” - -At this Sliver, who had resumed his doze, sat up again. His lugubrious -exclamation, “Oh, _hell_!” caused the others to look up a moment later. -With an empty demijohn held upside down Rosa stood in the doorway. She -did not speak. But her tragic pose, vindictive nod, said quite plainly, -“Now will you go?” - -Neither did they speak. The situation was beyond revilings. Slowly Jake -picked up and pocketed the cards. Sliver rose to his feet. In single -file they marched down the path to find their horses. Indeed, they had -caught the animals, saddled up at the stable on the flat below and were -riding away through the chaparral before they recovered sufficiently to -attempt to fix the blame for the shortage. - -Sliver—who, by the way, had gained his nickname under the law of -opposites because he was short and stout—remembered that he had warned -them several times “notter hit it so hard.” But his testimony lost force -by reason of certain “lone drinks” in the absorption of which he had, by -the others, been caught. Jake, on the other hand, had pleaded for more -liquor and less flour the last time they stocked up at Las Bocas. By -frank confession, moreover, he reduced the force of Sliver’s charge that -he would never be satisfied with less liquor than “he ked swim in.” - -“That’s right. I never really seen at one time more whisky than I felt I -c’d drink.” - -From this he went on with invectives against the wave of reform which, -by its sudden flooding of the “Territ’ries”—as he still called the -States of Arizona and New Mexico—might be held indirectly responsible -for his present thirst. “For a cowman, like Sliver here, it don’t matter -so much, him being used to dry spells out on the range. But for a man -that’s dealt faro in a s’loon for a spell of years with two fingers of -bourbon allus under his nose, it comes some bitter. Them was the golden -days. What a man made in beef cattle or gold was his’n to plank down on -a bar or place on a card. Till them pinch-faces from the Middle West -descended like locusts upon the lan’, drought was unknown save by a few -fool prospectors that got themselves lost in the desert. Locusts? I -wrong ’em! A locust does live up to its natural instincts. Locusts is a -blessing compared to pinch-faces. Why—” But certain lengthy reflections -that established the place of the “Middle-Wester” beneath even the lowly -bedbug in the scale of creation, must give place to his conclusion. “Si, -señores! ’twas them druv’ me to rustling. But for them I’d still be -living honest, dealing straight faro to all comers with on’y an -occasional turn from the bottom of the box for the good of the house.” - -“Pity for you!” - -Bull’s pithy comment was enlarged upon by Sliver. - -“An’ you-all needn’t to be howling so loud, either, about them dry -spells on the ranges. We allus had it in the bunk-houses an’ ’twas a -poor cook that couldn’t hide a keg in the chuck-wagon. As for your -faro—’twas to play the odd card you wolves dealt from the bottom that I -med my first rustle. But for you I’d be taking my copa right now out of -the cook’s keg instead of dying of thirst in this lousy desert.” - -There was real heat in the accusation, but the ex-gambler’s lean, -leathery face merely split in a dry grin. - -“If your mother bred you a fool, don’t blame me. The flea bit the dog, -the dog bit me; I kicked the dog an’ killed the flea. Take a drink of -water, Sliver; it all works out in the end. You next, Bull. Which was -it—water, wine, or weemen?” - -“None of ’em.” The big rustler shook his head. “Early piety did for me. -Prayers morning, noon, an’ night; grace before meals; two long sermons -on Sundays, an’ two hours, Sabbath-school, and what would you expect? I -was so well brought up I jest had to go wrong. But if we don’t jog along -we won’t make Las Bocas to-night.” - -As Bull spurred on ahead, Sliver looked at Jake. “Say, he ain’t exactly -what you-all ’d call frank in his conversings. If there’s a thing he -don’t know about us—well, ’tain’t our fault. But him? When you come to -think of it did you ever hear him say how he kem to take up rustling?” - -The gambler shook his head. “In a gen’ral way—so gen’ral that I couldn’t -tell jest how I got it—I’ve sorter gathered that he once croaked a man. -But whether ’twas before or after he took up the profesh I couldn’t say. -In the natural order of things, a rustler’s bound, sooner or later, to -down some prying fool. There’s so many that try to mix in his business. -But if it was before, Bull done it—I’ll bet you the gent had it coming.” - - - - -II: OVER THE BORDER - - -That night the Three put up at the _cantina_ in the little adobe town of -Las Bocas, where, by reason of occasional largesses to the leader of the -revolutionary faction that happened to be on top, a welcome was always -certain. Just now it was more particularly so because the present -_jefe-politico_, a Carranzista, varied his political activities by -acting as “fence” in the disposal of their plunder. - -In accordance with his advice, the following afternoon found them -approaching the American border at a point far west of their usual -sphere of operations. While they journeyed the sun slid down its western -slant till it hung like a smoky lamp in the far dust of the desert. -Behind them the sea of sage still ran off to distant mountains, but the -sunset glow washed its dust away, draping the land in a royal robe. -Ahead the grade was rising imperceptibly but steadily to a sparse grass -country where the sage, _palo verde_, and yucca gave place to huge -_sahuaros_ that strewed the plain with their fluted barrels like the -jade columns of some vast ruin. Among them roamed the flocks and herds -of a pink-walled _hacienda_ that nestled in a grove of lordly -cottonwoods. As they rode past, the Three noted with appraising glances -the sleek hides of a fine bunch of steers. - -“Dress a thousand pounds of beef apiece,” Jake opined. - -“Worth eighty pesos, gold, on the hoof, in El Paso,” Sliver yearningly -added. - -But their interest went no further—for reasons that appeared when, at -sundown, they rode past the concrete pillar that marked the -international boundary. Rustler that he was, drunkard and gambler, -utterly worthless if the reports current on the New Mexican ranges were -to be believed, Sliver’s eye nevertheless lit up at the sight of it; the -glow on his hard face was not all sunset reflection. - -“The good old U.S.,” he commented. “_Some_ country!” - -“He wasn’t talking that way las’ time we crossed.” Jake winked at Bull. - -“Guess not. He was cussing Cristobel Columbo for ever having discovered -it.” - -“That’s right,” Sliver admitted. “But I was what you-all might call in a -bit of a hurry with a squad of rangers streaking at my heels. Other -things being ekal—” - -“Which they ain’t,” Jake interrupted. “Mexico’s good enough for me. -Mexico an’ revolution! For I tell you right now that if Porfirio Diaz -was still boss, his rurales would have taken right holt where the -rangers left off. Instead of dangling from a pine on the American side, -we’d hev’ finished with a fusillado on this. But with the government -switching every five minutes between Orozco, Villa, Huerta, Carranza, -an’ the jefe-politicos an’ governors slaughtering each other -between-whiles, it’s nobody’s business to look after us. We make our -little sneaks across the border an’ return in peace an’ quiet. So ‘Viva -la revolucion!’ That reminds me—where’re you heading, Bull?” - -“Livingstone _rancho_ on the Little Stoney.” - -“Say, but that’s horses! Don’t they run ’em into the corrals at night?” - -The big rustler nodded. “All the easier to find, an’ after you once get -them moving it don’t take three days to run ’em over the line. Besides, -Don Manuel tol’ me at Las Bocas yesterday that the Carranzistas are -needing heavy horses for their artillery over on the Coast. He’ll pay -fifty pesos apiece an’ take his chance on a five-thousand-per-cent -profit after the old gentleman grabs the presidential chair.” He -emphatically concluded, “_Horses_, you bet!” - -“Some risky, cutting ’em out?” Sliver, too, looked dubious. - -“Not as much as you think. Did you never have some flea-bitten son of a -gun rub down the bars while you slept plumb up against the corral an’ -wake next morning to find nary a head in sight? A horse don’t like a -corral any more’n a man loves prison. The bars once down, you kin trust -’em to soft-foot it out to the open. Why”—his grin at the remembrance -set a flash of good-nature in his hard face—“why, I’ve seen an old nag -look back at a colt that kicked the bars passing out just like he was -saying, ‘You damn young fool! now you’ve upset the soup!’ Leave it to -me. I’ll work ’em out on foot while you sit tight an’ hold my horse. -Moon’s going to be jest about right, too. She’ll be taking her first -peep about the time we get ’em out in the clear. It’ll be a pipe, then, -to saddle up fresh beasts an’ shoot ’em over the border.” - - -The _rancho_ for which they were heading lay still two hours away, and -while they rode the _sahuaro_ pillars gave place in turn to _piñon_ and -juniper thinly strewn over rolling grassland. Before night settled down, -the wandering cattle-trails they had followed drew into the twin ruts of -a wagon-road. Their going was timed by the moon. But it stole out from -behind a low hill a trifle ahead of schedule. By its first dim radiance -they made out the dark mass of the _rancho_ buildings, house, corrals, -stables, in a swale between two hills. It was, however, dark enough for -their purpose, and, leaving his horse with the others, Bull went forward -on foot. - -It was nervous work, sitting there watching the buildings take form -under the waxing moon. Their strained senses took every sound, smell, -and sight; a dog’s bark, click of horns as a steer scratched his -forehead on the top rail of a corral, the impatient pawing of a horse, -the warm cattle odor that floated on the night breeze. Dim, uncertain -shapes seemed to form and fade in the nearer gloom. They were nervous as -cats by the time a gun suddenly flashed under the dark porch of the -house. - -The croupy cough of a child plus the nervous fears of its mother did it. -Not that the woman saw Bull when she drew the curtain and peeped out. -But these days, with a new revolution breaking, as Jake put it, “every -five minutes” over the border, the American ranchers along the -international line slept always with an eye open for possible raids. So -far as Bull was concerned, her whisper was just as fatal as though she -had seen him. - -“Pa! get up! I’m sure there’s some one out there!” - -Perhaps the rancher did see. Educated in objects moving through dusk, -his plainsman’s eye may have noticed movement. Or perhaps he shot on -chance. In either case he was quickly informed by the roar and clatter -of hoofs that followed, for though Bull did not expect, now, to get away -with a single head, pursuit would be blinded and divided by stampeding -the beasts. Dropping the bars while the gun continued to flash its -staccato warnings, he started the animals out, leaped on the back of -one; as soon as it cleared the huddle, went shooting down the trail, -guiding the animal with the swing of his body. - -Unfortunately, the whim that governs a stampede moved the other beasts -to follow. So when the rancher and his men—in shirts and trousers, but -not one without a gun—pulled their mounts out of the stables, their -pursuit was guided by the distant thunder of hoofs. Neither did Bull’s -quick change to his own beast divert the stampede. When the Three -galloped on, the scared animals still followed like dogs at their heels. - -“First time my prey ever chased me!” Jake laughed harshly, looking back -at the band. “If old man Livingstone don’t follow too close we’ll get -’em yet!” - -Bull shook his head. “Not with the moon sailing up to her full an’ the -critters leaving a trail broad as a pike road. Listen to that!” - -A sharp report punctuated the thud and clatter of the stampede; the -first shot of a fusillade that grew hotter and hotter as the horses -trailed off right and left, leaving the rustlers more exposed. As yet -they were running in the shadow of a long hill where the light was poor. -But half a mile ahead lay an open plain unbroken by cover. - -“They’ll shoot the lights outen us there!” Sliver prophesied. “Better -make a stan’ while we can.” - -“They _are_ getting sassy,” Jake agreed, as a bullet whizzed under his -chin. “We’ll have to teach ’em this ain’t no turkey-shoot.” - -The deciding word came, as usual, from Bull. “They’d surround an’ hold -us for the posse. You ride on while I check ’em. If they try to round me -it’ll be up to you to take ’em from the rear. Get behind so’s they don’t -see me turn.” - -In the faint light his sudden whirl behind a bush went unnoticed. He had -already unshipped his rifle from the saddle slings, and through the -upper branches he took careful aim. A hundred yards away Livingstone was -coming at full gallop, about the same distance ahead of his men. Bull -waited till he could see the old fellow’s hair, silver in the moonlight, -framing his angry red face. Once the sights lined up level between the -eyes. But muttering, “I ked sure spoil your beauty, but—I won’t,” Bull -lowered them to the horse’s chest and fired. - -With the report the beast plunged forward, head and neck doubled under, -throwing his rider out in the clear. Though badly shaken, the old man -was up the next instant, and as he ran for cover his sudden change of -expression from anger to flustered surprise drew from Bull a grin. - -“Teach you not to get so fresh.” - -At the crack of the rifle the others had also darted for cover, and as -their guns began to spit and flash from the chaparral along the -hillside, Bull laughed outright. “Not a rifle among ’em. Easy going! -Hasta luego, señores! Some other time!” - -One or two bolder spirits emerged from the chaparral as Bull rode out in -the open. But they scuttled back like rabbits as he swung in the saddle -with leveled rifle. Though they followed till the boundary pillar stood -out, two hours later, a shining silver shaft under the brilliant moon, -they preserved always a safe distance, and Bull denied Sliver’s -suggestion to “chuck a volley” into the dim mass. - -“Kain’t you leave your Uncle Samuel sleep? He ain’t a-going to be moved -off his ‘watchful waiting’ by the loss of no horse, but if we go to -killing folks, he’s sure going to take time to catch our goat b’twixt -revolutions.” - -“To-morrow morning,” Jake commented, grinning, “the morning papers will -be running scareheads an inch high about the ‘Latest Border Outrage!’ -Meanwhile we’ll be jogging home—” - -“—without the horses,” Bull dryly finished. - -“An’ Rosa, back at the roost,” Sliver added, “howling for coffee an’ -flour an’ grease.” - -Which reminded Jake of their former argument: “I told you we orter ha’ -bought more whisky. Nothing left but to ride back to Las Bocas an’ hit -Don Miguel for credit.” - - - - -III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - - -Las Bocas was slowly stewing in its native filth when the Three sighted -it again at noon next day. - -In all the world nothing reflects its environment more faithfully than a -Mexican town. Southward, the great cities of Mexico and Guadalajara -testify with their stately cathedrals, ornate public buildings, -theaters, parks, and plazas, the flowering _patios_ of lovely and -luxurious homes, first to the richness of the central Mexican plateau, -secondly to the fact that in normal times all the wealth of the republic -drains to them. Oppositely, the northern towns with their squalid adobe -streets, overrun with a plague of dirty children, dogs, vultures, pigs; -desiccated by fierce heat, drowned by torrential rains; these in their -place and turn are eminently characteristic of the arid desert. Save -that it was a little smaller, a little dirtier, perhaps a little richer -in the variety of its stenches, Las Bocas might serve as the type of all -Mexican frontier towns. - -As the wind blew their way, the Three smelled it from afar. But usage -breeds indifference even to evil odors. If not actually homesome, the -fetor bespoke a possible drink. - -A quarter mile before entering the town they crossed the _arroyo_ that -gave it drink. Its waters also furnished an open-air laundry for two -brown girls who knelt by its edge, pounding their soiled linen on flat -boulders. These days of rampant revolution, a good girl had needs be -careful, and at sight of the Three, dusty, unkempt, bearded, and gaunt -from tire and travel, _gringos_ at that, the two leaped up and fled -toward the town. - -Grinning at their fright, Bull and Sliver would have ridden on, but -Jake, who never missed a trick, reined in his beast and began to examine -the laundry with the eye of a connoisseur. Though the remainder of her -be clad in rags, the humblest _peona_ will have her lace petticoat, and -the dozen or so pieces that were already spread out to dry on the -neighboring bushes were really very fine. - -“D’you allow to turn lady’s maid?” Sliver spoke, as Jake bent to stuff -the lingerie into his saddle-bags. - -“Not till Rosa’s had the refusal of it. This orter keep her satisfied -for at least a month.” - -Grinning, the pair of rascals spurred their jaded beasts and overtook -Bull as he entered a narrow gut of a street that followed the -meanderings of the original cow-path to the _jefe’s_ house, a plastered -adobe, limewashed in purple and gold, that faced the inevitable military -barracks across a sorry attempt at a plaza. - -If the small traders and artisans who constituted the bulk of the -population had been addicted to such flights of imagination, they might -have pictured the _jefatura’s_ yawning gates as a huge gullet through -which, in normal times, their substance drained in taxes, fines, and -imposts to Mexico City, the nation’s stomach, there to be consumed by a -hungry tribe of official hookworms. Now, of course, it was being -deflected into the private pocket of the dominant revolutionary chief. -Lacking the imagination, they cursed beneath their breath and waited -patiently till the next revolution should bring a new tyrant to avenge -them on the present oppressor. - -The latest incumbent was at lunch under the peppertree in the _patio_ -when the Three dismounted at the gates. Fat and sleek and brown, his -generally gross appearance was accentuated by pouched beady eyes, waxed -mustache, unhealthy, erupted skin. As he sat there, shoveling in -_frijoles_ and _chile_, even a _peon’s_ slack imaginings could have -easily established a resemblance—if not between him and a hookworm, at -least, to some greedy parasite. The irritability, blind individualism, -offensive conceit, treachery, too common to Mexicans, lay hidden under -the usual veneer of Spanish courtesy. The embraces, backpattings, -effusive greetings with which he welcomed the Three would have graced -the reception of a favorite son. - -“Enter, amigos!” His welcome buzzed through the _patio_. “Sit down and -eat. Afterward we shall look over the horses. You have bestowed -them—where?” - -But when he learned of their failure, the scorpion showed through the -glaze of courtesy like a fly in amber. “_Carambar-r-r-aa_, señores!” His -read wagged in a nasty way. “I had counted on the horses—to save your -alive. On my desk lies a requisition from your gringo border police, -demanding your bodies. Que desgracia!” The spite that scintillated in -his beads of eyes gave his words sinister significance. “One would -dislike to do it, if ’twere only through hate of your Government. But -one has to account to his chiefs. Already they have inquired for you, -and always I made answer, ‘These are good hombres, useful to our cause.’ -But deeds count more than words. Horses for their artilleria would have -proved your worth. But now—” a second nasty wag told that their failure -left them as other _gringos_, to be despised, hated, persecuted. Having -given the impression time to sink in, he suggested, “But there must be -others? You will try again?” - -“No use.” Bull’s gloom emphasized the denial. “This is the second time -in a month that we’ve been chased across the border. They’re looking for -us all along the line.” - -“Si? Then must you go elsewhere. What of”—pausing, he looked cautiously -around—“what of this side? In central Chihuahua there are many -horse-ranchos, gringo ranches with fine blooded stock.” - -“But—” - -The _jefe’s_ shrug anticipated the objection. “Si, si! ’tis Mexico. That -is what I have always told my chief—‘these hombres bother only the -gringo pigs.’” With a covert grin at the safe insult, he continued, “But -a gringo is a gringo, whether here or in your United States. If they be -despoiled, we shall not shed many tears. There will be a complaint, of -course, to and from your Government, and much writing between -departments. In the mean time we have the horses. So—” - -“But that’s Valles’s country, isn’t it?” Jake put in. “He’s a bad hombre -to fool with!” - -The _jefe_ turned on him his evil grin. “What if the gringo ranchers had -caught you last night? Hanging, amigo, is a dog’s death. I would prefer -the fusilado of Valles’s men.” - -“What if he kicks to your people? Puts in a claim for our heads? You’re -working together, ain’t you?” - -Once again the _jefe_ looked around. “Listen, amigos! Between friends -one may show the truth. Already there is a cloud, a little cloud, no -bigger than a child’s hand arisen between us and Valles. If the horses -are taken from a gringo _rancho_ in Valles’s country, my chiefs will be -the better pleased. What they have Valles cannot get in the days when -the cloud grows big and black and bursts.” - -Sliver, who understood more Spanish than he could speak, here nudged -Bull. “Ask him if he’ll grub-stake the deal.” - -“Ask nothing!” Bull’s hot eyes shot brown fire. “You heard him rubbing -it into us, didn’t you? If it wasn’t that we need him I’d wring the -little brown adder’s neck.” He went on, suavely, in Spanish, “My amigo -questions me of the price. It will be the same—fifty pesos apiece, -señor?” - -Nodding, the _jefe_ glanced impatiently back at his lunch. He appeared -to have forgotten his invitation. Pleading an engagement, he bowed them -out through the gates, then returned to his gorging while, hungrier, and -even still thirstier, the Three rode down the street. - -Usually they were not averse to an exchange of glances, or a -flirtation—if the _hombre_ was not in sight—with the brown girls who -watched them from their doorways. But now their glances sought only the -_cantinas_, whose open bars displayed a tempting array of bottles. While -they looked their progress grew constantly slower, finally stopped in -front of one whose owner was taking his _siesta_ stretched out on the -bar. - -Jake looked from the sleeper to his companions, then at the bottles of -anisette and _tequila_ on the rough wooden shelves. “If he was drunk it -’u’d be easy—” As the Mexican disposed of the doubt, just then, by -opening one excessively sober eye, Jake desperately concluded, “Say, -kain’t we raise the price among us?” - -Bull tapped his empty pockets. - -Sliver mourned, “All I’ve got is a Confederate five some one slipped me -during my last toot in El Paso. I’ve carried it sence for a lucky -piece.” - -“An’ lucky it is!” Jake extended an eager hand. “After this -revolutionary currency that’s run off by the million on a newspaper -press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got -Jeff Davis’s picter on it? This fellow don’t know him from Abe Lincoln. -All gringo bills look alike to him. He’ll never know the diff.” - -Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the -bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two _pesos_ and some -_centavos_, along with three stiff _copas_. Deceived by the size of the -roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the _tienda_ behind the bar -coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa’s desire, and other -necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of _tequila_, it made a goodly -pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson -in finance—to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating -the _tequila_ from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and -shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some _centavos_ aforesaid -represented the value of either. - -From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the _tequila_; -then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck -of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver -happened to catch the merchant’s eye. - -He grinned, answering Sliver’s wink. “Si, señores, this time you shall -drink with me.” - -That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting -out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began -to throw two kings and an ace in the “three-card trick.” So deftly he -did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a -dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed -the Mexican’s interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the -flying cards. - -“Looks easy, don’t it?” Bull suggested. “Here, Sliver, give this hombre -a chance.” - -Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on -to try again. He could do it! He’d bet his _sombrero_, his horse, his -store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no -other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on -the counter, against their bottles of _tequila_—and lost! In the course -of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings, -there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original -thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, a bolt of lace and linen for -Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged -them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost -his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable -interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three -packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way. - -As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine. -Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, the -_comerciante_ would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so -his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser—perhaps because -she has usually no hand in the game—and as the Three rode off she let -loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner. - -“It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art -lost in a siesta!” she assailed him. “After them, lazy one, and recover -our goods!” - -By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was -quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two -girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street -and added their outcries to the woman’s clamor. And now the Three were -surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme -had been making sheep’s eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the -saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor. - -“They stole thy—” Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural indignation -increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up the street -and overtook the Three. - -Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish -punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his -discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull’s -bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the -man’s angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was -up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake’s bleak -eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull’s rifle was -aimed from the hip. - -To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If -one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a -company can—or a regiment. The man’s shrill whistle was really far more -dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the -next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally -brought from the _carcel_ a squad on the run. - -By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with -rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human -kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was -gone. Jake’s long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver’s reckless -face had frozen in stone. Bull’s head and huge shoulders rose above his -breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as -trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers -brought an officer and company from the barracks. - -Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican -comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery -set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of -Porfirio Diaz’s famed _rurales_, the blue and red stripes or fatigue -linen of the Federal Army, even the _charro_ suits of Orozco’s -Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men -were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown -faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy -would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the -officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled -rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this -fundamental truth—whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not -worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull. - -“Did I not see you, señor, at the jefatura just now?” - -With Bull’s nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on the -_comerciante_ and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint. -“They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in -carcel.” - -Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the -merchant’s back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. “How know -ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed -while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be -friends of the jefe and no stealers of women’s fripperies.” - -Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away. - -Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way—to the -_cantina_ where they usually put up. - -“All we’ve gotter do now,” Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the -street, “is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an’ Rosa’ll -be fixed for a month.” - -But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten, -followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural -“thirsts” turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course -they spent first the thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, drank up -their own _tequila_, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more -liquor for the rabble of _peones_ and brown girls that flocked to the -_cantina_ like buzzards to carrion. - -The “drunk” went through the customary stages from boisterous -conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times -Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at -each other’s throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse, -because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the -other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad -shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary -throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past -tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep. - -As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was -nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a -likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside; -unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their -natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at -that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, _sans_ -groceries, _sans tequila_, _sans_ money, but plus three splitting -headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor. - -“Tough on Rosa,” Jake said, with a rueful grin. - -“If she’s still there,” Sliver doubted. “An’ I’ll bet a peppercorn to a -toothpick she ain’t.” - -“Chihuahua, now, or starve,” Bull succinctly summed the situation. He -added, grinning, “Anyway, we’ll travel light.” - - - - -IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - - -Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the -first and greatest of the Chihuahua _haciendas_. - -Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of -the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled -on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train, -then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles -away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested -in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs -were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first -revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern -overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers, -artisans, _peones_, drew by his grace the very breath of life. - -“Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that.” - -Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining -distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped _mesas_ uplifted -their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away, -one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a -mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of -the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn -over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched -windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; -burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little -winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of -distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary -reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so -very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the -blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post. - -“Vultures,” Sliver pointed. “Must be something dead over there.” - -“Or dying?” Bull questioned. “Otherwise the birds ’u’d settle. These -days it’s as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way.” - -And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of -encircling cactus into an open space around a giant _sahuaro_. Head -fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, -limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full -stretch of his arms around the _sahuaro’s_ barrel. During the sixty -hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till -it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to -the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot -sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus. -Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow -roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the -approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling -the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings. - -“He’s white! a gringo!” Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords. - -“The poor devil!” Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, -limp body on his outspread coat. - -While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on -the man’s swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the -wrists and cut away the cords. - -If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered -through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have -noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would -probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too -weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the -point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself. - -He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from -the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His -house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings -up there. If he could only get to it, he’d be all right. - -And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and -cradled like a child in the rustler’s great arms, he scarcely felt the -journey. Viewed as he hung on the _sahuaro_, dirty, bruised, shrunken by -fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, -washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky -and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical -American miner of middle age—short gray beard, hawk profile, high -cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked -for themselves—for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too -late to go on—he had recovered his voice and told them all. - -“It was the ‘Colorados’ that tied me up. I knew them by the ‘red hearts’ -on the breasts of their charro jackets.” - -Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the -terror associated with the name. Originally the “Colorados” had been -Orozco’s soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution -against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern -Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by -the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter -power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids. - -“But I was lucky to get off with that,” he said, after describing the -beating that had preceded the tying-up. “They cut the soles off the feet -of two of my _peones_, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky -chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death -where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn’t been -that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I’d -have got the same. They left me to raid some _rancho_, but swore they’d -come back.” - -Riding in, they had passed the dead _peones_, and, bad man that he was, -Jake shuddered at the memory. “But why do you stay here, with that kind -of people running loose?” - -“Why do I stay?” The miner repeated the question, with heat. “The -American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man -stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties -that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had -been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, -and I’d worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to -come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose. - -“At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our -rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out—we that had invested -a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million -dollars’ worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it -all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned! - -“Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But -most of the others had. We’d thought, of course, that the mistreatment -of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans -till the thing had been done again and again. Since then—know what that -Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our -Government?” - -“‘Your Government!’ he sneered. ‘We have killed your men, we have -ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me -what else we can do to make your Government fight?’” - -He concluded, with bitter sadness, “I was brought up to love and revere -the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it -floated. But, men! I’ve seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled -by filthy _peones_, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of -Americans who believed in its power to save.” - -In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered -principally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the -central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the -Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief. - -“It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light,” Jake agreed. “He don’t -seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to -Mexico City.” - -Bull’s big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of -tobacco smoke. “Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put -the Apaches outer the scalping business an’ got through spanking Johnny -Reb.” - -Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. “Jest wait! D’you-all -know what’s going to happen one o’ these days? That same Uncle Sam, he’s -mighty patient an’ he’s been handed a heap o’ bad counsel; but one of -these days he’s a-going to get mad. When he does—listen! he’s a-going to -walk down to the Mexican line an’ take a look at it with his nose all -crinkled up like he smelled something bad. ‘Things ain’t quite right -here!’ he’ll say, ca’m an’ deliberate, that-a-way. Then he’ll stoop an’ -pick up that line, an’ when he sots it down again—it ’ull be south of -Panama. Jest you-all wait an’ see!” - -“‘Wait? Wait?’” the miner sarcastically repeated. “Seems as though I’d -heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me—one thing I know. Unless -your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there’ll be darned few -of us gringos left to see.” - -“Why not watch from the other side?” - -“Watch hell!” The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that, -despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and -indignation over his fellows’ wrongs, that despite all the indomitable -American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquest -of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California -to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from -disintegration, the fine old spirit of ’76, still burned under all. -“Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed -protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we’re going to stay! -To-morrow I’ll get together my _peones_ and go right to it again; -only”—he observed a significant pause—“the next time the Colorados come -there’ll be a machine-gun trained on ’em from up here on the bench. All -I ask is that the Lord sends me the same bunch again.” - -In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about, -the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the -gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a -solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he -passed out of their lives—in person, but not in other ways. His was one -of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life -and, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing -had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull, -at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the -sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the -pommel as they rode along. - -“I was thinking of what that fellow said las’ night,” he replied to -Jake’s questioning look. “To think, after that, we’re out to rob our own -countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser.” - -“That’s so.” Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed -alacrity. “Damned if I seen it that way afore.” - -But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a -sudden injection of rustler’s sense. “Aw, come off! You fellows may be -out for Mexicans, but I’m for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the -other side of the line, an’ what’s wrong with robbing them on this? I -kain’t see the diff. Business is business; we’ve gotter eat.” - -“That’s right, too.” Sliver caught the sense of it. “We’ve sure gotter -eat.” - -But Bull’s face grew blacker. The Colorado’s boast, “We’ve raped your -women, exterminated your brats,” had aroused in him instincts older than -the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling -hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind -at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the -entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal -women. - -He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become -a prey of _peon_ bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his -black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered -with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in -the defense of a common cause. And yet— - -Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their -evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan. - - -About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican -Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As -they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into -the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east -to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and -ruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes. - -Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of -twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated -carcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of -their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond -their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, and -crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the -_Nacional_ railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of -the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown. -Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge -wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the -evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it -to save the station. - -While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle -sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen, -whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling like -a dusty brown blanket over the desert. - -As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in -surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some -thousand _peon_ soldiers, part of Valles’s army on its way south to -pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction. -Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were -loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of -box-cars. - -In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with -tight _charro_ suits and _peon_ cottons, they were exceedingly -picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at -least fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges. - -Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their -brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on -earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the _frijoles_ and -_chile_ simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled, -smoked, or slept. - -Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs -dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal -drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets, -violets, blues, yellows of the women’s dresses and serapes, wreathed in -the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and -passed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor -to their roar and rattle. - -As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was -set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: “Come on, fellows! We’re -going to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!” - -It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men, -she who was largely responsible for their “rustlings,” investing it, as -she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through -hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede, -the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its -essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned -from it in disgust. - -If the train had stopped—perhaps their lives would have been deflected -into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the -trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it -vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in -the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they -were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be -had all over Mexico for “a cigarette and a smile.” - -While eating they extracted from their host, a simple _peon_, all the -information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid “requisitions” -payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press, -the _gringos hacendados_ had driven their animals into the mountain -pastures three-quarters of a day’s ride east of the tracks. But omitting -the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grass -ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the -raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in -the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon. - -Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the -difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican -scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about -the same part in their operations as a “jimmy” in those of a burglar, -Bull exclaimed his admiration, “_Some horses!_” - -“But—” Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a -fast trot down the valley, “we’re out of luck.” - -“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull handed him the glasses. “See what you make of -’em.” - -“_Colorados!_” Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on -the blue _charro_ jacket. “It’s the same outfit that tied up the miner, -too. Remember how he described the leader? ‘About twice as tall as a -common Mexican’? That fellow’s six-foot-two if he’s an inch.” - -“The gall of him,” Sliver snorted. “What do you think o’ that? After -_our_ horses! Well, they ’ain’t got ’em yet. We’ll jest ride along -behind the hill here an’—” - -But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted. -“No, you bet he hain’t. I’ve a hunch that the gent coming over the hill, -there, is the man that owns ’em.” - -As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause, -he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. “He’s -sure got his nerve.” - -“Mebbe he don’t know they’re Colorados.” - -Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders’ backs were turned, the daring -rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the -marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them -opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired. - -“Here comes his army!” Jake croaked. - -“Only a lad.” - -Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, white -with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the -galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down -the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from -their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his -tracks. At the same moment the lad’s hat, a soft slouch, blew off, -loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill -scream would still have proclaimed the rider’s sex. - -“Hell!” Bull’s astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. “It’s a -woman! a white girl—dressed in man’s riding-togs!” - - - - -V: THE “HACIENDA OF THE TREES” - - -Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart, -two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be -deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance, -yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two -drops that join running in down a window-pane. - -Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres, -and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would -appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun. -Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation -whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet—but let it suffice, for -the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the -_hacienda_ Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the -crest of a grassy knoll that overlooked the buildings. - -A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait. -Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect -shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume; -riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man’s cambric shirt -with a negligée collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small -and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly _retroussé_. Her eyes, -large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly -contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was -wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response -to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that -curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling. - -“Oh, dad, isn’t it beautiful!” - -The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit -billows; but her eyes were on the _hacienda_—_Hacienda de los Arboles_, -named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it -pleasant shade. - -Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the -height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, -storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to -the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, -with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the -old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the -meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of -giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading -with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing -fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, -crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as -ever a man looked upon and called his home. - -Carleton smiled as she added, “I’d hate to have been brought up in El -Paso or any other prosy American city.” - -He might have replied that there were American cities she might find -less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as -she did. - -His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of -accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his -satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his -creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or -three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with -Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, -he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a “land-poor” Spanish owner. - -To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid -almost four centuries ago by one of Cortés’s _conquistadores_ might have -meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From -a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a -story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its -massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during -her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very -being. - -They seldom overlooked the _hacienda_, as now, without making some -observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old -Dons, their _señoras_, _señoritas_, savage brown retainers, in the midst -of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it -were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to -think of himself as belonging to the family. - -“Great old fellows they were!” Though he spoke musingly, now, without -connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back. -“Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other -day, and the records read in princely fashion. ‘Between the rivers such -and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,’ that was a -favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like -cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few -square leagues.” - -“And here comes one of them.” Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who -had just topped the opposite rise. “Doesn’t he look it?” - -Surely he did. The _charro_ suit of soft tanned deerskin with its -_bolero_ jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the -lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes -that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced _sombrero_; the fine horse and -Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted _machete_ -in its saddle sheath under the rider’s leg, even the rope _riata_ coiled -around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in -that pageant of the past. - -“It is Ramon Icarza,” Carleton nodded. “He hasn’t been here for a long -time.” This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up. - -“Attending to the herds and the horses, señor. As with you, the most of -our _peones_ have run away to the wars. We have left only a few -_ancianos_ too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the -aid of the women we manage. That last requisition for the”—his shrug was -eloquent in its disdain—“_cause_. You paid it?” - -“Had to—or be confiscated.” With a grin comical in its mixture of -amusement and anger, Carleton went on, “I raked up five thousand pesos -of Valles’s money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he -said? ‘I don’t want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute. -You must pay me in gold.’” - -Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his -race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. “The devil take him! -Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us, -he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!” His hands and eyebrows -testified to Valles’s scandalous treatment of the merchants. “First he -demands a contribution to the _cause_. Those who refuse are foolish, for -first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the -poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the -money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left. -In the old days we used to curse the locusts, señor; but they, at least, -left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago, -that you and the señorita here and my venerable father would be reduced -to become herders of cattle?” - -“Oh, but it’s lots of fun!” Lee’s happy laugh bespoke sincerity. “I love -it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And -that reminds me that we’re almost due there for lunch.” - -“You’ll stay, of course, Ramon?” Pointing to a couple of mares with -foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton -added, “There’s still another over in the next valley. If you will take -these along, I’ll get her.” - -Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the -_hacienda_, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless -boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched -the girl’s maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly -knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she -exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty. - -“Oh, aren’t they pretty!” - -Ramon agreed—as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila -monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors—that -is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by -the hundred miles—their childhood had compassed more than the usual -number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him -slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of -many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of -course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last -iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself -and clothes. Having passed favorably on the material, fit, and -trimmings, she reached for his _sombrero_. - -“You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let -me look at it. What a beauty!” - -While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined -it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow -intensified in Ramon’s big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the -gold of his skin. His mouth—too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon -standards—drew into a tender smile. - -According to the cañons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black -or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, -with singular disregard, for writer’s law, Nature continued to weave for -Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee’s hair, rose blush -of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the -sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which -Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as -powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande. - -On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again, -Nature utterly ignored “best seller” conventions. Brought up among -Mexicans, counting Ramon’s sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial -prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal -health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After -sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on. - -“How does it look?” - -As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there -was no mistaking the “dare.” Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico, -Ramon caught the implication. - -“Pretty enough to—kiss!” - -With the word he reached swiftly for her neck, but caught only empty -air. Ducking with a touch of the spur, she shot from under his hand. - -The next second he was after her. Along the shallow valley for a -half-mile she led, then, whirling just as he rode alongside, she shot -back along the ridge. At the end he overtook her, and, anticipating her -whirl, caught her bridle rein. Leaning back, however, flat on her -beast’s back, laughing and panting, she was still out of his reach; and -when he began to travel, hand over hand, along the bridle, she leaped -down on the opposite side and dodged behind a lone _sahuaro_. - -Sure of her now, he followed. But, dodging like a hare around the -_sahuaro_, she came racing back for the horses; might possibly have -gained them and made good her escape, if, glancing back over her -shoulder, she had not seen Ramon stumble, stop, then clasp his right -ankle. - -“Oh, is it sprained?” she cried, running back. Then, as, reaching -suddenly, he caught her, she burst out, “Cheat! oh, you miserable -cheat!” - -That all is fair in love and war, however, goes in all languages, and -while she punctuated the struggle with customary objections whereby -young maids enhance the value of a kiss, there was no anger in her -protests. Wrestling her back and down, he got, at last, the laughing -face upturned in the hollow of his arm; had almost reached her lips, -when, with force that sent Lee to the ground, he was seized and thrown -violently against the horse. - -In the excitement of the chase they had completely forgotten Carleton, -who had viewed its beginnings from the opposite ridge. By self-adoption -he had almost, as before said, identified himself with the Spanish -strain that had flowed for centuries through the _patios_ and compound -of Los Arboles. He had even come to think in Spanish; in custom and -manner was almost Mexican. But in moments of anger habit gives place to -instinct. The instinct that first formed and later preserved the tribe, -pride of race, overpowered friendship. In one second the young Mexican, -whom he had regarded for years almost as a son, was transmuted into the -despised “greaser” of the border. - -“You—you—” Choking with anger, eyes bits of blue flame, he strode at -Ramon, fist bunched to strike. - -But the blow did not fall, for, scrambling up again, Lee seized his arm -from behind. “Oh, dad! dad!” Despite his struggles, she clung like a -cat, defeating his efforts to shake her off. “Oh, dad! It was only a bit -of fun! all my fault! I put on his hat! Please don’t!” - -If the young fellow had flinched, perhaps Carleton would have struck. -But, head erect, he quietly waited, and presently Carleton ceased -struggling. - -“All right! I’ll let him go—this time. But, remember”—bringing his -clenched fist in a heat of passion into the palm of the other hand, he -glared at the young man—“remember! when this girl is kissed—it will be -by a man of her own breed. Get off my land!” After helping Lee to mount, -he vaulted into his own saddle and rode away, driving the mares and -foals before them. - -In accordance with before-mentioned precedents, Ramon ought to have -folded his arms and hissed a threat through gritted teeth. Instead, he -stood very quietly, his face less angry than sad, watching them go. His -little nod, in its firmness, would have become any young American; went -very well with his thought. - -“We shall see.” - -Mounting, he rode away to the northward, and not till he had covered -many miles did he rein in his beast, so suddenly that it fell back on -its haunches. His dark face expressed vexation mixed with alarm. -“Maldito! I forgot to warn them that Colorados had been seen east of the -railroad. I must go back.” - -On their part, Lee and her father rode on toward the _hacienda_. Though -he glanced at her from time to time, it was always furtively, for with a -man’s dislike of scenes he made no reference to that which had just -passed. Nevertheless, it filled his mind. Man-like, he had watched her -develop into womanhood with scarcely a thought for her future. If he had -given the subject any consideration he would probably have concluded -that, sooner or later, she would choose a suitable mate from the -hundreds of American miners, railroad men, ranchers, and engineers that -had swarmed in the state of Chihuahua before the revolution. - -But with the clear vision of after sight he now saw that he had -unconsciously depended on the race pride which had just manifested -itself in himself to prevent her from contracting a mésalliance. Now, -with consternation, he faced the truth that racial pride is masculine; -contrary to both the feminine instinct and nature’s scheme of things. - -“I was a fool!” he berated himself. “A damned fool! She will have to go -north—live in the States for a while.” - -These and similar thoughts were whirling through his mind when they came -on a band of his horses at pasture under charge of an _anciano_, a -withered old _peon_, whose age and infirmities had estopped him from -joining the exodus to the wars. After cautioning the old fellow not to -allow the animals to stray too far, Carleton plunged again into deep -meditation. - -Had he not been thus preoccupied he would probably have long ago -discovered the five horsemen who were following at a distance, using the -natural cover afforded by the rolling land; for he always rode with a -powerful binocular in his holster, and often swept with it the prospect. -Several times the glass would have shown him a row of heads behind the -next ridge in rear. As it was, he had ridden to the crest of the rise -from which they had looked down on the _hacienda_ before habit asserted -itself. He had no sooner leveled the glasses than an exclamation burst -from his lips. “My God!” - -“What is it, dad?” Lee swung in her saddle, looking back at him. - -“Raiders! They are attacking Francisco! He has nothing but his staff! -He’s fighting them like an old lion! My God, they’re chopping him with -their machetes.” It came out of him in staccato phrases. “Race in and -send out Juan, Lerdo, and Prudencia with rifles! Stay there! Don’t dare -to follow!” - -Digging in his spurs, he galloped away. For a moment the girl hesitated. -Her eyes went to the _hacienda_, still half a mile away, then back to -her father racing madly down the slope. There was no time to go for -help! Loosening the pistol in her holster, she drove in her spurs and -galloped after. - -From Carleton’s first appearance till the girl screamed all had passed -so quickly that the Three could only sit and gape. From their original -intent to rob Carleton it was a far cry to the reconstructed impulse to -succor and save him, and it speaks well for them that they accomplished -the revolution as soon as they did. - -The scream had not passed unnoticed by the Colorados. The leader, who -had turned to ride on, swung his beast, looked, then, as the girl -dropped from the saddle to her knees beside the wounded man, drove in -his spurs and galloped toward her. Heedless of her own danger, Lee was -trying to stanch with her handkerchief the bloodflow from Carleton’s -chest, so lost in her agonized grief that she did not look up till the -Colorado leaped down and seized her. - -In this world there are savages who would have respected, for the time -at least, her white grief. But this was the man who had tortured the -miner and his _peones_; driven the latter naked through spiky cactus -after he had cut the soles off their feet. She sprang up when he seized -her, and as she fought bitterly, beating away his black, evil face with -her little fists, his strident laughter mingled with her wild sobbing -and carried to Bull behind the ridge. - -For three days this man’s boast had rung in his brain: “We’ve killed -your men, outraged your women!” But though anger blazed within him, his -tone was icy cold. “Look after the others. I’ll ’tend to him!” - -He had already pulled his rifle from the sling under his leg. Raising it -now, he lined the sights, the same sights that had directed a ball -through the brain of Livingstone’s horse. While Lee writhed and twisted -in the Colorado’s arms, he dared not shoot. He waited until, at the -double crack of his companions’ rifles, two of the other Colorados -pitched headlong from their saddles. Then, as their leader paused to -look and, with a swift wrench, Lee tore loose and let daylight between -them, the rifle spoke, sent its bullet whistling through his brain. - -“Keep after them!” Bull called back as he rode on over the ridge. - -But already Jake and Sliver’s rifles were barking like hungry dogs. -Trained to a hair in guerrilla warfare, the remaining Colorados had -spurred their beasts behind the horse herd. At the first shot the band -had stampeded, and now, urged on by the yells of the fugitives, who rode -crouched on their horses’ necks, the scared animals coursed swiftly down -the valley. - -“The gall of them! _Our_ horses!” Repeating his former observation, -Sliver would have ridden after. - -But Jake caught his bridle. His bleak eyes were scintillating like -sunlit icicles. His lean, avid face quivered with subdued ferocity. -“Don’t be a damn fool! They’re only using ’em for cover! We’ll shoot -along this side of the ridge an’ catch ’em at the end of the valley!” - -Meanwhile Bull rode on down the slope. After a surprised stare that -showed her rescuers to be Americans, Lee had knelt again beside her -father. As before said, Bull was no beauty. His black beard, bushy -brows, hot red eyes, drink-blotched face, were of themselves sufficient -to frighten a woman. Yet when she looked up sympathy illumined his -countenance till it shone in her distressed sight as a clear lamp -radiating human feeling. Without fear or doubt she turned to him for -help. - -“It’s my father! I’m afraid—Can’t you do something?” - -So far Carleton had lain with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and -spoke in detached whispers as Bull knelt by his side. “You’re—American. -I told her not to follow. Don’t bother—with me. I’m shot—through lungs -and stomach—bleeding inside. Get Lee—back to the house.” - -“Plenty of time,” Bull soothed him. As a crackle of rifle-fire turned -loose in the distance, followed by sudden silence, he added, “That ’ull -be the last o’ the Colorados. I’ll fix you a bit, an’ when my fellows -come back we’ll jest pack you home.” - -With a plainsman’s skill in crude surgery, he tore up Carleton’s shirt -to make a pad and bandage which he twisted with a stick till the -blood-flow stopped. This was no more accomplished before Jake and Sliver -rode up, driving the horses ahead. - -“They won’t cut no more soles offen people’s feet,” Jake answered Bull’s -questioning look. - -“Fine and dandy.” Bull nodded. “You, Jake, rope a fresh horse outer the -band an’ ride like hell to the railroad an’ wire El Paso for a doctor.” - -“No!” Lee eagerly suggested. “Wire the American Club at Chihuahua. These -dreadful days all gringos help one another.” - -Freshly horsed, five minutes thereafter, Jake galloped away—but not -before, cold, crafty, laconic, dissolute gambler as he was, he had left -a comforting word in the girl’s ear. “Don’t you be skeered, Miss. I’ll -bring out a doctor, if I have to ride inter El Paso an’ raid a -hospital.” - -As he went out of sight over the next roll Sliver, with the girl’s aid, -lifted the wounded man up to Bull in the saddle. So for the second time -within three days did the giant rustler bear like a child in his arms a -_gringo_ victim of the Mexican revolution. To the leaven that had been -working within him was now added the most powerful influence that can be -brought to bear on a man—a woman’s heartbroken sobbing. - - - - -VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - - -Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old -Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on -herself. But now she burst out crying. - -“The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down, -and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have -tried to pursue them alone.” - -“He was old—an’ died a man’s death,” Bull offered her rough comfort. -“You couldn’t wish him a better ending.” - -It was man’s reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman’s feelings, yet -it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull -suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room. - -By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off -his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into -unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. “Don’t you allow I’d better -leave ’em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an’—” He -stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull’s stare. - -“You’re dead right! Don’t trouble to say it. I’d steal the horses offen -a hearse.” - -Bull’s glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly, -he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: “Wait till he’s well -enough to fight for his own. Till then—we leave him alone.” - -Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the _patio_ -gateway. Within, arched _portales_ ran around three sides, supporting -the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful -creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only -vigorous pruning kept it from burying the _portales_ beneath. In the -center rose a great _arbol de fuego_, “tree of fire,” contrasting its -flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas. - -They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women, -house servants, and _peonas_; for of the scores of men who had worked -for Carleton before the wars there were left only three withered -_ancianos_ to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that -caught the fresh breeze from the mountains. - -Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the -surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even -from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry -desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied -the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch. - -Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating -marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made -shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache. - -“You she’d have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a -flip-flop onto him. Druv’ the pommel clean through his chest, it did. -Yet he was up an’ around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less ’n -five weeks.” - -Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her -father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was -announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had -achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from -a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to -bury its dead. - -The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull -picked him for a “colonist.” Just how, he himself could not have said. -His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to -overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been -cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows, -impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under -the _portales_ while he ate. - -“Say! but he’s whitish. Looks like he’d done time.” - -“He has,” Jake nodded. “I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in -Valles’s army that had got himself shot through both arms an’ was being -taken back to the base hospital with about a hun’red others. When I -landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out -of a box-car door, watching ’em bury his _compañeros_ that had died on -the way. - -“‘Gotter do it quick,’ he says. ‘They don’t keep worth a darn in this -clime.’ - -“He’d met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an’ ’twas him that sent the doctor -an’ tol’ me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he’d -belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies. -They’d insure some _peon_ that was about ready to croak, paying the -premiums themselves an’ c’llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If -he lingered ’twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite -proved, most of ’em being too far gone to testify when they was -resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an’ as the -Mexicans ain’t so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was -sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he’d been Mexican they’d -have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good -greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He’d actually -served twelve years—think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican jail -before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their -hospital-trains.” - -“Twelve years!” Sliver echoed it. “An’ just for croaking a few Mex? He -orter ha’ practised in New Mexico. They’d have give him a medal up -there.” - -After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came -down. While eating he made his report. “If I could do any good I’d stay. -But he will surely die to-night. It’s going to be mighty hard on that -poor girl. Like most of us”—his glance took in all Three—“Carleton -didn’t come down here for his health. It’s bad form in Mexico to inquire -about a man’s past. Nevertheless, it’s pretty well known that he killed -the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four -years old. She’s never been away since, and has no kin that she knows -of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl.” - -His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted -his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. “I’ve left an -opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don’t be -deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark.” - - -It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the -room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair -to the door, which opened out on the _corredor_, to secure the free air -his rustler’s lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the -moon’s pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its -maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains -loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid -chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet -and clear gold. - -_Gringo_ as he was, his people had lived under Carleton’s hand fuller, -freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican -overlords, and, day or night, the _patio_ had never lacked a dozen brown -_peonas_ on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under the _arbol -de fuego_ in the center of the _patio_ below three old crones had -erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of -gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note -which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still -night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched -between prayers. - -“Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that -means?” - -“Si; they were devils come for a soul.” - -“’Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The señor was a -good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard.” - -“The señorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that -she also will be cast into hell?” - -“Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty -centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her -soul’s sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor señor—” her pause -doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their -prayers for his saving. - -The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of -distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars, -combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle -of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate -the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed -heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed. - -In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw -Carleton’s face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both -were there. - -“Where is—Lee? Sleeping? Don’t wake her. Listen! She—must not—stay here. -Tell William Benson—he’s rough and a bully—but honest and good. Tell him -to get a permit—from the revolutionists—to drive my cattle and -horses—across to the States. They will bring enough—to keep Lee for -many—a year. Be sure—” - -The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a -stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the -moonlit plains. - -For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made -toward the door that led to the girl’s room. But as her tired face rose -before him he stopped and shook his head. “Let her finish her sleep.” -Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly -called the old women. - - - - -VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - - -“Well, I reckon this about lets us out.” - -The Three sat under the _portales_, heavily smoking. Bull puffed -meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed -absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had -trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all -necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands -were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental -concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the “this” alluded to -Carleton’s funeral, which had taken place the preceding day. - -It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor, -happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better -class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till -still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The -Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered _hacendado_, attended, with -Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American -rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds of -_gringos_, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come -in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton’s _peones_, and the Three, -had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little -adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus -consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways -and means. - -“Yes, I s’pose we’ll have to move on.” If not actually dismal, Sliver’s -indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction. - -Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had -just then stepped out of her room across the _patio_. Phyllis, the -younger, was to stay for a week, while Phœbe, the elder, returned home -with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee -walked with her guests the length of the _patio_ she took with her the -sympathetic glances of the Three. - -Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of -her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, -the sight of Carleton’s riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown -in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her -agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now -complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she -made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. -Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely -accidental, a natural trimming of her dress. - -Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American -born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, -dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee’s fairness. If -their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely -accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of -association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in -sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a -smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a -cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept -through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross -and passion. - -“Adios, you fellows!” Lovell’s friendly voice came floating back from -the gate. “Come and see us at San Miguel.” - -It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of -suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man’s hand was -against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and -trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver’s muttered -exclamation: “Lordy! I’d like to! but—” - -“—it’s no place for us.” Bull nodded toward Lee. “It ’u’d be easier if -she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an’ a new revolution -breaking every other day!” - -“Pretty fierce,” Jake coincided. “But if ’twas left to that young Mex at -the funeral yesterday—Ramòn Icarza, wasn’t that what they called him? If -’twas left to him she’d soon be—” - -“—damned an’ done for!” Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: -“Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex -that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. -Hell! if I thought she’d look twice his way, I’d croak him afore we -left.” - -“It wouldn’t be unnatural, she being raised here an’ not knowing much -else.” Bull’s gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. “I’ll bet -you that’s what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an’ -get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so’s I could tell him -afore we left.” - -“Tol’ her yet?” Sliver asked. - -Bull nodded. “Las’ night. Said she hadn’t given any thought, yet, to the -future.” - -The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to -go down the opposite _portales_. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her -arm from the other girl’s waist, and came walking on alone. - -They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well -formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They -felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness. - -“Oh, shore!” with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her -attempts to thank them for their kindness. “We hain’t done nothing worth -while.” - -“Sliver’s right.” Jake’s bleak eyes had grown almost soft. “You don’t -owe us anything. All that’s bothering us is—” - -“—that we kain’t jest see how you’re going to manage,” Bull finished. -“Your father’s idea—” He stopped. - -Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. “It -isn’t practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across -the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would—” Her -sweeping hand took in the sunlit _patio_, the brown _criadas_ -soft-footing it along the _corredor_; the compound ablaze with barbaric -color; the _peonas_ gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that -medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. “And if he -would—I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to -this. I’m part of it, and it of me,” she concluded, with a firm little -nod. “I shall carry on my father’s work.” - -The Three looked at one another. Bull’s troubled look, Jake’s dubious -brows, Sliver’s cough, all expressed their common doubt. “Can you do it, -Miss, alone?” - -“I sha’n’t be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here -to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you—” she paused, -looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. “Of course, -that’s absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know -some one?” - -The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of -each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in -a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the -American border tightly closed; the _fusilado_ against a ’dobe wall that -would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that -dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, -to do them justice, the girl’s helpless situation affected them most. If -they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new -path. - -Jake spoke first. “To tell the truth, Miss, we ain’t exactly what you’d -call rushed with business.” - -“Like all of us—upset by the revolutions.” She jumped to the natural -conclusion, “Were you—mining?” - -A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before -all Three. Not without truth was Bull’s statement, “We ain’t worked it -much, of late.” - -“Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?” - -A sudden memory of Rosa’s desertion permitted Sliver to say, “The las’ -we had left jest t’other day.” - -Her pretty face brightened. “Then you mean to say that you are free for -the present?” - -That was exactly what they had! - -She went on, slowly: “I’ll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and -sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven’t been permitted -to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don’t know, -even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I -can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten—” - -“Don’t you be bothering about that, Miss,” Bull broke in. “We’ll stay, -an’ when it comes that you don’t need us any longer—” - -“—we ain’t a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages,” Sliver -concluded. “To tell you the truth, Miss, I’d be willing to work for my -board jest to feel at loose on a range ag’in.” - -His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort, -it still added warmth to her words. “Then—now you are _my_ men.” - -The accent on the “my” unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her -bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own -and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an -alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the -fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies -in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely -enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke -loose on the devoted heads of the Three. - -“_My_ men!” It sealed their adoption. - -“Phyllis, come here!” She was eying them with that microscopic feminine -scrutiny that detects the minutest personal defect. Her gesture of -despair when the other girl came up was so lovingly insulting it could -not have been outdone by the best of mothers. “They are going to work -for me, so we’ll have to care for them. Do you suppose we can _ever_ get -them to rights?” - -Phyllis wasn’t quite sure, but as her interest while real was more -casual, she held out hope. “They’ll look better, dear, after they’re -washed and mended.” - -That was too mild for Lee. Nothing but revolution, drastic and complete, -would satiate that hungry instinct. “No, they’ll have to have new -things. The store is run down badly, but it will supply their present -needs.” - -With something of the air of convicts arraigned before a stern judge the -Three listened to certain other frank comments upon their appearance. As -laid down, their reconstruction included shaves for Sliver and Jake, a -beard-trim for Bull, hair-cuts for all three. To this they meekly -agreed; took their new things with sheepish thanks when they were -brought from the store; endured all with resignation, if not -cheerfulness, up to the moment that she tried to quarter them in the -house. Then the last shreds of masculine independence asserted -themselves. They made a stand. - -“If it’s all the same, Miss,” Jake pleaded, “we’d sooner bunk down in -one of those empty adobes.” - -Sliver supported the rebellion. “You see, Miss, we’re that rough an’ not -used to ladies’ society—” - -“An’ we smoke something dreadful,” Bull added his bit. “You really -couldn’t stan’—” - -“Oh, I wouldn’t mind it a bit. I love tobacco smoke. It’s half of -Mexico.” - -Deprived of their last weapon, the Three could only stand and fidget -till Phyllis came to the rescue. Her interest, as aforesaid, being -founded merely on the general principles of loyalty to her sex, she -could afford to be generous. - -“They’ll want to play cards and generally carry on,” she whispered. “Men -always do. Let them sleep in the adobe and take their meals with you at -the house.” - -A compromise thus effected, Lee marched the Three to their new abode. -But this was not the end. Just as they were about to settle therein she -turned loose upon them a veritable hornets’ nest of brown _criadas_. All -afternoon they found themselves encircled, as it were, by clouds of -flying skirts, and when the flutter subsided the adobe stood scrubbed -and dusted and furnished with _catres_, bed-clothing, wash-stands, -chairs, and a table for the “cards and general carrying on.” When the -invasion, brown and white, finally withdrew, and the suggested changes -in apparel and personal appearance were duly consummated, they were left -gazing with something of awe and a great deal of wonder at their -reconstructed selves. - -“You look almost human,” Jake gave his opinion of Bull. “A touch with a -powder-puff an’ I allow you might mash one o’ them criadas.” - -Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate. -“It’s dreadfully clean in here,” he remarked, coming back. “But I reckon -we’ll sorter get used to it. Now if we on’y had a bottle o’ aguardiente -to hold a bit of a house-warming, it ’u’d—” - -Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. “Look here! We’ve got the care -of a young girl on our han’s. There’s going to be no boozing—at least on -the premises. When you feel you kain’t stan’ it any longer, light out -somewheres an’ get it over.” - -“That’s right,” Jake lent support to the moralities. “Though it sorter -looks to me like she’d adopted us.” - -As a matter of fact, the girls’ talk, walking back to the house, quite -favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had -obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at -Phyllis’s remark, “Aren’t they big and crude and funny?” - -“Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I’ve had them a -month.” - -“Won’t it be a little difficult? They’re grown up; can’t be treated like -babies.” - -“Not a bit.” Lee laughed softly again. “If one of them misbehaves, I -shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct -Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they’d see -through it at once. Being men, they’ll feel quite perked up.” - -Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their -merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the -disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own -likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case, -as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a -crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again. - - - - -VIII: “THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS” - - -It was not done with malice aforethought, for Sliver had not quite -reached the point where “he couldn’t stan’ it any longer.” It just -happened. Heavy drinkers may be divided into three classes—to wit, the -sporadic, who break out in occasional wild debauches; the “steadies,” -who sop, sop, sop all the time; and a third class which combines the -traits of the other two. Of the Three, Bull represented the first, Jake -the second, Sliver the last and worst. - -If Sliver had not ridden his horse along the crest of a certain hog’s -back on the chance that the cattle he was hunting might be in the ravine -below, it might never have come to pass. If Napoleon Bonaparte, for -matter of that, hadn’t developed indigestion at Waterloo; if Christopher -Columbus had followed the Church instead of the sea; if Julius Cæsar had -been born a girl; if all the cats on all the famous fences of history -had happened to jump the other way—this world would be quite different. -So let it suffice that Sliver rode along the hog’s back. - -At its end the ridge ran out on a wide bench from which Sliver looked -over the foot-hills, rolling tumultuously under a black blanket of -chaparral out to the tawny valleys of the _hacienda_ pastures. Below, he -could see a path that ran with a silver stream at the bottom of the -ravine. Its deep rut, no wider than the swing of a mule, marked it for -one of those ancient highways whose place had been usurped by the Diaz -railways. In its heyday the cañon had rung with the tinklings of the -mule-trains that transported _aguardiente_, maize, tobacco, serapes, and -cloths between Mexico City and Santa Fé. But of that great traffic there -now remained barely enough to support the little _fonda_ that lay with -its mule _patio_ almost at Sliver’s feet. - -Though no one was in sight, he set down certain moving black dots as -chickens, goats, or pigs. Thus assured of tenancy, and thinking that he -might pick up some news of his strays, he rode on down a trail that -zigzagged through the chaparral. - -Looking down from above, Sliver had noted the resemblance of the place -to the lair back on the miner’s bench in Sonora. The _ramada_ of grass -and cornstalks might have been the same. Only that she was younger and -prettier, the Mexican girl who knelt before a _metate_ grinding -_tortilla_ paste could have passed for Rosa herself. Though Mexican -Indian, some vagrant Spanish strain had pushed up her brow, reduced her -cheek-bones, shortened her waist, and lengthened her limbs. Masses of -black hair framed her oval face. Her eyes were velvet pools; the nose -small and well shaped. Her bare arms tapered from fine shoulders to -small wrists, and if she followed Juno rather than Psyche in her -luxurious molding she was pliant as a willow, carried her shapely -poundage with an effect of slimness. - -If Sliver noted these desirable personal assets, his interest therein -disappeared after he had spied the sign, “Fonda,” over the door. True, -the month which had now elapsed since they entered Lee’s service had -not, however, been entirely “dry.” At the close of each day’s work the -Three took their _copa_ with the _ancianos_ at the _hacienda_ store in -the Mexican fashion. But the application of liquor in such medicinal -doses to a thirst like Sliver’s was equivalent to the squirting of -gasolene upon a fire. Now, as he gazed at the sign, spirituous desires -flamed within him. It was with difficulty that his dry lips formed his -question to the girl. - -Was there a _copita_ of _aguardiente_ to be had? - -Nodding, she rose, and as she let down a small wooden door in the wall -Sliver’s glance licked the rows of bottles within. - -_Tequila_, anisette, _aguardiente_, _mescal_, every variety of liquid -fire with which the Mexican _peon_ burns out his stomach, stood there in -deadly array. Beginning at one end, Sliver worked his way, during the -next two hours, along the row, and had just started back again when, -with some surprise, he noted a most curious phenomenon—to wit, the gray -hair and deep wrinkles the girl had suddenly acquired. Quite unaware -that she had resigned his thirst to her father, and was even then -vigorously rubbing _tortilla_ paste behind his back, he solemnly studied -this startling metamorphosis. Drunk as he was, his cowman’s instinct had -kept him warned of the sun’s declension. Sure, now, that he had had -enough, he paid his score, gravely addressing his host, meanwhile, -concerning his changed appearance. - -“You she’dn’t do it. It’s—hard on the nerves. Keep it up an’—you’ll -drive your custom away.” - -Having climbed into the saddle, he remained there because of that -merciful provision of nature by which a man may ride long after he has -lost the power to walk. Realizing his condition, he left the business of -going home to his horse. While it carried him down the cañon and out -across the plains he concentrated his remaining energies on “The -Cowboy’s Lament,” howling its one hundred and one verses at the top of -his voice, sending warning of his coming a full mile ahead. - - -In the mean time Bull with Lee, Jake “on his lonely,” had pursued the -search for the strays in other directions. It chanced that luck rode -with the former. Returning home at sundown, Jake saw them driving the -cattle along a shallow valley. - -During the month which had elapsed since her father’s death Lee had -taken the only real panacea for grief—hard work. In addition to the -management of the house _criadas_, she exercised a feudal overlordship -over the _hacienda peones_. Besides hiring and letting, leasing of lands -on charges, she acted as judge in their squabbles, adviser in their -small affairs, comforter in trouble. In addition, her womanhood brought -extra duties. She had to godmother the babes, attend christenings, -doctor the sick, lend her patronage to the _bailes_ and _fiestas_. - -Most of these duties she discharged in the mornings. Afternoons she -donned her man’s riding-togs and rode out with the Three, rounding up -strays, new-born calves, and foals. At nights her fair head might be -seen under a golden aureole lent by the lamp, while she mended or made -for them and herself. If it lacked the stimulation and color of city -life, it was, at least, a healthy and honest existence. Already it had -restored her shocked nerves, given back her roses. She had never been -prettier than when, reining in, she looked back at Jake as he came up! - -“We found them! _we_ found them!” Her pride in the fact provoked Jake’s -smile. “They were up in the Cañon del Norte. Whatever in the world is -that?” - -It might have been anything from the last puff of a worn-out calliope to -the yelp of a sick coyote, for at its best Sliver’s voice rarely came -within a quarter of a mile of a specified tune, and an hour’s steady -tearing into “The Cowboy’s Lament” had not improved its tone. As the -raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling -little laugh. - -“Mr. Sliver isn’t hardly what you could call a singer. Is he—often taken -like that?” - -They could have answered quite easily, Sliver’s vocal efforts being ever -timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank -disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs -and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to -the Cañon del Norte. - -“Piously drunk!” Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond -earshot. “Wonder where he got it!” - -“Search me,” Bull shrugged. “The question is how to stop him. You know -what to expect if he’s loose an’ drunk among all them _peonas_. You ride -on an’ head him off. Don’t stan’ any nonsense. Bat him over the can if -nec’ssary.” - -The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither -was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped -Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged -and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the -compound, had him lashed to his _catre_ in their adobe before Lee and -Bull arrived. - -So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull -replied to Lee’s inquiry concerning Sliver’s absence that he “wasn’t -feeling well.” - -She jumped up at once. “Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he -can eat!” - -A vivid mental picture of the “poor fellow,” gagged and lashed to his -_catre_, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself -for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating -his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it. - -“I wouldn’t—really, Miss.” - -She stopped, half-way along the _portales_. He had spoken so earnestly. -“Why not? Is it—catching?” - -Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further -complications. Jake shook his head. “No, it’s just chills an’ fever, a -sorter constitutional ague he’s taken with at this time o’ the year. -But—well, Miss, it’s this way, Sliver’s that bashful, though you -mightn’t think it to look at him, he’d die of shame if a young lady was -to see him in his bunk.” - -She hesitated, then came back. “But—he ought to be looked after.” - -“He has been.” Jake clinched the victory. “A copa’s the finest thing in -the world for chills. He’s had a couple an’ was sleeping like a babe -when we came in.” - -She gave in with a sigh. “Then we won’t wake him. But you must take him -a tray when you go out.” - -But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it -broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain -have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded -portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee “shooed” him like -a sick chicken into a corner of the _patio_, there to be coddled and -doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every -mother’s daughter of whom had her own infallible “_remedio_.” His real -contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his -companions at meals. - -“Invalid looks a bit better,” Jake would opine. - -“A week’s careful nursing orter bring him around,” Bull would add. Then -while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned -his poor, burned-out stomach. - -That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they -got him alone in the adobe. “I s’pose neither of you saints would ha’ -stopped even to smell of it,” he sarcastically inquired, after -confessing how and where he obtained the liquor. - -“’Tain’t that,” Bull admonished him. “I’m pretty near due for a bust -myself. But when it hits, you bet I’ll go somewheres so’s the sight of -my hoggishness ain’t a-going to offend our girl. No, ’tain’t that you -acquired a bun we’re kicking at, but that you toted it back here.” - -“You bet y’u,” Jake added. “Next time you’re took that-a-way, have ’em -hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an’ don’t budge till -you’re through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you -forgot to drink?” - -“Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!” Sliver groaned. “My liver’s burned right -out!” - -“Bueno!” Jake nodded his satisfaction. “Then if you’ve finished I’m free -to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. -That’s where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you’ve gotter do -is to find a bottle, but mine’s simply gotter have cards in it. I don’t -get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining -business of our’n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow.” - -“All right, get it over,” Bull agreed, after a moment’s rumination. -“Tell her at breakfast. She’ll fix you up with the fare.” - -“‘Tell her at breakfast’?” Jake looked his scorn. “An’ have her running -an’ fixing me out with socks an’ shirts an’ things like I was going off -on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable -and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an’ through, I -simply kain’t fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest -give me all you’ve got. With any kind of luck it’ll turn you big -interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so’s to catch an -early train.” - -So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But -thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed. - -When Jake arrived in El Paso—But the less said about his sojourn there -the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some -cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at -the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, -a week later, coming through the _patio_ gateway. - -“Oh, you poor man!” she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. -“They must have worked you all night.” - -“Which they did work me overtime,” he confessed to Bull, in the adobe -that evening. “Five days an’ most of the nights I sat inter one game. -Look at this!” - -The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of -American dollars. “When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled -a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten -Miss Lee’s hand. He was a— - -“What are you crinkling your nose at?” he hotly demanded of Bull. “This -ain’t no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying -horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of ’em came from this very -ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better -right to their money than the little girl?” - -“’Tain’t that.” Bull shook his head. “I was on’y thinking that I’d -liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don’t look like she’d take -easily to charity.” - -“_That so?_” Jake regarded him cynically. “Now kain’t you jest hear me -a-saying, ‘Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?’ -But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple -of thousand in horses?” - -“No; but she will.” - -And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three, -made his proposition, Lee shook her head. “It’s only a question of time -before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be -your two thousand dollars?” - -“In the same box with yours—stowed safely away where we can’t spend or -lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims,” Jake argued. “The -risk we’re willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that -account.” - -At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by -devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error, -turning evil to good, if only for once. - - - - -IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -“Lady-girl’s a-going to have a birthday.” - -The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house. -So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer -that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease -on their _catres_. But the title “Lady-girl,” Sliver’s especial name for -Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him. - -“That so?” Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. “How’d you know?” - -“She asked me to write a piece, t’other day, in her birthday-album, an’ -looking through it I kem on her day.” - -“She asked me, too,” Jake admitted. “What did you write?” - -“‘Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an’ so air you.’” - -“A real nice piece, too,” Jake commented upon this classic. “I like it -better ’n mine.” Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet, -he gave his own: - -Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. “I ked on’y -think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister’s album when I was -a kid. ’Tain’t near as good as yourn. - - “My pen is dull, my ink is pale; - My love for you will never fail.” - -“I think it’s pretty fine,” the others commended the effort. - -After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, “How -old is she, Sliver?” - -“Rising twenty, be the date.” - -“Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the ’casion—if -it’s on’y to keep her from feeling lonesome.” - -“Little bit close on the funeral,” Jake tentatively suggested. “Jest -about three months, ain’t it?” - -“Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an’ -have ’em drop in that day.” - -“We might shoot things up a bit, too,” Sliver began, but Jake cut him -off with utter scorn. - -“This ain’t no cowman’s jamboree. Girls don’t like any shooting except -what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles ’u’d be -my idee.” - -“‘Cake’?” Sliver now returned the scorn. “Kain’t you see these Mexican -dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an’ -curran’s an’ cit-tron peel, an’ with spice fixin’s to it? An enchilada -stuffed with store prunes ’u’d be the best they ked do.” - -“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled -waters. “What about Mrs. Mills?” - -He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her -young daughter and a few _peones_, had kept their _rancho_ going since -her husband’s death. “If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I’ll bet -you she’d fix up a cake, if ’twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for -candles, candles an’ beer-factories are the main products of Mexico.” - -Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward -consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull -delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the -following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe’s _fiancé_, a young mining -engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend, -a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded -to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on. - -“It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza,” Phyllis warmly -declared. “She and Lee have always been such good friends.” - -Accordingly, a _mozo_ delivered an invitation at the _Hacienda del Sol_ -about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow’s _rancho_. - -The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated -former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating -supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he -developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered -on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her -small daughter. - -Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her -flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything, -the girl’s childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled -happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless -directness that sometimes proved embarrassing. - -Had he a father, mother, sister? Where did they live? What was his -business? Married? Why not? And when he returned the usual answer that -no one would have him she brought him to sudden and utter confusion. - -“Oh, I’m so glad! Mother would take you, I’m sure. I’d just love to have -you for my father. Will you please marry her, then she will never be -anxious or fearful again?” - -Her mother’s merry laugh helped to cool Bull’s blushes. “Don’t be -specially insulted. She says that to every one.” Then, brave little soul -though she was, she lifted a corner of the curtain that veiled an -ever-present fear. “It’s true that I get sometimes terribly anxious. -Mexicans are lovely people when they’re kept in their place. But since -Diaz was overthrown they’re like a school of naughty children, let loose -without morality, discipline, or guidance to protect them from -themselves. Sometimes I think we ought to leave, but if we did the place -would be sacked and burned before we reached the railroad. So I’d rather -take the risk than be a pauper in the United States. But there, I’m -ungrateful talking this way instead of thanking Providence we’ve got -along so well.” - -“That’s the way to look at it, ma’am,” Bull encouraged her. While a -wicked flash shot from under his black brows he added, “If any one -bothers you jest send for us.” - -“Oo-oh, but you looked fierce then!” the child gave a delighted shudder. -“Do it again.” Though a humorous twinkle sterilized the rehearsal, she -consoled herself with the reflection: “’Tisn’t the same. But I’ll bet -you’re muy malo when you fight.” - -“It’s a good thing if he is.” From the sink, where she was washing -currants, her mother surveyed with approval Bull’s imposing bulk. “It -was a great relief when we heard that you and your friends were staying -with Lee.” - -Later, when Bull’s shyness had somewhat abated, she spoke more -intimately. From Ramon himself she had learned of his expulsion from Los -Arboles. “Ramon is a nice boy, yet no one could blame Mr. Carleton,” she -said. “Yet what is Lee to do? Before the revolution she could have taken -her pick from scores of young Americans, but now they’re all gone.” -Laughing, she finished with a remark which was destined, later, to -produce unexpected results. “I guess we’ll have to import her a -husband.” - -Bull’s heavy rumble echoed her laugh. It broke out again when Betty -cried out: “While you’re at it get one for me. I simply won’t marry a -greaser.” - -Because of the unusual proceedings she was allowed to sit up. Caught -yawning while the cake was baking, she fled to Bull’s knee, from which -strategic position she defeated her mother’s best efforts to coax her to -bed. Whereafter she promptly celebrated her victory by falling asleep. -Curled against him in trustful comfort, she slept with her fair head -pillowed on his mighty chest till, the cake finished, he carried her to -bed. A _catre_ had been moved out for him under the _portales_. But -after silence and sleep descended on the house he sat for a long time on -its edge, softly musing, the warmth of the child’s body enwrapping his -heart. Even Jake, whose sharp eyes had detected many an alien expression -on that scarred visage of late, would have wondered at its tenderness. - -Betty was still asleep when he mounted to leave next morning, but at the -beat of hoofs she came running, bare feet and legs flying under her -nightdress. Stooping, he swung her to the saddle before him. The -pressure of her warm arms around his neck, soft lips on his cheek, put a -thrill of earnestness into his farewell. - -“Remember, ma’am, we’ll come whenever you call.” - -A quarter-mile away he drew rein and looked back. Though smaller than -Los Arboles, the _rancho_ buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of -the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea -vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against -the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed -in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed -the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a -dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes. - -Shaking his big head, he spoke aloud. “’Tain’t safe for them here, -’tain’t safe!” - -So vivid was that dread feeling, presage of evil, the sweat broke on his -brow. Into his mind shot a vivid picture of the miner hanging limply -from the _sahuaro_, face turned up to the torrid sun. Around it, as in a -whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders -of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern -horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive -indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the -long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon -it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again -and rode on. - - -It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets -and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. These tendencies are due to -the fact that a woman lives principally in the past and present, a man -in the future; while she observes past occasions, he creates new ones. -Whether she be looking forward with youthful joy, or looking back with -increasing regret, a woman specializes upon her birthdays. But, -accustomed to her father’s bad memory, Lee had not expected any one to -remember; was accordingly astonished and pleased when, coming to -breakfast that morning, she found the table decorated with trailing -vines and a bouquet of wild flowers at her plate that had been picked by -Sliver. - -“Why—” she gave a little gasp. Then her shining glance accused the -Three, whose sheepish grins loudly proclaimed their guilt. “How _did_ -you know? What’s this?” - -While she was unwrapping the tissue-paper in which Mrs. Mills had -wrapped the cake the Three looked on with eager expectance, and were -treated to a second bath of sunshine. “A _real_ cake! Where _did_ you -get it?” - -In a country where cakes, if not actually hanging on every tree, may be -either home-grown or plucked from the counter of any pastry cook, her -joy might have seemed exaggerated. But in that alien desert, stripped of -its substance to the bare hot bones by repeated revolutions, the -conjunction of a sure-enough cake with a girl’s birthday verged on the -miraculous. Nor was Lee’s pleasure lessened after she heard at what -pains it had been produced. - -It was, of course, merely the first of the day’s surprises, some of -which were purely accidental, as when William Benson rode in at noon. As -a matter of fact, his visit pertained to a defensive alliance against -raiders, but, being warned in time, he straightway credited his visit to -the birthday. A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered -and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit -of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old -friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the _patio_ when the -second irruption of the Lovells and their _fiancés_—for Phyllis had -conquered the smelter man in record time—occurred midway of the -afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the _portales_ -before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under -the arched gateway into Lee’s arms. - -“But you surely did not come alone?” Though that was exactly what she -might have done herself, Lee looked at her in horror. - -“Ah no, querida! Ramon escorted me, and will return to-morrow!” - -“You don’t mean to say that he has—” Lee stopped, for she had caught, -just then, a glimpse of him riding away. - -“Your father—you remember—he thought—” - -Isabel stopped in her embarrassed explanations for, like a scared white -bird, Lee was flying through the gateway. Grabbing Isabel’s horse from -the _anciano_ who was just about to lead it around to the compound, she -leaped into the saddle and went flying down the trail. - -Turning at the sound of hoofs, Ramon waited for her. It was the first -time they had met since the funeral, and though embarrassment would have -been quite natural, Lee’s frank greeting put him at once at his ease. - -“You were going away—on my saint’s day?” - -“It was out of respect for—” - -She cut off his apology. “Yes, yes, but father was angry and unjust that -day. He would have acknowledged it himself, had he lived. You must come -back, at once, with me.” - -Not knowing the cause of her sudden flight, Bull had followed to the -gateway. As he stood there watching the two returning, Benson’s voice -broke at his shoulder. - -“That’s the hell of raising a girl in this country. I spoke often to -Carleton about it, but he was a lonely man and couldn’t bear to have her -away. I suppose that he felt she was perfectly safe with him.” - -Knowing him for Lee’s sincere friend, Bull did not scruple to hand on -the information he had gained from Mrs. Mills. Benson received it with a -low, shocked whistle. - -“And the poor man had to meet death with that on his mind? She hasn’t -seen Ramon since the funeral, you say? That speaks well for him. He -tried to go, just now, too. He’s not half bad. But when it’s a question -of marrying Lee, no Mexican need apply. But come on back in. She’ll pick -out in a second that we’re talking about them.” - -During the lively chatter that whiled away the afternoon; at supper when -the cake appeared in a glory of radiant candles; while the young folks -laughed and chatted thereafter under the lighted _portales_, the two -stealthily watched Lee and Ramon. Sliver and Jake having retired early, -Bull and Benson engaged in an interminable game of poker which left them -free to discuss the proposed defensive alliance without neglecting their -watch. - -Before night fell the girls had distributed candles here and there among -the foliage which now transmuted their waxen gleam into a greenish -incandescence. Behind the creeper that fell in a cascade from the roof, -the lamplit _portales_ gleamed in half-circles of gold. The massed -cluster of a bougainvillea dripped clotted blood down the façade of the -gate arch. As the girls moved under the golden arches opposite, their -white dresses might easily have been the fluttering wings of giant -tropical moths, and, noting it, Benson paused in filling his hand. - -“It’s like a beautiful stage setting.” - -Bull’s nod took in the bright faces, soft laughter, happy chatter. With -a slow, indulgent smile he musingly watched the secret glances between -the two pairs of lovers; artless subterfuges by which the girls achieved -small personal contacts. - -“Don’t take much to make ’em happy, does it? A little laughter an’ a -little song; plenty of chatter an’ some pretty clothes; a baby to love -and a man to boss; ’tain’t much, but Lordy, how many of ’em don’t get -it. If men ’u’d on’y keep on admiring in their wives the things they -liked in their sweethearts, the divorce courts ’u’d go out of business. -If I had a daughter, I’d marry her to a boot-black that understood the -nature of women ahead of a merchant prince; for a man that says to his -wife at breakfast, ‘Why, how pretty you look this morning!’ is a-going -to get a reward that can’t be bought with a million.” - -Just then Phœbe Lovell’s clear voice floated across the _patio_. “What a -lovely night! Let’s go for a walk.” - -“All right. Wait till I get a shawl.” - -As the others moved off, Lee ran back into her room. They had passed -through the gateway when she came out again, except Ramon, who took the -shawl and threw it over her shoulders. For a few moments they stood -talking under the lamplit _portal_, and, though the conversation was -quite ordinary, the glow in his big dark eyes was sufficiently -revealing. As Lee’s back was turned toward them, her face told nothing. -But just before they moved off she reached up and straightened the lapel -of Ramon’s coat. - -Bull frowned. “D’you really think she’s in love?” - -Benson shrugged. “When a girl fusses with a young man’s clothes she -doesn’t hate him.” - -Bull broke a second frowning pause. “You’ve knowed her almost all her -life. Kedn’t you put in a word?” - -The Englishman made a wry face. “I did, about six months ago, when I -first noticed this thing starting. But never again!” He laughed, a -little self-consciously. “I never had any one sauce me so in all my -life. Told me that it was none of my damn business; to go home and boss -my poor wife. Said that she preferred Mexicans to English, anyway. -Phe-e-ew! I never think of it, even now, without aching to spank her. -No, counsel wouldn’t help her.” - -“But she simply kain’t be allowed to go ahead an’ marry him.” Bull’s -coal eyes flashed with the old wicked gleam. “Before that I’d—lay for -him an’ shoot him.” - -Benson regarded him dryly. “Your plan has the advantage of finality, -but—it would lead to reprisals. Old Icarza stands well with Valles. If -anything happened to his beloved son we’d be wiped out so completely -there’d be no one left to mourn us. But why worry? We don’t know for -sure whether she even loves him. Give me two cards. I raise you three -blues.” - -For two hours thereafter the two played and talked, arranging a code of -smoke signals by day, beacons by night, to warn the _haciendas_. But -under it Bull’s thought still revolved around Lee and her problem. The -party had returned from the walk, and Lee was shooing all her guests off -to bed before his brow cleared and he uttered a low chuckle. - -“What’s the matter?” Benson looked up in surprise. - -“Oh, jest something I was thinking of. I raise you two reds.” - -Not until Jake woke up when Bull entered the bunkhouse did his secret -thought find expression. “Sure I noticed it,” he answered Jake’s remark -concerning Lee’s “likin’ for that Mexican.” “But leave it to me.” - -“What d’you allow to do?” - -This time Bull laughed outright. “Mrs. Mills was saying, t’other day, -that we’d have to import a rival. ’Tain’t sech a bad idea.” - -“What d’you reckon to do—put an ad in the paper ‘Wanted, a husband’?” - -“Never you mind,” Bull quietly replied to the cynical comment. “I’m -going, to-morrow, up to El Paso.” - - - - -X: WANTED—A HUSBAND - - -Departures are usually cheerless affairs, but the morning sun loosed a -flood of gold into the _patio_ where the party was in process of -dissolution. William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they -went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone. - -It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the -sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an -indulgent grin two small brown _criadas_, darting with needle and thread -and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the -transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the -beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love—set his big rough heart aglow. -The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. The young -men, with natural respect for quiet power, admired his kindliness and -strength. Their farewells and invitations were hearty and sincere. - -“You’ve promised and promised and never come yet—that is, for a real -visit,” Phœbe and Phyllis rebuked him. - -The young men earnestly charged him, “We look to you to take care of our -girls till we’re in shape to look after them ourselves.” - -Not till the Icarzas bid him good-by did that kindly glow fade. Even -when Isabel slid a small soft hand into his huge paw and turned on him -the full power of her big Spanish eyes while uttering lovely felicities, -he remained non-committal. He frowned hearing Lee accept an invitation -for a visit in the near future. But when she came in, after they left, -the hostile look had faded. - -“Oh, didn’t we have a lovely time?” She patted his arm. “And it was all -due to you.” - -“And now I’ll take my pay. I want to go up to El Paso.” - -“Oh, I’m so glad!” Darting into her room, she came running back with a -fat roll of bills. “I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr. -Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in -El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece.” - -Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the -last thing in the world that Bull’s heart desired. But she looked so -pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled -through the _patio_. - -“Now that’s real nice of you. But back up at the mine we’ve all got -store clothes to burn. One o’ these days, when the work ain’t so -pressing, Sliver kin ride over an’ get ’em. Fifty’ll be all I’ll need.” - -“Oh _dear_!” she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. “I did want -to do something; you’ve all been so kind.” - -But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his -comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then -bossed the job while her _criadas_ brushed and curried and sponged him. -After tying one of her father’s cravats around his neck she turned him -round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed -him with a gentle pat. - -On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, “be how an’ -when,” but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger -at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform -to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the -mixture of _peones_, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican -_comerciantes_ that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep -he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under -the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent. - -“’Morning, friend,” he greeted Bull, cordially. “My name is Naylor. -Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you’ll tip this water-bottle -for me, I’ll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer -of dust and cinders.” - -The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years -to establish in civilization’s cultured circles. Before it was over, -Bull had learned that his companion was “on a little _pasear_ between -revolutionary battles,” and had given, in return, some inkling of his -own affairs. The young fellow’s lithe, spare figure, clean face, -fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled -along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he -eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last, -the other’s attention. - -“Hey!” he demanded. “Is my nose out of plumb, or what?” - -Bull warded off offense with the truth. “I happened to be looking for a -man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?” - -“That depends.” The correspondent answered, breezily, but with caution. -“Without being what you could call wedded to this sandy, thirsty, -cutthroat business of Mexican revolutions, I like it better than -anything else in sight. But what’s your lay? Ranching?” He repeated it -after Bull. “In central Chihuahua? Forget it, friend.” - -Bull eyed him wistfully. He fitted so closely to specifications. -Finally, in desperation, he opened his simple heart; was explaining his -quest when the young fellow burst out laughing. - -“I beg your pardon.” He raised a protesting hand against Bull’s black -glower, then went on with sympathetic seriousness: “But you’ll have to -admit that one doesn’t see a man of your build every day in this -matrimonial business. So there’s a damsel in distress, hey? That alters -the case. If it wasn’t for a little girl up in San Francisco that I -expect to marry some day when I become very rich and famous, I’d try and -help you out, for I know just how you feel. It would be a damned shame -to have her throw herself away on a Mexican. But you’ve laid yourself -out some job. Not that you won’t be able to find men, good-looking chaps -at that. But to get the right one calls for some picking and choosing. -But I tell you what I will do—I shall be up for a week and I’d love to -give you a hand.” - -“Sure you kedn’t tackle it yourself?” - -The young fellow denied the wistful appeal. “Hombre! a million wouldn’t -release my girl’s mortgage.” - -With a regretful sigh Bull struck hands on the compact. While they were -talking the train had ambled through the brown adobe skirts of Juarez, -the squalid Mexican town across the Rio Grande, whence they were -presently shot by automobile over the international bridge into the -spacious bosom of El Paso’s largest hotel. Bull had calculated to go -out, at once, on his search, but while they sat at breakfast there -descended upon them a host of reporters and correspondents, ravenous for -news and aching to dispense hospitality. - -“Might as well put it off till to-morrow, Diogenes.” His friend had -already named Bull after the person who had such a deuce of a time -hunting an honest man among the grafters and ward heelers of ancient -Greece. “We’ll devote to-day to the irrigation of our desiccated -systems, then go to it mañana like hungry dogs. But safety first! Take a -ten out of your wad and give the rest to the clerk.” - -Instead of one day, however, three passed during which Bull’s huge bulk -upreared alongside a hundred bars. In all that time he never went to -bed, for, intensified by long abstinence, the outbreak proved unusually -virulent. Generally the conclusion of his debauches found him broke. -But, thanks to the correspondent’s prevision, he awoke on the fourth -morning, in bed at the hotel, with the bulk of his money still in the -office safe. While he was draining the water-jug according to -time-honored precedents, his friend appeared in the doorway of the -adjoining room. His own head was swathed in a wet towel that almost hid -his rueful grin. - -“One never knows what one is starting. You certainly went the limit, -Diogenes. Are you quite sure you’re through?” - -Bull nodded and put down the jug with a satisfied sigh. “It’s a bit of a -strain, this fathering an’ mothering a lone girl, a feller’s gotter keep -so straight.” He added, apologetically, “I was jest plumb ripe for a -bust, but I reckon this orter hold me for another three months.” - -“Very well, then, let’s get down to work. At intervals, while I could -still see, I kept one eye open for possibles. But it’s like looking for -gold or diamonds; the supply doesn’t touch the demand. The few prospects -all proved to have attachments in the shape of sweetheart or wife. Good -ones, I suppose, are so rare that the girls grab them at sight like -marked-down waists on a bargain-counter.” - -After two days of vain search through the plazas and parks, hotel -lobbies, streets, and bars of El Paso, Bull was almost driven to the -same conclusion. Short men, tall men, thin men, broad men; some that -were ugly, others handsome; well and ill clad from all walks of -life—passed under his observation. The few he trailed were either -engulfed within the sacred precincts of some bank or met at the doors of -suburban bungalows and there warmly kissed by young and pretty wives. -Without fulfilling the specifications called for in the potential -husband, it would have been difficult enough to have enlisted an -ordinary ranch hand for service across the line. At the close of the -second day Bull reported as much to the correspondent when they met in -the hotel lobby. - -“Guess I’ll have to give it up.” - -“Now if _that_ was only free.” The other bowed, just then, to a young -man who had just walked in from the street. “Look at him! Five-eleven in -his socks, hazel eyes, brown hair, good strong jaw, flat shoulders and -flanks, deep chest; walks the earth like he owned it. Some dresser, too. -That mixed plaid cost a hundred at his New York tailor’s.” - -“Some banker’s son, I’ll bet you,” Bull grumbled. - -“That or better. I had a little chat with him this morning. A ’varsity -man by his accent and manner. Seemed to know the Mexican situation down -to the ground from the Wall Street end, so papa’s probably a broker. -Holy snakes! Look at that! Neat work! Neat work!” - -Walking up to the counter, the young man had held out his hand—evidently -for the key of his room—while his indifferent gaze traveled around the -lobby. The clerk, who departed in no wise from the casual specifications -of his supercilious breed, glanced at the hand contemptuously. Turning, -the young man spoke. Then as, without glancing up, the clerk answered, -he snatched, hauled that superior person across the counter, and slammed -him down hard on the floor. Next, as they came on, he felled one large -door porter and three oversized bell-boys who had answered the clerk’s -yell. This done, he waited, expectantly, quietly surveying the wreck, -the hazel eye admired by Naylor transmuted into hard steel flecked with -dots of brown light. - -Jaw, eyes, pose, all said, “Next!” But the “wreck” was complete. The -oversized bell-boys ran off to answer imaginary calls. An automobile -party at the door called for the porter’s attention. Deserted, the clerk -swiftly retreated behind his counter, behind which, from a safe -distance, he issued defiant mutterings. With a slight nod that expressed -comprehension and satisfaction, Hazel-Eyes sauntered across the lobby -out into the street. - -All had passed in the time required for the correspondent to reach the -desk. He was back again in five seconds. “He’s broke—owes two weeks’ -room rent. Clerk told him to get out; hence the scrap. Diogenes, we’re -in luck! Venus and Cupid are in the ascendant. He’s our meat.” - -Grabbing Bull’s arm, he hustled him outside, where they spied the quarry -turning up a cross-street that led to the plaza. When he finally settled -down on an empty bench, the correspondent nudged Bull in the ribs. - -“Look at them!” He indicated the hundreds of men idling on the benches -or sprawled out on the turf. “Last refuge of the broke, home of the -out-of-works. That settles it. Bet you he hasn’t the price of a meal. -But, say! he’s plucky. The beggar is actually smiling.” - -From the way in which the young fellow’s glance wandered around the -assembled out-of-works, it was easy to see that he rather enjoyed the -novel situation. When Bull had noted and commented on the fact, the -correspondent went on: - -“Now, Diogenes, we must proceed with due regard for the traditions. When -grand dukes, princes, and caliphs in disguise befriend some worthy -person, they invariably begin by testing his honesty—see _Arabian -Nights_ and other authorities. Split a couple of tens off your wad and -drop them as you stroll past him. I’ll stay here and watch lest he be -found wanting.” - -Bull managed it, too, quite cleverly, scraping the bills out of his -pocket along with his tobacco-pouch. Watching closely, the correspondent -saw the young fellow look, pick them up, then run and tap Bull’s -shoulder. Leaning back, he shook with silent laughter. - -“And they say romance is dead,” his thought ran. “_Dead!_ while this -big, black giant stalks around like a knight of old seeking a perfect -husband for a girl he’s known only a few weeks. Diogenes, my friend, Don -Quixote had nothing on you. Of all the lovely, fine pieces of idiocy -that ever helped to raise us out of the muck of commercialism, this is -the very finest. And wouldn’t it be queer if it worked? It’s almost too -good to be true, and yet—a girl that can move a man to do things like -that must be remarkably worth while. Quien sabe? Perhaps it will end -like all true romances, with a happy marriage.” - -Till the two settled down side by side on a bench, the correspondent -watched. Then with a satisfied nod he rose and walked out of Bull’s life -in the same casual way he had entered it; to return once more, however, -at a critical juncture, many months later. - -Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with -diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual -observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor -conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated -astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was -remarkably well done. - -“_No-o-o!_” he protested. - -“Sure!” the other nodded. “I was turned out of my hotel only half an -hour ago.” - -Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended -doubt. “Broke, mebbe, but you don’t belong with these. What was it? -Wine, weemen, or cyards?” - -The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. “A woman, yes, but not in -the usual way. What would you think if I told you—But, pshaw! what’s the -use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work fairy-tale. -Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I’m here, busted and -broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gilt-edged -securities and real estate.” - -“A hundred thousand!” Bull’s financial acquaintance having rarely risen -above the sixty-a-month class, he could not repress his surprise. - -“There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I -refused a hundred thousand—with a girl attached.” - -Bull’s face fell. “I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an’ you refused -beca’se you’d already picked one for yourself.” - -The young man nodded. “Correct except in one or two particulars. I -disliked the girl so much that her money couldn’t tempt me. As for the -one I’ll marry, I haven’t picked her yet. But I mean to when I’m taken -that way.” - -Bull’s face lit up with hope again as, with naïve frankness, the young -fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a -marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only -daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all -that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there -was the hitch! - -“For a fellow doesn’t want to marry his sister,” he explained. “I know -her so well she hasn’t a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will -be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing -forever after. But the Relieving Officer”—he broke off, laughing at -Bull’s puzzled look—“that’s my name for my father. He was always coming -through when I got in debt at college, hence the title. He’s a good old -scout, but obstinate as—as—” - -“—yourself?” Bull suggested. - -“Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits -the immovable obstacle—something busts. That was me. Without even the -last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama, -I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn’t have me suffer. He -supposed I’d presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just -for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So -here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the -result—pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future.” - -“Oh, shore!” The caliph—that is, Bull—was proceeding very cautiously. -“You’ll get a job in some bank.” - -“Don’t believe it. You see, I’d just come home from Princeton and had no -commercial training. Anyway, I’d rather work in the open, ranching, or -something like that. If I had a little capital, I’d buy in. As I -haven’t, I’m open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I’ve got no -experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I’m afraid -it’s pick and shovel.” - -The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was -spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull -proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job—in fact, it was on -the same _hacienda_ where he worked himself! Of course it had the -disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing -was certain but death and “requisitions”! And there was always the -chance of a scrap! He, Bull, wouldn’t advise any one to try it that had -too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one -might be launched into “Kingdom Come.” But for a man who liked action -and would take a fighting chance—so forth and so on. - -A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred -inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so—Bull did -not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic -outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken. -He had finished telling of Carleton’s death at the hands of the -Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his -_compañeros_ had assumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow -thrust out his hand. - -“Say, that’s fine, old man! I’d be proud to have you take me in. My name -is Nevil—Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?” - -“Whenever the train goes, an’ that’s be guess an’ be God. It’s billed to -pull out from Juarez this evening, but we’ll be lucky if it leaves -before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an’ start almost on -time. So we’ll go aboard to-night.” - -“What about clothes?” The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay -at his fashionable tweeds. “I can’t punch cows in these.” - -“Hardly,” Bull grinned. “You’d come out from your first bunch of pear -chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an’ we’ll see about -an outfit.” - -It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon -changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army -shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman’s hat, -his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better -advantage. Bull’s expression, looking him over, would have fitted a -match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her début. His -comment, “You’ll do,” would have surprised the recipient could he have -divined all of its implications. - -Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon -stopped him. “Here, you can’t do that!” - -“But you’re broke.” - -“I still have these.” He held out the tweeds. “How much boot do I get, -Father Abraham?” - -Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he -stood for his tradition. “Only vot iss on your feet. These ain’d much -good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade.” - -“You’ll chuck in that pair of chaps?” - -With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own -generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were -stowing away the _chaparros_ and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out -a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner -read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very -cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents. - -Gordon burst into a merry laugh. “Father Abraham isn’t on to real -clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York.” - - - - -XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT - - -Starting “be guess an’ be God,” the train left Juarez at five the next -morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull -had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by -the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first -“shoo-fly” around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over -the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could -never be obtained through a Pullman window. - -It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern -experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, -tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly -revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in -purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun -rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its -nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also -revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with -grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, -startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land. - -“Destruction’s the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys,” Bull -answered Gordon’s question. “You orter see them at it. They run the loop -of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, -then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, -spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. After cutting down -the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an’ yank a mile of it away -at a time. As wreckers, they can’t be beat, for in four years they’ve -completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property -that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty -years to build.” - -“Are they still at it?” - -The sudden illumination of the young man’s face so palpably expressed -hope that Bull had to grin. “Yes, farther south, where Valles is -fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it -pretty close. Still”—his nod went beyond the distant mountains—“it’s -pretty much all bandit out there. Now an’ then they attack the trains. -There’s allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap.” - -“That isn’t so bad.” - -Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to -the scenery. - -In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first -took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash -in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts -violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible -ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as -its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear -in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and -had his being. - -The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow -sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the -revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when -the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of -his hair. - -It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like -the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the -feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal -expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled -away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by -deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him -always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the -hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican -_haciendas_ did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the -scenery as such. - -“I’m glad we’re up here.” From the engine, puffing away at the head of a -dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far -to their rear. “I wouldn’t exchange this for a Pullman.” - -“Well, don’t imagine that you’re traveling second-class,” Bull grinned. -“I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it’s worth it. You’d -suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some _peon_ -spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it -an’ grin. Sure!” He answered the young fellow’s look of disgust. “That -is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you’re German or -English, or b’long to any other nationality that looks after its people, -you might resent it an’ get away. But, thanks to our Government’s -policy, it’s open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a -few, too, every so long.” - -“Would _you_ stand for that?” - -Bull shrugged. “Kain’t say, till I’ve been tried. But it’s good advice, -nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don’t like it, you’d better be -toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home. - -“Here, here!” he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on -a telegraph-pole. “Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t’other -day for plugging insulators. Besides, it’s waste. Every bullet is worth -a life—mebbe your own.” - -“Maybe his own!” Again Gordon felt the prickling hair—in fact, as they -rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that -failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a -few miserable _peonas_, ragged and half-starved, begging for _centavos_. -There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of -a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty -brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied -the details. - -Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of -war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! -That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets -from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish _hacendado_ -whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and -torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the -full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape. - -Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. -Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, -the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit -tortures! - -He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before -he was aware of it the sun’s great red orb sank behind a huge black -mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a -while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark -pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them -rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the -running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a -luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at -the station at midnight. - -“We’d better go right on,” Bull said. “We’d get no sleep here for the -fleas, an’ desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we’ll be into -the grass country an’ kin take a nap while the animals graze.” - -With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved -off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over -its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours’ more travel -brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and -Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, -just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in -chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. _Riata_ swinging in -rhythm with her beast’s stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, -took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully -as any _vaquero_. - -“Pretty neat!” Gordon exclaimed. “That boy can ride!” - -“You bet you!” Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, “Sliver -himself, that was born with a rope in his han’, don’t throw a better -loop than Miss Lee.” - -“_What?_” As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a -clear cowman’s yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon -exclaimed, “Why, it—it _is_ a girl! In this country do they usually -wear—” - -“No more ’n they do in the Eastern States,” Bull dryly filled in the -hiatus. “On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican -Catholic—they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p’ints. Ever -sence the revolution, Miss Lee’s been doing vaquero’s work, an’ what -kind of a job d’you reckon she’d make of it going ’round in skirts? If -you don’t mind, I’ll ride on an’ help her with that critter.” - -The light that had flashed over the girl’s face at the sight of Bull -spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and -sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an -impulsive feeling. - -“Oh, I’m _so_ glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully.” - -“_Home!_” And she was happy because he, “Bull” Perrin, the notorious -rustler, had returned _home_! Earth held no terror that could have sent -that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he -controlled his voice. - -“Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?” - -“Indeed, no!” She laughed, merrily. “They’re like two old hens ’tending -an orphan chick. But—well, you know a girl, even as independent as I, -must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone.” - -A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant’s eyes. His -sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch. -Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be -forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of -sin. The shadow marked a resolution. - -He spoke very gently. “I hope that you’ll allus feel that way.” Then, -with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: “But what are -you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for -this.” - -She laughed saucily up in his face. “Then it is due to me. I gave them -the slip. Who is—” She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up. - -Bull briefly sketched his history. “Young chap I found dead broke in El -Paso. He’s the right sort.” Perhaps because he divined the probable -effect on her feminine psychology, he added: “He’s from the East—college -man—wealthy family—turned out because he refused to marry a fortune. I -tol’ him you’d likely hire him.” - -“I would in ordinary times.” She looked at Gordon, who had now reined -in. “But I cannot pay regular wages just now.” - -“He’s willing to wait, like us,” Bull began. “He’s—” - -“—out for experience,” Gordon put in. “To tell the truth, Miss Carleton, -I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you’ll find me worth my board.” - -He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet -reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which -she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke -out with a comical little laugh. “If it wasn’t so nice, it would be -ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking -for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is -the matter with you?” - -She may have read the answer in Gordon’s eyes and resented the indignity -it offered her independence. Or the feeling underneath her sudden -stiffening may have rooted deeper. Be a young man ever so comely, a girl -ever so pretty, there will flash between them on first meeting the -subtle challenge of sex; instinctive defiance based through love’s -history to the far time when every girl ran like a deer from a possible -lover and only gave in after he had proved his manhood by carrying her -off. It passed in a flash, for, noticing her stiffen, Gordon reduced his -gaze to respectful attention. - -Subtle as it was, Bull had still noticed the by-play. “Looks like she’d -taken a down on him.” - -But even as the doubt formed in his mind it was removed by her laughing -comment: “I suppose I’ll have to stand for it. But you must be starving. -Let us get on to the house.” - -As they rode along, moreover, Bull noted certain swift, stealthy glances -with which she took complete census of Gordon’s clean profile, strong -jaw, deep chest, flat flanks; signs of a secret and healthy curiosity. - -“She’s a-setting up an’ taking notice.” He winked, as it were, at -himself. “I reckon, Bull, you kin leave the rest to natur’.” - - - - -XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT—IN SEVERAL WAYS - - -“Well, what do you-all think of him?” - -Bull’s question emerged from the thick tobacco reek which invariably -mitigated the severity of their evening deliberations. - -It pertained, of course, to the new recruit, concerning whose merits or -demerits Jake and Sliver had reserved judgment during this, his first -week. When they had come from supper straight to the bunk-house, Gordon -had taken his pipe and gone for a stroll around the compound, which was -never more interesting than when clothed in the mystery of a hot brown -dusk. The lights and fires, like golden or scarlet blossoms; the soft -brown faces glimpsed in cavernous interiors by the rich glow of a -_brasero_; the women’s subdued chatter; laughter wild and musical as the -cooing of wood-pigeons—all had for him perpetual fascination; and while -he sauntered here and there, looking, listening, the Three held session -on his case. - -“What do we think of him?” Jake slowly repeated the question. “It’s a -bit soon to jedge, but if he’s half as good as he looks, he orter do.” - -Sliver, however, was more critical. “Too darned nice-looking fer me. I -hain’t got much use for these pretty boys.” - -“_Pretty_ yourself!” Bull swelled like a huge toad with indignation. “He -ain’t no pretty boy! You-all orter ha’ seen him clan up that hotel lobby -in El Paso.” - -“A _ho_-tel clerk, an’ some bell-hops!” Sliver sneered. “Why, a good -cowman ’u’d jest about as soon think of hitting a lady. ’Fore I allow -him even a look-in with Lady-girl, he’s gotter show me. If you-all ain’t -afraid he’ll spoil, jest send him an’ me out together to-morrow.” - -“All right, señor, he’s your meat.” Bull’s grin, provoked by a sudden -memory of the thwack with which the hotel clerk had hit the lobby floor, -was veiled by tobacco reek that reigned beyond the lamp’s golden -glimmer. “Only, don’t chew him. Kain’t afford to have his scenery -damaged.” - -“Nary a chew,” Sliver agreed. “Twon’t be necessary. I’ll take him in two -swallows.” - -In this wise was Gordon apprenticed to Sliver for the period of one day, -to learn, in course thereof, such lessons in cow and other kinds of -punching as it might bring forth. When they two rode out, armed -cap-a-pie as it were, with rifles, saddle _machetes_, and a brace of -Colt automatics, in addition to the usual cowman’s fixings, it is -doubtful whether North America held a happier young man than he. Out of -the thousand and one lovers who had awakened to the knowledge that this -was their wedding-day, some might have been equally happy. But none more -so, for Gordon was also espoused—to Adventure, the sweetest bride of -real men. It may be safely stated that no bride ever surveyed her -trousseau with more satisfaction than Gordon displayed in his “chaps,” -spurs, guns, and _riata_. - -This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He -wasn’t in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the -point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted -himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction -that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting, -park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman’s lope. In fact, so -quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the -course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with -thoughts of Lee. - -“’Twon’t do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her,” he told -himself. “He’s gotter show me, an’ if he don’t—out he goes.” - -Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse, -on Gordon’s part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with -brutal roughness. - -“Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride -the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you’ll -have to try an’ look like a man.” - -Gordon stared. It wasn’t so much the words as the accent that -established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes -were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown -specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden -disappointment when he rode on. - -“_Santa Maria Marrissima Me!_” He swore to himself in sudden alarm. “Is -he a-going to swallow it?” But the next moment brought relief. Gordon -was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine. - -With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the -wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. “Calculated it would -get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He’s putting it up to me!” - -Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel, -there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he -began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of -riding. “Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank—” - -The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him -out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped -down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy -chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear. - -A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in -two words, “Poor McNab!” Sliver was almost as terse in describing his -defeat to Bull and Jake that evening. - -“Gentlemen, hush! He leaned over as I took my holt, grabbed me round the -waist from behind, straightened, an’ away I flew over his shoulder an’ -kem down spread-eagled all over the grass, plumb knocked out.” - -Returning to the combat: When Sliver gathered his shocked wits together -and sat up, Gordon stood looking down upon him, hands on his hips, -quiet, determined, yet with an inquisitive twinkle in his eye. - -Sliver answered the twinkle. “Say, that was sure a lallapaloo. I’ve -wrestled with bears an’ once choked a cougar till he was gol-darned -anxious to quit. But I draw the line at earthquakes. If you-all ’ll -please to tell how you done it, I’ll shake han’s an’ call it squar’.” - -“Done!” Gordon broke out in a merry laugh. “And I’ll promise, on my -part, never to ride like that again.” - -“For which I’ll be greatly obliged; that hippity-haw, side-racking gait -does sure get on my nerves.” - -Striking hands upon it, they mounted and rode on. - -They were heading for a mountain valley, enormous green bowl hemmed in -on all sides, that could only be reached by a single rough trail. -Watered by a running stream and knee-deep in lush grass, the difficulty -of approach and sequestration rendered it almost raider-proof. But as it -afforded pasture for barely a third of Lee’s stock, it was their habit -to send the animals out in relays to remain under charge of an _anciano_ -for a week at a time. - -As they rode along, Sliver’s secret satisfaction revealed itself in many -a stealthy glance. At first they expressed that feeling alone, but -presently there entered into them a leaven of doubt. Their way now led -along the foot of the hog’s back from the crest of which Sliver had -obtained his first view of the _fonda_ on the other side, the discovery -of which caused his first lapse from grace. The slight doubt was -explained by the thought that accompanied his glance upward at the -ridge. - -“He’s a fine upstan’ing lad an’ kin take his own part. But that ain’t -all. Supposing he drinks? We-all jest kedn’t stan’ for any young soak -around Lady-girl.” - -In view of his own shortcomings, his grave shake of the head was rather -comical. Nevertheless, it was quite sincere; likewise his emendation: -“’Course we wouldn’t have him no canting prig. He orter be able to take -his two fingers like a gentleman, then leave it alone.” - -Reining in suddenly, he asked, “D’you ever take a drink?” - -Gordon looked surprised. “Why, yes, on occasion. But you don’t mean to -say—” - -“Come on!” Sliver’s manner was quite that of the “mysterious stranger” -of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to -befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, “It’s a -fine chance to try him out,” cloaked certain strong spirituous desires. - -Quarter of an hour’s heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks -brought them out in the _fonda_ dooryard. From above Gordon had noted -its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His -eyes now went, first to the two _ancianos_, a wrinkled old man and -woman, who dozed in the shade of the _ramada_; then to the girl who -knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. -Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a -mule-train going up the cañon added the last touch, vividly raised in -his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker -colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of -their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With -unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window, -and set out a bottle of _tequila_. - -Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have -been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide -and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When -their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he -missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words. - -“She wants to know who you are an’ all about you,” he translated her -rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played -as large a part as her tongue. “She says her father an’ mother are about -ready to cash in. If you’ll stay here an’ be her man, you’ll stan’ right -in line for the _fonda_.” - -It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. “Cash in?—the _fonda_? Say! -You’re fooling?” - -Sliver raised his right hand. “Take my oath!” - -“Then _she’s_ fooling.” - -“Nary!” Sliver grinned. “She’s serious as a New England housewife in -chase of a bedbug.” - -Now Gordon’s merry laugh rang out. “Is this leap year, or does this sort -of thing go all the time down here? Her proposal calls for a priest, I -suppose, and a marriage license?” - -“Nary.” Sliver grinned again. “Ladies of her class get along very nicely -without them artificial aids to marriage. All she wants is for you to -settle down here with her to housekeeping.” - -“Why—but—” He still half believed that Sliver was joking; but, looking -at the girl, he saw for himself the smoldering flame in her dusky eyes. -This time his laugh was a little confused. “Please tell her that I’m -dreadfully sorry, that I appreciate the high compliment, and if it -wasn’t for the fact that I don’t expect to stay long in this country I -would give her nice offer my most distinguished consideration.” - -Any further doubts that he might have entertained would have been -effectually dispersed by her dark disappointment when Sliver translated. -A touch of pity mingled with his amusement; moved him to add, “I hope -that you put it nicely.” - -“Sure,” Sliver breezily answered. “I told her that you said for her to -go to hell.” - -“Oh, well”—Gordon recovered his breath again—“at least that puts the -whole business beyond further doubt.” - -“Don’t you believe it.” Sliver gave a third and last grin. “She says -that you-all kin always find her here if you happen to change your -mind.” - -“Now that’s very nice.” Really pleased under his amusement, Gordon -brought the little comedy to a graceful end. Unsnapping the leather -watch-fob that bore his initials worked in gold, he laid it in the -girl’s hand. “A fellow doesn’t get a proposal of marriage every day. -Tell her for a little remembrance.” - -“And now for another drink.” - -But as Sliver reached for the bottle Gordon seized his arm, and any -doubts as to his sobriety were removed then and there from the cowman’s -mind. “You’ve had two already, and I’m not going to stand by and see you -burn your stomach out. Come on, gol darn you! or I’ll hand you one.” - -His smiling good humor removed the offense. Nevertheless, the curious -brown specks were floating again in the blue of his eye. - -Sliver knew the threat was real. “Just this one?” - -“Well, if you’ll down it quick and come on.” - -With feelings that had hovered between gratification at Gordon’s -sobriety and regret for his own, Sliver drank, bade the girl “Adios,” -and mounted again. Standing in the doorway, her glance followed them, -enwrapping Gordon’s upright figure with its dark caress. Just as they -crossed the stream at the foot of the path, her face lit with sudden -remembrance. Turning at her call they saw her coming at a breathless -run. - -“Kain’t bear the parting,” Sliver interpreted the action. - -But his grin faded as he listened to her voluble talk. “She says that -four strange Mexicans stayed here last night. They didn’t belong to this -country, an’ they questioned her closely about the different haciendas. -They were ’specially curious about our horses. Us being gringos an’ her -Mex, they naturally concluded she’d be ag’in us, and they would have -been right but for the fancy she’s taken to you. So they opened right -up; asked all about the mountain pastures an’ whether we kep’ a close -guard. She says they was heading for there. While I go after ’em, you -ride like the mill tails o’ hell an’ bring out Bull an’ Jake.” - -That crude but strong expression accurately described Gordon’s progress -homeward. While his beast scrambled like a cat up one side of the -ravine, slid like a four-footed avalanche down the other, and streaked -like a shooting star up and down the long earth rolls, he learned more -of horsemanship than during all his previous years. Lee, who saw him -coming from the upper gallery above the _patio_, nodded her approval. -Such haste, of course, had but one interpretation—raiders; and by the -time Gordon dashed into the compound she was already mounted and a fresh -beast waiting for him. - -“They are up in the Cañon del Norte,” she answered his inquiry for Bull -and Jake. “Come on!” - -“You are surely not thinking of—” - -Before he could finish, however, she shot under the gate arch; was off -at a speed that kept him galloping his hardest to keep her in sight. Not -until she slowed down on the rough trail that led into the cañon, within -sight of Bull and Jake, who had just roped a foal for branding, did he -catch her. But it was just as well, for that which he would have said -came with more authority from the lips of Bull. - -“All right, Missy. There’s on’y four, so you don’t need to be skeered. -You kin go right back home with Gordon an’ leave us to take keer of -them.” - -“Indeed I won’t!” she exclaimed, hotly. “I’m going, too! I am! I am!” -She cut off his remonstrance. “I am! I am! _I am!_” - -It was the first time their wills had clashed. Bull glanced at Jake, who -shook his head—not that he required support or intended to waste time in -fruitless argument. “You mean that?” His glance, grave with stern -disapproval, came back to Lee. - -It hurt her. But though her lips quivered, she answered, doggedly: “I -do! I _won’t_ go back.” - -“Very well. We’ve no time to waste. Ride on while I cut this foal -loose.” But as she obeyed, with one flick of the wrist he roped her -above the elbows from behind. Then, in spite of angry protests that -ended in tears, he cinched her little feet from stirrup to stirrup. - -“Now take her home.” Handing the lead rope to Gordon, he leaped into the -saddle and galloped after Jake. - -Till they disappeared, Lee looked after, wavering between anger and -tears. Tears won. Bowing her fair head, she wept unreservedly for fully -a minute. Realizing then that she was gaining nothing but swollen eyes -and a red nose, she stopped crying and turned to Gordon with a little -laugh. - -“Isn’t this ridiculous? Please untie me.” - -But now she found herself gazing into the sullen face of a young man -who, through her, had been cut out of a real fight. He shook his head. - -“You _won’t_?” - -“No.” - -“Why?” - -“You’d go after them.” - -They looked at each other. Her eyes were now gleaming brightly above two -red spots; but he met their gaze with stubborn obstinacy. - -“You mean to say that you are going to take me home tied up like a veal -calf?” - -He nodded. - -Biting her lips, she looked at him again. “Do you realize, sir, that you -never set eyes on me till a week ago?” - -“Sure!” - -“Also that you are my hired man?” - -He nodded again. - -“Very well, you’re fired! Now untie this rope, then get off my land!” - -But even this was turned against her. “I don’t have to. I’m no longer -your servant. I’ll get off your land, yes—after I’ve delivered you at -your home.” - -If looks could kill, to use that hackneyed but still expressive term, he -would have died there and then. But they don’t, and, masking his own -disappointment with a hypocritically cheerful whistle, he turned his -beast and rode down the cañon, towing her behind. - -It was dreadfully humiliating, and, being a girl, she cried some -more—this time for sheer anger. But soon her tears dried and she fell -into deep musing. Soon a small smile restored its softness to her mouth. -Her voice, seductively pleasant, mingled with the tramp of hoofs. “Won’t -you _please_ untie me? The rope is hurting my arms.” - -He stopped, pulled her horse up alongside, and as he began to fumble -with the ropes she turned her head so that he could not see her smile. -It was transmuted into a flash of fury when, finding the rope a little -loose, he drew it tighter. - -“I thought you were a gentleman!” she shot it viciously at his back as -he rode on. “Gentlemen don’t tie up ladies!” - -“Ladies don’t fire men for obeying orders. You needn’t think I’m -enjoying this. Just because you shoved in where you were not wanted, I -have to go back.” - -She did not like that, either. What girl would? Once more she bit her -lip, yet, for all her anger, a touch of respect mingled with her -resentment. Concerned principally with his own disappointment, he rode -on without looking back and so missed the little persistent wriggles by -which she gradually freed one hand. Soon she was able, by leaning -forward, to reach and draw her saddle _machete_. Indeed, she worked with -such caution that he got his first warning when, with one slash, she cut -the rope between them. By the time he had swung his beast around she was -going like the wind back up the cañon. - -Her mocking laughter came floating back. - - - - -XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - - -Shoving rapidly into the mountains, Sliver ascended with the trail in a -couple of hours through upland growth of _piñon_ and juniper to the -height of land, a pass riven by earthquake or subsidence between twin -jagged peaks, from where he overlooked the valley pasture. - -Like a great jade bowl, bisected by the silver line of a stream, its -wide green circle, miles in diameter, lay within a broad ring of purple -chaparral. Over its surface black dots were scurrying toward the corrals -at the northern end, and under Sliver’s glass these resolved into horses -that were being rounded up by four Mexicans; for he could see their -peaked _sombreros_, tight _charro_ suits, even at that distance. Turning -the glass on the _jacal_, a rude hut of poles and grass thatch near the -corrals, he looked for Pedro, the _anciano_. - -“Poor old chap! they’ve sure got his goat.” While clucking his -commiseration, however, he shifted the glass to a patch of white on a -near-by tree, and it immediately resolved into the old fellow’s blouse -and _calzones_. “No, they’ve just tied him up. Then these ain’t no -Colorados. It’s Felicia’s gang, all right, all right.” He added, -chuckling, “Four nice little raiders in a pretty trap, along comes Jake -and Bull, then there was none.” - -And trapped they were. Except where the stream slipped out over a -precipice between two narrow walls, the mountains rose sheer around the -Bowl, unscalable save where the trail rose by precarious zigzags to -where Sliver held the pass a thousand feet above. At few places was it -possible for two horsemen to ride abreast. At that point there was -barely room for one; if necessary, he could have held it, alone, against -a score. But it was not. Watching closely, he saw the raiders first -drive the horses into the corrals, then settle down for a _siesta_ in -the shade of the _jacal_. - -“Going to bring ’em up at sundown,” he muttered, “in time to make the -first run by night.” - -So certain he was of it that he did not scruple to take a sleep himself; -cat-napped, with occasional squints down into the valley up to the -moment that he was awakened by the hoof-beats of Jake and Bull’s beasts. -The glass then showed the raiders working the horses out of the corrals. -As the herd thinned out to single file at the trail, one man took the -lead; a second and third fell in at even distances; the last brought up -the rear. - -“They know their business,” Bull commented on the manœuver. “It’s easier -to keep ’em moving.” He grimly added: “And easier for us. The line will -string out for a quarter-mile, so I’ll go down that distance an’ hide in -the chaparral. Let the last man pass me before you hold up the first. -Then, while one of you keeps him covered, t’other can take away his -tools. I’ll keep ’em moving on up till you’ve got the other three.” - -While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By -that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and, -peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow -black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear, -above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another. -Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see -the leader’s face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral -Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. Somewhere, -though he could not place it, he had seen the man before! He was still -puzzling over it when Jake’s command rang out in Spanish: - -“Hands up!” - -The leader looked and complied, persuaded by the black muzzles, wicked -eyes, that looked down from the rock above. The second and third men did -try to turn, but were blocked by the file of animals. An attempt to pass -would have sent them down, bounding from level to level to the floor of -the valley below. The fourth man swung his beast around only to find -himself looking into Bull’s rifle. So while Jake covered the operation -from above and Bull from below, Sliver disarmed and bound the raiders. - -After the captives were arranged in line under a _copal_ tree upon a -little plateau, where the trail began to fall downhill on the other -side, Bull stood frowning down from his height on the man whose face had -aroused that haunting memory. “I’ve a hunch that I’ve seen this chap -afore.” - -He would have been more certain of it had he noticed the fellow’s look -of recognition and fear only a moment before. But now his ugly -countenance was veiled in that ox-like stolidity which a Mexican _peon_ -can so easily assume. He shook his head in dull negation to all of -Bull’s questions. He did not come from any of the neighboring -_haciendas_! They had never met before! His _pais_ was far—it might have -been anywhere in a thousand-mile circle implied by the wave of his hand. - -“Yet I could swear to him.” Bull looked musingly at Sliver. -“Pock-marked, too. Where have I seen him afore?” - -Sliver shook his head. “Can’t prove it be me. All _peones_ look like so -many peas in a pod; some mebbe a bit uglier than others; an’ pock-marks -ain’t no distinction with two-thirds of ’em pitted like a -nutmeg-grater.” - -“That ain’t the question before the house, neither,” Jake put in. “All -I’m bothering about is whether to hang or shoot ’em. Hanging is what I -was brought up to, but shooting’s more fashionable down here. I’d allow -they’d likely prefer it.” - -“Shooting’s too good for ’em.” In a spasm of virtuous indignation, -Sliver shook his fist at the captives. “Hanging’s slower an’ hurts a -heap, an’ if it gets about that the gent that meddles with our stock is -in for a slow, choking they ain’t a-going to be near so careless.” - -“There’s something in that,” Jake conceded. “An’ this copal’s got nice -stout limbs. We kin use their own riatas, an’ that’ll be what the -Tombstone editor used to call ‘poetic justice.’ Hanging goes.” - -Bull was still staring at the raider, but, taking his consent for -granted, they proceeded to fit the _riatas_ around the prisoners’ necks. -Jake had, indeed, thrown the slack of the last over a bough when there -came a rattle of stones and scrape of hoofs on the trail below. Grabbing -his rifle, he slid with Bull and Sliver, each behind a tree. One second -thereafter their guns were trained on the spot where the trail debouched -on the plateau. - - -Meanwhile, with Gordon in pursuit, Lee had led the race into the hills. -Her blood mare was the fleetest animal she owned and, had she chosen, -Gordon would have soon dropped out of sight. But she contented herself -with just holding a lead. - -Unaware of this, Gordon made repeated attempts to catch her with sudden -bursts of speed. Perfectly aware of it, on her part, she would wait till -his horse’s head almost touched her leg, then shoot ahead with a little -laugh. Her face, looking back at him, was hard as her laugh—eyes bright -and shining, nose contemptuously tilted, mouth one scarlet line. - -To be defied, drawn on, mocked, and teased with low, derisive laughter -is not a situation that any man loves. But if thoroughly angry, mad -clear to the bone, Gordon’s face revealed only dogged hope. For Chance -was riding with him. If Lee’s beast slipped or tired. If she were a -second late with the spur. One of the three was fairly certain, and the -belief set a gleam in his eyes that caused her a quiver of apprehension. - -“Oh, he’s mad enough to beat me!” she told it to herself. “I wonder if -he would.” - -Nevertheless, every time she looked back at that dogged face she felt a -sense of security. With raiders at large, it was just as well to have -him around! The thought was in her mind when, with him only a few feet -behind, she shot over the edge of the last steep out upon the plateau. - -“Oh, my _goodness_!” It burst from her in sudden fright. - -The Three, of course, were out of sight. The natural droop of the -_copal’s_ outer branches hid the halters, and she saw only the four -raiders, unevenly grouped, and three rifle-barrels aimed from behind the -tree. As she reined her beast back on its haunches Gordon swung his -animal sideways between her and the raiders, and, quite shamelessly, she -accepted the protection. - -“Beat it quick!” - -Already he had pulled his gun, and but for the fact that Bull just then -stepped out in the open the question of hanging or shooting would have -been decided for at least one of the thieves. As it was, his readiness -served one purpose—reduced the heat in Bull’s eyes. - -“Put up your gun, Son, the job’s done.” Pointing at Lee, he sternly -inquired, “But what’s _she_ doing here?” - -Now fright, plus Gordon’s chivalrous behavior, had driven the last -vestige of anger out of Lee. She spoke before he could answer. “Don’t -blame him. He did his best to take me in.” - -“Then who shall I blame?” - -“Me!” The coals of her anger sent forth a last flash that was -immediately quenched by her mischievous smile. “Or blame yourself for -leaving me the machete. I wiggled and wiggled till one hand was free, -then cut the rope.” - -Combined with the smile, her little illustrative wriggle completed his -rout. He turned to hide a grin, but was betrayed by his shaking -shoulders. Noting it, she flashed with feminine quickness from defendant -to accuser. She pointed at the halters. - -“_What are you going to do?_” - -Sliver and Jake had now come out. The former answered, “We was jest -about to bump ’em off, Miss.” - -“What? _Hang_ them?” - -“Now look a-here, Lady-girl!” Sliver burst forth in indignant -remonstrance. “Didn’t we catch ’em red-handed? An’ d’you allow we’re -a-going to let ’em loose to try again?” - -“But _hang_ them? Just for stealing? Of course, if they were Colorados, -but—” She stopped, clasping her hands in sudden fear. “Oh! they killed -him—poor Pedro?” - -“Nary; jes’ tied him up,” Sliver quickly reassured her. “I seen him -wiggling through the glass, an’ the big thief, there, says they didn’t -harm him.” - -Sighing with sudden relief, she returned to the charge. “Then if they -spared _him_, why are you going to kill _them_?” - -“Look a-here, Missy,” Bull now intervened. “’Twas agreed between Benson -an’ all the hacendados to make an example of captured raiders. If you -once start letting ’em off, there won’t be a head of stock left in all -this country at the end of a year. That was why I wanted you to go back, -an’—” - -“I’m glad that I didn’t.” - -Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian -stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in -their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not -preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is -universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the -pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish. - -They were poor _hombres_ with families back in their _pais_ reduced to -the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they -would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted -to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For -themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there -would be an end! But their women? And the little _niñas_? These would be -left in continual suffering! - -Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep -instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she -began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women. -Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been -duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and -so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing -into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing. -Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and -reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they -related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces, -leaving them soft and human. - -Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk _jacales_ with their -brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands -for their men’s return; their small, nude children playing in the hot -dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great _vaquero_, -roping chickens and cats with a string _riata_, then dragging them, -captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by -the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It -was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow. - -“This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They -were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us -might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would -you feel?” - -“_Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!_” -She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the -prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at -Sliver, who looked away. - -A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and -beyond the pleasant span of to-day’s existence the old rustler life of -yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was -now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely. -But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of -each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las -Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they -looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish -grins. - -“Under the same circumstances,” Bull answered, slowly and truthfully, -“_we-all ’u’d expect to hang_. But if you feel different”—his glance -interrogated Sliver and Jake—“it goes as you say. On’y, if you let ’em -go, we’ll have to run ’em out of the country in fairness to the other -haciendas.” - -“Of course.” Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. “We’ll take them home -now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out.” - -This settled, and while Sliver rode on down into the valley to free the -_anciano_, Bull and Jake cinched the thieves securely in their saddles. -Then, driving them and the horses ahead, with Lee and Gordon following, -they started down the trail. - -Now the spectacle of four men trussed for hanging is not to be seen -every day—let us say, on the streets of New York—and though Gordon had -looked on with breathless interest, he could hardly believe that the -business would have been carried to a conclusion. - -“Do you really think they would?” - -Lee looked at him in surprise. “Of course! You know Valles has issued -orders for hacendados to shoot raiders on sight; that is”—she added it -with a little sigh—“all but his own.” - -Her tone was so casual, he felt convicted of vast and unlimited -greenness. But where, according to the lights under which he had been -raised, he ought to have suffered a severe revulsion, he actually -experienced a thrill. This juxtaposition of life and death, the violence -and quickness with which events rang their changes, somehow stripped -away the veils from the riddle of existence, reduced its complex terms -to their basic factors. Here in the mountains, desert, plains, they were -very simple—to eat well, sleep well, fight well, and die well, even as -these thieves, comprised the whole duty of man. The thrill recorded his -acceptance of the terms. - -While they were riding down and down the sun lowered its great crimson -orb till it hung, transfixed, on a distant peak. The mountain steeps -above, spurs, and ridges beneath, were washed in its dying crimson. Deep -purple filled the hollows; faint violet clothed the distant plains. Over -all a cloud-flecked sky spread its parti-colored glories. Mountain and -plain, cañon and deep ravine, it was a scene infinitely wild, infinitely -beautiful, and as he looked over it all Gordon took his breath in a deep -sigh. - -“This is life! I hate to leave it.” - -“Leave it?” If Lee’s surprise was assumed, it was exceedingly well done. -She went on, with a low laugh: “Oh, I see! Papa wins out. The prodigal -will return to marry the beautiful heiress and live happy ever -afterward.” - -“Who told you? Oh, Bull, of course. Now that comes of owning a blabbing -tongue. Confound him! Well, since you want to know, I won’t. In my -present mood, New York is the last place in the world I want to see.” - -“Then you have tired of us—_so_ soon?” - -“Or you of me? You forget—_I’m_ fired.” - -She noted the subtle accent, and equally subtle was her reply. “Why, -yes, so you _were_.” - -Then, looking at each other, they both laughed. - - - - -XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE—AND IS “DOGGED,” IN TURN, BY LEE - - -Midnight saw the prisoners safely bestowed in a ’dobe that had served -the old Spaniard, Carleton’s predecessor, for a jail. During the -remainder of the night the Three stood guard in turn and Gordon, who -relieved Sliver at daybreak, was still at the door when Lee came out of -her bedroom on the upper gallery. - -Goodness knows she was pretty enough in her man’s riding-togs, but now a -flowing kimono added the softness and mystery a man loves best in a -woman. As she moved forward to the rail and stretched, looking off and -away to the mountains, the loose sleeves fell away and Gordon obtained a -distracting glimpse of polished arms, small white teeth, in a round red -mouth, all set in the blazing gold of her hair. Seeing him, she cut off -the yawn and smiled. - -“You must be dreadfully hungry.” Her clear call floated across the -compound. “Come to breakfast. I’ll send Miguel to keep watch.” - -She was already seated at the table under the _portales_ when he came -in, and as he took his seat Maria, the smaller of the two house -_criadas_, reported the Three as being still lost in sleep. - -“The poor fellows!” Lee commented, distressfully. “They must be dead. -Don’t awaken them.” - -Thus, after the crowding events of the previous day, which included a -fist fight, proposal of marriage from one girl, wild chase after -another, a bandit raid and lynching-party, all rendered more impressive -by the dark ride through warm, mysterious night, Gordon now sat -_tête-à-tête_ with his pretty employer. - -The _patio_, with its arched _corredors_, cool as a grotto under -flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the -_arbol de fuego_; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a _criada_ down -on her knees rubbing _tortilla_ paste on a stone _metate_; the soft -stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these -helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee’s -small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and -gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came -still others. - -Two brown girls, who stood twisting their skirts in the gateway, moved -forward at Lee’s word. - -“They wish to take my advice about following their lovers to the wars,” -she summed for him their Spanish. “I explained the risks of hunting them -among twenty thousand revolutionists, and advised them to wait till they -came home. But they say that is too indefinite. They may be killed, and -there is no one to marry them here but the _ancianos_, and they already -have wives. So they are going—to join the rag and bobtail in the wake of -the revolution.” - -After the next client, a wrinkled old woman, had followed the girls out, -Lee burst out in merry laughter. “She was telling me of a miracle that -occurred at the funeral of her brother, who worked for William Benson. -It appears that he had only his dirty cotton calzones to be buried in, -so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson. The poor old -fellow had been reduced by sickness to a rack of bones, and you could -have rolled him in it like a blanket. And here came the miracle! The -weather, you know, was exceedingly hot last week, and instead of burying -him at once they waited till some relatives from a distance had arrived. -And when the coffin was opened for them to take a last look—lo! the -miracle! - -“‘For Saint Joseph,’ she said, just now, ‘had wrought a most wonderful -thing, señorita. Whereas Refugio had lain in the señor’s clothes like a -nut in a withered shell, he was now so large and handsome they fitted -him like his skin!’” - -He laughed so heartily she was drawn on to tell him more, and pleased -herself thereby as much as him. For to be really happy, a girl must have -exercise for her tongue, and with all their genuine devotion the Three -offered but a limited field for conversation. Naturally laconic, their -communications touched principally upon flocks and herds; and holding, -as they did, the traditional frontier viewpoint concerning Mexicans—to -wit, that they ranked in the scale of creation below the Gila -monster—they shared neither her affection for, nor understanding of, her -brown retainers. - -But Gordon, with his quick and reciprocal feeling, made an ideal -listener. From the “miracle” she ran on with anecdotes and happenings, -some quaint, others amusing, several tragic, that revealed with a -vividness beyond the power of description the mixture of love and -treachery, simplicity and savagery, ignorance and idealism, religious -faith and gross superstition, that go into the making of a Mexican. -While she talked and he listened, there was established a community of -feeling which was destined to produce immediate results. - -“What is it, Maria?” Pausing, she looked up at the _criada_ who had just -carried the prisoners their breakfast. - -“They wish to speak to me,” she translated the girl’s answer, “alone. -They say it is very important.” - -“Better let me go with you.” Gordon rose. “I can wait outside.” - -“Surely.” She accepted, at once, his offer, and when, moreover, he -followed in after Miguel opened the prison door, she offered no -objection. - -Neither did the raiders—for reasons that quickly developed. “It matters -not, señorita.” The man whose face had caused Bull such disturbance -shrugged his indifference when Lee explained that Gordon spoke no -Spanish. “’Tis of the others, your servants, I would speak.” - -While crossing the compound she had puckered her smooth brow over the -mystery—without gaining any inkling to break the force of the -communication. While the fellow ran on, hands and shoulders helping out -his torrential Spanish, Gordon saw her expression pass through surprise, -incredulity, doubt, finally settle in deep concern, when, with emphasis -that carried conviction, the other three testified to the truth of their -fellow’s words. - -“I— Oh, do you know what they say?” Distressed, she turned to Gordon -with blind instinct for help. “I really don’t know whether I ought to -tell you. It so dreadfully, pitifully concerns our poor friends. You -have been here such a short time, yet—I feel that you can be trusted. -They say—” - -But the tale, as elaborated and filled in by Gordon’s cross-examination, -is best summed. Not for nothing had been Bull’s “hunch.” The haunting -face fitted the _charro_ who had held their horses that day at the -_jefe-politico’s_ gate in Las Bocas. When the Three failed to return -with Carleton’s horses, that astute person—the “wicked one” of -yesterday’s talk—had sent out others. In return for the _señorita’s_ -great kindness in saving their lives—but principally, if the truth be -known, because they feared to be sent out under convoy of Sliver and -Jake—they wished to make grateful return by warning her against these -evil ones; these wolves in sheep’s clothing that had slunk into her -fold! Followed a recital of their border raids that lost nothing by -reason of the details being filled in from imagination! They were -terrible _hombres_! _Muy malo_! greatly desired by the _gringo_ police -for dreadful crimes! - -“Don’t you suppose they are lying?” Gordon suggested. - -She shook her head. “Their story is too literal. When a _peon_ lies, he -goes the limit. Some terrible tale of atrocious murder and torture would -be the least; something beyond mere banditry, which is scarcely a crime -in their eyes. Then it is corroborated by a lot of little things. You -know they were riding my horses yesterday and were differently dressed, -yet this man described their horses and clothing as he saw them in Las -Bocas, just as they were the first day they came here. And do you -remember how they looked at one another yesterday when I said that any -of us might have done the same thing?” - -Gordon nodded. “They did look queer, and do you recall Bull’s answer? -‘Under the same circumstances, we-all ’u’d expect to hang.’ He spoke so -slowly, looking at the others, and they both nodded.” - -“Then see how they came here—started up, as it were, out of the ground. -In Mexico one doesn’t ask strangers embarrassing questions. It would be -like throwing stones at random in a city of glass. But if they stay with -you, one generally learns something of their past. But theirs is wrapped -in mystery. I know no more of them than on the day they came. It is -probably true.” - -Her tone was quiet, indeed so casual in its acceptance of the fact that -Gordon wondered. In El Paso he had been greatly impressed by the -knight-errantry of the Three in espousing the cause of a lonely girl. -During the last week he had seen for himself their simplicity of heart, -rough kindliness, genuine devotion; and now this land of surprises had -confounded him again with its juggler’s changes of good and evil. These -kindly fellows were, after all, cattle-rustlers, but one remove from -bandits. - -To him it was a most astonishing situation. In New York, where folks -were sharply divided into the sheep and the goats, it would have been -easily solved; one would have merely rung for the police. But here, -where everything seemed to go by contraries, anything might happen. -Accordingly, he looked at her and waited. - -But she did not answer his unspoken question. She was looking at him, -yes, with wide, distressed eyes. But he felt, without understanding, -that she was looking across that queer situation. He had a sudden, vivid -suspicion that he was on trial in her mind instead of the Three. He was -certain of it when she spoke. - -“What would _you_ do?” - -Ten days ago he would undoubtedly have viewed the case under his -previous lights and have pronounced it one for the police. Now he -answered from the larger charity that belonged to the land: “You -remember what you said yesterday and repeated a moment ago—under the -same circumstances we might have done the same thing? It isn’t what they -_were_; it’s what they _are_ that counts.” - -“Oh, I _knew_ you would say it!” She impulsively thrust out her hand, -and as the small, firm fingers locked with his in a strong grip, he knew -that not only had he emerged victorious, but also that his answer had -established between them a real bond. Eyes shining, she ran on: “They -saved my life, helped to nurse my father, have been so kind and good and -dear! If they had been the vilest criminals it would make no difference -to me. They are my people, my _men_!” - -“Of course they are!” Gordon cordially agreed. “Now what about these -fellows? What will you tell them?” - -Doubt clouded her shining enthusiasm. “I don’t quite know. What do you -think would be best?” - -“The truth. If what they say is true, and we believe it is, they can’t -be bluffed. But it won’t do to have them believe you knew nothing of -this. I’d hint that though you were not acquainted with the details, you -were perfectly aware of your servants’ past, but that they are now -leading honorable lives. Clinch it by adding that you hope they will do -half as well with their chance.” - -“Fine!” Her face lit up again, and when, having put it all into Spanish -for the thieves, they went outside, she thanked him for the counsel. “I -knew you could help me. Now just one more thing—this is all between you -and me. No one else must ever know—especially them.” - -“We’ll forget it ourselves.” - -Once more her small cool fingers locked with his, and, smiling brightly, -she went back to the house, leaving him to resume his guard till the -prisoners were taken away by Sliver and Jake. - -After they were gone there entered into Gordon’s mind a small doubt. -Supposing the raiders talked? Spread their report of the Three through -the desert country? It remained, that little doubt, like a thorn in the -side till it was drawn by Sliver and Jake when they returned the -following night. - -“We’d calc’lated to hand ’em over to the vaqueros at Hacienda El Reposo, -an’ have them chase ’em beyond their bounds,” Jake explained. “But at -the railroad we ran into a Valles colonel that was drumming up recruits. -He grabbed ’em offen our hands that quick they hadn’t time to kick.” - -“By now,” Sliver added, “they’re three hundred miles south on their way -to death an’ glory.” - -“But the little girl mustn’t know that,” Bull’s heavy bass rose in -caution. “She was that sot on returning ’em to their women and children, -it ’u’d half break her heart.” - -“Not a whisper,” the two agreed, but Sliver added, with a chuckle, “Alle -same, they’ll stay put an’ trouble her no more.” - -Inwardly Gordon echoed it, “They’ll trouble _you_ no more.” - -While the others were away Bull had also been doing some thinking, and -after Gordon went out for his evening stroll through the compound he -laid the results before them. “Say, I’ve placed that chap.” - -“Which chap?” - -“Fellow with the pock-marks. D’you remember the mozo that held our -horses at Don Miguel’s gate?” - -“No-o-o—” Jake began, but with memory thus stimulated Sliver recalled -him. - -“Julius Seize-her! you’re right!” As the possibilities of the late -situation flashed upon him he gave a low whistle. “What an escape! We’ve -had some close calls in our time, but none to beat it. ’Twas lucky he -didn’t recognize us, for he’d sure have peached, an’ I wouldn’t have -Lady-girl to know for a cold million.” - -“Nor me,” Jake added. “But it ain’t likely—now.” - -“Thank God for that!” Sliver exclaimed it with almost religious fervor. -With deep thankfulness Bull repeated it in his mind. - - - - -XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - - -“Ain’t that queer?” - -The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank -bench in front of their ’dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to -smoke in the house, they preferred it there—partly through a rooted -instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the -natural enemy of “Lady Nicotine,” regarding her always as a formidable -rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the -compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver’s remark broke -the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who -sat in the doorway of a ’dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of -three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile. - -“Ain’t what queer?” Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through -the warm air. “There’s so many queer things down here I’ll have to ask -you to come again.” - -Sliver nodded at Gordon. “Ain’t it odd how he cottons to them little -Mexes? To me they’re no more’ n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat -up night afore last with a sick one?” - -“No-o-o-o!” Jake’s surprise knew no bounds. - -“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat -there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he -did.” - -“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the -country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown -b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n -ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl -likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good -daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s -what they’re all a-wanting.” - -“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at -him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well -raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But -though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I -ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make -her sit up an’ take notice!” - -Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly—friendly as a brace -of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling, -evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like -clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing -an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as -you say—there’s nothing doing.” - -Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his -disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. -“Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As, -rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: -“I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while -I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that -clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.” - -“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this -month—once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was -rumored raiders had been seen around her _rancho_; now beca’se he wants -advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you -think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’—” - -“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I -uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as -did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there -ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the -table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean, -sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and -left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old -hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d -try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But -I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m -talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my -fingers is itching to get into a game.” - -“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood. -“I’ll soon be due for a night at the _fonda_.” He added, with comical -pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish -Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so -when I’m through.” - -“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted -to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to -the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull—” - - -Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his -first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s _rancho_. The low sun -filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid -gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red -masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on -Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited -altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe -wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his -musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack -till a voice broke the golden silence. - -“It will pay you, señor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the -eyes out of you with perfect ease.” - -As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in -outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, -emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing -it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile -warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull’s question. - -“Si, the señora is there. Ride on, señor. I shall watch here for a -little while.” - -Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull’s knee, the widow explained -the apparition. “That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He’s very -faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times -in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used -to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on -his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, -almost shot to pieces. After I’d nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got -his pardon from Diaz on condition that he’d stay with us and behave. -That’s over ten years ago. He’s been with us ever since, and that old -bandit reputation of his has been our best protection.” - -“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bull made hearty comment. “It takes a bad man to -scare a bad man. I’ll feel easier for knowing this.” - -The widow had already dismissed Terrubio’s woman, who served as her -_criada_, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull’s -supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and -constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her -skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. -Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of -the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at -last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch -him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, -though he introduced it then. - -“Two months he’s been here, ma’am,” he concluded his tale of woe, “an’ -nary a thing doing.” - -“Why, what did you expect?” Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter -and Betty joined her childish merriment. “Did you think it would happen -in the first five minutes? Now just consider—what good would she ever -have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at -first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out -at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a -lasting love. It’s good that he isn’t impressionable, for he’ll go down -all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn’t have liked Lee to fall -in love with him at once. But she isn’t that easy kind. The man that -gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they -act?” - -Bull gave the diagnosis—they appeared to like each other! Were very -friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn’t think of anything -else! - -The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst -out laughing. “Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men -are! That isn’t much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she -him, accidental, as it were?” - -Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the -stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the -question. “Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t’other day. -It lashed out an’ upset them an’ for a minute they was that balled up -you kedn’t tell t’other from which. Didn’t seem a bit anxious to let go, -either.” - -“That’s favorable,” the widow nodded thoughtfully. “Looking at it from a -distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It’s the -life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. -They’ll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up -like a wind, then—up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles -since Mr. Nevil came?” - -“A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an’ Ramon -was gone afore we kem in.” - -“It’s a pity he hadn’t been there. He’d feel the same about as we do, -and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t try to cut Ramon out. Let me see.” -She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. -“I know! I’m having a birthday next week. I’ll make a little party and -invite Ramon and Lee. You’ll see to it that Gordon brings her here?” - -“But then Bull won’t be able to come,” Betty’s small voice piped, -indignantly. “And you told me only yesterday that you weren’t going to -ask any one but him.” - -Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. “So I did, dear, and I’d -rather have him. But when Lee’s happiness is at stake we’ll have to give -up our own pleasure. And you mustn’t call him that. ’Tisn’t respectful. -Say Mr. Perrin.” - -“But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could—didn’t you, Bull? There, -you see!” Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with further -revelations. “Mother will be thirty-sev—” when the widow clapped her -hand over the small, traitorous mouth. - -She broke into a little, conscious laugh. “I know it’s silly. But was -there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won’t -acknowledge to a day over thirty.” - -“And you look five years younger than that, ma’am,” Bull gallantly -replied. - -He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus -consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, -warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, -electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, -forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or -flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids -and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more -personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations. - -In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to -sleep in Bull’s arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the -soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not -of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he -dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment: - -“’Tain’t for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own -hand.” - -He repeated it next morning, looking back on the _rancho_ from the last -rise. “No, Son, ’tain’t for you.” - -At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his -distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might -have read denial of his thought in both the child’s words and the -widow’s reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of -his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade -longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty’s words -with a sudden squeeze. - -“Mother, I just know he’s falling in love with you. Wouldn’t it be nice -if he asked—” - - - - -XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT— - - -The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow’s birthday. Not that -there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, -the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua—altogether too brightly for -a white man’s comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses -into the shade of the ’dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in -the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was -initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of “cat’s cradle” with a -loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house. - -At the sight of the two heads bent over the “cradle,” the girl’s face -lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. -“Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?” - -“Is this she?” Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. “I had -just about made up my mind to adopt her myself.” - -“Let me see—” Lee’s smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. “She’s -about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been -born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I -cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. -Oh, you needn’t blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was -loud in your praises. ‘Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio’s sick babe all -night. What a husband for some happy señorita!’” - -“That was very nice of Maria.” He laughed. “Only, I’m afraid there’s -nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow -up—somehow I lose interest.” - -It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected -far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines -that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself -for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. -The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then -by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the -parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe -housekeeping around the corner. - -“Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the señorita,” came a voice, -gruff with masculine authority. “Only we be married.” - -“But will they be married, Pancho?” piped a softer treble. - -“Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old ’Lupe -talking at the well. ‘Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman -with never a duenna to her name? ’Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood -runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, -this may not end without marriage.’ This is what old ’Lupe said to thy -mother.” - -Rich color swept from the roots of Lee’s hair down to her neck. She -hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; -then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky -sentences, she regained her composure. - -“Woman!” “Don Gor-r-r-don” was speaking again. “What is this—the -tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of -the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? ’Tis sour as swill, fit -only for swine.” - -“Then it should suit thee very well,” came the softer voice, with -unexpected spirit. - -“A-r-r-r-h!” It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which -Don Gor-r-r-don’s father resented household rebellions. “Thou wouldst -answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!” - -Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don -Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the -house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon. - -“Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you,” she teased him. “They -were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he -handed Dolores one on the mouth.” - -He laughed. “The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the -proper relation of the sexes.” - -This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again -and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the -saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased -surprise. - -Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value -these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician—the widow, for -instance—would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they -rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long -earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, -her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a -curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite -frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little -gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed -nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled—and -mishandled—man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the -wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private -chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded -being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends. - -He “lost interest in them after they grew up.” Indeed! Why, the -freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic -beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all -the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were -nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of -her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature’s -cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, -he did not know it. The “fire and tow” still lacked a “wind.” - -They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell’s -_rancho_ to the widow’s; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. “It -is rougher,” she said, “with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both -shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded -cañon past a country _fonda_. There I’ll show you the prettiest Mexican -girl in all Chihuahua.” - -“At the _fonda_? Then I have seen her.” - -Her quick look said quite plainly, “Oh, _you have_?” - -“Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should -say!” He added, laughing, “She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, -adding the _fonda_ as an extra inducement.” - -Her expression now said, “Oh, she _did_?” But as she looked away, he -failed to see it, got only her words, “And you had the heart to refuse?” - -“Sad to relate.” - -“And you haven’t even been to see her again?” - -“No time.” - -She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, -as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that -expressed—perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and -reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman -is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up -the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy -watch as they approached the _fonda_. - -“There’s your beauty—attired like a bride for her groom.” - -Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an _olla_ -of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a -handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from -under the _olla_, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy -mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and -shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe -bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty -picture overmuch for his companion’s taste. - -His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, “Perhaps she hasn’t -lost hope?” - -She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. -While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with -seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient -because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came -hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that -followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl -reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s fob -dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads. - -At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under -pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette, -she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s -monogram in gold. - -“Ah, _ha_! señor!” - -Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under -it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was -it the widow’s “wind” fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least -when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze -following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. -Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke: - -“I am yours!” - -After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling -after Gordon’s up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag -staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question. - - - - -XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - - -When they rode in to the _rancho_ that afternoon, the “wind”—that is, -Ramon—had not yet “blown in”; so there were no complications to -interfere with the widow’s first attempts at diagnosis of the “case.” -She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and -Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the -pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her -across to the veranda. - -“Promising,” she inwardly commented. - -A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered -temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and -white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow’s -bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark: - -“Ramon is coming.” - -“Yes? Isabel too?” - -An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills’s belief that the indifference -was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. “No, it was quite -accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along -their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and -show me to-day.” - -“Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy.” - -She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. “Never -missed a dab. William Benson’s a fool—though, of course, she may have -changed her mind.” This she proceeded to find out. “Your new man seems -nice?” - -“He is.” Followed a long description of Gordon’s night vigil with the -child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, “But—” - -“But what?” - -“He’s been going to see Felicia at the _fonda_. Sliver took him there, -one day, and he says that he has never been again. But—she’s wearing his -watch-fob in her bosom— Yes, yes! I know! A _peona_ will beg the shoes -off any man’s feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But—” - -Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously -made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in _peonas_’ bosoms, will -bear watching. “Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is -very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn’t he -twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh—” - -She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly -subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little -smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed. - -Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. “Oh, wouldn’t that be -just too lovely! Is it—settled?” - -The widow, of course, shook her head. - -“But it will be.” - -“How do you know?” She was quite willing to be convinced. - -“How do I know?” The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of -powder. “Just as if it depended on _him_. Just as if any woman—who -hasn’t a harelip—can’t marry any man she wants.” - -Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a “case,” Mrs. -Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so -self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an -honest person, she owned up with a hug. - -Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom -dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to -an equally keen if less discreet examination. - -Betty’s major premise agreed marvelously with Lee’s and was stated with -the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the -subject from different distances and points of view. “I like you—only -not so well as Bull. You’re nicer-looking, but—” A long pause emphasized -more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways. -“I’m going to marry him when I grow up—that is, if mother doesn’t beat -me to it!” - -“Any danger of that?” Gordon laughed. - -“You bet there is. Bull’s dead in love with her, and she—of course, she -doesn’t admit it, but _I know_.” - -“Well, well, isn’t that fine!” Gordon really meant it. “Congratulations, -I suppose, are not yet in order.” - -“I should say _not_!” Betty’s blue eyes widened with horror. “Don’t you -_dare_! I’m not too big, yet, to be spanked”—she wriggled, -reminiscently—“and when mother’s real mad she goes the limit. -Nevertheless, it’s true.” After a second calculating survey, she -concluded, “But if she grabs Bull, I _might_ marry you.” - -“If you only will,” he pleaded, “I’ll be _so-o_ good! Can’t we consider -ourselves engaged?” - -After a moment’s thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. “No, I’m -afraid not.” - -“Why?” - -“Because.” - -“Because doesn’t answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why.” - -“Because I’d only be disappointed again.” She added, with a little sigh: -“All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You’ll fall -in love with Lee.” - -“_I?_ With _Lee_?” His real surprise showed how little that contingency -had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of -apprehension colored his accent. “Now how do you figure that?” - -“Because you’d be a fool if you didn’t.” - -The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. “But—but, you -know, I am only her hired man?” - -“That wouldn’t count—if she liked you.” After another examination: “And -she might do worse. _Gee!_ if I were only a man!” - -“Yes?” he prompted. “If you were a man?” - -“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d—” - -But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her -mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. -Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with -plentiful food for thought. - -During the last two months he had seen Lee—riding the range, a pretty -lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in -her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a -girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the -sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it -with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there -something wrong with his head? - -Presently he gained an inkling—he had been wearing another’s colors! She -whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of -this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. -Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering -surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; -deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland -rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet—these and a -thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. -Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail! - -He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were -really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful -things! Come to think of it—Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! -He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant -tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the -gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the -upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding -her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall -dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the -course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the -earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not -belong. - -Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary -effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly -dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of -his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung -in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, -stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl! - -It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the -feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but -actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a -billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings -under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the -dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure -rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, -that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, -without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste. - -“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing -clothes!” - -“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.” - -Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of -course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, -badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under -all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she -reacted to it—though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who -had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam -still sparkled in her eye. - -“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind. - -She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.” - -“Oh! I’m _so_ glad to see you!” - -With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the -_corredor_, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, -giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, -aunts, cousins—goodness knows! the category might have embraced every -one of his _peones_ if she had not been warned by the deepening of the -young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go. - -“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You -are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.” - -“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she -managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr. -Nevil, our latest acquisition.” - -“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent -further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table. - -On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two -men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, -was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever -with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His -great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced -_sombrero_; the _charro_ suit of soft leather that so finely displayed -his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle—made such a -figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage. - -Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just -as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they -settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from -Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in -course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point -of view. - -“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the -outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, -without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our -troubles ourselves—because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not -try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside—but that we -should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your -throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living -on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and -nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like -careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in -order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, -señor”—he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug—“we should -fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’—as your -political speakers would say—to cut one another’s throats and run off -with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years. -We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have -done our best to make up the arrears.” - -So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think -your father must be a bit of a cynic.” - -“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In -your schools—I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your -big military academies—you teach that every American boy has a chance to -be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your -one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine -million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no -chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the -belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill -all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the -throats of those who come between us and again what your political -speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many -millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to -result. - -“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is -right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between -our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time -comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute -ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of -children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no -principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your -warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to -our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that -is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces -our _peones_ live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat -and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in -their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the -least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with -your system.” - -“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the -fire’?” - -For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application -of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?” - -“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange -ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the -foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested -billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective -countries, you can never turn them out.” - -Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set -back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its -ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a -detested commercialism, was not to be stayed. - -“Why did we do it? _We_ did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo -de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have -built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But -after him—Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his -cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them -out—now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed -Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time—we -shall fight.” - -From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let -alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee -returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In -fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she -addressed him half an hour later. - -“We are going for a little walk. You may come—if you choose.” - -He didn’t _choose_! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off -alongside the _charro_ suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face -displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common -to two creatures under the sun—to wit, a bull being played with the -_capa_ by a skilful _matador_ and a man under torture by a woman. - -When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here -the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with -him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had -first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of -a—well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet -under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a -respectable blaze. - -If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their -relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, -Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned -almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the -going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted -shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. -In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, -at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he -started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her -well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, -threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. -But never for a moment was she deceived. - -“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the -situation. - -With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at -the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer; -also the stiffness of the bows between the young men. - -A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her -inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction -not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into -her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the -door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, -thereby, from a correct judgment of results. - -“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I -wonder who will score to-morrow?” - -It was Lee. - -“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. -“You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.” - -There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode -away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note -that contained—at least so she said—the recipe for a liniment Terrubio -used on their horses which he had promised to Bull. - -Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the -curtains. “That’s downright cruelty,” she scolded. - -“Well?” Lee shrugged. “Didn’t he say, yesterday morning, that he didn’t -take any interest in girls after they grew up?” - -“But he does.” - -Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little -laugh, “I know it.” - -Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure—that is, -they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the -path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. “Oh, he’s going back -by the _fonda_!” - -“Ah-ha!” the widow mused. “Now we shall see.” - -She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee -routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after. - - - - -XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY - - -In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike. - -A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode -into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary -with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and -flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their -heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t -give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the -pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air. - -The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden -impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty -ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let -go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!” - -Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on—madder -than ever. Also—but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed -to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw the -_fonda_ lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly -reckless state. - -Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been -in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, -plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit -them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so -caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the -number shall never be told! - -In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed -up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget -it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the _fonda’s_ liquors less -than to her. - -A _peona’s_ life gravitates between her grinding at the _metate_ and -laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between. -Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was -making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on -the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down -from above. - -From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around -a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the -satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl -would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat -out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, -led his horse in under the shady _ramada_, then proceeded calmly with -her toilet. - -Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the -dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and -arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! -eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that -would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start -out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape. - -The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, -golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was -exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and -flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a -girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. -Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of -his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he -looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and -shoulders. - -Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the -cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled -two _copas_ of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him -in Spanish. - -“Salud y pesitos, señor!” (Health and a little money!) - -In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the -contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a _peso_ -note—even after he had filled and drunk again. - -A _peona_ refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had -he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was -not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his -years. But being absolutely ignorant of _peona_ nature, and in fine -fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and -chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs. - -When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a -_diccionario_ with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the -personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had -repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But -now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped -herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats. - -To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and -burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so -delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the -“long-haired _diccionario_” was in constant use. While her father and -mother dozed under the _ramada_ he consulted it about the scenery and -natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But -when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer -objects—fingers, eyes, hair—the lesson passed the boundaries of -etymology into the domain of love. - -He was well over that border before he realized it—how far he did not -guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” the -_diccionario_ answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action -to illustrate it. - - - - -XIX: A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the -cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling -like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a -binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in -that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both -the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the -“wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation—especially if the -party of the second part be of Latin blood—is apt to be disaster. Lee -was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up -and pressed down, last night’s consequences. - -With a girl’s keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and -had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, -that would have appeared ridiculous—besides, though she would not have -admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that _dreadful_ -girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself -for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had -ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited -chatter—Ramon’s family, _hacienda_ affairs, the scenery—while she dodged -like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing this -were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? Would -she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, -herself, what her answer might have been! But she _did_ know that she -would have let him speak. - -If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride—bolstered by irritation, -for with a woman’s illogic she charged her present plight to him—her -pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her -from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort -great as a physical strain. - -But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the -mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And -their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to -check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently -leaped over and swept all before it. - -A remark of hers concerning his father’s age precipitated the flood. -“Si, he has many years.” Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran -on: “Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he -but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on”—he paused, -then added the _tu_ of lovers—“on _thee_. If—” - -“Oh, Ramon!” she pleaded, in wild distress. “_Please_—don’t!” - -But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, -but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his -love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of -spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert—all -were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his -universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, -it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have -listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now—it filled her -with dismay. - -“Oh, you poor Ramon!” She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but -when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. “Oh no! -_no!_ Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played—” - -But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the -moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. “There is no hurry. I did not -intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou -hast always known it.” - -“Oh yes.” Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. “Yes, but—” Then -realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the -compromise. “No, I won’t answer now. Wait.” - -“If there be any one else—” His brow drew down over somber, threatening -eyes. - -“Oh, there isn’t!” She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she -repeated again. “There _isn’t_, Ramon!” - -“Bueno!” His face cleared. “Then I am content.” - -Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of -imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think. - -Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved -on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between -remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately -refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the cañon, -curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. -Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the -zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate. - -Their first view of the _fonda_ showed, of course, only the roof and -walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon’s horse -tied to a post of the _ramada_, then the young man himself leaning at -ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of -the “long-haired _diccionario_,” which was now being consulted in the -matter of hair and eyes. - -“The señor seems to be enjoying himself.” - -His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not -see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, -she watched from across the stream the girl’s head go up and meet -Gordon’s in a kiss. - -For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. -The chrome-yellow walls of the _fonda_, toned under the eaves by Time’s -green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a -greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed -brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which -knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of -it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have -carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an -audience—in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of a -deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just sat -her beast. - -In taking the last turn, Ramon’s horse dislodged a pebble, and as it -rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl’s -clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon’s glance of startled -inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet. - -“My God, she saw it!” - -Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change -wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had -assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. -Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole -world had gone to smithereens! - -“Competition is the life of love!” Mrs. Mills might have added—sometimes -its death. The “wind” had blown with a vengeance—from opposite ways. -Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon shivered. Though -only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and joined Ramon in -front of the _fonda_, it seemed to both a deathless age. - -After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, -and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the -girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee -stiffened and looked at Gordon. - -“I am glad that we overtook you. Señor Icarza has asked me to marry him. -You shall be first to congratulate us.” - -Gordon’s glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then—the -tricks fancy plays us! _Fonda_ and ravine faded into a glade in a Java -forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a -golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without -recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice. - -“I wish you all happiness!” - -The crash of Lee’s glass as she threw it among the stones brought him -back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the cañon. - -Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder. - -Gordon’s practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He -spoke very quietly. “We’d better catch her before she breaks her neck.” - - - - -XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - - -Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden -more recklessly. - -Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in -successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast -launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on -full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks -that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed -by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon and out upon the -plain. - -Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on -and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught -of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from -her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she -slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon’s, -to catch up. - -Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he -had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. “Little -Wicked One!” he called, coming up. “Have a care for my happiness if not -for your neck!” But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly -engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded -from his own. “Why, queridita? What—” - -“I want you to leave me now.” She cut him abruptly off. - -His big eyes widened. “After raising me to heaven would you plunge me -in—” - -“Ah no, no!” She impulsively thrust out her hand. “You have earned far -more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But—” - -“Si? But—” - -She gave him a little wan smile. “When you come to understand girls -better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a -thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the -cause.” - -“But—” - -“Ramon,” she looked at him with sweet severity, “if I had told you on -top of the mountain what I said back there—wouldn’t you have been -content?” - -“Assuredly! It was only—” - -“Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now—and stay till I either send -or come. It won’t be long—I promise.” - -“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!” - -Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his -beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off -to the north. - -His departure left her free to review the situation—with little -satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out—in a moment of pique -she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, -she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break -it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that. - -“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal; -accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable -_thing_, and now you’ll go through with it.” - -It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might -be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with -her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of -comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. -She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal—the chief, if -unconscious, cause of it all—was getting along; and though he was too -far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting -dejection. - -As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as—as she could have -wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a -personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests -and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely -places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would -tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden -aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening -to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly -and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her -reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his -rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds. - -“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but—no -greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated -up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.” - -For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by -open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a -vagrant inclination—even if the latter were based on a sense of -injury—might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance. -Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across -which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed -their hopelessness. - -“Poor girl!” he pitied her. - -“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction. - -Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of -Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her -heroic mood. “Our friends”—she nodded toward the distant buildings—“are -quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to -yourself.” - -He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence. - -At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the _patio_ gate, Lee did -cheer up a little—partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, -more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. -Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the -droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom. - -He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.” - -He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow’s recipe for -“liniment,” after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the -stable. It ran: - - “Dear Friend,—Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the - _fonda_ the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. - It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon.” In her - ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: “But there - is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep - him away from the _fonda_, I am sure things will turn out all - right.” - -Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own -pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was -something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the -signature “Your friend, Mary Mills.” Gordon had almost finished caring -for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after -carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, -he fished for further information. - -“Any one else there?” he inquired, nonchalantly. - -“Young Mexican,” Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive -curtness. - -“Ramon Icarza, I reckon.” Bull went innocently on: “He an’ Miss Lee were -almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of -him—” - -“No reason why she shouldn’t.” - -Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee’s horse to hide a -chuckle. “Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary—” he paused, reddening, -for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated -it with lingering delight. “Mary—was right. We’ve sure stirred ’em up. -On’y we’ll have to ’tend to Felicia at once.” - -His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia’s solution with the -characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper -that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake -and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light. - -“You-all never orter ha’ taken him there,” he charged Sliver. “Here we -go an’ import this young fellow at no end of trouble an’ expense, then -you herd him right into the arms of another girl.” - -“Aw! she don’t count.” Sliver excused himself. “She’s Mex an’ wild -girl.” He sagely added: “You see, I was that anxious to make sure he -didn’t drink. We kain’t have no young soaks ’round Lady-girl.” - -His solicitude drew Jake’s satirical grin. “You wasn’t looking for a -drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an’ wild—you damn fool, -don’t you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He’s -be’n there once an’ he’ll go again.” - -“If he ain’t stopped,” Bull qualified. - -“If he ain’t stopped,” Jake nodded. “An’ it’s up to you to do it.” - -“But how?” Sliver’s broad, round face struggled like a full moon in -clouds of helplessness. “How in the ’tarnal kin _I_ stop him?” - -“By ’quiring vested rights in the premises,” Jake nodded sagely. “If you -marry her he kain’t come ’round.” - -“_Marry_ her? _Me?_ Marry a _Mex_?” Sliver almost yelled it. - -“That’s what.” While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf -grin, Jake went on: “Anyhow, what’s your idee in shying an’ rearing -this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss ’n a colt at flying paper? Why, -other men rush for it like ’twas—” - -“Sticky fly-paper,” Sliver ungallantly supplied. “An’ once they’re -in—_good night_!” - -But Jake ignored the interruption. “You-all orter take shame to -yourself. Marriage is nature’s most holy an’ necessary ordinance. Don’t -all the preachers tell it? An’ what would become of the census without -it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an’ -thanking your stars that a girl can be found that’s damn fool enough to -take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an’ howling like a hungry -coyote.” - -While Jake thus orated, Sliver’s expression of obstinacy was leavened by -fleeting hope. “If you b’lieve all that—what’s the matter with you -marrying her yourself?” - -Jake’s thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. “I’ve no calling -for it. You see I’m that soft by nat’er any woman could crush my tender -feelings. But one glance at your brutal count’nance would tell even a -blind man that your wife would be kep’ in her place. Besides—was it me -that took Gordon up there?” - -“Quit your fooling,” Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of -the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his -cherished plan, he faced Sliver. “Yes or no—will you do it?” - -“No, I’m da—” - -“You won’t?” Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl, -knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of -corn fodder on which he was sitting. “You upset the beans we put to -b’ile an’ refuse to pick ’em up?” - -Almost as quickly Sliver’s knife took the lantern gleam, and as they -circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months -dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against -man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before -they could close, Bull’s bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great -hands sent them staggering back. - -“Cut it out! We can’t stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee.” -Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the -law. “You an’ us have ridden an’ fit together for many a year. So far -you’ve never failed us an’ I don’t believe you will. We brought this -young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an’ you’ve -sp’iled our game by throwing him in Felicia’s way. Now it’s up to you. -If you make good—we go on. If you don’t—there’s the trail.” - -He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked -only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife, -though, Sliver glared at Jake. - -“I’ll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the -range.” Addressing Bull, he went on: “Of course if it’s to help -Lady-girl, you bet I’ll go the limit. But what d’you-all expect? That -I’m a-going to cinch her with a priest an’ license?” - -“That’d be more loving-like; she’d appreciate it, too.” - -“Shut up, Jake! We don’t care so long as you acquire enough title to -shoo Gordon off. Here’s fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio ’u’d -sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of -course you’ll have to live out there for a whiles—mebbe till this Ramon -business is knocked out of Miss Lee’s head.” - -“What! An’ cut out the range?” Sliver exclaimed in horror. “Me hang -around there a-selling aguardiente to _peones_?” - -“What’s left after you get through,” Jake began, but was cut off again. - -“No, we can arrange the work so there’ll be plenty for you within easy -riding.” - -“So’s you won’t be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn’t -stan’ for that.” - -Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver’s answer transcends print. -He wound up with the complaint: “All right, I’ll go, but I see my -finish. I’ll die on Felicia’s grub.” - -“Couldn’t be any worse than Rosa’s,” Jake comforted. “You managed to -live on that.” - - -With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next -morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his -kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these -preliminaries, Sliver’s mien was rather that of chief mourner at a -funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left -him he even advanced a belated plea. - -“Don’t you allow we ked get some one else?” - -“With all the men in the country off at the wars?” Bull shook his head. -“Besides, no _peon_ could hold her down. She needs a strong hand.” - -“It’s either you or Gordon,” Jake added. “You’ll have to sacrifice.” - -Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind -the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee. -“’Tain’t going to be so dreadful easy,” Bull frowned thoughtfully, “she -being a girl and prejudiced. She’d hardly cotton to sech primitive -nupt’als as Sliver is likely to consummate.” - -“I she’d think not!” Jake looked his horror and scorn. “You’ll make a -mess of it. Better leave it to me.” - -Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on -the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact -at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret -love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won, -ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for -feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved -how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the -former’s service. - -“No, Missy, you ain’t a-going to lose him,” Bull answered, on his part, -Lee’s troubled question. “He’ll take care of things over that way.” - -“Well—” Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, “I hope he’ll be—happy.” -Then becoming conscious of Gordon’s gaze, she dropped her glance to her -plate. But not before he had read its meaning. - -“Why hadn’t this happened a week ago!” - - - - -XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - - -Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on -wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor? - -Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and -misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee’s flesh -during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy. - -Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman’s life is her feelings, and -if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a -certain mournful satisfaction—akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the -ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent -springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion -and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally -masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon -perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him -in a quiet, sisterly manner. - -A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between -desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of -which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has -to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine -precedent, returning for Lee’s sisterly solicitude more than the average -brotherly brusqueness. - -Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings -of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable. -Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with -neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place -her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon. -What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it. - -Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a _mozo_ -rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon. - -Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, “May I -come?” and though she returned a single line, “I’m coming to see Isabel -next week,” the flower had done its work. - -The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination -and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her -eyes that, without understanding, Gordon’s sulks gave place to pity. -Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a _mozo_ with a note to the -widow. - -Straight to the point the epistle ran: - - Dear Ma’am,—The young man, he’s a-moping like a moulting chicken - an’ Miss Lee’s that peaked and pale and down-hearted you’d - hardly know her. T’other day a _mozo_ brought her some sort of a - package from Ramon, and ever since she’s looked wild-eyed and - scared as a canary in fear of a cat. There’s something queer - going on. It wouldn’t take you more’n a minute to find it out, - and you owe us about a dozen visits, anyway. Couldn’t you take a - day off and come? - -She came, of course, the good, kind soul, with Betty, under guard of -Terrubio and the bandit reputation which gained so much from his weird -eyes. The gods and goddesses willed it that they fell in with Gordon -returning to the _hacienda_ at the close of his day’s work, and the -widow seized the opportunity like a skilful general. After permitting -Betty and Terrubio to ride on beyond earshot over the slopes that were -dyed a glowing apricot by the low sun, she opened on Gordon. - -“Now tell me all about it, young man.” - -He looked at her, surprised, then laughed. “You mean all that I would -have said if I hadn’t been ordered home that morning? All right. Of -course I don’t have to tell you that I love you madly, and if it wasn’t -for the fact that Bull would wring my neck, I should propose at once. -Really—” - -“Nice boy!” She laughed merrily. “To comfort your poor mother. It was -simply disgraceful the way you flirted with me, almost compromised me -with my own offspring. ‘I was just ashamed of your dreadful behavior, -mama,’ Betty told me, afterward, ‘trying to take poor Lee’s beau from -her.’ Nevertheless, I found it very encouraging.” - -“My mother?” He achieved an excellent example of that species of -cachinnation known as the “horse laugh.” Then, with sincerity of accent -and feeling that caused her a little blush, he ran on: “My mother, -madam, is more than twenty-eight. Yes, I said twenty-eight. Add to that -eyes as clear and young as—” - -“Make it Lee’s.” - -“As Betty’s. A fine, soft skin, pretty nose, figure—um! just right. -Why—” - -“Yes! yes!” She held up her hand, laughing. “But we mustn’t waste time. -You know I’m on your side. Tell me—what happened?” - -“That’s easy—she’s engaged herself to Ramon.” - -“What?” Her shriek of horror and surprise caused Betty and Terrubio to -look back. Her next question showed the keenness of her intuition. “Why, -whatever did _you_ do to her?” - -He told—of his anger, jealousy, pique, attempt to soothe his ruffled -vanity by flirting with Felicia. He told all with candor and humorous -insight into his own feelings that robbed the narrative of conceit. He -told even of the kiss and that Lee had seen it. “Though I don’t see how -that could have anything to do with her engagement, for she announced it -the next second.” - -“She sent him off within the next hour—with only a kiss of her -hand—hasn’t seen him since—nor communicated with him till the other -day—has looked like a frightened bird ever since.” She told off the -items with amused contempt. “How stupid men are! Why, it is plain as -day. He asked her to marry him, yes, on the way. How could she escape -after the way she had flirted? But she had either refused or held him -off. But when she saw you kiss—” - -“My God!” It burst on him. “What a fool I am! Why did I—” - -“Don’t blame, yourself. She was more in fault. The question is—not what -is done, but what to do.” - -“I had thought, at first, of quitting this to join Valles. It would be -lots of fun and I was so darned mad—” - -“And leave _her_ to _him_?” She looked a little scornful. “Why—” - -But he cut in. “You bet I won’t! He’ll never marry her—if I have to -carry her off.” - -“And I’d help you do it,” she warmly declared. “At present Ramon is all -right, and if you could put up, like preserves, so he’d keep, it -wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, he’s all right—but, so are the young of any -kind, a lamb or kid, little frog, tiny snake, and there’s nothing cuter -in the whole world than a baby pig. But after it grows up—good Lord -deliver us! - -“And it’s the same with Mexicans. They are the prettiest babies; nice -young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too -handsome to live just now. But after a while he’ll grow stout and lazy -from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks -like a scorched hide. Right now he’s so romantic he’d twang a guitar all -night under Lee’s window. After a while she wouldn’t be able to sleep -for his snores. Now he’d fly at her bidding. Later, she’d fly at his. -She would live behind bars while she was young; go without love in her -middle age, be tyrannized and bulldozed all the time.” - -“But do you think she would _really_ do it?” - -“Indeed, yes! She’s highly idealistic, and was trained by her father in -the old ideas. Now that she has given her word, it will take wild horses -to pull her from it—or wild men.” - -After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above -the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: “Now -listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he’s sensitive as -a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she’s -promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance -so much as strays in any one else’s direction, he’ll be ready to kill. -It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will -either break the engagement or give her cause. In other words, you must -force him to play your hand.” - -She continued, with a little deprecatory laugh: “I know it’s a low-down -trick, but it may stave off something worse. Before he would let Lee -marry Ramon, I feel sure Mr. Perrin would kill him.” - -A mischievous grin broke up Gordon’s grimness. “So we are not altogether -disinterested. We could never stand to see Bull get in bad.” - -She laughed softly, happily, looking away, and lapsed into silence which -endured while they rode up and over the last slope that laid the -_hacienda_ at their feet. - -Its walls and courts, _patio_, painted adobes, lay, a small city of gold -magnificently blazoned by the rich red brush of the setting sun. The -glossy crests of the shading cottonwoods flamed a deep apricot under a -sky that spread its glories of saffron, and cinnabar purple, and umber, -down over the horizon. All about them the pastures laid an undulating -carpet, violet in the hollows, crimson on the hills. From the stubby -chimneys soft smoke pennons trailed away till lost in the smoldering -dusk of the east. Up through the clear air came a soft cooing of woman -voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. - -The widow lowered her voice in harmony with the peace of it all. “It is -a great prize.” - -He nodded. “It’s beautiful, but—I’d love her as much in rags.” - -Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from -teasing. “Yet—a week ago you hardly gave her a thought.” - -He looked at her in naive wonder. “Isn’t it queer—how sudden it gets -you?” - -She nodded. “That’s the beauty of it.” - - - - -XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - - -As, in the seclusion of Lee’s bedroom that night, she and the widow sat -side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making -their night toilets, a “movie-man” would have given his head to -reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair, -filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these -may be left where they belong—behind the secure guard of Lee’s oaken -door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation. - -“So we’ve engaged ourself, have we?” As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went -straight to the bat. - -“Why—” Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked -her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. “Mary Mills! -_whoever_ told you?” - -“This and these would be enough.” The widow touched the girl’s pale -cheeks and shadowed eyes. “But I caught your young man, coming in, and -made him confess. So we got mad—because he kissed another girl, and took -it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little fool!” - -Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the -filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. “If it had been Phyllis -or Phœbe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn’t have cared. But—a -peona.” - -“Well, what of it?” Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the -widow went confidently forward. “She’s mighty pretty.” - -“But a _peona_! And you know _her_.” - -“Yes, and I know _him_—better than you do. Now look here, my dear—” -Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had -profited by her married experience. “A man is a _man_ and there’s no -sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she -excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a -man—while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see -beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to -stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I’d have allowed -you real reason. After thirty a man’s kisses mean something. But at -Gordon’s age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity -rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty -girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his -self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are -mostly to blame. Why—” - -Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal -applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. “_You_ -didn’t flirt with _him_, of course.” - -“Goodness, child! don’t bite me! I couldn’t see the poor boy crushed -into the face of the earth. Now listen.” After detailing Gordon’s -confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to -solace in Felicia’s smiles, she concluded, “But you—after driving him to -desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life.” - -“And you think that was the way of it? That he didn’t really _mean_ -anything?” - -“Didn’t he tell me so himself?” - -“Well—” she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly -collapsed on the other’s warm shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad! I—I _hate_ -him!” - -The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. “Of -course you do.” She gently fondled the fair head. “How much?” - -The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. “I hate him so much -I—I could just _kill_ any other girl that tried to take him!” With a -wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder. - -“Well, they’ll try, all right.” - -The head rose again, startled eyes, big and brown, staring from the -glass. “Do you—really think so?” - -“What do you expect—a nice boy like that to mope and pine for the rest -of his life with ten million girls of marriageable age running loose in -the United States? What brought him here, anyway—bolting to escape one -girl’s noose. Take my advice and rope him quick.” - -“But I’m promised, now, to Ramon.” - -“Call it off.” - -“Oh no.” Sitting up straight, she shook her head. “I cannot ruin his -life.” - -“Hum!” The widow coughed. “You cannot ruin his life? So you intend to -bless it by devoting to his service affections that belong to another? -Also to cut him off from the greatest thing in the world—the real love -of some other woman? Ruin his life, indeed? Lee, I always credited you -with a little sense.” - -“There is something in that.” She snatched at the hope. “The best thing -is to tell him I don’t love him and leave it to him to decide.” - -“And he’ll do it, have no fear!” The widow tossed her head. “Ramon’s -nice, but he cannot rise above his race, and you know very well there’s -neither reason nor justice nor the instinct of fairness in it. Fancy a -Mexican giving up a girl because she loves another! He’d resent even the -suggestion, take his revenge after marriage.” - -The gleam of hope had died. She sighed. “I can try.” - -“Oh, you little fool!” In her irritation the widow bestowed a smart slap -on the girl’s shoulder. But she spoiled the moral effect the next second -by gathering her in her arms. “Don’t you know that up in the States -girls take on a new beau every Saturday night and break the engagement -the following Sunday?” - -But the precedent produced only a second envious sigh. “I wish _I_ could -do it. I guess I wasn’t brought up right.” - -“’Tisn’t training; it’s heredity. You’re your father over again; will go -your own way. I wash my hands of you.” - - -That charitable process known as “washing one’s hands of anybody” was, -however, the last thing Mrs. Mills was capable of. The assertion simply -marked a change of plan which, rising early next morning, she -inaugurated when she caught Bull on his way to the stables. - -Though he had sat next to her during the long pleasant evening that -followed supper last night, the others’ presence had debarred private -communications. Content to hear her voice running with Lee’s in happy -chatter—so content, indeed, that he forgot for the time being the -impending trouble—Bull had smoked furiously in the dusk till they -retired to bed. - -He listened, now, in silence while the widow told of Lee’s engagement. -But the sudden lowering of his black brows was far more dangerous than -any threat. She laid her hand on his arm in sudden alarm. - -“Easy, my friend. Don’t be too quick. She isn’t married yet, and won’t -be—if you leave it to me.” - -More powerful than the plea was her gentle pressure. Apart from certain -accidental contacts, before mentioned, which had caused him such -pleasurable embarrassment, it was the first time she had actually -touched him. Big, burly, black giant that he was, he still trembled like -a school-girl; trembled so violently that she felt it and dropped both -her hand and her eyes. Transferring the embarrassment to herself, that -helped him mightily. He was the first to break a confused but happy -silence. - -“What do you want me to do?” - -“Nothing, just now, except to let Gordon ride with me a piece of the way -home.” - -It was impossible to overlook his sudden disappointment. With -characteristic frankness she did not wait for him to tell it. “I’d -rather have you; there are so many things I want to consult you about. -Dear me!” Her little vexed face was very comforting; it expressed such -sincere feeling. “These young folks certainly do make one a lot of -trouble. Betty wanted you _so_ badly at my party—and so did I; but we -just had to ask Gordon to help Lee out. But I’m going to settle this -business right quick. And when it is all over—you will come and make us -a real visit, won’t you?” - -Wouldn’t he? His nod and effulgent grin expressed happiness in the -prospect beyond the powers of his slow tongue. Satisfied, she proceeded. - -“So let me have him this once. Lee is going to ride a few miles with us, -and before she comes back—” - -But the matter of her communication is covered by her talk with Gordon, -whom she caught coming out of the bunk-house five minutes later. - -“I argued with her half the night,” she told him, walking along at his -side. “Goodness me, young man, you don’t know what you are up against! -Such obstinacy! Lucky for you that it is balanced by a sweet temper and -strong sense of justice. All I gained was her promise to beg off from -Ramon. She plans to go over and see him some time this week, and if she -does—well, with Isabel loving her to death, the old man tendering sage -advice, and Ramon passionately pleading his cause, they’ll have her to -the priest and married before she has time to think. She mustn’t go.” - -“But if she is so obstinate—” Gordon began. - -“I’ll take care of that. I shall call on Ramon on the way home and -explain the true state of his lady’s heart. Of course he’ll raise Cain -and probably damn me for a black-hearted liar, but I can stand it. The -point is—he will come right over here. In the mean time you must get -busy. A declaration in hand is worth two suspected, and though I’ve -hinted very strongly that you are not altogether indifferent to her -sweet self, it will make Ramon’s task ten times harder if she hears it -from your lips. Now listen!” - -The rest was plot, dark and devious. Lee had promised to ride with her a -few miles on the homeward journey, and Bull would detail him, Gordon, -for her escort. Coming back, he would have all the time in the world. - - - - -XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - - -As thus arranged, the program was carried out after breakfast. Very -artfully Bull waited till the party was almost out of sight before he -sent Gordon galloping after. Even then the plot was endangered when, -turning at the sound of hoof-beats, Lee saw him coming. Her face clearly -expressed her determination to send him back, but in the nick of time -the widow spoke. - -“Oh, let him come! The poor fellow is suffering enough.” - -Lee’s nod and faint smile, riding on, revealed a queer mixture of -happiness and apprehension, which was wiped out by amused astonishment -when, just as Gordon came up, a lone figure hove in sight, coming from -the opposite direction. - -“Why—it’s Sliver!” - -And Sliver it was—though difficult to recognize by reason of a complex -embroidery of scratches, bumps, and bruises. His own broad grin broke -through, however, when Lee inquired after his wife. - -“She was fine an’ dandy when I seen her last, which, was in the shank of -the evening two nights ago.” Lovingly fingering a huge bump that -occupied a central position in his altered scenery, he went into the -intimate details of his matrimonial venture. “Till then it had all been -lovely. She’d sorter cut up a bit, at first, me an her padre having -fixed up the match without any of her ’sistance. But after I’d given her -a fair larruping with a saddle strap, jest to show who wore the pants, -as the saying goes, she come right into camp; snuggled in like a kitten. -Sure, she behaved real domestic till Fernando, that hawk-nosed arriero -from San Ramon, blew in with his mules two nights gone. I orter ’a’ -suspicioned him, he was that free in handing out drinks. But I -didn’t—leastways not till Felicia laid me out with one whack of a -cordwood stick from behind. The rest I got from the mirror an’ the padre -when I woke next morning and found him doctoring my map. She an’ -Fernando had gone off together.” - -“She’s gone!” Lee gave a little hysterical laugh. “For good?” - -“An’ then some—they’re off to the wars.” Gently massaging the bump, -Sliver added: “She’ll stay there if she’s wise. It’ll be a ’tarnation -sight less risky than coming back. She was for cutting my throat, but -neither the padre nor Fernando would stan’ for that, they being afraid -of ‘The Black Devil’ an’ ‘The Python,’ which they call Bull an’ Jake. -‘For I knew, señor, that they would follow us to the ends of the earth -if any harm came to thee,’ the old fellow tol’. But they made her free -of my map, an’, as you see, she done a good job.” - -“Oh, I’m so sorry! I must go back and care for your face.” - -With Lee’s exclamation the props trembled beneath the widow’s plot, but -Sliver restored their stability. “It’s cheap at the price. Many’s the -man up home that gets as bad or worse an’ is stuck, to boot, for -lawyer’s fees an’ al’mony. Don’t you bother ’bout me, Lady-girl. All I -need is a bit of salve, an’ Maria kin get me that.” - -As Sliver rode on, the widow looked at Lee, who returned her meaning -glance. Neither looked at Gordon, who discreetly watched Betty. But the -thought was the same in the minds of all three. “Thank goodness, she’s -gone.” - -For a while Lee hesitated and debated whether, after all, she ought not -to go back, and she reined in, startled, when a long howl presently -drifted over the rise behind which Sliver had disappeared. A coyote, in -its death agony, might have equaled the sound. But as, presently, the -tortured notes resolved into the opening bars of “The Cowboy’s Lament,” -she giggled and rode on for another five miles. Sliver was happy! - -While Lee was kissing Betty good-by the widow managed to pass a whisper -to Gordon. “Now don’t let her escape! And remember—look out for Ramon -to-morrow.” - -He nodded and, looking back from behind the crest of the next rise, she -saw for herself how well he obeyed. Lee had made to get off at a gallop, -but had reined in when he spoke, and now they were riding side by side, -deep in earnest conversation. - -Nodding, the widow rode on, but stopped again for a last look while she -could still see over the rise. She was practically invisible when Lee -looked back, protesting, as Gordon grabbed her bridle and pulled her -beast alongside. Her pointing finger said, quite plainly: - -“They will see!” - -The widow gasped, for with one swift reach he snatched Lee out of the -saddle and set her before him. - - - - -XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - - -Had she heard the conversation which preceded that bold action, Mrs. -Mills would have been still more impressed. Determination is the natural -foe of diplomacy. Warned by one single, furtive glance that Lee intended -to make off, Gordon plunged at one smash through her fence of reserve. - -“Do you intend to keep that engagement?” - -Coming from a young man whom one hated so vindictively that one could -“just kill any other girl that tried to take him,” the question was well -calculated to arrest attention. Neither was its force lessened by the -fact that it was _his_, not _hers_—perish the thought!—outrageous -conduct which had caused said engagement! - -The audacity of it caused her first to gasp, then draw rein and stare at -him in utter surprise; finally to ride slowly on while preparing an -answer that should not only wither him, there, in the saddle, but also -hide the tumult of fright and pleasure in her own breast. - -Her glance said, “You certainly have got your gall with you!” But her -answer was much more dignified, “By what right do you ask?” - -“The right of a man who loves you.” - -It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her -affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient -court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so -conceded by one girl’s fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had -been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural -cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and -men, she proceeded to deny it. - -“Yes?” she raised cool brows. “Judging by what I saw in the cañon—it -must be recent.” - -She looked for him to wither, but—the fellow refused! He did not even -flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness; -sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn’t -help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light -subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness. - -“I thought so myself—but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful, -picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you, -but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn’t till you shot -that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke—awoke to the fact that -all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life -and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear.” - -This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he -built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played -with the coils of her _riata_. As an oratorical effort, it could not -compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon’s rhythmical -Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant -feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any -honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by -its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he -finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel. - -“When—when did you find this out?” - -She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little -hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her -hunger for more. - -Be certain she got it—in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of -poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had -ridden over to the widow’s together that the sunlight proceeded from her -hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of -the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation. - -There was also some mention of the hair in connection with a certain -Java forest, with passing reference to the Chinese Wall and a voyage he -had intended to make up the great Asian rivers. Not having personal -experience in their navigation, said references were rather vague, but -her imagination abundantly supplied the requisite flora and fauna from -magazine articles and pictures. Porcelain towers, orchids, giant palms; -deep jungle temples; the crowded boat life of the Yangtse-Kiang, junks -and sampans with their cargoes of saffron-faced, slant-eyed Celestials, -men, women, and children—especially children—her imagination improved on -the lovely dreams she had so cruelly disrupted. He concluded with that: - -“And you smashed it—all to smithereens.” - -For a while she rode in silence. Apprehension and fright had given place -to sorrow that contended tumultuously with delight for possession of her -soul. “I’m sorry,” she spoke at last. “_So_ sorry, but—you provoked it.” - -“Why! How?” - -He was reminded, of course, that he “lost interest in girls after they -grew up.” She added, a little vindictively, “And _you_ didn’t flirt with -Mrs. Mills?” - -“Only in self-defense. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, -isn’t it?” - -But she denied this bit of ancient wisdom. “No, it isn’t! And—and you -_kissed_ that dreadful girl! I—oh, I could have _killed_ you!” - -“Why?” - -She was looking at him now, and the compound of bright anger, pleading -and defiance, regret, love, hope, and despair that alternately flashed -and swam in the wet eyes gave sufficient answer. It was then he plucked -her from the saddle; crushed her to him with force that squeezed out, -for the moment, the anger, regret, despair, left only love and hope. - -Ensued the usual delirious moment when poor mortals conquer time and -eternity, set at naught the black riddle of existence. Her face buried -in his shoulder, his in her hair, they clung to each other while his -horse moved slowly forward and hers went careering on over the next -earth roll. - -Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were -coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; -feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of -them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue -loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one -another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that “cause”; -committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither -and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment -over these sunlit plains. - -Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only -of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to -themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in -an illumined dream. - -It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face, -he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly -recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand -over his mouth. - -“You mustn’t.” - -“Why?” - -“You forget—I am still engaged.” - -“Why—so you are!” Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted -when he saw she was in earnest. “You surely don’t intend—” - -“No, indeed!” She read his thought. “I had believed, at first, that I -ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon -while—” - -“Say it.” - -“While I loved _you_.” - -For a girl who had just restated her engagement to another man, she -behaved most disgracefully during a long silence that was broken only by -the measured tread of the horse. Snuggling in closer, she re-entered -that illumined dream, and made no attempt to check the kisses he -showered on the soft palm of the restraining hand. It was, no doubt, -some realization of her misbehavior that caused her to sit up, -presently, and pull it away. - -“This won’t do. For the present we’ll have to behave like ordinary -persons.” - -“But your horse is gone,” he protested when she gently put away his arm. -“You can’t walk.” - -“No, but I can ride behind you in the Mexican fashion. Stop, while I -change.” - -He would have preferred it as it was, but when, after mounting behind -him, she slid her arm about his waist, he had to concede the Mexican -habit its own delights. It was surely nice of her to allow him to cover -her hand. - -“The young people,” she explained, “are not allowed to do this—only -husbands and wives.” - -“Poor young people!” he pitied. “But, on the whole, quite right. It -would never do to have them cavorting over the country like this; too -much of a strain on the conventions. Indeed, I think we ought to conform -ourselves at once.” - -“How?” Just as if she hadn’t known what he meant. - -“Let’s ride into San Carlos, get a license from the jefe and be married -at once?” - -The bold proposal drew only a soft laugh. “To think that, up to a week -ago, he didn’t even see me—except as part of the scenery. No, amigo, -till to-morrow we are to be ordinary persons. Then I shall go and tell -Ramon.” - -“And if he refuses?” - -“I shall break it myself.” - -It was in his mind to say that she could not go alone. But he remembered -that Ramon would probably arrive at Los Arboles before she started. He -turned again to the delightful present. - -“And after that?” - -A little pressure at his waist made answer. - -Reaching behind, he drew her other arm forward till her hands clasped in -front, then squeezed his own elbows down tight over hers. Thus, -oblivious once more of the toiling billions, revolutionists beyond the -mountain’s loom, they rode forward again in that illumined dream, two -foolish, happy souls at loose in the spheres. - - - - -XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - - -In those days of raids and “requisitions,” the customary oversight of -the herds on the Chihuahua _haciendas_ had grown of necessity into a -system of patrols. At Los Arboles not a day passed without Gordon and -the Three describing a circle around the _hacienda_. - -Riding south after the others left, Bull had covered only a few miles -before he spied a lone horseman topping a distant ridge. As the rider -drew near the first indefinite outlines resolved into the square, hard -figure of William Benson. Scarcely a week had passed without a visit -from the Englishman. From the first he had accorded Bull the respect due -to his quiet strength. Later, this had developed into a real liking -which showed in the smile that wiped out, for the moment, his native -harshness. - -“Heard the news? The Carranzistas have given Valles a lovely trimming. -He didn’t stop running till he reached El Oro.” - -Bull’s black brows rose. “We’d allus allowed Valles could whip twice his -weight in Carranzistas. So long as they keep on killing one another off, -we sh’d worry.” - -Nodding, Benson went on. “Valles lost heavily in horses, and is looking -for fresh mounts. One of his colonels came to my place yesterday and -offered me a thousand pesos apiece for all I have.” - -“_Gold?_” - -Benson’s big mouth split in a sardonic grin. “Valles money, amigo, -beautifully printed on butcher paper. He must have used up all the -newspaper stocks in northern Mexico.” - -“And you sold?” - -“I’d cut their throats first. It may come to that, but just now I see a -way—if not to pull even, at least to avoid complete loss. Between us we -can pretty nearly equip Valles with fresh mounts. The beggar has -gold—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in the El Paso banks, and -my idea is for us, you representing Lee, to go down to El Oro and offer -him all that we have for a low price in gold on condition that he permit -us to drive our other stock across the line. If he accepts, we then go -out of business till order is restored.” - -“Fine idea!” Bull added. “Could you let Mrs. Mills in on it? She was -telling last night she didn’t know where to turn for living expenses.” - -Benson heartily agreed. “Only too glad!” - -“And when do you start?” - -“To-morrow night. There’s a freight going down.” - -“All right. Pity you hadn’t come earlier. Mrs. Mills left only a couple -of hours ago. But I’ll ride over this afternoon, get her written -authority, then meet you at the railroad.” - -Riding back to Los Arboles, they perfected their plans. They were, -indeed, in sight of the buildings before Benson switched the -conversation to Lee. Her oldest and stanchest friend, it was his right -to know, and Bull told all, from his plotting with the widow down to the -disastrous ending in the sudden engagement. - -“The little spitfire!” Benson grinned. “Hello! What’s that?” - -It was Lee’s horse galloping down a distant slope toward the _hacienda_. -In that wild country a riderless beast generally bespoke tragedy. -Without a word they galloped off in the direction from which the beast -had come; rode at top speed until Benson, who had gained a lead, -suddenly reined in. - -A bunch of chaparral intervened, at first, between Bull and the object -at which the other was pointing. Then, rising in his stirrups, he saw -Lee and Gordon on the one horse; at least in Bull’s sight it was a -horse. In that of the lovers, horses, plains, _haciendas_, and other -commonplaces of ordinary existence had vanished, leaving them -unconscious of time and space, proceeding magically through the -aforesaid illumined dream. - -Perhaps some touch of their feeling wirelessed across the intervening -space, for Benson’s harshness melted, delight burst like sunlight -through Bull’s truculence. - -“That’s too good to spoil,” Benson whispered. “Let them go by.” - -They had passed over the next ridge before Bull spoke. “I tol’ you Mrs. -Mills could do it. She’s a right smart woman.” - -“A fine woman!” Benson echoed. “I don’t know what you are thinking -about. Now if I were single——” He burst out laughing at Bull’s blush. -Instantly it was drowned in brighter scarlet. But this faded as Bull -noted the kindly twinkle in the other’s eye. He shook his head in -deprecation. - -“What c’d a nice woman do with a bear like me?” - -“That’s her business. I’m not denying that it would some job.” Benson -critically surveyed Bull’s great bulk. “But if there’s anything in the -world a woman loves it is making a man over, like an old dress. After -she finishes, she generally realizes that she’s spoiled the material and -wishes him back as he was. But in the mean time she has had her fun. -I’ll bet Mary Mills is just itching to try her hand on you.” - -“Do you really mean that?” Bull looked up with sudden hope—that quickly -died. He shook his big head. “She deserves something better. I’d only -spoil her life.” - -Nevertheless, he relapsed into deep thought, returning only -monosyllables to Benson’s talk. The little seed thus planted rooted deep -in his silence. - - -Strange is first love with its intense desire for purity! Cleanliness is -next to Godliness, and Godliness is Love. Thus Cleanliness must be next -of kin to Love. - -If this be doubted, observe a ten-year-old boy, self-convicted of -water-marks on his neck and soil in his ears enough to grow potatoes. -See him scrub himself with profuse use of soap till his countenance -shines so that it might serve as a mirror for the small charmer who has -ensnared his budding affections with her bright curls. Watch him, later, -a man grown, solicitous about his daily tub, careful of his raiment, -choice in cravats! Later his wife shall drive him with revilings to his -bath! Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling -shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt. - -Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering -in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them -earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is -when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. So Lee, who was perhaps even -a bit more boyish than the average, came to lunch in a soft white dress -with a flower at her throat, powdered and delicately perfumed, bright -hair framing happy eyes, every soft line and fold proclaiming her -womanhood. Like an emanation, soft and effulgent as moonlit mist, the -fullness of her content proceeded from her, wrapped her in a bright -atmosphere in the midst of which she softly brooded. Not that she was -silent. She laughed and talked; seriously discussed Benson’s schemes. -But that was all of the surface. Behind the chatter she lived in the -enchantment of her dream. - -It was too marked to pass unnoticed. But if Bull and Benson saw the -clinging of glances, sensed the pulsing feeling, they observed with the -friendly indulgence of experience the young man’s honest devotion, the -girl’s shy happiness. During the long hour they sat talking after lunch, -no silly jest marred its beauty. Except for a greater kindliness of -manner, with delicacy quite foreign to his harsh exterior, Benson gave -no hint of his understanding up to the moment he rode away. - -Then for a brief moment Bull was taken into the dream. While Gordon went -for his horse, Lee packed his saddlebags with clean things for the -journey, and was giving him the usual last critical inspection. As he -stood smiling down on her, hugely pleased, her eyes rose from the tie -she was arranging to his; and as she read their sympathy and -intelligence, she clasped his neck and hid her face against his broad -breast. - -Until the beat of hoofs at the _patio_ gate announced Gordon’s return, -he held her to him with one arm while the other hand gently patted her -shoulder. Neither spoke. Words would have told less. When she withdrew -and walked with him to the gate, she was soothed and comforted as any -girl that ever made a confidante of her mother. - -When she ran back after the quirt he had purposely left on the table, he -had time to pass a word to Gordon. “Remember, she don’t leave this house -to go _anywhere_ alone!” - -Gordon nodded, and, satisfied, he rode away with Lee’s last charge -floating after him, “Come home soon!” - -The words were still ringing in his ears, he still felt the firm, cool -clasp on his neck, when he drew rein at the first rise and looked back -at the _hacienda_. From one corner, where an _anciano_ had burned some -rubbish, rose a lazy pennon of smoke, but the brown girls, women, and -children who usually filled the compound with restless life were in full -enjoyment of the noon _siesta_. Within its bright walls, the place dozed -in the pleasant shade of its towering cottonwoods. - -Somehow the stillness recalled to Bull’s mind the Spaniard’s house he -had shown Gordon from the railroad—sacked, burned, its vacant windows -staring like empty eyes over the desert. His face clouded. He moved -uneasily in his saddle, but presently the golden peace that incited the -memory worked its own remedy. Jake and Sliver and Gordon were there, and -the place was still far beyond the surge and swirl of the revolution. - -“And I’ll be home again in less than a week,” he encouraged himself. - -Home! It recalled again Lee’s words. He felt her clasp, thrilled at the -memory. He, “Bull” Perrin, the rustler! Around his neck that had been in -constant hazard of the halter for a dozen years, this fine, clean girl -had thrown her arms. His tender musing over the wonder would have -excited the scorn of a city man, _blasé_ and stale from the constant -presence and attentions of pretty women. But it was sincere. While he -rode on over the hills and plains, the thought warmed his heart, -quickened the seed planted therein by Benson, freed his soul from the -bonds of his great humility. - -“Of course it’s damn foolish for you even to think of it,” he chid -himself. Nevertheless, he did, slowly, heavily, taking stock with minute -exactness of his own demerits. How great they were none knew better. The -rustling, of course, he had abandoned along with certain gross habits of -life. But the liquor? These periodical debauches? Was he strong enough -to conquer them? - -“If I c’d only ride into a town an’ either leave it alone or take a -man’s fair allowance,” he mused. “But kin I? Mebbe with a fine little -woman like that to help me.” But the next instant he shook his head. -“An’ have her take the chance? No, no, hombre, you’re crazy. You put all -that behind you by your own act years ago.” - -Yet this conclusion did not end the argument. When, at sundown, he drew -rein at the accustomed spot and looked down on the _rancho_ buildings -now dyed a flaming apricot he took his breath deeply. With its -bougainvillea draping walls and porches in rich purple clusters, its -pretty _patio_ and outside kitchen garden, it was just such a home as -would fit the dreams of a common man. Instantly his mind filled in the -picture, the man and woman sitting after supper on the veranda, he with -his pipe and paper, a child on his knee, she with her sewing. A thousand -intimacies were supplied by his lonely, hungry soul, and when the -picture stood complete he burst out with a great resolve. - -“By God, I’ll do it! You’re a-going to walk like a man into town an’ -come out without teching a drop!” - -From where he was sitting he usually could see—either Betty at play on -the veranda, her mother moving in and out, or Terrubio moving around the -stables. To-night silence wrapped the place. From the west, as on the -south where he sat, the land fell rapidly toward the _rancho_, and as he -rode forward, puzzled, the silence was explained. Over the western ridge -the widow, Terrubio, and Betty came riding, and reached the house just -as he rode up. - -“Though we brought bad news to his son,” she explained the delay, “the -old Icarza would not permit us to leave till we had broken his bread. -How did Ramon take it? Just as I said he would—out came the Mex in in -all of its nasty selfishness, blind conceit. She was promised to him and -he would hold her to it! He’d kill any one who interfered. Goodness! you -never _saw_ such fireworks! He showed no trace of the real pride that -would have kept one of our boys from showing his hurt; and still less -consideration for Lee. It was”—she gave a little sniff of disgust—“just -sickening. I was almost sorry she couldn’t have been there, for it would -have effectually cured her remorse. But she’ll get it to-morrow, for -he’s going over to plead his own cause.” - -Unease swept Bull’s dark visage. After a brief statement of his mission -he voiced his apprehension. “But if he’s coming to-morrow, I don’t know -but I orter go back.” - -“Nonsense!” Mrs. Mills pooh-poohed the idea. “It’s all fireworks—and -there’s Sliver and Gordon and Jake.” - -To which Betty added a direct command. “You are just going to stay here. -We haven’t seen you for ever so long, and mama is just dying to tell you -her troubles.” - -“Tea and trouble,” the widow laughed. “A genuine woman’s party.” - -When he lifted and placed her with one swing on the veranda she allowed -one hand to remain on his shoulder, and he was not so ignorant of woman -nature as not to recognize the liking behind the action. While she -bustled around, adding dainties to the meal Terrubio’s woman had ready, -he watched her with an expression that she, on her part, could not fail -to interpret. And whereas, on previous visits, she had managed all kinds -of accidental contacts, watched with mischievous delight for the effect, -she was now filled with pleasurable confusion that manifested itself in -an almost girlish shyness. - -When, afterward, they moved out upon the veranda, Bull’s dream of an -hour ago was almost fulfilled. For Betty snuggled as usual in his arms, -while the widow busied herself with a bit of sewing—a fine excuse that -lent itself to the lowering of eyes, permitted stealthy glances. - -While they were at supper, the sun had slid down to the western horizon. -Pools of deep indigo now filled the hollows. Above them the plains ran, -a deep violet sea broken with apricot foam where the crests of the great -earth waves rolled high, ran off and away around the bases of gold and -crimson mountains. - -It was unearthly in its beauty, and while they could not have put their -feeling in words, it filled both with that sense of vastness before -which man in his littleness quails. Often the widow paused in her -sewing, and as Bull saw that infinite loneliness reflected in her face, -the big, simple soul of him melted with love and pity. Till the lights -faded and she no longer needed its excuse, she alternately sewed and -gazed; then when warm gloaming settled over all, wiped out the -loneliness with its friendly gloom, she recovered her voice. - -“Oh, I had almost forgotten.” - -It was that which she had seen in the morning—to wit, Gordon snatching -Lee out of her saddle. - -“And oh, isn’t it nice to think that she’ll be settled, at last, with -that fine boy!” - -Happy in the conclusion, she began to sketch a picture of them settled -happily at Los Arboles. Her voice, as she ran on, took a little quiver -that powerfully expressed her own loneliness, inspired in Bull an -intense desire to seize and squeeze it out. Instead his arms tightened -around the child. - -“Not one marriage in a hundred turns out what it might be. But with the -exception, when respect, friendliness, affection, and a sense of duty -are reinforced by love—well, it’s the nearest to heaven that poor humans -ever gain.” She added, with a sigh: “Excepting that it gave me this -child, my own wasn’t all that it might have been. She’s been a joy and -comfort, but—in a few years more she’ll be marrying, herself. Then I’ll -be again alone.” - -“Why did _you_ never marry?” Betty’s small, soft voice stole out on the -darkness from the depths of Bull’s embrace. - -The stock excuses rose to his lips—but did not pass, for through the -friendly gloaming he was aware of a rustle. His face turned toward it. - -“I never felt myself fit.” - -“Why, that’s just nonsense!” Betty indignantly declared. “Any woman that -wasn’t a downright fool would be glad to have you. I know one that would -give her best shoes—” - -“Betty!” - -But the small rebel ran on, “Well, she would—even if I can’t tell you -her name.” - -Once more Bull faced a stir in the darkness. “I’ve led a hard, rough, -bad life. No decent woman would ever want me.” - -Now he saw the dim whiteness of her face turning to him. Her quiet voice -took up the argument. “It’s a thin, pinched nature that’s always good. A -big, strong one is liable to be led astray by its own force before -wisdom comes to teach and chasten. In the long run I don’t know but that -it gains by it in charity and loving-kindness. Wickedness of the flesh -doesn’t count so much as wickedness of the heart; the inward vileness -that rots and corrupts; and I’ve seen as much of that in the churches as -among downright sinners.” She concluded with the very words that Gordon -had used with Lee. “It isn’t what you _were_, but what you _are_ that -counts.” - -From a second warm silence issued Bull’s vibrant rumble. “You think a -man that has lived hard has a right to speak, to a good woman—providing -he’s put it all behind him?” - -Low, but confident and firm, her answer thrilled through the gloaming. -“I do, and—she’d _love_ to help him.” - -Almost without his volition, Bull’s huge paw stole out. He half hoped -she wouldn’t see it. He had begun to withdraw it when, like a dim white -dove, her hand came fluttering and nested in his. - -Every life has its golden hour. That was Bull’s, and, like a pearl -shining in the mire, it stood out from the blackness of his past life. -Though neither spoke, the peace and quiet, surety of perfect -understanding, settled upon them. When, presently, Betty resumed her -chatter, they listened or joined in. After she fell asleep they relapsed -again into happy silence; just sat like a shy boy and girl, hand in -hand, till she rose and carried the child off to her bed. - -To meet her, next morning, was to Bull something of an ordeal, but her -quiet smile restored at once the perfect understanding. Her sense of -proprietorship showed in the way she fussed over his coffee and eggs, -berated him for his lack of appetite. Her final inspection before he -left could not have been outdone in severity by Lee herself. But nothing -was said. She knew that he would speak in his own good time. - -Except that her hand clung a little in parting, it differed little from -their usual. “I shall look for you when you return.” Her call after him -reiterated ownership. - -His answer confirmed it. “I shall come here, ma’am, straight from the -station.” - -Indeed, the real parting came when, reining in at fifty yards, he looked -back over his shoulder. With both hands on Betty’s shoulders, slightly -dejected, yet with her honest, level gaze sending out trust and hope, -she stood watching him go, as the race of wives and mothers have stood -throughout the generations. And just as, throughout time, the sight of a -woman’s trust and child’s faith have urged real men on to big deeds, so -the sight of them set the ex-rustler’s heart swelling within him. As, -with a last wave of the hand, he turned again and rode on, the spirit -within him equaled in love and reverence that of an ancient -knight-errant starting out in pursuit of the Holy Grail. - - - - -XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - - -About the time Bull started, Lee and Gordon rose from the -breakfast-table under the Los Arboles _portales_. - -Perhaps with sympathetic intuition, for they exchanged an amiable grin, -Sliver and Jake had already passed out. It is true that Maria and -Teresa, the small brown _criadas_, were peeping from the crypt-like -depths of their kitchen. But even had she been aware of their vast -interest, Lee would not have withdrawn the hand which, as they rose, had -somehow tangled with Gordon’s. Reflected and thrown up from the yellow -wall, the strong morning lights bathed the flesh of her arms, face, and -neck with suffused amber, wove a soft glow in the mesh of her hair. So -different from her usual boyish activity, her gentle quiet, combined -with the warm air, suffused lights, to create a dreamy spell. Goodness -knows how long they would have stood if Maria had not come out to clear -the table. - -Then Lee spoke. “Such sloth! This will never do if I am to go to El Sol -and return to-day. While I dress will you please get my horse?” - -When Gordon reached the stable Sliver had already gone, but Jake had -lingered to say a word. It was very much to the point. “Say! Bull tipped -me off as how the young greaser was likely to show up an’ raise some -hell to-day. Don’t you allow I’d better hang around?” - -He nodded, however, when Gordon explained the situation. “Missy don’t -know he’s coming, hey?—thinks she’s going over there. Then they’ll meet -on the way. Mebbe I’d better tag along.” - -But to this Gordon’s pride would not consent. “Don’t you think I can -take care of her?” - -“No one better,” Jake hastened to appease. “But, say! If he doesn’t show -up, don’t you let her go on over there—not if you have to rope an’ drag -her home.” - -“Like we did before?” He smiled at the memory. “This time I’ll not leave -her the saddle machete.” - -“Little bit too smart for you that time,” Jake grinned in sympathy. -“Take care she don’t spring a new one. She ain’t so very slow.” - -Nevertheless, in the face of his apparent acquiescence, while apparently -heading out on his usual beat, he whirled behind the first ridge and, -proceeding at a fast lope, had covered five miles of the way to El Sol, -the Icarzas’ _hacienda_, by the time Lee came out. Slowing down, then, -he rode more leisurely, had covered another mile when, over the crest of -a ridge, he sighted Ramon coming at a gallop down the opposite slope. A -clump of mesquite and _palo verde_ afforded convenient cover. Forcing -his beast in, Jake stooped low and watched Ramon go by, so close that -his stirrup whipped the bushes. - -It had never been Jake’s habit to notice Mexicans. But now he noted with -surprise the change in the young man’s face. The lines deeply plowed -down the nose under the cheeks, the hardening of the red, womanish lips, -the vindictive black sparkle that had contracted his great dusky eyes -into burning black dots, added ten years to his age. - -“The Mex is souring in him,” Jake inwardly commented. “That guinea’s -liable to try an’ hurt some one. Glad I came.” - -Allowing Ramon to pass on, Jake then rode after, and so, progressing -from ridge to ridge, keeping always the height of land between them, was -less than fifty yards behind when, peeping over the crest, he saw Lee -and Gordon coming up the slope. - -Another bunch of chaparral afforded cover, and after tying his horse in -it, Jake crawled up to the ridge and looked over. - - -It was not without argument that Gordon had obtained Lee’s consent to -accompany her. When she found him standing with two horses at the gate, -her brows rose in a troubled arch. - -He understood that she hesitated to accuse him of bad taste, and quoted -Bull’s last orders to remove the impression. “He said that you were -never to ride alone.” - -The responsibility being thus shifted, she felt able to speak. “It is -rather— Really, I don’t see how I can do anything else.” - -“Why go at all? Why not write?” - -She shook her head. “I’ve known him since childhood—and have treated him -badly. I owe him an apology and it will have to come from my own lips.” - -It was reasonable enough from her point of view, but not from his. If -Ramon were an American he would have said, “Go, ahead; take your -medicine!” Being Mexican, discretion bade him remain. - -“At least let me ride with you part of the way. I will turn before you -reach El Sol.” - -“Oh, that will be all right,” she had conceded at once. - -He had felt certain, of course, that they would meet Ramon. But the -usual witcheries, sweep of the tawny earth-waves under the bright sun, -satisfying thud of hoofs on the trail, creak and smell of hot leather, -had combined to blind him to all but her presence. Now, before he could -turn, Ramon reined in before them. - -Like Jake, they noticed at once the sardonic furrows, set mouth, frown -above the glittering eyes. With his youth had vanished that veneer of -refinement which conceals natural Mexican grossness. Like veins in a -stratum revealed by a landslide, selfishness, conceit, violence, -revenge, lay exposed. With the natural instinct of good breeding, Gordon -had half turned to withdraw. But even if one glance at the passion-torn -face had not checked the impulse, it would have been killed when Lee -backed toward him. Shocked and a little afraid, she gazed at Ramon -before she spoke. - -“Are you ill? You look so—” - -“So it was true, what the señora told me yesterday!” He spoke in low, -strained tones. “It was true, though I did not believe; refused to -believe. But now I see. It is true that you used me as bait for your -fishing.” - -“Ramon!” She raised her hand, but he switched suddenly from denunciation -to appeal. - -“No! it is not true! It cannot be! She lied! I will not believe it even -though you tell me yourself!” - -From this he ran on with an appeal, hysterical and disconnected, which -reflected as in a clear glass the nature of his love. In it was no -appreciation of the feminine personality with its delicacies of feeling, -refinements, inconsistencies, helplessness, all the illogicalities that -render it charming, as much or more than its faith and love. In terms of -blind egotism, it expressed only his passion and jealousy, fatuous -conceit. As in a clear glass, under a powerful light, he revealed -himself so that even a woman blinded by love could not have failed to -see. In the middle of it Gordon heard Lee take a long breath, and knew -it for thankfulness. Yet her relief did not kill her poignant regret for -the part she had played. - -She spoke softly, pityingly, when he stopped. “Ramon, I’m sorry. It was -wicked of me to draw you on. But to marry you would be far worse. What -can I do to make up?” - -He told, with anger and offense. She had promised to be his wife! It was -a betrothal! as binding in Mexican eyes as marriage! He had announced it -to his father, mother, sister, friends! His conceit cropped out again as -he pictured himself, jilted, in their eyes. Angered by his own -imaginings, he was growing abusive when she cut him quietly off. - -“I was on my way when we met, to own and ask pardon for my fault. I had -counted on our old friendship and your generosity to make it less -difficult. But I see, now, my error. There is nothing left but to bid -you good-by.” - -Now came the ultimate revelation, that passion of furious jealousy which -drives the Mexican _peon_ to cut off the hands, slash the face and -breast, of his love. His eyes narrowed to shifting, insane sparks. Hand -raised, as though to strike, he spurred his beast forward. - -“You—you—” - -He got no further, for one hard dig of the spur shot Gordon’s horse in -between. From English to Spanish the argument had run, but from Lee’s -answers Gordon had gathered enough. Though slower, his beast was heavier -than Ramon’s, and while forcing horse and rider sideways with a steady -pressure he issued his orders: - -“That’s about enough for you! Get!” - -Ramon’s hand flew to his saddle _machete_, but he did not draw, for -Gordon’s had gone to his gun. Leg pressed against leg, they manœuvered -their plunging beasts; without drawing a weapon fought the old fight of -the brown man and the white; the struggle which began when Cortés -imposed his will on the Aztec emperors; was continued by the Puritan -forefathers against the American Indian; which has been fought to the -same conclusion all over the world. And from the two faces—Gordon’s -cold, hard-eyed, Ramon’s distorted with black fury—the cause of that -inevitable ending might have been read. - -So close they were Gordon could see the palpitation of light from the -insane waverings of the other’s eyeballs steady under a doubt. He felt -rather than saw the Mexican’s sudden swift reach for his knife. Even -more swiftly he snatched, and with a sudden wrench of the other’s wrist -sent the knife flying and bore him back flat in the saddle. For a moment -he held him, then with a powerful shove his horse sent Ramon’s beast -stumbling sideways and broke the grip. Wheeling in a circle, Ramon faced -them again. - -So far Lee had looked on distressed. Now she spurred forward and caught -Gordon’s arm. “Let him go!—please!” Her anger gone now, sorrow quivering -in her voice, she added, “You will, won’t you, Ramon?” - -His fury, passion, wild jealousy had settled in dark calm. “Yes, I am -going _now_. But the next time—.” He wheeled and galloped off. - -Till the tip of his _sombrero_ vanished behind the ridge Lee watched him -go, distress and relief mingling in a wintry smile. - -“Don’t give him too much of your pity,” Gordon consoled. “One -disappointment doesn’t make much of a dent in such egotism as that. -After a while he’ll find some pretty señorita to take him at his own -valuation.” - -“I hope so.” Her smile brightened. “Though I still feel guilty. But if -he hadn’t behaved so ridiculously I should feel much worse.” - -Gordon nodded toward the ridge. “You heard his threat. Do you suppose -he’ll—-” - -“Oh no!” Her hair flew in a cloud under her vigorous shake. “After he’s -had time to cool off he’ll forget and forgive. But just to think”—her -glance displayed an even mixture of mischief and reproach—“just to think -that all this trouble was caused by you kissing that horrid girl!” - -“Why—” he gasped, under the sudden attack. “Well, I’ll be— Say! Who -drove me to it with her disgraceful flirting?” - -“Did it make you feel _awfully_ bad?” - -“Did it?” The thought of his miserable unhappiness was still powerful -enough to cloud his face, and she noted it with a little quiver of -satisfaction. “Let’s forget it.” Snatching her hand, he worked his horse -in against hers and tried to draw her to him. “There’s a momentous -question I wish to consult you about; one you refused to consider -yesterday. Will you—” - -But she pulled away. “Not yet. First there’s something I want settled. -Was it really pique that—made you kiss her?” - -He wanted to laugh, but refrained, for under her smile he felt her -earnestness. “Nothing else.” - -“You’re sure?” - -“Sure!” - -“Cross your heart to die?” - -He performed that solemn and ancient function, and if she still -entertained a doubt she stuffed it away down in consciousness. - -“Very well.” With a little sigh of content she let her head fall back on -his shoulder and a whisper escape from her upturned lips, “Now—you may.” - - -From his covert on the ridge Jake had observed the meeting, talk, -struggle, Ramon’s retreat, also something which was hidden from the -lovers in the valley below—the fact that, after crossing the ridge, -Ramon had dismounted, pulled his rifle from the saddle slings, and -crawled back on hands and knees to the edge of Jake’s covert. By that -time the little tilt concerning Felicia was over, and as Lee’s head went -to Gordon’s shoulder Ramon raised the rifle. - -A shot at that short distance would have pierced them both, but as -Ramon’s eye dropped to the sights a sharp order issued from the covert, -“Throw up your hands! damn quick!” - -A quick, startled glance showed Ramon the lean, grim face through a -break in the chaparral. Not for nothing had the _peones_ named Jake “The -Python.” In moments such as this his lean personality, deadly eye, -conveyed that very impression—of a snake coiled to strike. As Ramon’s -hands went up, he stepped out and, crouching behind the ridge, took the -other’s rifle and drove him downhill to his horse. - -Having extracted the cartridge both from the rifle and from the revolver -in Ramon’s holster, he threw the weapon at his feet. “I reckon I orter -plug you, an’ I would for two cents. It’d be set down to raiders, which -fixes it very nice. Sure, I reckon I orter do it, but if you’ve got a -few thinks to the contrary spit ’em out.” - -It was no idle threat. The vicious gleam of the cold gray eye told that. -But in place of fear Ramon’s face showed almost relief. “Very good, -señor. There is nothing you could do that would suit me better.” - -The cold eye flickered. “Hell! you’re too anxious. I couldn’t make up my -mind to do it that quick—an’ there’s a few things I wanter find out. For -one, what’s your idee in wanting to drill them young folks?” - -Ramon told—this time without the fireworks. - -Jake summed it briefly. “Promised you, then threw you down. That’s hard -luck. But there’s one thing you Mexes can never get into your hot -heads—the right of our little American queens to change their pretty -minds as often as they damn please without any gent’s consent. You was -damn lucky that she ever give you a smile. If I conclude to change my -mind on plugging you, have it writ up large in your family tree that -oncet an American girl let herself be engaged to you for nearly five -minutes. Now supposing I refrain from my desire to make you into a -corpse, d’you reckon you could keep a promise and not make any attempt -on their lives?” - -While he was talking Ramon’s face had stiffened in defiance. He shook -his head. But instead of anger, a small gleam of admiration lit Jake’s -hard eyes. Raising his gun, he aimed full at the other’s breast. - -“You have just two minutes to make up your mind.” - -“One minute!” - -For a time it seemed as though he would have to shoot. But just before -the time expired, Ramon spoke. “For myself, I do not care. But I have an -old father and mother, whom my death would surely kill. I promise.” - -“All right.” Jake dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm. “I allow -that I’m foolish for trusting a Mex, but the little Missy allus liked -you. On her account we’ll take one chance. Here’s your cartridge—only -don’t load till you’re off this range. An’ remember”—a cold flash -emphasized the order—“after this our boundary is your dead-line. Cross -it again—you’ll be shot like a panther, coyote, or other varmint.” - -Returning to his horse, he watched the other mount and ride away. A -glance in the opposite direction showed him Lee and Gordon, going hand -in hand up the opposite slope. Till they had gained across to the next -valley he remained where he was. Then, riding in their rear, with a -sharp eye always behind, keeping the width of a valley between them, he -followed home. - - - - -XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - - -Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped -and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he -had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the -Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him -across the tracks. - -“There’s a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been -streaking through all day carrying Valles’s reserves from Chihuahua. Don -Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If -we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along.” - -“Half an hour?” Bull snorted. “That means half the night an’ then some. -We’ll have time for supper an’ a sleep.” - -But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the -crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the -train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail -of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on -top. - -“Must be yesterday’s train a bit overdue,” Bull defended his theory, as -the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. “The comandante’ll be in the -passenger-coach ahead. We’d better to mosey along an’ brace him.” - -But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs -dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop. - -“Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it -pan out?” - -It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull’s friend and Cupid’s aide. As his -car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the -titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest -subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign -in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the -dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their -dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a -composite welcoming grin. - -“Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings.” The correspondent breezily -ran off the names. “There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles’s chief of -staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government -clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us, -but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room. -Come right up.” - -A partition divided the car into kitchen and living-quarters. Bunks rose -in a tier of four at the end of the latter. Four more could be slept on -long lockers at each side of the table which was being set for supper by -the Chinese cook. From the oldest to the youngest, the correspondents -were on edge for the approaching battle. At supper their talk ran on its -possibilities. - -“If Valles is beaten again,” Weekes, the gray-haired dean, summed the -conversation, “our government will throw another of its silly flip-flops -and turn him down. And then—” - -“—this corresponding job won’t make good insurance.” - -“And then—” the dean began again. - -“We’ll hit for El Paso before Santos-Coy grabs us again.” - -“And then”—the dean triumphed over interruptions—“God pity the poor -gringos in northern Mexico.” - -Bull’s friend nodded. “Valles’s army will scatter into bands that will -rake the country with fine-tooth combs for the least bit of plunder. You -had better get your girl and her fellow, Diogenes, and come out with -us.” - -Later, when they had all climbed up on the roof and sat watching the -oil-smoke from the laboring locomotive whirl and twist, then float away -and lay its great sable plumes against the rich reds and golds of the -evening sky, they gave expert opinion on Benson’s mission. - -“If Valles wins, so do you,” the dean opined. “He needs horses worse -than money, and, as you say, has slathers of it in the El Paso banks. -But if he loses—hit for the border at once. I saw him the other day -after the first defeat, and hell couldn’t produce his equal. He was -crazy; a maniac; a tiger gone stark, staring, frothing mad. - -“And lose he will. How do I know?” He answered a challenge. “It’s a mere -problem of mathematics, the first equation of which was worked out in -the battle the other day. Given two men of equal military ability, the -one with a trained mind is bound to win. The other fellow, as you know, -is a college man—a college man against a bandit.” He turned to Bull and -Benson. “It’s a cinch that he’ll win. If I were you, gentlemen, I’d wait -the event.” - -Benson shook his head. “If we see Valles now and strike a bargain, we -can get our cattle across the border before he’s all in.” - -“Good enough reasoning,” the dean admitted. “But—ever since the first -defeat he’s been in one of his towering rages. Even his own generals -hardly dare go near him.” - -Benson shrugged; with British obstinacy he clung to his point. “It won’t -be the first time I’ve seen him in his rages. He may be dangerous—to -Americans, but John Bull looks after his people and even Valles is -careful of how he flies in the old fellow’s face. I shall go to see him -at once, and if he refuses—well”—his voice grew harsh and -menacing—“he’ll hear the truth about himself.” - -Not knowing him, the correspondents received it in silence. While they -smoked Benson went on in his hard, rough voice. “I tell you, amigos, -that your people have made a sad mess of this whole Mexican business. -For three years, now, you have been trying to apply the principles of -your Declaration of Independence to a race which won’t have evolved to a -point where it has the faintest understanding of them for a thousand -years to come. You stand on your Monroe doctrine, but refuse to take up -its obligations and give alien nationals the protection you will not -allow their own government to extend. While your statesmen prattle about -the sacred right of revolution and Mexico’s ability to settle her own -affairs, the country is overrun with bandits and mobs of pelados who are -killing off the decent people and destroying billions in property they -never created. - -“Bah!” he snorted his disgust. “Don’t talk to me of republics. Do you -suppose that either England or Germany would have stood for the anarchy -which rules here? For centuries John Bull has been ruling brown peoples -and he knows his job. ‘Be good and you’ll be happy!’ he tells them. If -they’re not—they get it, hot and heavy, on the spot where it will do -most good. The brown man is all right in his place—which isn’t on top of -the white man—but your government, so far, has failed to perceive it.” - -He went on from a pause: “Republics are incapacitated by nature in any -case for the job. They are too divided in their counsels—swayed to-day -by capital that will accept any dishonor rather than jeopardize its -revenues; to-morrow by sentimentalists who hold up hands of horror at -the very thought of war; governed most of the time by a ridiculous -yellow press. Individually, you Yanks are good people, but taken -collectively, as represented by your government and papers, you are -hypocritical, weak, hysterical, sentimental, without dignity or force. -You are grown fat with wealth, soft with luxury, too lazy and -indifferent to undertake your responsibilities abroad, and if you were -not, you lack the first essentials—centralized federal authority and -military strength to enforce your will. If you do anything here it will -be accidental—such as when the blowing up of the _Maine_ aroused one of -your periodical brainstorms, stung you into action. But in the mean time -the destruction of Mexico will be complete. There will be nothing left -of the civilization built up at such enormous pains by Diaz and which it -was your duty to maintain.” - -Silence followed, the uncomfortable silence that attends the digestion -of unpalatable truth. While they talked, the cars had resolved into dim -masses that swayed and swung through hot dusk that was splashed, here -and there, with the red glow of charcoal cooking fires. On those -immediately ahead and behind, dim sombreroed figures still loomed in -half-gloom. The flash of a match occasionally set a dark face out in -startling relief. The tinkle of a guitar accompanying a high, nasal -_peon_ chant, mingled with the roar and rattle of wheels. For some time -its whine rose under the stars before the voice of the dean broke the -silence. - -“What you say is true—most of it. We have been tried in the balance and -found wanting. We’ve neglected our duty to the Mexicans and our own -people—that’s the hell of it! But nations, like individuals, learn their -lessons through painful mistakes. We’ve had bad leadership and worse -counsels—so much of it that it would almost seem that we were -irrevocably stamped as incapable. But it’s only a phase. Under it all -the heart of the people still beats sound and true. Sooner or later its -voice will be heard. And when it is—the bleating of the sentimentalists -will be drowned in the tramp of marching men.” - -“You bet you!” It rolled out in chorus. - -“In the mean time,” a voice added, “what’s the matter with a little -drink?” - -Instantly the recumbent figures rose in a shadowy mass, and as its units -made their way down over the edge of the swaying car, the correspondent -jogged Bull’s elbow. “Come along, Diogenes!” - -But though a flame, sudden and fierce, had leaped within him; though he -trembled under the intensity of his desire, he shook his head. “Thanks, -I’m not drinking.” - -“Why—Diogenes? Whatever is the matter? If parental responsibilities do -this, damned if I know whether I’ll ever dare to hook up—providing my -San Francisco girl ever consents. Is this straight?” - -“Straight.” - -Warned, perhaps, by a certain earnestness, the other answered: “All -right, old man—only—if you change your mind, come on down.” - -Bull made no answer, could not, for as he lay there, huge bulk stretched -out on the running-board, face turned up to the stars, every ounce of -his energy, even the bit that would have been used up in speech, was -consumed in the fight against the furious desire that brought the sweat -starting on his brow, shook him like a leaf. Out of the rack and bang of -the swinging cars, click and roar of the wheels, his ear presently -picked the clink of glasses. Out through the lamp-lit doorway floated -Benson’s rough voice. - -“Well, here’s to Uncle Sam! wishing him better counselors and quicker -understanding!” - -Bull heard no more, for he had rolled over, buried his face in his arms -to hide from his snuffing nostrils whiffs of spirits. Once he half rose, -looking toward the ladder. But, strengthening his resolution, there rose -in his mind just then a picture of Betty and her mother as he had seen -them at parting—her hands on the child’s shoulders, stooped in slight -dejection, yet radiating faith and trust. - -Lying down again, he lay, hands clasped under his head, gazing up at the -fire of stars, while his mind traveled back to the _rancho_, lived over -and over again the slow, sweet hours of last night. Below, an undertone -to the roar of the speeding train, he now caught the hum of talk. But he -took no heed—even when it ceased. He dreamed on till a hand shook his -foot. - -“Aren’t you coming down to bed?” - -“No; I reckon I’ll lay out here. It’s cooler.” He did not acknowledge to -himself his fear of sniffing the spirituous odors. - -“All right, only don’t roll off.” The correspondent paused on his way -back to the ladder. “Say! did your friend mean what he said? Or was it -just talk?” - -When Bull answered with a sketch of Benson’s violent temper, illustrated -by a few instances, the correspondent shook his head. “Well, don’t let -him see Valles alone.” Going down the ladder, he called back, “If you -should change your mind about the drink, you’ll find the jug on the -table.” - -Instantly it materialized in Bull’s vision, a round stone jug and -glasses, as solid and real as though it stood within the reach of his -hand. Nor could he shut out the vision, as he had the odor, by burying -his face. With the cars swinging and swaying through the night, shut -out, it stood forth clearer than ever. He saw himself snatching out the -cork; felt the burning liquid coursing down his throat. - -“My God! why did I come? I’ll never be able to stan’ it!” - -The thought of the temptation, ever present, growing more powerful -through the coming days, gaining in strength while he grew weaker, -brought out of him a cry of dismay: “I’ll never be able to stan’ it!” -Then, very quickly, “I’ll have to! If I don’t—then I’m no fit man for -her!” - -The thought brought her face again in all its sweet wholesomeness. -Through the warm dusk, as it were beside him, he saw her hand fluttering -like a homing dove into his. He felt it lifting, raising him above his -temptation. The memory of its soft pressures strengthened and comforted. -Presently his fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the -running-board. Exhausted, he fell asleep. - - - - -XXVIII: A “REQUISITION” - - -Slipping in over the patio wall, a golden sunbeam struck behind where -Gordon sat writing and flooded the _portales_ with topaz lights. From -the kitchen came the soft spat, spat of _tortillas_ in the course of -shapement between Teresa’s palms, competing splash and flop of Maria’s -cloth as she washed off the brown-tiled floor. No other sound disturbed -the morning freshness, for Gordon had risen early to get off a letter -with Lovell, who had dropped in last night on his way to El Paso to -attend Phœbe’s wedding. - -So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung -across Lee’s bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The -rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of -white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair’s bright tousle, -round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily -dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono -and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back. -Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon’s first -notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes. - -With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could -feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore -it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom -she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the _ancianos_, he -was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of the -_hacienda_ when she cut him off. - -“Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had -guessed right I might have given you a—” - -He took it—in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. “To my -father and mother,” he replied to her question. “I thought it was about -time I dropped them a line—haven’t written home since I came down.” - -“What?” She uttered a small shocked scream. “You’ve let them suffer all -this time in suspense and alarm?” - -He looked up in innocent surprise. “Why should _they_ suffer? I didn’t.” - -_He hadn’t?_ Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against -such utter lack of imagination—but dropped again quickly, owing to a -second base treachery on the part of the sleeves. - -“Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. _You_ -didn’t suffer? _Oooooh!_” She pulled his ear till he yelled. “If you -ever dare to treat me like that!” - -“That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together.” - -After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she -asked: “But why this sudden plunge into correspondence—after such long -abstinence?” - -“To inform them,” he replied, with great dignity, “of a certain -momentous change impending in my condition.” - -“Oh, you are telling them about—_me_? May I see what you have written?” - -She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that -his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes -passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against -his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it -had evolved into a bear hug. - -“Oh, what a liar they will think you!” - -“To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the -silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing’s believing.” - -Of course she declared it “wasn’t a bit like her” and the rest of it. -Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee, -picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for -the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally -and _in toto_ denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor -panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent. - -“Only you are so blind. They’ll hate me when they see it.” - -“Trust dad for that!” he laughed. “He still has a soft spot for a pretty -damsel. When he sees this—well, he’ll go straight out and buy a fatted -calf.” - -“But your mother and sister? They’ll never forgive me for taking you -from that other girl.” - -“Wrong again! They weren’t a bit anxious about it. It was all my -father—with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They’ll love you -as much as I—no, that’s impossible! But they’ll love you, all right.” - -A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. “That other girl? You -never told me about her. Did you ever—kiss her?” - -“Lots of times.” Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. “At -parties, when I was a kid—and when we played ‘post-office’ and sich.” - -“Never since you grew up?” - -“Never.” - -“Oh, well,” she sighed, “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you since you -were so very small, and it’s such a long time ago I’ll really have -to—make up.” - -Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she -had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. “And now—what -about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they -receive it?” - -Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. “Such -impatience! Aren’t you happy?” - -“Happy?” His voice rang with sincerity. “Happier than I ever thought -possible, but—” - -“But—?” - -“I want to be happier still.” - -He meant and thought it. But she with her woman’s intuition knew this, -their love time, for what it was—the flowerage of their lives. Later -would come the ripe fruit—content mixed with the joys and sorrows that -form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed -forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she -would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was -not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it. - -“After—after Bull comes home.” - -In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the -shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped -in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time -before he spoke. - -“If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made -it a double marriage. Why, what’s the matter?” - -She had sat up with a little shiver. “Oh no! I could never be happy in -one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!” Coiling up again, she -allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. “I never saw him, he who -was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon -behind a cloud, but he felt—like you. In my visions he always took me -into the wilds—the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go. - -“It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and -gone down the length of the Sierra Madres—at first alone, later -traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then -down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only -the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that -impossible. But this we can do—go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, -who are both old friends of my father’s, to be married, then ride -straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by -ourselves till—till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you look -after the horses, and we can play that we are simple _peones_ and be—oh, -_so_ happy!” - -Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good -as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. “How perfectly lovely! Why -didn’t I think of that myself?” - -“You would have, in time. Oh!” She sprang from his knee at a stir and -tinkle of water. “Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress.” - -“You’ll go out with me to-day?” he called after her. - -“No.” She bent down over the rail to answer. “I promised Jake to go with -him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts.” - -“Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?” he -protested. “’Tisn’t fair.” - -But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out -from behind the sheet. - - -From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now -described about the _hacienda_, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise -from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had -become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with -Sliver or Jake—and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests -of great earth waves—then to sit and muse while the declining sun washed -the wide world with its resplendence. - -As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted -adobes, _patio_, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, -the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the -burning hills. But—in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and -wild—there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry. - -“Beast! she is but a child!” - -Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses -standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a -flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the -adobes. - -“Raiders!” he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, -“_Revueltosos!_” - -A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a -fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its -panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear -which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. -Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back -compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway -of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth. - -From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon’s sight, -blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the -half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw -a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a _revueltoso_. The elder -sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this -helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing. - -“Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!” - -At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon’s spine. Blind, -breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and -tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man’s arms, and threw him -violently against the wall. - -So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the -fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming -imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired, -aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a -finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then, -stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll -over. - -Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely -surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he -stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the -mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them. - -The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a -heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed -to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick, -it withstood a violent hammering. - -The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit -under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse. -But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand, -the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood -very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the -burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning. - -“They say to bring fire and burn down the door.” Her quick motion -simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame. -Whispering: “Tira! señor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!” she pointed at the -window. - -It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside, -and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the _revueltosos_ were hugging -the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the -bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at -random, there followed a quick scurry of feet. - -Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in -swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they -could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back -before—zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in -through the window and plump in the back wall. - -Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above -the woman’s shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against -him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window, -they waited—in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So -still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman’s excited breathing and -an occasional sob under the bed. - -“Tempting me to look out,” he read the silence. - -But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet -and the voice of Maria, the little _criada_, called through the bars: - -“It ess good now, señor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with -those evil ones.” - -The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned, -first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them, -“Don” Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back -gate Sliver and two _ancianos_ now stood with leveled rifles. Two more -poked deadly snouts over the low _patio_ wall, Lee and Jake behind them. -And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets -out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, _machetes_, a -hysterical, dangerous mob. - -In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed -at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind -him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the -ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they -showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them -villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they -rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with -evil jokes. - -“Drive back those women!” Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. “Then -bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over -here.” - -Nodding in reply to Gordon’s gesture, the leader followed him across the -compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly -cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome -Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the -ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such -reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature’s -mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales -and addressed Jake with an authoritative air: - -“Now, señor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of -General Valles?” - -“Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles -attacked my people!” - -It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man’s riding-clothes, and -the man’s surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy. -Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his -first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair. - -“I did not know”—his bold glance wandered over her costume—“you will -pardon me, señorita?” - -Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time -that revolutionists had come with “requisitions” to Los Arboles. She -answered from experience. - -“You have a commission from General Valles?” - -He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language -that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to -contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, _el -capitan_ Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or -other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with -his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles’s own -illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal. - -Lee handed it back. “This seems to be in legal form. That being the -case”—she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake -an appreciative nod “perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my -people!” - -“I know of no attack except”—the straight brows knit over a black flash -at Gordon—“when this man killed one of my men.” - -Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: -“He shot in self-defense—to save one of my girls.” - -“Santa Maria!” His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. “What -foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled -a dove. You Americanos take these _peonas_ too seriously, fill them with -ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a -soldado for a sweetheart.” - -Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined -just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on -Gordon’s part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool -calculation by Jake as to the possibility of “getting away with it” -should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still -holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering -if he could send one bullet through all four heads. - -If the thoughts of the _peonas_—now gathered in a murmuring, -gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling -like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall—a composite of their -thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and -torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of -mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought -and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine -nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee’s voice: - -“_You_ say that? _You_, a follower of a man who was once himself a -_peon_, who boasts that his is the _peones’_ cause? _You_, his -representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor -creatures? If you _do_ represent him, then God help us, for we have -little but violence to expect from your cause.” - -It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the -strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but -little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused -even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the _peon_ in all his -ways, to mutter: “You bet! they hain’t got nothing coming from him!” But -in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by -training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only -surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of -her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, -with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the -shibboleths of his “Cause.” Surely they were fighting for the _peon_; to -obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the -_hacendados_. - -“If my hombre did as you say,” he concluded, “he earned his death. My -general would be the first to applaud it.” With a gesture that dismissed -the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: “So let us -say no more of that. My wish is to serve _you_!” - -Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied -them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry -blood flooding Gordon’s face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing -his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture. - -“Leave him to me,” she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in -the eye, she gave him his answer. “You wish to serve me? Very well, -señor, you may do so very easily—by removing yourself and your men off -my place.” - -For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise. -In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. “Si, señorita—after -you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new -levy for equipment and supplies. Also”—another black flash went to -Gordon—“it will be my duty to take this man to my general.” - -“Perhaps I had better go,” Gordon whispered. “It may save you—” - -Lee cut him off without looking around. “And shoot him the moment you -get him outside the gates?” She quoted the Mexican law of “The escape.” -“No, señor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him -with my own hands at your general’s call.” She added, after a -significant pause, “Along with the evidence of your own neglect in -permitting your men to attack my people.” - -For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of -effect—especially upon meddlesome consuls—it was the fashion in the -revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one -could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He -blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed -through his vicious look. - -“Very well, señorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the -horses. These I must have at once.” - -“Well, think you’ve got ’em, an’ let it go at that!” - -While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her -meditation flashed a sharp question: “Were you at the hacienda of the -señor Benson last week?” - -The man’s dark brows rose. “No, señorita. If there was a requisition -served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez.” - -“When did you leave the cuartel general?” - -“Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other -side of the railroad. But what difference does it make—” - -“A great deal.” She gave a little nod. “Since you left headquarters the -señor Benson, with my manager, the señor Perrin, has gone with an offer -of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter -may also be left with him.” - -“Which lets you out!” Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the -background, now burst out. “Now git! That’s what I said—an’ take your -dead hombre along.” - -From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the -man’s glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the -peonas who were now crowding the _patio_ gates. Everywhere his glance -fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of -glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning -fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his -glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent -behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a -shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the _peonas_ -opened. - -While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the -_patio_ wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and -Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his -_ancianos_ still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret -mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it. - -As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they -passed out under the _patio_ arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically, -then followed his men. - -“Saddle a fresh horse an’ go after them,” Jake ordered, when Sliver came -up. “Don’t let ’em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we’ll -have to keep one man circling the hills while the _ancianos_ keep watch -an’ watch at the gates.” - -With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men -ride away. “I am sorry to have brought this on you,” he said, in low -tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added, -“Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him.” - -A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. -Jake was shooing the _peonas_ back to their quarters with much language -and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick -movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and -planted a swift kiss on his cheek. - -“I don’t want to be widowed—before I’m married.” - -At midnight Sliver brought in his report. “They’ve gone on to El Sol. -After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into ’em when they -stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood -quiet an’ the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. -The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. - -“‘The damned gringos shoot straight,’ I heard one of ’em say. ‘Already -have they killed one of us, an’ now they be ready. Also the horses are -tired an’ we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.’ Then, after -some jawing, they moved on.” - -“An’ they won’t come back,” Jake commented on the report. “Not so long -as they kin find something that looks easier.” - -Which was only half of the truth! - - - - -XXIX: TEMPTATION - - -Bull’s eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted -pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering -mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half -conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence, -the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth. - -Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town -enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in -the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand -_revueltosos_, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in -their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the -scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth -within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung -straight as strings in the crystal air. - -“’Morning, Diogenes!” The correspondent’s cheerful face poked up from -under the edge of the car. “Some picturesque, heigh? Who’d think, to -look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the -destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But -that’s your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a -quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night -for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A -night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to -the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit -each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a -cheerful, ‘Adios, señor, it is time to begin fighting!’ they return to -their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the -midst of their dirt and disorder.” He added, thoughtfully, “I never see -them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children -shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the -powerful weapons we placed in their hands.” - -“Picturesque? Yes,” he went on, from a pause. “But it’s mighty hard on -the common people. Look at that!” - -He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was -clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car. - -“She’s picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!” -Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: “If our wise men -in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are -doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! _The seed corn and -the brood mares!_ You know what that means—famine! If I were a poet I’d -take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles’s -war horses—I’d take her for the symbol of Mexico—Mexico bleeding and -bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed. - -“It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it’s -true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast -returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring -perpetually upon one another. Already—oh!” He descended to a homely but -vital conclusion. “They make me sick. God send us a _man_! A man with -sympathy and insight; understanding of this people’s failings and -necessities. God send us another Lincoln!” - -“You bet it’s hell!” In spite of the profanity Bull’s laconic comment -was reverent in its essence as the most profound “Amen!” - -With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful -self. “I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast.” - -Stepping from the ladder, Bull’s glance went, in spite of himself, to -the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone -jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his -back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look -when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his -sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and -when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town, -it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind. - -From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in -dirty streams of khaki and _peon mantas_ splashed with the flash of -brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot -of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured -into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt -and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with -a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its -evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson’s remark as -they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified: - -“If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this -would be a safer, cleaner land.” - -Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet -odor of carrion hung thick in the air. - -“More Mexican efficiency,” the dean shrugged. “After the last scrap out -here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They’d pile -twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the -soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of -hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way—it’s hard -on a white man, though the Mexicans don’t seem to mind. Appeals to the -natural vulture in them, I suppose.” - -While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the -crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under -guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten -years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one -thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the -extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell—to be -picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and -hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd. - -“Ole, Enrico!” As they came opposite, Bull’s friend hailed the officer -in command. - -After walking a few feet with him, he came back. “They’re Spanish -storekeepers on the way to ‘the place designated,’ which is a -revolutionary euphemism for being shot. ‘The place’ is the cemetery -where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican -refinement, eh, making a man’s legs carry him to his own funeral? Their -crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in -contributing to the ‘Cause,’ been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps -have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters’ beds. -Even in this country”—he spoke with bitter irony—“there are still men to -be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are -Spanish. God knows, it’s enough. Valles never forgets that he is a -_peon_. After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children’s -children the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec -forebears. It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some -justification for it—if it were only a cause and effect. But”—his -pitying glance followed the stumbling boy—“it is rotten hard to watch.” - -It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while -running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing -glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As -the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of -Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an -interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a _revueltoso_ -would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest -from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at -the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter, -quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand. - -“That isn’t quite so bad.” The correspondent nodded at one struggling -desperately with her captor. “She’ll soon give in and dry her tears. In -one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within -twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with -Valles’s soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by -a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it -doesn’t matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the -others—daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many -of them educated in Europe—well, during the sack of Durango forty girls -of the upper classes committed suicide.” - -After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and -turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old -Spanish mansion, with a great _patio_ and interior garden, its high -walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The -glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which -flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun -blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by -contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet -demesne. - -As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in -earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest. - -“More victims of the ‘Cause.’” After he had greeted them, the consul, a -bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. “Valles has robbed churches, -seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with—this. Last -spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to -which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and -came here to-day to ask the priest—who is himself a refugee whom I saved -from a mob that was stoning him to death outside—to ask permission for -themselves and others to end their desecration by suicide. One would -think that such experiences would kill in any human being the belief in -a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good stuff. Sticks right -to his guns.” - -Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came -just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the -burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: “The life He gave -none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is -not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight. -It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness; -puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was -necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked -ones to their proper end? It may be”—he paused, shaking his old head, -tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks—“but it is not for us to attempt -answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have wished that -He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones of the mob. -But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait till His -brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision.” - -Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the -children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of -mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty -four or five, raised her pale, olive face. “And may we love them, our -babes, when they come?” - -The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the -wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. “God is love, Sisters. He -would not wish otherwise.” - -In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were -wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked -slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house. - -Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost -pain. And yet—even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the -garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on -a small side-table. On their way they had passed _cantina_ after -cantina, all thronged with half-drunken _revueltosos_, all exhaling a -thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the -drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul’s invitation, he walked out -on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in -time to hear the consul’s conclusion on Benson’s business. - -“As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was -never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn’t help -any for me to go with you, for I’ve been fighting him on other accounts -all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that -will secure your admittance.” - -On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the _cantinas_. With -invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful -was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals; -seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd -that blocked always the gates of Valles’s headquarters—simple _peones_ -who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of -obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a _peon_ like themselves who had -abased the great _hacendados_, their taskmasters, confiscated their -lands, beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though -he shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw -them; had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming -and going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a -secretary, seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to -what was going on. - -“That’s ‘Matador’ Fero, Valles’s killer.” Benson nudged him as a man -looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a -suspicious stare. “He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon, -in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power -rifle. Looks it, doesn’t he?” - -He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black, -piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his -colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom -they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there -closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged -before the desk, and also the _revueltoso_ officers who lounged on the -window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice. - -Fierce beast that the “Matador” was, Bull’s keen knowledge of men, -developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less -dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive -upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his -thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest, -sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither, -told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the -bandit _peon_, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they -entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand -nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling, -it would rise and fall with a bang. - -“You may tell your papers, señores, the reverse of the other day was -sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow—you have seen my -reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?—to-morrow I -shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot -wind. And you can tell them”—he observed a sinister pause—“you may tell -them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is now -giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American lives -and property in the country I control, but if your government allies -itself with my enemies—” His big fist struck the table with force that -emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes. - -Yet, pulsing with vindictive anger, the exhibition paled by contrast -with his furious attack on one of his own officers who came in as the -correspondents filed out. The fact that he had been wounded and had gone -on, alone, when his command refused to face a galling fire, made no -difference. Beast mouth stretched to a gorilla grin, every line of his -face writhing in an awful smile, Valles scored him with coarse insult -and seething invective while his hand toyed thirstily with the hilt of -his knife. - -Flushing and paling, the man stood with hanging head till an order -issued from the last furious burst. “Go, now, and shoot every tenth man -in your command. I will teach them that I am more to be feared than the -damned Carranzistas!” - -In the midst of it Bull nudged Benson. “Don’t you allow we better leave -him cool for a while?” - -But the Englishman’s obstinate jaw set hard. “I’m not afraid of him. -Besides”—the secretary stood again in the doorway—“it is too late.” - -A curt nod marked Valles’s recognition of Benson as they followed in. -Then, as his tigerish eyes took in Bull, they lit with quick -appreciation of his bulk, then went off again on their suspicious -questing. While Benson talked, he beat again a soft tattoo with the heel -of his hand; then, rising, he walked off into another room. - -The secretary followed, and through the closed door they caught the -harsh, throaty monotone. When it ceased the secretary came out. - -“My general says that all of your property is subject to requisition to -be paid for in legal currency issued by him as the chief of the -republican armies.” - -“And he thinks we’ll stand for that?” His eyes flashing under bent -brows, harsh face burning with anger, Benson stepped toward the door. -“I’ll—” - -But as he moved the “Matador” stepped in between. Half a dozen lounging -officers, too, came hurrying from the balconies. - -“It would do no good, señor.” The secretary’s shoulders rose in a shrug. -“Wait a more favorable time.” - -Benson stared down upon him, big fists clenched, face purple with -furious passion. Thinking he was about to strike, Bull put out his hand. -But, turning suddenly, Benson strode out of the room, throwing his -defiance back over his shoulder. - -“He can’t bluff a British subject that way! He’ll give me his answer -_himself_—and he’ll give it _to-day_.” - -As Bull followed out a hand touched his shoulder. Thinking it was the -secretary, he turned—then stood staring at the sentry on guard at the -door, who returned a sheepish grin. Though the face seemed familiar, he -did not recognize the man for one of the raiders Lee had saved from -hanging till he spoke. - -“Ah, señor, ’tis fine to see an old face. The señorita, she that saved -us from your just anger, she is well? Tell her that fine mercy was -defeated by the _revueltosos_ who took us from her servants. Ask if she -will in her great kindness have the general set us free that we may -return to our wives and babes in Las Bocas.” - -In spite of his own stress, Bull could not but grin. “Was the jefe of -Las Bocas a better master than Valles?” - -“A master is always a master.” The man shrugged. “But one’s pais is -one’s pais and the niñas, the flesh of one’s body, blood of his blood, -cannot be forgotten. Thou wilt speak to her, señor?” - -The tear that trickled down his villainous face earned him a civil -answer. Though he knew the futility of it, Bull nodded. “Si, I will -speak.” - -Below he found Benson shoving like an angry bull through the _peon_ -crowd. On its outskirts he turned and shook his fist at the building. - -“I’m going back to the consul—to tell him something that he’ll take -better alone. Where shall I meet you?” - -“Here?” - -“No, I can’t tell how long I may be. Make it after lunch at the car.” - -Bull nodded. Then remembering the correspondent’s warning, he called -after him, “I’d like to be there when you tackle him again.” - -Nodding, Benson walked on. Left alone, Bull sat down on a bench in the -plaza. Already the drink desire was returned upon him. And as he sat -there, in the grip of his mortal weakness, three soldiers seated -themselves on the same bench and proceeded to pass a bottle of -_tequila_. - -Before he even saw it Bull’s mutinous nostrils snuffed the odor. Looking -away, he tried to think, to recall the vision that strengthened and -cooled him in his hour of torture last night. But now, the stronger for -his long abstinence, that enormous desire inflamed his brain; enveloped -it in heated mists through which the pretty, wholesome faces loomed dim -and indefinite. And then— - -After a curious glance up at the huge figure, the nearest soldier tapped -his arm. “You will drink with us, señor?” - -What it cost him to refuse and walk away! Men have gone down in history -as martyrs by the exercise of no more effort. But just as pressure -enough will snap a bone, as persistent fatigue will paralyze a muscle, -so the effort weakened his will, broke his resolution. Feeling curiously -weak, utterly exhausted, he stopped at the plaza corner and gazed at a -_cantina_ across the road. - -Even then he did not give in. Hands writhing behind his back, face one -purple suffusion, he circled and recircled the plaza half a dozen times -before he stopped at the same spot again. In that time desire has no -height he did not reach; passion no heat, hell no torture, he did not -endure. And while he stood watching the _cantina’s_ roaring trade, -reluctant but conscious in his soul that the end was come, a hand -dropped with a hearty slap on his back. - -“Come on, Diogenes, you’re just in time. We’ve discovered some beer, -good cold beer, down at the German Club. Counting the consul, there’s -only two Dutchmen left in the town, but trust them to have their beer. -Don’t waste time in astonishment. Come right along.” - -In his mortal weakness Bull snatched at the straw. He could drink a -barrel of the thin Mexican stuff without knowing it—at least he felt he -could! But while, for an hour thereafter, they sat in a cool _patio_ -talking and sipping, the despised brew was still potent enough to loose -the mad rustler spirit that hearkened only to the voice of desire. - -When the correspondents left to file their despatches, he remained. - -“I’m waiting for Benson,” he told them. “If you see him, tell him I’m -here.” - -While they walked down the _patio_ and out through the bar into the -street, he sat nervously making rings with his beer-glass. Then, -trembling with eagerness, he called the waiter. - -“This stuff hasn’t a kick in it. Bring me a bottle of whisky!” - - - - -XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - - -As they sat at breakfast Gordon’s glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her -smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in -his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal. - -“I’m going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day,” she told Jake. - -Sliver’s nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement. -“It’s a cinch,” he chuckled. “’Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never -seen two folks more sot on each other.” - -Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. “An’ who in hell might they be?” - -“Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other -like two stamps at the end of a day’s ride in a sweaty pocket; allus -that close up walkin’, standin’ or settin’, you had to walk around ’em -twice to find the jine.” - -“An’ after they was married?” Jake questioned. - -Sliver scratched his head. “You-all mightn’t believe it, but you c’d -have fired a charge of buckshot between ’em at long range without -hittin’ either.” - -Jake nodded. “I’d have allowed as much. But these ain’t that kind. Did -you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she’ll keep him -on aidge that-a-way all his life. He’ll never get all at once; never -quite reach the end. They’ll allus be something beyond.” - -“Say!” Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. “Fer an old bachelor you -know a heap. Where’d you learn it?” - -“Where any man learns it—from a woman.” A shadow swept, for a moment, -the reckless face. “On’y—I didn’t have sense enough to stay be my -teacher.” - -Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up—for -it was his day on guard—Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover, -he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon -ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his -being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had -somehow failed to fill. - -Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in -morals which has puzzled wiser heads. “Ain’t Natur’ the fickle jade, -a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he’s still -terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn’t she a’ b’en more single-minded?” - -His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a -flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were -now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at -correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver’s could easily have -perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the -attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch. - -“Say,” he called down, “d’you allow it’s all right for them two to go -off that-a-way by themselves?” - -Jake snorted. “Didn’t she ride with you yesterday an’ me the day afore?” - -“Yes, but she’s our boss an’—well, they love each other a whole lot.” - -“So that’s what’s biting you?” In one sentence Jake countered heavily on -the common view of things. “She kin ride with tough guys like you an’ me -an’ it’s all right; but she mustn’t go out with the man that loves her -more ’n anything on earth. Where’s your sense?” - -Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing, -he made weak answer, “I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a -chapperonny.” Vanquished by Jake’s disgusted snort, he withdrew and went -down to close the gates. - -Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise, -from where she and her father had overlooked the _hacienda_ on that last -fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge -painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As -then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant -cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range -rolling in bright billows to the far hills. - -Her cry was the same: “Oh, isn’t it beautiful? Soon the rains will come -and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be -had anywhere, but these golds—that is Mexico.” - -Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her -father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges, -scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and -their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential -calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the -soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and -grace of its flexures from her man’s riding-clothes, the mobile face, -molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest -subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when -she showed signs of stopping. - -“Oh, I’m so glad that you love it!” she sighed, happily. “It would have -been such a disappointment if you— But that is so silly, because it -wouldn’t have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark -evenings after”—she went on with a little flourish—“I shall read you -stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old -leather trunk. It will be lots of fun.” - -Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where -she left off, he began. “Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big -streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees -this—well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled -down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary -nonsense, we’ll—” - -The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his -imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid, -healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot -she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy -pause. - -Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to -their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged -in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a -trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods -freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly -scheme of things according to their hearts’ desire, the gods in -resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were -to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from -the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently -joined hands and rode on. - -At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher’s purpose. After they -passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always -out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the -mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their -course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went -after them at a gallop. - -Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and, -as he drew nearer, she recognized the _mozo_ who had brought Ramon’s -message from El Sol. - -“Que? Filomena?” - -As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her -happiness. “Oh, Betty is ill!” she translated for Gordon. “Mary Mills -sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as -my escort, so it won’t be necessary for you—” She paused, anticipating -rebellion. - -It came. “Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn’t let -you, anyway.” - -If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. “That’s what -one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I’ll have to put up with it.” -Turning to the _mozo_, she gave him his orders in Spanish: “The señor -will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the -gringo señor, where we have gone.” - -Disconcertion showed through the man’s _peon_ immobility. But with an -obsequious “Si, señorita!” he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, -dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly. - -Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to -be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight -he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he -built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the -succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet. - -Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it -soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and -lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke -puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, -mounted and rode away. - - -About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight -embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the _fonda_. But in -place of Felicia’s smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of -old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an -_arriero_ whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream. - -As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her -glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, -she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled -around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the -kiss, into neutral territory. - -Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the -night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge -to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and -violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that -undulated like a woman’s mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the -hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with -green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and -plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in -one mood as the other. - -“A wonderful land!” Gordon breathed it. - -Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and -its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across -brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; -then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, -and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the -mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, -rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in -the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, -richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled -Garden of Eden—could he have done all this, even then imagination would -have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to -prophecy. - -“Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this -is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth.” - -That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet -brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration -but an eagle’s flight away. Following battle and retreat across -sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was -scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon’s blast over the face of the land -to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range -columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning _haciendas_. With -them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded -and tortured, wailing of ravished women. - -In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that -had spied the _mozo’s_ signal and were now watching them from the -chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on. - - -“Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease.” - -If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few -hundred yards away, might have heard the argument. - -She would easily have recognized Ramon’s voice. “True, amigo, and I love -him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his -compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it—to make no -attempt on their lives.” - -“A promise?” A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. “What is it but a -deadfall for one’s enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, -women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it -to find a hot enough corner in hell. But _I_ gave no promise—and he -killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to -me.” - -“No, no!” Ramon’s voice rose in quick protest. “His killing would still -be at my hands. Also”—the addition came in lower tones—“I would rather -he lived—to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in -my arms. No, señor, we will rope him from behind.” - -“Bueno! Have it thy—” A sharp hiss cut them off. - -Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of -a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through -thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, -with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with -the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men -before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above. - -She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her -stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. “I’ll go down first. If I break my -neck you can pick up the remains.” - -Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way -on her beast’s haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with -skilful use of the bridle. - -“Come on!” she called back, laughing. - -But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the -noose of a _riata_ writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and -was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a -man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under -her horse’s belly. - -“Run!” From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her -shoulder. “Run! Oh, _run_!” - -He could not—had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had barely -time to use the spur, and if Ramon’s cast had been made a second sooner -he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the loop -settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next -second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. -While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. -Now he turned it loose downhill. - -That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker’s boast, -and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious -through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, -shooting close to the ground. - -His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging -of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, -the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the -leader’s head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm -in against his body. - -At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. “He -has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!” - -Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them -snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill. - -Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only -have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while -the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness -and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break -his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee’s voice, shrill in its -mortal terror, rang out: - -“If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!” - -To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, -like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, -but without answer raised a warning hand. “The gringo is not to be -harmed, hombre.” - -“But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compañero.” - -“The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own -life in the hollow of his hand.” - -Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. -Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in -all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a -_peon_. Behind them rose a coarse laugh. - -“Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou -forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave -thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? -As for Tomas—I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us to -divide this señor’s money.” - -The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. “Bueno, Rafael, -bueno!” Another called: “Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man’s -shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas’s throat it flashed at -last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee.” - -The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to -back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon -pulled a roll of notes from his breast. - -“Here, hombre.” - -The man’s huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his -share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee’s horse by the -bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last -odd note, she spoke in English. - -“I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against -me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster.” From which she ran -on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of -memory—their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her -own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. “And now would you -destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And -what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love.” - -She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked -and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes -stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic -fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the -hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its -grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took -out of bitter anger. - -“What have I to gain?” He threw up his head in defiance. “You! with love -or without it!” - -By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent -outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear. - -“Ramon, what are you going to do?” - -Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. -“Take you to San Angel—to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and -priest.” - -“Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known -me from childhood—” - -“They are Mexican—would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like -themselves. They will do as I say. If not”—his nod carried a sinister -significance—“so much the worse for you.” - -Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the -brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his -insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned -away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its -mate. - -She bent her head in sudden shame. “Ramon, please take me home.” - -“Yes, to _ours_.” He snatched her bridle. “Come! already we have wasted -too much time.” - -As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. “You -stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember -she is no _peona_, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you -will be called to account by our government.” - -“Your government?” Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. “Your -government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and -hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a -villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the -massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and -obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government—for -the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it -has lodged—complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us—nor help -_you_. Come on, hombre!” - -As he moved off, leading Lee’s beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to -break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to -his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking -back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the -moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm, -her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then -the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair. - -Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot -swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The -revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at -him. - -“Going to cut my throat, now he’s gone,” Gordon read it—and did not -care. - -But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts -even a bandit nature. “We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him.” -Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the -others. “Let us lift him over there in the shade.” - -“’Tis hard on thee, amigo,” the fellow went on, after they moved him. -“’Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no fear”—though -he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the gestures, helped out -by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning on his meaning—“we -will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to the strong. He has -not got her yet. Adios—and better luck!” - -As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored, -for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear, -cold vision to face its dread facts—the tragic realities even then in -course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In -agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them -go. - - - - -XXXI: “BRAINS WIN” - - -Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken -faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad -phantasmagoria, devil’s dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting. -As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a -window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More -clearly, a second picture stood out—of a big black rustler—to wit, -himself—set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the -rifles aimed, and yet—his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he -lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet -across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the _patio_ of -the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the -staccato pulsations of rifle-fire. - -“The battle’s on!” - -As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony, -poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and -covered his face, but could not shut out despair. “My God! I’ve fallen -down!” - -Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood, -face buried in his hands, till he recognized the “dean’s” voice. - -“Well, come on, fellows! They’re going to it again. Let’s get out where -we can see.” - -“I’ll take a look at Diogenes first,” came the voice of his friend. “You -chaps go on. I’ll catch up.” - -Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the -correspondent’s gaze. “Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went -it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but—last night!” He shook his head in mock -reproof. - -“What did you do? What didn’t you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then -went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in -business—those you didn’t break up. It took a troop to round you up. -They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. -Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here.” - -“Well, I’m sorry! damned sorry that he did!” Bull shrugged. “On’y to be -shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother -in the gutter.” - -His bitterness touched the other. “Look here, old man, don’t take it so -hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and -go on again.” - -Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling -had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, -as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent’s face grew grave. -Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way. - -“Where’s Benson?” He looked up. “Did he go again to Valles?” - -“Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it—without avail. -What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he -said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done -much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. ‘So if the -son of a gun kills me,’ he told him, ‘the boys will know it for murder.’ -He must have had a hunch, for he never came back.” - -“Dead?” Bull broke a shocked silence. - -The other nodded. “They acknowledge it—say he tried to kill Valles, -which is, of course, all rot.” - -Bull had leaped up. “Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It’s -no use.” He waved away expostulations. “You yourself warned me not to -let him go alone!” He started out the door. - -“Here!” the correspondent seized him. “Where are you going?” - -“Out—to get drunk—get killed if I kin!” - -Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the -correspondent stuck. “All right! all right! But what’s your hurry? -You’ll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with -me.” - -Through Bull’s black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. “Humph! Stand on -a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?” - -“Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that’s -exactly the crack Valles made about ‘gringo correspondents’ and -‘long-distance reporting.’ I’m going to show the beggar. It’s me for the -outposts where folks get killed.” - -Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. “Don’t be a fool! You’re paid -to get the news, not to do Valles’s fighting.” - -The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not -repress a grin. “What’s sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have -a right to get yourself killed, so have I.” - -The black shadow again wrapped Bull. “I’ve good reason. If I kin git -myself shot, like a man, I’m just that much ahead. But you—” - -“Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away -with a crack like that? We’re doing too much talking. Come on!” - -“I’d—” Bull hesitated. “I’d like to see—_his_ consul first. His -wife—she’d naterally like to know. She’s in El Paso, just now, an’ I -know her address.” - -“We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don’t -turn up, I wouldn’t want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too -long.” - -Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. “You needn’t to be scairt.” He -answered the other’s look. “My thirst’s over—for a while. But I need a -bracer.” Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier -significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return -to the old life. - -Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet -of despair he listened while the consul talked. - -“I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I’d -succeeded. If it hadn’t been that he was seen going in, he would simply -have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several -stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he -carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being -placed under arrest. Lastly—to satisfy me and give his murder the -semblance of a military execution—that he was tried by drumhead -court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general. -But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin”—he went on from a heavy -pause—“this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon my -records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one year—it -may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come up again. -No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may have -fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite the -name of William Benson in our archives, ‘The murderer was brought to -justice.’” - -The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among -wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented -thereon in his breezy fashion. - -“That’s Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than -hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up -goes a regiment and decimates the tribe—or a brigade, or an army, if -necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a -British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat -old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He’d make shorter work -of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the -Hindu rajahs.” - -In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally -impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet -square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the -United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a -letter. - -“Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!” He coughed -ironically. “Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact -that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and -in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle -Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial -ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or -property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save -this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints! -Oyez! Oyez! Frankly,” he turned to the consul, “what do you think of -it?” - -The consul shrugged his shoulders. “You wish to register?” - -His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the -correspondent’s name and commission. “Anybody else you wish to notify?” - -The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then -he reached for the letter the correspondent handed. - -“To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?” - -The pen scratched Lee’s name and address. - -“Anything to send?” - -“Nothing!” - -“Very well, gentlemen!” His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his -handshake—the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. “I shall -observe your wishes—if possible. Well—” His shoulders rose again. “Hasta -luego! Till we meet again.” - -“A brave man in a weak place!” The correspondent rightfully placed him, -outside. “Now, Diogenes, for the front.” - -An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last -quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and -rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of -stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the -flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a -battery of French “threes” was spitting shrapnel with the feverish -energy of an angry cat. - -Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, -whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot -through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile -in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting -that flank. - -Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were -to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in -a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista -positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the -ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would -strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping -through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist. - -Seizing the dead man’s rifle, Bull stepped into his place. - -It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would -have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment’s -surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights -and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler -spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his -_vaqueros_ on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every -other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully -as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter -puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, -grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the -dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction. - -“Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he’ll soon get over it.” - -Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and -began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The -spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling -rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of -the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture -of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy. - -A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her -heels patting out _tortillas_ while she gossiped with another girl, in -complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was -indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her -coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face -convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while -screaming frightful curses. - -“Damned dogs of Carranzistas!” she finished with her last, spent breath. -“Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with -tails between the legs!” - -Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The -fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. -“Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my -first prisoner.” - -Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while -making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards -separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that -burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, -shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its -mark; she collapsed in a heap. - -Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent’s -yell: “Come back, you fool! She’s dead! shot through the head!” he ran -out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall. - -As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept -space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was -not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a -while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes -flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic -curses at the distant line. - -“Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day -shall be my lover!” - -“And here comes he that will do it!” The man on Bull’s left touched his -shoulder. - -Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling -gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great -black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance -the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, -rifle-fire, booming guns. - -“It’s Valles!” - -As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black -horse launched out and shot up the hill. - -“Make way, hombres, for the guns!” - -Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken -vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the -correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension -flashed in his hot eyes. - -“Ole, compañero!” His wave of the hand took in all. “Hot work! but -nothing to that which is to come. Mira!” - -Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of -dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. -“Carranzista cavalry! But—look again!” - -Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, -brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the -west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. -Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching -as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles -shook his fist at the distant dust. - -“Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!” - -The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse -with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling -bullets, he directed their emplacement. “To the left, hombres! a little -more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!” The last one set, he -rasped out a last command: “Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!” Then -followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill. - -“He bears a charmed life!” The man next Bull spoke again. “Out of a -hundred battles he has come with never a hurt.” He added, with a wink, -“An’ it was not always from his front the bullets came.” - -Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit -with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The -artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up -his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, -the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to -the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle. - -“What are you trying to do?” - -“Justice on that grinning devil.” - -“Good job no one saw you.” A quick glance around showed the artillerymen -and revolutionists absorbed in their own work “Do you know what they -would have done to both of us—skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or -something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don’t care yourself, just -think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, ‘Having -toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.’” - -“I hadn’t thought of that. But if I’d been alone—” - -He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to -his loophole. - -On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the -massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown -blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and -sabers, _machetes_, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then -the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, -like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. -Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that -other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud -rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. - -“Weekes was wrong!” It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. -“He’s smashed ’em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!” But as the -cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, “That is, if -Valles stops and comes back.” - -When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved -into criticism. “Whatever is he thinking of? There he’s gone with all -the cavalry and left his flank exposed!” - -At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with -greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand -drums. Answering the “threes,” shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking -curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next -wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next -to Bull collapsed without a groan. - -Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps -where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill -came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns. - -“Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of -their guns! They’ve drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they’ll -flank us! My God! there they come!” - -From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of -smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. -He leaped and caught Bull’s arm. - -“Come on! Let’s get while we can!” - -They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, -maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head. - -“Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself.” - -“Man! Valles is defeated!” The other seized and shook him. “Do you know -what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. -If you won’t consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to -leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against -Americans?” - -Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and -smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, -there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; -then the feel of Lee’s soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, -the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear. - -“Come on!” - -Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden -their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain -of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and -low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the -dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his -jokes. - -“Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!” he gasped. “Gosh! but that -chaparral is going faster the other way!” - -A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that -dire moment he remained his cheerful self. - -“Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they’d ever get -me. Here’s my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck -’em on to the wires. Now, _run like hell_!” - -And Bull did “run like hell”—with the correspondent across his -shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded -out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the -knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief -twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his -saddle, arms around his horse’s neck, he headed for the town. - -As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging -yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. -Followed the terrible roar of a rout—yells, shrieks, curses, victorious -shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it -caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated -above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked -with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted -adobe streets to the railroad yards. - -There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains -and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the -hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, -then—the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass be-spattered -with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, sentient human -beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with Valles’s own -guns. - -“We’re farther up!” the correspondent whispered through white, drawn -lips. “We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main -line to insure our getaway.” - -He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile. -“That’s queer. It stood about here, yet I don’t see the placards. -Perhaps we have overshot.” - -But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car -ahead. “Here, señores! This way!” - -Just then, too, the door rolled back and the “dean” looked out. “Hurry -up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales -Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick -sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out. -We’re traveling, for the present, incognito. You’re hurt! Here, you -fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!” - -After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the “dean” turned to -Bull. “That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning, -looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the -Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants.” - -But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome -accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang, -and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine’s tug. - - - - -XXXII: TRAVAIL - - -The instant she passed from Gordon’s sight Lee’s smile went out, -quenched by mortal fear. For years tales that defied by their black -horror exaggeration by even the fervid _peon_ minds had filtered into -Los Arboles, and, more vividly than Gordon, she realized her danger. - -It was not so much Ramon. At San Carlos she would have a fighting -chance; stood ready to match her woman’s wit against his man’s strength. -Her fear centered on the men. - -As, overtaking them, he rode by on the narrow path, Ilarian pressed -close against her. “Cheer up, little one! ’Tis the fighting cock that -wins his hen. ’Tis the way of the world, and what matter it so long as -she be won? ’Tis his turn now, but later ’twill be for thee to keep him -itching.” - -Laughing hoarsely, he rode on, but in passing his rude fingers searched -the softness of her arm and she caught the bold look into her eyes of -his grinning fellow. Thereafter she felt their glances touching, -plucking at her like fumbling fingers. Now glowing with shame, again -frozen with terror, she endured it—to her it seemed hours before she -spoke to Ramon. - -“I’m afraid of those men. Can’t you—send them away?” - -He shrugged. “You have more reason to be afraid of me.” - -“You?” In spite of the deadly chill at her heart she managed a little -laugh. “That is impossible.” - -“Why?” - -“Fear one’s oldest friend?” Already, with intuitive guile, she was -laying the foundations of her defense. Though he looked at her with -quick suspicion, she returned the innocent eyes nature has given woman -for her chief protection. “For you—a man of whom I have known only good? -But these men fill me with fear.” - -Suspicion clouded, for a moment, his eyes. Passing, it left his gloom -lighter. Reassurance softened his tone. “Don’t be afraid. They will -leave us at San Carlos.” - -“But, Ramon, it is now noon. If we ride hard we cannot get there before -dark.” She shuddered at the thought. - -“You would rather we were alone?” - -“A thousand times.” She returned to his gaze the same innocent eyes—and -once more his gloom lightened a shade. - -“They are going to San Carlos anyway, so I can hardly send them away. -But I am armed, and there is no necessity for you to be afraid. Also—you -said that the jefe and priest at San Carlos would refuse to marry us. If -so, these are the men who can help me compel.” - -“Ramon!” she spoke with dread earnestness, “look quickly behind you!” - -He did, and his quick frown told that he was not pleased. Dismounting -under a pretext of cinching up his saddle, he motioned for the two men -behind to pass ahead. - -“You saw!” she said, riding on. “You are armed, but they are four to -one; may take you unawares. I ask only one thing. Keep my feet bound, -take any other precaution you choose, but unfasten my hands and—lend me -your knife.” - -“To use on _me_, if you get the chance?” - -“Not on you nor them!” Her steady look carried her meaning. - -His glance went forward to the revolutionists, who broke out, just then, -in uproarious laughter. - -“If I thought—” His hand went to his gun, then fell again. “No! they are -rough and coarse, but they know well that my father is Valles’s friend; -that if they lifted a hand against me he would flay them alive. Really, -there is no danger, yet—if it will make you less fearful. But you -promise—to return it, the knife, at San Carlos?” - -“I promise.” - -“I never knew you to lie, and I—” His face lost a little of its -hardness. “I would prefer to be gentle.” - -Leaning over, he unbound her arms, then gave her the case-knife that -hung at his hip. “I suppose I’m a fool,” he said as she slid it under -her belt inside her shirt. - -“Indeed you are not!” she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a -picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned -her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead -rope and go galloping back. - -The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse. -Also, with a woman’s self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the -thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on -till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her -again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the -afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and -rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley, -thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them. -While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows -drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which -men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped, -suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with -apprehension. - -“The beasts are tired, señor, and this is a good place to camp,” a voice -came back. - -“Oh, don’t! Let us keep on!” she pleaded. - -“The animals are tired and must be fed,” Ramon answered. “After they are -rested we will go on.” - -As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a -wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been -possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a -match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her -down and seated her close to the fire. - -Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her -swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet—all -the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror. -Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from -his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her, -she broke out with a sudden scream: - -“Take care!” - -Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him, -pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee -leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started -toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his -pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the -wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and -pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white -shoulder and threw her to the ground. - -She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish -face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark -lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay -till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily. - -“No, no!” The snatch of the second man loosened the other’s grip so that -she fell between them to the ground. “No, hombre, fair play between -compañeros. We shall gamble for her. The winner, if he choose, can then -sell his chance.” - -The fighting, writhing mass at the other side of the fire now -straightened out, and as they rose, leaving Ramon securely bound on the -ground, the other two added their protests. “Si, hombre, we will not -stand for that. She goes first to the winner, according to our custom. -Bring her back to the fire.” - -To avoid their handling, she rose and walked herself. As she came where -the light fell on Ramon she saw that he had managed to struggle up on -his knees. Now he began to speak, pleading, arguing, threatening his -captors with the displeasure of their general. - -But he drew only jokes and laughter. “Valles?” Ilarian answered him. “He -was defeated by the Carranzistas, and has trouble enough to care for -himself. The requisition el capitan showed was made out months before -the battle. Had the señor, your father, been fool enough to fill it, we -should have taken the horses for ourselves.” With a shove that sent -Ramon flat on his back, he added: “Lie down, hombre! For these many -years thou and thy fathers laid the whip on our backs. While we starved -they fed fat and made free with our women. Now it is for thee to watch -us at the eating and loving.” - -Laughing, he caught Lee again with a sudden snatch, was forcing her head -back, when Rafael again interfered. “Hands off, hombre, till the cards -say she is thine!” - -“Si, muddle not the waters for our drinking,” the others added. “Let us -eat, then get to the cards.” - -“The bride? She must not go hungry at the wedding feast.” The fourth man -offered her food. “Here, little one.” - -Weak and faint, she was backing away, but stopped with a sudden -inspiration. “If I may share it with him?” - -“Seguro.” Rising, the man dragged Ramon a few feet away and set him up, -back propped against a tree. “Only take care he bite not thy pretty -fingers.” - -Laughing, he went back to the fire, leaving her to sit and watch their -feeding of meat and _tortillas_, with gulps of liquor from clay bottles. - -Between her and them yawned a gap in time wider than the centuries that -intervened between herself and her wode-stained ancestors running wild -in the woods of Britain. Their low, sloping foreheads, unbalanced heads -with all the weight below; their loose mouths, brute jaws, dark skin, -nature’s infallible stigma of inferiority, pronounced them half a -million years behind her, the last-bloom of a higher race. - -In her a solitary youth had intensified the delicate fancies, -sensitiveness, timorous imaginings, shrinkings, and retreats that mark a -young girl’s first reachings toward love. And now—her idealizations were -suddenly confronted with the caveman’s brutal practice. Sitting there, -she endured a thousand tortures. Worse than their coarse jests were -their glances. She shrank under them in hot shame; to escape them took -the food they offered, moved over and knelt beside Ramon. - -He was sitting, head hanging, but as, now, he looked up the firelight -showed the sweat in beads on his brow. “_You_ bring _me_ food?” His -accent carried more than a thousand self-reproaches. - -She did not attempt consolation she did not feel. “Pretend to eat.” She -spoke in English. “They are watching, now. But soon they will -gamble”—she shuddered, thinking of the stake—“will see only the cards. I -still have your knife. When the time serves I will cut you loose. Their -rifles are piled behind us with the saddles. They may shoot you down -from the fire. But to reach them is our only chance.” - -He lowered his head to hide a sudden flash of hope. “I will do anything, -take any chance. Greater punishment no man could suffer than I am -enduring. But it has made me think—realize my blind selfishness. I can -only ask your forgiveness.” - -“Now, compañeros, the cards! Cut and shuffle for love!” A hoarse voice -came from the fire. - -While the first hand of a game she did not understand was being dealt -she watched the flying cards with dread interest; was still watching -when Ramon whispered: - -“I know that game. Five minutes will see it finished. By leaning a -little to one side, your body will cover my elbows. One cut will set -them free. I will still sit as I am, and when I whisper slash the riata -at my feet, then run! run into the depths of the woods. From here to San -Carlos is but a couple of leagues. Once there—with the jefe, you will be -safe.” - -Ilarian’s bellowing laugh rang out, just then, marking the close of the -first hand. “One to me, little one! Be not impatient. The luck is with -us. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.” - -“If he wins again it will be over in a minute,” Ramon whispered, while -the cards were fluttering around again. As the men bent over them, -thumbing their hands, he gave the word, “Now!” - -With two slashes she did it, one at his arms, the other at his feet. But -swift as was the movement, Rafael caught it in the tail of his eye. When -he turned she had dropped the knife in the grass and, though her heart -stood still, she resumed her pretense of feeding Ramon. As he watched -her the suspicion died out of the man’s stare. He was just about to turn -again to the game when, as Ramon leaned forward to take the bite she was -offering, the severed _riata_ fell from his elbows. - -Given two men in a sudden juncture, the one with a definite plan wins -the lead. As the man jumped up, pointing, Ramon sprang, reached the -rifles, aimed and shot him down. The others looked up, startled, and as -he aimed again they pulled and fired. - -“Run, querida, run!” Ramon had called it, leaping up. As he collapsed on -the heap of saddles it issued again on his last dry whisper, “Run!” - -It had all happened while she was scrambling up. Naturally she turned -when Ramon fell and paused, horror-stricken. Not till the others were -almost upon her did she turn and run—too late. - -As, heart fluttering like that of a frightened quail, she ran for the -wood Ilarian seized her. Wildly beating the brutal, pock-marked face, -she writhed helplessly in his arms. - - - - -XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - - -During the rest of the day, while the train rolled and rattled and -jolted its slow way over the heated face of the desert, the -correspondents stewed with Bull in their own juices in semi-darkness. At -intervals there would come a stop. With the mad, blind selfishness of -panic the _brigada_ Gonzales had burned the watering-tanks as they -passed. So those that followed had to draw for the engine with buckets -from wells. Also there were occasional rails to be replaced which, with -equal selfishness, they tore up again the moment the train passed over. - -When the sun finally set in a fiery conflagration and dusk brought some -cess of the heat the conductor came in with tales of wholesale -desertions from the _brigada_ Gonzales, and shortly thereafter began the -dispersion of their own men. As they approached familiar country, or -tempted by tales of rich loot to be taken from near-by _haciendas_, they -began to drop off in fives, fifties, tens. Of those that had kept the -corrugated-iron roof beating like a drum with their stampings and -shufflings throughout the afternoon, there remained only a single -solitary figure when, after dark, Bull climbed up on top to air his -choked lungs. - -As he sat down on the running-board the figure looked up, then moved -closer. “It is thee, señor?” - -Peering, Bull made out the face. It was the sentry who had spoken to him -at Valles’s door. As his mind associated what the “dean” had said with -the recognition he spoke quickly. “The señor Benson? Didst thou see—” - -“Si, señor.” His head moved in the gloom. In the rambling _peon_ fashion -he ran on: “‘The close mouth admits no flies,’ said Matador. ‘Keep thine -shut and we shall make thee a captain to-morrow.’” - -“A captain of what, señor? Of ghosts? For I was not deceived. He that -was sentry when they killed the German? He became a captain? Also they -that helped to roast the Spaniard till he told where he had hidden his -gold? And the three that killed el presidente for Huerta? Captains and -majors and colonels were they—of the dead. Si, among the _revueltosos_ -it is become a saying, ‘Be not a captain till thou hast grown -lieutenant’s spurs.’ Si, I knew that I should be dead before the eve of -another day, so I fled my guard, señor, and came straight to thee.” - -Though he was on fire to hear, Bull knew better than to bring his crude -thought into confusion by interruption. While the train ambled along he -let the narrative take its own course. - -“‘A captain?’ said Matador!” His eloquent shoulders quivered in the -gloom. “Better to be a live mozo at the tail of Don Miguel’s horses in -Las Bocas.” - -From a second pause he ran on: “He came to the cuartel general, the -señor Benson, while I was sentry of the second watch at the door of my -general. He was in there, Valles, with a girl. I had seen her go in—such -a girl! tall and straight, with eyes misty as twin nights, teeth white -as bleached bone, hair thick and black as the pine forests that clothe -the Sierra Madras! Santisimo, señor! such a girl as one may have when he -has combed a country and taken first pick of its women! I could hear her -laughing in there when the señor Benson came striding up the stairs. - -“I saw, when he drew near, that his face was flushed, but there was no -smell of liquor upon him. ’Twas the red of the great anger that burned -in his veins, kept his head shaking like that of a tormented bull. When -I barred the way he looked at me with eyes that snapped like living -sparks, shoved me aside into the corner with one sweep of his arm, -before I could stop him had opened the door and walked in—walked in, -señor, through the anteroom into the private office where Valles was at -play with the girl! - -“El Matador himself had warned me, ‘Let no man pass!’ But when I had -picked myself out of the corner and followed in, there he stood in front -of Valles, who had dropped the girl and leaped to his feet. Surprise and -fear showed on his face—the fear of bullet, knife, and poison that dogs -him everywhere. But it changed at once to a grin—the terrible grin his -people fear. His glance at me said, ‘Stay!’ and as I stood, waiting in -fear and trembling, he spoke with a voice that cut like a knife. - -“‘It is my amigo, the señor Benson.’ - -“Señor, I have seen his generals tremble when he spoke like that. Even -el Matador, tiger that he is, would slink before him like a whipped cat. -For all the pesos in all the world I would not have taken his place. Yet -that great Englishman stood before him solid and square as a stone; -answered with a voice of a hacendado in speech with a _peon_. - -“‘I came to tell you, Valles’—just like that he spoke, señor, without -even a ‘my general’—‘I came to tell you that I do not take my answers -from secretaries. The offer I made you this morning was fair and square -and good business for both of us. It deserved more than a threat of -‘requisitions.’ You’ll never get my horses that way—if I have to cut -their throats. If you want them, say so—yes or no.’ - -“He got it, the ‘no,’ quick and hard. Then the great anger that was in -him burst forth like a river in flood. Like bear and tiger they -quarreled, the señor threatening Valles with the power and vengeance of -his government, Valles snarling defiance, their passions feeding each -other as brands burn together in a fire. - -“One other thing, and you will have a picture of it, señor—the two at -their furious talk, the girl against the wall behind Valles, one hand -held out, fear in her great eyes, and a fourth; for as they wrangled -there came a stir behind me. So quietly that I, whom he touched in -passing, did not hear, el Matador came into the room. One second he -stood, watching them from narrow eyes, then, slowly and quietly as a -snake slipping through grass, he drew up behind the señor. I have shot -men in this war. At home in Las Bocas I have drawn the knife in passion. -But the cold glittering of his eyes, slow snake crawl, chilled the blood -of me. - -“He had gained knifing distance when the señor roared in disgust. ‘Bah! -Why do I waste words on a _peon_? My general, is it? I have had such -generals whipped on my place! General? A bandit _peon_ who steals horses -in place of the chickens with which he began his thieveries!’ - -“‘Bandit _peon_? Stealer of chickens?’ This, señor, to Valles that had -killed a hundred men with his own hand before the wars ever began? The -yellow eyes of him seemed to leap out of his face. At the sight of him, -frothing like a mad tiger in lust to kill, the girl screamed, hiding her -face! At his belt hung pearl-jeweled pistols, the best of their kind. -But with the instinct of his old trade the hand of the butcher flew to -his knife. - -“They say that the señor tried to kill him. It is a lie! Even when the -knife flashed in his eyes he still stood at his distance, shaking his -big fist, growling his threats, angry but unafraid; so big, strong, -masterful, that Valles, even in his fury, hesitated. But not el Matador! -Looking back as she ran out of the room, the girl saw as I saw; screamed -aloud as the knife passed, once! twice! with a hiss and ’heigh! -splitting the backbone, piercing the heart.” - -With that strong sense of the dramatic which makes the _peon_ a born -story-teller he stopped. For a moment the flash of a match lifted the -brown, hard face from the gloom under a tattered _sombrero_, lighting -the faded red of his blanket serape. Then they faded again into a dim, -huddled figure that swayed with the rack and swing of the cars. - -Bull had unconsciously suspended his breath. Now it expired in a sigh. -“His disposal. Know you aught of that?” - -The shrug quivered again in the darkness. “There is little more that I -saw. Across the body el Matador looked at me, and I chilled with the -sure knowledge that I should never see my niñas again. He even stepped, -then Valles spoke. - -“‘This is a good hombre. He will help thee with—that!’ He followed the -girl into the next room. - -“Between us, el Matador and I, we rolled the señor in serapes, binding -them with cords so that the face should not be seen by them that carried -him out to the secret place; and it was then that he spoke of my -captaincy. - -“‘Go now to thy quarters, señor.’ He clapped me on both shoulders. ‘And -dream of the stars the morning sun will see flashing here.’ - -“But lest I sleep too well, señor, I came from the cuartel here.” - -For a full minute, while Bull chewed the bitter cud of remorse, the cars -racked on through the night. Then he spoke. “There is one in El Oro, the -consul Ingles, that would have given many pesos—not the currency of -Valles, but real pesos of silver and gold—for thee to set thy name to -this!” - -“Si!” His cigarette glowed in the midst of a shrug. “Of what use pesos, -even silver and gold, when the sight is darkened and the mouth shut? -When one may no longer see the niñas at play, watch the dancing of -girls? When the taste of good food is gone from the mouth, the feel of -warm liquor from the throat? He that betrays Valles will have no more -use of these.” - -“But in El Paso,” Bull urged, “one would be beyond the reach of his -hand. There, also, is a consul Ingles.” - -“One’s pais? The rise and set of sun across the desert beyond Las Bocas; -the chatter of the women at their washing by the stream; the soft -laughter of girls; one’s children watching at dusk for the return—these -are not to be bought with pesos. One’s pais is one’s pais. To it one -always returns.” - -“Si,” Bull acknowledged the call, the most powerful in the feeling of a -Mexican. “But from El Paso one could go by the ferrocarril Americano. In -one day he could cross from El Paso to Nogales, thence south to Las -Bocas and live in plenty beyond the reach of Valles. And one’s woman and -niñas—would smile the sweeter at the sight of a bulging pocket.” - -The cigarette glowed again, this time without the shrug. “There is -something in that. Si, señor, I will do it!—go to the consul Ingles in -El Paso.” - -Just then the Chinaman called for Bull to come down to supper. He was -not hungry, but he had food handed up for the man, who, after eating it, -rolled up in his serape and went to sleep. Then, while he snored and the -train racked slowly along the chain of fires, each a station that lay -like red beads on the desert’s dark breast, Bull lay suffering agonies -of shame and remorse that grew more vivid as the miles lessened between -him and home. - -It was long after midnight before he fell into troubled sleep. When he -woke, at gray dawn, the revolutionist was gone. - -“Homesick and scared out!” Bull shrugged—and what did it matter? That -which was done was done! - -Nor was he the only deserter. All through the night the train had -dribbled away its evil freight in trickles that would spread through the -land till it was inundated with a flood of carnage, robbery, rape. Of -the clustering brown swarm on the roof there remained only a few dozens -scattered in heavy sleep throughout the train’s length. - -Across the brightening east the mountains now laid a familiar pattern. -Beyond—the _patio_ and compound of Los Arboles were lying still and gray -under the dawn. Bull saw, with the distinctness of vision, the sheet -across Lee’s doorway quiver under the breath of dawn. Then it faded, -gave place to the Mills _rancho_, equally still, equally silent; its -warm gold walls pale gray, the clustering bougainvilleas dark as clotted -blood. - -That feeling analogous to the chill of death which envelops a sleeping -house held him in thrall. While he gazed, there appeared on the veranda -the familiar vision. But he shut it out, tightly closing the eyes of his -mind. He turned his face to a dark dot, walls of the burned station, -that appeared to be moving toward him across the desert’s grays. -Climbing down over the end, he passed through the Chinaman’s kitchen -into the car. - -It was still dusk in there, but he could hear the deep breathing of -correspondents, sleeping heavily after the exhaustion of the hot night. -Quietly he gathered his belongings, had shoved open the door -sufficiently to pass out, when a whisper came from behind: - -“Adios, Diogenes!” - -Turning, he saw the correspondent leaning out of his bunk. - -“Don’t take that little slip too seriously, old man,” he whispered as -they shook hands. “Try again. If it wasn’t for this”—he tapped his -knee—“I’d have helped you to get out your girl. But you’ll make it all -right. Only don’t dally. There’s going to be hell to pay.” - -The engine was whistling for the station. Though it did not stop, Bull -jumped and, if a bit shaken, landed unhurt. He was watching the train -recede, his hand still tingling, heart warmed by the strong pressure of -his friend’s hand, when his name was called. - -“It is you, señor Perrin?” - -Drowsy and heavy-eyed from lost sleep, the Mexican agent stood in the -doorway of his box-car station. Anxiety and fear shadowed his face. - -“Wicked times, señor. Up and down the line they are robbing and -murdering, Valles’s defeated soldados. Many gringos have been slain. -Early in the night a company of fifty dropped off here and are gone, mad -with hate, to loot the gringo haciendas.” - -Appalled, Bull stared at the distant mountains. - - - - -XXXIV: ---------------------? - - -Left alone on the trail, Gordon suffered his own agonies—the poignant -anguishes of youth unmitigated by the fatalism or philosophy of -experience. Time and again his spirit rose in furious rebellion against -the frightful injustice of fate. Eyes starting with the strain, sweat -pouring from his brow, he rolled in successive paroxysms, vainly -striving to burst his bonds—only to subside each time into a coma of -utter despair. Then, as the very violence of his exertions cleared the -blood from his brain, he did that which an older head would have done at -first—lay still and began to think. - -How to get loose! There must be some way! He had once seen a prisoner in -a “movie” burn off his bonds with a fire of hay started by the coals -from his pipe. But if it were possible—outside of a “movie”—where were -the hay and pipe? An attempt to cut the _riata_ by abrasion on a stone -behind him produced only a sore on his wrists. Yet there must be some -way! If he could only loosen them by flexing and reflexing his muscles! -He stopped thinking, at this point, and lay staring downhill. - -His struggles had carried him to within a few feet of the dead -revolutionist. Before leaving, his followers had looted the body of its -guns, bandolier of cartridges, but had left the belt. Under the body -Gordon now caught a glimpse of his knife. - -To roll downhill was simple. With his butting shoulders, it was no trick -to move the body till the knife came up into position where he could -draw it with his teeth. But thereafter—a knife in the teeth could not be -used to free hands bound behind one’s back! - -He looked about him. The problem was simple. If the knife could be held -firmly so that he could turn and rub the wrist-cords against the edge. -Presently his eye lit on the stump of a _palo verde_ that had been -bruised and split off by the slip of some passing beast. Working his way -over to it, he bent and carefully placed the horn handle in the split, -edge up, point resting at an angle of forty-five on the ground. Then, -shuffling around, he felt delicately till the razor edge came squarely -between his wrists. Very lightly, in mortal dread of a miscarriage, he -sawed, sawed, sawed until his hands suddenly split apart. One slash at -his ankles and he was upon his feet. - -His first thought was to run, wildly, madly, after Lee. Then his usual -good judgment resumed command. The revolutionists were mounted and had -an hour’s start! He must have a horse! And with the thought there rose a -mental picture of the _arriero_ they had seen at the _fonda_. - -A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from -the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee -had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to -help. - -He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now -the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he -came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose -out of the cañon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the -_arriero’s_ sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling -up out on the level. - -The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top -speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the _arriero_ only one -thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his -rifle across the animal’s back showed how he came to be still riding the -trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and “requisitions.” -As he had seen Lee pass the _fonda_ with Gordon, one word, -“revolutionists,” fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got -only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his -clucks of commiseration. - -“Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied -remedies to my own niñas when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will -cry her eyes out over this!” - -Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the -hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule -crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of -serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his -questions with frightful oaths. - -“How many were they, señor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That -leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all -with one flick of my knife! Take thou this.” - -It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own -riding-mule, he ran on: - -“You shall ride her, señor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats -of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding. -But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse’s two. An -hour’s start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in -five, or less if they camp at dark.” - -He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol -cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back -down the ravine to the lush grass by the _fonda_, where old Antonio -would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle -across his arm, saddle _machete_ and knife close to his hand, black eyes -glittering under his _sombrero_, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready -for the start. - -Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did -Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made -up in utility. Justifying its owner’s boast, it navigated steeps, slid -down into cañons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the -opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking -pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free -wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds, -now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again -hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would -easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained -steadily upon the first. - -Fast as the little beasts traveled, however, their pace appeared like an -insect’s crawl when measured by Gordon’s fears. Action, at first, -brought relief. Later he fell again a prey to anguish. The threat of the -revolutionists filled him with horror through which, as in a dreadful -nightmare, he saw Lee struggling frantically. Of Ramon he never even -thought. It was always the men. Yet he managed to hold himself in hand; -refrained from lashing the mule into the furious pace that would, while -killing it, have still lagged far behind his fears. - -And he had always at his side the _arriero_, with his repeated, “Do not -trouble, señor; they will keep traveling till dark!” to cheer him. - -The latter’s sharp glance it was that picked out the sign where the -revolutionists had swung on to the San Carlos trail. His hawk eyes -found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the -opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn -veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists’ -fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly, -it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them, -after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently -shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light -of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside -Ramon. - -“One to me, little one,” Ilarian’s bellow just then rang out. “Be not -impatient. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.” - -At the sight of Ramon, the _arriero’s_ brows had gone up under the roots -of his hair, for, had he wished it, Gordon’s Spanish would not have -permitted a full explanation. Now he touched Gordon, pointing. Nodding, -he nipped off a few leaves, then leveled the long Colt, aiming at the -nearest man. A glance to his right showed him the _arriero_ slowly -shoving his rifle-barrel through the leaves. Then, turning again to his -aim, he was just in time to see Lee slash Ramon’s bonds. - -The next instant the latter sprang for the rifles. Lee was up and -standing almost in line with the man he had covered. He dared not shoot, -and in the next five seconds, before they could readjust themselves to -the rapid change, the situation had flashed into its final stage—Ramon -had fallen with one revolutionist; the others were rushing at Lee across -the firelit space. - -By that time Gordon had risen. As, standing, he fired from the edge of -the wood a second man fell forward upon his face. The _arriero’s_ rifle -cracked sharply, and there remained only Ilarian. Swinging with Lee, -still in his arms, he faced Gordon charging across the firelit space. - -Usually Gordon could be depended upon to keep his head. But Lee’s bitter -cry, the sight of her helplessness, combined with the awful strain of -the afternoon, produced in him a berserker rage. Teeth bared in a snarl, -his gun completely forgotten, he seized Ilarian with his naked hands -just as he dropped Lee; threw him with such violence that his feet rose -in the air and he struck shoulders first on the ground. Then, without -even a second glance, he lifted and gathered Lee in his arms. - -Fortunately, the _arriero_ not only kept his wits, but was working them -overtime. As, rolling over, Ilarian pulled and pointed his gun the -_arriero’s_ second bullet plumped between his shoulders. - -It is doubtful whether Gordon heard the shot. His face in Lee’s hair, -hers hidden in his breast, they remained without looking around even -when the _arriero_ spoke. - -“Warm work, señor!” - -Receiving no answer, he grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose. -“They are all that way—at first,” he confided in the stars. “But wait -till the priest ties them so that neither can wriggle without the other. -Wait!” - -A cough also passing unnoticed, he walked over and knelt beside Ramon. -With a heavy shake of the head, he passed to the revolutionists. Three -were dead, but, though unconscious, Ilarian still breathed stertorously. - -“The worse for thee, amigo,” the _arriero_ addressed him. “The old señor -Icarza will pay well to do thy killing with his own hands. By sunrise, -mañana, I should have thee to him, and then”—he gave a little sinister -nod at the dead—“and then thou wilt be envying these.” - -A glance at the lovers having shown them to be, to all intents and -purposes, still alone under the stars, he went off, shaking his head, to -bring up the mules. “Santa Maria Marisima! to think that I, also, was -once so foolish!” - -On his return he gathered up the arms, belts, knives, bandoliers of -cartridges, guns—it has to be written, also stripping the khaki coats -and riding-boots from the dead. “They will serve thee no more after the -old señor finishes,” he addressed the unconscious Ilarian, as he tore -off his. - -While he was packing his loot in an orderly and methodical manner on the -mules a murmur of talk rose behind him. But as it was couched in English -he was saved from further reflections. - -“Oh—_dear!_” Lee’s exclamations, partially smothered in a rough and -dirty shirt, still conveyed a curious mixture of confidence and fear, -regret, relief, sorrow, and happiness, hope and doubt. “Oh—_dear!_ I -used to be so independent and fearless. Now—I feel so weak.” - -“Time you did.” A hug mitigated the severity of the comment. “After this -perhaps you will let me do a little of your thinking?” - -“For a while.” The shirt choked a little, perverse laugh. “Till I get -over it.” - -“Very well, we are going on, right now, to be married in San Carlos.” - -“Oh, but—” - -“No ‘buts.’ We’ll take no more chances.” - -She hesitated and—gave in. “Oh, isn’t it nice to have some one decide -for you?” - -Had the _arriero_ been consulted he could have told a tale. But Gordon -quite believed it. He was raising her face to his when her eyes -distended with a sudden sorrow. - -“Oh, poor Ramon! Whatever are we thinking of?” - -Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the _arriero_ had -finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent -her back into Gordon’s arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the -_arriero_ took affairs into his own capable hands. - -“I shall take him home to the old señor, with this wicked one, and tell -him that he died in defense of thee.” - -With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better. -“They will never—know,” she sobbed, more quietly. “And—at the end—he was -sorry.” - - - - -XXXV: WHY? - - -While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the -chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky -that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills. - -“The bandits moved toward the señor Lovell’s.” He answered. “Praise the -saints! the señoritas are both in El Paso.” - -“Then they’ll go straight on to Mary’s!” The last vestige of color -drained from Bull’s face. - -Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle -of foul humanity dribbling down upon the _rancho_. He saw Mary Mills on -the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and -trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating -the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty -dribble swept around her and the child. - -He turned to the agent. “My horse? Did they get him?” - -“No, señor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral.” He -pointed eastward. “Come!” - -Half an hour later the _mozo_ shoved a shock head out of the chaparral -in answer to the agent’s whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was -on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare -of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed -through his mind. - -In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and -Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden -agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. -But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he -would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end. -At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that -afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a -mountain ahead. - -He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson -to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line -with the widow’s _rancho_ his fears crystallized around its slender -column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched -till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in -bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast. - - -Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always -timed Bull’s arrival at the _rancho_ with the lowering of the sun. As he -urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow -lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the -ominous cloud had died on the mountain’s high shoulder; but, more -ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though -prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the -place. - -The externals were the same—crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny -pastures. At this hour the widow’s cattle were usually to be seen -forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now—in all the -wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, -lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills. - -The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the -evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with -purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that -stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that -shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, -Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle -and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then -a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer. - -A wild rush of hope swept his being—to die the next moment when, -rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio’s woman. On her knees, hands raised -in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see -or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder. - -She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked -beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull’s face. Though -she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that -follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only -the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half -vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections -of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at -him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a -passion of tears. - -At any other time Bull’s dominant racial contempt would have caused him -to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his -sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion. - -“Aie!... Aie!” Soon she began to speak. “Aie! the poor señora ... and -the niña ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! -Aie! where were they?” - -A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited -with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man -on the train, to tell the tale in her own way. - -“They came in from all sides, señor.” Her hands swept the round of the -hills. “Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, -escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The señora -was at breakfast with the niña in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came -running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White -as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. -But she shook it off, señor, went forward to meet them with smiles and -greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while -she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to -them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of -pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its -paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating -them off with her smiles. - -“‘Enter, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.’ -Thus she spoke them. - -“Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of -beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it -reeked with their evil presence. - -“At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the -sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in -place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so -their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, -soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad -talk, they proceeded to worse—entered her bedroom and the child’s, broke -open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing. - -“For that she did not care—not for anything, could she but keep the -child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her -with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon -them. - -“‘Get Betty away!’ she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to -that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard. - -“Still she had hope—that, being fed and flattered and pleased with their -plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and went -among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and pinches, she -still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with smiling -reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from her hand, -and then—and then—how shall one tell it? - -“They demanded that the señorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At -first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her -‘Linda’ and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At -last one beast pulled her on to his knee. - -“To me, in the kitchen, came the child’s scream and the señora’s bitter -cry. ‘For the sake of your mothers, señores!’ followed by the crash of -furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor. - -“At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at -the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One! -Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went -down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the -ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I -gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward -upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams -of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of -God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?” - -Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she -cowered at Bull’s feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame. - -“Go on!” He stooped and shook her violently. “Go on!” - -She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. “I was wrong, señor. -One mercy was granted—death! They murdered them ... murdered them! -Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them—the innocent -woman, sweet child!” - -“Yet you—escaped?” - -“Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was -almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, -they were gone—gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after -they have slain the white heifer of the plains.” - -Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his -arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, -blind struggle filled his mind. - -The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in -a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this -horror? “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to -the fourth generation,” says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills’s -blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and -farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement? -And she—who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout -her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul? -Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration? - -Not in these clear terms did Bull’s thought run. Blind anguish kept him -straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he -felt—felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any -doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it. - -While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his -consciousness a sound that rose above the woman’s sobbing—the dry murmur -of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. They -were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone forever -beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! Surely -they were gone! Yet—the corruption of the tomb, mold of the grave, would -never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames they had passed -into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains that he was, -born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took comfort in the -thought. - -Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in -upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw -through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills’s -face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a -timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then—with deep -thankfulness he realized it—now she would never know! never know how far -he had fallen below his resolves. - -Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did -enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, -was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own -sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they -were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, -he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary -way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his -breast the thought—now she would never know! - -From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, “Why?” He -had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is -merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this -terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in -their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him. -His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds -than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had -utterly failed in its duties to its own—the government that, with the -purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and -loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric -people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies. - -Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward. -Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by -diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern -nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged—across the -Rio Grande. - -“You done it!” His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the -force of his indictment. “Yes, _you_ done it!” - -The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his -attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still -forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he -knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to -supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from -sharing. - -When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the -sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains—and -revenge. - - - - -XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—” - - -Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night -that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam -of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined -days before obscured by gathering dangers. - -Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his -arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in -their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos -nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the -railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it -had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed -like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a -picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise -counsel of Lee’s good friends, the _jefe_ and priest, Gordon had -prevailed. - -“These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own,” the -priest had advised. “Los Arboles needs a man’s hardness.” - -To which the _jefe_ had added his little joke, “Managing thee, niña, -will not be his lightest work.” - -No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, -taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican -law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the -wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would -have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church -are on Cupid’s side—well, there is no country on earth where his -business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that -shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and -Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, -according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures. - -Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl’s -expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon’s notice. -Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder. - -“I was thinking of the girl I left down there.” She expressed the -feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they -have left their girlhood. “She meant well, but—was _so_ foolish. I was -just wondering if—if—” - -“Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton.” He helped her out. “If -she isn’t the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of -heaven”—he paused, grinning—“and hell—” - -“You didn’t make _me_ suffer, of course!” She flashed up in quite the -old manner. “The way you carried on with that _dreadful_ girl. But there -goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning. -Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to. -Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose -her temper and—What are you laughing at? Don’t you _want_ me to reform?” - -“There! there!” Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second -laugh. “If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I’d—I’d march -you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the service -backward.” Quite illogically he went on: “I, too, had a serious hour -with myself. I made up my mind—” - -He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. “Not -to change? Don’t dare to say it!” - -Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change -is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion. - -“You won’t, will you?” - -He assured her, of course, that he wouldn’t—and believed it, no doubt. -So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to -remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they -turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went -with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid -underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and -valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, -midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the -mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on -a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter. - -In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by -sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining -along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in -many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It -looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon’s beast dropped -hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still -longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes -Pedro’s _jacal_ in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of -ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the _camisa_ and -_calzones_ of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old -fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a -welcoming grin. - -“He’s really part of the scenery”—Lee communed aloud with -herself—“almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay. -But, no!” She shook her head. “I don’t want any human being here but -ourselves. Oh, I know! We’ll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to -Sliver and Jake.” - -Neither would she—after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any -commerce with the _jacal_. “It isn’t that it’s dirty. Old Pedro is as -clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his -housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We’ll camp by the stream at the -far end of the valley.” - -She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated -a savory stew of _frijoles_ which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it -to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon -commandeered an old shot-gun. - -“What for?” Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his -eye proved him at one with her in spirit. “To kill the meat for our -first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of -any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in -this neck of the woods.” - -“That will be fine!” Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not -clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. “The wood at the -end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They’re just lovely broiled -over hot coals.” - -“Broiled over hot coals?” he teased her. “Wild doves, the symbol of -love? What desecration!” - -“I don’t care,” she pouted. “One has to eat—and they’re awfully good.” - -Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down -a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went -after wild pigeon without compunction. - -After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath. - -It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak -had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to -gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches. -First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance -around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a -natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with -a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim. - -“Your turn, Dirty Man,” she rallied him. “Go and take your bath.” - -When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow -wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and -served the _frijoles_ on golden husks of corn from Pedro’s garden. -Nature supplied the other utensils—fingers for forks, their sharp young -teeth for knives, bits of _tortilla_ to scoop up the stew. Both in its -preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first -meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a -dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all -sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to -help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down. - -“Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is _my_ work. You can -watch and smoke.” - -Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a -cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation. - -“I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven’t tried.” The -confession was nullified by a little sigh. “But it always makes me sick. -You don’t know how I envy Maria and Teresa!” Lighting it, she took a -couple of small puffs, then passed it on. “I always tried to get Bull -and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own -quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father’s den -and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he -went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into -his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so -tobaccery and strong and—_manny_. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort -and protection.” - -Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the -attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, -rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few -utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a -squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of -the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really -clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or -relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most -powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so -entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his -eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing -her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he -rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands. - -She came on a little run and thereafter—it was as she had wished it in -her girl’s dreams—as far as dawn and dark from the conventional -marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed—the law older than -theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. -In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, -in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink -cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening -song of the insects, its sanctions were recited. - -In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all -things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a -cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, -supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature -to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of -pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the _blasé_ modern -viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his -roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of -young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may -never know; and—your real philosopher will admit it—most divinely in -accord with the scheme of things. - -Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, -had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, -her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson -lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars -wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening -vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from -the rest of the world. - - -Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! -“In the midst of one we are in the other,” and the friendly night that -wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar -of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles -whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, -incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon -dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It -also lit the march of Gonzales’s bandits across the desert. - -Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the -stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary -splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face -and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the -preparation of their breakfast. - -In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on, -of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their -second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the -gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies. -Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee’s -knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond -the rim. - -“Look!” - -Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out: -“It’s the Millses’ beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses! -Quick!” - - - - -XXXVII: THE THREE—AGAIN - - -Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering -knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He -returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she -looked up at his touch. - -“You heard them talking before—before—” - -“Si, señor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them -speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell -them at the border.” - -Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the -ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a -voice called out, “Ole, señor!” - -Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes, -weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved -mistress—to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame. -From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father -of the woman. - -“I had thought thee one of those wicked ones.” The old fellow slapped -the butt of an old musket. “Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but -by the mercy of God I waited. Si, señor, I saw them go. After I sent up -the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always -the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted -them when they passed; a full score, señor, and more, on their way by -the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the niña, señor? They -did not harm—” - -He stopped, halted by Bull’s look, then cried aloud while the tears -coursed down his wrinkled face. “The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and -I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of -the best! I would go after them, señor, those wicked ones; but of what -use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The -biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take -thou my horse.” - -Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the -smoldering beacon on the mountain’s shoulder before daylight failed. -Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued -to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson -wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull -felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint -stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the -fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to -intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it -that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull -sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary -systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That -pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it, -this peace that quieted his troubled spirit. - -He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt -and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in -his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief. -He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a -clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the -sage. - - -Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had -been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough -to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained -the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of -the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee’s note the preceding evening, -Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment’s thought he voted -down Sliver’s proposal to ride down for Gordon. - -“He’d come in handy. Kin shoot some an’ his nerve’s all right. But you -jes’ kedn’t shut her out. Better to leave them where she’s safe.” - -“That’s right,” Sliver had added. “An’ it ’u’d shore be a shame to break -up their honeymoon.” - -Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake -and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on -Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman’s -yell issued simultaneously from their throats. - -“Why, you dolgorned old son of a—” Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he -saw Bull’s face. “Why, hombre! What—” - -Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark -valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in -those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that -which is denied to speech—the soul agony of a strong man. Given that -blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest. - -“Murdered!... Mother and child!... Burned ... with the house!” - -To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in -readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the -news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the -darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining -a fray in his _riata_. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city -person would have been greatly shocked. - -“The poor damn kid!” - -“Hell, ain’t it?” Jake’s tone was quite indifferent. - -But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking -lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold, -snake sparkle in Jake’s bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient. - -“They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail.” After a long -silence he answered Jake’s question concerning the raiders. “Must be -nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an’—” - -“They ain’t there.” Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. “They’re—” -He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs. -Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon. - -Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had -weighed down the girl’s spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot—for -the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him, -hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look. - -“Why—what—” Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, their -inaction, told all before he spoke. “Gone!—both!—burned with the house!” -Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to Gordon. -Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about again and -ran to Bull. - -“Oh, you poor, _poor_ man!” - -Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee -while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull -gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake -led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to -hear when she began to sob out a broken confession. - -“Oh, I feel—so wicked. While all this—was happening—I—I was—getting -married!” - -“Married?” - -“Yes—to Gordon.” She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of all -that had happened since his departure—her abduction, Ramon’s death, -Gordon’s ultimatum. “He begged so hard—and the padre and the jefe -said—that I ought—and I wanted to, myself—and we were so happy until—we -saw the smoke. And now I—I feel like a criminal.” - -“Then you needn’t.” He patted her shoulder. “The jefe was right. Never -again will you have more need of a man’s strength.” - -“But? At this time? While—” - -“How were you to know? An’ remember how hard _she_ worked and wished to -bring this very thing about. ’Twould have filled her with joy to know -that it had come to pass. ’Deed, Missy, she does know an’ is glad at -this very moment.” With that mixture of rude faith and humility that -made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: “Sure she knows an’ -some day she’ll tell you so herself. ’Twon’t be for me to hear it. My -kind don’t go where she is. But you will, an’, mark me, the first thing -she’ll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage.” - -“Oh, if I thought she would!” - -“Be certain of it, child.” The last lights had now gone out on the -highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited -many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed. - -While he talked Lee’s sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished. -“That makes me feel better. And _you_? You, too, think I did right?” - -She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. “For what d’you -s’pose I brought him here?” - -“Not to marry _me_?” She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment, -her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl -who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from -the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. “Oh, if I’d -only known it!” She added, with loving illogic, “I’m _so_ glad that I -didn’t.” - -“That’s fine.” He patted her head. “It will be easier, now, if you have -to live for a while in the States.” - -“_The States?_” she repeated. - -In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson’s death—she had enough to -bear—he described the scattering of Valles’s army, concluding, “They’re -wild against Americans.” He nodded at the fire. “The men that did this -are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there.” - -“My poor people!” she broke out, in sudden distress. “Gordon! Come -here!” When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried -it again: “Our poor, poor people! They are on their way—the raiders! To -Arboles! We must go—at once!” - -“Too late!” Bull spoke heavily. “Even an aeroplane couldn’t get us there -in time.” After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others -recent events, he went on: “I came back to bring you and Mary and the -child out. For them it’s too late, but you must go at once—you an’ your -husband an’ Sliver an’ Jake.” - -“And you?” Lee questioned. - -“I’m going on.” The statement in its simplicity carried more -significance than the wildest vow of revenge. - -“Alone?” Lee again demanded. “And you think we’d go slinking home to the -States and leave you to face that band yourself?” - -“It’s my quarrel, my work.” His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the -darkness. “You are young and have your husband. Your future is all -ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With -Sliver an’ Jake to guard you—” - -But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver’s voice rose in the -darkness. “An’ there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to look after -Lady-girl. But I ain’t so much of a fool that I don’t know the store she -sets by you, Bull, that’s been father an’ mother to her, now, for nigh -on a year. So it don’t go that-a-way. It’s me for Arboles while you-all -hit with them for the States.” - -“Good enough!” Jake’s acid tones trembled through the gloom. “With a -small amendment. You’re that young an’ foolish, Sliver, it ’u’d be a -shame to cut you off—worse ’n the green grass that goes to the oven. So -it stan’s like this—you-all go back; I go on.” - -“No, you don’t.” Gordon’s quiet voice interrupted. “At any other time -I’d feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I -could never look my wife”—he felt her hand steal up into his—“I could -never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get -out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border—” - -“They won’t—till we all go,” Lee broke in. “It’s easy to see that you’ve -all made up your minds to stay—and you’ll need me to hold the horses. -We’d better be getting on.” - -“But, Missy—” Bull began. - -But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse’s hoofs returned -unmistakable answer. - - - - -XXXVIII: FIRE - - -Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee’s right, but when the trail -permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded -his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the -mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of -creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail, -the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above -Antonio’s _fonda_ when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an -exclamation. - -Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow -which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and -swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them -to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon -it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the -flames roaring through the Arboles _patio_, bursting from doors and -windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows -of adobes. - -“My poor people!” Lee sat her horse and gazed. - -The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality -strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up -in flames—her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects -and _hacienda_ stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of -old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately -connected with her father’s memory. Surely a great loss! but if it -flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming -indignation—not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being -destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice, -ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand -such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with -its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver’s voice broke in the darkness -behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock. - -“Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain’t burn them yard-thick walls.” - -“An’ we left word for the _ancianos_ to drive the stock into the -mountains,” Jake added. “Must ha’ b’en cl’ar away long before they got -there.” - -“It isn’t that.” She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper. -“My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they -escaped.” As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added: -“There’s only one thing left. We must—” - -Bull’s heavy voice completed it for her,—“catch ’em before daylight.” - -While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose -above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march -the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one -thing—they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock of -_aguardiente_! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep. -And then— - -His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the -change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black -bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the -yellow walls of the _fonda_. It also restored a little color into the -bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children, -herded together like sheep around its blaze. - -When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy, -apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their -babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a _peon_ who -had run in from Lovell’s _rancho_; second, that the _ancianos_ had -driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle -among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust -forward to tell his tale. - -He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with -that _peon_ indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of -raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep. -Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic -stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them -he recognized a _peon_ who had run away to the wars after being whipped -for some grossness by the señor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard -them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast -over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the -renegade’s expressions of reassurance. - -“Si, señores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los -Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded -stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for -safe-keeping, ’twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret -pasture in the great Bowl.” - -Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed -the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a -vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the -precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be -caught in the same way? Jake’s remark expressed their joint conclusion. - -“It ’u’d be a _cinch_!” - -“Horses all tired out now, too,” Sliver added. “If anythin’ went wrong, -we’d have no getaway. Not that I’d care, but we kain’t take no chances -with Lady-girl.” - -Bull’s word decided. He made his dispositions, sent the youth to sleep -out on the plains and bring early warning of the raiders’ movements; -posted other sentries at intervals. Finally, he saw first to the horses, -that they were watered and fed and groomed; then to the serving of a -meal. - -He ate, but even his steady, methodical munching bespoke purpose, the -conserving of strength for his ends. As he sat, after the meal, gazing -into the fire, even Lee failed to discern much difference from his usual -self. But after the others, refugees and all, lay wrapped in their -serapes, dim, muffled figures under the red light of half a dozen fires, -he still sat, a somber figure in black outline against the glow. - -After Lee had cried herself to sleep he sat on. At midnight her -awakening eyes showed him still there. When she awoke again he was -gone—on the round of sentries. He returned before she fell asleep again -and sat on, staring into the fire, an ominous figure fraught with -danger. - - - - -XXXIX: “VENGEANCE IS MINE” - - -From the “hog’s back” where Sliver had accidentally discovered Felicia -and the _fonda_, Lee, Gordon, and the Three watched a yellow dust cloud -rolling slowly across the plains. The occasional silver flash that -stabbed it through as the sun struck a saber or bayonet told that it -enveloped the raiders. Three hours ago Sliver had come galloping in from -a reconnaissance with the news of their advance. Instantly the refugees -had fled like frightened quail into the secret places of the hills. -After burying various bottles that contained the liquid abominations -wherewith he burned out the stomachs of his customers, Antonio had -followed. So for two hours the ravine had been untenanted. - -Even after the watchers sighted the dust, an hour passed before it -disappeared in the mouth of the ravine; for, as their few horses were -loaded down with loot, the raiders moved slowly. Another half-hour -dragged by before they appeared, filing like ragged ants up the path -along the silver stream. Sighting the _fonda_, they stopped, hastily -took cover behind some bushes, and held a hurried consultation. When the -file split and began to work its way through the chaparral on each side -of the ravine Jake interpreted the manœuver. - -“Nobody home, amigos. Fooled this time.” - -A hoarse yell presently confirmed his diagnosis. Its note changed almost -immediately to rage and disappointment, and presently a thin coil of -smoke issued from the doorway, followed by a bright flash of flame as -the fire licked up the dry thatch of the _ramada_. Like infuriated ants -the raiders ran next to fire the stables. They were within easy -rifle-shot and Sliver was drawing an experimental bead when Jake knocked -up his rifle. - -“One shot,” he replied, to Sliver’s grumble, “an’ they’ll go like a -flock of quail into the chaparral.” - -Happening to glance at Bull just then, he nudged Sliver to look. - -On his knees, peering through a bush, the man looked for all the world -like some great animal, bear or black tiger, crouching for its prey. -Under dark brows, his coal eyes burned. Like some huge dog held in -leash, slow shivers coursed through his frame. Always the two had -recognized in him depths of feeling beyond them. The slow shake of the -head that passed between them expressed consciousness of a hurt beyond -their plumbing. They looked quickly away as Bull turned toward them. - -“Time to be moving. They’ll be coming presently.” - - -An hour later saw them all placed—Gordon in the chaparral at the top of -the trail; Bull, Sliver, and Jake at intervals of quarter of a mile down -the zigzag trail. - -“No shooting as they go down,” Bull cautioned them. “Coming back, -they’ll be among the horses without a chance to turn.” - -The arrangement, while wise, was not altogether to Sliver’s taste; he -grumbled to Jake as they moved on down to their places: “Fat chance for -us. He’ll pick half of ’em off going up between him and Gordon, then -turn and plug the others. Any maverick that gets by to us will be that -riddled a bullet ’ull slip through him without t’eching.” - -“Ain’t it coming to him?” Jake scornfully questioned. “He’s welcome to -my share—if it’s any comfort. But listen, hombre—let me tell you that -the killing of every _revueltoso_ in Mexico ain’t a-going to cure his -hurt.” - -Leaving Sliver at his post, Jake moved on down, and after he also -disappeared in the chaparral silence spread a warm spell over valley and -mountain; golden, sunlit silence that was emphasized rather than broken -by the wild screech of a hawk. - -From above Gordon looked right down into the amber heart of the Bowl. -Almost beneath him, the _jacal_ rose like a doll’s house out of the -vermilion splash of Pedro’s ripe peppers. From it the green veining of -the stream ran through the tawny pastures that were spotted with black -dots, the feeding horses. Far down, just where the stream slipped out of -the Bowl, he could see the giant oak that marked their camp; and though -even his strong young eyes were unequal to the distance, imagination -supplied the ashes of their fire, the bed of leaves under the spreading -branches. - -Instantly he began reliving, tenderly reliving that happy day so -absorbed that he forgot for the moment the tragedy that had brought it -to a close. He did not notice a slight rustle in the chaparral nor catch -the gleam of peering eyes. Were it a raider, he had proved an easy prey. -But the eyes were soft; the hand that presently stole out of a bush and -shook his foot was small and white. Whirling, he came face to face with -Lee. - -“What are you doing here?” - -She placed her finger to her lip. “Hush! they are coming! I just -couldn’t stand it, up there in the chaparral all alone. So I tied the -horses and—here I am.” - -There was nothing that could be done—except to look stern. Reaching, he -pulled her down beside him, shook her a little, then spoiled the effect -by a kiss. Then, lying flat on their stomachs, they kept a joint watch -till the scrape of a hoof, rumble of voices, broke on the trail. - -Peeping cautiously, they saw a motley procession file on to the plateau. -Like the soldiers of Las Bocas, their clothing ran the gamut of the -service uniforms of Porfirio Diaz’s army; the silver and gray of -_rurales_, red and blue of the infantry, variations from these of -cavalry and artillery, fatigue linen mixed in varying quantities with -_charro_ and _peon_ costumes. Accentuating this motley, their loose -gross mouths, blunt animal noses, lewd eyes in the midst of faces -swollen by last night’s debauch, fully justified Gordon’s judgment: - -“Gosh! what a gallows crew!” - -Weary and footsore after two days of heavy marching, neither their -appearance nor their spirits were improved by the fact that half of them -limped. Their voices had been raised in strident altercation. One -fellow’s angry complaint carried across to Gordon and Lee. - -“The two gringo señoritas at the Lovell _rancho_, where were they?—fled -to El Paso. At the second we got what?—one woman, a child, and three -horses—and lost three men. At Los Arboles there were to be women, a -score at least, young and pretty; also a gringo girl with golden hair -and a skin of milk? And horses by the hundred, blooded beasts of fine -breeding? What got we?—an empty house! Thou art a pretty leader, -Filomena.” - -“Si!” came a second growl. “And the _fonda_? ‘Courage, señores,’ he says -but two hours ago. ‘In the barranca we shall find a _fonda_ with liquors -and a girl, none prettier in all Chihuahua.’ And—” - -“Again an empty house!” - -By one and another it was kept up. “We limp like lame cats,” the first -man spoke again. “If this business go like the first and there be no -horses—I know of one throat that will be cut.” - -“And I of another!” The guide, an ugly, squat _peon_, turned on him with -a snarl. “Was it I that sent up the warning smoke? No? Then fasten your -tongue with your teeth. If you want women, they are to be had at San -Carlos, a few hours away, a fine town untouched by war.” - -“Si, more marching,” the first grumbler was beginning, when the other -cut him off. He had advanced to the edge of the plateau and stood -pointing down into the Bowl. - -“And horses, say you? There they are—scores! Si, hundreds! enough to -make us all rich when sold at the border.” - -Success! the shibboleth of the modern world! Even among these scoundrels -it wrought the customary effect; turned malcontents into enthusiastic -friends. “Bueno!” He who had issued the sinister hint of cut throats was -the first to clap the guide on the back. “Bueno, amigo! thou art a -leader indeed. ’Twas no fault of thine that the white-skinned girl -escaped. I will slit the gizzard of the next that says it.” - -On his part the guide swelled and ruffled in the flattering sunlight. “I -told ye. ‘Leave it to Filomena,’ said I. ‘Leave it to him to show ye fat -booty.’ Behold!” - -Also he assumed the airs and authority of real leadership. “The horses -we shall need to rope fresh mounts. Hide the stuff in the bushes till we -return. ’Twill be only for a couple of hours.” - -Fired by the sight of the horses, the raiders fell feverishly to work -unloading their loot, which—Gordon noted it with satisfaction—was -largely provisions. Then, lameness and blisters forgotten, unaware of -the cold, fierce eyes watching from the bushes, they followed the -horsemen downhill, yelling and hooting, raising the echoes with snatches -of ribald song. - -A thin wisp of smoke above the _jacal_ followed by an explosive flash as -the dry thatch took fire announced their arrival at the bottom. From -above Gordon and Lee saw them move down the valley in a long line that -presently came sweeping back in a half-circle with the horses in its -belly. - -There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts -were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid -vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then -the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single -file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider -sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers -looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and -around the trail’s yellow convolutions. - -After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose -to Jake’s post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in -the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked -more like “The Python” he appeared in _peon_ eyes. And he had the -serpent’s patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle -trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull’s -shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward -grumblings as the file rose to him. - -“If ’twasn’t for orders,” he mentally harangued the first raider that -passed, “your black soul ’u’d be a-busting now on its way to hell!” - -High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes -transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But -his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic -vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine -across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift -of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow -winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a -vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray’s “Elegy.” In place -of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which -man’s imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight -and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for -that peaceful contrast, he felt—felt with savage joy—Death, the grim -angel, hovering above. - -With her girl’s strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the -wriggling black line rose up to Bull’s station she leaned forward and -broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon’s sighting. Yet, -in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a -black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon -drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands. - -And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line -of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain—the beast mouths, -blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in -the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish -spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was -the face of Death itself—the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near. - -In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic -emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles -too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the -bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a -flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when -nothing better offered. - -About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed -below. Instantly Bull’s rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its -sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But -the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that -the last two raiders were still below Jake’s station. - -He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let -three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the -action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the -world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a -haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for -the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a -fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the -edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a -mad stampede. - -A hoarse yell marked the first raider’s realization of his danger. With -spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a -hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and -beast sideways over the cliff. - -Springing up as the mare whirled, Gordon saw laid out directly beneath -the course of the stampede down and around the stony staircases. At -first it stood out clearly as in those cinema pictures of galloping men -taken from a height. Following the first man’s cry came the wild yells -of the second and third. One! two! three! he saw them squeezed out over -the cliff; saw them strike the next level and bound off and over on a -longer leap; saw them turn, slowly in midair till the horses showed like -fat slugs above the men; saw the final crash and disappearance in the -chaparral below. But when his glance came back the crystal clearness was -gone, obscured by yellow dust cloud from the bowels of which men and -horses were ejected sideways as the stampede whirled on down. - -Of the thirty raiders, but one had a chance—he who brought up the rear. -But as he turned to run he came face to face with Jake, who had sprung -up to see. Instantly Jake raised his gun, but there came a roar and -rattle of stones and hoofs. Before he could fire the dust cloud -swallowed the man. Three minutes later it rolled down the last night to -the pastures. - -Over the Bowl silence fell again, golden, sunlit silence broken only by -the screech of the hovering hawk. As before, the wind whispered in the -sage, the clouds marched slowly across the blue fields above, the bees -went busily upon their ways; but in the mean time—when the dust settled -there remained, of the two hundred horses and thirty men, only the few -animals that spread out fanwise as they galloped across the level -bottoms. - -With the swiftness, sureness of a lightning stroke in the night it had -come, the doom—so swiftly that Lee and Gordon above, Jake and Sliver -below, could only stand and stare, doubting their eyes. And Bull— - -The instant the mare turned his mind leaped to the inevitable -conclusion. With a roar, bellow of rage, inchoate, wild as the snarl of -a balked tiger, he threw his hands on high, rifle waving like a reed in -one great fist. Crash! lock, stock, and barrel, it flew in a thousand -pieces as he brought it down on a rock! From the bank he leaped down to -the trail, in his hot mind some mad idea of stopping the rush. But -already the stampede had passed. He ran a few yards, as though to -overtake and pull it back. But it swept on and down beyond his speed. -Stopping, then, arms raised skyward, fists clenched, teeth bared, eyes -glaring in the midst of his swollen, purple face, he stood, a towering -figure of furious despair. - -Into those few minutes were compressed all the agonies he had endured in -the last few weeks—his trial, temptations, failure, bitter -disappointment, tragic grief, crowned by this, the robbing of his just -revenge. Swelling with a sense of vast injustice, the injustice that -created the world on a scheme of struggle and pain, he turned maniacal -eyes to the sky; stood shaking his bunched fists while a terrible -blasphemy rose to his lips. But it never issued. For in the moment that -it seemed his reason must crack there came slipping into his hot mind, -like a cooling breath, the old vision—of Mary and Betty as on that last -night. - -In the sunlight that wrapped the valley, just as in the vast world -loneliness under the quiet stars, he sensed her presence. His arms -dropped, the mad light died. Bowing his dark face in his hands, he shook -again with the throes of silent grief—but only for a short space. -Presently he looked up, the old humility restored, its expression on his -lips. - -“’Twasn’t for me. I wasn’t fit. ’Twas taken out of my hands.” - -Quiet now, he watched the horses careering over the bottoms. When at -last Sliver joined him he gave quiet orders: “Go down, you an’ Jake, an’ -collect up their guns—an’ ammunition. Bring up fresh horses for all of -us an’ a couple for the packs. We’ll have to light out for the border at -once.” - - - - -XL: SLIVER “MAKES GOOD” - - -By the time Sliver and Jake returned the sun hung like a red-hot ball in -the smoke of the horizon. Even if the horses had not been tired, it was -too late to start that night. Accordingly, after loading the raiders’ -provisions, they rode on down into the ravine and used the glowing -embers of the _fonda_ for their camp-fire. - -To them, sitting there, by ones and twos and threes the refugees came -straggling in to gather for the night around their own fires. Going from -one to another, Lee and Gordon dealt comfort and advice. They were to -reap the standing corn and sow again for their own use in the secret -places of the mountains. The _hacienda_ cattle they could herd in the -cañons of the lower hills. Thus, with plenty of milk for butter and -cheese, corn, and beans, their own chickens, goats, and pigs, they would -be able to live in rude comfort till the coming of peace permitted Lee’s -return. - -“The knowledge that they will not suffer makes it easier to bear.” - -Lee spoke, looking back at the brown faces enlivened by the ruddy glare -of the fires. But when, next morning, they crowded around her, old men, -women, young girls, and little children, mixing prayers, blessings, and -lamentations with their good-bys, she was less philosophical. She was -still weeping when she looked back at those that had followed her as far -as the mouth of the ravine. - -“Oh, if our government could only see them! Surely they would help.” - -Gordon looked for another outburst when, later, they sighted ruined -Arboles from the very spot he and Mary Mills had overlooked it. How well -he remembered it! The walls and courts, _patio_, rainbow adobes, a small -city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun; -the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy -of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far -horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into -the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by -laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. Now, roofless, windowless, its -blackened walls upreared in the midst of a wide, blurred smudge. Yet -though the contrast brought stinging tears to her eyes, Lee took it -calmly. - -“What does it matter? It can be rebuilt. But there are other things”—her -voice lowered and trailed away—“that can never be replaced.” - -They were both sad and sick at heart. Yet youth may not permanently be -cast down. When, riding on, they left the smoke-blacked ruin behind them -and passed from the dreary waste of burned pasture into golden plains -she began restoration. A native carpenter could replace every loved -beam; rebuild the massive old furniture just as it was. The _peones_ -would lime-wash the exterior in its usual rainbow color! Also, -restoration would give opportunity for remodeling and improvement. - -As she ran on Gordon sensed another motive; perceived that she was -striving to draw Bull out of his sorrow. Not a plan that did not include -him! A great fireplace, for use during the rains, was to have a -comfortable settle at one side, on which the Three could lounge and -smoke while basking in the blaze. Each was to have his own room. Thus -and so! Nor was her prattle without effect. Always sensitive where she -was concerned, Bull divined her motive, and, albeit with an effort great -as a physical strain, he responded, listened, and nodded acquiescence, -occasionally forced a smile. - -Only Sliver was fooled. “Say,” he remarked to Jake, who rode with him in -the rear, “did you allow she’d have taken it so light?” - -But Jake, the keen, discerning critic, quickly opened his eyes. “Take it -light, you ——! ——! ——! ——!” The epithets, if printed, would scorch a -hole in the page. “Kain’t you see she’s grieving her little heart out? -She’s doing it all for Bull.” - -At any other time one of those epithets would probably have produced a -retort that would have tumbled Jake out of his saddle. But, -conscience-stricken, Sliver accepted all. With humility that was almost -pathetic, he actually put into words feeling that was, for him, quite -subtle. “’Tain’t that I’d set in jedgment on Lady-girl, on’y—I reckon -it’s so with all of us—I jes’ kain’t bear to see her say or do anything -that don’t jes’ fit.” - -After a pause he went on: “About these plans o’ her’n? If there warn’t -no revolution, an’ we ked stay along here without a break, an’ they’d -destroy all the licker in the world an’ forgit the art of making it, I -don’t know but that we might live up to ’em. But I’m telling you, -hombre, it’s been awful wearing an’ I jes’ know what a spell in El Paso -’ull do for me—I’ll be that swinish I’ll never dare to come near her -ag’in.” - -When Jake had admitted like feelings Sliver continued: “Sure, under them -conditions, licker an’ its makers being, so to say, put on the hog-train -an’ run off the aidge of the earth, I’d hev’ one chanst to make good. -But as ’tis, an’ seeing that she’s now settled with a fine young husband -an’ kin get along very nicely, I’m sorter allowing that El Paso ’ull let -me out.” While his eyes blinked guiltily and his lips quivered with -anticipatory thirst, he concluded, “Sure I’m that dry ’twon’t take much -temptation for me to tell my troubles to a barkeep an’ have him drown -’em in drink.” - -“Nor me,” Jake seconded. “Besides, my fingers is jes’ itching to get -into a game.” - -“Drink, cards, flat broke—back to rustling.” Sliver laid down the law of -their being. “With me it runs like, the A-B-C.” - -“I drink, you drink, he drinks, we drink,” Jake chanted it _sotto voce_. -“If folks wasn’t so onreasonable a feller might make an honest living. -But the best tinhorn that ever turned a card from the bottom is bound to -make a slip, an’ when he does—whoosh! if he’s lucky enough to make his -getaway, rustling’s all that’s left.” - -“Bull?” Sliver nodded at the broad back ahead. “D’you allow he’s a-going -to stay put?” - -Jake’s shake of the head mixed doubt with concern. “If we meet up with -any Mex—we’ll never get him away. He’ll run amuck among ’em.” - -Sliver’s reckless eye lit with a fighting gleam. “An’ the country’s jes’ -lousy with _revueltosos_? Hombre, it’s a cinch! Not that I’d want it,” -he hypocritically added, “Lady-girl being along. But if we do chance on -a few—hum! what’s the exchange, jes’ now, in Valles’s money? Seven to -one, heigh? Well, we’ve three rifles apiece, counting the extras on the -pack-horses. One man with three rifles is as good as two men. Twice four -of us makes eight. At current exchange, one gringo for seven Mex, we -orter account for fifty-six.” - -“There or thereabouts,” Jake agreed. “But, as you say, Missy being -along, it’s up to us to dodge ’em.” - -“Five days?” Sliver hopefully repeated. “We’d jes’ as well look out for -trouble.” - - -Not till the morning of the third day did the “trouble” loom up over the -horizon. - -To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would -strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso. -Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a -few _peon_ herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But -while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them -away from water, the first necessity of desert travel. - -From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse -grass country dotted with _sahuaros_; thereafter into sage desert -sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same; -a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation, -its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only -by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs. -Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost -due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the -railroad. - -Dusk was falling when they—more correctly, the horses—found a small -_arroyo_. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they -might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They -did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too, -they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between -them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for -danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without -fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the -“trouble” showed up in form of a line of _sombreros_ behind the peak of -a limestone ridge—unfortunately, to the eastward. - -Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the -pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as -they rode, Gordon saw the line of _sombreros_ rise in correspondence as -the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the -ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief -against the sky-line. - -“They’ve seen us!” - -As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their -galloping hoofs. “Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!” - -A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets -chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew -overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main -wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards -away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the -ridge. - -Differing speed had strung the pursuers out in a scattering column, and -Sliver grinned his delight at the arrangement. “Like bowling at the -county fair. Miss one, you’ve still a chance at the next behind. Set ’em -up again!” he yelled as, following their volley, two men and a horse -plunged forward on the ground. - -“A bit lower, Son,” Bull quietly admonished Gordon. “Aim at the jine of -man an’ horse. That gives you a seven-foot target.” - -“One cigar, one baby down!” - -Sliver’s second yell marked the fall of two more horses and another -man—shot by Bull out of his saddle. Aiming and firing with the deadly -accuracy bred by years of just such fighting against more sagacious -foes, they dropped the leaders as fast as they came on; in three minutes -had drawn a dead-line of men and horses across their front. And that -deadly practice told. Brave enough, after their lights, the raiders were -not accustomed to such shooting. In the revolutionary wars their own -practice, like that of their opponents, was to spring up out of a -trench, yell “_Viva Mexico!_” fire in the enemy’s direction, and drop -back again, trusting to the god of war to find a billet for the bullet. -Turning, they raced back for the opposite ridge, spurred on by the -galling shooting that emptied two more saddles. - -Bull’s black glance following them with longing that confirmed Jake’s -diagnosis—he would have “run amuck among ’em” if left to himself. The -more steadily, perhaps, for his deadly thirst to kill, he had aimed and -fired with automatic precision. Withal, he had found time to note -Gordon’s steady shooting. - -“You done fine, lad,” he commented. “If there was only ourselves, I’d be -in favor of carrying it to ’em. But”—his glance went to Lee, who was -holding the horses—“we’ll have to fall back. They’ve had their lesson -an’ ain’t a-going to try any more fool charges. Now they’ll try an’ -flank us. While Sliver an’ Jake hold ’em, we’ll run back to the next -ridge.” - -But Gordon, flushed with his taste of battle, rebelled. “What’s the -matter with me staying? You fellows care for me like three hens -scratching for an orphan chicken. I’m tired of this sheltered life.” - -“‘Sheltered life’?” Communing with himself, Jake glanced at the grisly -dead-line. “‘Sheltered life,’ an’ him with two stretched out down -there.” - -“Comes o’ being married,” Sliver added. “No married man has a right to -run with batchelders.” - -“That’s right,” Jake approved. “It’s up to you to look after your wife.” - -“Well?” Gordon protested. “How can I do it better than by staying here?” - -“What?” Sliver looked scandalized. “Us take a chanst of her being -widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree! -Git out.” - -“Come on, Son, you’re delaying the game.” Bull had already joined Lee. -His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug, -Gordon obeyed. - -The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others -had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. “Bet you -they’ve split already an’ are moving around us. Now if we do the same, -keeping well out of sight, we’ll mebbe get another crack at ’em.” - -And so it was. When, after a half-mile détour through limestone and sage -chaparral, the halves of the raiders’ party showed in the open two -rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless -horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From -the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back -and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the -nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an -occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead. - -While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its -southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like -an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge -behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But -with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in -unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely -upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only -roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would -bring forth no new enemy. - -Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut -the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered -more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an -impassable barrier, forcing a détour. Worst of all, the denser growths -permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver, -midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than -two hundred yards away. - -“If ’twas on’y black powder they was using,” Sliver bitterly complained, -“we’d stan’ some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their -smoke.” - -“You’re onreasonable,” Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting -from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los -Arboles: “In order that these here bandits kin exercise the ‘sacred -right of revolution to reg’late their own internal affairs’ your Uncle -Samuel has kindly supplied ’em with the latest smokeless cartridge. -Thanks to his benevolence, some one’s going to get hurt pretty soon.” - -He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they -evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down -Sliver’s horse. Hanging on to Jake’s stirrup leather, he made the next -ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load -abandoned. - -“An’ this is on’y the beginning.” Jake continued his remarks from the -next ridge. “The railroad’s not far away, an’ as I remember the country -hereabouts, she runs right out in the open, with nary a snitch of cover -for over twenty miles. There’ll be nothing to stop ’em from shooting us -down by volleys at long range. So it all boils down to this—some one’s -got to hold ’em at the next good stand while the others make their -getaway.” - -They had been carrying two rifles apiece. Now Sliver quietly -appropriated Jake’s extra weapon. “With three rifles I orter be good for -two hours.” - -“When I said ‘some one’”—Jake quietly repossessed himself of the -weapon—“I naterally allowed his name was Jake Evers. Git! before I bust -you over the head.” - -“If ’twasn’t for them”—Sliver’s hard glance went out to the -chaparral—“there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to take time to rub your -long hoss face in the dust.” - -The threat, however, produced from Jake only his wolf grin. “You damned -fool! D’you know what’s going to happen to the man that stays behind? -He’s a-going to be what the society columns call ‘the piece de -resistence’ at a Mexican barbecure. There ain’t a thing in the line of -torture that them bandits won’t do to you.” - -“You ked never stan’ it.” Sliver displayed great solicitude. “You’re -getting along, Jake, an’ your nerve ain’t what it used to be.” - -“You’ve said it.” Jake’s cold eye warmed. He placed a friendly hand on -Sliver’s shoulder. “You’re dead right, Son. I’m getting on. What’s more, -I’m that dyed-in-the-wool with deviltry ’twon’t hurt anybody when I -pinch out. But you’re young yet. You’ll—” - -“—hit El Paso an’ go straight to the devil. You know it darned well. -We’ll gamble for it.” He spat on a pebble and threw it up. “Wet or dry, -which? Wet! I win!” - -“Jest my luck!” Jake’s complaint was sincere as though, instead of death -or torture, life and fortune had been the hazard. “I don’t have no -chance at all except with cards. What did I wanter go an’ do that for, -anyway, an’ me with a deck right here in my pocket?” - -“Too late!” Sliver pressed his triumph. “Now git!” - -But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the -stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon -were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it -loomed even more inaccessible. - -“’Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the -middle.” - -Sliver’s glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the -ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. “Don’t tell -Lady-girl—that is, not jes’ now. Let her think I’ll make my getaway to -the northward. But some day, after she’s safe in El Paso, you kin tell -her—that Sliver was on’y too damn glad to give his life for her’n.” He -went on, dreamily: “’Course I knew it ’u’d be all off after I’d hit the -city. But I’d sorter thought, now an’ then, that if the rangers didn’t -get me too quick, some day I’d come back to Arboles, when her kids was -about hip-high, an’ teach ’em to ride an’ shoot. But that was jes’ a -dream.” - -Jake’s glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the -_revueltosos_, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver’s request -might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other -trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he -could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone. - -“Funny, ain’t it? But that’s just what I’d often thought myself. Sure -I’ll tell her—if them devils don’t down me on the next run. They’re damn -close now, and they’ll be up here before we’re half-way across. Against -that limestone front we’ll make some mark, an’ with fifty of ’em -cracking at us it ’ull be the luck of hell if they don’t down one or -both.” - -Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the -boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering -behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks -or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless -scramble up the last steep two found their mark—one through Sliver’s -knee, the other dropped Jake’s horse. - -Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of -his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried -him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a -full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain -traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see—not the tracks; it -was too far away for that—a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine. -Bull and Gordon still lay answering the _revueltosos’_ fire. But Sliver -and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in -which the dead horse lay out of sight. - -“Hey!” Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. “Let ’em go! -You’ll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I’m hurt. You -kin take my horse; on’y lift me down first an’ prop me up among the -rocks where I kin lie comfortable an’ pump a gun.” - -Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his -rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well -and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him, -painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride -with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands, -shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring -raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the -memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other -beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends; -all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound -the “Three Bad Men of Las Bocas” closer than brothers—all this combined -in an emotion that revolted at desertion. - -“My _God_, hombre!” he broke out in protest. “I kain’t leave you here, -wounded, to fall in the han’s of them wolves!” - -“You kain’t do nothing else!” Hard eyes flashing, Sliver went on: -“Didn’t we gamble, jest now, for who was to stay? An’ didn’t I win? Now -you’re trying to renig?” As he noted the sweat standing out on Jake’s -brow, he went on more quietly: “Look at it sensible. What ked you-all do -with a wounded man? You’d on’y sign Lady-girl’s death warrant. And don’t -worry about them wolves. They ain’t a-going to light no fires on my -belly nor burn my feet. If I don’t get done up in the scrap—the last -bullet will be for myself.” - -Also he turned an adamant face to a proposal that Jake should stay too. -“No, hombre, it’s still over a hundred miles to the border, an’ they -need you. There’s nothing left for you but to take my horse an’ git.” - -It had all been said and done without strain, effort, or -self-consciousness; was entirely the expression of his hardy, careless -soul that had never known the vice of self-pity. But when Jake still -stood, his long, lean face working lugubriously in his attempts to hide -his grief, Sliver did that which, for him, was a miracle in -divination—entered into and felt the pain of another soul. - -“Oh, shore, hombre!” His face lit up with sympathy. “You orter be glad. -Ain’t it better to die clean, this-a-way, than to choke slowly at the -end of some ranger’s rope? Go on, now, an’ catch up to ’em an’ keep ’em -moving till night. With the least bit of luck, you’ll pull through all -right.” - - -As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver’s -consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee -was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake’s -departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; _i.e._, to -inflate to the limit the current exchange of one _gringo_ for seven -_revueltosos_. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark, -addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake -had left at his elbow. - -“Gosh, but I’d like a drink!” - -His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. “You’re -going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You’ve taken your last.” - -Pulling his Colt’s .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle. -“Handy for the funeral.” He uttered a second grim chuckle. - -The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he -lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge—so quiet that a -lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully -away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent -history so much firing had invariably brought food. - -From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly -rifles picked them off, the _revueltosos_ had learned caution, only -advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake -had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, the -_revueltosos_ remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple of -_sombreros_ rose cautiously out of a clump of sage. - -“Stuck up on sticks.” Sliver criticized their wabbly motion. - -After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly -broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into -the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of -sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he -draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the -_revueltosos_ that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied -the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses -and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two -more as the _revueltosos_ raced back over the opposite ridge. - -“Six added to three I got makes nine!” Sliver grunted. “A few more an’ I -kin afford to cash in.” - -He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he -noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his -satisfaction. - -“You ain’t a-going to try an’ pass through me ag’in,” he addressed the -invisible foe. “An’ you ain’t going to leave me here. It’ll take you an -hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with -night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you—” - -The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series -designed to keep the _revueltosos’_ attention upon himself, and when, -half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep -face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded. - -“They reckon we’re all here, trying to stick it out till night,” he -correctly interpreted the movement. “It ’ull take ’em another half-hour -to find out.” - -A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the -brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face -of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots -in both directions along the ridge. - -“Not that I’m expecting to bag any of youse,” he addressed the unseen -enemy. “But just to slow you up a bit an’ let you know I’m here. When -you get there”—his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that -commanded his post on both sides—“good-by an’ _good_ night.” - -Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to -wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver -stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he -counted each minute, each second in yards—the hundreds, scores of yards -Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day -in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. -While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched -slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge -oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed -neither fear nor softening in Sliver’s face when, from the spot he had -long noted, a rifle spoke. - -It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks -about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that -time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff -of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many -years claimed the stakes. - -He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched -arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights, -his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out. - -Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low -sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child. - - - - -XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE” - - -By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being, -whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had -withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired -for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth -while to inquire. - -“_Him?_ Oh, he’s back there a-holding ’em off while we gain a spell.” - -Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not -altogether relieve her anxiety. “But—how will he find us again?” - -Jake’s shrug was fine in its indifference. “He’ll play a lone han’, -Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he’ll -likely beat us to it.” - -“You really think so?” - -“He’ll be there to meet us.” - -Jake’s tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not -deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of -the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the -knee—he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, -explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the _revueltosos_ came out -in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the -ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, -explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter’s slow shake of the -head, signaled then that all was over. - -While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the -sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp -black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose -from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid -his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all -night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along -the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when -they began the fight that morning. - -The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range -glasses at the dark smoke plume. “Enjine an’ five cars.” - -He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter’s keen sight the -lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle -on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay -_rebozos_ told they were mostly women, and that told all. “Nobody there -but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that’s chasing us.” - -“A hundred miles to El Paso,” Jake spoke. “Three days’ horseback? Three -hours with that old mogul?” - -“Golly!” The idea fastened on Gordon. “Couldn’t we?” In place of their -present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past -as they sped northward in the engine. - -“On’y women and wounded?” Jake repeated it, musingly. - -“Dark in half an hour?” Bull added: “They kedn’t tell us from their own. -’Course we should lose the horses.” With his accustomed caution he read -the reverse of the shield. “If anything went wrong—we’d be left afoot on -the desert.” - -“No worse than we are,” Jake argued. “These beasts have been running -sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to -the mountains we’re not sure of feed nor water—an’ still a hundred miles -from the border.” - -“But Sliver?” Lee protested. “We can’t leave him.” - -She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind -a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and -steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a -good end. “The last thing he tol’ me, Missy, was not to wait. ‘’Twould -hinder me an’ hinder you-all. I’ll make my run alone.’” - -“Very well.” Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that -her boy would be safer under her own eye. “Very well, but I _do_ wish he -were here.” - -Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither -spoke. - -While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. “It ’ull be up to -you an’ Missy,” he told Gordon, “to take care of the engineer while Jake -an’ me stan’ off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you -pitch the stuff aboard.” - -The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its -warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some -were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths -of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the -scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a -_revueltosos’_ train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their -knees at the _metates_, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all -gossiping at their work. Here and there a man’s face showed in the fire -glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his -presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the -railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were -stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up -their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man -raised a gun, and as Bull’s rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged -headlong from the top of the car to the ground. - -Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the -mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from -Gordon’s gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. -Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with -Lee’s gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their -stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots -along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened -wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward. - -The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman’s shovel. “Here’s -where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions.” - -Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch -the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he -shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual -caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable -information with the muzzle of his gun. - -His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of -the speeding engine across the cab. “He says the half of Valles’s army -is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what’s left -he’s making a las’ stan’ north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the -country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to -supply the new base!” The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. -“Hooray! the line’s open clean to the border! He don’t know of any -trains being run to-night! Thinks we’ll have a clear track!” - -Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine -came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section -gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown -faces. - -They suggested Bull’s question, “Ask him if there’s any revueltosos on -the way.” - -“At La Mancha!” Jake yelled back. “About thirty miles this side of the -border!... Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!” - -The _brigada_ Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of -Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull’s dark face. His big hands -clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained -control of his voice. - -“Does he allow we kin run through there?” - -Jake nodded. “If we douse the headlight and race by afore they have time -to block us.” - -Looking back, just then, at Gordon, now stripped to his undershirt and -growing sootier every minute, Lee heard the answer. She did not, -however, give it much thought. The hills and rocks that took on queer -shapes in the dim light of a rising moon, giant _sahuaros_ that went -slipping past like huge ghosts, the occasional fires and lights, -glimpses of strange brown faces, the rush and roar of the engine -speeding through mysterious night, held her senses. Yet it stuck in her -mind, came popping out when, as the engine rounded a sharp curve, the -headlight beam struck full on a sheaf of glittering wires. - -“Oh!” she called out in sudden alarm. “We ought to have cut the wires!” - -It was a vital error. Gordon’s whistle expressed their joint dismay; but -Jake, with his intense practicability, recovered first. “Well, what’s to -do—stop an’ cut them?” - -Bull shook his head. “Too late! We’ve been running over an hour. Nothing -left but to take a chanst.” - -Jake nodded. But presently he spoke again. “Chanst? If they pull up a -rail an’ ditch us at La Mancha, I’d hardly call it a chanst with half of -the brigada Gonzales shooting us up from all around. We’d be pickled for -keeps.” - -During their “rustler days” it had always been Jake’s craft that pulled -them out of tight places. Habit held Bull silent till, after he had -spoken to the engineer, Jake went on: “He says the track runs two per -cent. down into La Mancha. We kin shut off steam an’ pussy-foot it the -last few miles. So here’s the dope. We drop you-all”—his glance took in -the others—“a mile this side of the station, give you two hours to go -around, then shoot ahead. If we get through, you-all strike a light an’ -we’ll stop and pick you up. If we don’t—we don’t. But you’ll be less ’n -thirty miles from the border an’ have all night to make your getaway.” - -“But—” - -Gordon’s objection, however, was nipped by Bull. “It goes.” - -Lee, however, was not so easily silenced. Climbing down, she crossed the -wabbling cab with unsteady steps and caught Jake’s arm. “Oh, don’t take -the risk. We’ll abandon the engine. Come with us!” - -Looking down into her face, Jake’s bleak eyes were almost soft. He -gently patted her hand. “Now don’t be jumping at conclusions, Missy. We -need the enjine to go on, but I ain’t a-going to commit suicide. If the -tracks are blocked we’ll back right off. Then I’ll take to the bushes -an’ follow you round.” - -With that she had to be content. But, realizing the danger, she climbed -up and sat beside him while the mogul rolled and racked and plunged -forward through the night. She was still sitting there when, an hour -later, a headlight flashed up far away. - -“They’ve wired ahead!” Bull yelled across the cab. “Make him stop, Jake! -We’ll take to the bushes here.” - -“Oh! now you come with us!” Lee cried. - -But Jake’s answer wiped out her happiness. “No, Missy, I’ll pull ’em -along for a few miles while you-all make your getaway afore I drop off.” - -Already the throttle was closed. Slowing under the brakes, the mogul -glided to a stop. Leaping down, Gordon caught the provisions, -ammunition, and rifles as Bull threw them down. Meanwhile Lee stood -looking up at Jake with wide, distressed eyes. - -“Come on, dear!” Gordon called up from below. - -“No time to waste.” Bull touched her shoulder. - -Still she stood. “Oh, I hate to leave you. _Do_ come!” - -“Oh, shore!” Jake laughed, patting her cheek. “I’ll jine you in a few -hours—or at El Paso, if I miss you here.” - -Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the -least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed -beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her -hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his -cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon’s arms. - -Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer -threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to -glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips -had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some -reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him -in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would -never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames. - -The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before -he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant -waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning -spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught -by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer. - -“What are you grinning at?” - -The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his -seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake. - -“The trouble with you, Alberto, ain’t that you Mexicans are a dirty, -lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you’re too plumb ignorant to -know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you -call a face there ain’t a gleam to show you’re sensible of the honor -you’ve jest been paid. You don’t know it, Alberto, an’ you probably -never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten -country ’twouldn’t come near it. If I don’t blow the top of your head -off during the next hour—which I likely will—you’ll be able to tell it -to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they’re -smart they won’t believe you. But it’s the closest to fame you’ll ever -get, so play it for all it’s worth. Now listen, Alberto”—he shook his -finger in the engineer’s frightened face—“if you ever expect to hand it -down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to -business.” - -Delivered in English, the harangue flew high over the Mexican’s head. -But it did Jake lots of good. Having, as it were, palliated his shameful -emotions, he followed his own advice and turned to the business in hand. - -“How far is that enjine, Alberto?” He poked the question in with his -gun. - -“Five miles, señor.” - -“Jest an enjine?” - -“No, señor, it rides too steadily. It draws two cars; no more or it -could not take the grade at this speed.” - -“How long afore they catch us?” - -“Ten more miles, señor. They travel two to our one.” - -“All right, slow up a bit.” - -With hollow clank of drivers the mogul moved on at slackened speed until -less than half a mile intervened. It was running, of course, reversed, -and across the intervening space the headlights stared. When, obedient -to Jake’s order, the throttle was thrown wide again the two engines ran -like giant insects through the night, one in chase of the other, -thundering across bridges, whizzing around curves, shooting through -cuts, chimneys spitting smoke and flame, headlights flashing defiance -like fiery eyes. - -All the while Jake timed the distance. “Cut her off a notch,” he ordered -when the mogul began to gain. “I wanter draw ’em on as far as I kin.” - -But out of the dim smoke that trailed behind the pursuing engine broke, -just then, a series of red flashes in furious staccato. The drumming -reports were drowned in the roar and clank of the racing engines; but -the hail of bullets that rattled and glanced from the mogul’s side was -unmistakable. - -“Machine-guns!” Jake exclaimed. “Chuck her into high, Alberto!” As, -under a full head of steam, the engine picked up and ran through the -night like a frightened girl, he added: “Sheer accident, they hit us, -anyway. They kain’t do it again.” - -Proving his words, the next burst of firing went wide. Only one bullet -struck the cowcatcher, and, leaping like a horse from the spur, the -mogul launched in dizzy flight down grade; had drawn two miles ahead by -the time she took the next sharp curve. - -“Hold her at that,” Jake ordered. - -But again he had failed to reckon with the wires, which, after blocking -their advance, now cut off retreat. Shortly thereafter came a flash of -light as the engine shot from a cut through the first of the series of -stations they had passed on their way up. - -In accordance with the inscrutable law which governs the location of -Mexican stations, it stood a half-mile from the little adobe town that -dragged its unclean, brown skirts across the tracks. If the inhabitants -thereof had been content to obey telegraphed orders to build an obstacle -and let it go at that, the mogul would probably have gone into the ditch -without a second’s warning. But, desiring to see the smash, they had -lighted a huge fire alongside the tracks, and under its glare the pile -of ties, earth, and stones stood out plain as by day. Wheels grinding, -blue sparks shooting from the sanded rails, the mogul stopped within a -hundred yards. - -After he had closed the throttle and thrown on the brakes the engineer’s -eye had gone to the cab door. Then it switched to the ugly, black muzzle -of Jake’s gun. Releasing the brakes, he reversed and opened the -throttle. - -A sputter of musketry had followed the first yell of disappointment that -went up from the rabble of _peon_ watchers. Fired from ancient pieces, -however, the bullets fell short or rebounded like peas from the mogul’s -sides. Picking up her stride, she outran their feeble pursuit in a -hundred yards. - -It was then that the engineer’s voice rose in protest: “But, señor, we -shall run into the other train! Mira! Mira! it is now only a mile away!” - -Jake’s eye measured the distance. Then, in dry soliloquy that, even if -it had not been couched in English, would still have gone over the -other’s head, he spoke. “Do you know what a maquina loca is, Alberto? -You don’t? You s’prise me.” Scared out of his small wits, the poor devil -had not even answered. “It’s the one great invention your pais has -produced. ’Twas first used by Mr. Orozco shortly after he graduated from -a mule’s tail to be commander-in-chief of Madero’s army. He designed it -for the extirpation of Huertistas that got to tagging after him like -these gents is trailing us. ’Twas very simple. He’d load up half a ton -of dynamite on an enjine cowcatcher an’ turn her loose with the throttle -wide open jest where she’d catch a troop-train in a blind cut. Mighty -effective, it was, too. Some o’ them Huertistas was so elevated above -their normal they hain’t finished raining down yet. Of course we’re shy -on the dynamite. But a forty-ton mogul careering along at sixty miles an -hour ain’t to be despised. Anyway, we’ll try it. At this gait we orter -catch ’em in the cut beyond the station. Hit her up.” - -While talking he had not been idle. First he laid his rifle by the cab -door, ready to jump; then slipped over his head and shoulder the -bandoliers of cartridge-clips Gordon had left for him. Meanwhile the -Mexican’s frightened glance swung between him and the tracks which were -slipping faster and faster under the mogul. Beyond the station a faint -glow, reflection from its headlight, marked the entrance of the -_revueltosos’_ train into the cut. In his mind the engineer’s horror, -burning, mangling, scalding, fought for supremacy with his fear of -Jake—and won. Selecting the moment that the latter’s two hands were -engaged with the bandoliers, the engineer crossed the cab in one leap -and plunged down and out. - -“You son of a gun!” Grabbing his rifle, Jake jumped after. - -But in the few seconds that elapsed between their leaps the mogul -carried Jake a hundred yards. A second to a bump and each roll as he -struck rebounded and turned over and over lost more time. A few more -were required before he picked himself up. Then his glance went after -the mogul, now shooting like a comet toward the cut from which the -_revueltosos’_ train had just emerged. In the glare of the headlights -each vividly illuminating the other, like two dragons breathing fire and -smoke, they flew at each other’s throats. - -Came a yell! a crash! Then darkness, hazy with steam, wiped out all but -screams and agonized curses. - -“_God!_” It burst from Jake. “If Bull could on’y have been here!” - -Both while in the air and rolling over and over he had an impression -that he must have jumped almost on top of the engineer. But now, looking -around, he became aware—first, that he was standing directly opposite -the station; second, of a dark figure in the lighted doorway; third, of -a flash, pistol-crack, of a bullet singing by his ear; lastly of a -baker’s dozen of other dark figures rushing at him from all around. - -In a pinch—how well Sliver and Bull had known it!—Jake could always be -counted upon to do the unexpected. Behind him stretched an open, moonlit -plain where he would be easily shot down or overtaken. Grabbing the bull -by the horns, he rushed straight at the figure in the doorway. Into its -dark midst went the butt of his rifle. Bang! he slammed the door, a -heavy, three-inch affair of oak that fitted against stone jambs and -lintels; was secured by iron swing-bars. As he dropped these in place -the panels quivered under the impact of many shoulders. Leaving the man -he had overthrown writhing and holding his middle, Jake crossed quickly -to the window. - -In readiness for just such contingencies, its iron grill had been set -out six inches to permit a raking fire along the wall, and shooting at -ten feet into the convulsive movement at the door Jake’s first shot -dropped a man. As the others dodged around the corner a yell told of -another wounded. - -A smaller window commanded that side, and, crossing over, Jake raked the -fugitives in their flight with a galling fire till the last dim figure -disappeared in the brush. Then, after he had noted with satisfaction -that the window rose high above the ground, he turned to his captive, -who still lay groaning on the floor. - -“Git up!” - -Steel eyes and ugly pistol muzzle enforced the order. - -The man, a fat Mexican with a yellow, bilious face and small, beady -eyes, arose. “If you will only let me live, señor—” - -“Shut up!” Jake cut him off. “You’re the station agent?” - -“Si, señor!” - -“What’s in those boxes?” - -“Powder, señor, giant powder that was brought in by revueltosos from a -gringo mine. It is to be shipped on the train to-morrow to Valles, who -will have it made into bombs for use in his trenches.” - -“Thought so.” Jake grinned at the pile of boxes. “’Tain’t no trick to -tell gringo dynamite. The markings fairly scream, ‘Made in America!’ So -Valles is going to make bombs of it? Well, well!” - -“Señor, you will—” - -“Now, Alberto, cut that out.” Having thus transferred the cognomen from -the engineer to his present captive, Jake went on. “That precious -existence o’ yourn depends altogether upon your paisanos outside. The -longer I hold ’em off the longer you live. Get it? Bueno! Now trot over -to the window. The second you see any one—yelp! If you don’t—” He tapped -his gun significantly. - -The agent thus placed, he looked around the room, The blackened stone of -the walls told that it had already been burned in one or other of the -revolutions. He grinned again, noting that the original roof had been -replaced with laminated iron. “Kain’t roast us out, anyway, Alberto.” - -On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a -small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a -few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall. -Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent -watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid -block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window. - -Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight. -Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of -dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry, -command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst, -then dropped it again. - -“’Tain’t square, shooting wounded.” But there was no pity in his eyes. -His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: “I’d like to know jest -how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who’s -here!” - -It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick -eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred -yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the -chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer. - -“Afraid I’ve spoiled another of your colleagues.” He turned to the -agent. “They ain’t very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It’s -a cinch they’re not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an’ -I simply kain’t waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep -watch, Alberto.” - -Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and -laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after -game Jake’s brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and -tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He -could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing -with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a -frontier bunk-house. - -In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face -loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held -him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff -of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he -watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the -gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having -compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung -poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak. - -Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and -looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A -stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing -in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled -in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak -now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded. - -Lee’s face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her -arms around his neck, when he murmured, “On’y thirty miles to the -border, a clean getaway.” - -Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range -that marked Sliver’s last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face -turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small -nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness -settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a -sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the -shutters, he returned to the table—not any too soon; for as he sat down -and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range, -the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters. - -Through all, as a rat in a corner might watch a cat, the agent had -watched him with deadly fascination. From the north window where he -stood it was but a step to the door. Apparently Jake did not notice him -take it, for he did not look up—even when the agent’s hand touched the -upper bar. - -“If I was you, Alberto, I’d come away from there.” - -The agent froze. But Jake had spoken in English. The hand went again to -the bar, was slowly lifting it when, following a second splintering -crash, he fell forward on his face with a hollow cough. - -“Through the lungs, I reckon.” Jake looked down at the gross body, -writhing in its death agony. “I told you to keep away, Alberto.” - -The man’s last convulsive clutch had swung the upper bar clear of its -sockets, but Jake did not move. The lower bar still held and, standing -up, he watched the oaken panels quiver and split under heavy blows. With -rhythmic regularity came the crash of volleys fired point-blank into the -shutters. Bullets, too, were spitting through the side window—to strike -and flatten on the opposite wall. Over all, above the crash of -rifle-fire, thud of the beam they were using on the door, rose the roar -and howl of a blood-mad _peon_ rabble. - -“The hull town has come to the funeral,” Jake muttered. “Well, they’ll -see some wake.” - -As the door crashed in he stooped and blew out the light. Darkness fell -through the room—darkness that pulsed with convulsive movement. Over the -body of the agent the leaders tripped and fell. Upon them others piled -in a heap, yet under the pressure of the howling crowd outside still -others streamed in. Above the oaths, curses, mad howls, rose yells for -some one to bring a light. - -Presently it came, a piece of engine waste soaked in alcohol at the end -of a stick; and when it did, the rolling eyeballs, furious faces, -vicious mouths, stood out for a second, writhing in murderous lust, then -set in sudden horror. - -For the bluish flare fell full on a grim figure, tall, lean, topped with -a hard face, steel-point eyes. The muzzle of Jake’s gun touched the top -layer of powder. Cold, weird, satanic, he must have loomed in their -vision as the Evil One in whose existence they all believed. Paralyzed -by the impending doom, some stood staring. Others, screaming hoarsely, -fought in vain to beat back through the crowd. Till the last moment, -yes, till one hardier scoundrel raised a gun, Jake held them in torture, -then— - -Both shots were wiped out by the tremendous explosion whose thunder and -red sky-flash were heard and seen by Bull fifteen miles away. - - - - -XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - - -After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the -sage-brush while the _revueltoso_ engine approached. With a roar it came -at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead. -For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette -against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and -swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of -smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on -spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared -past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of -dust. - -Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while -they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away. - -“We’ll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours,” he -said. “We kain’t afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we’ll have to travel -at night an’ hide up during the day—unless we chance on a _rancho_ where -we kin steal horses! Of course, it’s terrible on you, Missy. But if you -kin stan’ it for a little longer—” He stopped as Lee shook, as he -thought, with a sob. - -It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and -trouble. “It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own, -should have to turn rustler.” With a little mothering pat that somehow -reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her -fostering care, she added: “Don’t worry about me. If I could only make -you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a -rifle. I can at least carry something.” - -But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and -provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding -through sage, _palo verde_, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure -hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they -obstinately refused—and it was well that they did. When Bull called a -halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and -swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock. - -“Don’t dare to move,” he ordered, “till I get you something to eat.” - -They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt -meat. But after “Alberto” cut off the engine Gordon had “requisitioned” -his _tortillas_ and chile stew—plenty for three. Once again Lee wished -she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct -still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery _tortillas_ his -head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the -engine soot off his face. - -Neither did Bull escape. “There!” Bestowing a little, loving box on -Gordon’s ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and -washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child. -Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction. - -“Well, you’re _half_-clean, anyway.” - -Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken -his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew -from Bull a grave smile. “Sleep, now, you kids,” he admonished them. -“Two hours an’ we’ll have to be moving again.” - -“You, too!” Lee insisted. - -Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at -once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower -rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet. -Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding -their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles -to the southward Jake was playing his last lone “hand.” He was in Bull’s -mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with -calcium red. - -“Something doing there.” Though he could have no accurate knowledge, -Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. “Bet you Jake had a -finger in it.” - -Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and -provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she -needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused -in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open. - -Yet she made light of it. “My feet seem to belong to some one else. All -the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!” - -It was the barbed thorn of a _nopal_, which hurt worse coming out than -it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, “cat’s claws” and -“crucifixion thorns” lay everywhere in prickly ambush. “Spanish bayonet” -scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would -rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open -among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of -the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In -daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking. -When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once; -in five seconds were fast asleep. - -This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed -on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to -the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first -pale lights. - -Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and -scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee, -pale, tired, limping, but cheerful. - -She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. “To -be sure! We’ll have all day to rest.” - -“I didn’t mean, though, for you to walk no more.” Stooping suddenly, he -rose with her sitting on his shoulder. - -“Your weight ain’t no more to me than a fly,” he replied to her protest; -and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these -brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a _mesa_ that -raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the -boulders and sage. - -“’Tain’t safe to go on,” he said, setting her down. “You’d think, to -look around, there wasn’t a living thing within a hundred thousand -miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without -being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard. -Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding -from the _rurales_; but there’s always some one. We’ll stop while it’s -safe.” - -He was right. Already they had been seen—by a _peon_ who had been driven -by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret spring -from _revueltoso_ lovers. But the tale of their passing did not go forth -by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of their -burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away “Alberto,” the -engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop of -_revueltosos_ he had guided up the line. - -“Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet? -These little ones no larger than a child’s are those of the woman.” - -“A white girl, thou sayest?” the leader asked. - -“Si, señor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man’s -riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate -for thee.” - -“There should be _some_ pay.” The _capitan_ went on, with a vile oath. -“Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us; -si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs -come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt -that gringo. But he goes out like”—he blew out the match with which he -was lighting his cigarette—“this! and takes a hundred more of us with -him. Bueno!” His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. “They -are gone, our compañeros, but we shall meet again—in hell. But these -others, the girl and her men, shall pay.” - -At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of -which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to -the north and east as they went, they approached Bull’s limestone castle -just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon. - -After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a -rough _ramada_ of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting -in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the _revueltoso_ -line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust -clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet -let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so -carefully that Lee slept on. - -“There ain’t many of ’em,” he whispered. “We must make ’em sick at the -first shooting. I’m going to slip along the ridge to get that second -man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin -see his eyes; then bust him where he’s biggest.” - -Yesterday’s fighting had absorbed most of Gordon’s thrills. But now, as -he lay looking down at the _revueltoso_ coming on a little, ambling jog, -he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and -fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed -different—as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon -instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When, -pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon -experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after -fair warning. - -But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened -him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting -from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired. - -At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the _ramada_, startled and -wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide -headlong to the ground. Bull’s man was also down, and as the riderless -horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the -sage whirled back and combined half a mile away. - -By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at -a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. “That -is the Tejon Pass—about ten miles away. The American border is on’y -twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold ’em till -then we’ll have all night to climb through the Pass.” - -They made a good gain while the _revueltosos_ were recovering from that -first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle -around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller -elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further. - -Thus began a repetition of the previous day’s fighting—with this -disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone -ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time -with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the -brush with their bullets to keep the _revueltosos_ from crawling up on -them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time -more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the _revueltosos_ -brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired -directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was -complete. - -It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the -circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he -sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into -the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up, -then fell forward. - -So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set -the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a -huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon’s -dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance, -supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of -the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly -thereafter they entered the Pass. - -From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell, -hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool, -at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after -they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on -his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail -to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So -tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of -crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering -her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep. - -Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his -ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he -closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was -accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his -thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything, -it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal -perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed -down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the -hour. - -Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in -the curve of Gordon’s arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces -turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl’s -color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under -the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad, -low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier -mold of Gordon’s features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose, -forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw, -supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the -other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in -spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long -limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly. - -In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower. -The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of -Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and -earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that -age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft -dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past -loves enveloped them sleeping there. - -“Jes’ naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get -such a pair.” - -Bull’s murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world -to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of -health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to -degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the -world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a -thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature’s intent so -completely fulfilled. - -To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and -to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at -Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the _portales_ many a -time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the -Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that -tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself -and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under -Bull’s eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter -raised the echoes in the _patio_. Now they were young men and women! He -saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine -young fellows come in to woo and win Lee’s girls. - -With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under -forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by -the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship -into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships -thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of -iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee’s children, always strong, -always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In -legislature, church, halls of state, they took place—at first a few -white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race -drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors, -legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its -neighbor across the Rio Grande. - -It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately -consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in -the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull’s -gaze came back to them. - -Surely they were “fit,” the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long -process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained -children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste -the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought -about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and -complete. “Fit,” morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the -term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more -ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the “fit” of ten -thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on -their lives. - -It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it—and died; as Jake had -sworn to it—and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation, -heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the -cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of -heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only -enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon’s, he had to empty -his own. - -“Won’t need it, anyway.” - -Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last -evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley, -then on up here, he had searched for just such a place. - -“No, I won’t need it.” - -Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into -Lee’s face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He -knew it for the last time—just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like -Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had -repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial -with a heavy shake of the head. - -“Twould on’y break them up an’ do me no good.” - -Very gently he woke up Gordon. “Don’t wake her till I’m through telling. -It will soon be daylight. With it they’ll be on top of us again. The -border’s over there—on’y a few miles.” With heavy steadiness he went on -with the last fine lie: “I’m keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an’ -I’ll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don’t you wait for -me. She’s well rested now; so keep going and going till you’ve crossed.” - -Reaching up, Gordon took Bull’s hand in a strong grip. “I suppose -there’s no use asking you to let me stay?” - -“No.” Bull shook his head. “An’ if I would—she wouldn’t! Now wake her -up.” - -Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while -making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered -their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet -when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing -there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back. - -“Oh, won’t you come?” she pleaded. - -“Sure, come on!” Gordon seconded her plea. “We can fight and run like -yesterday.” - -“Yes, _do_?” Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him, -shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread -earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. “Oh, _won’t_ -you come? I’m _so_ afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I’m -dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them—will happen to -you. And if it did—oh, what should I do? What _shall_ I do?” - -Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a -year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in -holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, “had walked in an’ -come out again, sober, like a man,” he might have given in; gone on in -her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the -desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake. - -She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through -events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne -herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to -restrain her tears. “There! there!” Gathering her to him, Bull patted -her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. “There! there! -In a few hours we’ll be over the border, and ’twon’t be long afore we’ll -be back at Arboles, you an’ Gordon an’ me an’ Sliver an’ Jake.” He said -more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life. -Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of -the pain it covered, he concluded: “So don’t bother about me. There’s -less risk here than in any of the stan’s we made in the last three days. -I’ve got ’em all down below me an’ there’s on’y this trail. If they try -to come on, it ’ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I’ll hold ’em -jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run -along.” - -“You’re sure?” - -“Sure!” He had to swallow his heart to say it. - -“Remember,” she called back, moving away, “I’ll be on pins and needles -till you come.” - -Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer. -“I won’t be here long.” - -Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in -hand, he turned his face to the foe. - - - - -XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - -As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and -fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. -From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high -walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a -lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched -down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they -could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting -men. - -After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, -Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the -largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from -below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and -looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to -form in the pale dawn. - -Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so -fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity -or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who -shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first -pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their -great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of -rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in -the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the -emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a -man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was -strong upon him. - -In such moments a man’s whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema -drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull’s reflections began with -his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden -pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, -coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the -wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados. - -Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute -white fear on the opposite side of Carleton’s death-bed. He saw her, -after the funeral, coming toward him through the _patio_ gateway, -swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis -Lovell’s rich, dark beauty. - -Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her -diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded -some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. -All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of -match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his -thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one -scene. - -Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he -started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure -her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read -their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her -face buried itself in his breast. - -Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still -in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, -as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills _rancho_, memory leaped -the gap in time and distance—he was sitting in the widow’s kitchen, -Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee’s birthday -cake. - -From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last -tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her -pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the -bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he -was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm -in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into -dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always -in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through -the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that -his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her -ownership. - -“I shall expect you soon?” - -He heard, too, his own answer, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.” - -Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty’s shoulder, and—the -bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty windows that -stared with fiery eyes from seared walls. - -In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dénouement came almost -with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony. - -While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and -strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the -rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple -shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow -interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam -of the sun. - -It announced the _revueltosos_ of the _brigada_ Gonzales! Her murderers! -Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew -into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac -glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a -club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he -peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now -wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was -again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the -_revueltosos_ in the _fonda_ cañon. Big, black, burly, he looked more -like a bear than a man. - -If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the -long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that -sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his -care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives -to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his -revolver, a heavy Colt’s .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised -them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and -climbed to the crest of the opposite bank. - -Lying there, he looked down on the _revueltosos_ who had begun to climb -up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was -impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high -and fired. - -The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the -_revueltosos_ tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared -with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the -“fight and run” of yesterday’s warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they -moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from -which to return his fire. - -Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at -intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust -about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long -silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up. - -Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, -each recording a stage in Lee’s advance toward safety. As clearly as -though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but -moving steadily on with Gordon’s help. And his imaginings ran with the -facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, -down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the -plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that -marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently -grew into a United States cavalry patrol. - -Suspecting an ambush, the _revueltosos_ came forward slowly. Quarter of -an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the -opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long -silence, three appeared in the open. - -“They have gone! Bring up the horses!” - -The leader’s call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they -waited, he heard their conversation: - -“If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, -we had caught them last night.” - -“Si,” came the answer. “But he wanted the girl for himself.” - -“The swine!” The epithet was set in vile oaths. “But he is cured forever -of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The -bullet took him squarely between the eyes.” - -There was more of it—their present hope to run the _gringos_ down with -horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition -they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black -eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, -hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of -the horses. - -A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and -sliding, most of the time on their beasts’ haunches, down into the rock -pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. -Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage: - -“They are surely gone. Vamos!” - -A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room -for all in the “bore.” He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing -of the first beast he waited, then—with a sudden pry of the rifle-barrel -he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast as he could -pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed rifle -waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth bared, -leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the midst of -the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among them -almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound from -the opposite hill. - -For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of -which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the -dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat -time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the -primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that -evil chaff, dropping them as they came on. - -And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds, -they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his -fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and _machetes_. Till -only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up -the hill Bull made no effort to follow. - -Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the -dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with -the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled -and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand -and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two _revueltosos_ -staring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his -rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white -cloud overhead. - -With such intensity did he stare, the second _revueltoso_ also looked -up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the -faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw; -clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills’s voice: - -“I shall expect you soon?” - -The _revueltoso_ was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his -answer rang out, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.” - -The rifle cracked and “Bull” Perrin, the last of the “Three Bad Men of -Las Bocas,” collapsed in a heap. - - - THE END. - - - - - ZANE GREY’S NOVELS - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list. - -THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS - - A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of - frontier warfare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she - is captured by bandits. A surprising climax brings the story to - a delightful close. - -THE RAINBOW TRAIL - - The story of a young clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the - great western uplands—until at last love and faith awake. - -DESERT GOLD - - The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and - ends with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had - willed to the girl who is the story’s heroine. - -RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE - - A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago when - Mormon authority ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is - the theme of the story. - -THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN - - This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo - Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the - Arizona desert and of a hunt in “that wonderful country of deep - cañons and giant pines.” - -THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT - - A lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love - a young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands - that the girl shall become the second wife of one of the - Mormons— Well, that’s the problem of this great story. - -THE SHORT STOP - - The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win - fame and fortune as a professional ball player. His hard knocks - at the start are followed by such success as clean - sportsmanship, courage and honesty ought to win. - -BETTY ZANE - - This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the - beautiful young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest - pioneers. - -THE LONE STAR RANGER - - After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an - outlaw along the Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of - the river, he finds a young girl held prisoner, and in - attempting to rescue her, brings down upon himself the wrath of - her captors and henceforth is hunted on one side by honest men, - on the other by outlaws. - -THE BORDER LEGION - - Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a - lawless Western mining camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing - that she loved him—she followed him out. On her way, she is - captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots - Kells, the leader—and nurses him to health again. Here enters - another romance—when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, - in the throes of dissipation. A gold strike, a thrilling - robbery—gambling and gun play carry you along breathlessly. - -THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey - - The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” as - told by his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in - Iowa and his first encounter with an Indian. We see “Bill” as a - pony express rider, then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the - Scouts, and later engaged in the most dangerous Indian - campaigns. There is also a very interesting account of the - travels of “The Wild West” Show. No character in public life - makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than - “Buffalo Bill,” whose daring and bravery made him famous. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY - WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE - - HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap’s list. - -MAVERICKS. - - A tale of the western frontier, where the “rustler,” whose - depredations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the - range, abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told. - -A TEXAS RANGER. - - How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried - law into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a - series of thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, - and then passed through deadly peril to ultimate happiness. - -WYOMING. - - In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured - the breezy charm of “cattleland,” and brings out the turbid life - of the frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor. - -RIDGWAY OF MONTANA. - - The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where - politics and mining industries are the religion of the country. - The political contest, the love scene, and the fine character - drawing give this story great strength and charm. - -BUCKY O’CONNOR. - - Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, replete - with the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash - and absorbing fascination of style and plot. - -CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT. - - A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a - bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is - a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination - that is fittingly characteristic of the great free West. - -BRAND BLOTTERS. - - A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid - life of the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with - a charming love interest running through its 320 pages. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - - -Title: Over the Border - -Author: Herman Whitaker - -Release Date: August 27, 2012 [EBook #40600] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net. - - - - - - OVER THE BORDER - - - A NOVEL - - BY - - - HERMAN WHITAKER - - - AUTHOR OF "THE SETTLER," "THE PLANTER," "THE PROBATIONER," Etc. - - - NEW YORK - GROSSET & DUNLAP - PUBLISHERS - - Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers - - - - - Books by HERMAN WHITAKER - - - OVER THE BORDER - THE PROBATIONER - THE SETTLER - THE PLANTER - THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA - CROSS TRAILS - - - HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK - Established 1817 - - - Over The Border - Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers - - - Printed in the United States of America - Published May, 1917 - - - - - TO - Jack London - IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP - - - - -[Illustration: GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS] - - - - -Contents - - - I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - II: OVER THE BORDER - III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - V: THE "HACIENDA OF THE TREES" - VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - VIII: "THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS" - IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - X: WANTED--A HUSBAND - XI: GORDON'S DBUT - XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT--IN SEVERAL WAYS - XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE--AND IS "DOGGED," IN TURN, BY LEE - XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT-- - XVII: --BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY - XIX: A KISS--ITS CONSEQUENCES - XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - XXVIII: A "REQUISITION" - XXIX: TEMPTATION - XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - XXXI: "BRAINS WIN" - XXXII: TRAVAIL - XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - XXXIV: ---------------------? - XXXV: WHY? - XXXVI: "IN THE MIDST OF LIFE--" - XXXVII: THE THREE--AGAIN - XXXVIII: FIRE - XXXIX: "VENGEANCE IS MINE" - XL: SLIVER "MAKES GOOD" - XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE "EXCHANGE" - XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - - - -I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - - -The Three had chosen their lair wisely. - -In the picturesque Spanish phrase, it "situated itself" midway of the -desert, the great Mexican desert that is more varied in its heated -monotony than a land of woods and fields and streams. Here it runs to -sparse grass land under upland _pion_; there spreads over wide, clean -sands that reflect like burnished brass the intolerable glare of the -sun. Now it marches for leagues with the yuccas that fling crazed arms -and shrunken limbs like posturing dwarfs; again it is dotted with lonely -_mesas_, monolithic masses that raise orange and vermilion facades out -of a violet mirage. A magic land it is, made out of shattered rainbows, -girded with crimson-and-gold mountains that wear around their high -foreheads cooling bandages of snow; a land of deathless calms, cyclonic -storms, torrential rains, peopled only by the vultures that wheel -against the sky and the little golden dust-whorls which dance together -over its heated face. A country where dwells the very spirit of romance; -of which anything might be predicted and come to pass; therefore, as -before said, the very place for a lair. - -Secondly, the Three had shown a nice discrimination in the selection of -a site. Its capacities in the way of offense and defense would have -earned the instant commendation of a medieval baron, Mexican bandit, -revolutionist, or "movie" director in search of an ideal robber's roost. -Years ago a Yankee "prospector" with more faith than sense and money -enough to have left prospecting severely alone, had kept a raft of -_peones_ busy for the better part of two years ripping the heart out of -a mountain-top in a feverish search for fabulous gold. Rumors that still -linger in Sonora _jacales_ tell that the _gringo_ worked under the -direction of the spirits--or a spiritualist, which may or may not be -quite the same. The results--to wit, a huge gap in the mountain and an -abandoned adobe powder house, now serving as a residence for the Three -Bad Men--seem to favor the rumor. Spirits were never good miners. But -that is neither here nor there, the Three concerning themselves only -with the natural fortifications they thus inherited. - -The adobe stood well back in a semicircular gap, protected on three -sides by the curving walls of the excavation. Behind them, the mountain -dropped almost a thousand feet sheer, and the level bench in front of -the house could only be gained by a narrow path that fell like a yellow -snake down the steep slopes into thick chaparral. From its edge one -overlooked the vast reaches of the central Sonora desert, an ashen sea -of sage and mimosa shored in by far mountains that loomed dusky purple -or stood out stark yellow as they happened to lie to the sun. Since the -Yankee went back on his "controls," or they on him, a _sahuaro_ cactus -had raised its fluted barrel within the excavation, captaining a squad -of dwarf yuccas that poked grotesque arms in pathetic entreaty out of -the rubble. To these natural improvements the Three had added a -_ramada_, broad porch of poles and cornstalks, in the shade of which -they took their ease one hot nooning, two playing _pedro_ at a rough -wooden table while the third dozed and nodded with stool tilted back -against the adobe wall. - -It did not require more than a cursory glance to know the Three for -members of that sad colony which is doomed by its past to remain on the -wrong side of the Mexican border. Beginning with Sliver Smith, the -sleeper; his drowsy lids hid blue eyes that were hard as chips of agate -and exactly fitted his reckless face. Just now sleep had softened its -lines and brought a certain underlying good-nature. But for the mouth -and deep creases down each side of the nose, which bespoke passions -violent and unrestrained, one would have put him down now for that which -he had been--a cowman from the New Mexican ranges. - -The other two, however, really looked the "bad man." "Bull" Perrin, the -biggest and eldest, might have been especially cast by nature for the -part. Big, burly, black-visaged, and heavy-jowled, excessive drinking -had dyed his face out of all relation to the creamy skin the gods had -given him. The hot brown eyes under straight bushy brows bespoke a -cyclonic temper. But though Bull conveyed the impression of an "ugly -customer" at first sight, a physiognomist would have picked Jake Evers, -his partner, as a far more dangerous man. The cold, bleak sparks of eyes -in his lean, lantern-jawed face scintillated with cunning. But for a -certain humor that lurked about the corners of his mouth, his face would -have been utterly repulsive. - -Yet after granting their "badness," there was about them no taint of the -mean, rat-like wickedness of the city criminal. Their composite was of -strong impulses, misdirected forces gone to waste, of men cast by birth -in a wrong age. In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their -strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in -the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned -toad in the sand at Bull's feet, as much as the lizard that coursed -swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper's head; as much as the -_sahuaro_ and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold -glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that--horses and cattle not -being in question--they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter -of its best traditions. - -Looking at Bull and Jake as they sat at play, the former might be -likened to a grizzly; the latter to a tiger, alert, stealthy, cunning, -ferocious; qualities which sprang into evidence with startling -suddenness when a shrill burst of woman's scolding presently disrupted -the heated silence. - -Apparently the noise issued from a white cloud that hid the doorway; but -as this settled and cleared away, a buxom slattern of a Mexican girl -stood revealed. While flicking out the last dust of flour from an empty -sack she bitterly reviled the Three. Though delivered in Spanish, the -substance of her complaint was international and goes easily into -English. - -"Flojos! Lazy ones! how shall one cook without flour? The coffee, too, -is gone--and the sugar. Of lard or grease there is not a smear for the -pan. You must go forth, to-day." - -This was merely the text. While she enlarged thereon with copious -illustrations to prove their worthlessness as providers, the two men at -the table proceeded quietly with their play. It was the third that -finally interrupted the harangue with the irascibility of one aroused -from pleasant sleep. - -"Shut up, Dove!" - -In its literal sense the word stands for the most innocent of birds. But -she chose to take the opposite meaning of the sarcastic Spanish. - -"Si, seor! I am that or I should not be here now, cooking for three -beasts." After a comparison between them and the lower animals that -greatly favored the latter, she ran on with increasing heat: - -"'Dove,' indeed? Then where is my price? Where are they, the fine -clothes, the silks and satins and linen, the jewelry and laces you were -to gain for me? Was it by this I was bought?" She held out her dirty -black skirt. "I, that might be now sitting in the cantina of Ignacio -Flores at Las Bocas, selling aguardiente and anisette to his custom? Si, -seores, _where are they_, the velvets, ribands, and neck chains? I--" - -It was at this point that Jake displayed his quality. Swinging swiftly -around, he threw his knife, so hard and quickly that it stuck quivering -in the door lintel close to the girl's throat before she had time to -close her mouth. - -"Here! don't be so careless." Bull's bushy brows drew down over his -burning eyes in quick reproof. But his next remark proved that the -interference was not based on altruism. "If you croak her, who's to do -the cooking? Any corn left, Rosa?" - -Whereas Sliver's rude interruption had merely stimulated her tongue; -whereas, also, she had stuck out that member at Jake the instant she -made sure the knife had missed, she now caught her breath with a little, -frightened gulp. "Si, seor." - -"Then make some tortillas and serve them along with the jerky," he -called after her. "And bring us out a drink." - -At this Sliver, who had resumed his doze, sat up again. His lugubrious -exclamation, "Oh, _hell_!" caused the others to look up a moment later. -With an empty demijohn held upside down Rosa stood in the doorway. She -did not speak. But her tragic pose, vindictive nod, said quite plainly, -"Now will you go?" - -Neither did they speak. The situation was beyond revilings. Slowly Jake -picked up and pocketed the cards. Sliver rose to his feet. In single -file they marched down the path to find their horses. Indeed, they had -caught the animals, saddled up at the stable on the flat below and were -riding away through the chaparral before they recovered sufficiently to -attempt to fix the blame for the shortage. - -Sliver--who, by the way, had gained his nickname under the law of -opposites because he was short and stout--remembered that he had warned -them several times "notter hit it so hard." But his testimony lost force -by reason of certain "lone drinks" in the absorption of which he had, by -the others, been caught. Jake, on the other hand, had pleaded for more -liquor and less flour the last time they stocked up at Las Bocas. By -frank confession, moreover, he reduced the force of Sliver's charge that -he would never be satisfied with less liquor than "he ked swim in." - -"That's right. I never really seen at one time more whisky than I felt I -c'd drink." - -From this he went on with invectives against the wave of reform which, -by its sudden flooding of the "Territ'ries"--as he still called the -States of Arizona and New Mexico--might be held indirectly responsible -for his present thirst. "For a cowman, like Sliver here, it don't matter -so much, him being used to dry spells out on the range. But for a man -that's dealt faro in a s'loon for a spell of years with two fingers of -bourbon allus under his nose, it comes some bitter. Them was the golden -days. What a man made in beef cattle or gold was his'n to plank down on -a bar or place on a card. Till them pinch-faces from the Middle West -descended like locusts upon the lan', drought was unknown save by a few -fool prospectors that got themselves lost in the desert. Locusts? I -wrong 'em! A locust does live up to its natural instincts. Locusts is a -blessing compared to pinch-faces. Why--" But certain lengthy reflections -that established the place of the "Middle-Wester" beneath even the lowly -bedbug in the scale of creation, must give place to his conclusion. "Si, -seores! 'twas them druv' me to rustling. But for them I'd still be -living honest, dealing straight faro to all comers with on'y an -occasional turn from the bottom of the box for the good of the house." - -"Pity for you!" - -Bull's pithy comment was enlarged upon by Sliver. - -"An' you-all needn't to be howling so loud, either, about them dry -spells on the ranges. We allus had it in the bunk-houses an' 'twas a -poor cook that couldn't hide a keg in the chuck-wagon. As for your -faro--'twas to play the odd card you wolves dealt from the bottom that I -med my first rustle. But for you I'd be taking my copa right now out of -the cook's keg instead of dying of thirst in this lousy desert." - -There was real heat in the accusation, but the ex-gambler's lean, -leathery face merely split in a dry grin. - -"If your mother bred you a fool, don't blame me. The flea bit the dog, -the dog bit me; I kicked the dog an' killed the flea. Take a drink of -water, Sliver; it all works out in the end. You next, Bull. Which was -it--water, wine, or weemen?" - -"None of 'em." The big rustler shook his head. "Early piety did for me. -Prayers morning, noon, an' night; grace before meals; two long sermons -on Sundays, an' two hours, Sabbath-school, and what would you expect? I -was so well brought up I jest had to go wrong. But if we don't jog along -we won't make Las Bocas to-night." - -As Bull spurred on ahead, Sliver looked at Jake. "Say, he ain't exactly -what you-all 'd call frank in his conversings. If there's a thing he -don't know about us--well, 'tain't our fault. But him? When you come to -think of it did you ever hear him say how he kem to take up rustling?" - -The gambler shook his head. "In a gen'ral way--so gen'ral that I -couldn't tell jest how I got it--I've sorter gathered that he once -croaked a man. But whether 'twas before or after he took up the profesh -I couldn't say. In the natural order of things, a rustler's bound, -sooner or later, to down some prying fool. There's so many that try to -mix in his business. But if it was before, Bull done it--I'll bet you -the gent had it coming." - - - - -II: OVER THE BORDER - - -That night the Three put up at the _cantina_ in the little adobe town of -Las Bocas, where, by reason of occasional largesses to the leader of the -revolutionary faction that happened to be on top, a welcome was always -certain. Just now it was more particularly so because the present -_jefe-politico_, a Carranzista, varied his political activities by -acting as "fence" in the disposal of their plunder. - -In accordance with his advice, the following afternoon found them -approaching the American border at a point far west of their usual -sphere of operations. While they journeyed the sun slid down its western -slant till it hung like a smoky lamp in the far dust of the desert. -Behind them the sea of sage still ran off to distant mountains, but the -sunset glow washed its dust away, draping the land in a royal robe. -Ahead the grade was rising imperceptibly but steadily to a sparse grass -country where the sage, _palo verde_, and yucca gave place to huge -_sahuaros_ that strewed the plain with their fluted barrels like the -jade columns of some vast ruin. Among them roamed the flocks and herds -of a pink-walled _hacienda_ that nestled in a grove of lordly -cottonwoods. As they rode past, the Three noted with appraising glances -the sleek hides of a fine bunch of steers. - -"Dress a thousand pounds of beef apiece," Jake opined. - -"Worth eighty pesos, gold, on the hoof, in El Paso," Sliver yearningly -added. - -But their interest went no further--for reasons that appeared when, at -sundown, they rode past the concrete pillar that marked the -international boundary. Rustler that he was, drunkard and gambler, -utterly worthless if the reports current on the New Mexican ranges were -to be believed, Sliver's eye nevertheless lit up at the sight of it; the -glow on his hard face was not all sunset reflection. - -"The good old U.S.," he commented. "_Some_ country!" - -"He wasn't talking that way las' time we crossed." Jake winked at Bull. - -"Guess not. He was cussing Cristobel Columbo for ever having discovered -it." - -"That's right," Sliver admitted. "But I was what you-all might call in a -bit of a hurry with a squad of rangers streaking at my heels. Other -things being ekal--" - -"Which they ain't," Jake interrupted. "Mexico's good enough for me. -Mexico an' revolution! For I tell you right now that if Porfirio Diaz -was still boss, his rurales would have taken right holt where the -rangers left off. Instead of dangling from a pine on the American side, -we'd hev' finished with a fusillado on this. But with the government -switching every five minutes between Orozco, Villa, Huerta, Carranza, -an' the jefe-politicos an' governors slaughtering each other -between-whiles, it's nobody's business to look after us. We make our -little sneaks across the border an' return in peace an' quiet. So 'Viva -la revolucion!' That reminds me--where're you heading, Bull?" - -"Livingstone _rancho_ on the Little Stoney." - -"Say, but that's horses! Don't they run 'em into the corrals at night?" - -The big rustler nodded. "All the easier to find, an' after you once get -them moving it don't take three days to run 'em over the line. Besides, -Don Manuel tol' me at Las Bocas yesterday that the Carranzistas are -needing heavy horses for their artillery over on the Coast. He'll pay -fifty pesos apiece an' take his chance on a five-thousand-per-cent -profit after the old gentleman grabs the presidential chair." He -emphatically concluded, "_Horses_, you bet!" - -"Some risky, cutting 'em out?" Sliver, too, looked dubious. - -"Not as much as you think. Did you never have some flea-bitten son of a -gun rub down the bars while you slept plumb up against the corral an' -wake next morning to find nary a head in sight? A horse don't like a -corral any more'n a man loves prison. The bars once down, you kin trust -'em to soft-foot it out to the open. Why"--his grin at the remembrance -set a flash of good-nature in his hard face--"why, I've seen an old nag -look back at a colt that kicked the bars passing out just like he was -saying, 'You damn young fool! now you've upset the soup!' Leave it to -me. I'll work 'em out on foot while you sit tight an' hold my horse. -Moon's going to be jest about right, too. She'll be taking her first -peep about the time we get 'em out in the clear. It'll be a pipe, then, -to saddle up fresh beasts an' shoot 'em over the border." - - -The _rancho_ for which they were heading lay still two hours away, and -while they rode the _sahuaro_ pillars gave place in turn to _pion_ and -juniper thinly strewn over rolling grassland. Before night settled down, -the wandering cattle-trails they had followed drew into the twin ruts of -a wagon-road. Their going was timed by the moon. But it stole out from -behind a low hill a trifle ahead of schedule. By its first dim radiance -they made out the dark mass of the _rancho_ buildings, house, corrals, -stables, in a swale between two hills. It was, however, dark enough for -their purpose, and, leaving his horse with the others, Bull went forward -on foot. - -It was nervous work, sitting there watching the buildings take form -under the waxing moon. Their strained senses took every sound, smell, -and sight; a dog's bark, click of horns as a steer scratched his -forehead on the top rail of a corral, the impatient pawing of a horse, -the warm cattle odor that floated on the night breeze. Dim, uncertain -shapes seemed to form and fade in the nearer gloom. They were nervous as -cats by the time a gun suddenly flashed under the dark porch of the -house. - -The croupy cough of a child plus the nervous fears of its mother did it. -Not that the woman saw Bull when she drew the curtain and peeped out. -But these days, with a new revolution breaking, as Jake put it, "every -five minutes" over the border, the American ranchers along the -international line slept always with an eye open for possible raids. So -far as Bull was concerned, her whisper was just as fatal as though she -had seen him. - -"Pa! get up! I'm sure there's some one out there!" - -Perhaps the rancher did see. Educated in objects moving through dusk, -his plainsman's eye may have noticed movement. Or perhaps he shot on -chance. In either case he was quickly informed by the roar and clatter -of hoofs that followed, for though Bull did not expect, now, to get away -with a single head, pursuit would be blinded and divided by stampeding -the beasts. Dropping the bars while the gun continued to flash its -staccato warnings, he started the animals out, leaped on the back of -one; as soon as it cleared the huddle, went shooting down the trail, -guiding the animal with the swing of his body. - -Unfortunately, the whim that governs a stampede moved the other beasts -to follow. So when the rancher and his men--in shirts and trousers, but -not one without a gun--pulled their mounts out of the stables, their -pursuit was guided by the distant thunder of hoofs. Neither did Bull's -quick change to his own beast divert the stampede. When the Three -galloped on, the scared animals still followed like dogs at their heels. - -"First time my prey ever chased me!" Jake laughed harshly, looking back -at the band. "If old man Livingstone don't follow too close we'll get -'em yet!" - -Bull shook his head. "Not with the moon sailing up to her full an' the -critters leaving a trail broad as a pike road. Listen to that!" - -A sharp report punctuated the thud and clatter of the stampede; the -first shot of a fusillade that grew hotter and hotter as the horses -trailed off right and left, leaving the rustlers more exposed. As yet -they were running in the shadow of a long hill where the light was poor. -But half a mile ahead lay an open plain unbroken by cover. - -"They'll shoot the lights outen us there!" Sliver prophesied. "Better -make a stan' while we can." - -"They _are_ getting sassy," Jake agreed, as a bullet whizzed under his -chin. "We'll have to teach 'em this ain't no turkey-shoot." - -The deciding word came, as usual, from Bull. "They'd surround an' hold -us for the posse. You ride on while I check 'em. If they try to round me -it'll be up to you to take 'em from the rear. Get behind so's they don't -see me turn." - -In the faint light his sudden whirl behind a bush went unnoticed. He had -already unshipped his rifle from the saddle slings, and through the -upper branches he took careful aim. A hundred yards away Livingstone was -coming at full gallop, about the same distance ahead of his men. Bull -waited till he could see the old fellow's hair, silver in the moonlight, -framing his angry red face. Once the sights lined up level between the -eyes. But muttering, "I ked sure spoil your beauty, but--I won't," Bull -lowered them to the horse's chest and fired. - -With the report the beast plunged forward, head and neck doubled under, -throwing his rider out in the clear. Though badly shaken, the old man -was up the next instant, and as he ran for cover his sudden change of -expression from anger to flustered surprise drew from Bull a grin. - -"Teach you not to get so fresh." - -At the crack of the rifle the others had also darted for cover, and as -their guns began to spit and flash from the chaparral along the -hillside, Bull laughed outright. "Not a rifle among 'em. Easy going! -Hasta luego, seores! Some other time!" - -One or two bolder spirits emerged from the chaparral as Bull rode out in -the open. But they scuttled back like rabbits as he swung in the saddle -with leveled rifle. Though they followed till the boundary pillar stood -out, two hours later, a shining silver shaft under the brilliant moon, -they preserved always a safe distance, and Bull denied Sliver's -suggestion to "chuck a volley" into the dim mass. - -"Kain't you leave your Uncle Samuel sleep? He ain't a-going to be moved -off his 'watchful waiting' by the loss of no horse, but if we go to -killing folks, he's sure going to take time to catch our goat b'twixt -revolutions." - -"To-morrow morning," Jake commented, grinning, "the morning papers will -be running scareheads an inch high about the 'Latest Border Outrage!' -Meanwhile we'll be jogging home--" - -"--without the horses," Bull dryly finished. - -"An' Rosa, back at the roost," Sliver added, "howling for coffee an' -flour an' grease." - -Which reminded Jake of their former argument: "I told you we orter ha' -bought more whisky. Nothing left but to ride back to Las Bocas an' hit -Don Miguel for credit." - - - - -III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - - -Las Bocas was slowly stewing in its native filth when the Three sighted -it again at noon next day. - -In all the world nothing reflects its environment more faithfully than a -Mexican town. Southward, the great cities of Mexico and Guadalajara -testify with their stately cathedrals, ornate public buildings, -theaters, parks, and plazas, the flowering _patios_ of lovely and -luxurious homes, first to the richness of the central Mexican plateau, -secondly to the fact that in normal times all the wealth of the republic -drains to them. Oppositely, the northern towns with their squalid adobe -streets, overrun with a plague of dirty children, dogs, vultures, pigs; -desiccated by fierce heat, drowned by torrential rains; these in their -place and turn are eminently characteristic of the arid desert. Save -that it was a little smaller, a little dirtier, perhaps a little richer -in the variety of its stenches, Las Bocas might serve as the type of all -Mexican frontier towns. - -As the wind blew their way, the Three smelled it from afar. But usage -breeds indifference even to evil odors. If not actually homesome, the -fetor bespoke a possible drink. - -A quarter mile before entering the town they crossed the _arroyo_ that -gave it drink. Its waters also furnished an open-air laundry for two -brown girls who knelt by its edge, pounding their soiled linen on flat -boulders. These days of rampant revolution, a good girl had needs be -careful, and at sight of the Three, dusty, unkempt, bearded, and gaunt -from tire and travel, _gringos_ at that, the two leaped up and fled -toward the town. - -Grinning at their fright, Bull and Sliver would have ridden on, but -Jake, who never missed a trick, reined in his beast and began to examine -the laundry with the eye of a connoisseur. Though the remainder of her -be clad in rags, the humblest _peona_ will have her lace petticoat, and -the dozen or so pieces that were already spread out to dry on the -neighboring bushes were really very fine. - -"D'you allow to turn lady's maid?" Sliver spoke, as Jake bent to stuff -the lingerie into his saddle-bags. - -"Not till Rosa's had the refusal of it. This orter keep her satisfied -for at least a month." - -Grinning, the pair of rascals spurred their jaded beasts and overtook -Bull as he entered a narrow gut of a street that followed the -meanderings of the original cow-path to the _jefe's_ house, a plastered -adobe, limewashed in purple and gold, that faced the inevitable military -barracks across a sorry attempt at a plaza. - -If the small traders and artisans who constituted the bulk of the -population had been addicted to such flights of imagination, they might -have pictured the _jefatura's_ yawning gates as a huge gullet through -which, in normal times, their substance drained in taxes, fines, and -imposts to Mexico City, the nation's stomach, there to be consumed by a -hungry tribe of official hookworms. Now, of course, it was being -deflected into the private pocket of the dominant revolutionary chief. -Lacking the imagination, they cursed beneath their breath and waited -patiently till the next revolution should bring a new tyrant to avenge -them on the present oppressor. - -The latest incumbent was at lunch under the peppertree in the _patio_ -when the Three dismounted at the gates. Fat and sleek and brown, his -generally gross appearance was accentuated by pouched beady eyes, waxed -mustache, unhealthy, erupted skin. As he sat there, shoveling in -_frijoles_ and _chile_, even a _peon's_ slack imaginings could have -easily established a resemblance--if not between him and a hookworm, at -least, to some greedy parasite. The irritability, blind individualism, -offensive conceit, treachery, too common to Mexicans, lay hidden under -the usual veneer of Spanish courtesy. The embraces, backpattings, -effusive greetings with which he welcomed the Three would have graced -the reception of a favorite son. - -"Enter, amigos!" His welcome buzzed through the _patio_. "Sit down and -eat. Afterward we shall look over the horses. You have bestowed -them--where?" - -But when he learned of their failure, the scorpion showed through the -glaze of courtesy like a fly in amber. "_Carambar-r-r-aa_, seores!" His -read wagged in a nasty way. "I had counted on the horses--to save your -alive. On my desk lies a requisition from your gringo border police, -demanding your bodies. Que desgracia!" The spite that scintillated in -his beads of eyes gave his words sinister significance. "One would -dislike to do it, if 'twere only through hate of your Government. But -one has to account to his chiefs. Already they have inquired for you, -and always I made answer, 'These are good hombres, useful to our cause.' -But deeds count more than words. Horses for their artilleria would have -proved your worth. But now--" a second nasty wag told that their failure -left them as other _gringos_, to be despised, hated, persecuted. Having -given the impression time to sink in, he suggested, "But there must be -others? You will try again?" - -"No use." Bull's gloom emphasized the denial. "This is the second time -in a month that we've been chased across the border. They're looking for -us all along the line." - -"Si? Then must you go elsewhere. What of"--pausing, he looked cautiously -around--"what of this side? In central Chihuahua there are many -horse-ranchos, gringo ranches with fine blooded stock." - -"But--" - -The _jefe's_ shrug anticipated the objection. "Si, si! 'tis Mexico. That -is what I have always told my chief--'these hombres bother only the -gringo pigs.'" With a covert grin at the safe insult, he continued, "But -a gringo is a gringo, whether here or in your United States. If they be -despoiled, we shall not shed many tears. There will be a complaint, of -course, to and from your Government, and much writing between -departments. In the mean time we have the horses. So--" - -"But that's Valles's country, isn't it?" Jake put in. "He's a bad hombre -to fool with!" - -The _jefe_ turned on him his evil grin. "What if the gringo ranchers had -caught you last night? Hanging, amigo, is a dog's death. I would prefer -the fusilado of Valles's men." - -"What if he kicks to your people? Puts in a claim for our heads? You're -working together, ain't you?" - -Once again the _jefe_ looked around. "Listen, amigos! Between friends -one may show the truth. Already there is a cloud, a little cloud, no -bigger than a child's hand arisen between us and Valles. If the horses -are taken from a gringo _rancho_ in Valles's country, my chiefs will be -the better pleased. What they have Valles cannot get in the days when -the cloud grows big and black and bursts." - -Sliver, who understood more Spanish than he could speak, here nudged -Bull. "Ask him if he'll grub-stake the deal." - -"Ask nothing!" Bull's hot eyes shot brown fire. "You heard him rubbing -it into us, didn't you? If it wasn't that we need him I'd wring the -little brown adder's neck." He went on, suavely, in Spanish, "My amigo -questions me of the price. It will be the same--fifty pesos apiece, -seor?" - -Nodding, the _jefe_ glanced impatiently back at his lunch. He appeared -to have forgotten his invitation. Pleading an engagement, he bowed them -out through the gates, then returned to his gorging while, hungrier, and -even still thirstier, the Three rode down the street. - -Usually they were not averse to an exchange of glances, or a -flirtation--if the _hombre_ was not in sight--with the brown girls who -watched them from their doorways. But now their glances sought only the -_cantinas_, whose open bars displayed a tempting array of bottles. While -they looked their progress grew constantly slower, finally stopped in -front of one whose owner was taking his _siesta_ stretched out on the -bar. - -Jake looked from the sleeper to his companions, then at the bottles of -anisette and _tequila_ on the rough wooden shelves. "If he was drunk it -'u'd be easy--" As the Mexican disposed of the doubt, just then, by -opening one excessively sober eye, Jake desperately concluded, "Say, -kain't we raise the price among us?" - -Bull tapped his empty pockets. - -Sliver mourned, "All I've got is a Confederate five some one slipped me -during my last toot in El Paso. I've carried it sence for a lucky -piece." - -"An' lucky it is!" Jake extended an eager hand. "After this -revolutionary currency that's run off by the million on a newspaper -press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got -Jeff Davis's picter on it? This fellow don't know him from Abe Lincoln. -All gringo bills look alike to him. He'll never know the diff." - -Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the -bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two _pesos_ and some -_centavos_, along with three stiff _copas_. Deceived by the size of the -roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the _tienda_ behind the bar -coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa's desire, and other -necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of _tequila_, it made a goodly -pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson -in finance--to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating -the _tequila_ from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and -shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some _centavos_ aforesaid -represented the value of either. - -From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the _tequila_; -then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck -of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver -happened to catch the merchant's eye. - -He grinned, answering Sliver's wink. "Si, seores, this time you shall -drink with me." - -That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting -out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began -to throw two kings and an ace in the "three-card trick." So deftly he -did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a -dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed -the Mexican's interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the -flying cards. - -"Looks easy, don't it?" Bull suggested. "Here, Sliver, give this hombre -a chance." - -Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on -to try again. He could do it! He'd bet his _sombrero_, his horse, his -store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no -other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on -the counter, against their bottles of _tequila_--and lost! In the course -of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings, -there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original -thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, a bolt of lace and linen for -Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged -them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost -his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable -interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three -packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way. - -As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine. -Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, the -_comerciante_ would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so -his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser--perhaps because -she has usually no hand in the game--and as the Three rode off she let -loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner. - -"It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art -lost in a siesta!" she assailed him. "After them, lazy one, and recover -our goods!" - -By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was -quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two -girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street -and added their outcries to the woman's clamor. And now the Three were -surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme -had been making sheep's eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the -saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor. - -"They stole thy--" Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural -indignation increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up -the street and overtook the Three. - -Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish -punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his -discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull's -bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the -man's angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was -up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake's bleak -eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull's rifle was -aimed from the hip. - -To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If -one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a -company can--or a regiment. The man's shrill whistle was really far more -dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the -next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally -brought from the _carcel_ a squad on the run. - -By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with -rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human -kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was -gone. Jake's long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver's reckless -face had frozen in stone. Bull's head and huge shoulders rose above his -breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as -trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers -brought an officer and company from the barracks. - -Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican -comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery -set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of -Porfirio Diaz's famed _rurales_, the blue and red stripes or fatigue -linen of the Federal Army, even the _charro_ suits of Orozco's -Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men -were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown -faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy -would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the -officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled -rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this -fundamental truth--whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not -worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull. - -"Did I not see you, seor, at the jefatura just now?" - -With Bull's nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on the -_comerciante_ and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint. -"They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in -carcel." - -Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the -merchant's back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. "How know -ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed -while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be -friends of the jefe and no stealers of women's fripperies." - -Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away. - -Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way--to the -_cantina_ where they usually put up. - -"All we've gotter do now," Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the -street, "is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an' Rosa'll -be fixed for a month." - -But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten, -followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural -"thirsts" turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course -they spent first the thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, drank up -their own _tequila_, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more -liquor for the rabble of _peones_ and brown girls that flocked to the -_cantina_ like buzzards to carrion. - -The "drunk" went through the customary stages from boisterous -conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times -Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at -each other's throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse, -because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the -other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad -shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary -throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past -tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep. - -As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was -nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a -likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside; -unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their -natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at -that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, _sans_ -groceries, _sans tequila_, _sans_ money, but plus three splitting -headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor. - -"Tough on Rosa," Jake said, with a rueful grin. - -"If she's still there," Sliver doubted. "An' I'll bet a peppercorn to a -toothpick she ain't." - -"Chihuahua, now, or starve," Bull succinctly summed the situation. He -added, grinning, "Anyway, we'll travel light." - - - - -IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - - -Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the -first and greatest of the Chihuahua _haciendas_. - -Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of -the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled -on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train, -then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles -away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested -in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs -were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first -revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern -overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers, -artisans, _peones_, drew by his grace the very breath of life. - -"Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that." - -Jake's glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining -distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped _mesas_ uplifted -their chrome and vermilion faades from the dead flat. Very far away, -one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a -mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of -the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn -over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched -windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; -burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little -winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of -distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary -reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so -very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the -blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post. - -"Vultures," Sliver pointed. "Must be something dead over there." - -"Or dying?" Bull questioned. "Otherwise the birds 'u'd settle. These -days it's as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way." - -And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of -encircling cactus into an open space around a giant _sahuaro_. Head -fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, -limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full -stretch of his arms around the _sahuaro's_ barrel. During the sixty -hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till -it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to -the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot -sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus. -Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow -roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the -approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling -the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings. - -"He's white! a gringo!" Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords. - -"The poor devil!" Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, -limp body on his outspread coat. - -While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on -the man's swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the -wrists and cut away the cords. - -If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered -through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have -noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would -probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too -weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the -point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself. - -He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from -the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His -house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings -up there. If he could only get to it, he'd be all right. - -And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and -cradled like a child in the rustler's great arms, he scarcely felt the -journey. Viewed as he hung on the _sahuaro_, dirty, bruised, shrunken by -fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, -washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky -and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical -American miner of middle age--short gray beard, hawk profile, high -cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked -for themselves--for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too -late to go on--he had recovered his voice and told them all. - -"It was the 'Colorados' that tied me up. I knew them by the 'red hearts' -on the breasts of their charro jackets." - -Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the -terror associated with the name. Originally the "Colorados" had been -Orozco's soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution -against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern -Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by -the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter -power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids. - -"But I was lucky to get off with that," he said, after describing the -beating that had preceded the tying-up. "They cut the soles off the feet -of two of my _peones_, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky -chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death -where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn't been -that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I'd -have got the same. They left me to raid some _rancho_, but swore they'd -come back." - -Riding in, they had passed the dead _peones_, and, bad man that he was, -Jake shuddered at the memory. "But why do you stay here, with that kind -of people running loose?" - -"Why do I stay?" The miner repeated the question, with heat. "The -American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man -stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties -that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had -been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, -and I'd worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to -come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose. - -"At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our -rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out--we that had invested -a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million -dollars' worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it -all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned! - -"Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But -most of the others had. We'd thought, of course, that the mistreatment -of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans -till the thing had been done again and again. Since then--know what that -Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our -Government?" - -"'Your Government!' he sneered. 'We have killed your men, we have -ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me -what else we can do to make your Government fight?'" - -He concluded, with bitter sadness, "I was brought up to love and revere -the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it -floated. But, men! I've seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled -by filthy _peones_, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of -Americans who believed in its power to save." - -In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered -principally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the -central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the -Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief. - -"It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light," Jake agreed. "He don't -seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to -Mexico City." - -Bull's big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of -tobacco smoke. "Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put -the Apaches outer the scalping business an' got through spanking Johnny -Reb." - -Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. "Jest wait! D'you-all -know what's going to happen one o' these days? That same Uncle Sam, he's -mighty patient an' he's been handed a heap o' bad counsel; but one of -these days he's a-going to get mad. When he does--listen! he's a-going -to walk down to the Mexican line an' take a look at it with his nose all -crinkled up like he smelled something bad. 'Things ain't quite right -here!' he'll say, ca'm an' deliberate, that-a-way. Then he'll stoop an' -pick up that line, an' when he sots it down again--it 'ull be south of -Panama. Jest you-all wait an' see!" - -"'Wait? Wait?'" the miner sarcastically repeated. "Seems as though I'd -heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me--one thing I know. -Unless your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there'll be -darned few of us gringos left to see." - -"Why not watch from the other side?" - -"Watch hell!" The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that, -despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and -indignation over his fellows' wrongs, that despite all the indomitable -American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquest -of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California -to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from -disintegration, the fine old spirit of '76, still burned under all. -"Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed -protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we're going to stay! -To-morrow I'll get together my _peones_ and go right to it again; -only"--he observed a significant pause--"the next time the Colorados -come there'll be a machine-gun trained on 'em from up here on the bench. -All I ask is that the Lord sends me the same bunch again." - -In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about, -the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the -gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a -solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he -passed out of their lives--in person, but not in other ways. His was one -of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life -and, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing -had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull, -at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the -sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the -pommel as they rode along. - -"I was thinking of what that fellow said las' night," he replied to -Jake's questioning look. "To think, after that, we're out to rob our own -countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser." - -"That's so." Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed -alacrity. "Damned if I seen it that way afore." - -But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a -sudden injection of rustler's sense. "Aw, come off! You fellows may be -out for Mexicans, but I'm for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the -other side of the line, an' what's wrong with robbing them on this? I -kain't see the diff. Business is business; we've gotter eat." - -"That's right, too." Sliver caught the sense of it. "We've sure gotter -eat." - -But Bull's face grew blacker. The Colorado's boast, "We've raped your -women, exterminated your brats," had aroused in him instincts older than -the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling -hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind -at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the -entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal -women. - -He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become -a prey of _peon_ bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his -black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered -with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in -the defense of a common cause. And yet-- - -Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their -evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan. - - -About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican -Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As -they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into -the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east -to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and -ruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes. - -Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of -twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated -carcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of -their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond -their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, and -crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the -_Nacional_ railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of -the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown. -Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge -wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the -evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it -to save the station. - -While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle -sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen, -whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling like -a dusty brown blanket over the desert. - -As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in -surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some -thousand _peon_ soldiers, part of Valles's army on its way south to -pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction. -Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were -loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of -box-cars. - -In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with -tight _charro_ suits and _peon_ cottons, they were exceedingly -picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at -least fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges. - -Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their -brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on -earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the _frijoles_ and -_chile_ simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled, -smoked, or slept. - -Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs -dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal -drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets, -violets, blues, yellows of the women's dresses and serapes, wreathed in -the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and -passed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor -to their roar and rattle. - -As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was -set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: "Come on, fellows! We're -going to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!" - -It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men, -she who was largely responsible for their "rustlings," investing it, as -she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through -hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede, -the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its -essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned -from it in disgust. - -If the train had stopped--perhaps their lives would have been deflected -into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the -trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it -vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in -the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they -were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be -had all over Mexico for "a cigarette and a smile." - -While eating they extracted from their host, a simple _peon_, all the -information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid "requisitions" -payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press, -the _gringos hacendados_ had driven their animals into the mountain -pastures three-quarters of a day's ride east of the tracks. But omitting -the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grass -ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the -raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in -the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon. - -Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the -difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican -scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about -the same part in their operations as a "jimmy" in those of a burglar, -Bull exclaimed his admiration, "_Some horses!_" - -"But--" Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a -fast trot down the valley, "we're out of luck." - -"Oh, I don't know." Bull handed him the glasses. "See what you make of -'em." - -"_Colorados!_" Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on -the blue _charro_ jacket. "It's the same outfit that tied up the miner, -too. Remember how he described the leader? 'About twice as tall as a -common Mexican'? That fellow's six-foot-two if he's an inch." - -"The gall of him," Sliver snorted. "What do you think o' that? After -_our_ horses! Well, they 'ain't got 'em yet. We'll jest ride along -behind the hill here an'--" - -But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted. -"No, you bet he hain't. I've a hunch that the gent coming over the hill, -there, is the man that owns 'em." - -As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause, -he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. "He's -sure got his nerve." - -"Mebbe he don't know they're Colorados." - -Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders' backs were turned, the daring -rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the -marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them -opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired. - -"Here comes his army!" Jake croaked. - -"Only a lad." - -Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, white -with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the -galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down -the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from -their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his -tracks. At the same moment the lad's hat, a soft slouch, blew off, -loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill -scream would still have proclaimed the rider's sex. - -"Hell!" Bull's astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. "It's a -woman! a white girl--dressed in man's riding-togs!" - - - - -V: THE "HACIENDA OF THE TREES" - - -Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart, -two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be -deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance, -yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two -drops that join running in down a window-pane. - -Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres, -and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would -appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun. -Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation -whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet--but let it suffice, for -the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the -_hacienda_ Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the -crest of a grassy knoll that overlooked the buildings. - -A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait. -Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect -shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume; -riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man's cambric shirt -with a neglige collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small -and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly _retrouss_. Her eyes, -large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly -contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was -wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response -to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that -curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling. - -"Oh, dad, isn't it beautiful!" - -The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit -billows; but her eyes were on the _hacienda_--_Hacienda de los Arboles_, -named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it -pleasant shade. - -Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the -height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, -storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to -the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, -with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the -old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the -meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of -giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading -with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing -fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, -crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as -ever a man looked upon and called his home. - -Carleton smiled as she added, "I'd hate to have been brought up in El -Paso or any other prosy American city." - -He might have replied that there were American cities she might find -less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as -she did. - -His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of -accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his -satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his -creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or -three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with -Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, -he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a "land-poor" Spanish owner. - -To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid -almost four centuries ago by one of Corts's _conquistadores_ might have -meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From -a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a -story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its -massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during -her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very -being. - -They seldom overlooked the _hacienda_, as now, without making some -observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old -Dons, their _seoras_, _seoritas_, savage brown retainers, in the midst -of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it -were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to -think of himself as belonging to the family. - -"Great old fellows they were!" Though he spoke musingly, now, without -connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back. -"Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other -day, and the records read in princely fashion. 'Between the rivers such -and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,' that was a -favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like -cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few -square leagues." - -"And here comes one of them." Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who -had just topped the opposite rise. "Doesn't he look it?" - -Surely he did. The _charro_ suit of soft tanned deerskin with its -_bolero_ jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the -lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes -that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced _sombrero_; the fine horse and -Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted _machete_ -in its saddle sheath under the rider's leg, even the rope _riata_ coiled -around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in -that pageant of the past. - -"It is Ramon Icarza," Carleton nodded. "He hasn't been here for a long -time." This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up. - -"Attending to the herds and the horses, seor. As with you, the most of -our _peones_ have run away to the wars. We have left only a few -_ancianos_ too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the -aid of the women we manage. That last requisition for the"--his shrug -was eloquent in its disdain--"_cause_. You paid it?" - -"Had to--or be confiscated." With a grin comical in its mixture of -amusement and anger, Carleton went on, "I raked up five thousand pesos -of Valles's money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he -said? 'I don't want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute. -You must pay me in gold.'" - -Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his -race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. "The devil take him! -Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us, -he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!" His hands and eyebrows -testified to Valles's scandalous treatment of the merchants. "First he -demands a contribution to the _cause_. Those who refuse are foolish, for -first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the -poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the -money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left. -In the old days we used to curse the locusts, seor; but they, at least, -left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago, -that you and the seorita here and my venerable father would be reduced -to become herders of cattle?" - -"Oh, but it's lots of fun!" Lee's happy laugh bespoke sincerity. "I love -it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And -that reminds me that we're almost due there for lunch." - -"You'll stay, of course, Ramon?" Pointing to a couple of mares with -foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton -added, "There's still another over in the next valley. If you will take -these along, I'll get her." - -Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the -_hacienda_, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless -boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched -the girl's maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly -knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she -exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty. - -"Oh, aren't they pretty!" - -Ramon agreed--as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila -monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors--that -is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by -the hundred miles--their childhood had compassed more than the usual -number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him -slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of -many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of -course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last -iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself -and clothes. Having passed favorably on the material, fit, and -trimmings, she reached for his _sombrero_. - -"You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let -me look at it. What a beauty!" - -While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined -it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow -intensified in Ramon's big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the -gold of his skin. His mouth--too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon -standards--drew into a tender smile. - -According to the caons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black -or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, -with singular disregard, for writer's law, Nature continued to weave for -Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee's hair, rose blush -of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the -sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which -Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as -powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande. - -On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again, -Nature utterly ignored "best seller" conventions. Brought up among -Mexicans, counting Ramon's sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial -prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal -health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After -sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on. - -"How does it look?" - -As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there -was no mistaking the "dare." Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico, -Ramon caught the implication. - -"Pretty enough to--kiss!" - -With the word he reached swiftly for her neck, but caught only empty -air. Ducking with a touch of the spur, she shot from under his hand. - -The next second he was after her. Along the shallow valley for a -half-mile she led, then, whirling just as he rode alongside, she shot -back along the ridge. At the end he overtook her, and, anticipating her -whirl, caught her bridle rein. Leaning back, however, flat on her -beast's back, laughing and panting, she was still out of his reach; and -when he began to travel, hand over hand, along the bridle, she leaped -down on the opposite side and dodged behind a lone _sahuaro_. - -Sure of her now, he followed. But, dodging like a hare around the -_sahuaro_, she came racing back for the horses; might possibly have -gained them and made good her escape, if, glancing back over her -shoulder, she had not seen Ramon stumble, stop, then clasp his right -ankle. - -"Oh, is it sprained?" she cried, running back. Then, as, reaching -suddenly, he caught her, she burst out, "Cheat! oh, you miserable -cheat!" - -That all is fair in love and war, however, goes in all languages, and -while she punctuated the struggle with customary objections whereby -young maids enhance the value of a kiss, there was no anger in her -protests. Wrestling her back and down, he got, at last, the laughing -face upturned in the hollow of his arm; had almost reached her lips, -when, with force that sent Lee to the ground, he was seized and thrown -violently against the horse. - -In the excitement of the chase they had completely forgotten Carleton, -who had viewed its beginnings from the opposite ridge. By self-adoption -he had almost, as before said, identified himself with the Spanish -strain that had flowed for centuries through the _patios_ and compound -of Los Arboles. He had even come to think in Spanish; in custom and -manner was almost Mexican. But in moments of anger habit gives place to -instinct. The instinct that first formed and later preserved the tribe, -pride of race, overpowered friendship. In one second the young Mexican, -whom he had regarded for years almost as a son, was transmuted into the -despised "greaser" of the border. - -"You--you--" Choking with anger, eyes bits of blue flame, he strode at -Ramon, fist bunched to strike. - -But the blow did not fall, for, scrambling up again, Lee seized his arm -from behind. "Oh, dad! dad!" Despite his struggles, she clung like a -cat, defeating his efforts to shake her off. "Oh, dad! It was only a bit -of fun! all my fault! I put on his hat! Please don't!" - -If the young fellow had flinched, perhaps Carleton would have struck. -But, head erect, he quietly waited, and presently Carleton ceased -struggling. - -"All right! I'll let him go--this time. But, remember"--bringing his -clenched fist in a heat of passion into the palm of the other hand, he -glared at the young man--"remember! when this girl is kissed--it will be -by a man of her own breed. Get off my land!" After helping Lee to mount, -he vaulted into his own saddle and rode away, driving the mares and -foals before them. - -In accordance with before-mentioned precedents, Ramon ought to have -folded his arms and hissed a threat through gritted teeth. Instead, he -stood very quietly, his face less angry than sad, watching them go. His -little nod, in its firmness, would have become any young American; went -very well with his thought. - -"We shall see." - -Mounting, he rode away to the northward, and not till he had covered -many miles did he rein in his beast, so suddenly that it fell back on -its haunches. His dark face expressed vexation mixed with alarm. -"Maldito! I forgot to warn them that Colorados had been seen east of the -railroad. I must go back." - -On their part, Lee and her father rode on toward the _hacienda_. Though -he glanced at her from time to time, it was always furtively, for with a -man's dislike of scenes he made no reference to that which had just -passed. Nevertheless, it filled his mind. Man-like, he had watched her -develop into womanhood with scarcely a thought for her future. If he had -given the subject any consideration he would probably have concluded -that, sooner or later, she would choose a suitable mate from the -hundreds of American miners, railroad men, ranchers, and engineers that -had swarmed in the state of Chihuahua before the revolution. - -But with the clear vision of after sight he now saw that he had -unconsciously depended on the race pride which had just manifested -itself in himself to prevent her from contracting a msalliance. Now, -with consternation, he faced the truth that racial pride is masculine; -contrary to both the feminine instinct and nature's scheme of things. - -"I was a fool!" he berated himself. "A damned fool! She will have to go -north--live in the States for a while." - -These and similar thoughts were whirling through his mind when they came -on a band of his horses at pasture under charge of an _anciano_, a -withered old _peon_, whose age and infirmities had estopped him from -joining the exodus to the wars. After cautioning the old fellow not to -allow the animals to stray too far, Carleton plunged again into deep -meditation. - -Had he not been thus preoccupied he would probably have long ago -discovered the five horsemen who were following at a distance, using the -natural cover afforded by the rolling land; for he always rode with a -powerful binocular in his holster, and often swept with it the prospect. -Several times the glass would have shown him a row of heads behind the -next ridge in rear. As it was, he had ridden to the crest of the rise -from which they had looked down on the _hacienda_ before habit asserted -itself. He had no sooner leveled the glasses than an exclamation burst -from his lips. "My God!" - -"What is it, dad?" Lee swung in her saddle, looking back at him. - -"Raiders! They are attacking Francisco! He has nothing but his staff! -He's fighting them like an old lion! My God, they're chopping him with -their machetes." It came out of him in staccato phrases. "Race in and -send out Juan, Lerdo, and Prudencia with rifles! Stay there! Don't dare -to follow!" - -Digging in his spurs, he galloped away. For a moment the girl hesitated. -Her eyes went to the _hacienda_, still half a mile away, then back to -her father racing madly down the slope. There was no time to go for -help! Loosening the pistol in her holster, she drove in her spurs and -galloped after. - -From Carleton's first appearance till the girl screamed all had passed -so quickly that the Three could only sit and gape. From their original -intent to rob Carleton it was a far cry to the reconstructed impulse to -succor and save him, and it speaks well for them that they accomplished -the revolution as soon as they did. - -The scream had not passed unnoticed by the Colorados. The leader, who -had turned to ride on, swung his beast, looked, then, as the girl -dropped from the saddle to her knees beside the wounded man, drove in -his spurs and galloped toward her. Heedless of her own danger, Lee was -trying to stanch with her handkerchief the bloodflow from Carleton's -chest, so lost in her agonized grief that she did not look up till the -Colorado leaped down and seized her. - -In this world there are savages who would have respected, for the time -at least, her white grief. But this was the man who had tortured the -miner and his _peones_; driven the latter naked through spiky cactus -after he had cut the soles off their feet. She sprang up when he seized -her, and as she fought bitterly, beating away his black, evil face with -her little fists, his strident laughter mingled with her wild sobbing -and carried to Bull behind the ridge. - -For three days this man's boast had rung in his brain: "We've killed -your men, outraged your women!" But though anger blazed within him, his -tone was icy cold. "Look after the others. I'll 'tend to him!" - -He had already pulled his rifle from the sling under his leg. Raising it -now, he lined the sights, the same sights that had directed a ball -through the brain of Livingstone's horse. While Lee writhed and twisted -in the Colorado's arms, he dared not shoot. He waited until, at the -double crack of his companions' rifles, two of the other Colorados -pitched headlong from their saddles. Then, as their leader paused to -look and, with a swift wrench, Lee tore loose and let daylight between -them, the rifle spoke, sent its bullet whistling through his brain. - -"Keep after them!" Bull called back as he rode on over the ridge. - -But already Jake and Sliver's rifles were barking like hungry dogs. -Trained to a hair in guerrilla warfare, the remaining Colorados had -spurred their beasts behind the horse herd. At the first shot the band -had stampeded, and now, urged on by the yells of the fugitives, who rode -crouched on their horses' necks, the scared animals coursed swiftly down -the valley. - -"The gall of them! _Our_ horses!" Repeating his former observation, -Sliver would have ridden after. - -But Jake caught his bridle. His bleak eyes were scintillating like -sunlit icicles. His lean, avid face quivered with subdued ferocity. -"Don't be a damn fool! They're only using 'em for cover! We'll shoot -along this side of the ridge an' catch 'em at the end of the valley!" - -Meanwhile Bull rode on down the slope. After a surprised stare that -showed her rescuers to be Americans, Lee had knelt again beside her -father. As before said, Bull was no beauty. His black beard, bushy -brows, hot red eyes, drink-blotched face, were of themselves sufficient -to frighten a woman. Yet when she looked up sympathy illumined his -countenance till it shone in her distressed sight as a clear lamp -radiating human feeling. Without fear or doubt she turned to him for -help. - -"It's my father! I'm afraid--Can't you do something?" - -So far Carleton had lain with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and -spoke in detached whispers as Bull knelt by his side. "You're--American. -I told her not to follow. Don't bother--with me. I'm shot--through lungs -and stomach--bleeding inside. Get Lee--back to the house." - -"Plenty of time," Bull soothed him. As a crackle of rifle-fire turned -loose in the distance, followed by sudden silence, he added, "That 'ull -be the last o' the Colorados. I'll fix you a bit, an' when my fellows -come back we'll jest pack you home." - -With a plainsman's skill in crude surgery, he tore up Carleton's shirt -to make a pad and bandage which he twisted with a stick till the -blood-flow stopped. This was no more accomplished before Jake and Sliver -rode up, driving the horses ahead. - -"They won't cut no more soles offen people's feet," Jake answered Bull's -questioning look. - -"Fine and dandy." Bull nodded. "You, Jake, rope a fresh horse outer the -band an' ride like hell to the railroad an' wire El Paso for a doctor." - -"No!" Lee eagerly suggested. "Wire the American Club at Chihuahua. These -dreadful days all gringos help one another." - -Freshly horsed, five minutes thereafter, Jake galloped away--but not -before, cold, crafty, laconic, dissolute gambler as he was, he had left -a comforting word in the girl's ear. "Don't you be skeered, Miss. I'll -bring out a doctor, if I have to ride inter El Paso an' raid a -hospital." - -As he went out of sight over the next roll Sliver, with the girl's aid, -lifted the wounded man up to Bull in the saddle. So for the second time -within three days did the giant rustler bear like a child in his arms a -_gringo_ victim of the Mexican revolution. To the leaven that had been -working within him was now added the most powerful influence that can be -brought to bear on a man--a woman's heartbroken sobbing. - - - - -VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - - -Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old -Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on -herself. But now she burst out crying. - -"The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down, -and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have -tried to pursue them alone." - -"He was old--an' died a man's death," Bull offered her rough comfort. -"You couldn't wish him a better ending." - -It was man's reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman's feelings, yet -it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull -suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room. - -By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off -his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into -unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. "Don't you allow I'd better -leave 'em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an'--" He -stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull's stare. - -"You're dead right! Don't trouble to say it. I'd steal the horses offen -a hearse." - -Bull's glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly, -he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: "Wait till he's well -enough to fight for his own. Till then--we leave him alone." - -Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the _patio_ -gateway. Within, arched _portales_ ran around three sides, supporting -the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful -creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only -vigorous pruning kept it from burying the _portales_ beneath. In the -center rose a great _arbol de fuego_, "tree of fire," contrasting its -flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas. - -They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women, -house servants, and _peonas_; for of the scores of men who had worked -for Carleton before the wars there were left only three withered -_ancianos_ to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that -caught the fresh breeze from the mountains. - -Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the -surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even -from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry -desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied -the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch. - -Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating -marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made -shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache. - -"You she'd have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a -flip-flop onto him. Druv' the pommel clean through his chest, it did. -Yet he was up an' around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less 'n -five weeks." - -Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her -father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was -announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had -achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from -a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to -bury its dead. - -The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull -picked him for a "colonist." Just how, he himself could not have said. -His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to -overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been -cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows, -impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under -the _portales_ while he ate. - -"Say! but he's whitish. Looks like he'd done time." - -"He has," Jake nodded. "I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in -Valles's army that had got himself shot through both arms an' was being -taken back to the base hospital with about a hun'red others. When I -landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out -of a box-car door, watching 'em bury his _compaeros_ that had died on -the way. - -"'Gotter do it quick,' he says. 'They don't keep worth a darn in this -clime.' - -"He'd met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an' 'twas him that sent the doctor -an' tol' me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he'd -belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies. -They'd insure some _peon_ that was about ready to croak, paying the -premiums themselves an' c'llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If -he lingered 'twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite -proved, most of 'em being too far gone to testify when they was -resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an' as the -Mexicans ain't so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was -sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he'd been Mexican they'd -have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good -greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He'd actually -served twelve years--think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican -jail before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their -hospital-trains." - -"Twelve years!" Sliver echoed it. "An' just for croaking a few Mex? He -orter ha' practised in New Mexico. They'd have give him a medal up -there." - -After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came -down. While eating he made his report. "If I could do any good I'd stay. -But he will surely die to-night. It's going to be mighty hard on that -poor girl. Like most of us"--his glance took in all Three--"Carleton -didn't come down here for his health. It's bad form in Mexico to inquire -about a man's past. Nevertheless, it's pretty well known that he killed -the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four -years old. She's never been away since, and has no kin that she knows -of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl." - -His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted -his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. "I've left an -opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don't be -deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark." - - -It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the -room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair -to the door, which opened out on the _corredor_, to secure the free air -his rustler's lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the -moon's pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its -maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains -loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid -chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet -and clear gold. - -_Gringo_ as he was, his people had lived under Carleton's hand fuller, -freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican -overlords, and, day or night, the _patio_ had never lacked a dozen brown -_peonas_ on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under the _arbol -de fuego_ in the center of the _patio_ below three old crones had -erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of -gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note -which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still -night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched -between prayers. - -"Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that -means?" - -"Si; they were devils come for a soul." - -"'Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The seor was a -good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard." - -"The seorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that -she also will be cast into hell?" - -"Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty -centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her -soul's sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor seor--" her pause -doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their -prayers for his saving. - -The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of -distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars, -combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle -of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate -the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed -heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed. - -In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw -Carleton's face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both -were there. - -"Where is--Lee? Sleeping? Don't wake her. Listen! She--must not--stay -here. Tell William Benson--he's rough and a bully--but honest and good. -Tell him to get a permit--from the revolutionists--to drive my cattle -and horses--across to the States. They will bring enough--to keep Lee -for many--a year. Be sure--" - -The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a -stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the -moonlit plains. - -For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made -toward the door that led to the girl's room. But as her tired face rose -before him he stopped and shook his head. "Let her finish her sleep." -Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly -called the old women. - - - - -VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - - -"Well, I reckon this about lets us out." - -The Three sat under the _portales_, heavily smoking. Bull puffed -meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed -absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had -trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all -necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands -were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental -concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the "this" alluded to -Carleton's funeral, which had taken place the preceding day. - -It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor, -happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better -class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till -still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The -Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered _hacendado_, attended, with -Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American -rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds of -_gringos_, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come -in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton's _peones_, and the Three, -had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little -adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus -consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways -and means. - -"Yes, I s'pose we'll have to move on." If not actually dismal, Sliver's -indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction. - -Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had -just then stepped out of her room across the _patio_. Phyllis, the -younger, was to stay for a week, while Phoebe, the elder, returned home -with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee -walked with her guests the length of the _patio_ she took with her the -sympathetic glances of the Three. - -Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of -her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, -the sight of Carleton's riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown -in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her -agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now -complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she -made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. -Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely -accidental, a natural trimming of her dress. - -Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American -born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, -dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee's fairness. If -their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely -accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of -association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in -sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a -smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a -cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept -through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross -and passion. - -"Adios, you fellows!" Lovell's friendly voice came floating back from -the gate. "Come and see us at San Miguel." - -It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of -suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man's hand was -against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and -trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver's muttered -exclamation: "Lordy! I'd like to! but--" - -"--it's no place for us." Bull nodded toward Lee. "It 'u'd be easier if -she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an' a new revolution -breaking every other day!" - -"Pretty fierce," Jake coincided. "But if 'twas left to that young Mex at -the funeral yesterday--Ramn Icarza, wasn't that what they called him? -If 'twas left to him she'd soon be--" - -"--damned an' done for!" Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: -"Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex -that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. -Hell! if I thought she'd look twice his way, I'd croak him afore we -left." - -"It wouldn't be unnatural, she being raised here an' not knowing much -else." Bull's gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. "I'll bet -you that's what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an' -get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so's I could tell him -afore we left." - -"Tol' her yet?" Sliver asked. - -Bull nodded. "Las' night. Said she hadn't given any thought, yet, to the -future." - -The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to -go down the opposite _portales_. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her -arm from the other girl's waist, and came walking on alone. - -They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well -formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They -felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness. - -"Oh, shore!" with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her -attempts to thank them for their kindness. "We hain't done nothing worth -while." - -"Sliver's right." Jake's bleak eyes had grown almost soft. "You don't -owe us anything. All that's bothering us is--" - -"--that we kain't jest see how you're going to manage," Bull finished. -"Your father's idea--" He stopped. - -Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. "It -isn't practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across -the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would--" Her -sweeping hand took in the sunlit _patio_, the brown _criadas_ -soft-footing it along the _corredor_; the compound ablaze with barbaric -color; the _peonas_ gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that -medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. "And if he -would--I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to -this. I'm part of it, and it of me," she concluded, with a firm little -nod. "I shall carry on my father's work." - -The Three looked at one another. Bull's troubled look, Jake's dubious -brows, Sliver's cough, all expressed their common doubt. "Can you do it, -Miss, alone?" - -"I sha'n't be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here -to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you--" she paused, -looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. "Of course, -that's absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know -some one?" - -The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of -each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in -a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the -American border tightly closed; the _fusilado_ against a 'dobe wall that -would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that -dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, -to do them justice, the girl's helpless situation affected them most. If -they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new -path. - -Jake spoke first. "To tell the truth, Miss, we ain't exactly what you'd -call rushed with business." - -"Like all of us--upset by the revolutions." She jumped to the natural -conclusion, "Were you--mining?" - -A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before -all Three. Not without truth was Bull's statement, "We ain't worked it -much, of late." - -"Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?" - -A sudden memory of Rosa's desertion permitted Sliver to say, "The las' -we had left jest t'other day." - -Her pretty face brightened. "Then you mean to say that you are free for -the present?" - -That was exactly what they had! - -She went on, slowly: "I'll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and -sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven't been permitted -to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don't know, -even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I -can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten--" - -"Don't you be bothering about that, Miss," Bull broke in. "We'll stay, -an' when it comes that you don't need us any longer--" - -"--we ain't a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages," Sliver -concluded. "To tell you the truth, Miss, I'd be willing to work for my -board jest to feel at loose on a range ag'in." - -His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort, -it still added warmth to her words. "Then--now you are _my_ men." - -The accent on the "my" unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her -bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own -and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an -alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the -fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies -in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely -enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke -loose on the devoted heads of the Three. - -"_My_ men!" It sealed their adoption. - -"Phyllis, come here!" She was eying them with that microscopic feminine -scrutiny that detects the minutest personal defect. Her gesture of -despair when the other girl came up was so lovingly insulting it could -not have been outdone by the best of mothers. "They are going to work -for me, so we'll have to care for them. Do you suppose we can _ever_ get -them to rights?" - -Phyllis wasn't quite sure, but as her interest while real was more -casual, she held out hope. "They'll look better, dear, after they're -washed and mended." - -That was too mild for Lee. Nothing but revolution, drastic and complete, -would satiate that hungry instinct. "No, they'll have to have new -things. The store is run down badly, but it will supply their present -needs." - -With something of the air of convicts arraigned before a stern judge the -Three listened to certain other frank comments upon their appearance. As -laid down, their reconstruction included shaves for Sliver and Jake, a -beard-trim for Bull, hair-cuts for all three. To this they meekly -agreed; took their new things with sheepish thanks when they were -brought from the store; endured all with resignation, if not -cheerfulness, up to the moment that she tried to quarter them in the -house. Then the last shreds of masculine independence asserted -themselves. They made a stand. - -"If it's all the same, Miss," Jake pleaded, "we'd sooner bunk down in -one of those empty adobes." - -Sliver supported the rebellion. "You see, Miss, we're that rough an' not -used to ladies' society--" - -"An' we smoke something dreadful," Bull added his bit. "You really -couldn't stan'--" - -"Oh, I wouldn't mind it a bit. I love tobacco smoke. It's half of -Mexico." - -Deprived of their last weapon, the Three could only stand and fidget -till Phyllis came to the rescue. Her interest, as aforesaid, being -founded merely on the general principles of loyalty to her sex, she -could afford to be generous. - -"They'll want to play cards and generally carry on," she whispered. "Men -always do. Let them sleep in the adobe and take their meals with you at -the house." - -A compromise thus effected, Lee marched the Three to their new abode. -But this was not the end. Just as they were about to settle therein she -turned loose upon them a veritable hornets' nest of brown _criadas_. All -afternoon they found themselves encircled, as it were, by clouds of -flying skirts, and when the flutter subsided the adobe stood scrubbed -and dusted and furnished with _catres_, bed-clothing, wash-stands, -chairs, and a table for the "cards and general carrying on." When the -invasion, brown and white, finally withdrew, and the suggested changes -in apparel and personal appearance were duly consummated, they were left -gazing with something of awe and a great deal of wonder at their -reconstructed selves. - -"You look almost human," Jake gave his opinion of Bull. "A touch with a -powder-puff an' I allow you might mash one o' them criadas." - -Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate. -"It's dreadfully clean in here," he remarked, coming back. "But I reckon -we'll sorter get used to it. Now if we on'y had a bottle o' aguardiente -to hold a bit of a house-warming, it 'u'd--" - -Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. "Look here! We've got the care -of a young girl on our han's. There's going to be no boozing--at least -on the premises. When you feel you kain't stan' it any longer, light out -somewheres an' get it over." - -"That's right," Jake lent support to the moralities. "Though it sorter -looks to me like she'd adopted us." - -As a matter of fact, the girls' talk, walking back to the house, quite -favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had -obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at -Phyllis's remark, "Aren't they big and crude and funny?" - -"Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I've had them a -month." - -"Won't it be a little difficult? They're grown up; can't be treated like -babies." - -"Not a bit." Lee laughed softly again. "If one of them misbehaves, I -shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct -Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they'd see -through it at once. Being men, they'll feel quite perked up." - -Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their -merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the -disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own -likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case, -as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a -crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again. - - - - -VIII: "THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS" - - -It was not done with malice aforethought, for Sliver had not quite -reached the point where "he couldn't stan' it any longer." It just -happened. Heavy drinkers may be divided into three classes--to wit, the -sporadic, who break out in occasional wild debauches; the "steadies," -who sop, sop, sop all the time; and a third class which combines the -traits of the other two. Of the Three, Bull represented the first, Jake -the second, Sliver the last and worst. - -If Sliver had not ridden his horse along the crest of a certain hog's -back on the chance that the cattle he was hunting might be in the ravine -below, it might never have come to pass. If Napoleon Bonaparte, for -matter of that, hadn't developed indigestion at Waterloo; if Christopher -Columbus had followed the Church instead of the sea; if Julius Csar had -been born a girl; if all the cats on all the famous fences of history -had happened to jump the other way--this world would be quite different. -So let it suffice that Sliver rode along the hog's back. - -At its end the ridge ran out on a wide bench from which Sliver looked -over the foot-hills, rolling tumultuously under a black blanket of -chaparral out to the tawny valleys of the _hacienda_ pastures. Below, he -could see a path that ran with a silver stream at the bottom of the -ravine. Its deep rut, no wider than the swing of a mule, marked it for -one of those ancient highways whose place had been usurped by the Diaz -railways. In its heyday the caon had rung with the tinklings of the -mule-trains that transported _aguardiente_, maize, tobacco, serapes, and -cloths between Mexico City and Santa F. But of that great traffic there -now remained barely enough to support the little _fonda_ that lay with -its mule _patio_ almost at Sliver's feet. - -Though no one was in sight, he set down certain moving black dots as -chickens, goats, or pigs. Thus assured of tenancy, and thinking that he -might pick up some news of his strays, he rode on down a trail that -zigzagged through the chaparral. - -Looking down from above, Sliver had noted the resemblance of the place -to the lair back on the miner's bench in Sonora. The _ramada_ of grass -and cornstalks might have been the same. Only that she was younger and -prettier, the Mexican girl who knelt before a _metate_ grinding -_tortilla_ paste could have passed for Rosa herself. Though Mexican -Indian, some vagrant Spanish strain had pushed up her brow, reduced her -cheek-bones, shortened her waist, and lengthened her limbs. Masses of -black hair framed her oval face. Her eyes were velvet pools; the nose -small and well shaped. Her bare arms tapered from fine shoulders to -small wrists, and if she followed Juno rather than Psyche in her -luxurious molding she was pliant as a willow, carried her shapely -poundage with an effect of slimness. - -If Sliver noted these desirable personal assets, his interest therein -disappeared after he had spied the sign, "Fonda," over the door. True, -the month which had now elapsed since they entered Lee's service had -not, however, been entirely "dry." At the close of each day's work the -Three took their _copa_ with the _ancianos_ at the _hacienda_ store in -the Mexican fashion. But the application of liquor in such medicinal -doses to a thirst like Sliver's was equivalent to the squirting of -gasolene upon a fire. Now, as he gazed at the sign, spirituous desires -flamed within him. It was with difficulty that his dry lips formed his -question to the girl. - -Was there a _copita_ of _aguardiente_ to be had? - -Nodding, she rose, and as she let down a small wooden door in the wall -Sliver's glance licked the rows of bottles within. - -_Tequila_, anisette, _aguardiente_, _mescal_, every variety of liquid -fire with which the Mexican _peon_ burns out his stomach, stood there in -deadly array. Beginning at one end, Sliver worked his way, during the -next two hours, along the row, and had just started back again when, -with some surprise, he noted a most curious phenomenon--to wit, the gray -hair and deep wrinkles the girl had suddenly acquired. Quite unaware -that she had resigned his thirst to her father, and was even then -vigorously rubbing _tortilla_ paste behind his back, he solemnly studied -this startling metamorphosis. Drunk as he was, his cowman's instinct had -kept him warned of the sun's declension. Sure, now, that he had had -enough, he paid his score, gravely addressing his host, meanwhile, -concerning his changed appearance. - -"You she'dn't do it. It's--hard on the nerves. Keep it up an'--you'll -drive your custom away." - -Having climbed into the saddle, he remained there because of that -merciful provision of nature by which a man may ride long after he has -lost the power to walk. Realizing his condition, he left the business of -going home to his horse. While it carried him down the caon and out -across the plains he concentrated his remaining energies on "The -Cowboy's Lament," howling its one hundred and one verses at the top of -his voice, sending warning of his coming a full mile ahead. - - -In the mean time Bull with Lee, Jake "on his lonely," had pursued the -search for the strays in other directions. It chanced that luck rode -with the former. Returning home at sundown, Jake saw them driving the -cattle along a shallow valley. - -During the month which had elapsed since her father's death Lee had -taken the only real panacea for grief--hard work. In addition to the -management of the house _criadas_, she exercised a feudal overlordship -over the _hacienda peones_. Besides hiring and letting, leasing of lands -on charges, she acted as judge in their squabbles, adviser in their -small affairs, comforter in trouble. In addition, her womanhood brought -extra duties. She had to godmother the babes, attend christenings, -doctor the sick, lend her patronage to the _bailes_ and _fiestas_. - -Most of these duties she discharged in the mornings. Afternoons she -donned her man's riding-togs and rode out with the Three, rounding up -strays, new-born calves, and foals. At nights her fair head might be -seen under a golden aureole lent by the lamp, while she mended or made -for them and herself. If it lacked the stimulation and color of city -life, it was, at least, a healthy and honest existence. Already it had -restored her shocked nerves, given back her roses. She had never been -prettier than when, reining in, she looked back at Jake as he came up! - -"We found them! _we_ found them!" Her pride in the fact provoked Jake's -smile. "They were up in the Caon del Norte. Whatever in the world is -that?" - -It might have been anything from the last puff of a worn-out calliope to -the yelp of a sick coyote, for at its best Sliver's voice rarely came -within a quarter of a mile of a specified tune, and an hour's steady -tearing into "The Cowboy's Lament" had not improved its tone. As the -raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling -little laugh. - -"Mr. Sliver isn't hardly what you could call a singer. Is he--often -taken like that?" - -They could have answered quite easily, Sliver's vocal efforts being ever -timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank -disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs -and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to -the Caon del Norte. - -"Piously drunk!" Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond -earshot. "Wonder where he got it!" - -"Search me," Bull shrugged. "The question is how to stop him. You know -what to expect if he's loose an' drunk among all them _peonas_. You ride -on an' head him off. Don't stan' any nonsense. Bat him over the can if -nec'ssary." - -The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither -was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped -Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged -and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the -compound, had him lashed to his _catre_ in their adobe before Lee and -Bull arrived. - -So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull -replied to Lee's inquiry concerning Sliver's absence that he "wasn't -feeling well." - -She jumped up at once. "Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he -can eat!" - -A vivid mental picture of the "poor fellow," gagged and lashed to his -_catre_, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself -for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating -his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it. - -"I wouldn't--really, Miss." - -She stopped, half-way along the _portales_. He had spoken so earnestly. -"Why not? Is it--catching?" - -Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further -complications. Jake shook his head. "No, it's just chills an' fever, a -sorter constitutional ague he's taken with at this time o' the year. -But--well, Miss, it's this way, Sliver's that bashful, though you -mightn't think it to look at him, he'd die of shame if a young lady was -to see him in his bunk." - -She hesitated, then came back. "But--he ought to be looked after." - -"He has been." Jake clinched the victory. "A copa's the finest thing in -the world for chills. He's had a couple an' was sleeping like a babe -when we came in." - -She gave in with a sigh. "Then we won't wake him. But you must take him -a tray when you go out." - -But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it -broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain -have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded -portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee "shooed" him like -a sick chicken into a corner of the _patio_, there to be coddled and -doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every -mother's daughter of whom had her own infallible "_remedio_." His real -contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his -companions at meals. - -"Invalid looks a bit better," Jake would opine. - -"A week's careful nursing orter bring him around," Bull would add. Then -while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned -his poor, burned-out stomach. - -That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they -got him alone in the adobe. "I s'pose neither of you saints would ha' -stopped even to smell of it," he sarcastically inquired, after -confessing how and where he obtained the liquor. - -"'Tain't that," Bull admonished him. "I'm pretty near due for a bust -myself. But when it hits, you bet I'll go somewheres so's the sight of -my hoggishness ain't a-going to offend our girl. No, 'tain't that you -acquired a bun we're kicking at, but that you toted it back here." - -"You bet y'u," Jake added. "Next time you're took that-a-way, have 'em -hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an' don't budge till -you're through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you -forgot to drink?" - -"Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!" Sliver groaned. "My liver's burned right -out!" - -"Bueno!" Jake nodded his satisfaction. "Then if you've finished I'm free -to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. -That's where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you've gotter do -is to find a bottle, but mine's simply gotter have cards in it. I don't -get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining -business of our'n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow." - -"All right, get it over," Bull agreed, after a moment's rumination. -"Tell her at breakfast. She'll fix you up with the fare." - -"'Tell her at breakfast'?" Jake looked his scorn. "An' have her running -an' fixing me out with socks an' shirts an' things like I was going off -on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable -and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an' through, I -simply kain't fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest -give me all you've got. With any kind of luck it'll turn you big -interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so's to catch an -early train." - -So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But -thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed. - -When Jake arrived in El Paso--But the less said about his sojourn there -the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some -cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at -the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, -a week later, coming through the _patio_ gateway. - -"Oh, you poor man!" she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. -"They must have worked you all night." - -"Which they did work me overtime," he confessed to Bull, in the adobe -that evening. "Five days an' most of the nights I sat inter one game. -Look at this!" - -The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of -American dollars. "When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled -a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten -Miss Lee's hand. He was a-- - -"What are you crinkling your nose at?" he hotly demanded of Bull. "This -ain't no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying -horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of 'em came from this very -ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better -right to their money than the little girl?" - -"'Tain't that." Bull shook his head. "I was on'y thinking that I'd -liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don't look like she'd take -easily to charity." - -"_That so?_" Jake regarded him cynically. "Now kain't you jest hear me -a-saying, 'Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?' -But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple -of thousand in horses?" - -"No; but she will." - -And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three, -made his proposition, Lee shook her head. "It's only a question of time -before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be -your two thousand dollars?" - -"In the same box with yours--stowed safely away where we can't spend or -lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims," Jake argued. "The -risk we're willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that -account." - -At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by -devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error, -turning evil to good, if only for once. - - - - -IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -"Lady-girl's a-going to have a birthday." - -The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house. -So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer -that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease -on their _catres_. But the title "Lady-girl," Sliver's especial name for -Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him. - -"That so?" Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. "How'd you know?" - -"She asked me to write a piece, t'other day, in her birthday-album, an' -looking through it I kem on her day." - -"She asked me, too," Jake admitted. "What did you write?" - -"'Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an' so air you.'" - -"A real nice piece, too," Jake commented upon this classic. "I like it -better 'n mine." Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet, -he gave his own: - -Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. "I ked on'y -think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister's album when I was -a kid. 'Tain't near as good as yourn. - - "My pen is dull, my ink is pale; - My love for you will never fail." - -"I think it's pretty fine," the others commended the effort. - -After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, "How -old is she, Sliver?" - -"Rising twenty, be the date." - -"Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the 'casion--if -it's on'y to keep her from feeling lonesome." - -"Little bit close on the funeral," Jake tentatively suggested. "Jest -about three months, ain't it?" - -"Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an' -have 'em drop in that day." - -"We might shoot things up a bit, too," Sliver began, but Jake cut him -off with utter scorn. - -"This ain't no cowman's jamboree. Girls don't like any shooting except -what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles 'u'd be -my idee." - -"'Cake'?" Sliver now returned the scorn. "Kain't you see these Mexican -dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an' -curran's an' cit-tron peel, an' with spice fixin's to it? An enchilada -stuffed with store prunes 'u'd be the best they ked do." - -"Oh, I don't know." Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled -waters. "What about Mrs. Mills?" - -He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her -young daughter and a few _peones_, had kept their _rancho_ going since -her husband's death. "If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I'll bet -you she'd fix up a cake, if 'twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for -candles, candles an' beer-factories are the main products of Mexico." - -Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward -consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull -delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the -following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe's _fianc_, a young mining -engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend, -a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded -to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on. - -"It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza," Phyllis warmly -declared. "She and Lee have always been such good friends." - -Accordingly, a _mozo_ delivered an invitation at the _Hacienda del Sol_ -about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow's _rancho_. - -The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated -former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating -supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he -developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered -on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her -small daughter. - -Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her -flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything, -the girl's childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled -happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless -directness that sometimes proved embarrassing. - -Had he a father, mother, sister? Where did they live? What was his -business? Married? Why not? And when he returned the usual answer that -no one would have him she brought him to sudden and utter confusion. - -"Oh, I'm so glad! Mother would take you, I'm sure. I'd just love to have -you for my father. Will you please marry her, then she will never be -anxious or fearful again?" - -Her mother's merry laugh helped to cool Bull's blushes. "Don't be -specially insulted. She says that to every one." Then, brave little soul -though she was, she lifted a corner of the curtain that veiled an -ever-present fear. "It's true that I get sometimes terribly anxious. -Mexicans are lovely people when they're kept in their place. But since -Diaz was overthrown they're like a school of naughty children, let loose -without morality, discipline, or guidance to protect them from -themselves. Sometimes I think we ought to leave, but if we did the place -would be sacked and burned before we reached the railroad. So I'd rather -take the risk than be a pauper in the United States. But there, I'm -ungrateful talking this way instead of thanking Providence we've got -along so well." - -"That's the way to look at it, ma'am," Bull encouraged her. While a -wicked flash shot from under his black brows he added, "If any one -bothers you jest send for us." - -"Oo-oh, but you looked fierce then!" the child gave a delighted shudder. -"Do it again." Though a humorous twinkle sterilized the rehearsal, she -consoled herself with the reflection: "'Tisn't the same. But I'll bet -you're muy malo when you fight." - -"It's a good thing if he is." From the sink, where she was washing -currants, her mother surveyed with approval Bull's imposing bulk. "It -was a great relief when we heard that you and your friends were staying -with Lee." - -Later, when Bull's shyness had somewhat abated, she spoke more -intimately. From Ramon himself she had learned of his expulsion from Los -Arboles. "Ramon is a nice boy, yet no one could blame Mr. Carleton," she -said. "Yet what is Lee to do? Before the revolution she could have taken -her pick from scores of young Americans, but now they're all gone." -Laughing, she finished with a remark which was destined, later, to -produce unexpected results. "I guess we'll have to import her a -husband." - -Bull's heavy rumble echoed her laugh. It broke out again when Betty -cried out: "While you're at it get one for me. I simply won't marry a -greaser." - -Because of the unusual proceedings she was allowed to sit up. Caught -yawning while the cake was baking, she fled to Bull's knee, from which -strategic position she defeated her mother's best efforts to coax her to -bed. Whereafter she promptly celebrated her victory by falling asleep. -Curled against him in trustful comfort, she slept with her fair head -pillowed on his mighty chest till, the cake finished, he carried her to -bed. A _catre_ had been moved out for him under the _portales_. But -after silence and sleep descended on the house he sat for a long time on -its edge, softly musing, the warmth of the child's body enwrapping his -heart. Even Jake, whose sharp eyes had detected many an alien expression -on that scarred visage of late, would have wondered at its tenderness. - -Betty was still asleep when he mounted to leave next morning, but at the -beat of hoofs she came running, bare feet and legs flying under her -nightdress. Stooping, he swung her to the saddle before him. The -pressure of her warm arms around his neck, soft lips on his cheek, put a -thrill of earnestness into his farewell. - -"Remember, ma'am, we'll come whenever you call." - -A quarter-mile away he drew rein and looked back. Though smaller than -Los Arboles, the _rancho_ buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of -the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea -vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against -the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed -in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed -the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a -dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes. - -Shaking his big head, he spoke aloud. "'Tain't safe for them here, -'tain't safe!" - -So vivid was that dread feeling, presage of evil, the sweat broke on his -brow. Into his mind shot a vivid picture of the miner hanging limply -from the _sahuaro_, face turned up to the torrid sun. Around it, as in a -whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders -of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern -horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive -indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the -long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon -it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again -and rode on. - - -It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets -and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. These tendencies are due to -the fact that a woman lives principally in the past and present, a man -in the future; while she observes past occasions, he creates new ones. -Whether she be looking forward with youthful joy, or looking back with -increasing regret, a woman specializes upon her birthdays. But, -accustomed to her father's bad memory, Lee had not expected any one to -remember; was accordingly astonished and pleased when, coming to -breakfast that morning, she found the table decorated with trailing -vines and a bouquet of wild flowers at her plate that had been picked by -Sliver. - -"Why--" she gave a little gasp. Then her shining glance accused the -Three, whose sheepish grins loudly proclaimed their guilt. "How _did_ -you know? What's this?" - -While she was unwrapping the tissue-paper in which Mrs. Mills had -wrapped the cake the Three looked on with eager expectance, and were -treated to a second bath of sunshine. "A _real_ cake! Where _did_ you -get it?" - -In a country where cakes, if not actually hanging on every tree, may be -either home-grown or plucked from the counter of any pastry cook, her -joy might have seemed exaggerated. But in that alien desert, stripped of -its substance to the bare hot bones by repeated revolutions, the -conjunction of a sure-enough cake with a girl's birthday verged on the -miraculous. Nor was Lee's pleasure lessened after she heard at what -pains it had been produced. - -It was, of course, merely the first of the day's surprises, some of -which were purely accidental, as when William Benson rode in at noon. As -a matter of fact, his visit pertained to a defensive alliance against -raiders, but, being warned in time, he straightway credited his visit to -the birthday. A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered -and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit -of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old -friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the _patio_ when the -second irruption of the Lovells and their _fiancs_--for Phyllis had -conquered the smelter man in record time--occurred midway of the -afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the _portales_ -before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under -the arched gateway into Lee's arms. - -"But you surely did not come alone?" Though that was exactly what she -might have done herself, Lee looked at her in horror. - -"Ah no, querida! Ramon escorted me, and will return to-morrow!" - -"You don't mean to say that he has--" Lee stopped, for she had caught, -just then, a glimpse of him riding away. - -"Your father--you remember--he thought--" - -Isabel stopped in her embarrassed explanations for, like a scared white -bird, Lee was flying through the gateway. Grabbing Isabel's horse from -the _anciano_ who was just about to lead it around to the compound, she -leaped into the saddle and went flying down the trail. - -Turning at the sound of hoofs, Ramon waited for her. It was the first -time they had met since the funeral, and though embarrassment would have -been quite natural, Lee's frank greeting put him at once at his ease. - -"You were going away--on my saint's day?" - -"It was out of respect for--" - -She cut off his apology. "Yes, yes, but father was angry and unjust that -day. He would have acknowledged it himself, had he lived. You must come -back, at once, with me." - -Not knowing the cause of her sudden flight, Bull had followed to the -gateway. As he stood there watching the two returning, Benson's voice -broke at his shoulder. - -"That's the hell of raising a girl in this country. I spoke often to -Carleton about it, but he was a lonely man and couldn't bear to have her -away. I suppose that he felt she was perfectly safe with him." - -Knowing him for Lee's sincere friend, Bull did not scruple to hand on -the information he had gained from Mrs. Mills. Benson received it with a -low, shocked whistle. - -"And the poor man had to meet death with that on his mind? She hasn't -seen Ramon since the funeral, you say? That speaks well for him. He -tried to go, just now, too. He's not half bad. But when it's a question -of marrying Lee, no Mexican need apply. But come on back in. She'll pick -out in a second that we're talking about them." - -During the lively chatter that whiled away the afternoon; at supper when -the cake appeared in a glory of radiant candles; while the young folks -laughed and chatted thereafter under the lighted _portales_, the two -stealthily watched Lee and Ramon. Sliver and Jake having retired early, -Bull and Benson engaged in an interminable game of poker which left them -free to discuss the proposed defensive alliance without neglecting their -watch. - -Before night fell the girls had distributed candles here and there among -the foliage which now transmuted their waxen gleam into a greenish -incandescence. Behind the creeper that fell in a cascade from the roof, -the lamplit _portales_ gleamed in half-circles of gold. The massed -cluster of a bougainvillea dripped clotted blood down the faade of the -gate arch. As the girls moved under the golden arches opposite, their -white dresses might easily have been the fluttering wings of giant -tropical moths, and, noting it, Benson paused in filling his hand. - -"It's like a beautiful stage setting." - -Bull's nod took in the bright faces, soft laughter, happy chatter. With -a slow, indulgent smile he musingly watched the secret glances between -the two pairs of lovers; artless subterfuges by which the girls achieved -small personal contacts. - -"Don't take much to make 'em happy, does it? A little laughter an' a -little song; plenty of chatter an' some pretty clothes; a baby to love -and a man to boss; 'tain't much, but Lordy, how many of 'em don't get -it. If men 'u'd on'y keep on admiring in their wives the things they -liked in their sweethearts, the divorce courts 'u'd go out of business. -If I had a daughter, I'd marry her to a boot-black that understood the -nature of women ahead of a merchant prince; for a man that says to his -wife at breakfast, 'Why, how pretty you look this morning!' is a-going -to get a reward that can't be bought with a million." - -Just then Phoebe Lovell's clear voice floated across the _patio_. "What -a lovely night! Let's go for a walk." - -"All right. Wait till I get a shawl." - -As the others moved off, Lee ran back into her room. They had passed -through the gateway when she came out again, except Ramon, who took the -shawl and threw it over her shoulders. For a few moments they stood -talking under the lamplit _portal_, and, though the conversation was -quite ordinary, the glow in his big dark eyes was sufficiently -revealing. As Lee's back was turned toward them, her face told nothing. -But just before they moved off she reached up and straightened the lapel -of Ramon's coat. - -Bull frowned. "D'you really think she's in love?" - -Benson shrugged. "When a girl fusses with a young man's clothes she -doesn't hate him." - -Bull broke a second frowning pause. "You've knowed her almost all her -life. Kedn't you put in a word?" - -The Englishman made a wry face. "I did, about six months ago, when I -first noticed this thing starting. But never again!" He laughed, a -little self-consciously. "I never had any one sauce me so in all my -life. Told me that it was none of my damn business; to go home and boss -my poor wife. Said that she preferred Mexicans to English, anyway. -Phe-e-ew! I never think of it, even now, without aching to spank her. -No, counsel wouldn't help her." - -"But she simply kain't be allowed to go ahead an' marry him." Bull's -coal eyes flashed with the old wicked gleam. "Before that I'd--lay for -him an' shoot him." - -Benson regarded him dryly. "Your plan has the advantage of finality, -but--it would lead to reprisals. Old Icarza stands well with Valles. If -anything happened to his beloved son we'd be wiped out so completely -there'd be no one left to mourn us. But why worry? We don't know for -sure whether she even loves him. Give me two cards. I raise you three -blues." - -For two hours thereafter the two played and talked, arranging a code of -smoke signals by day, beacons by night, to warn the _haciendas_. But -under it Bull's thought still revolved around Lee and her problem. The -party had returned from the walk, and Lee was shooing all her guests off -to bed before his brow cleared and he uttered a low chuckle. - -"What's the matter?" Benson looked up in surprise. - -"Oh, jest something I was thinking of. I raise you two reds." - -Not until Jake woke up when Bull entered the bunkhouse did his secret -thought find expression. "Sure I noticed it," he answered Jake's remark -concerning Lee's "likin' for that Mexican." "But leave it to me." - -"What d'you allow to do?" - -This time Bull laughed outright. "Mrs. Mills was saying, t'other day, -that we'd have to import a rival. 'Tain't sech a bad idea." - -"What d'you reckon to do--put an ad in the paper 'Wanted, a husband'?" - -"Never you mind," Bull quietly replied to the cynical comment. "I'm -going, to-morrow, up to El Paso." - - - - -X: WANTED--A HUSBAND - - -Departures are usually cheerless affairs, but the morning sun loosed a -flood of gold into the _patio_ where the party was in process of -dissolution. William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they -went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone. - -It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the -sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an -indulgent grin two small brown _criadas_, darting with needle and thread -and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the -transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the -beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love--set his big rough heart aglow. -The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. The young -men, with natural respect for quiet power, admired his kindliness and -strength. Their farewells and invitations were hearty and sincere. - -"You've promised and promised and never come yet--that is, for a real -visit," Phoebe and Phyllis rebuked him. - -The young men earnestly charged him, "We look to you to take care of our -girls till we're in shape to look after them ourselves." - -Not till the Icarzas bid him good-by did that kindly glow fade. Even -when Isabel slid a small soft hand into his huge paw and turned on him -the full power of her big Spanish eyes while uttering lovely felicities, -he remained non-committal. He frowned hearing Lee accept an invitation -for a visit in the near future. But when she came in, after they left, -the hostile look had faded. - -"Oh, didn't we have a lovely time?" She patted his arm. "And it was all -due to you." - -"And now I'll take my pay. I want to go up to El Paso." - -"Oh, I'm so glad!" Darting into her room, she came running back with a -fat roll of bills. "I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr. -Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in -El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece." - -Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the -last thing in the world that Bull's heart desired. But she looked so -pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled -through the _patio_. - -"Now that's real nice of you. But back up at the mine we've all got -store clothes to burn. One o' these days, when the work ain't so -pressing, Sliver kin ride over an' get 'em. Fifty'll be all I'll need." - -"Oh _dear_!" she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. "I did want -to do something; you've all been so kind." - -But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his -comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then -bossed the job while her _criadas_ brushed and curried and sponged him. -After tying one of her father's cravats around his neck she turned him -round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed -him with a gentle pat. - -On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, "be how an' -when," but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger -at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform -to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the -mixture of _peones_, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican -_comerciantes_ that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep -he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under -the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent. - -"'Morning, friend," he greeted Bull, cordially. "My name is Naylor. -Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you'll tip this water-bottle -for me, I'll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer -of dust and cinders." - -The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years -to establish in civilization's cultured circles. Before it was over, -Bull had learned that his companion was "on a little _pasear_ between -revolutionary battles," and had given, in return, some inkling of his -own affairs. The young fellow's lithe, spare figure, clean face, -fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled -along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he -eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last, -the other's attention. - -"Hey!" he demanded. "Is my nose out of plumb, or what?" - -Bull warded off offense with the truth. "I happened to be looking for a -man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?" - -"That depends." The correspondent answered, breezily, but with caution. -"Without being what you could call wedded to this sandy, thirsty, -cutthroat business of Mexican revolutions, I like it better than -anything else in sight. But what's your lay? Ranching?" He repeated it -after Bull. "In central Chihuahua? Forget it, friend." - -Bull eyed him wistfully. He fitted so closely to specifications. -Finally, in desperation, he opened his simple heart; was explaining his -quest when the young fellow burst out laughing. - -"I beg your pardon." He raised a protesting hand against Bull's black -glower, then went on with sympathetic seriousness: "But you'll have to -admit that one doesn't see a man of your build every day in this -matrimonial business. So there's a damsel in distress, hey? That alters -the case. If it wasn't for a little girl up in San Francisco that I -expect to marry some day when I become very rich and famous, I'd try and -help you out, for I know just how you feel. It would be a damned shame -to have her throw herself away on a Mexican. But you've laid yourself -out some job. Not that you won't be able to find men, good-looking chaps -at that. But to get the right one calls for some picking and choosing. -But I tell you what I will do--I shall be up for a week and I'd love to -give you a hand." - -"Sure you kedn't tackle it yourself?" - -The young fellow denied the wistful appeal. "Hombre! a million wouldn't -release my girl's mortgage." - -With a regretful sigh Bull struck hands on the compact. While they were -talking the train had ambled through the brown adobe skirts of Juarez, -the squalid Mexican town across the Rio Grande, whence they were -presently shot by automobile over the international bridge into the -spacious bosom of El Paso's largest hotel. Bull had calculated to go -out, at once, on his search, but while they sat at breakfast there -descended upon them a host of reporters and correspondents, ravenous for -news and aching to dispense hospitality. - -"Might as well put it off till to-morrow, Diogenes." His friend had -already named Bull after the person who had such a deuce of a time -hunting an honest man among the grafters and ward heelers of ancient -Greece. "We'll devote to-day to the irrigation of our desiccated -systems, then go to it maana like hungry dogs. But safety first! Take a -ten out of your wad and give the rest to the clerk." - -Instead of one day, however, three passed during which Bull's huge bulk -upreared alongside a hundred bars. In all that time he never went to -bed, for, intensified by long abstinence, the outbreak proved unusually -virulent. Generally the conclusion of his debauches found him broke. -But, thanks to the correspondent's prevision, he awoke on the fourth -morning, in bed at the hotel, with the bulk of his money still in the -office safe. While he was draining the water-jug according to -time-honored precedents, his friend appeared in the doorway of the -adjoining room. His own head was swathed in a wet towel that almost hid -his rueful grin. - -"One never knows what one is starting. You certainly went the limit, -Diogenes. Are you quite sure you're through?" - -Bull nodded and put down the jug with a satisfied sigh. "It's a bit of a -strain, this fathering an' mothering a lone girl, a feller's gotter keep -so straight." He added, apologetically, "I was jest plumb ripe for a -bust, but I reckon this orter hold me for another three months." - -"Very well, then, let's get down to work. At intervals, while I could -still see, I kept one eye open for possibles. But it's like looking for -gold or diamonds; the supply doesn't touch the demand. The few prospects -all proved to have attachments in the shape of sweetheart or wife. Good -ones, I suppose, are so rare that the girls grab them at sight like -marked-down waists on a bargain-counter." - -After two days of vain search through the plazas and parks, hotel -lobbies, streets, and bars of El Paso, Bull was almost driven to the -same conclusion. Short men, tall men, thin men, broad men; some that -were ugly, others handsome; well and ill clad from all walks of -life--passed under his observation. The few he trailed were either -engulfed within the sacred precincts of some bank or met at the doors of -suburban bungalows and there warmly kissed by young and pretty wives. -Without fulfilling the specifications called for in the potential -husband, it would have been difficult enough to have enlisted an -ordinary ranch hand for service across the line. At the close of the -second day Bull reported as much to the correspondent when they met in -the hotel lobby. - -"Guess I'll have to give it up." - -"Now if _that_ was only free." The other bowed, just then, to a young -man who had just walked in from the street. "Look at him! Five-eleven in -his socks, hazel eyes, brown hair, good strong jaw, flat shoulders and -flanks, deep chest; walks the earth like he owned it. Some dresser, too. -That mixed plaid cost a hundred at his New York tailor's." - -"Some banker's son, I'll bet you," Bull grumbled. - -"That or better. I had a little chat with him this morning. A 'varsity -man by his accent and manner. Seemed to know the Mexican situation down -to the ground from the Wall Street end, so papa's probably a broker. -Holy snakes! Look at that! Neat work! Neat work!" - -Walking up to the counter, the young man had held out his -hand--evidently for the key of his room--while his indifferent gaze -traveled around the lobby. The clerk, who departed in no wise from the -casual specifications of his supercilious breed, glanced at the hand -contemptuously. Turning, the young man spoke. Then as, without glancing -up, the clerk answered, he snatched, hauled that superior person across -the counter, and slammed him down hard on the floor. Next, as they came -on, he felled one large door porter and three oversized bell-boys who -had answered the clerk's yell. This done, he waited, expectantly, -quietly surveying the wreck, the hazel eye admired by Naylor transmuted -into hard steel flecked with dots of brown light. - -Jaw, eyes, pose, all said, "Next!" But the "wreck" was complete. The -oversized bell-boys ran off to answer imaginary calls. An automobile -party at the door called for the porter's attention. Deserted, the clerk -swiftly retreated behind his counter, behind which, from a safe -distance, he issued defiant mutterings. With a slight nod that expressed -comprehension and satisfaction, Hazel-Eyes sauntered across the lobby -out into the street. - -All had passed in the time required for the correspondent to reach the -desk. He was back again in five seconds. "He's broke--owes two weeks' -room rent. Clerk told him to get out; hence the scrap. Diogenes, we're -in luck! Venus and Cupid are in the ascendant. He's our meat." - -Grabbing Bull's arm, he hustled him outside, where they spied the quarry -turning up a cross-street that led to the plaza. When he finally settled -down on an empty bench, the correspondent nudged Bull in the ribs. - -"Look at them!" He indicated the hundreds of men idling on the benches -or sprawled out on the turf. "Last refuge of the broke, home of the -out-of-works. That settles it. Bet you he hasn't the price of a meal. -But, say! he's plucky. The beggar is actually smiling." - -From the way in which the young fellow's glance wandered around the -assembled out-of-works, it was easy to see that he rather enjoyed the -novel situation. When Bull had noted and commented on the fact, the -correspondent went on: - -"Now, Diogenes, we must proceed with due regard for the traditions. When -grand dukes, princes, and caliphs in disguise befriend some worthy -person, they invariably begin by testing his honesty--see _Arabian -Nights_ and other authorities. Split a couple of tens off your wad and -drop them as you stroll past him. I'll stay here and watch lest he be -found wanting." - -Bull managed it, too, quite cleverly, scraping the bills out of his -pocket along with his tobacco-pouch. Watching closely, the correspondent -saw the young fellow look, pick them up, then run and tap Bull's -shoulder. Leaning back, he shook with silent laughter. - -"And they say romance is dead," his thought ran. "_Dead!_ while this -big, black giant stalks around like a knight of old seeking a perfect -husband for a girl he's known only a few weeks. Diogenes, my friend, Don -Quixote had nothing on you. Of all the lovely, fine pieces of idiocy -that ever helped to raise us out of the muck of commercialism, this is -the very finest. And wouldn't it be queer if it worked? It's almost too -good to be true, and yet--a girl that can move a man to do things like -that must be remarkably worth while. Quien sabe? Perhaps it will end -like all true romances, with a happy marriage." - -Till the two settled down side by side on a bench, the correspondent -watched. Then with a satisfied nod he rose and walked out of Bull's life -in the same casual way he had entered it; to return once more, however, -at a critical juncture, many months later. - -Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with -diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual -observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor -conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated -astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was -remarkably well done. - -"_No-o-o!_" he protested. - -"Sure!" the other nodded. "I was turned out of my hotel only half an -hour ago." - -Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended -doubt. "Broke, mebbe, but you don't belong with these. What was it? -Wine, weemen, or cyards?" - -The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. "A woman, yes, but not in -the usual way. What would you think if I told you--But, pshaw! what's -the use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work -fairy-tale. Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I'm -here, busted and broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars' -worth of gilt-edged securities and real estate." - -"A hundred thousand!" Bull's financial acquaintance having rarely risen -above the sixty-a-month class, he could not repress his surprise. - -"There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I -refused a hundred thousand--with a girl attached." - -Bull's face fell. "I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an' you refused -beca'se you'd already picked one for yourself." - -The young man nodded. "Correct except in one or two particulars. I -disliked the girl so much that her money couldn't tempt me. As for the -one I'll marry, I haven't picked her yet. But I mean to when I'm taken -that way." - -Bull's face lit up with hope again as, with nave frankness, the young -fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a -marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only -daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all -that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there -was the hitch! - -"For a fellow doesn't want to marry his sister," he explained. "I know -her so well she hasn't a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will -be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing -forever after. But the Relieving Officer"--he broke off, laughing at -Bull's puzzled look--"that's my name for my father. He was always coming -through when I got in debt at college, hence the title. He's a good old -scout, but obstinate as--as--" - -"--yourself?" Bull suggested. - -"Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits -the immovable obstacle--something busts. That was me. Without even the -last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama, -I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn't have me suffer. He -supposed I'd presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just -for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So -here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the -result--pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future." - -"Oh, shore!" The caliph--that is, Bull--was proceeding very cautiously. -"You'll get a job in some bank." - -"Don't believe it. You see, I'd just come home from Princeton and had no -commercial training. Anyway, I'd rather work in the open, ranching, or -something like that. If I had a little capital, I'd buy in. As I -haven't, I'm open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I've got no -experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I'm afraid -it's pick and shovel." - -The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was -spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull -proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job--in fact, it was on -the same _hacienda_ where he worked himself! Of course it had the -disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing -was certain but death and "requisitions"! And there was always the -chance of a scrap! He, Bull, wouldn't advise any one to try it that had -too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one -might be launched into "Kingdom Come." But for a man who liked action -and would take a fighting chance--so forth and so on. - -A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred -inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so--Bull -did not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic -outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken. -He had finished telling of Carleton's death at the hands of the -Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his -_compaeros_ had assumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow -thrust out his hand. - -"Say, that's fine, old man! I'd be proud to have you take me in. My name -is Nevil--Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?" - -"Whenever the train goes, an' that's be guess an' be God. It's billed to -pull out from Juarez this evening, but we'll be lucky if it leaves -before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an' start almost on -time. So we'll go aboard to-night." - -"What about clothes?" The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay -at his fashionable tweeds. "I can't punch cows in these." - -"Hardly," Bull grinned. "You'd come out from your first bunch of pear -chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an' we'll see about -an outfit." - -It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon -changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army -shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman's hat, -his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better -advantage. Bull's expression, looking him over, would have fitted a -match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her dbut. His -comment, "You'll do," would have surprised the recipient could he have -divined all of its implications. - -Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon -stopped him. "Here, you can't do that!" - -"But you're broke." - -"I still have these." He held out the tweeds. "How much boot do I get, -Father Abraham?" - -Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he -stood for his tradition. "Only vot iss on your feet. These ain'd much -good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade." - -"You'll chuck in that pair of chaps?" - -With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own -generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were -stowing away the _chaparros_ and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out -a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner -read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very -cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents. - -Gordon burst into a merry laugh. "Father Abraham isn't on to real -clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York." - - - - -XI: GORDON'S DBUT - - -Starting "be guess an' be God," the train left Juarez at five the next -morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull -had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by -the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first -"shoo-fly" around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over -the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could -never be obtained through a Pullman window. - -It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern -experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, -tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly -revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in -purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun -rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its -nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also -revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with -grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, -startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land. - -"Destruction's the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys," Bull -answered Gordon's question. "You orter see them at it. They run the loop -of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, -then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, -spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith's hammer. After cutting down -the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an' yank a mile of it away -at a time. As wreckers, they can't be beat, for in four years they've -completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property -that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty -years to build." - -"Are they still at it?" - -The sudden illumination of the young man's face so palpably expressed -hope that Bull had to grin. "Yes, farther south, where Valles is -fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it -pretty close. Still"--his nod went beyond the distant mountains--"it's -pretty much all bandit out there. Now an' then they attack the trains. -There's allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap." - -"That isn't so bad." - -Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to -the scenery. - -In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first -took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash -in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts -violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible -ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as -its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear -in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and -had his being. - -The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow -sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the -revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when -the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of -his hair. - -It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like -the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the -feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal -expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled -away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by -deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him -always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the -hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican -_haciendas_ did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the -scenery as such. - -"I'm glad we're up here." From the engine, puffing away at the head of a -dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far -to their rear. "I wouldn't exchange this for a Pullman." - -"Well, don't imagine that you're traveling second-class," Bull grinned. -"I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it's worth it. You'd -suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some _peon_ -spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it -an' grin. Sure!" He answered the young fellow's look of disgust. "That -is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you're German or -English, or b'long to any other nationality that looks after its people, -you might resent it an' get away. But, thanks to our Government's -policy, it's open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a -few, too, every so long." - -"Would _you_ stand for that?" - -Bull shrugged. "Kain't say, till I've been tried. But it's good advice, -nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don't like it, you'd better be -toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home. - -"Here, here!" he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on -a telegraph-pole. "Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t'other -day for plugging insulators. Besides, it's waste. Every bullet is worth -a life--mebbe your own." - -"Maybe his own!" Again Gordon felt the prickling hair--in fact, as they -rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that -failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a -few miserable _peonas_, ragged and half-starved, begging for _centavos_. -There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of -a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty -brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied -the details. - -Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of -war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! -That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets -from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish _hacendado_ -whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and -torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the -full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape. - -Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. -Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, -the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit -tortures! - -He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before -he was aware of it the sun's great red orb sank behind a huge black -mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a -while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark -pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them -rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the -running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a -luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at -the station at midnight. - -"We'd better go right on," Bull said. "We'd get no sleep here for the -fleas, an' desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we'll be into -the grass country an' kin take a nap while the animals graze." - -With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved -off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over -its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours' more travel -brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and -Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, -just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in -chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. _Riata_ swinging in -rhythm with her beast's stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, -took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully -as any _vaquero_. - -"Pretty neat!" Gordon exclaimed. "That boy can ride!" - -"You bet you!" Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, "Sliver -himself, that was born with a rope in his han', don't throw a better -loop than Miss Lee." - -"_What?_" As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a -clear cowman's yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon -exclaimed, "Why, it--it _is_ a girl! In this country do they usually -wear--" - -"No more 'n they do in the Eastern States," Bull dryly filled in the -hiatus. "On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican -Catholic--they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p'ints. Ever -sence the revolution, Miss Lee's been doing vaquero's work, an' what -kind of a job d'you reckon she'd make of it going 'round in skirts? If -you don't mind, I'll ride on an' help her with that critter." - -The light that had flashed over the girl's face at the sight of Bull -spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and -sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an -impulsive feeling. - -"Oh, I'm _so_ glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully." - -"_Home!_" And she was happy because he, "Bull" Perrin, the notorious -rustler, had returned _home_! Earth held no terror that could have sent -that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he -controlled his voice. - -"Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?" - -"Indeed, no!" She laughed, merrily. "They're like two old hens 'tending -an orphan chick. But--well, you know a girl, even as independent as I, -must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone." - -A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant's eyes. His -sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch. -Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be -forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of -sin. The shadow marked a resolution. - -He spoke very gently. "I hope that you'll allus feel that way." Then, -with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: "But what are -you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for -this." - -She laughed saucily up in his face. "Then it is due to me. I gave them -the slip. Who is--" She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up. - -Bull briefly sketched his history. "Young chap I found dead broke in El -Paso. He's the right sort." Perhaps because he divined the probable -effect on her feminine psychology, he added: "He's from the -East--college man--wealthy family--turned out because he refused to -marry a fortune. I tol' him you'd likely hire him." - -"I would in ordinary times." She looked at Gordon, who had now reined -in. "But I cannot pay regular wages just now." - -"He's willing to wait, like us," Bull began. "He's--" - -"--out for experience," Gordon put in. "To tell the truth, Miss -Carleton, I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you'll find me worth my -board." - -He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet -reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which -she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke -out with a comical little laugh. "If it wasn't so nice, it would be -ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking -for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is -the matter with you?" - -She may have read the answer in Gordon's eyes and resented the indignity -it offered her independence. Or the feeling underneath her sudden -stiffening may have rooted deeper. Be a young man ever so comely, a girl -ever so pretty, there will flash between them on first meeting the -subtle challenge of sex; instinctive defiance based through love's -history to the far time when every girl ran like a deer from a possible -lover and only gave in after he had proved his manhood by carrying her -off. It passed in a flash, for, noticing her stiffen, Gordon reduced his -gaze to respectful attention. - -Subtle as it was, Bull had still noticed the by-play. "Looks like she'd -taken a down on him." - -But even as the doubt formed in his mind it was removed by her laughing -comment: "I suppose I'll have to stand for it. But you must be starving. -Let us get on to the house." - -As they rode along, moreover, Bull noted certain swift, stealthy glances -with which she took complete census of Gordon's clean profile, strong -jaw, deep chest, flat flanks; signs of a secret and healthy curiosity. - -"She's a-setting up an' taking notice." He winked, as it were, at -himself. "I reckon, Bull, you kin leave the rest to natur'." - - - - -XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT--IN SEVERAL WAYS - - -"Well, what do you-all think of him?" - -Bull's question emerged from the thick tobacco reek which invariably -mitigated the severity of their evening deliberations. - -It pertained, of course, to the new recruit, concerning whose merits or -demerits Jake and Sliver had reserved judgment during this, his first -week. When they had come from supper straight to the bunk-house, Gordon -had taken his pipe and gone for a stroll around the compound, which was -never more interesting than when clothed in the mystery of a hot brown -dusk. The lights and fires, like golden or scarlet blossoms; the soft -brown faces glimpsed in cavernous interiors by the rich glow of a -_brasero_; the women's subdued chatter; laughter wild and musical as the -cooing of wood-pigeons--all had for him perpetual fascination; and while -he sauntered here and there, looking, listening, the Three held session -on his case. - -"What do we think of him?" Jake slowly repeated the question. "It's a -bit soon to jedge, but if he's half as good as he looks, he orter do." - -Sliver, however, was more critical. "Too darned nice-looking fer me. I -hain't got much use for these pretty boys." - -"_Pretty_ yourself!" Bull swelled like a huge toad with indignation. "He -ain't no pretty boy! You-all orter ha' seen him clan up that hotel lobby -in El Paso." - -"A _ho_-tel clerk, an' some bell-hops!" Sliver sneered. "Why, a good -cowman 'u'd jest about as soon think of hitting a lady. 'Fore I allow -him even a look-in with Lady-girl, he's gotter show me. If you-all ain't -afraid he'll spoil, jest send him an' me out together to-morrow." - -"All right, seor, he's your meat." Bull's grin, provoked by a sudden -memory of the thwack with which the hotel clerk had hit the lobby floor, -was veiled by tobacco reek that reigned beyond the lamp's golden -glimmer. "Only, don't chew him. Kain't afford to have his scenery -damaged." - -"Nary a chew," Sliver agreed. "Twon't be necessary. I'll take him in two -swallows." - -In this wise was Gordon apprenticed to Sliver for the period of one day, -to learn, in course thereof, such lessons in cow and other kinds of -punching as it might bring forth. When they two rode out, armed -cap-a-pie as it were, with rifles, saddle _machetes_, and a brace of -Colt automatics, in addition to the usual cowman's fixings, it is -doubtful whether North America held a happier young man than he. Out of -the thousand and one lovers who had awakened to the knowledge that this -was their wedding-day, some might have been equally happy. But none more -so, for Gordon was also espoused--to Adventure, the sweetest bride of -real men. It may be safely stated that no bride ever surveyed her -trousseau with more satisfaction than Gordon displayed in his "chaps," -spurs, guns, and _riata_. - -This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He -wasn't in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the -point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted -himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction -that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting, -park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman's lope. In fact, so -quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the -course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with -thoughts of Lee. - -"'Twon't do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her," he told -himself. "He's gotter show me, an' if he don't--out he goes." - -Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse, -on Gordon's part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with -brutal roughness. - -"Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride -the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you'll -have to try an' look like a man." - -Gordon stared. It wasn't so much the words as the accent that -established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes -were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown -specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden -disappointment when he rode on. - -"_Santa Maria Marrissima Me!_" He swore to himself in sudden alarm. "Is -he a-going to swallow it?" But the next moment brought relief. Gordon -was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine. - -With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the -wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. "Calculated it would -get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He's putting it up to me!" - -Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel, -there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he -began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of -riding. "Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank--" - -The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him -out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped -down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy -chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear. - -A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in -two words, "Poor McNab!" Sliver was almost as terse in describing his -defeat to Bull and Jake that evening. - -"Gentlemen, hush! He leaned over as I took my holt, grabbed me round the -waist from behind, straightened, an' away I flew over his shoulder an' -kem down spread-eagled all over the grass, plumb knocked out." - -Returning to the combat: When Sliver gathered his shocked wits together -and sat up, Gordon stood looking down upon him, hands on his hips, -quiet, determined, yet with an inquisitive twinkle in his eye. - -Sliver answered the twinkle. "Say, that was sure a lallapaloo. I've -wrestled with bears an' once choked a cougar till he was gol-darned -anxious to quit. But I draw the line at earthquakes. If you-all 'll -please to tell how you done it, I'll shake han's an' call it squar'." - -"Done!" Gordon broke out in a merry laugh. "And I'll promise, on my -part, never to ride like that again." - -"For which I'll be greatly obliged; that hippity-haw, side-racking gait -does sure get on my nerves." - -Striking hands upon it, they mounted and rode on. - -They were heading for a mountain valley, enormous green bowl hemmed in -on all sides, that could only be reached by a single rough trail. -Watered by a running stream and knee-deep in lush grass, the difficulty -of approach and sequestration rendered it almost raider-proof. But as it -afforded pasture for barely a third of Lee's stock, it was their habit -to send the animals out in relays to remain under charge of an _anciano_ -for a week at a time. - -As they rode along, Sliver's secret satisfaction revealed itself in many -a stealthy glance. At first they expressed that feeling alone, but -presently there entered into them a leaven of doubt. Their way now led -along the foot of the hog's back from the crest of which Sliver had -obtained his first view of the _fonda_ on the other side, the discovery -of which caused his first lapse from grace. The slight doubt was -explained by the thought that accompanied his glance upward at the -ridge. - -"He's a fine upstan'ing lad an' kin take his own part. But that ain't -all. Supposing he drinks? We-all jest kedn't stan' for any young soak -around Lady-girl." - -In view of his own shortcomings, his grave shake of the head was rather -comical. Nevertheless, it was quite sincere; likewise his emendation: -"'Course we wouldn't have him no canting prig. He orter be able to take -his two fingers like a gentleman, then leave it alone." - -Reining in suddenly, he asked, "D'you ever take a drink?" - -Gordon looked surprised. "Why, yes, on occasion. But you don't mean to -say--" - -"Come on!" Sliver's manner was quite that of the "mysterious stranger" -of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to -befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, "It's a -fine chance to try him out," cloaked certain strong spirituous desires. - -Quarter of an hour's heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks -brought them out in the _fonda_ dooryard. From above Gordon had noted -its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His -eyes now went, first to the two _ancianos_, a wrinkled old man and -woman, who dozed in the shade of the _ramada_; then to the girl who -knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. -Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a -mule-train going up the caon added the last touch, vividly raised in -his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker -colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of -their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With -unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window, -and set out a bottle of _tequila_. - -Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have -been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide -and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When -their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he -missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words. - -"She wants to know who you are an' all about you," he translated her -rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played -as large a part as her tongue. "She says her father an' mother are about -ready to cash in. If you'll stay here an' be her man, you'll stan' right -in line for the _fonda_." - -It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. "Cash in?--the _fonda_? Say! -You're fooling?" - -Sliver raised his right hand. "Take my oath!" - -"Then _she's_ fooling." - -"Nary!" Sliver grinned. "She's serious as a New England housewife in -chase of a bedbug." - -Now Gordon's merry laugh rang out. "Is this leap year, or does this sort -of thing go all the time down here? Her proposal calls for a priest, I -suppose, and a marriage license?" - -"Nary." Sliver grinned again. "Ladies of her class get along very nicely -without them artificial aids to marriage. All she wants is for you to -settle down here with her to housekeeping." - -"Why--but--" He still half believed that Sliver was joking; but, looking -at the girl, he saw for himself the smoldering flame in her dusky eyes. -This time his laugh was a little confused. "Please tell her that I'm -dreadfully sorry, that I appreciate the high compliment, and if it -wasn't for the fact that I don't expect to stay long in this country I -would give her nice offer my most distinguished consideration." - -Any further doubts that he might have entertained would have been -effectually dispersed by her dark disappointment when Sliver translated. -A touch of pity mingled with his amusement; moved him to add, "I hope -that you put it nicely." - -"Sure," Sliver breezily answered. "I told her that you said for her to -go to hell." - -"Oh, well"--Gordon recovered his breath again--"at least that puts the -whole business beyond further doubt." - -"Don't you believe it." Sliver gave a third and last grin. "She says -that you-all kin always find her here if you happen to change your -mind." - -"Now that's very nice." Really pleased under his amusement, Gordon -brought the little comedy to a graceful end. Unsnapping the leather -watch-fob that bore his initials worked in gold, he laid it in the -girl's hand. "A fellow doesn't get a proposal of marriage every day. -Tell her for a little remembrance." - -"And now for another drink." - -But as Sliver reached for the bottle Gordon seized his arm, and any -doubts as to his sobriety were removed then and there from the cowman's -mind. "You've had two already, and I'm not going to stand by and see you -burn your stomach out. Come on, gol darn you! or I'll hand you one." - -His smiling good humor removed the offense. Nevertheless, the curious -brown specks were floating again in the blue of his eye. - -Sliver knew the threat was real. "Just this one?" - -"Well, if you'll down it quick and come on." - -With feelings that had hovered between gratification at Gordon's -sobriety and regret for his own, Sliver drank, bade the girl "Adios," -and mounted again. Standing in the doorway, her glance followed them, -enwrapping Gordon's upright figure with its dark caress. Just as they -crossed the stream at the foot of the path, her face lit with sudden -remembrance. Turning at her call they saw her coming at a breathless -run. - -"Kain't bear the parting," Sliver interpreted the action. - -But his grin faded as he listened to her voluble talk. "She says that -four strange Mexicans stayed here last night. They didn't belong to this -country, an' they questioned her closely about the different haciendas. -They were 'specially curious about our horses. Us being gringos an' her -Mex, they naturally concluded she'd be ag'in us, and they would have -been right but for the fancy she's taken to you. So they opened right -up; asked all about the mountain pastures an' whether we kep' a close -guard. She says they was heading for there. While I go after 'em, you -ride like the mill tails o' hell an' bring out Bull an' Jake." - -That crude but strong expression accurately described Gordon's progress -homeward. While his beast scrambled like a cat up one side of the -ravine, slid like a four-footed avalanche down the other, and streaked -like a shooting star up and down the long earth rolls, he learned more -of horsemanship than during all his previous years. Lee, who saw him -coming from the upper gallery above the _patio_, nodded her approval. -Such haste, of course, had but one interpretation--raiders; and by the -time Gordon dashed into the compound she was already mounted and a fresh -beast waiting for him. - -"They are up in the Caon del Norte," she answered his inquiry for Bull -and Jake. "Come on!" - -"You are surely not thinking of--" - -Before he could finish, however, she shot under the gate arch; was off -at a speed that kept him galloping his hardest to keep her in sight. Not -until she slowed down on the rough trail that led into the caon, within -sight of Bull and Jake, who had just roped a foal for branding, did he -catch her. But it was just as well, for that which he would have said -came with more authority from the lips of Bull. - -"All right, Missy. There's on'y four, so you don't need to be skeered. -You kin go right back home with Gordon an' leave us to take keer of -them." - -"Indeed I won't!" she exclaimed, hotly. "I'm going, too! I am! I am!" -She cut off his remonstrance. "I am! I am! _I am!_" - -It was the first time their wills had clashed. Bull glanced at Jake, who -shook his head--not that he required support or intended to waste time -in fruitless argument. "You mean that?" His glance, grave with stern -disapproval, came back to Lee. - -It hurt her. But though her lips quivered, she answered, doggedly: "I -do! I _won't_ go back." - -"Very well. We've no time to waste. Ride on while I cut this foal -loose." But as she obeyed, with one flick of the wrist he roped her -above the elbows from behind. Then, in spite of angry protests that -ended in tears, he cinched her little feet from stirrup to stirrup. - -"Now take her home." Handing the lead rope to Gordon, he leaped into the -saddle and galloped after Jake. - -Till they disappeared, Lee looked after, wavering between anger and -tears. Tears won. Bowing her fair head, she wept unreservedly for fully -a minute. Realizing then that she was gaining nothing but swollen eyes -and a red nose, she stopped crying and turned to Gordon with a little -laugh. - -"Isn't this ridiculous? Please untie me." - -But now she found herself gazing into the sullen face of a young man -who, through her, had been cut out of a real fight. He shook his head. - -"You _won't_?" - -"No." - -"Why?" - -"You'd go after them." - -They looked at each other. Her eyes were now gleaming brightly above two -red spots; but he met their gaze with stubborn obstinacy. - -"You mean to say that you are going to take me home tied up like a veal -calf?" - -He nodded. - -Biting her lips, she looked at him again. "Do you realize, sir, that you -never set eyes on me till a week ago?" - -"Sure!" - -"Also that you are my hired man?" - -He nodded again. - -"Very well, you're fired! Now untie this rope, then get off my land!" - -But even this was turned against her. "I don't have to. I'm no longer -your servant. I'll get off your land, yes--after I've delivered you at -your home." - -If looks could kill, to use that hackneyed but still expressive term, he -would have died there and then. But they don't, and, masking his own -disappointment with a hypocritically cheerful whistle, he turned his -beast and rode down the caon, towing her behind. - -It was dreadfully humiliating, and, being a girl, she cried some -more--this time for sheer anger. But soon her tears dried and she fell -into deep musing. Soon a small smile restored its softness to her mouth. -Her voice, seductively pleasant, mingled with the tramp of hoofs. "Won't -you _please_ untie me? The rope is hurting my arms." - -He stopped, pulled her horse up alongside, and as he began to fumble -with the ropes she turned her head so that he could not see her smile. -It was transmuted into a flash of fury when, finding the rope a little -loose, he drew it tighter. - -"I thought you were a gentleman!" she shot it viciously at his back as -he rode on. "Gentlemen don't tie up ladies!" - -"Ladies don't fire men for obeying orders. You needn't think I'm -enjoying this. Just because you shoved in where you were not wanted, I -have to go back." - -She did not like that, either. What girl would? Once more she bit her -lip, yet, for all her anger, a touch of respect mingled with her -resentment. Concerned principally with his own disappointment, he rode -on without looking back and so missed the little persistent wriggles by -which she gradually freed one hand. Soon she was able, by leaning -forward, to reach and draw her saddle _machete_. Indeed, she worked with -such caution that he got his first warning when, with one slash, she cut -the rope between them. By the time he had swung his beast around she was -going like the wind back up the caon. - -Her mocking laughter came floating back. - - - - -XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - - -Shoving rapidly into the mountains, Sliver ascended with the trail in a -couple of hours through upland growth of _pion_ and juniper to the -height of land, a pass riven by earthquake or subsidence between twin -jagged peaks, from where he overlooked the valley pasture. - -Like a great jade bowl, bisected by the silver line of a stream, its -wide green circle, miles in diameter, lay within a broad ring of purple -chaparral. Over its surface black dots were scurrying toward the corrals -at the northern end, and under Sliver's glass these resolved into horses -that were being rounded up by four Mexicans; for he could see their -peaked _sombreros_, tight _charro_ suits, even at that distance. Turning -the glass on the _jacal_, a rude hut of poles and grass thatch near the -corrals, he looked for Pedro, the _anciano_. - -"Poor old chap! they've sure got his goat." While clucking his -commiseration, however, he shifted the glass to a patch of white on a -near-by tree, and it immediately resolved into the old fellow's blouse -and _calzones_. "No, they've just tied him up. Then these ain't no -Colorados. It's Felicia's gang, all right, all right." He added, -chuckling, "Four nice little raiders in a pretty trap, along comes Jake -and Bull, then there was none." - -And trapped they were. Except where the stream slipped out over a -precipice between two narrow walls, the mountains rose sheer around the -Bowl, unscalable save where the trail rose by precarious zigzags to -where Sliver held the pass a thousand feet above. At few places was it -possible for two horsemen to ride abreast. At that point there was -barely room for one; if necessary, he could have held it, alone, against -a score. But it was not. Watching closely, he saw the raiders first -drive the horses into the corrals, then settle down for a _siesta_ in -the shade of the _jacal_. - -"Going to bring 'em up at sundown," he muttered, "in time to make the -first run by night." - -So certain he was of it that he did not scruple to take a sleep himself; -cat-napped, with occasional squints down into the valley up to the -moment that he was awakened by the hoof-beats of Jake and Bull's beasts. -The glass then showed the raiders working the horses out of the corrals. -As the herd thinned out to single file at the trail, one man took the -lead; a second and third fell in at even distances; the last brought up -the rear. - -"They know their business," Bull commented on the manoeuver. "It's -easier to keep 'em moving." He grimly added: "And easier for us. The -line will string out for a quarter-mile, so I'll go down that distance -an' hide in the chaparral. Let the last man pass me before you hold up -the first. Then, while one of you keeps him covered, t'other can take -away his tools. I'll keep 'em moving on up till you've got the other -three." - -While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By -that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and, -peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow -black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear, -above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another. -Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see -the leader's face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral -Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. Somewhere, -though he could not place it, he had seen the man before! He was still -puzzling over it when Jake's command rang out in Spanish: - -"Hands up!" - -The leader looked and complied, persuaded by the black muzzles, wicked -eyes, that looked down from the rock above. The second and third men did -try to turn, but were blocked by the file of animals. An attempt to pass -would have sent them down, bounding from level to level to the floor of -the valley below. The fourth man swung his beast around only to find -himself looking into Bull's rifle. So while Jake covered the operation -from above and Bull from below, Sliver disarmed and bound the raiders. - -After the captives were arranged in line under a _copal_ tree upon a -little plateau, where the trail began to fall downhill on the other -side, Bull stood frowning down from his height on the man whose face had -aroused that haunting memory. "I've a hunch that I've seen this chap -afore." - -He would have been more certain of it had he noticed the fellow's look -of recognition and fear only a moment before. But now his ugly -countenance was veiled in that ox-like stolidity which a Mexican _peon_ -can so easily assume. He shook his head in dull negation to all of -Bull's questions. He did not come from any of the neighboring -_haciendas_! They had never met before! His _pais_ was far--it might -have been anywhere in a thousand-mile circle implied by the wave of his -hand. - -"Yet I could swear to him." Bull looked musingly at Sliver. -"Pock-marked, too. Where have I seen him afore?" - -Sliver shook his head. "Can't prove it be me. All _peones_ look like so -many peas in a pod; some mebbe a bit uglier than others; an' pock-marks -ain't no distinction with two-thirds of 'em pitted like a -nutmeg-grater." - -"That ain't the question before the house, neither," Jake put in. "All -I'm bothering about is whether to hang or shoot 'em. Hanging is what I -was brought up to, but shooting's more fashionable down here. I'd allow -they'd likely prefer it." - -"Shooting's too good for 'em." In a spasm of virtuous indignation, -Sliver shook his fist at the captives. "Hanging's slower an' hurts a -heap, an' if it gets about that the gent that meddles with our stock is -in for a slow, choking they ain't a-going to be near so careless." - -"There's something in that," Jake conceded. "An' this copal's got nice -stout limbs. We kin use their own riatas, an' that'll be what the -Tombstone editor used to call 'poetic justice.' Hanging goes." - -Bull was still staring at the raider, but, taking his consent for -granted, they proceeded to fit the _riatas_ around the prisoners' necks. -Jake had, indeed, thrown the slack of the last over a bough when there -came a rattle of stones and scrape of hoofs on the trail below. Grabbing -his rifle, he slid with Bull and Sliver, each behind a tree. One second -thereafter their guns were trained on the spot where the trail debouched -on the plateau. - - -Meanwhile, with Gordon in pursuit, Lee had led the race into the hills. -Her blood mare was the fleetest animal she owned and, had she chosen, -Gordon would have soon dropped out of sight. But she contented herself -with just holding a lead. - -Unaware of this, Gordon made repeated attempts to catch her with sudden -bursts of speed. Perfectly aware of it, on her part, she would wait till -his horse's head almost touched her leg, then shoot ahead with a little -laugh. Her face, looking back at him, was hard as her laugh--eyes bright -and shining, nose contemptuously tilted, mouth one scarlet line. - -To be defied, drawn on, mocked, and teased with low, derisive laughter -is not a situation that any man loves. But if thoroughly angry, mad -clear to the bone, Gordon's face revealed only dogged hope. For Chance -was riding with him. If Lee's beast slipped or tired. If she were a -second late with the spur. One of the three was fairly certain, and the -belief set a gleam in his eyes that caused her a quiver of apprehension. - -"Oh, he's mad enough to beat me!" she told it to herself. "I wonder if -he would." - -Nevertheless, every time she looked back at that dogged face she felt a -sense of security. With raiders at large, it was just as well to have -him around! The thought was in her mind when, with him only a few feet -behind, she shot over the edge of the last steep out upon the plateau. - -"Oh, my _goodness_!" It burst from her in sudden fright. - -The Three, of course, were out of sight. The natural droop of the -_copal's_ outer branches hid the halters, and she saw only the four -raiders, unevenly grouped, and three rifle-barrels aimed from behind the -tree. As she reined her beast back on its haunches Gordon swung his -animal sideways between her and the raiders, and, quite shamelessly, she -accepted the protection. - -"Beat it quick!" - -Already he had pulled his gun, and but for the fact that Bull just then -stepped out in the open the question of hanging or shooting would have -been decided for at least one of the thieves. As it was, his readiness -served one purpose--reduced the heat in Bull's eyes. - -"Put up your gun, Son, the job's done." Pointing at Lee, he sternly -inquired, "But what's _she_ doing here?" - -Now fright, plus Gordon's chivalrous behavior, had driven the last -vestige of anger out of Lee. She spoke before he could answer. "Don't -blame him. He did his best to take me in." - -"Then who shall I blame?" - -"Me!" The coals of her anger sent forth a last flash that was -immediately quenched by her mischievous smile. "Or blame yourself for -leaving me the machete. I wiggled and wiggled till one hand was free, -then cut the rope." - -Combined with the smile, her little illustrative wriggle completed his -rout. He turned to hide a grin, but was betrayed by his shaking -shoulders. Noting it, she flashed with feminine quickness from defendant -to accuser. She pointed at the halters. - -"_What are you going to do?_" - -Sliver and Jake had now come out. The former answered, "We was jest -about to bump 'em off, Miss." - -"What? _Hang_ them?" - -"Now look a-here, Lady-girl!" Sliver burst forth in indignant -remonstrance. "Didn't we catch 'em red-handed? An' d'you allow we're -a-going to let 'em loose to try again?" - -"But _hang_ them? Just for stealing? Of course, if they were Colorados, -but--" She stopped, clasping her hands in sudden fear. "Oh! they killed -him--poor Pedro?" - -"Nary; jes' tied him up," Sliver quickly reassured her. "I seen him -wiggling through the glass, an' the big thief, there, says they didn't -harm him." - -Sighing with sudden relief, she returned to the charge. "Then if they -spared _him_, why are you going to kill _them_?" - -"Look a-here, Missy," Bull now intervened. "'Twas agreed between Benson -an' all the hacendados to make an example of captured raiders. If you -once start letting 'em off, there won't be a head of stock left in all -this country at the end of a year. That was why I wanted you to go back, -an'--" - -"I'm glad that I didn't." - -Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian -stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in -their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not -preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is -universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the -pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish. - -They were poor _hombres_ with families back in their _pais_ reduced to -the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they -would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted -to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For -themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there -would be an end! But their women? And the little _nias_? These would be -left in continual suffering! - -Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep -instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she -began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women. -Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been -duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and -so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing -into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing. -Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and -reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they -related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces, -leaving them soft and human. - -Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk _jacales_ with their -brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands -for their men's return; their small, nude children playing in the hot -dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great _vaquero_, -roping chickens and cats with a string _riata_, then dragging them, -captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by -the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It -was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow. - -"This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They -were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us -might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would -you feel?" - -"_Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!_" -She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the -prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at -Sliver, who looked away. - -A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and -beyond the pleasant span of to-day's existence the old rustler life of -yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was -now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely. -But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of -each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las -Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they -looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish -grins. - -"Under the same circumstances," Bull answered, slowly and truthfully, -"_we-all 'u'd expect to hang_. But if you feel different"--his glance -interrogated Sliver and Jake--"it goes as you say. On'y, if you let 'em -go, we'll have to run 'em out of the country in fairness to the other -haciendas." - -"Of course." Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. "We'll take them home -now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out." - -This settled, and while Sliver rode on down into the valley to free the -_anciano_, Bull and Jake cinched the thieves securely in their saddles. -Then, driving them and the horses ahead, with Lee and Gordon following, -they started down the trail. - -Now the spectacle of four men trussed for hanging is not to be seen -every day--let us say, on the streets of New York--and though Gordon had -looked on with breathless interest, he could hardly believe that the -business would have been carried to a conclusion. - -"Do you really think they would?" - -Lee looked at him in surprise. "Of course! You know Valles has issued -orders for hacendados to shoot raiders on sight; that is"--she added it -with a little sigh--"all but his own." - -Her tone was so casual, he felt convicted of vast and unlimited -greenness. But where, according to the lights under which he had been -raised, he ought to have suffered a severe revulsion, he actually -experienced a thrill. This juxtaposition of life and death, the violence -and quickness with which events rang their changes, somehow stripped -away the veils from the riddle of existence, reduced its complex terms -to their basic factors. Here in the mountains, desert, plains, they were -very simple--to eat well, sleep well, fight well, and die well, even as -these thieves, comprised the whole duty of man. The thrill recorded his -acceptance of the terms. - -While they were riding down and down the sun lowered its great crimson -orb till it hung, transfixed, on a distant peak. The mountain steeps -above, spurs, and ridges beneath, were washed in its dying crimson. Deep -purple filled the hollows; faint violet clothed the distant plains. Over -all a cloud-flecked sky spread its parti-colored glories. Mountain and -plain, caon and deep ravine, it was a scene infinitely wild, infinitely -beautiful, and as he looked over it all Gordon took his breath in a deep -sigh. - -"This is life! I hate to leave it." - -"Leave it?" If Lee's surprise was assumed, it was exceedingly well done. -She went on, with a low laugh: "Oh, I see! Papa wins out. The prodigal -will return to marry the beautiful heiress and live happy ever -afterward." - -"Who told you? Oh, Bull, of course. Now that comes of owning a blabbing -tongue. Confound him! Well, since you want to know, I won't. In my -present mood, New York is the last place in the world I want to see." - -"Then you have tired of us--_so_ soon?" - -"Or you of me? You forget--_I'm_ fired." - -She noted the subtle accent, and equally subtle was her reply. "Why, -yes, so you _were_." - -Then, looking at each other, they both laughed. - - - - -XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE--AND IS "DOGGED," IN TURN, BY LEE - - -Midnight saw the prisoners safely bestowed in a 'dobe that had served -the old Spaniard, Carleton's predecessor, for a jail. During the -remainder of the night the Three stood guard in turn and Gordon, who -relieved Sliver at daybreak, was still at the door when Lee came out of -her bedroom on the upper gallery. - -Goodness knows she was pretty enough in her man's riding-togs, but now a -flowing kimono added the softness and mystery a man loves best in a -woman. As she moved forward to the rail and stretched, looking off and -away to the mountains, the loose sleeves fell away and Gordon obtained a -distracting glimpse of polished arms, small white teeth, in a round red -mouth, all set in the blazing gold of her hair. Seeing him, she cut off -the yawn and smiled. - -"You must be dreadfully hungry." Her clear call floated across the -compound. "Come to breakfast. I'll send Miguel to keep watch." - -She was already seated at the table under the _portales_ when he came -in, and as he took his seat Maria, the smaller of the two house -_criadas_, reported the Three as being still lost in sleep. - -"The poor fellows!" Lee commented, distressfully. "They must be dead. -Don't awaken them." - -Thus, after the crowding events of the previous day, which included a -fist fight, proposal of marriage from one girl, wild chase after -another, a bandit raid and lynching-party, all rendered more impressive -by the dark ride through warm, mysterious night, Gordon now sat -_tte--tte_ with his pretty employer. - -The _patio_, with its arched _corredors_, cool as a grotto under -flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the -_arbol de fuego_; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a _criada_ down -on her knees rubbing _tortilla_ paste on a stone _metate_; the soft -stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these -helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee's -small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and -gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came -still others. - -Two brown girls, who stood twisting their skirts in the gateway, moved -forward at Lee's word. - -"They wish to take my advice about following their lovers to the wars," -she summed for him their Spanish. "I explained the risks of hunting them -among twenty thousand revolutionists, and advised them to wait till they -came home. But they say that is too indefinite. They may be killed, and -there is no one to marry them here but the _ancianos_, and they already -have wives. So they are going--to join the rag and bobtail in the wake -of the revolution." - -After the next client, a wrinkled old woman, had followed the girls out, -Lee burst out in merry laughter. "She was telling me of a miracle that -occurred at the funeral of her brother, who worked for William Benson. -It appears that he had only his dirty cotton calzones to be buried in, -so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson. The poor old -fellow had been reduced by sickness to a rack of bones, and you could -have rolled him in it like a blanket. And here came the miracle! The -weather, you know, was exceedingly hot last week, and instead of burying -him at once they waited till some relatives from a distance had arrived. -And when the coffin was opened for them to take a last look--lo! the -miracle! - -"'For Saint Joseph,' she said, just now, 'had wrought a most wonderful -thing, seorita. Whereas Refugio had lain in the seor's clothes like a -nut in a withered shell, he was now so large and handsome they fitted -him like his skin!'" - -He laughed so heartily she was drawn on to tell him more, and pleased -herself thereby as much as him. For to be really happy, a girl must have -exercise for her tongue, and with all their genuine devotion the Three -offered but a limited field for conversation. Naturally laconic, their -communications touched principally upon flocks and herds; and holding, -as they did, the traditional frontier viewpoint concerning Mexicans--to -wit, that they ranked in the scale of creation below the Gila -monster--they shared neither her affection for, nor understanding of, -her brown retainers. - -But Gordon, with his quick and reciprocal feeling, made an ideal -listener. From the "miracle" she ran on with anecdotes and happenings, -some quaint, others amusing, several tragic, that revealed with a -vividness beyond the power of description the mixture of love and -treachery, simplicity and savagery, ignorance and idealism, religious -faith and gross superstition, that go into the making of a Mexican. -While she talked and he listened, there was established a community of -feeling which was destined to produce immediate results. - -"What is it, Maria?" Pausing, she looked up at the _criada_ who had just -carried the prisoners their breakfast. - -"They wish to speak to me," she translated the girl's answer, "alone. -They say it is very important." - -"Better let me go with you." Gordon rose. "I can wait outside." - -"Surely." She accepted, at once, his offer, and when, moreover, he -followed in after Miguel opened the prison door, she offered no -objection. - -Neither did the raiders--for reasons that quickly developed. "It matters -not, seorita." The man whose face had caused Bull such disturbance -shrugged his indifference when Lee explained that Gordon spoke no -Spanish. "'Tis of the others, your servants, I would speak." - -While crossing the compound she had puckered her smooth brow over the -mystery--without gaining any inkling to break the force of the -communication. While the fellow ran on, hands and shoulders helping out -his torrential Spanish, Gordon saw her expression pass through surprise, -incredulity, doubt, finally settle in deep concern, when, with emphasis -that carried conviction, the other three testified to the truth of their -fellow's words. - -"I-- Oh, do you know what they say?" Distressed, she turned to Gordon -with blind instinct for help. "I really don't know whether I ought to -tell you. It so dreadfully, pitifully concerns our poor friends. You -have been here such a short time, yet--I feel that you can be trusted. -They say--" - -But the tale, as elaborated and filled in by Gordon's cross-examination, -is best summed. Not for nothing had been Bull's "hunch." The haunting -face fitted the _charro_ who had held their horses that day at the -_jefe-politico's_ gate in Las Bocas. When the Three failed to return -with Carleton's horses, that astute person--the "wicked one" of -yesterday's talk--had sent out others. In return for the _seorita's_ -great kindness in saving their lives--but principally, if the truth be -known, because they feared to be sent out under convoy of Sliver and -Jake--they wished to make grateful return by warning her against these -evil ones; these wolves in sheep's clothing that had slunk into her -fold! Followed a recital of their border raids that lost nothing by -reason of the details being filled in from imagination! They were -terrible _hombres_! _Muy malo_! greatly desired by the _gringo_ police -for dreadful crimes! - -"Don't you suppose they are lying?" Gordon suggested. - -She shook her head. "Their story is too literal. When a _peon_ lies, he -goes the limit. Some terrible tale of atrocious murder and torture would -be the least; something beyond mere banditry, which is scarcely a crime -in their eyes. Then it is corroborated by a lot of little things. You -know they were riding my horses yesterday and were differently dressed, -yet this man described their horses and clothing as he saw them in Las -Bocas, just as they were the first day they came here. And do you -remember how they looked at one another yesterday when I said that any -of us might have done the same thing?" - -Gordon nodded. "They did look queer, and do you recall Bull's answer? -'Under the same circumstances, we-all 'u'd expect to hang.' He spoke so -slowly, looking at the others, and they both nodded." - -"Then see how they came here--started up, as it were, out of the ground. -In Mexico one doesn't ask strangers embarrassing questions. It would be -like throwing stones at random in a city of glass. But if they stay with -you, one generally learns something of their past. But theirs is wrapped -in mystery. I know no more of them than on the day they came. It is -probably true." - -Her tone was quiet, indeed so casual in its acceptance of the fact that -Gordon wondered. In El Paso he had been greatly impressed by the -knight-errantry of the Three in espousing the cause of a lonely girl. -During the last week he had seen for himself their simplicity of heart, -rough kindliness, genuine devotion; and now this land of surprises had -confounded him again with its juggler's changes of good and evil. These -kindly fellows were, after all, cattle-rustlers, but one remove from -bandits. - -To him it was a most astonishing situation. In New York, where folks -were sharply divided into the sheep and the goats, it would have been -easily solved; one would have merely rung for the police. But here, -where everything seemed to go by contraries, anything might happen. -Accordingly, he looked at her and waited. - -But she did not answer his unspoken question. She was looking at him, -yes, with wide, distressed eyes. But he felt, without understanding, -that she was looking across that queer situation. He had a sudden, vivid -suspicion that he was on trial in her mind instead of the Three. He was -certain of it when she spoke. - -"What would _you_ do?" - -Ten days ago he would undoubtedly have viewed the case under his -previous lights and have pronounced it one for the police. Now he -answered from the larger charity that belonged to the land: "You -remember what you said yesterday and repeated a moment ago--under the -same circumstances we might have done the same thing? It isn't what they -_were_; it's what they _are_ that counts." - -"Oh, I _knew_ you would say it!" She impulsively thrust out her hand, -and as the small, firm fingers locked with his in a strong grip, he knew -that not only had he emerged victorious, but also that his answer had -established between them a real bond. Eyes shining, she ran on: "They -saved my life, helped to nurse my father, have been so kind and good and -dear! If they had been the vilest criminals it would make no difference -to me. They are my people, my _men_!" - -"Of course they are!" Gordon cordially agreed. "Now what about these -fellows? What will you tell them?" - -Doubt clouded her shining enthusiasm. "I don't quite know. What do you -think would be best?" - -"The truth. If what they say is true, and we believe it is, they can't -be bluffed. But it won't do to have them believe you knew nothing of -this. I'd hint that though you were not acquainted with the details, you -were perfectly aware of your servants' past, but that they are now -leading honorable lives. Clinch it by adding that you hope they will do -half as well with their chance." - -"Fine!" Her face lit up again, and when, having put it all into Spanish -for the thieves, they went outside, she thanked him for the counsel. "I -knew you could help me. Now just one more thing--this is all between you -and me. No one else must ever know--especially them." - -"We'll forget it ourselves." - -Once more her small cool fingers locked with his, and, smiling brightly, -she went back to the house, leaving him to resume his guard till the -prisoners were taken away by Sliver and Jake. - -After they were gone there entered into Gordon's mind a small doubt. -Supposing the raiders talked? Spread their report of the Three through -the desert country? It remained, that little doubt, like a thorn in the -side till it was drawn by Sliver and Jake when they returned the -following night. - -"We'd calc'lated to hand 'em over to the vaqueros at Hacienda El Reposo, -an' have them chase 'em beyond their bounds," Jake explained. "But at -the railroad we ran into a Valles colonel that was drumming up recruits. -He grabbed 'em offen our hands that quick they hadn't time to kick." - -"By now," Sliver added, "they're three hundred miles south on their way -to death an' glory." - -"But the little girl mustn't know that," Bull's heavy bass rose in -caution. "She was that sot on returning 'em to their women and children, -it 'u'd half break her heart." - -"Not a whisper," the two agreed, but Sliver added, with a chuckle, "Alle -same, they'll stay put an' trouble her no more." - -Inwardly Gordon echoed it, "They'll trouble _you_ no more." - -While the others were away Bull had also been doing some thinking, and -after Gordon went out for his evening stroll through the compound he -laid the results before them. "Say, I've placed that chap." - -"Which chap?" - -"Fellow with the pock-marks. D'you remember the mozo that held our -horses at Don Miguel's gate?" - -"No-o-o--" Jake began, but with memory thus stimulated Sliver recalled -him. - -"Julius Seize-her! you're right!" As the possibilities of the late -situation flashed upon him he gave a low whistle. "What an escape! We've -had some close calls in our time, but none to beat it. 'Twas lucky he -didn't recognize us, for he'd sure have peached, an' I wouldn't have -Lady-girl to know for a cold million." - -"Nor me," Jake added. "But it ain't likely--now." - -"Thank God for that!" Sliver exclaimed it with almost religious fervor. -With deep thankfulness Bull repeated it in his mind. - - - - -XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - - -"Ain't that queer?" - -The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank -bench in front of their 'dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to -smoke in the house, they preferred it there--partly through a rooted -instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the -natural enemy of "Lady Nicotine," regarding her always as a formidable -rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the -compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver's remark broke -the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who -sat in the doorway of a 'dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of -three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile. - -"Ain't what queer?" Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through -the warm air. "There's so many queer things down here I'll have to ask -you to come again." - -Sliver nodded at Gordon. "Ain't it odd how he cottons to them little -Mexes? To me they're no more' n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat -up night afore last with a sick one?" - -"No-o-o-o!" Jake's surprise knew no bounds. - -"He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an' he sat -there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it 'round, too, he -did." - -"Kain't understan' it." Jake shook his head. "For my part, I'd sink the -country under water twenty minutes if I could, an' drown the hull brown -b'iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his'n -ain't going to hurt him none with Missy. If there's anything a girl -likes in a man it's to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good -daddy, I s'pose, an' without actually reasoning it out that way it's -what they're all a-wanting." - -"Don't seem to have feazed her much as yet," Sliver grumbled. "Look at -him. A fine lad, straight an' strong an' true, eddicated an' well -raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But -though he's been here two months, there's nothing doing. Sometimes I -ketch myself wishing he'd hand her a crack like he give me. It 'u'd make -her sit up an' take notice!" - -Jake approved the diagnosis. "They're real friendly--friendly as a brace -of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he's telling, -evenings, about New York, an' university doings, her eyes shine like -clear wax candles, but 'tain't fer him. She's jest a-seeing an' a-doing -an' a-being what he's telling. Sure she likes him an' him her, but, as -you say--there's nothing doing." - -Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his -disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. -"Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together." As, -rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: -"I've gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an' while -I'm that far I'll jest go on an' have a word with Mrs. Mills. She's that -clever I'll bet you she'd have 'em hitched be this if she'd been here." - -"Say!" Sliver's nod followed Bull as he walked away. "Third time this -month--once beca'se he'd heard Betty was ailing; again 'cause it was -rumored raiders had been seen around her _rancho_; now beca'se he wants -advice. D'y' know, I believe it's the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you -think of it! Old Bull an' her an' domestic bliss an'--" - -"D'you reckon it's anything to josh about?" Jake sternly interrupted. "I -uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an' sorter scorn them as -did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there -ain't a thing in the world left for him but a wife's smile across the -table an' children's hands clutching his knee." His bleak eyes, lean, -sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and -left it even colder. "After the pleasant time we've had here, that old -hell an' ruin life looks like a bad dream. I've thought, sometimes, I'd -try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull's natural goodness. But -I'm bad clean through to the bone. Why, I'm fixing even now, while I'm -talking, for a bust. My system's that dry I ked drink up a lake, an' my -fingers is itching to get into a game." - -"Me, too." Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake's mood. -"I'll soon be due for a night at the _fonda_." He added, with comical -pathos: "You bet, I'll go an' lie down to it again. But I do wish -Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p'ison. I suffer so -when I'm through." - -"Sure." Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted -to satisfaction. "One of these days I'll take a tumble an' go back to -the old life till it's cut off by the sheriff's rope. But Bull--" - - -Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his -first visit, he had looked back on the widow's _rancho_. The low sun -filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid -gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red -masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on -Bull's face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited -altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old 'dobe -wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his -musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack -till a voice broke the golden silence. - -"It will pay you, seor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the -eyes out of you with perfect ease." - -As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in -outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, -emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing -it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile -warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull's question. - -"Si, the seora is there. Ride on, seor. I shall watch here for a -little while." - -Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull's knee, the widow explained -the apparition. "That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He's very -faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times -in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used -to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on -his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, -almost shot to pieces. After I'd nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got -his pardon from Diaz on condition that he'd stay with us and behave. -That's over ten years ago. He's been with us ever since, and that old -bandit reputation of his has been our best protection." - -"That's fine, ma'am," Bull made hearty comment. "It takes a bad man to -scare a bad man. I'll feel easier for knowing this." - -The widow had already dismissed Terrubio's woman, who served as her -_criada_, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull's -supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and -constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her -skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. -Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of -the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at -last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch -him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, -though he introduced it then. - -"Two months he's been here, ma'am," he concluded his tale of woe, "an' -nary a thing doing." - -"Why, what did you expect?" Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter -and Betty joined her childish merriment. "Did you think it would happen -in the first five minutes? Now just consider--what good would she ever -have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at -first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out -at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a -lasting love. It's good that he isn't impressionable, for he'll go down -all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn't have liked Lee to fall -in love with him at once. But she isn't that easy kind. The man that -gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they -act?" - -Bull gave the diagnosis--they appeared to like each other! Were very -friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn't think of anything -else! - -The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst -out laughing. "Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men -are! That isn't much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she -him, accidental, as it were?" - -Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the -stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the -question. "Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t'other day. -It lashed out an' upset them an' for a minute they was that balled up -you kedn't tell t'other from which. Didn't seem a bit anxious to let go, -either." - -"That's favorable," the widow nodded thoughtfully. "Looking at it from a -distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It's the -life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. -They'll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up -like a wind, then--up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles -since Mr. Nevil came?" - -"A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an' Ramon -was gone afore we kem in." - -"It's a pity he hadn't been there. He'd feel the same about as we do, -and he wouldn't be human if he didn't try to cut Ramon out. Let me see." -She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. -"I know! I'm having a birthday next week. I'll make a little party and -invite Ramon and Lee. You'll see to it that Gordon brings her here?" - -"But then Bull won't be able to come," Betty's small voice piped, -indignantly. "And you told me only yesterday that you weren't going to -ask any one but him." - -Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. "So I did, dear, and I'd -rather have him. But when Lee's happiness is at stake we'll have to give -up our own pleasure. And you mustn't call him that. 'Tisn't respectful. -Say Mr. Perrin." - -"But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could--didn't you, Bull? -There, you see!" Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with -further revelations. "Mother will be thirty-sev--" when the widow -clapped her hand over the small, traitorous mouth. - -She broke into a little, conscious laugh. "I know it's silly. But was -there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won't -acknowledge to a day over thirty." - -"And you look five years younger than that, ma'am," Bull gallantly -replied. - -He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus -consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, -warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, -electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, -forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or -flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids -and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more -personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations. - -In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to -sleep in Bull's arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the -soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not -of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he -dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment: - -"'Tain't for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own -hand." - -He repeated it next morning, looking back on the _rancho_ from the last -rise. "No, Son, 'tain't for you." - -At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his -distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might -have read denial of his thought in both the child's words and the -widow's reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of -his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade -longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty's words -with a sudden squeeze. - -"Mother, I just know he's falling in love with you. Wouldn't it be nice -if he asked--" - - - - -XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT-- - - -The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow's birthday. Not that -there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, -the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua--altogether too brightly for -a white man's comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses -into the shade of the 'dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in -the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was -initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of "cat's cradle" with a -loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house. - -At the sight of the two heads bent over the "cradle," the girl's face -lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. -"Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?" - -"Is this she?" Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. "I had -just about made up my mind to adopt her myself." - -"Let me see--" Lee's smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. "She's -about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been -born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I -cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. -Oh, you needn't blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was -loud in your praises. 'Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio's sick babe all -night. What a husband for some happy seorita!'" - -"That was very nice of Maria." He laughed. "Only, I'm afraid there's -nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow -up--somehow I lose interest." - -It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected -far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines -that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself -for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. -The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then -by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the -parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe -housekeeping around the corner. - -"Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the seorita," came a voice, -gruff with masculine authority. "Only we be married." - -"But will they be married, Pancho?" piped a softer treble. - -"Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old 'Lupe -talking at the well. 'Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman -with never a duenna to her name? 'Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood -runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, -this may not end without marriage.' This is what old 'Lupe said to thy -mother." - -Rich color swept from the roots of Lee's hair down to her neck. She -hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; -then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky -sentences, she regained her composure. - -"Woman!" "Don Gor-r-r-don" was speaking again. "What is this--the -tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of -the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? 'Tis sour as swill, fit -only for swine." - -"Then it should suit thee very well," came the softer voice, with -unexpected spirit. - -"A-r-r-r-h!" It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which -Don Gor-r-r-don's father resented household rebellions. "Thou wouldst -answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!" - -Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don -Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the -house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon. - -"Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you," she teased him. "They -were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he -handed Dolores one on the mouth." - -He laughed. "The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the -proper relation of the sexes." - -This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again -and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the -saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased -surprise. - -Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value -these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician--the widow, for -instance--would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they -rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long -earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, -her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a -curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite -frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little -gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed -nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled--and -mishandled--man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the -wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private -chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded -being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends. - -He "lost interest in them after they grew up." Indeed! Why, the -freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic -beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all -the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were -nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of -her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature's -cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, -he did not know it. The "fire and tow" still lacked a "wind." - -They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell's -_rancho_ to the widow's; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. "It -is rougher," she said, "with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both -shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded -caon past a country _fonda_. There I'll show you the prettiest Mexican -girl in all Chihuahua." - -"At the _fonda_? Then I have seen her." - -Her quick look said quite plainly, "Oh, _you have_?" - -"Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should -say!" He added, laughing, "She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, -adding the _fonda_ as an extra inducement." - -Her expression now said, "Oh, she _did_?" But as she looked away, he -failed to see it, got only her words, "And you had the heart to refuse?" - -"Sad to relate." - -"And you haven't even been to see her again?" - -"No time." - -She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, -as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that -expressed--perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and -reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman -is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up -the caon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy -watch as they approached the _fonda_. - -"There's your beauty--attired like a bride for her groom." - -Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an _olla_ -of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a -handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from -under the _olla_, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy -mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and -shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe -bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty -picture overmuch for his companion's taste. - -His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, "Perhaps she hasn't -lost hope?" - -She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. -While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with -seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient -because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came -hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that -followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl -reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon's fob -dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads. - -At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under -pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl's chemisette, -she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon's -monogram in gold. - -"Ah, _ha_! seor!" - -Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under -it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was -it the widow's "wind" fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least -when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze -following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. -Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke: - -"I am yours!" - -After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling -after Gordon's up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag -staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question. - - - - -XVII: --BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - - -When they rode in to the _rancho_ that afternoon, the "wind"--that is, -Ramon--had not yet "blown in"; so there were no complications to -interfere with the widow's first attempts at diagnosis of the "case." -She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and -Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the -pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her -across to the veranda. - -"Promising," she inwardly commented. - -A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered -temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and -white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow's -bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark: - -"Ramon is coming." - -"Yes? Isabel too?" - -An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills's belief that the indifference -was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. "No, it was quite -accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along -their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and -show me to-day." - -"Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy." - -She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. "Never -missed a dab. William Benson's a fool--though, of course, she may have -changed her mind." This she proceeded to find out. "Your new man seems -nice?" - -"He is." Followed a long description of Gordon's night vigil with the -child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, "But--" - -"But what?" - -"He's been going to see Felicia at the _fonda_. Sliver took him there, -one day, and he says that he has never been again. But--she's wearing -his watch-fob in her bosom-- Yes, yes! I know! A _peona_ will beg the -shoes off any man's feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. -But--" - -Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously -made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in _peonas_' bosoms, will -bear watching. "Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is -very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn't he -twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh--" - -She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly -subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little -smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed. - -Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. "Oh, wouldn't that be -just too lovely! Is it--settled?" - -The widow, of course, shook her head. - -"But it will be." - -"How do you know?" She was quite willing to be convinced. - -"How do I know?" The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of -powder. "Just as if it depended on _him_. Just as if any woman--who -hasn't a harelip--can't marry any man she wants." - -Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a "case," Mrs. -Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so -self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an -honest person, she owned up with a hug. - -Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom -dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to -an equally keen if less discreet examination. - -Betty's major premise agreed marvelously with Lee's and was stated with -the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the -subject from different distances and points of view. "I like you--only -not so well as Bull. You're nicer-looking, but--" A long pause -emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in -other ways. "I'm going to marry him when I grow up--that is, if mother -doesn't beat me to it!" - -"Any danger of that?" Gordon laughed. - -"You bet there is. Bull's dead in love with her, and she--of course, she -doesn't admit it, but _I know_." - -"Well, well, isn't that fine!" Gordon really meant it. "Congratulations, -I suppose, are not yet in order." - -"I should say _not_!" Betty's blue eyes widened with horror. "Don't you -_dare_! I'm not too big, yet, to be spanked"--she wriggled, -reminiscently--"and when mother's real mad she goes the limit. -Nevertheless, it's true." After a second calculating survey, she -concluded, "But if she grabs Bull, I _might_ marry you." - -"If you only will," he pleaded, "I'll be _so-o_ good! Can't we consider -ourselves engaged?" - -After a moment's thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. "No, I'm -afraid not." - -"Why?" - -"Because." - -"Because doesn't answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why." - -"Because I'd only be disappointed again." She added, with a little sigh: -"All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You'll fall -in love with Lee." - -"_I?_ With _Lee_?" His real surprise showed how little that contingency -had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of -apprehension colored his accent. "Now how do you figure that?" - -"Because you'd be a fool if you didn't." - -The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. "But--but, you -know, I am only her hired man?" - -"That wouldn't count--if she liked you." After another examination: "And -she might do worse. _Gee!_ if I were only a man!" - -"Yes?" he prompted. "If you were a man?" - -"I'd love her so hard she'd just have to give in. I'd--" - -But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her -mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. -Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with -plentiful food for thought. - -During the last two months he had seen Lee--riding the range, a pretty -lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in -her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a -girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the -sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it -with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there -something wrong with his head? - -Presently he gained an inkling--he had been wearing another's colors! -She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance -of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his -view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with -thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the -Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the -inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet--these -and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his -brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure's trail! - -He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were -really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one's joy in beautiful -things! Come to think of it--Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! -He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant -tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the -gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the -upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding -her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall -dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the -course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the -earth's fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not -belong. - -Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary -effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly -dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of -his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung -in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, -stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl! - -It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it's the -feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but -actually triumphed over, Lee's severe man's riding-clothes, took a -billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings -under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the -dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure -rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, -that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, -without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste. - -"Why, Sister!" he returned her greeting of the morning. "What killing -clothes!" - -"Right, Brother!" she answered, in kind. "That's what they're for." - -Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of -course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, -badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders' wit. But under -all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she -reacted to it--though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who -had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam -still sparkled in her eye. - -"I wonder what she's up to?" The thought formed in Mrs. Mills's mind. - -She soon found out, for just then the "wind," alias Ramon, "blew in." - -"Oh! I'm _so_ glad to see you!" - -With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the -_corredor_, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, -giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, -aunts, cousins--goodness knows! the category might have embraced every -one of his _peones_ if she had not been warned by the deepening of the -young fellow's rich color that it was about time to let go. - -"Just a bit too effusive," the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, "You -are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear." - -"Oh, I beg your pardon!" But the glint in her eye took it back and she -managed the introductions with malicious skill. "Ramon, this is Mr. -Nevil, our latest acquisition." - -"Just as if he'd been a horse," the widow inwardly commented. To prevent -further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table. - -On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two -men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, -was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever -with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His -great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced -_sombrero_; the _charro_ suit of soft leather that so finely displayed -his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle--made such a -figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage. - -Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just -as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they -settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from -Gordon's impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in -course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point -of view. - -"I do not know of myself," Ramon replied to his question concerning the -outcome, "but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, -without forming some opinions. No, seor, we shall never settle our -troubles ourselves--because, first, it isn't in us; second, we do not -try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside--but that we -should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your -throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living -on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and -nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like -careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in -order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, -seor"--he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug--"we should -fight any attempt on your part to limit our 'God-given right'--as your -political speakers would say--to cut one another's throats and run off -with one another's women as we have been doing for thousands of years. -We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have -done our best to make up the arrears." - -So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. "I think -your father must be a bit of a cynic." - -"No, seor." Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. "He merely knows us. In -your schools--I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your -big military academies--you teach that every American boy has a chance -to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of -your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so -forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men -have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with -the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to -kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without -scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your -political speakers would call 'our God-appointed place.' As there are -many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound -to result. - -"Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is -right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between -our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time -comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute -ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of -children's and women's lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no -principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your -warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to -our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that -is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces -our _peones_ live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat -and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in -their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the -least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with -your system." - -"In other words," Gordon suggested, "'you prefer the frying-pan to the -fire'?" - -For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application -of the strange proverb, he laughed. "Exactly, seor. Why trade devils?" - -"So that is how you Mexicans feel?" Gordon commented on these strange -ideas after a thoughtful pause. "Then why did you ever let the -foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested -billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective -countries, you can never turn them out." - -Ramon's nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set -back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its -ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a -detested commercialism, was not to be stayed. - -"Why did we do it? _We_ did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo -de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have -built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But -after him--Diaz, the Flood!" Flicking the ash carelessly from his -cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: "No, we cannot throw them -out--now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed -Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time--we -shall fight." - -From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let -alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee -returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In -fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she -addressed him half an hour later. - -"We are going for a little walk. You may come--if you choose." - -He didn't _choose_! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off -alongside the _charro_ suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face -displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common -to two creatures under the sun--to wit, a bull being played with the -_capa_ by a skilful _matador_ and a man under torture by a woman. - -When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here -the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with -him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had -first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of -a--well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet -under his wrath the "wind" was fanning another flame into quite a -respectable blaze. - -If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their -relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, -Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned -almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the -going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted -shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. -In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, -at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he -started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her -well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, -threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. -But never for a moment was she deceived. - -"Flirting their young heads off against each other," she summed the -situation. - -With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon's good-night at -the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee's answer; -also the stiffness of the bows between the young men. - -A certain restraint in the girl's good-night to herself caused her -inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction -not to let the sun go down on one's offense. She entered with Lee into -her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the -door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, -thereby, from a correct judgment of results. - -"On the whole honors were even," she mused while making her toilet. "I -wonder who will score to-morrow?" - -It was Lee. - -"I'm coming home later," she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. -"You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me." - -There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode -away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note -that contained--at least so she said--the recipe for a liniment Terrubio -used on their horses which he had promised to Bull. - -Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the -curtains. "That's downright cruelty," she scolded. - -"Well?" Lee shrugged. "Didn't he say, yesterday morning, that he didn't -take any interest in girls after they grew up?" - -"But he does." - -Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little -laugh, "I know it." - -Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure--that -is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on -the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. "Oh, he's going -back by the _fonda_!" - -"Ah-ha!" the widow mused. "Now we shall see." - -She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee -routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after. - - - - -XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY - - -In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike. - -A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode -into the hills Gordon's thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary -with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and -flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their -heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he "didn't -give a damn"! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the -pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air. - -The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden -impulses to go back, punch Ramon's head, and lead Lee away by one pretty -ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let -go with the admonition, "There! that will teach you to behave!" - -Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode -on--madder than ever. Also--but, as before said, his thoughts and -feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, -hours later, he saw the _fonda_ lying like a cup of gold in the ravine -below he was in a highly reckless state. - -Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been -in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, -plowman and professor alike proceed to "take a hair of the dog that bit -them" by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so -caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the -number shall never be told! - -In accordance with this natural law, Felicia's pretty face now flashed -up before Gordon's eyes. His exclamation, "Aw, take a drink and forget -it!" might, metaphorically, be applied to the _fonda's_ liquors less -than to her. - -A _peona's_ life gravitates between her grinding at the _metate_ and -laundering on the river boulders, with spells of "drawnwork" between. -Having put out her "wash" and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was -making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on -the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down -from above. - -From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around -a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the -satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl -would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat -out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, -led his horse in under the shady _ramada_, then proceeded calmly with -her toilet. - -Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the -dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and -arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! -eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that -would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start -out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape. - -The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, -golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was -exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and -flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a -girl's contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. -Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of -his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he -looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and -shoulders. - -Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the -cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled -two _copas_ of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him -in Spanish. - -"Salud y pesitos, seor!" (Health and a little money!) - -In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the -contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a _peso_ -note--even after he had filled and drunk again. - -A _peona_ refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had -he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was -not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his -years. But being absolutely ignorant of _peona_ nature, and in fine -fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and -chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs. - -When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a -_diccionario_ with "long hair" he laughed, but failed to catch the -personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had -repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But -now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped -herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats. - -To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and -burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so -delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the -"long-haired _diccionario_" was in constant use. While her father and -mother dozed under the _ramada_ he consulted it about the scenery and -natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But -when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer -objects--fingers, eyes, hair--the lesson passed the boundaries of -etymology into the domain of love. - -He was well over that border before he realized it--how far he did not -guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for "kiss," the -_diccionario_ answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action -to illustrate it. - - - - -XIX: A KISS--ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the -caon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling -like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a -binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in -that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both -the girl's worried expression and Ramon's glowing ardor. For just as the -"wages of sin is death," so the wages of flirtation--especially if the -party of the second part be of Latin blood--is apt to be disaster. Lee -was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up -and pressed down, last night's consequences. - -With a girl's keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and -had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, -that would have appeared ridiculous--besides, though she would not have -admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that _dreadful_ -girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself -for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had -ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited -chatter--Ramon's family, _hacienda_ affairs, the scenery--while she -dodged like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing -this were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? -Would she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, -herself, what her answer might have been! But she _did_ know that she -would have let him speak. - -If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride--bolstered by irritation, -for with a woman's illogic she charged her present plight to him--her -pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her -from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort -great as a physical strain. - -But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the -mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And -their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to -check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently -leaped over and swept all before it. - -A remark of hers concerning his father's age precipitated the flood. -"Si, he has many years." Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran -on: "Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he -but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on"--he paused, -then added the _tu_ of lovers--"on _thee_. If--" - -"Oh, Ramon!" she pleaded, in wild distress. "_Please_--don't!" - -But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, -but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his -love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of -spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert--all -were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his -universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, -it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have -listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now--it filled her -with dismay. - -"Oh, you poor Ramon!" She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but -when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. "Oh no! -_no!_ Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played--" - -But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the -moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. "There is no hurry. I did not -intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou -hast always known it." - -"Oh yes." Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. "Yes, but--" Then -realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the -compromise. "No, I won't answer now. Wait." - -"If there be any one else--" His brow drew down over somber, threatening -eyes. - -"Oh, there isn't!" She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she -repeated again. "There _isn't_, Ramon!" - -"Bueno!" His face cleared. "Then I am content." - -Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of -imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think. - -Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved -on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between -remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately -refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the caon, -curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. -Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the -zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate. - -Their first view of the _fonda_ showed, of course, only the roof and -walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon's horse -tied to a post of the _ramada_, then the young man himself leaning at -ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of -the "long-haired _diccionario_," which was now being consulted in the -matter of hair and eyes. - -"The seor seems to be enjoying himself." - -His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not -see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, -she watched from across the stream the girl's head go up and meet -Gordon's in a kiss. - -For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. -The chrome-yellow walls of the _fonda_, toned under the eaves by Time's -green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a -greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed -brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which -knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of -it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have -carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an -audience--in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of -a deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just -sat her beast. - -In taking the last turn, Ramon's horse dislodged a pebble, and as it -rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl's -clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon's glance of startled -inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet. - -"My God, she saw it!" - -Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change -wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had -assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. -Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole -world had gone to smithereens! - -"Competition is the life of love!" Mrs. Mills might have -added--sometimes its death. The "wind" had blown with a vengeance--from -opposite ways. Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon -shivered. Though only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and -joined Ramon in front of the _fonda_, it seemed to both a deathless age. - -After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, -and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the -girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee -stiffened and looked at Gordon. - -"I am glad that we overtook you. Seor Icarza has asked me to marry him. -You shall be first to congratulate us." - -Gordon's glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then--the -tricks fancy plays us! _Fonda_ and ravine faded into a glade in a Java -forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a -golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without -recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice. - -"I wish you all happiness!" - -The crash of Lee's glass as she threw it among the stones brought him -back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the caon. - -Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder. - -Gordon's practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He -spoke very quietly. "We'd better catch her before she breaks her neck." - - - - -XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - - -Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden -more recklessly. - -Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in -successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast -launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on -full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks -that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed -by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the caon and out upon the -plain. - -Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on -and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught -of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from -her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she -slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon's, -to catch up. - -Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he -had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. "Little -Wicked One!" he called, coming up. "Have a care for my happiness if not -for your neck!" But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly -engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded -from his own. "Why, queridita? What--" - -"I want you to leave me now." She cut him abruptly off. - -His big eyes widened. "After raising me to heaven would you plunge me -in--" - -"Ah no, no!" She impulsively thrust out her hand. "You have earned far -more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But--" - -"Si? But--" - -She gave him a little wan smile. "When you come to understand girls -better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a -thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the -cause." - -"But--" - -"Ramon," she looked at him with sweet severity, "if I had told you on -top of the mountain what I said back there--wouldn't you have been -content?" - -"Assuredly! It was only--" - -"Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now--and stay till I either -send or come. It won't be long--I promise." - -"Bueno," he shrugged. "Though minutes will be ages!" - -Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his -beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off -to the north. - -His departure left her free to review the situation--with little -satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out--in a moment of pique -she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, -she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break -it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that. - -"You flirted with him," she berated herself. "Led him on to an avowal; -accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable -_thing_, and now you'll go through with it." - -It never occurred to her that, being so "mean and despicable" it might -be against Ramon's interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with -her girl's illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of -comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. -She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal--the chief, if -unconscious, cause of it all--was getting along; and though he was too -far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting -dejection. - -As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as--as she could have -wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a -personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests -and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely -places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would -tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden -aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening -to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly -and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her -reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his -rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds. - -"It's a damn shame!" he told himself. "Ramon seems a good sort, but--no -greaser is good enough for her!" While the bright, hard specks floated -up in his eye, he added, "And it isn't going to be." - -For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by -open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a -vagrant inclination--even if the latter were based on a sense of -injury--might not appeal to her woman's logic, he kept his distance. -Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across -which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed -their hopelessness. - -"Poor girl!" he pitied her. - -"He's feeling terribly," she told herself, with mournful satisfaction. - -Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of -Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her -heroic mood. "Our friends"--she nodded toward the distant -buildings--"are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep -it to yourself." - -He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence. - -At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the _patio_ gate, Lee did -cheer up a little--partly because of a natural instinct to hide her -hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always -gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both -the droop of her shoulders and Gordon's air of gloom. - -He was not to be deceived. "Been fighting. Wonder what it's all about." - -He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow's recipe for -"liniment," after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the -stable. It ran: - - "Dear Friend,--Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the - _fonda_ the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. - It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon." In her - ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: "But there - is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep - him away from the _fonda_, I am sure things will turn out all - right." - -Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own -pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was -something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the -signature "Your friend, Mary Mills." Gordon had almost finished caring -for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after -carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, -he fished for further information. - -"Any one else there?" he inquired, nonchalantly. - -"Young Mexican," Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive -curtness. - -"Ramon Icarza, I reckon." Bull went innocently on: "He an' Miss Lee were -almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of -him--" - -"No reason why she shouldn't." - -Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee's horse to hide a -chuckle. "Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary--" he paused, reddening, -for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated -it with lingering delight. "Mary--was right. We've sure stirred 'em up. -On'y we'll have to 'tend to Felicia at once." - -His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia's solution with the -characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper -that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake -and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light. - -"You-all never orter ha' taken him there," he charged Sliver. "Here we -go an' import this young fellow at no end of trouble an' expense, then -you herd him right into the arms of another girl." - -"Aw! she don't count." Sliver excused himself. "She's Mex an' wild -girl." He sagely added: "You see, I was that anxious to make sure he -didn't drink. We kain't have no young soaks 'round Lady-girl." - -His solicitude drew Jake's satirical grin. "You wasn't looking for a -drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an' wild--you damn fool, -don't you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He's -be'n there once an' he'll go again." - -"If he ain't stopped," Bull qualified. - -"If he ain't stopped," Jake nodded. "An' it's up to you to do it." - -"But how?" Sliver's broad, round face struggled like a full moon in -clouds of helplessness. "How in the 'tarnal kin _I_ stop him?" - -"By 'quiring vested rights in the premises," Jake nodded sagely. "If you -marry her he kain't come 'round." - -"_Marry_ her? _Me?_ Marry a _Mex_?" Sliver almost yelled it. - -"That's what." While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf -grin, Jake went on: "Anyhow, what's your idee in shying an' rearing -this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss 'n a colt at flying paper? Why, -other men rush for it like 'twas--" - -"Sticky fly-paper," Sliver ungallantly supplied. "An' once they're -in--_good night_!" - -But Jake ignored the interruption. "You-all orter take shame to -yourself. Marriage is nature's most holy an' necessary ordinance. Don't -all the preachers tell it? An' what would become of the census without -it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an' -thanking your stars that a girl can be found that's damn fool enough to -take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an' howling like a hungry -coyote." - -While Jake thus orated, Sliver's expression of obstinacy was leavened by -fleeting hope. "If you b'lieve all that--what's the matter with you -marrying her yourself?" - -Jake's thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. "I've no calling -for it. You see I'm that soft by nat'er any woman could crush my tender -feelings. But one glance at your brutal count'nance would tell even a -blind man that your wife would be kep' in her place. Besides--was it me -that took Gordon up there?" - -"Quit your fooling," Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of -the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his -cherished plan, he faced Sliver. "Yes or no--will you do it?" - -"No, I'm da--" - -"You won't?" Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl, -knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of -corn fodder on which he was sitting. "You upset the beans we put to -b'ile an' refuse to pick 'em up?" - -Almost as quickly Sliver's knife took the lantern gleam, and as they -circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months -dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against -man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before -they could close, Bull's bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great -hands sent them staggering back. - -"Cut it out! We can't stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee." -Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the -law. "You an' us have ridden an' fit together for many a year. So far -you've never failed us an' I don't believe you will. We brought this -young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an' you've -sp'iled our game by throwing him in Felicia's way. Now it's up to you. -If you make good--we go on. If you don't--there's the trail." - -He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked -only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife, -though, Sliver glared at Jake. - -"I'll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the -range." Addressing Bull, he went on: "Of course if it's to help -Lady-girl, you bet I'll go the limit. But what d'you-all expect? That -I'm a-going to cinch her with a priest an' license?" - -"That'd be more loving-like; she'd appreciate it, too." - -"Shut up, Jake! We don't care so long as you acquire enough title to -shoo Gordon off. Here's fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio 'u'd -sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of -course you'll have to live out there for a whiles--mebbe till this Ramon -business is knocked out of Miss Lee's head." - -"What! An' cut out the range?" Sliver exclaimed in horror. "Me hang -around there a-selling aguardiente to _peones_?" - -"What's left after you get through," Jake began, but was cut off again. - -"No, we can arrange the work so there'll be plenty for you within easy -riding." - -"So's you won't be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn't -stan' for that." - -Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver's answer transcends print. -He wound up with the complaint: "All right, I'll go, but I see my -finish. I'll die on Felicia's grub." - -"Couldn't be any worse than Rosa's," Jake comforted. "You managed to -live on that." - - -With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next -morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his -kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these -preliminaries, Sliver's mien was rather that of chief mourner at a -funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left -him he even advanced a belated plea. - -"Don't you allow we ked get some one else?" - -"With all the men in the country off at the wars?" Bull shook his head. -"Besides, no _peon_ could hold her down. She needs a strong hand." - -"It's either you or Gordon," Jake added. "You'll have to sacrifice." - -Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind -the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee. -"'Tain't going to be so dreadful easy," Bull frowned thoughtfully, "she -being a girl and prejudiced. She'd hardly cotton to sech primitive -nupt'als as Sliver is likely to consummate." - -"I she'd think not!" Jake looked his horror and scorn. "You'll make a -mess of it. Better leave it to me." - -Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on -the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact -at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret -love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won, -ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for -feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved -how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the -former's service. - -"No, Missy, you ain't a-going to lose him," Bull answered, on his part, -Lee's troubled question. "He'll take care of things over that way." - -"Well--" Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, "I hope he'll be--happy." -Then becoming conscious of Gordon's gaze, she dropped her glance to her -plate. But not before he had read its meaning. - -"Why hadn't this happened a week ago!" - - - - -XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - - -Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on -wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor? - -Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and -misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee's flesh -during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy. - -Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman's life is her feelings, and -if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a -certain mournful satisfaction--akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the -ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent -springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion -and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally -masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon -perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him -in a quiet, sisterly manner. - -A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between -desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of -which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has -to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine -precedent, returning for Lee's sisterly solicitude more than the average -brotherly brusqueness. - -Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings -of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable. -Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with -neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place -her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon. -What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it. - -Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a _mozo_ -rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon. - -Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, "May I -come?" and though she returned a single line, "I'm coming to see Isabel -next week," the flower had done its work. - -The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination -and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her -eyes that, without understanding, Gordon's sulks gave place to pity. -Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a _mozo_ with a note to the -widow. - -Straight to the point the epistle ran: - - Dear Ma'am,--The young man, he's a-moping like a moulting - chicken an' Miss Lee's that peaked and pale and down-hearted - you'd hardly know her. T'other day a _mozo_ brought her some - sort of a package from Ramon, and ever since she's looked - wild-eyed and scared as a canary in fear of a cat. There's - something queer going on. It wouldn't take you more'n a minute - to find it out, and you owe us about a dozen visits, anyway. - Couldn't you take a day off and come? - -She came, of course, the good, kind soul, with Betty, under guard of -Terrubio and the bandit reputation which gained so much from his weird -eyes. The gods and goddesses willed it that they fell in with Gordon -returning to the _hacienda_ at the close of his day's work, and the -widow seized the opportunity like a skilful general. After permitting -Betty and Terrubio to ride on beyond earshot over the slopes that were -dyed a glowing apricot by the low sun, she opened on Gordon. - -"Now tell me all about it, young man." - -He looked at her, surprised, then laughed. "You mean all that I would -have said if I hadn't been ordered home that morning? All right. Of -course I don't have to tell you that I love you madly, and if it wasn't -for the fact that Bull would wring my neck, I should propose at once. -Really--" - -"Nice boy!" She laughed merrily. "To comfort your poor mother. It was -simply disgraceful the way you flirted with me, almost compromised me -with my own offspring. 'I was just ashamed of your dreadful behavior, -mama,' Betty told me, afterward, 'trying to take poor Lee's beau from -her.' Nevertheless, I found it very encouraging." - -"My mother?" He achieved an excellent example of that species of -cachinnation known as the "horse laugh." Then, with sincerity of accent -and feeling that caused her a little blush, he ran on: "My mother, -madam, is more than twenty-eight. Yes, I said twenty-eight. Add to that -eyes as clear and young as--" - -"Make it Lee's." - -"As Betty's. A fine, soft skin, pretty nose, figure--um! just right. -Why--" - -"Yes! yes!" She held up her hand, laughing. "But we mustn't waste time. -You know I'm on your side. Tell me--what happened?" - -"That's easy--she's engaged herself to Ramon." - -"What?" Her shriek of horror and surprise caused Betty and Terrubio to -look back. Her next question showed the keenness of her intuition. "Why, -whatever did _you_ do to her?" - -He told--of his anger, jealousy, pique, attempt to soothe his ruffled -vanity by flirting with Felicia. He told all with candor and humorous -insight into his own feelings that robbed the narrative of conceit. He -told even of the kiss and that Lee had seen it. "Though I don't see how -that could have anything to do with her engagement, for she announced it -the next second." - -"She sent him off within the next hour--with only a kiss of her -hand--hasn't seen him since--nor communicated with him till the other -day--has looked like a frightened bird ever since." She told off the -items with amused contempt. "How stupid men are! Why, it is plain as -day. He asked her to marry him, yes, on the way. How could she escape -after the way she had flirted? But she had either refused or held him -off. But when she saw you kiss--" - -"My God!" It burst on him. "What a fool I am! Why did I--" - -"Don't blame, yourself. She was more in fault. The question is--not what -is done, but what to do." - -"I had thought, at first, of quitting this to join Valles. It would be -lots of fun and I was so darned mad--" - -"And leave _her_ to _him_?" She looked a little scornful. "Why--" - -But he cut in. "You bet I won't! He'll never marry her--if I have to -carry her off." - -"And I'd help you do it," she warmly declared. "At present Ramon is all -right, and if you could put up, like preserves, so he'd keep, it -wouldn't be so bad. Yes, he's all right--but, so are the young of any -kind, a lamb or kid, little frog, tiny snake, and there's nothing cuter -in the whole world than a baby pig. But after it grows up--good Lord -deliver us! - -"And it's the same with Mexicans. They are the prettiest babies; nice -young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too -handsome to live just now. But after a while he'll grow stout and lazy -from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks -like a scorched hide. Right now he's so romantic he'd twang a guitar all -night under Lee's window. After a while she wouldn't be able to sleep -for his snores. Now he'd fly at her bidding. Later, she'd fly at his. -She would live behind bars while she was young; go without love in her -middle age, be tyrannized and bulldozed all the time." - -"But do you think she would _really_ do it?" - -"Indeed, yes! She's highly idealistic, and was trained by her father in -the old ideas. Now that she has given her word, it will take wild horses -to pull her from it--or wild men." - -After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above -the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: "Now -listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he's sensitive as -a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she's -promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance -so much as strays in any one else's direction, he'll be ready to kill. -It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will -either break the engagement or give her cause. In other words, you must -force him to play your hand." - -She continued, with a little deprecatory laugh: "I know it's a low-down -trick, but it may stave off something worse. Before he would let Lee -marry Ramon, I feel sure Mr. Perrin would kill him." - -A mischievous grin broke up Gordon's grimness. "So we are not altogether -disinterested. We could never stand to see Bull get in bad." - -She laughed softly, happily, looking away, and lapsed into silence which -endured while they rode up and over the last slope that laid the -_hacienda_ at their feet. - -Its walls and courts, _patio_, painted adobes, lay, a small city of gold -magnificently blazoned by the rich red brush of the setting sun. The -glossy crests of the shading cottonwoods flamed a deep apricot under a -sky that spread its glories of saffron, and cinnabar purple, and umber, -down over the horizon. All about them the pastures laid an undulating -carpet, violet in the hollows, crimson on the hills. From the stubby -chimneys soft smoke pennons trailed away till lost in the smoldering -dusk of the east. Up through the clear air came a soft cooing of woman -voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. - -The widow lowered her voice in harmony with the peace of it all. "It is -a great prize." - -He nodded. "It's beautiful, but--I'd love her as much in rags." - -Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from -teasing. "Yet--a week ago you hardly gave her a thought." - -He looked at her in naive wonder. "Isn't it queer--how sudden it gets -you?" - -She nodded. "That's the beauty of it." - - - - -XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - - -As, in the seclusion of Lee's bedroom that night, she and the widow sat -side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making -their night toilets, a "movie-man" would have given his head to -reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair, -filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these -may be left where they belong--behind the secure guard of Lee's oaken -door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation. - -"So we've engaged ourself, have we?" As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went -straight to the bat. - -"Why--" Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked -her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. "Mary Mills! -_whoever_ told you?" - -"This and these would be enough." The widow touched the girl's pale -cheeks and shadowed eyes. "But I caught your young man, coming in, and -made him confess. So we got mad--because he kissed another girl, and -took it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little -fool!" - -Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the -filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. "If it had been Phyllis -or Phoebe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn't have cared. But--a -peona." - -"Well, what of it?" Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the -widow went confidently forward. "She's mighty pretty." - -"But a _peona_! And you know _her_." - -"Yes, and I know _him_--better than you do. Now look here, my dear--" -Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had -profited by her married experience. "A man is a _man_ and there's no -sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she -excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a -man--while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see -beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to -stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I'd have allowed -you real reason. After thirty a man's kisses mean something. But at -Gordon's age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity -rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty -girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his -self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are -mostly to blame. Why--" - -Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal -applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. "_You_ -didn't flirt with _him_, of course." - -"Goodness, child! don't bite me! I couldn't see the poor boy crushed -into the face of the earth. Now listen." After detailing Gordon's -confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to -solace in Felicia's smiles, she concluded, "But you--after driving him -to desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life." - -"And you think that was the way of it? That he didn't really _mean_ -anything?" - -"Didn't he tell me so himself?" - -"Well--" she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly -collapsed on the other's warm shoulder. "Oh, I'm so glad! I--I _hate_ -him!" - -The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. "Of -course you do." She gently fondled the fair head. "How much?" - -The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. "I hate him so much -I--I could just _kill_ any other girl that tried to take him!" With a -wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder. - -"Well, they'll try, all right." - -The head rose again, startled eyes, big and brown, staring from the -glass. "Do you--really think so?" - -"What do you expect--a nice boy like that to mope and pine for the rest -of his life with ten million girls of marriageable age running loose in -the United States? What brought him here, anyway--bolting to escape one -girl's noose. Take my advice and rope him quick." - -"But I'm promised, now, to Ramon." - -"Call it off." - -"Oh no." Sitting up straight, she shook her head. "I cannot ruin his -life." - -"Hum!" The widow coughed. "You cannot ruin his life? So you intend to -bless it by devoting to his service affections that belong to another? -Also to cut him off from the greatest thing in the world--the real love -of some other woman? Ruin his life, indeed? Lee, I always credited you -with a little sense." - -"There is something in that." She snatched at the hope. "The best thing -is to tell him I don't love him and leave it to him to decide." - -"And he'll do it, have no fear!" The widow tossed her head. "Ramon's -nice, but he cannot rise above his race, and you know very well there's -neither reason nor justice nor the instinct of fairness in it. Fancy a -Mexican giving up a girl because she loves another! He'd resent even the -suggestion, take his revenge after marriage." - -The gleam of hope had died. She sighed. "I can try." - -"Oh, you little fool!" In her irritation the widow bestowed a smart slap -on the girl's shoulder. But she spoiled the moral effect the next second -by gathering her in her arms. "Don't you know that up in the States -girls take on a new beau every Saturday night and break the engagement -the following Sunday?" - -But the precedent produced only a second envious sigh. "I wish _I_ could -do it. I guess I wasn't brought up right." - -"'Tisn't training; it's heredity. You're your father over again; will go -your own way. I wash my hands of you." - - -That charitable process known as "washing one's hands of anybody" was, -however, the last thing Mrs. Mills was capable of. The assertion simply -marked a change of plan which, rising early next morning, she -inaugurated when she caught Bull on his way to the stables. - -Though he had sat next to her during the long pleasant evening that -followed supper last night, the others' presence had debarred private -communications. Content to hear her voice running with Lee's in happy -chatter--so content, indeed, that he forgot for the time being the -impending trouble--Bull had smoked furiously in the dusk till they -retired to bed. - -He listened, now, in silence while the widow told of Lee's engagement. -But the sudden lowering of his black brows was far more dangerous than -any threat. She laid her hand on his arm in sudden alarm. - -"Easy, my friend. Don't be too quick. She isn't married yet, and won't -be--if you leave it to me." - -More powerful than the plea was her gentle pressure. Apart from certain -accidental contacts, before mentioned, which had caused him such -pleasurable embarrassment, it was the first time she had actually -touched him. Big, burly, black giant that he was, he still trembled like -a school-girl; trembled so violently that she felt it and dropped both -her hand and her eyes. Transferring the embarrassment to herself, that -helped him mightily. He was the first to break a confused but happy -silence. - -"What do you want me to do?" - -"Nothing, just now, except to let Gordon ride with me a piece of the way -home." - -It was impossible to overlook his sudden disappointment. With -characteristic frankness she did not wait for him to tell it. "I'd -rather have you; there are so many things I want to consult you about. -Dear me!" Her little vexed face was very comforting; it expressed such -sincere feeling. "These young folks certainly do make one a lot of -trouble. Betty wanted you _so_ badly at my party--and so did I; but we -just had to ask Gordon to help Lee out. But I'm going to settle this -business right quick. And when it is all over--you will come and make us -a real visit, won't you?" - -Wouldn't he? His nod and effulgent grin expressed happiness in the -prospect beyond the powers of his slow tongue. Satisfied, she proceeded. - -"So let me have him this once. Lee is going to ride a few miles with us, -and before she comes back--" - -But the matter of her communication is covered by her talk with Gordon, -whom she caught coming out of the bunk-house five minutes later. - -"I argued with her half the night," she told him, walking along at his -side. "Goodness me, young man, you don't know what you are up against! -Such obstinacy! Lucky for you that it is balanced by a sweet temper and -strong sense of justice. All I gained was her promise to beg off from -Ramon. She plans to go over and see him some time this week, and if she -does--well, with Isabel loving her to death, the old man tendering sage -advice, and Ramon passionately pleading his cause, they'll have her to -the priest and married before she has time to think. She mustn't go." - -"But if she is so obstinate--" Gordon began. - -"I'll take care of that. I shall call on Ramon on the way home and -explain the true state of his lady's heart. Of course he'll raise Cain -and probably damn me for a black-hearted liar, but I can stand it. The -point is--he will come right over here. In the mean time you must get -busy. A declaration in hand is worth two suspected, and though I've -hinted very strongly that you are not altogether indifferent to her -sweet self, it will make Ramon's task ten times harder if she hears it -from your lips. Now listen!" - -The rest was plot, dark and devious. Lee had promised to ride with her a -few miles on the homeward journey, and Bull would detail him, Gordon, -for her escort. Coming back, he would have all the time in the world. - - - - -XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - - -As thus arranged, the program was carried out after breakfast. Very -artfully Bull waited till the party was almost out of sight before he -sent Gordon galloping after. Even then the plot was endangered when, -turning at the sound of hoof-beats, Lee saw him coming. Her face clearly -expressed her determination to send him back, but in the nick of time -the widow spoke. - -"Oh, let him come! The poor fellow is suffering enough." - -Lee's nod and faint smile, riding on, revealed a queer mixture of -happiness and apprehension, which was wiped out by amused astonishment -when, just as Gordon came up, a lone figure hove in sight, coming from -the opposite direction. - -"Why--it's Sliver!" - -And Sliver it was--though difficult to recognize by reason of a complex -embroidery of scratches, bumps, and bruises. His own broad grin broke -through, however, when Lee inquired after his wife. - -"She was fine an' dandy when I seen her last, which, was in the shank of -the evening two nights ago." Lovingly fingering a huge bump that -occupied a central position in his altered scenery, he went into the -intimate details of his matrimonial venture. "Till then it had all been -lovely. She'd sorter cut up a bit, at first, me an her padre having -fixed up the match without any of her 'sistance. But after I'd given her -a fair larruping with a saddle strap, jest to show who wore the pants, -as the saying goes, she come right into camp; snuggled in like a kitten. -Sure, she behaved real domestic till Fernando, that hawk-nosed arriero -from San Ramon, blew in with his mules two nights gone. I orter 'a' -suspicioned him, he was that free in handing out drinks. But I -didn't--leastways not till Felicia laid me out with one whack of a -cordwood stick from behind. The rest I got from the mirror an' the padre -when I woke next morning and found him doctoring my map. She an' -Fernando had gone off together." - -"She's gone!" Lee gave a little hysterical laugh. "For good?" - -"An' then some--they're off to the wars." Gently massaging the bump, -Sliver added: "She'll stay there if she's wise. It'll be a 'tarnation -sight less risky than coming back. She was for cutting my throat, but -neither the padre nor Fernando would stan' for that, they being afraid -of 'The Black Devil' an' 'The Python,' which they call Bull an' Jake. -'For I knew, seor, that they would follow us to the ends of the earth -if any harm came to thee,' the old fellow tol'. But they made her free -of my map, an', as you see, she done a good job." - -"Oh, I'm so sorry! I must go back and care for your face." - -With Lee's exclamation the props trembled beneath the widow's plot, but -Sliver restored their stability. "It's cheap at the price. Many's the -man up home that gets as bad or worse an' is stuck, to boot, for -lawyer's fees an' al'mony. Don't you bother 'bout me, Lady-girl. All I -need is a bit of salve, an' Maria kin get me that." - -As Sliver rode on, the widow looked at Lee, who returned her meaning -glance. Neither looked at Gordon, who discreetly watched Betty. But the -thought was the same in the minds of all three. "Thank goodness, she's -gone." - -For a while Lee hesitated and debated whether, after all, she ought not -to go back, and she reined in, startled, when a long howl presently -drifted over the rise behind which Sliver had disappeared. A coyote, in -its death agony, might have equaled the sound. But as, presently, the -tortured notes resolved into the opening bars of "The Cowboy's Lament," -she giggled and rode on for another five miles. Sliver was happy! - -While Lee was kissing Betty good-by the widow managed to pass a whisper -to Gordon. "Now don't let her escape! And remember--look out for Ramon -to-morrow." - -He nodded and, looking back from behind the crest of the next rise, she -saw for herself how well he obeyed. Lee had made to get off at a gallop, -but had reined in when he spoke, and now they were riding side by side, -deep in earnest conversation. - -Nodding, the widow rode on, but stopped again for a last look while she -could still see over the rise. She was practically invisible when Lee -looked back, protesting, as Gordon grabbed her bridle and pulled her -beast alongside. Her pointing finger said, quite plainly: - -"They will see!" - -The widow gasped, for with one swift reach he snatched Lee out of the -saddle and set her before him. - - - - -XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - - -Had she heard the conversation which preceded that bold action, Mrs. -Mills would have been still more impressed. Determination is the natural -foe of diplomacy. Warned by one single, furtive glance that Lee intended -to make off, Gordon plunged at one smash through her fence of reserve. - -"Do you intend to keep that engagement?" - -Coming from a young man whom one hated so vindictively that one could -"just kill any other girl that tried to take him," the question was well -calculated to arrest attention. Neither was its force lessened by the -fact that it was _his_, not _hers_--perish the thought!--outrageous -conduct which had caused said engagement! - -The audacity of it caused her first to gasp, then draw rein and stare at -him in utter surprise; finally to ride slowly on while preparing an -answer that should not only wither him, there, in the saddle, but also -hide the tumult of fright and pleasure in her own breast. - -Her glance said, "You certainly have got your gall with you!" But her -answer was much more dignified, "By what right do you ask?" - -"The right of a man who loves you." - -It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her -affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient -court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so -conceded by one girl's fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had -been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural -cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and -men, she proceeded to deny it. - -"Yes?" she raised cool brows. "Judging by what I saw in the caon--it -must be recent." - -She looked for him to wither, but--the fellow refused! He did not even -flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness; -sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn't -help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light -subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness. - -"I thought so myself--but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful, -picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you, -but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn't till you shot -that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke--awoke to the fact that -all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life -and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear." - -This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he -built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played -with the coils of her _riata_. As an oratorical effort, it could not -compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon's rhythmical -Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant -feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any -honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by -its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he -finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel. - -"When--when did you find this out?" - -She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little -hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her -hunger for more. - -Be certain she got it--in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of -poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had -ridden over to the widow's together that the sunlight proceeded from her -hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of -the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation. - -There was also some mention of the hair in connection with a certain -Java forest, with passing reference to the Chinese Wall and a voyage he -had intended to make up the great Asian rivers. Not having personal -experience in their navigation, said references were rather vague, but -her imagination abundantly supplied the requisite flora and fauna from -magazine articles and pictures. Porcelain towers, orchids, giant palms; -deep jungle temples; the crowded boat life of the Yangtse-Kiang, junks -and sampans with their cargoes of saffron-faced, slant-eyed Celestials, -men, women, and children--especially children--her imagination improved -on the lovely dreams she had so cruelly disrupted. He concluded with -that: - -"And you smashed it--all to smithereens." - -For a while she rode in silence. Apprehension and fright had given place -to sorrow that contended tumultuously with delight for possession of her -soul. "I'm sorry," she spoke at last. "_So_ sorry, but--you provoked -it." - -"Why! How?" - -He was reminded, of course, that he "lost interest in girls after they -grew up." She added, a little vindictively, "And _you_ didn't flirt with -Mrs. Mills?" - -"Only in self-defense. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, -isn't it?" - -But she denied this bit of ancient wisdom. "No, it isn't! And--and you -_kissed_ that dreadful girl! I--oh, I could have _killed_ you!" - -"Why?" - -She was looking at him now, and the compound of bright anger, pleading -and defiance, regret, love, hope, and despair that alternately flashed -and swam in the wet eyes gave sufficient answer. It was then he plucked -her from the saddle; crushed her to him with force that squeezed out, -for the moment, the anger, regret, despair, left only love and hope. - -Ensued the usual delirious moment when poor mortals conquer time and -eternity, set at naught the black riddle of existence. Her face buried -in his shoulder, his in her hair, they clung to each other while his -horse moved slowly forward and hers went careering on over the next -earth roll. - -Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were -coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; -feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of -them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue -loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one -another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that "cause"; -committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither -and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment -over these sunlit plains. - -Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only -of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to -themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in -an illumined dream. - -It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face, -he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly -recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand -over his mouth. - -"You mustn't." - -"Why?" - -"You forget--I am still engaged." - -"Why--so you are!" Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted -when he saw she was in earnest. "You surely don't intend--" - -"No, indeed!" She read his thought. "I had believed, at first, that I -ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon -while--" - -"Say it." - -"While I loved _you_." - -For a girl who had just restated her engagement to another man, she -behaved most disgracefully during a long silence that was broken only by -the measured tread of the horse. Snuggling in closer, she re-entered -that illumined dream, and made no attempt to check the kisses he -showered on the soft palm of the restraining hand. It was, no doubt, -some realization of her misbehavior that caused her to sit up, -presently, and pull it away. - -"This won't do. For the present we'll have to behave like ordinary -persons." - -"But your horse is gone," he protested when she gently put away his arm. -"You can't walk." - -"No, but I can ride behind you in the Mexican fashion. Stop, while I -change." - -He would have preferred it as it was, but when, after mounting behind -him, she slid her arm about his waist, he had to concede the Mexican -habit its own delights. It was surely nice of her to allow him to cover -her hand. - -"The young people," she explained, "are not allowed to do this--only -husbands and wives." - -"Poor young people!" he pitied. "But, on the whole, quite right. It -would never do to have them cavorting over the country like this; too -much of a strain on the conventions. Indeed, I think we ought to conform -ourselves at once." - -"How?" Just as if she hadn't known what he meant. - -"Let's ride into San Carlos, get a license from the jefe and be married -at once?" - -The bold proposal drew only a soft laugh. "To think that, up to a week -ago, he didn't even see me--except as part of the scenery. No, amigo, -till to-morrow we are to be ordinary persons. Then I shall go and tell -Ramon." - -"And if he refuses?" - -"I shall break it myself." - -It was in his mind to say that she could not go alone. But he remembered -that Ramon would probably arrive at Los Arboles before she started. He -turned again to the delightful present. - -"And after that?" - -A little pressure at his waist made answer. - -Reaching behind, he drew her other arm forward till her hands clasped in -front, then squeezed his own elbows down tight over hers. Thus, -oblivious once more of the toiling billions, revolutionists beyond the -mountain's loom, they rode forward again in that illumined dream, two -foolish, happy souls at loose in the spheres. - - - - -XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - - -In those days of raids and "requisitions," the customary oversight of -the herds on the Chihuahua _haciendas_ had grown of necessity into a -system of patrols. At Los Arboles not a day passed without Gordon and -the Three describing a circle around the _hacienda_. - -Riding south after the others left, Bull had covered only a few miles -before he spied a lone horseman topping a distant ridge. As the rider -drew near the first indefinite outlines resolved into the square, hard -figure of William Benson. Scarcely a week had passed without a visit -from the Englishman. From the first he had accorded Bull the respect due -to his quiet strength. Later, this had developed into a real liking -which showed in the smile that wiped out, for the moment, his native -harshness. - -"Heard the news? The Carranzistas have given Valles a lovely trimming. -He didn't stop running till he reached El Oro." - -Bull's black brows rose. "We'd allus allowed Valles could whip twice his -weight in Carranzistas. So long as they keep on killing one another off, -we sh'd worry." - -Nodding, Benson went on. "Valles lost heavily in horses, and is looking -for fresh mounts. One of his colonels came to my place yesterday and -offered me a thousand pesos apiece for all I have." - -"_Gold?_" - -Benson's big mouth split in a sardonic grin. "Valles money, amigo, -beautifully printed on butcher paper. He must have used up all the -newspaper stocks in northern Mexico." - -"And you sold?" - -"I'd cut their throats first. It may come to that, but just now I see a -way--if not to pull even, at least to avoid complete loss. Between us we -can pretty nearly equip Valles with fresh mounts. The beggar has -gold--hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in the El Paso banks, and -my idea is for us, you representing Lee, to go down to El Oro and offer -him all that we have for a low price in gold on condition that he permit -us to drive our other stock across the line. If he accepts, we then go -out of business till order is restored." - -"Fine idea!" Bull added. "Could you let Mrs. Mills in on it? She was -telling last night she didn't know where to turn for living expenses." - -Benson heartily agreed. "Only too glad!" - -"And when do you start?" - -"To-morrow night. There's a freight going down." - -"All right. Pity you hadn't come earlier. Mrs. Mills left only a couple -of hours ago. But I'll ride over this afternoon, get her written -authority, then meet you at the railroad." - -Riding back to Los Arboles, they perfected their plans. They were, -indeed, in sight of the buildings before Benson switched the -conversation to Lee. Her oldest and stanchest friend, it was his right -to know, and Bull told all, from his plotting with the widow down to the -disastrous ending in the sudden engagement. - -"The little spitfire!" Benson grinned. "Hello! What's that?" - -It was Lee's horse galloping down a distant slope toward the _hacienda_. -In that wild country a riderless beast generally bespoke tragedy. -Without a word they galloped off in the direction from which the beast -had come; rode at top speed until Benson, who had gained a lead, -suddenly reined in. - -A bunch of chaparral intervened, at first, between Bull and the object -at which the other was pointing. Then, rising in his stirrups, he saw -Lee and Gordon on the one horse; at least in Bull's sight it was a -horse. In that of the lovers, horses, plains, _haciendas_, and other -commonplaces of ordinary existence had vanished, leaving them -unconscious of time and space, proceeding magically through the -aforesaid illumined dream. - -Perhaps some touch of their feeling wirelessed across the intervening -space, for Benson's harshness melted, delight burst like sunlight -through Bull's truculence. - -"That's too good to spoil," Benson whispered. "Let them go by." - -They had passed over the next ridge before Bull spoke. "I tol' you Mrs. -Mills could do it. She's a right smart woman." - -"A fine woman!" Benson echoed. "I don't know what you are thinking -about. Now if I were single----" He burst out laughing at Bull's blush. -Instantly it was drowned in brighter scarlet. But this faded as Bull -noted the kindly twinkle in the other's eye. He shook his head in -deprecation. - -"What c'd a nice woman do with a bear like me?" - -"That's her business. I'm not denying that it would some job." Benson -critically surveyed Bull's great bulk. "But if there's anything in the -world a woman loves it is making a man over, like an old dress. After -she finishes, she generally realizes that she's spoiled the material and -wishes him back as he was. But in the mean time she has had her fun. -I'll bet Mary Mills is just itching to try her hand on you." - -"Do you really mean that?" Bull looked up with sudden hope--that quickly -died. He shook his big head. "She deserves something better. I'd only -spoil her life." - -Nevertheless, he relapsed into deep thought, returning only -monosyllables to Benson's talk. The little seed thus planted rooted deep -in his silence. - - -Strange is first love with its intense desire for purity! Cleanliness is -next to Godliness, and Godliness is Love. Thus Cleanliness must be next -of kin to Love. - -If this be doubted, observe a ten-year-old boy, self-convicted of -water-marks on his neck and soil in his ears enough to grow potatoes. -See him scrub himself with profuse use of soap till his countenance -shines so that it might serve as a mirror for the small charmer who has -ensnared his budding affections with her bright curls. Watch him, later, -a man grown, solicitous about his daily tub, careful of his raiment, -choice in cravats! Later his wife shall drive him with revilings to his -bath! Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling -shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt. - -Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering -in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them -earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is -when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. So Lee, who was perhaps even -a bit more boyish than the average, came to lunch in a soft white dress -with a flower at her throat, powdered and delicately perfumed, bright -hair framing happy eyes, every soft line and fold proclaiming her -womanhood. Like an emanation, soft and effulgent as moonlit mist, the -fullness of her content proceeded from her, wrapped her in a bright -atmosphere in the midst of which she softly brooded. Not that she was -silent. She laughed and talked; seriously discussed Benson's schemes. -But that was all of the surface. Behind the chatter she lived in the -enchantment of her dream. - -It was too marked to pass unnoticed. But if Bull and Benson saw the -clinging of glances, sensed the pulsing feeling, they observed with the -friendly indulgence of experience the young man's honest devotion, the -girl's shy happiness. During the long hour they sat talking after lunch, -no silly jest marred its beauty. Except for a greater kindliness of -manner, with delicacy quite foreign to his harsh exterior, Benson gave -no hint of his understanding up to the moment he rode away. - -Then for a brief moment Bull was taken into the dream. While Gordon went -for his horse, Lee packed his saddlebags with clean things for the -journey, and was giving him the usual last critical inspection. As he -stood smiling down on her, hugely pleased, her eyes rose from the tie -she was arranging to his; and as she read their sympathy and -intelligence, she clasped his neck and hid her face against his broad -breast. - -Until the beat of hoofs at the _patio_ gate announced Gordon's return, -he held her to him with one arm while the other hand gently patted her -shoulder. Neither spoke. Words would have told less. When she withdrew -and walked with him to the gate, she was soothed and comforted as any -girl that ever made a confidante of her mother. - -When she ran back after the quirt he had purposely left on the table, he -had time to pass a word to Gordon. "Remember, she don't leave this house -to go _anywhere_ alone!" - -Gordon nodded, and, satisfied, he rode away with Lee's last charge -floating after him, "Come home soon!" - -The words were still ringing in his ears, he still felt the firm, cool -clasp on his neck, when he drew rein at the first rise and looked back -at the _hacienda_. From one corner, where an _anciano_ had burned some -rubbish, rose a lazy pennon of smoke, but the brown girls, women, and -children who usually filled the compound with restless life were in full -enjoyment of the noon _siesta_. Within its bright walls, the place dozed -in the pleasant shade of its towering cottonwoods. - -Somehow the stillness recalled to Bull's mind the Spaniard's house he -had shown Gordon from the railroad--sacked, burned, its vacant windows -staring like empty eyes over the desert. His face clouded. He moved -uneasily in his saddle, but presently the golden peace that incited the -memory worked its own remedy. Jake and Sliver and Gordon were there, and -the place was still far beyond the surge and swirl of the revolution. - -"And I'll be home again in less than a week," he encouraged himself. - -Home! It recalled again Lee's words. He felt her clasp, thrilled at the -memory. He, "Bull" Perrin, the rustler! Around his neck that had been in -constant hazard of the halter for a dozen years, this fine, clean girl -had thrown her arms. His tender musing over the wonder would have -excited the scorn of a city man, _blas_ and stale from the constant -presence and attentions of pretty women. But it was sincere. While he -rode on over the hills and plains, the thought warmed his heart, -quickened the seed planted therein by Benson, freed his soul from the -bonds of his great humility. - -"Of course it's damn foolish for you even to think of it," he chid -himself. Nevertheless, he did, slowly, heavily, taking stock with minute -exactness of his own demerits. How great they were none knew better. The -rustling, of course, he had abandoned along with certain gross habits of -life. But the liquor? These periodical debauches? Was he strong enough -to conquer them? - -"If I c'd only ride into a town an' either leave it alone or take a -man's fair allowance," he mused. "But kin I? Mebbe with a fine little -woman like that to help me." But the next instant he shook his head. -"An' have her take the chance? No, no, hombre, you're crazy. You put all -that behind you by your own act years ago." - -Yet this conclusion did not end the argument. When, at sundown, he drew -rein at the accustomed spot and looked down on the _rancho_ buildings -now dyed a flaming apricot he took his breath deeply. With its -bougainvillea draping walls and porches in rich purple clusters, its -pretty _patio_ and outside kitchen garden, it was just such a home as -would fit the dreams of a common man. Instantly his mind filled in the -picture, the man and woman sitting after supper on the veranda, he with -his pipe and paper, a child on his knee, she with her sewing. A thousand -intimacies were supplied by his lonely, hungry soul, and when the -picture stood complete he burst out with a great resolve. - -"By God, I'll do it! You're a-going to walk like a man into town an' -come out without teching a drop!" - -From where he was sitting he usually could see--either Betty at play on -the veranda, her mother moving in and out, or Terrubio moving around the -stables. To-night silence wrapped the place. From the west, as on the -south where he sat, the land fell rapidly toward the _rancho_, and as he -rode forward, puzzled, the silence was explained. Over the western ridge -the widow, Terrubio, and Betty came riding, and reached the house just -as he rode up. - -"Though we brought bad news to his son," she explained the delay, "the -old Icarza would not permit us to leave till we had broken his bread. -How did Ramon take it? Just as I said he would--out came the Mex in in -all of its nasty selfishness, blind conceit. She was promised to him and -he would hold her to it! He'd kill any one who interfered. Goodness! you -never _saw_ such fireworks! He showed no trace of the real pride that -would have kept one of our boys from showing his hurt; and still less -consideration for Lee. It was"--she gave a little sniff of -disgust--"just sickening. I was almost sorry she couldn't have been -there, for it would have effectually cured her remorse. But she'll get -it to-morrow, for he's going over to plead his own cause." - -Unease swept Bull's dark visage. After a brief statement of his mission -he voiced his apprehension. "But if he's coming to-morrow, I don't know -but I orter go back." - -"Nonsense!" Mrs. Mills pooh-poohed the idea. "It's all fireworks--and -there's Sliver and Gordon and Jake." - -To which Betty added a direct command. "You are just going to stay here. -We haven't seen you for ever so long, and mama is just dying to tell you -her troubles." - -"Tea and trouble," the widow laughed. "A genuine woman's party." - -When he lifted and placed her with one swing on the veranda she allowed -one hand to remain on his shoulder, and he was not so ignorant of woman -nature as not to recognize the liking behind the action. While she -bustled around, adding dainties to the meal Terrubio's woman had ready, -he watched her with an expression that she, on her part, could not fail -to interpret. And whereas, on previous visits, she had managed all kinds -of accidental contacts, watched with mischievous delight for the effect, -she was now filled with pleasurable confusion that manifested itself in -an almost girlish shyness. - -When, afterward, they moved out upon the veranda, Bull's dream of an -hour ago was almost fulfilled. For Betty snuggled as usual in his arms, -while the widow busied herself with a bit of sewing--a fine excuse that -lent itself to the lowering of eyes, permitted stealthy glances. - -While they were at supper, the sun had slid down to the western horizon. -Pools of deep indigo now filled the hollows. Above them the plains ran, -a deep violet sea broken with apricot foam where the crests of the great -earth waves rolled high, ran off and away around the bases of gold and -crimson mountains. - -It was unearthly in its beauty, and while they could not have put their -feeling in words, it filled both with that sense of vastness before -which man in his littleness quails. Often the widow paused in her -sewing, and as Bull saw that infinite loneliness reflected in her face, -the big, simple soul of him melted with love and pity. Till the lights -faded and she no longer needed its excuse, she alternately sewed and -gazed; then when warm gloaming settled over all, wiped out the -loneliness with its friendly gloom, she recovered her voice. - -"Oh, I had almost forgotten." - -It was that which she had seen in the morning--to wit, Gordon snatching -Lee out of her saddle. - -"And oh, isn't it nice to think that she'll be settled, at last, with -that fine boy!" - -Happy in the conclusion, she began to sketch a picture of them settled -happily at Los Arboles. Her voice, as she ran on, took a little quiver -that powerfully expressed her own loneliness, inspired in Bull an -intense desire to seize and squeeze it out. Instead his arms tightened -around the child. - -"Not one marriage in a hundred turns out what it might be. But with the -exception, when respect, friendliness, affection, and a sense of duty -are reinforced by love--well, it's the nearest to heaven that poor -humans ever gain." She added, with a sigh: "Excepting that it gave me -this child, my own wasn't all that it might have been. She's been a joy -and comfort, but--in a few years more she'll be marrying, herself. Then -I'll be again alone." - -"Why did _you_ never marry?" Betty's small, soft voice stole out on the -darkness from the depths of Bull's embrace. - -The stock excuses rose to his lips--but did not pass, for through the -friendly gloaming he was aware of a rustle. His face turned toward it. - -"I never felt myself fit." - -"Why, that's just nonsense!" Betty indignantly declared. "Any woman that -wasn't a downright fool would be glad to have you. I know one that would -give her best shoes--" - -"Betty!" - -But the small rebel ran on, "Well, she would--even if I can't tell you -her name." - -Once more Bull faced a stir in the darkness. "I've led a hard, rough, -bad life. No decent woman would ever want me." - -Now he saw the dim whiteness of her face turning to him. Her quiet voice -took up the argument. "It's a thin, pinched nature that's always good. A -big, strong one is liable to be led astray by its own force before -wisdom comes to teach and chasten. In the long run I don't know but that -it gains by it in charity and loving-kindness. Wickedness of the flesh -doesn't count so much as wickedness of the heart; the inward vileness -that rots and corrupts; and I've seen as much of that in the churches as -among downright sinners." She concluded with the very words that Gordon -had used with Lee. "It isn't what you _were_, but what you _are_ that -counts." - -From a second warm silence issued Bull's vibrant rumble. "You think a -man that has lived hard has a right to speak, to a good woman--providing -he's put it all behind him?" - -Low, but confident and firm, her answer thrilled through the gloaming. -"I do, and--she'd _love_ to help him." - -Almost without his volition, Bull's huge paw stole out. He half hoped -she wouldn't see it. He had begun to withdraw it when, like a dim white -dove, her hand came fluttering and nested in his. - -Every life has its golden hour. That was Bull's, and, like a pearl -shining in the mire, it stood out from the blackness of his past life. -Though neither spoke, the peace and quiet, surety of perfect -understanding, settled upon them. When, presently, Betty resumed her -chatter, they listened or joined in. After she fell asleep they relapsed -again into happy silence; just sat like a shy boy and girl, hand in -hand, till she rose and carried the child off to her bed. - -To meet her, next morning, was to Bull something of an ordeal, but her -quiet smile restored at once the perfect understanding. Her sense of -proprietorship showed in the way she fussed over his coffee and eggs, -berated him for his lack of appetite. Her final inspection before he -left could not have been outdone in severity by Lee herself. But nothing -was said. She knew that he would speak in his own good time. - -Except that her hand clung a little in parting, it differed little from -their usual. "I shall look for you when you return." Her call after him -reiterated ownership. - -His answer confirmed it. "I shall come here, ma'am, straight from the -station." - -Indeed, the real parting came when, reining in at fifty yards, he looked -back over his shoulder. With both hands on Betty's shoulders, slightly -dejected, yet with her honest, level gaze sending out trust and hope, -she stood watching him go, as the race of wives and mothers have stood -throughout the generations. And just as, throughout time, the sight of a -woman's trust and child's faith have urged real men on to big deeds, so -the sight of them set the ex-rustler's heart swelling within him. As, -with a last wave of the hand, he turned again and rode on, the spirit -within him equaled in love and reverence that of an ancient -knight-errant starting out in pursuit of the Holy Grail. - - - - -XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - - -About the time Bull started, Lee and Gordon rose from the -breakfast-table under the Los Arboles _portales_. - -Perhaps with sympathetic intuition, for they exchanged an amiable grin, -Sliver and Jake had already passed out. It is true that Maria and -Teresa, the small brown _criadas_, were peeping from the crypt-like -depths of their kitchen. But even had she been aware of their vast -interest, Lee would not have withdrawn the hand which, as they rose, had -somehow tangled with Gordon's. Reflected and thrown up from the yellow -wall, the strong morning lights bathed the flesh of her arms, face, and -neck with suffused amber, wove a soft glow in the mesh of her hair. So -different from her usual boyish activity, her gentle quiet, combined -with the warm air, suffused lights, to create a dreamy spell. Goodness -knows how long they would have stood if Maria had not come out to clear -the table. - -Then Lee spoke. "Such sloth! This will never do if I am to go to El Sol -and return to-day. While I dress will you please get my horse?" - -When Gordon reached the stable Sliver had already gone, but Jake had -lingered to say a word. It was very much to the point. "Say! Bull tipped -me off as how the young greaser was likely to show up an' raise some -hell to-day. Don't you allow I'd better hang around?" - -He nodded, however, when Gordon explained the situation. "Missy don't -know he's coming, hey?--thinks she's going over there. Then they'll meet -on the way. Mebbe I'd better tag along." - -But to this Gordon's pride would not consent. "Don't you think I can -take care of her?" - -"No one better," Jake hastened to appease. "But, say! If he doesn't show -up, don't you let her go on over there--not if you have to rope an' drag -her home." - -"Like we did before?" He smiled at the memory. "This time I'll not leave -her the saddle machete." - -"Little bit too smart for you that time," Jake grinned in sympathy. -"Take care she don't spring a new one. She ain't so very slow." - -Nevertheless, in the face of his apparent acquiescence, while apparently -heading out on his usual beat, he whirled behind the first ridge and, -proceeding at a fast lope, had covered five miles of the way to El Sol, -the Icarzas' _hacienda_, by the time Lee came out. Slowing down, then, -he rode more leisurely, had covered another mile when, over the crest of -a ridge, he sighted Ramon coming at a gallop down the opposite slope. A -clump of mesquite and _palo verde_ afforded convenient cover. Forcing -his beast in, Jake stooped low and watched Ramon go by, so close that -his stirrup whipped the bushes. - -It had never been Jake's habit to notice Mexicans. But now he noted with -surprise the change in the young man's face. The lines deeply plowed -down the nose under the cheeks, the hardening of the red, womanish lips, -the vindictive black sparkle that had contracted his great dusky eyes -into burning black dots, added ten years to his age. - -"The Mex is souring in him," Jake inwardly commented. "That guinea's -liable to try an' hurt some one. Glad I came." - -Allowing Ramon to pass on, Jake then rode after, and so, progressing -from ridge to ridge, keeping always the height of land between them, was -less than fifty yards behind when, peeping over the crest, he saw Lee -and Gordon coming up the slope. - -Another bunch of chaparral afforded cover, and after tying his horse in -it, Jake crawled up to the ridge and looked over. - - -It was not without argument that Gordon had obtained Lee's consent to -accompany her. When she found him standing with two horses at the gate, -her brows rose in a troubled arch. - -He understood that she hesitated to accuse him of bad taste, and quoted -Bull's last orders to remove the impression. "He said that you were -never to ride alone." - -The responsibility being thus shifted, she felt able to speak. "It is -rather-- Really, I don't see how I can do anything else." - -"Why go at all? Why not write?" - -She shook her head. "I've known him since childhood--and have treated -him badly. I owe him an apology and it will have to come from my own -lips." - -It was reasonable enough from her point of view, but not from his. If -Ramon were an American he would have said, "Go, ahead; take your -medicine!" Being Mexican, discretion bade him remain. - -"At least let me ride with you part of the way. I will turn before you -reach El Sol." - -"Oh, that will be all right," she had conceded at once. - -He had felt certain, of course, that they would meet Ramon. But the -usual witcheries, sweep of the tawny earth-waves under the bright sun, -satisfying thud of hoofs on the trail, creak and smell of hot leather, -had combined to blind him to all but her presence. Now, before he could -turn, Ramon reined in before them. - -Like Jake, they noticed at once the sardonic furrows, set mouth, frown -above the glittering eyes. With his youth had vanished that veneer of -refinement which conceals natural Mexican grossness. Like veins in a -stratum revealed by a landslide, selfishness, conceit, violence, -revenge, lay exposed. With the natural instinct of good breeding, Gordon -had half turned to withdraw. But even if one glance at the passion-torn -face had not checked the impulse, it would have been killed when Lee -backed toward him. Shocked and a little afraid, she gazed at Ramon -before she spoke. - -"Are you ill? You look so--" - -"So it was true, what the seora told me yesterday!" He spoke in low, -strained tones. "It was true, though I did not believe; refused to -believe. But now I see. It is true that you used me as bait for your -fishing." - -"Ramon!" She raised her hand, but he switched suddenly from denunciation -to appeal. - -"No! it is not true! It cannot be! She lied! I will not believe it even -though you tell me yourself!" - -From this he ran on with an appeal, hysterical and disconnected, which -reflected as in a clear glass the nature of his love. In it was no -appreciation of the feminine personality with its delicacies of feeling, -refinements, inconsistencies, helplessness, all the illogicalities that -render it charming, as much or more than its faith and love. In terms of -blind egotism, it expressed only his passion and jealousy, fatuous -conceit. As in a clear glass, under a powerful light, he revealed -himself so that even a woman blinded by love could not have failed to -see. In the middle of it Gordon heard Lee take a long breath, and knew -it for thankfulness. Yet her relief did not kill her poignant regret for -the part she had played. - -She spoke softly, pityingly, when he stopped. "Ramon, I'm sorry. It was -wicked of me to draw you on. But to marry you would be far worse. What -can I do to make up?" - -He told, with anger and offense. She had promised to be his wife! It was -a betrothal! as binding in Mexican eyes as marriage! He had announced it -to his father, mother, sister, friends! His conceit cropped out again as -he pictured himself, jilted, in their eyes. Angered by his own -imaginings, he was growing abusive when she cut him quietly off. - -"I was on my way when we met, to own and ask pardon for my fault. I had -counted on our old friendship and your generosity to make it less -difficult. But I see, now, my error. There is nothing left but to bid -you good-by." - -Now came the ultimate revelation, that passion of furious jealousy which -drives the Mexican _peon_ to cut off the hands, slash the face and -breast, of his love. His eyes narrowed to shifting, insane sparks. Hand -raised, as though to strike, he spurred his beast forward. - -"You--you--" - -He got no further, for one hard dig of the spur shot Gordon's horse in -between. From English to Spanish the argument had run, but from Lee's -answers Gordon had gathered enough. Though slower, his beast was heavier -than Ramon's, and while forcing horse and rider sideways with a steady -pressure he issued his orders: - -"That's about enough for you! Get!" - -Ramon's hand flew to his saddle _machete_, but he did not draw, for -Gordon's had gone to his gun. Leg pressed against leg, they manoeuvered -their plunging beasts; without drawing a weapon fought the old fight of -the brown man and the white; the struggle which began when Corts -imposed his will on the Aztec emperors; was continued by the Puritan -forefathers against the American Indian; which has been fought to the -same conclusion all over the world. And from the two faces--Gordon's -cold, hard-eyed, Ramon's distorted with black fury--the cause of that -inevitable ending might have been read. - -So close they were Gordon could see the palpitation of light from the -insane waverings of the other's eyeballs steady under a doubt. He felt -rather than saw the Mexican's sudden swift reach for his knife. Even -more swiftly he snatched, and with a sudden wrench of the other's wrist -sent the knife flying and bore him back flat in the saddle. For a moment -he held him, then with a powerful shove his horse sent Ramon's beast -stumbling sideways and broke the grip. Wheeling in a circle, Ramon faced -them again. - -So far Lee had looked on distressed. Now she spurred forward and caught -Gordon's arm. "Let him go!--please!" Her anger gone now, sorrow -quivering in her voice, she added, "You will, won't you, Ramon?" - -His fury, passion, wild jealousy had settled in dark calm. "Yes, I am -going _now_. But the next time--." He wheeled and galloped off. - -Till the tip of his _sombrero_ vanished behind the ridge Lee watched him -go, distress and relief mingling in a wintry smile. - -"Don't give him too much of your pity," Gordon consoled. "One -disappointment doesn't make much of a dent in such egotism as that. -After a while he'll find some pretty seorita to take him at his own -valuation." - -"I hope so." Her smile brightened. "Though I still feel guilty. But if -he hadn't behaved so ridiculously I should feel much worse." - -Gordon nodded toward the ridge. "You heard his threat. Do you suppose -he'll---" - -"Oh no!" Her hair flew in a cloud under her vigorous shake. "After he's -had time to cool off he'll forget and forgive. But just to think"--her -glance displayed an even mixture of mischief and reproach--"just to -think that all this trouble was caused by you kissing that horrid girl!" - -"Why--" he gasped, under the sudden attack. "Well, I'll be-- Say! Who -drove me to it with her disgraceful flirting?" - -"Did it make you feel _awfully_ bad?" - -"Did it?" The thought of his miserable unhappiness was still powerful -enough to cloud his face, and she noted it with a little quiver of -satisfaction. "Let's forget it." Snatching her hand, he worked his horse -in against hers and tried to draw her to him. "There's a momentous -question I wish to consult you about; one you refused to consider -yesterday. Will you--" - -But she pulled away. "Not yet. First there's something I want settled. -Was it really pique that--made you kiss her?" - -He wanted to laugh, but refrained, for under her smile he felt her -earnestness. "Nothing else." - -"You're sure?" - -"Sure!" - -"Cross your heart to die?" - -He performed that solemn and ancient function, and if she still -entertained a doubt she stuffed it away down in consciousness. - -"Very well." With a little sigh of content she let her head fall back on -his shoulder and a whisper escape from her upturned lips, "Now--you -may." - - -From his covert on the ridge Jake had observed the meeting, talk, -struggle, Ramon's retreat, also something which was hidden from the -lovers in the valley below--the fact that, after crossing the ridge, -Ramon had dismounted, pulled his rifle from the saddle slings, and -crawled back on hands and knees to the edge of Jake's covert. By that -time the little tilt concerning Felicia was over, and as Lee's head went -to Gordon's shoulder Ramon raised the rifle. - -A shot at that short distance would have pierced them both, but as -Ramon's eye dropped to the sights a sharp order issued from the covert, -"Throw up your hands! damn quick!" - -A quick, startled glance showed Ramon the lean, grim face through a -break in the chaparral. Not for nothing had the _peones_ named Jake "The -Python." In moments such as this his lean personality, deadly eye, -conveyed that very impression--of a snake coiled to strike. As Ramon's -hands went up, he stepped out and, crouching behind the ridge, took the -other's rifle and drove him downhill to his horse. - -Having extracted the cartridge both from the rifle and from the revolver -in Ramon's holster, he threw the weapon at his feet. "I reckon I orter -plug you, an' I would for two cents. It'd be set down to raiders, which -fixes it very nice. Sure, I reckon I orter do it, but if you've got a -few thinks to the contrary spit 'em out." - -It was no idle threat. The vicious gleam of the cold gray eye told that. -But in place of fear Ramon's face showed almost relief. "Very good, -seor. There is nothing you could do that would suit me better." - -The cold eye flickered. "Hell! you're too anxious. I couldn't make up my -mind to do it that quick--an' there's a few things I wanter find out. -For one, what's your idee in wanting to drill them young folks?" - -Ramon told--this time without the fireworks. - -Jake summed it briefly. "Promised you, then threw you down. That's hard -luck. But there's one thing you Mexes can never get into your hot -heads--the right of our little American queens to change their pretty -minds as often as they damn please without any gent's consent. You was -damn lucky that she ever give you a smile. If I conclude to change my -mind on plugging you, have it writ up large in your family tree that -oncet an American girl let herself be engaged to you for nearly five -minutes. Now supposing I refrain from my desire to make you into a -corpse, d'you reckon you could keep a promise and not make any attempt -on their lives?" - -While he was talking Ramon's face had stiffened in defiance. He shook -his head. But instead of anger, a small gleam of admiration lit Jake's -hard eyes. Raising his gun, he aimed full at the other's breast. - -"You have just two minutes to make up your mind." - -"One minute!" - -For a time it seemed as though he would have to shoot. But just before -the time expired, Ramon spoke. "For myself, I do not care. But I have an -old father and mother, whom my death would surely kill. I promise." - -"All right." Jake dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm. "I allow -that I'm foolish for trusting a Mex, but the little Missy allus liked -you. On her account we'll take one chance. Here's your cartridge--only -don't load till you're off this range. An' remember"--a cold flash -emphasized the order--"after this our boundary is your dead-line. Cross -it again--you'll be shot like a panther, coyote, or other varmint." - -Returning to his horse, he watched the other mount and ride away. A -glance in the opposite direction showed him Lee and Gordon, going hand -in hand up the opposite slope. Till they had gained across to the next -valley he remained where he was. Then, riding in their rear, with a -sharp eye always behind, keeping the width of a valley between them, he -followed home. - - - - -XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - - -Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped -and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he -had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the -Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him -across the tracks. - -"There's a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been -streaking through all day carrying Valles's reserves from Chihuahua. Don -Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If -we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along." - -"Half an hour?" Bull snorted. "That means half the night an' then some. -We'll have time for supper an' a sleep." - -But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the -crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the -train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail -of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on -top. - -"Must be yesterday's train a bit overdue," Bull defended his theory, as -the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. "The comandante'll be in the -passenger-coach ahead. We'd better to mosey along an' brace him." - -But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs -dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop. - -"Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it -pan out?" - -It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull's friend and Cupid's aide. As his -car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the -titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest -subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign -in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the -dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their -dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a -composite welcoming grin. - -"Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings." The correspondent breezily -ran off the names. "There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles's chief of -staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government -clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us, -but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room. -Come right up." - -A partition divided the car into kitchen and living-quarters. Bunks rose -in a tier of four at the end of the latter. Four more could be slept on -long lockers at each side of the table which was being set for supper by -the Chinese cook. From the oldest to the youngest, the correspondents -were on edge for the approaching battle. At supper their talk ran on its -possibilities. - -"If Valles is beaten again," Weekes, the gray-haired dean, summed the -conversation, "our government will throw another of its silly flip-flops -and turn him down. And then--" - -"--this corresponding job won't make good insurance." - -"And then--" the dean began again. - -"We'll hit for El Paso before Santos-Coy grabs us again." - -"And then"--the dean triumphed over interruptions--"God pity the poor -gringos in northern Mexico." - -Bull's friend nodded. "Valles's army will scatter into bands that will -rake the country with fine-tooth combs for the least bit of plunder. You -had better get your girl and her fellow, Diogenes, and come out with -us." - -Later, when they had all climbed up on the roof and sat watching the -oil-smoke from the laboring locomotive whirl and twist, then float away -and lay its great sable plumes against the rich reds and golds of the -evening sky, they gave expert opinion on Benson's mission. - -"If Valles wins, so do you," the dean opined. "He needs horses worse -than money, and, as you say, has slathers of it in the El Paso banks. -But if he loses--hit for the border at once. I saw him the other day -after the first defeat, and hell couldn't produce his equal. He was -crazy; a maniac; a tiger gone stark, staring, frothing mad. - -"And lose he will. How do I know?" He answered a challenge. "It's a mere -problem of mathematics, the first equation of which was worked out in -the battle the other day. Given two men of equal military ability, the -one with a trained mind is bound to win. The other fellow, as you know, -is a college man--a college man against a bandit." He turned to Bull and -Benson. "It's a cinch that he'll win. If I were you, gentlemen, I'd wait -the event." - -Benson shook his head. "If we see Valles now and strike a bargain, we -can get our cattle across the border before he's all in." - -"Good enough reasoning," the dean admitted. "But--ever since the first -defeat he's been in one of his towering rages. Even his own generals -hardly dare go near him." - -Benson shrugged; with British obstinacy he clung to his point. "It won't -be the first time I've seen him in his rages. He may be dangerous--to -Americans, but John Bull looks after his people and even Valles is -careful of how he flies in the old fellow's face. I shall go to see him -at once, and if he refuses--well"--his voice grew harsh and -menacing--"he'll hear the truth about himself." - -Not knowing him, the correspondents received it in silence. While they -smoked Benson went on in his hard, rough voice. "I tell you, amigos, -that your people have made a sad mess of this whole Mexican business. -For three years, now, you have been trying to apply the principles of -your Declaration of Independence to a race which won't have evolved to a -point where it has the faintest understanding of them for a thousand -years to come. You stand on your Monroe doctrine, but refuse to take up -its obligations and give alien nationals the protection you will not -allow their own government to extend. While your statesmen prattle about -the sacred right of revolution and Mexico's ability to settle her own -affairs, the country is overrun with bandits and mobs of pelados who are -killing off the decent people and destroying billions in property they -never created. - -"Bah!" he snorted his disgust. "Don't talk to me of republics. Do you -suppose that either England or Germany would have stood for the anarchy -which rules here? For centuries John Bull has been ruling brown peoples -and he knows his job. 'Be good and you'll be happy!' he tells them. If -they're not--they get it, hot and heavy, on the spot where it will do -most good. The brown man is all right in his place--which isn't on top -of the white man--but your government, so far, has failed to perceive -it." - -He went on from a pause: "Republics are incapacitated by nature in any -case for the job. They are too divided in their counsels--swayed to-day -by capital that will accept any dishonor rather than jeopardize its -revenues; to-morrow by sentimentalists who hold up hands of horror at -the very thought of war; governed most of the time by a ridiculous -yellow press. Individually, you Yanks are good people, but taken -collectively, as represented by your government and papers, you are -hypocritical, weak, hysterical, sentimental, without dignity or force. -You are grown fat with wealth, soft with luxury, too lazy and -indifferent to undertake your responsibilities abroad, and if you were -not, you lack the first essentials--centralized federal authority and -military strength to enforce your will. If you do anything here it will -be accidental--such as when the blowing up of the _Maine_ aroused one of -your periodical brainstorms, stung you into action. But in the mean time -the destruction of Mexico will be complete. There will be nothing left -of the civilization built up at such enormous pains by Diaz and which it -was your duty to maintain." - -Silence followed, the uncomfortable silence that attends the digestion -of unpalatable truth. While they talked, the cars had resolved into dim -masses that swayed and swung through hot dusk that was splashed, here -and there, with the red glow of charcoal cooking fires. On those -immediately ahead and behind, dim sombreroed figures still loomed in -half-gloom. The flash of a match occasionally set a dark face out in -startling relief. The tinkle of a guitar accompanying a high, nasal -_peon_ chant, mingled with the roar and rattle of wheels. For some time -its whine rose under the stars before the voice of the dean broke the -silence. - -"What you say is true--most of it. We have been tried in the balance and -found wanting. We've neglected our duty to the Mexicans and our own -people--that's the hell of it! But nations, like individuals, learn -their lessons through painful mistakes. We've had bad leadership and -worse counsels--so much of it that it would almost seem that we were -irrevocably stamped as incapable. But it's only a phase. Under it all -the heart of the people still beats sound and true. Sooner or later its -voice will be heard. And when it is--the bleating of the sentimentalists -will be drowned in the tramp of marching men." - -"You bet you!" It rolled out in chorus. - -"In the mean time," a voice added, "what's the matter with a little -drink?" - -Instantly the recumbent figures rose in a shadowy mass, and as its units -made their way down over the edge of the swaying car, the correspondent -jogged Bull's elbow. "Come along, Diogenes!" - -But though a flame, sudden and fierce, had leaped within him; though he -trembled under the intensity of his desire, he shook his head. "Thanks, -I'm not drinking." - -"Why--Diogenes? Whatever is the matter? If parental responsibilities do -this, damned if I know whether I'll ever dare to hook up--providing my -San Francisco girl ever consents. Is this straight?" - -"Straight." - -Warned, perhaps, by a certain earnestness, the other answered: "All -right, old man--only--if you change your mind, come on down." - -Bull made no answer, could not, for as he lay there, huge bulk stretched -out on the running-board, face turned up to the stars, every ounce of -his energy, even the bit that would have been used up in speech, was -consumed in the fight against the furious desire that brought the sweat -starting on his brow, shook him like a leaf. Out of the rack and bang of -the swinging cars, click and roar of the wheels, his ear presently -picked the clink of glasses. Out through the lamp-lit doorway floated -Benson's rough voice. - -"Well, here's to Uncle Sam! wishing him better counselors and quicker -understanding!" - -Bull heard no more, for he had rolled over, buried his face in his arms -to hide from his snuffing nostrils whiffs of spirits. Once he half rose, -looking toward the ladder. But, strengthening his resolution, there rose -in his mind just then a picture of Betty and her mother as he had seen -them at parting--her hands on the child's shoulders, stooped in slight -dejection, yet radiating faith and trust. - -Lying down again, he lay, hands clasped under his head, gazing up at the -fire of stars, while his mind traveled back to the _rancho_, lived over -and over again the slow, sweet hours of last night. Below, an undertone -to the roar of the speeding train, he now caught the hum of talk. But he -took no heed--even when it ceased. He dreamed on till a hand shook his -foot. - -"Aren't you coming down to bed?" - -"No; I reckon I'll lay out here. It's cooler." He did not acknowledge to -himself his fear of sniffing the spirituous odors. - -"All right, only don't roll off." The correspondent paused on his way -back to the ladder. "Say! did your friend mean what he said? Or was it -just talk?" - -When Bull answered with a sketch of Benson's violent temper, illustrated -by a few instances, the correspondent shook his head. "Well, don't let -him see Valles alone." Going down the ladder, he called back, "If you -should change your mind about the drink, you'll find the jug on the -table." - -Instantly it materialized in Bull's vision, a round stone jug and -glasses, as solid and real as though it stood within the reach of his -hand. Nor could he shut out the vision, as he had the odor, by burying -his face. With the cars swinging and swaying through the night, shut -out, it stood forth clearer than ever. He saw himself snatching out the -cork; felt the burning liquid coursing down his throat. - -"My God! why did I come? I'll never be able to stan' it!" - -The thought of the temptation, ever present, growing more powerful -through the coming days, gaining in strength while he grew weaker, -brought out of him a cry of dismay: "I'll never be able to stan' it!" -Then, very quickly, "I'll have to! If I don't--then I'm no fit man for -her!" - -The thought brought her face again in all its sweet wholesomeness. -Through the warm dusk, as it were beside him, he saw her hand fluttering -like a homing dove into his. He felt it lifting, raising him above his -temptation. The memory of its soft pressures strengthened and comforted. -Presently his fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the -running-board. Exhausted, he fell asleep. - - - - -XXVIII: A "REQUISITION" - - -Slipping in over the patio wall, a golden sunbeam struck behind where -Gordon sat writing and flooded the _portales_ with topaz lights. From -the kitchen came the soft spat, spat of _tortillas_ in the course of -shapement between Teresa's palms, competing splash and flop of Maria's -cloth as she washed off the brown-tiled floor. No other sound disturbed -the morning freshness, for Gordon had risen early to get off a letter -with Lovell, who had dropped in last night on his way to El Paso to -attend Phoebe's wedding. - -So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung -across Lee's bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The -rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of -white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair's bright tousle, -round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily -dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono -and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back. -Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon's first -notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes. - -With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could -feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore -it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom -she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the _ancianos_, he -was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of the -_hacienda_ when she cut him off. - -"Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had -guessed right I might have given you a--" - -He took it--in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. "To my -father and mother," he replied to her question. "I thought it was about -time I dropped them a line--haven't written home since I came down." - -"What?" She uttered a small shocked scream. "You've let them suffer all -this time in suspense and alarm?" - -He looked up in innocent surprise. "Why should _they_ suffer? I didn't." - -_He hadn't?_ Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against -such utter lack of imagination--but dropped again quickly, owing to a -second base treachery on the part of the sleeves. - -"Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. _You_ -didn't suffer? _Oooooh!_" She pulled his ear till he yelled. "If you -ever dare to treat me like that!" - -"That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together." - -After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she -asked: "But why this sudden plunge into correspondence--after such long -abstinence?" - -"To inform them," he replied, with great dignity, "of a certain -momentous change impending in my condition." - -"Oh, you are telling them about--_me_? May I see what you have written?" - -She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that -his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes -passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against -his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it -had evolved into a bear hug. - -"Oh, what a liar they will think you!" - -"To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the -silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing's believing." - -Of course she declared it "wasn't a bit like her" and the rest of it. -Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee, -picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for -the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally -and _in toto_ denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor -panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent. - -"Only you are so blind. They'll hate me when they see it." - -"Trust dad for that!" he laughed. "He still has a soft spot for a pretty -damsel. When he sees this--well, he'll go straight out and buy a fatted -calf." - -"But your mother and sister? They'll never forgive me for taking you -from that other girl." - -"Wrong again! They weren't a bit anxious about it. It was all my -father--with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They'll love you -as much as I--no, that's impossible! But they'll love you, all right." - -A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. "That other girl? You -never told me about her. Did you ever--kiss her?" - -"Lots of times." Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. "At -parties, when I was a kid--and when we played 'post-office' and sich." - -"Never since you grew up?" - -"Never." - -"Oh, well," she sighed, "I suppose I'll have to forgive you since you -were so very small, and it's such a long time ago I'll really have -to--make up." - -Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she -had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. "And now--what -about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they -receive it?" - -Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. "Such -impatience! Aren't you happy?" - -"Happy?" His voice rang with sincerity. "Happier than I ever thought -possible, but--" - -"But--?" - -"I want to be happier still." - -He meant and thought it. But she with her woman's intuition knew this, -their love time, for what it was--the flowerage of their lives. Later -would come the ripe fruit--content mixed with the joys and sorrows that -form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed -forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she -would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was -not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it. - -"After--after Bull comes home." - -In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the -shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped -in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time -before he spoke. - -"If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made -it a double marriage. Why, what's the matter?" - -She had sat up with a little shiver. "Oh no! I could never be happy in -one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!" Coiling up again, she -allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. "I never saw him, he who -was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon -behind a cloud, but he felt--like you. In my visions he always took me -into the wilds--the hills, woods, caons, and it is there we must go. - -"It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and -gone down the length of the Sierra Madres--at first alone, later -traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then -down on the other side through giant caons. We should have seen only -the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that -impossible. But this we can do--go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, -who are both old friends of my father's, to be married, then ride -straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by -ourselves till--till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you -look after the horses, and we can play that we are simple _peones_ and -be--oh, _so_ happy!" - -Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good -as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. "How perfectly lovely! Why -didn't I think of that myself?" - -"You would have, in time. Oh!" She sprang from his knee at a stir and -tinkle of water. "Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress." - -"You'll go out with me to-day?" he called after her. - -"No." She bent down over the rail to answer. "I promised Jake to go with -him to Caon del Norte to look at the colts." - -"Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?" he -protested. "'Tisn't fair." - -But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out -from behind the sheet. - - -From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now -described about the _hacienda_, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise -from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had -become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with -Sliver or Jake--and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests -of great earth waves--then to sit and muse while the declining sun -washed the wide world with its resplendence. - -As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted -adobes, _patio_, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, -the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the -burning hills. But--in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and -wild--there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry. - -"Beast! she is but a child!" - -Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses -standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a -flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the -adobes. - -"Raiders!" he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, -"_Revueltosos!_" - -A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a -fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its -panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear -which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. -Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back -compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway -of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth. - -From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon's sight, -blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the -half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw -a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a _revueltoso_. The elder -sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this -helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing. - -"Seor! Seor! Pity of Mary!" - -At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon's spine. Blind, -breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and -tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man's arms, and threw him -violently against the wall. - -So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the -fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming -imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired, -aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a -finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then, -stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll -over. - -Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely -surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he -stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the -mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them. - -The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a -heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed -to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick, -it withstood a violent hammering. - -The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit -under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse. -But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand, -the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood -very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the -burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning. - -"They say to bring fire and burn down the door." Her quick motion -simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame. -Whispering: "Tira! seor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!" she pointed at the -window. - -It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside, -and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the _revueltosos_ were hugging -the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the -bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at -random, there followed a quick scurry of feet. - -Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in -swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they -could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back -before--zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in -through the window and plump in the back wall. - -Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above -the woman's shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against -him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window, -they waited--in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So -still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman's excited breathing and -an occasional sob under the bed. - -"Tempting me to look out," he read the silence. - -But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet -and the voice of Maria, the little _criada_, called through the bars: - -"It ess good now, seor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with -those evil ones." - -The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned, -first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them, -"Don" Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back -gate Sliver and two _ancianos_ now stood with leveled rifles. Two more -poked deadly snouts over the low _patio_ wall, Lee and Jake behind them. -And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets -out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, _machetes_, a -hysterical, dangerous mob. - -In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed -at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind -him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the -ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they -showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them -villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they -rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with -evil jokes. - -"Drive back those women!" Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. "Then -bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over -here." - -Nodding in reply to Gordon's gesture, the leader followed him across the -compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly -cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome -Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the -ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such -reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature's -mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales -and addressed Jake with an authoritative air: - -"Now, seor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of -General Valles?" - -"Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles -attacked my people!" - -It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man's riding-clothes, and -the man's surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy. -Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his -first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair. - -"I did not know"--his bold glance wandered over her costume--"you will -pardon me, seorita?" - -Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time -that revolutionists had come with "requisitions" to Los Arboles. She -answered from experience. - -"You have a commission from General Valles?" - -He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language -that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to -contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, _el -capitan_ Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or -other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with -his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles's own -illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal. - -Lee handed it back. "This seems to be in legal form. That being the -case"--she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake -an appreciative nod "perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my -people!" - -"I know of no attack except"--the straight brows knit over a black flash -at Gordon--"when this man killed one of my men." - -Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: -"He shot in self-defense--to save one of my girls." - -"Santa Maria!" His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. "What -foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled -a dove. You Americanos take these _peonas_ too seriously, fill them with -ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a -soldado for a sweetheart." - -Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined -just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on -Gordon's part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool -calculation by Jake as to the possibility of "getting away with it" -should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still -holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering -if he could send one bullet through all four heads. - -If the thoughts of the _peonas_--now gathered in a murmuring, -gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling -like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall--a composite of their -thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and -torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of -mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought -and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine -nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee's voice: - -"_You_ say that? _You_, a follower of a man who was once himself a -_peon_, who boasts that his is the _peones'_ cause? _You_, his -representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor -creatures? If you _do_ represent him, then God help us, for we have -little but violence to expect from your cause." - -It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the -strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but -little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused -even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the _peon_ in all his -ways, to mutter: "You bet! they hain't got nothing coming from him!" But -in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by -training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only -surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of -her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, -with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the -shibboleths of his "Cause." Surely they were fighting for the _peon_; to -obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the -_hacendados_. - -"If my hombre did as you say," he concluded, "he earned his death. My -general would be the first to applaud it." With a gesture that dismissed -the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: "So let us -say no more of that. My wish is to serve _you_!" - -Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied -them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry -blood flooding Gordon's face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing -his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture. - -"Leave him to me," she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in -the eye, she gave him his answer. "You wish to serve me? Very well, -seor, you may do so very easily--by removing yourself and your men off -my place." - -For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise. -In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. "Si, seorita--after -you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new -levy for equipment and supplies. Also"--another black flash went to -Gordon--"it will be my duty to take this man to my general." - -"Perhaps I had better go," Gordon whispered. "It may save you--" - -Lee cut him off without looking around. "And shoot him the moment you -get him outside the gates?" She quoted the Mexican law of "The escape." -"No, seor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him -with my own hands at your general's call." She added, after a -significant pause, "Along with the evidence of your own neglect in -permitting your men to attack my people." - -For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of -effect--especially upon meddlesome consuls--it was the fashion in the -revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one -could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He -blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed -through his vicious look. - -"Very well, seorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the -horses. These I must have at once." - -"Well, think you've got 'em, an' let it go at that!" - -While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her -meditation flashed a sharp question: "Were you at the hacienda of the -seor Benson last week?" - -The man's dark brows rose. "No, seorita. If there was a requisition -served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez." - -"When did you leave the cuartel general?" - -"Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other -side of the railroad. But what difference does it make--" - -"A great deal." She gave a little nod. "Since you left headquarters the -seor Benson, with my manager, the seor Perrin, has gone with an offer -of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter -may also be left with him." - -"Which lets you out!" Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the -background, now burst out. "Now git! That's what I said--an' take your -dead hombre along." - -From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the -man's glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the -peonas who were now crowding the _patio_ gates. Everywhere his glance -fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of -glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning -fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his -glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent -behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a -shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the _peonas_ -opened. - -While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the -_patio_ wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and -Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his -_ancianos_ still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret -mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it. - -As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they -passed out under the _patio_ arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically, -then followed his men. - -"Saddle a fresh horse an' go after them," Jake ordered, when Sliver came -up. "Don't let 'em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we'll -have to keep one man circling the hills while the _ancianos_ keep watch -an' watch at the gates." - -With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men -ride away. "I am sorry to have brought this on you," he said, in low -tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added, -"Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him." - -A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. -Jake was shooing the _peonas_ back to their quarters with much language -and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick -movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and -planted a swift kiss on his cheek. - -"I don't want to be widowed--before I'm married." - -At midnight Sliver brought in his report. "They've gone on to El Sol. -After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into 'em when they -stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood -quiet an' the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. -The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn't hear of it. - -"'The damned gringos shoot straight,' I heard one of 'em say. 'Already -have they killed one of us, an' now they be ready. Also the horses are -tired an' we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.' Then, after -some jawing, they moved on." - -"An' they won't come back," Jake commented on the report. "Not so long -as they kin find something that looks easier." - -Which was only half of the truth! - - - - -XXIX: TEMPTATION - - -Bull's eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted -pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering -mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half -conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence, -the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth. - -Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town -enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in -the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand -_revueltosos_, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in -their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the -scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth -within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung -straight as strings in the crystal air. - -"'Morning, Diogenes!" The correspondent's cheerful face poked up from -under the edge of the car. "Some picturesque, heigh? Who'd think, to -look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the -destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But -that's your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a -quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night -for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A -night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to -the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit -each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a -cheerful, 'Adios, seor, it is time to begin fighting!' they return to -their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the -midst of their dirt and disorder." He added, thoughtfully, "I never see -them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children -shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the -powerful weapons we placed in their hands." - -"Picturesque? Yes," he went on, from a pause. "But it's mighty hard on -the common people. Look at that!" - -He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was -clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car. - -"She's picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!" -Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: "If our wise men -in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are -doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! _The seed corn and -the brood mares!_ You know what that means--famine! If I were a poet I'd -take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles's -war horses--I'd take her for the symbol of Mexico--Mexico bleeding and -bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed. - -"It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it's -true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast -returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring -perpetually upon one another. Already--oh!" He descended to a homely but -vital conclusion. "They make me sick. God send us a _man_! A man with -sympathy and insight; understanding of this people's failings and -necessities. God send us another Lincoln!" - -"You bet it's hell!" In spite of the profanity Bull's laconic comment -was reverent in its essence as the most profound "Amen!" - -With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful -self. "I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast." - -Stepping from the ladder, Bull's glance went, in spite of himself, to -the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone -jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his -back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look -when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his -sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and -when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town, -it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind. - -From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in -dirty streams of khaki and _peon mantas_ splashed with the flash of -brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot -of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured -into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt -and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with -a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its -evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson's remark as -they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified: - -"If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this -would be a safer, cleaner land." - -Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet -odor of carrion hung thick in the air. - -"More Mexican efficiency," the dean shrugged. "After the last scrap out -here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They'd pile -twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the -soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of -hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way--it's -hard on a white man, though the Mexicans don't seem to mind. Appeals to -the natural vulture in them, I suppose." - -While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the -crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under -guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten -years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one -thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the -extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell--to be -picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and -hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd. - -"Ole, Enrico!" As they came opposite, Bull's friend hailed the officer -in command. - -After walking a few feet with him, he came back. "They're Spanish -storekeepers on the way to 'the place designated,' which is a -revolutionary euphemism for being shot. 'The place' is the cemetery -where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican -refinement, eh, making a man's legs carry him to his own funeral? Their -crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in -contributing to the 'Cause,' been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps -have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters' beds. -Even in this country"--he spoke with bitter irony--"there are still men -to be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are -Spanish. God knows, it's enough. Valles never forgets that he is a -_peon_. After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children's -children the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec -forebears. It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some -justification for it--if it were only a cause and effect. But"--his -pitying glance followed the stumbling boy--"it is rotten hard to watch." - -It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while -running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing -glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As -the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of -Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an -interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a _revueltoso_ -would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest -from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at -the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter, -quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand. - -"That isn't quite so bad." The correspondent nodded at one struggling -desperately with her captor. "She'll soon give in and dry her tears. In -one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within -twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with -Valles's soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by -a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it -doesn't matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the -others--daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many -of them educated in Europe--well, during the sack of Durango forty girls -of the upper classes committed suicide." - -After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and -turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old -Spanish mansion, with a great _patio_ and interior garden, its high -walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The -glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which -flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun -blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by -contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet -demesne. - -As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in -earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest. - -"More victims of the 'Cause.'" After he had greeted them, the consul, a -bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. "Valles has robbed churches, -seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with--this. Last -spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to -which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and -came here to-day to ask the priest--who is himself a refugee whom I -saved from a mob that was stoning him to death outside--to ask -permission for themselves and others to end their desecration by -suicide. One would think that such experiences would kill in any human -being the belief in a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good -stuff. Sticks right to his guns." - -Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came -just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the -burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: "The life He gave -none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is -not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight. -It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness; -puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was -necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked -ones to their proper end? It may be"--he paused, shaking his old head, -tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks--"but it is not for us to -attempt answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have -wished that He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones -of the mob. But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait -till His brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision." - -Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the -children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of -mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty -four or five, raised her pale, olive face. "And may we love them, our -babes, when they come?" - -The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the -wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. "God is love, Sisters. He -would not wish otherwise." - -In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were -wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked -slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house. - -Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost -pain. And yet--even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the -garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on -a small side-table. On their way they had passed _cantina_ after -cantina, all thronged with half-drunken _revueltosos_, all exhaling a -thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the -drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul's invitation, he walked out -on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in -time to hear the consul's conclusion on Benson's business. - -"As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was -never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn't help -any for me to go with you, for I've been fighting him on other accounts -all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that -will secure your admittance." - -On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the _cantinas_. With -invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful -was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals; -seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd -that blocked always the gates of Valles's headquarters--simple _peones_ -who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of -obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a _peon_ like themselves who had -abased the great _hacendados_, their taskmasters, confiscated their -lands, beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though -he shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw -them; had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming -and going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a -secretary, seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to -what was going on. - -"That's 'Matador' Fero, Valles's killer." Benson nudged him as a man -looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a -suspicious stare. "He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon, -in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power -rifle. Looks it, doesn't he?" - -He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black, -piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his -colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom -they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there -closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged -before the desk, and also the _revueltoso_ officers who lounged on the -window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice. - -Fierce beast that the "Matador" was, Bull's keen knowledge of men, -developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less -dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive -upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his -thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest, -sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither, -told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the -bandit _peon_, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they -entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand -nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling, -it would rise and fall with a bang. - -"You may tell your papers, seores, the reverse of the other day was -sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow--you have seen my -reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?--to-morrow -I shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot -wind. And you can tell them"--he observed a sinister pause--"you may -tell them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is -now giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American -lives and property in the country I control, but if your government -allies itself with my enemies--" His big fist struck the table with -force that emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes. - -Yet, pulsing with vindictive anger, the exhibition paled by contrast -with his furious attack on one of his own officers who came in as the -correspondents filed out. The fact that he had been wounded and had gone -on, alone, when his command refused to face a galling fire, made no -difference. Beast mouth stretched to a gorilla grin, every line of his -face writhing in an awful smile, Valles scored him with coarse insult -and seething invective while his hand toyed thirstily with the hilt of -his knife. - -Flushing and paling, the man stood with hanging head till an order -issued from the last furious burst. "Go, now, and shoot every tenth man -in your command. I will teach them that I am more to be feared than the -damned Carranzistas!" - -In the midst of it Bull nudged Benson. "Don't you allow we better leave -him cool for a while?" - -But the Englishman's obstinate jaw set hard. "I'm not afraid of him. -Besides"--the secretary stood again in the doorway--"it is too late." - -A curt nod marked Valles's recognition of Benson as they followed in. -Then, as his tigerish eyes took in Bull, they lit with quick -appreciation of his bulk, then went off again on their suspicious -questing. While Benson talked, he beat again a soft tattoo with the heel -of his hand; then, rising, he walked off into another room. - -The secretary followed, and through the closed door they caught the -harsh, throaty monotone. When it ceased the secretary came out. - -"My general says that all of your property is subject to requisition to -be paid for in legal currency issued by him as the chief of the -republican armies." - -"And he thinks we'll stand for that?" His eyes flashing under bent -brows, harsh face burning with anger, Benson stepped toward the door. -"I'll--" - -But as he moved the "Matador" stepped in between. Half a dozen lounging -officers, too, came hurrying from the balconies. - -"It would do no good, seor." The secretary's shoulders rose in a shrug. -"Wait a more favorable time." - -Benson stared down upon him, big fists clenched, face purple with -furious passion. Thinking he was about to strike, Bull put out his hand. -But, turning suddenly, Benson strode out of the room, throwing his -defiance back over his shoulder. - -"He can't bluff a British subject that way! He'll give me his answer -_himself_--and he'll give it _to-day_." - -As Bull followed out a hand touched his shoulder. Thinking it was the -secretary, he turned--then stood staring at the sentry on guard at the -door, who returned a sheepish grin. Though the face seemed familiar, he -did not recognize the man for one of the raiders Lee had saved from -hanging till he spoke. - -"Ah, seor, 'tis fine to see an old face. The seorita, she that saved -us from your just anger, she is well? Tell her that fine mercy was -defeated by the _revueltosos_ who took us from her servants. Ask if she -will in her great kindness have the general set us free that we may -return to our wives and babes in Las Bocas." - -In spite of his own stress, Bull could not but grin. "Was the jefe of -Las Bocas a better master than Valles?" - -"A master is always a master." The man shrugged. "But one's pais is -one's pais and the nias, the flesh of one's body, blood of his blood, -cannot be forgotten. Thou wilt speak to her, seor?" - -The tear that trickled down his villainous face earned him a civil -answer. Though he knew the futility of it, Bull nodded. "Si, I will -speak." - -Below he found Benson shoving like an angry bull through the _peon_ -crowd. On its outskirts he turned and shook his fist at the building. - -"I'm going back to the consul--to tell him something that he'll take -better alone. Where shall I meet you?" - -"Here?" - -"No, I can't tell how long I may be. Make it after lunch at the car." - -Bull nodded. Then remembering the correspondent's warning, he called -after him, "I'd like to be there when you tackle him again." - -Nodding, Benson walked on. Left alone, Bull sat down on a bench in the -plaza. Already the drink desire was returned upon him. And as he sat -there, in the grip of his mortal weakness, three soldiers seated -themselves on the same bench and proceeded to pass a bottle of -_tequila_. - -Before he even saw it Bull's mutinous nostrils snuffed the odor. Looking -away, he tried to think, to recall the vision that strengthened and -cooled him in his hour of torture last night. But now, the stronger for -his long abstinence, that enormous desire inflamed his brain; enveloped -it in heated mists through which the pretty, wholesome faces loomed dim -and indefinite. And then-- - -After a curious glance up at the huge figure, the nearest soldier tapped -his arm. "You will drink with us, seor?" - -What it cost him to refuse and walk away! Men have gone down in history -as martyrs by the exercise of no more effort. But just as pressure -enough will snap a bone, as persistent fatigue will paralyze a muscle, -so the effort weakened his will, broke his resolution. Feeling curiously -weak, utterly exhausted, he stopped at the plaza corner and gazed at a -_cantina_ across the road. - -Even then he did not give in. Hands writhing behind his back, face one -purple suffusion, he circled and recircled the plaza half a dozen times -before he stopped at the same spot again. In that time desire has no -height he did not reach; passion no heat, hell no torture, he did not -endure. And while he stood watching the _cantina's_ roaring trade, -reluctant but conscious in his soul that the end was come, a hand -dropped with a hearty slap on his back. - -"Come on, Diogenes, you're just in time. We've discovered some beer, -good cold beer, down at the German Club. Counting the consul, there's -only two Dutchmen left in the town, but trust them to have their beer. -Don't waste time in astonishment. Come right along." - -In his mortal weakness Bull snatched at the straw. He could drink a -barrel of the thin Mexican stuff without knowing it--at least he felt he -could! But while, for an hour thereafter, they sat in a cool _patio_ -talking and sipping, the despised brew was still potent enough to loose -the mad rustler spirit that hearkened only to the voice of desire. - -When the correspondents left to file their despatches, he remained. - -"I'm waiting for Benson," he told them. "If you see him, tell him I'm -here." - -While they walked down the _patio_ and out through the bar into the -street, he sat nervously making rings with his beer-glass. Then, -trembling with eagerness, he called the waiter. - -"This stuff hasn't a kick in it. Bring me a bottle of whisky!" - - - - -XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - - -As they sat at breakfast Gordon's glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her -smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in -his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal. - -"I'm going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day," she told Jake. - -Sliver's nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement. -"It's a cinch," he chuckled. "'Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never -seen two folks more sot on each other." - -Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. "An' who in hell might they be?" - -"Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other -like two stamps at the end of a day's ride in a sweaty pocket; allus -that close up walkin', standin' or settin', you had to walk around 'em -twice to find the jine." - -"An' after they was married?" Jake questioned. - -Sliver scratched his head. "You-all mightn't believe it, but you c'd -have fired a charge of buckshot between 'em at long range without -hittin' either." - -Jake nodded. "I'd have allowed as much. But these ain't that kind. Did -you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she'll keep him -on aidge that-a-way all his life. He'll never get all at once; never -quite reach the end. They'll allus be something beyond." - -"Say!" Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. "Fer an old bachelor you -know a heap. Where'd you learn it?" - -"Where any man learns it--from a woman." A shadow swept, for a moment, -the reckless face. "On'y--I didn't have sense enough to stay be my -teacher." - -Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up--for -it was his day on guard--Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover, -he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon -ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his -being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had -somehow failed to fill. - -Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in -morals which has puzzled wiser heads. "Ain't Natur' the fickle jade, -a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he's still -terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn't she a' b'en more single-minded?" - -His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a -flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were -now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at -correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver's could easily have -perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the -attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch. - -"Say," he called down, "d'you allow it's all right for them two to go -off that-a-way by themselves?" - -Jake snorted. "Didn't she ride with you yesterday an' me the day afore?" - -"Yes, but she's our boss an'--well, they love each other a whole lot." - -"So that's what's biting you?" In one sentence Jake countered heavily on -the common view of things. "She kin ride with tough guys like you an' me -an' it's all right; but she mustn't go out with the man that loves her -more 'n anything on earth. Where's your sense?" - -Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing, -he made weak answer, "I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a -chapperonny." Vanquished by Jake's disgusted snort, he withdrew and went -down to close the gates. - -Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise, -from where she and her father had overlooked the _hacienda_ on that last -fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge -painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As -then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant -cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range -rolling in bright billows to the far hills. - -Her cry was the same: "Oh, isn't it beautiful? Soon the rains will come -and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be -had anywhere, but these golds--that is Mexico." - -Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her -father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges, -scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and -their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential -calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the -soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and -grace of its flexures from her man's riding-clothes, the mobile face, -molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest -subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when -she showed signs of stopping. - -"Oh, I'm so glad that you love it!" she sighed, happily. "It would have -been such a disappointment if you-- But that is so silly, because it -wouldn't have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark -evenings after"--she went on with a little flourish--"I shall read you -stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old -leather trunk. It will be lots of fun." - -Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where -she left off, he began. "Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big -streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees -this--well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled -down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary -nonsense, we'll--" - -The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his -imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid, -healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot -she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy -pause. - -Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to -their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged -in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a -trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods -freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly -scheme of things according to their hearts' desire, the gods in -resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were -to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from -the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently -joined hands and rode on. - -At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher's purpose. After they -passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always -out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the -mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their -course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went -after them at a gallop. - -Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and, -as he drew nearer, she recognized the _mozo_ who had brought Ramon's -message from El Sol. - -"Que? Filomena?" - -As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her -happiness. "Oh, Betty is ill!" she translated for Gordon. "Mary Mills -sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as -my escort, so it won't be necessary for you--" She paused, anticipating -rebellion. - -It came. "Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn't let -you, anyway." - -If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. "That's what -one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I'll have to put up with it." -Turning to the _mozo_, she gave him his orders in Spanish: "The seor -will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the -gringo seor, where we have gone." - -Disconcertion showed through the man's _peon_ immobility. But with an -obsequious "Si, seorita!" he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, -dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly. - -Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to -be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight -he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he -built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the -succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet. - -Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it -soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and -lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke -puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, -mounted and rode away. - - -About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight -embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the _fonda_. But in -place of Felicia's smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of -old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an -_arriero_ whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream. - -As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her -glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, -she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled -around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the -kiss, into neutral territory. - -Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the -night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge -to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and -violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that -undulated like a woman's mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the -hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with -green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and -plains, caon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in -one mood as the other. - -"A wonderful land!" Gordon breathed it. - -Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and -its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across -brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; -then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, -and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the caons, streets of the -mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, -rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in -the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, -richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled -Garden of Eden--could he have done all this, even then imagination would -have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to -prophecy. - -"Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this -is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth." - -That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet -brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration -but an eagle's flight away. Following battle and retreat across -sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was -scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon's blast over the face of the land -to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range -columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning _haciendas_. With -them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded -and tortured, wailing of ravished women. - -In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that -had spied the _mozo's_ signal and were now watching them from the -chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on. - - -"Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease." - -If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few -hundred yards away, might have heard the argument. - -She would easily have recognized Ramon's voice. "True, amigo, and I love -him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his -compaero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it--to make no -attempt on their lives." - -"A promise?" A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. "What is it but a -deadfall for one's enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, -women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it -to find a hot enough corner in hell. But _I_ gave no promise--and he -killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to -me." - -"No, no!" Ramon's voice rose in quick protest. "His killing would still -be at my hands. Also"--the addition came in lower tones--"I would rather -he lived--to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in -my arms. No, seor, we will rope him from behind." - -"Bueno! Have it thy--" A sharp hiss cut them off. - -Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of -a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through -thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, -with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with -the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men -before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above. - -She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her -stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. "I'll go down first. If I break my -neck you can pick up the remains." - -Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way -on her beast's haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with -skilful use of the bridle. - -"Come on!" she called back, laughing. - -But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the -noose of a _riata_ writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and -was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a -man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under -her horse's belly. - -"Run!" From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her -shoulder. "Run! Oh, _run_!" - -He could not--had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had -barely time to use the spur, and if Ramon's cast had been made a second -sooner he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the -loop settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next -second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. -While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. -Now he turned it loose downhill. - -That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker's boast, -and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious -through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, -shooting close to the ground. - -His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging -of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, -the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the -leader's head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm -in against his body. - -At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. "He -has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!" - -Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them -snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill. - -Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only -have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while -the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness -and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break -his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee's voice, shrill in its -mortal terror, rang out: - -"If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!" - -To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, -like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, -but without answer raised a warning hand. "The gringo is not to be -harmed, hombre." - -"But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compaero." - -"The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own -life in the hollow of his hand." - -Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. -Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in -all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a -_peon_. Behind them rose a coarse laugh. - -"Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou -forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave -thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? -As for Tomas--I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us -to divide this seor's money." - -The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. "Bueno, Rafael, -bueno!" Another called: "Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man's -shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas's throat it flashed at -last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee." - -The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to -back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon -pulled a roll of notes from his breast. - -"Here, hombre." - -The man's huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his -share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee's horse by the -bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last -odd note, she spoke in English. - -"I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against -me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster." From which she ran -on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of -memory--their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her -own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. "And now would you -destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And -what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love." - -She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked -and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes -stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic -fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the -hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its -grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took -out of bitter anger. - -"What have I to gain?" He threw up his head in defiance. "You! with love -or without it!" - -By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent -outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear. - -"Ramon, what are you going to do?" - -Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. -"Take you to San Angel--to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and -priest." - -"Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known -me from childhood--" - -"They are Mexican--would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like -themselves. They will do as I say. If not"--his nod carried a sinister -significance--"so much the worse for you." - -Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the -brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his -insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned -away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its -mate. - -She bent her head in sudden shame. "Ramon, please take me home." - -"Yes, to _ours_." He snatched her bridle. "Come! already we have wasted -too much time." - -As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. "You -stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember -she is no _peona_, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you -will be called to account by our government." - -"Your government?" Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. "Your -government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and -hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a -villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the -massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and -obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government--for -the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it -has lodged--complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us--nor help -_you_. Come on, hombre!" - -As he moved off, leading Lee's beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to -break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to -his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking -back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the -moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm, -her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then -the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair. - -Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot -swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The -revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at -him. - -"Going to cut my throat, now he's gone," Gordon read it--and did not -care. - -But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts -even a bandit nature. "We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him." -Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the -others. "Let us lift him over there in the shade." - -"'Tis hard on thee, amigo," the fellow went on, after they moved him. -"'Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no -fear"--though he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the -gestures, helped out by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning -on his meaning--"we will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to -the strong. He has not got her yet. Adios--and better luck!" - -As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored, -for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear, -cold vision to face its dread facts--the tragic realities even then in -course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In -agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them -go. - - - - -XXXI: "BRAINS WIN" - - -Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken -faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad -phantasmagoria, devil's dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting. -As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a -window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More -clearly, a second picture stood out--of a big black rustler--to wit, -himself--set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the -rifles aimed, and yet--his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he -lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet -across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the _patio_ of -the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the -staccato pulsations of rifle-fire. - -"The battle's on!" - -As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony, -poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and -covered his face, but could not shut out despair. "My God! I've fallen -down!" - -Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood, -face buried in his hands, till he recognized the "dean's" voice. - -"Well, come on, fellows! They're going to it again. Let's get out where -we can see." - -"I'll take a look at Diogenes first," came the voice of his friend. "You -chaps go on. I'll catch up." - -Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the -correspondent's gaze. "Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went -it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but--last night!" He shook his head in -mock reproof. - -"What did you do? What didn't you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then -went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in -business--those you didn't break up. It took a troop to round you up. -They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. -Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here." - -"Well, I'm sorry! damned sorry that he did!" Bull shrugged. "On'y to be -shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother -in the gutter." - -His bitterness touched the other. "Look here, old man, don't take it so -hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and -go on again." - -Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling -had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, -as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent's face grew grave. -Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way. - -"Where's Benson?" He looked up. "Did he go again to Valles?" - -"Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it--without avail. -What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he -said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done -much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. 'So if the -son of a gun kills me,' he told him, 'the boys will know it for murder.' -He must have had a hunch, for he never came back." - -"Dead?" Bull broke a shocked silence. - -The other nodded. "They acknowledge it--say he tried to kill Valles, -which is, of course, all rot." - -Bull had leaped up. "Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It's -no use." He waved away expostulations. "You yourself warned me not to -let him go alone!" He started out the door. - -"Here!" the correspondent seized him. "Where are you going?" - -"Out--to get drunk--get killed if I kin!" - -Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the -correspondent stuck. "All right! all right! But what's your hurry? -You'll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with -me." - -Through Bull's black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. "Humph! Stand on -a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?" - -"Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that's -exactly the crack Valles made about 'gringo correspondents' and -'long-distance reporting.' I'm going to show the beggar. It's me for the -outposts where folks get killed." - -Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. "Don't be a fool! You're paid -to get the news, not to do Valles's fighting." - -The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not -repress a grin. "What's sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have -a right to get yourself killed, so have I." - -The black shadow again wrapped Bull. "I've good reason. If I kin git -myself shot, like a man, I'm just that much ahead. But you--" - -"Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away -with a crack like that? We're doing too much talking. Come on!" - -"I'd--" Bull hesitated. "I'd like to see--_his_ consul first. His -wife--she'd naterally like to know. She's in El Paso, just now, an' I -know her address." - -"We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don't -turn up, I wouldn't want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too -long." - -Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. "You needn't to be scairt." He -answered the other's look. "My thirst's over--for a while. But I need a -bracer." Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier -significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return -to the old life. - -Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet -of despair he listened while the consul talked. - -"I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I'd -succeeded. If it hadn't been that he was seen going in, he would simply -have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several -stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he -carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being -placed under arrest. Lastly--to satisfy me and give his murder the -semblance of a military execution--that he was tried by drumhead -court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general. -But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin"--he went on from a heavy -pause--"this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon -my records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one -year--it may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come -up again. No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may -have fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite -the name of William Benson in our archives, 'The murderer was brought to -justice.'" - -The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among -wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented -thereon in his breezy fashion. - -"That's Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than -hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up -goes a regiment and decimates the tribe--or a brigade, or an army, if -necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a -British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat -old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He'd make shorter work -of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the -Hindu rajahs." - -In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally -impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet -square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the -United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a -letter. - -"Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!" He coughed -ironically. "Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact -that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and -in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle -Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial -ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or -property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save -this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints! -Oyez! Oyez! Frankly," he turned to the consul, "what do you think of -it?" - -The consul shrugged his shoulders. "You wish to register?" - -His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the -correspondent's name and commission. "Anybody else you wish to notify?" - -The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then -he reached for the letter the correspondent handed. - -"To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?" - -The pen scratched Lee's name and address. - -"Anything to send?" - -"Nothing!" - -"Very well, gentlemen!" His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his -handshake--the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. "I shall -observe your wishes--if possible. Well--" His shoulders rose again. -"Hasta luego! Till we meet again." - -"A brave man in a weak place!" The correspondent rightfully placed him, -outside. "Now, Diogenes, for the front." - -An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last -quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and -rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of -stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the -flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a -battery of French "threes" was spitting shrapnel with the feverish -energy of an angry cat. - -Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, -whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot -through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile -in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting -that flank. - -Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were -to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in -a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista -positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the -ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would -strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping -through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist. - -Seizing the dead man's rifle, Bull stepped into his place. - -It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would -have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment's -surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights -and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler -spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his -_vaqueros_ on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every -other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully -as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter -puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, -grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the -dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction. - -"Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he'll soon get over it." - -Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and -began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The -spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling -rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of -the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture -of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy. - -A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her -heels patting out _tortillas_ while she gossiped with another girl, in -complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was -indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her -coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face -convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while -screaming frightful curses. - -"Damned dogs of Carranzistas!" she finished with her last, spent breath. -"Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with -tails between the legs!" - -Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The -fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. -"Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my -first prisoner." - -Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while -making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards -separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that -burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, -shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its -mark; she collapsed in a heap. - -Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent's -yell: "Come back, you fool! She's dead! shot through the head!" he ran -out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall. - -As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept -space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was -not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a -while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes -flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic -curses at the distant line. - -"Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day -shall be my lover!" - -"And here comes he that will do it!" The man on Bull's left touched his -shoulder. - -Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling -gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great -black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance -the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, -rifle-fire, booming guns. - -"It's Valles!" - -As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black -horse launched out and shot up the hill. - -"Make way, hombres, for the guns!" - -Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken -vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the -correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension -flashed in his hot eyes. - -"Ole, compaero!" His wave of the hand took in all. "Hot work! but -nothing to that which is to come. Mira!" - -Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of -dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. -"Carranzista cavalry! But--look again!" - -Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, -brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the -west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. -Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching -as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles -shook his fist at the distant dust. - -"Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!" - -The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse -with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling -bullets, he directed their emplacement. "To the left, hombres! a little -more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!" The last one set, he -rasped out a last command: "Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!" Then -followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill. - -"He bears a charmed life!" The man next Bull spoke again. "Out of a -hundred battles he has come with never a hurt." He added, with a wink, -"An' it was not always from his front the bullets came." - -Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit -with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The -artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up -his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, -the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to -the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle. - -"What are you trying to do?" - -"Justice on that grinning devil." - -"Good job no one saw you." A quick glance around showed the artillerymen -and revolutionists absorbed in their own work "Do you know what they -would have done to both of us--skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or -something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don't care yourself, just -think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, 'Having -toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.'" - -"I hadn't thought of that. But if I'd been alone--" - -He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to -his loophole. - -On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the -massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown -blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and -sabers, _machetes_, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then -the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, -like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. -Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that -other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud -rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. - -"Weekes was wrong!" It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. -"He's smashed 'em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!" But as the -cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, "That is, if -Valles stops and comes back." - -When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved -into criticism. "Whatever is he thinking of? There he's gone with all -the cavalry and left his flank exposed!" - -At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with -greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand -drums. Answering the "threes," shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking -curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next -wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next -to Bull collapsed without a groan. - -Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps -where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill -came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns. - -"Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of -their guns! They've drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they'll -flank us! My God! there they come!" - -From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of -smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. -He leaped and caught Bull's arm. - -"Come on! Let's get while we can!" - -They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, -maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head. - -"Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself." - -"Man! Valles is defeated!" The other seized and shook him. "Do you know -what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. -If you won't consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to -leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against -Americans?" - -Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and -smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, -there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; -then the feel of Lee's soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, -the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear. - -"Come on!" - -Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden -their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain -of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and -low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the -dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his -jokes. - -"Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!" he gasped. "Gosh! but that -chaparral is going faster the other way!" - -A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that -dire moment he remained his cheerful self. - -"Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they'd ever get -me. Here's my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck -'em on to the wires. Now, _run like hell_!" - -And Bull did "run like hell"--with the correspondent across his -shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded -out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the -knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief -twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his -saddle, arms around his horse's neck, he headed for the town. - -As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging -yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. -Followed the terrible roar of a rout--yells, shrieks, curses, victorious -shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it -caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated -above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked -with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted -adobe streets to the railroad yards. - -There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains -and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the -hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, -then--the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass -be-spattered with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, -sentient human beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with -Valles's own guns. - -"We're farther up!" the correspondent whispered through white, drawn -lips. "We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main -line to insure our getaway." - -He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile. -"That's queer. It stood about here, yet I don't see the placards. -Perhaps we have overshot." - -But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car -ahead. "Here, seores! This way!" - -Just then, too, the door rolled back and the "dean" looked out. "Hurry -up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales -Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick -sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out. -We're traveling, for the present, incognito. You're hurt! Here, you -fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!" - -After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the "dean" turned to -Bull. "That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning, -looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the -Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants." - -But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome -accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang, -and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine's tug. - - - - -XXXII: TRAVAIL - - -The instant she passed from Gordon's sight Lee's smile went out, -quenched by mortal fear. For years tales that defied by their black -horror exaggeration by even the fervid _peon_ minds had filtered into -Los Arboles, and, more vividly than Gordon, she realized her danger. - -It was not so much Ramon. At San Carlos she would have a fighting -chance; stood ready to match her woman's wit against his man's strength. -Her fear centered on the men. - -As, overtaking them, he rode by on the narrow path, Ilarian pressed -close against her. "Cheer up, little one! 'Tis the fighting cock that -wins his hen. 'Tis the way of the world, and what matter it so long as -she be won? 'Tis his turn now, but later 'twill be for thee to keep him -itching." - -Laughing hoarsely, he rode on, but in passing his rude fingers searched -the softness of her arm and she caught the bold look into her eyes of -his grinning fellow. Thereafter she felt their glances touching, -plucking at her like fumbling fingers. Now glowing with shame, again -frozen with terror, she endured it--to her it seemed hours before she -spoke to Ramon. - -"I'm afraid of those men. Can't you--send them away?" - -He shrugged. "You have more reason to be afraid of me." - -"You?" In spite of the deadly chill at her heart she managed a little -laugh. "That is impossible." - -"Why?" - -"Fear one's oldest friend?" Already, with intuitive guile, she was -laying the foundations of her defense. Though he looked at her with -quick suspicion, she returned the innocent eyes nature has given woman -for her chief protection. "For you--a man of whom I have known only -good? But these men fill me with fear." - -Suspicion clouded, for a moment, his eyes. Passing, it left his gloom -lighter. Reassurance softened his tone. "Don't be afraid. They will -leave us at San Carlos." - -"But, Ramon, it is now noon. If we ride hard we cannot get there before -dark." She shuddered at the thought. - -"You would rather we were alone?" - -"A thousand times." She returned to his gaze the same innocent eyes--and -once more his gloom lightened a shade. - -"They are going to San Carlos anyway, so I can hardly send them away. -But I am armed, and there is no necessity for you to be afraid. -Also--you said that the jefe and priest at San Carlos would refuse to -marry us. If so, these are the men who can help me compel." - -"Ramon!" she spoke with dread earnestness, "look quickly behind you!" - -He did, and his quick frown told that he was not pleased. Dismounting -under a pretext of cinching up his saddle, he motioned for the two men -behind to pass ahead. - -"You saw!" she said, riding on. "You are armed, but they are four to -one; may take you unawares. I ask only one thing. Keep my feet bound, -take any other precaution you choose, but unfasten my hands and--lend me -your knife." - -"To use on _me_, if you get the chance?" - -"Not on you nor them!" Her steady look carried her meaning. - -His glance went forward to the revolutionists, who broke out, just then, -in uproarious laughter. - -"If I thought--" His hand went to his gun, then fell again. "No! they -are rough and coarse, but they know well that my father is Valles's -friend; that if they lifted a hand against me he would flay them alive. -Really, there is no danger, yet--if it will make you less fearful. But -you promise--to return it, the knife, at San Carlos?" - -"I promise." - -"I never knew you to lie, and I--" His face lost a little of its -hardness. "I would prefer to be gentle." - -Leaning over, he unbound her arms, then gave her the case-knife that -hung at his hip. "I suppose I'm a fool," he said as she slid it under -her belt inside her shirt. - -"Indeed you are not!" she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a -picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned -her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead -rope and go galloping back. - -The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse. -Also, with a woman's self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the -thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on -till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her -again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the -afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and -rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley, -thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them. -While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows -drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which -men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped, -suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with -apprehension. - -"The beasts are tired, seor, and this is a good place to camp," a voice -came back. - -"Oh, don't! Let us keep on!" she pleaded. - -"The animals are tired and must be fed," Ramon answered. "After they are -rested we will go on." - -As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a -wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been -possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a -match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her -down and seated her close to the fire. - -Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her -swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet--all -the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror. -Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from -his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her, -she broke out with a sudden scream: - -"Take care!" - -Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him, -pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee -leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started -toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his -pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the -wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and -pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white -shoulder and threw her to the ground. - -She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish -face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark -lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay -till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily. - -"No, no!" The snatch of the second man loosened the other's grip so that -she fell between them to the ground. "No, hombre, fair play between -compaeros. We shall gamble for her. The winner, if he choose, can then -sell his chance." - -The fighting, writhing mass at the other side of the fire now -straightened out, and as they rose, leaving Ramon securely bound on the -ground, the other two added their protests. "Si, hombre, we will not -stand for that. She goes first to the winner, according to our custom. -Bring her back to the fire." - -To avoid their handling, she rose and walked herself. As she came where -the light fell on Ramon she saw that he had managed to struggle up on -his knees. Now he began to speak, pleading, arguing, threatening his -captors with the displeasure of their general. - -But he drew only jokes and laughter. "Valles?" Ilarian answered him. "He -was defeated by the Carranzistas, and has trouble enough to care for -himself. The requisition el capitan showed was made out months before -the battle. Had the seor, your father, been fool enough to fill it, we -should have taken the horses for ourselves." With a shove that sent -Ramon flat on his back, he added: "Lie down, hombre! For these many -years thou and thy fathers laid the whip on our backs. While we starved -they fed fat and made free with our women. Now it is for thee to watch -us at the eating and loving." - -Laughing, he caught Lee again with a sudden snatch, was forcing her head -back, when Rafael again interfered. "Hands off, hombre, till the cards -say she is thine!" - -"Si, muddle not the waters for our drinking," the others added. "Let us -eat, then get to the cards." - -"The bride? She must not go hungry at the wedding feast." The fourth man -offered her food. "Here, little one." - -Weak and faint, she was backing away, but stopped with a sudden -inspiration. "If I may share it with him?" - -"Seguro." Rising, the man dragged Ramon a few feet away and set him up, -back propped against a tree. "Only take care he bite not thy pretty -fingers." - -Laughing, he went back to the fire, leaving her to sit and watch their -feeding of meat and _tortillas_, with gulps of liquor from clay bottles. - -Between her and them yawned a gap in time wider than the centuries that -intervened between herself and her wode-stained ancestors running wild -in the woods of Britain. Their low, sloping foreheads, unbalanced heads -with all the weight below; their loose mouths, brute jaws, dark skin, -nature's infallible stigma of inferiority, pronounced them half a -million years behind her, the last-bloom of a higher race. - -In her a solitary youth had intensified the delicate fancies, -sensitiveness, timorous imaginings, shrinkings, and retreats that mark a -young girl's first reachings toward love. And now--her idealizations -were suddenly confronted with the caveman's brutal practice. Sitting -there, she endured a thousand tortures. Worse than their coarse jests -were their glances. She shrank under them in hot shame; to escape them -took the food they offered, moved over and knelt beside Ramon. - -He was sitting, head hanging, but as, now, he looked up the firelight -showed the sweat in beads on his brow. "_You_ bring _me_ food?" His -accent carried more than a thousand self-reproaches. - -She did not attempt consolation she did not feel. "Pretend to eat." She -spoke in English. "They are watching, now. But soon they will -gamble"--she shuddered, thinking of the stake--"will see only the cards. -I still have your knife. When the time serves I will cut you loose. -Their rifles are piled behind us with the saddles. They may shoot you -down from the fire. But to reach them is our only chance." - -He lowered his head to hide a sudden flash of hope. "I will do anything, -take any chance. Greater punishment no man could suffer than I am -enduring. But it has made me think--realize my blind selfishness. I can -only ask your forgiveness." - -"Now, compaeros, the cards! Cut and shuffle for love!" A hoarse voice -came from the fire. - -While the first hand of a game she did not understand was being dealt -she watched the flying cards with dread interest; was still watching -when Ramon whispered: - -"I know that game. Five minutes will see it finished. By leaning a -little to one side, your body will cover my elbows. One cut will set -them free. I will still sit as I am, and when I whisper slash the riata -at my feet, then run! run into the depths of the woods. From here to San -Carlos is but a couple of leagues. Once there--with the jefe, you will -be safe." - -Ilarian's bellowing laugh rang out, just then, marking the close of the -first hand. "One to me, little one! Be not impatient. The luck is with -us. Soon we shall take a little pasear together." - -"If he wins again it will be over in a minute," Ramon whispered, while -the cards were fluttering around again. As the men bent over them, -thumbing their hands, he gave the word, "Now!" - -With two slashes she did it, one at his arms, the other at his feet. But -swift as was the movement, Rafael caught it in the tail of his eye. When -he turned she had dropped the knife in the grass and, though her heart -stood still, she resumed her pretense of feeding Ramon. As he watched -her the suspicion died out of the man's stare. He was just about to turn -again to the game when, as Ramon leaned forward to take the bite she was -offering, the severed _riata_ fell from his elbows. - -Given two men in a sudden juncture, the one with a definite plan wins -the lead. As the man jumped up, pointing, Ramon sprang, reached the -rifles, aimed and shot him down. The others looked up, startled, and as -he aimed again they pulled and fired. - -"Run, querida, run!" Ramon had called it, leaping up. As he collapsed on -the heap of saddles it issued again on his last dry whisper, "Run!" - -It had all happened while she was scrambling up. Naturally she turned -when Ramon fell and paused, horror-stricken. Not till the others were -almost upon her did she turn and run--too late. - -As, heart fluttering like that of a frightened quail, she ran for the -wood Ilarian seized her. Wildly beating the brutal, pock-marked face, -she writhed helplessly in his arms. - - - - -XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - - -During the rest of the day, while the train rolled and rattled and -jolted its slow way over the heated face of the desert, the -correspondents stewed with Bull in their own juices in semi-darkness. At -intervals there would come a stop. With the mad, blind selfishness of -panic the _brigada_ Gonzales had burned the watering-tanks as they -passed. So those that followed had to draw for the engine with buckets -from wells. Also there were occasional rails to be replaced which, with -equal selfishness, they tore up again the moment the train passed over. - -When the sun finally set in a fiery conflagration and dusk brought some -cess of the heat the conductor came in with tales of wholesale -desertions from the _brigada_ Gonzales, and shortly thereafter began the -dispersion of their own men. As they approached familiar country, or -tempted by tales of rich loot to be taken from near-by _haciendas_, they -began to drop off in fives, fifties, tens. Of those that had kept the -corrugated-iron roof beating like a drum with their stampings and -shufflings throughout the afternoon, there remained only a single -solitary figure when, after dark, Bull climbed up on top to air his -choked lungs. - -As he sat down on the running-board the figure looked up, then moved -closer. "It is thee, seor?" - -Peering, Bull made out the face. It was the sentry who had spoken to him -at Valles's door. As his mind associated what the "dean" had said with -the recognition he spoke quickly. "The seor Benson? Didst thou see--" - -"Si, seor." His head moved in the gloom. In the rambling _peon_ fashion -he ran on: "'The close mouth admits no flies,' said Matador. 'Keep thine -shut and we shall make thee a captain to-morrow.'" - -"A captain of what, seor? Of ghosts? For I was not deceived. He that -was sentry when they killed the German? He became a captain? Also they -that helped to roast the Spaniard till he told where he had hidden his -gold? And the three that killed el presidente for Huerta? Captains and -majors and colonels were they--of the dead. Si, among the _revueltosos_ -it is become a saying, 'Be not a captain till thou hast grown -lieutenant's spurs.' Si, I knew that I should be dead before the eve of -another day, so I fled my guard, seor, and came straight to thee." - -Though he was on fire to hear, Bull knew better than to bring his crude -thought into confusion by interruption. While the train ambled along he -let the narrative take its own course. - -"'A captain?' said Matador!" His eloquent shoulders quivered in the -gloom. "Better to be a live mozo at the tail of Don Miguel's horses in -Las Bocas." - -From a second pause he ran on: "He came to the cuartel general, the -seor Benson, while I was sentry of the second watch at the door of my -general. He was in there, Valles, with a girl. I had seen her go -in--such a girl! tall and straight, with eyes misty as twin nights, -teeth white as bleached bone, hair thick and black as the pine forests -that clothe the Sierra Madras! Santisimo, seor! such a girl as one may -have when he has combed a country and taken first pick of its women! I -could hear her laughing in there when the seor Benson came striding up -the stairs. - -"I saw, when he drew near, that his face was flushed, but there was no -smell of liquor upon him. 'Twas the red of the great anger that burned -in his veins, kept his head shaking like that of a tormented bull. When -I barred the way he looked at me with eyes that snapped like living -sparks, shoved me aside into the corner with one sweep of his arm, -before I could stop him had opened the door and walked in--walked in, -seor, through the anteroom into the private office where Valles was at -play with the girl! - -"El Matador himself had warned me, 'Let no man pass!' But when I had -picked myself out of the corner and followed in, there he stood in front -of Valles, who had dropped the girl and leaped to his feet. Surprise and -fear showed on his face--the fear of bullet, knife, and poison that dogs -him everywhere. But it changed at once to a grin--the terrible grin his -people fear. His glance at me said, 'Stay!' and as I stood, waiting in -fear and trembling, he spoke with a voice that cut like a knife. - -"'It is my amigo, the seor Benson.' - -"Seor, I have seen his generals tremble when he spoke like that. Even -el Matador, tiger that he is, would slink before him like a whipped cat. -For all the pesos in all the world I would not have taken his place. Yet -that great Englishman stood before him solid and square as a stone; -answered with a voice of a hacendado in speech with a _peon_. - -"'I came to tell you, Valles'--just like that he spoke, seor, without -even a 'my general'--'I came to tell you that I do not take my answers -from secretaries. The offer I made you this morning was fair and square -and good business for both of us. It deserved more than a threat of -'requisitions.' You'll never get my horses that way--if I have to cut -their throats. If you want them, say so--yes or no.' - -"He got it, the 'no,' quick and hard. Then the great anger that was in -him burst forth like a river in flood. Like bear and tiger they -quarreled, the seor threatening Valles with the power and vengeance of -his government, Valles snarling defiance, their passions feeding each -other as brands burn together in a fire. - -"One other thing, and you will have a picture of it, seor--the two at -their furious talk, the girl against the wall behind Valles, one hand -held out, fear in her great eyes, and a fourth; for as they wrangled -there came a stir behind me. So quietly that I, whom he touched in -passing, did not hear, el Matador came into the room. One second he -stood, watching them from narrow eyes, then, slowly and quietly as a -snake slipping through grass, he drew up behind the seor. I have shot -men in this war. At home in Las Bocas I have drawn the knife in passion. -But the cold glittering of his eyes, slow snake crawl, chilled the blood -of me. - -"He had gained knifing distance when the seor roared in disgust. 'Bah! -Why do I waste words on a _peon_? My general, is it? I have had such -generals whipped on my place! General? A bandit _peon_ who steals horses -in place of the chickens with which he began his thieveries!' - -"'Bandit _peon_? Stealer of chickens?' This, seor, to Valles that had -killed a hundred men with his own hand before the wars ever began? The -yellow eyes of him seemed to leap out of his face. At the sight of him, -frothing like a mad tiger in lust to kill, the girl screamed, hiding her -face! At his belt hung pearl-jeweled pistols, the best of their kind. -But with the instinct of his old trade the hand of the butcher flew to -his knife. - -"They say that the seor tried to kill him. It is a lie! Even when the -knife flashed in his eyes he still stood at his distance, shaking his -big fist, growling his threats, angry but unafraid; so big, strong, -masterful, that Valles, even in his fury, hesitated. But not el Matador! -Looking back as she ran out of the room, the girl saw as I saw; screamed -aloud as the knife passed, once! twice! with a hiss and 'heigh! -splitting the backbone, piercing the heart." - -With that strong sense of the dramatic which makes the _peon_ a born -story-teller he stopped. For a moment the flash of a match lifted the -brown, hard face from the gloom under a tattered _sombrero_, lighting -the faded red of his blanket serape. Then they faded again into a dim, -huddled figure that swayed with the rack and swing of the cars. - -Bull had unconsciously suspended his breath. Now it expired in a sigh. -"His disposal. Know you aught of that?" - -The shrug quivered again in the darkness. "There is little more that I -saw. Across the body el Matador looked at me, and I chilled with the -sure knowledge that I should never see my nias again. He even stepped, -then Valles spoke. - -"'This is a good hombre. He will help thee with--that!' He followed the -girl into the next room. - -"Between us, el Matador and I, we rolled the seor in serapes, binding -them with cords so that the face should not be seen by them that carried -him out to the secret place; and it was then that he spoke of my -captaincy. - -"'Go now to thy quarters, seor.' He clapped me on both shoulders. 'And -dream of the stars the morning sun will see flashing here.' - -"But lest I sleep too well, seor, I came from the cuartel here." - -For a full minute, while Bull chewed the bitter cud of remorse, the cars -racked on through the night. Then he spoke. "There is one in El Oro, the -consul Ingles, that would have given many pesos--not the currency of -Valles, but real pesos of silver and gold--for thee to set thy name to -this!" - -"Si!" His cigarette glowed in the midst of a shrug. "Of what use pesos, -even silver and gold, when the sight is darkened and the mouth shut? -When one may no longer see the nias at play, watch the dancing of -girls? When the taste of good food is gone from the mouth, the feel of -warm liquor from the throat? He that betrays Valles will have no more -use of these." - -"But in El Paso," Bull urged, "one would be beyond the reach of his -hand. There, also, is a consul Ingles." - -"One's pais? The rise and set of sun across the desert beyond Las Bocas; -the chatter of the women at their washing by the stream; the soft -laughter of girls; one's children watching at dusk for the return--these -are not to be bought with pesos. One's pais is one's pais. To it one -always returns." - -"Si," Bull acknowledged the call, the most powerful in the feeling of a -Mexican. "But from El Paso one could go by the ferrocarril Americano. In -one day he could cross from El Paso to Nogales, thence south to Las -Bocas and live in plenty beyond the reach of Valles. And one's woman and -nias--would smile the sweeter at the sight of a bulging pocket." - -The cigarette glowed again, this time without the shrug. "There is -something in that. Si, seor, I will do it!--go to the consul Ingles in -El Paso." - -Just then the Chinaman called for Bull to come down to supper. He was -not hungry, but he had food handed up for the man, who, after eating it, -rolled up in his serape and went to sleep. Then, while he snored and the -train racked slowly along the chain of fires, each a station that lay -like red beads on the desert's dark breast, Bull lay suffering agonies -of shame and remorse that grew more vivid as the miles lessened between -him and home. - -It was long after midnight before he fell into troubled sleep. When he -woke, at gray dawn, the revolutionist was gone. - -"Homesick and scared out!" Bull shrugged--and what did it matter? That -which was done was done! - -Nor was he the only deserter. All through the night the train had -dribbled away its evil freight in trickles that would spread through the -land till it was inundated with a flood of carnage, robbery, rape. Of -the clustering brown swarm on the roof there remained only a few dozens -scattered in heavy sleep throughout the train's length. - -Across the brightening east the mountains now laid a familiar pattern. -Beyond--the _patio_ and compound of Los Arboles were lying still and -gray under the dawn. Bull saw, with the distinctness of vision, the -sheet across Lee's doorway quiver under the breath of dawn. Then it -faded, gave place to the Mills _rancho_, equally still, equally silent; -its warm gold walls pale gray, the clustering bougainvilleas dark as -clotted blood. - -That feeling analogous to the chill of death which envelops a sleeping -house held him in thrall. While he gazed, there appeared on the veranda -the familiar vision. But he shut it out, tightly closing the eyes of his -mind. He turned his face to a dark dot, walls of the burned station, -that appeared to be moving toward him across the desert's grays. -Climbing down over the end, he passed through the Chinaman's kitchen -into the car. - -It was still dusk in there, but he could hear the deep breathing of -correspondents, sleeping heavily after the exhaustion of the hot night. -Quietly he gathered his belongings, had shoved open the door -sufficiently to pass out, when a whisper came from behind: - -"Adios, Diogenes!" - -Turning, he saw the correspondent leaning out of his bunk. - -"Don't take that little slip too seriously, old man," he whispered as -they shook hands. "Try again. If it wasn't for this"--he tapped his -knee--"I'd have helped you to get out your girl. But you'll make it all -right. Only don't dally. There's going to be hell to pay." - -The engine was whistling for the station. Though it did not stop, Bull -jumped and, if a bit shaken, landed unhurt. He was watching the train -recede, his hand still tingling, heart warmed by the strong pressure of -his friend's hand, when his name was called. - -"It is you, seor Perrin?" - -Drowsy and heavy-eyed from lost sleep, the Mexican agent stood in the -doorway of his box-car station. Anxiety and fear shadowed his face. - -"Wicked times, seor. Up and down the line they are robbing and -murdering, Valles's defeated soldados. Many gringos have been slain. -Early in the night a company of fifty dropped off here and are gone, mad -with hate, to loot the gringo haciendas." - -Appalled, Bull stared at the distant mountains. - - - - -XXXIV: ---------------------? - - -Left alone on the trail, Gordon suffered his own agonies--the poignant -anguishes of youth unmitigated by the fatalism or philosophy of -experience. Time and again his spirit rose in furious rebellion against -the frightful injustice of fate. Eyes starting with the strain, sweat -pouring from his brow, he rolled in successive paroxysms, vainly -striving to burst his bonds--only to subside each time into a coma of -utter despair. Then, as the very violence of his exertions cleared the -blood from his brain, he did that which an older head would have done at -first--lay still and began to think. - -How to get loose! There must be some way! He had once seen a prisoner in -a "movie" burn off his bonds with a fire of hay started by the coals -from his pipe. But if it were possible--outside of a "movie"--where were -the hay and pipe? An attempt to cut the _riata_ by abrasion on a stone -behind him produced only a sore on his wrists. Yet there must be some -way! If he could only loosen them by flexing and reflexing his muscles! -He stopped thinking, at this point, and lay staring downhill. - -His struggles had carried him to within a few feet of the dead -revolutionist. Before leaving, his followers had looted the body of its -guns, bandolier of cartridges, but had left the belt. Under the body -Gordon now caught a glimpse of his knife. - -To roll downhill was simple. With his butting shoulders, it was no trick -to move the body till the knife came up into position where he could -draw it with his teeth. But thereafter--a knife in the teeth could not -be used to free hands bound behind one's back! - -He looked about him. The problem was simple. If the knife could be held -firmly so that he could turn and rub the wrist-cords against the edge. -Presently his eye lit on the stump of a _palo verde_ that had been -bruised and split off by the slip of some passing beast. Working his way -over to it, he bent and carefully placed the horn handle in the split, -edge up, point resting at an angle of forty-five on the ground. Then, -shuffling around, he felt delicately till the razor edge came squarely -between his wrists. Very lightly, in mortal dread of a miscarriage, he -sawed, sawed, sawed until his hands suddenly split apart. One slash at -his ankles and he was upon his feet. - -His first thought was to run, wildly, madly, after Lee. Then his usual -good judgment resumed command. The revolutionists were mounted and had -an hour's start! He must have a horse! And with the thought there rose a -mental picture of the _arriero_ they had seen at the _fonda_. - -A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from -the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee -had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to -help. - -He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now -the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he -came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose -out of the caon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the -_arriero's_ sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling -up out on the level. - -The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top -speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the _arriero_ only one -thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his -rifle across the animal's back showed how he came to be still riding the -trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and "requisitions." -As he had seen Lee pass the _fonda_ with Gordon, one word, -"revolutionists," fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got -only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his -clucks of commiseration. - -"Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied -remedies to my own nias when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will -cry her eyes out over this!" - -Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the -hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule -crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of -serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his -questions with frightful oaths. - -"How many were they, seor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That -leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all -with one flick of my knife! Take thou this." - -It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own -riding-mule, he ran on: - -"You shall ride her, seor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats -of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding. -But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse's two. An -hour's start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in -five, or less if they camp at dark." - -He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol -cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back -down the ravine to the lush grass by the _fonda_, where old Antonio -would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle -across his arm, saddle _machete_ and knife close to his hand, black eyes -glittering under his _sombrero_, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready -for the start. - -Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did -Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made -up in utility. Justifying its owner's boast, it navigated steeps, slid -down into caons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the -opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking -pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free -wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds, -now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again -hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would -easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained -steadily upon the first. - -Fast as the little beasts traveled, however, their pace appeared like an -insect's crawl when measured by Gordon's fears. Action, at first, -brought relief. Later he fell again a prey to anguish. The threat of the -revolutionists filled him with horror through which, as in a dreadful -nightmare, he saw Lee struggling frantically. Of Ramon he never even -thought. It was always the men. Yet he managed to hold himself in hand; -refrained from lashing the mule into the furious pace that would, while -killing it, have still lagged far behind his fears. - -And he had always at his side the _arriero_, with his repeated, "Do not -trouble, seor; they will keep traveling till dark!" to cheer him. - -The latter's sharp glance it was that picked out the sign where the -revolutionists had swung on to the San Carlos trail. His hawk eyes -found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the -opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn -veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists' -fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly, -it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them, -after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently -shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light -of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside -Ramon. - -"One to me, little one," Ilarian's bellow just then rang out. "Be not -impatient. Soon we shall take a little pasear together." - -At the sight of Ramon, the _arriero's_ brows had gone up under the roots -of his hair, for, had he wished it, Gordon's Spanish would not have -permitted a full explanation. Now he touched Gordon, pointing. Nodding, -he nipped off a few leaves, then leveled the long Colt, aiming at the -nearest man. A glance to his right showed him the _arriero_ slowly -shoving his rifle-barrel through the leaves. Then, turning again to his -aim, he was just in time to see Lee slash Ramon's bonds. - -The next instant the latter sprang for the rifles. Lee was up and -standing almost in line with the man he had covered. He dared not shoot, -and in the next five seconds, before they could readjust themselves to -the rapid change, the situation had flashed into its final stage--Ramon -had fallen with one revolutionist; the others were rushing at Lee across -the firelit space. - -By that time Gordon had risen. As, standing, he fired from the edge of -the wood a second man fell forward upon his face. The _arriero's_ rifle -cracked sharply, and there remained only Ilarian. Swinging with Lee, -still in his arms, he faced Gordon charging across the firelit space. - -Usually Gordon could be depended upon to keep his head. But Lee's bitter -cry, the sight of her helplessness, combined with the awful strain of -the afternoon, produced in him a berserker rage. Teeth bared in a snarl, -his gun completely forgotten, he seized Ilarian with his naked hands -just as he dropped Lee; threw him with such violence that his feet rose -in the air and he struck shoulders first on the ground. Then, without -even a second glance, he lifted and gathered Lee in his arms. - -Fortunately, the _arriero_ not only kept his wits, but was working them -overtime. As, rolling over, Ilarian pulled and pointed his gun the -_arriero's_ second bullet plumped between his shoulders. - -It is doubtful whether Gordon heard the shot. His face in Lee's hair, -hers hidden in his breast, they remained without looking around even -when the _arriero_ spoke. - -"Warm work, seor!" - -Receiving no answer, he grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose. -"They are all that way--at first," he confided in the stars. "But wait -till the priest ties them so that neither can wriggle without the other. -Wait!" - -A cough also passing unnoticed, he walked over and knelt beside Ramon. -With a heavy shake of the head, he passed to the revolutionists. Three -were dead, but, though unconscious, Ilarian still breathed stertorously. - -"The worse for thee, amigo," the _arriero_ addressed him. "The old seor -Icarza will pay well to do thy killing with his own hands. By sunrise, -maana, I should have thee to him, and then"--he gave a little sinister -nod at the dead--"and then thou wilt be envying these." - -A glance at the lovers having shown them to be, to all intents and -purposes, still alone under the stars, he went off, shaking his head, to -bring up the mules. "Santa Maria Marisima! to think that I, also, was -once so foolish!" - -On his return he gathered up the arms, belts, knives, bandoliers of -cartridges, guns--it has to be written, also stripping the khaki coats -and riding-boots from the dead. "They will serve thee no more after the -old seor finishes," he addressed the unconscious Ilarian, as he tore -off his. - -While he was packing his loot in an orderly and methodical manner on the -mules a murmur of talk rose behind him. But as it was couched in English -he was saved from further reflections. - -"Oh--_dear!_" Lee's exclamations, partially smothered in a rough and -dirty shirt, still conveyed a curious mixture of confidence and fear, -regret, relief, sorrow, and happiness, hope and doubt. "Oh--_dear!_ I -used to be so independent and fearless. Now--I feel so weak." - -"Time you did." A hug mitigated the severity of the comment. "After this -perhaps you will let me do a little of your thinking?" - -"For a while." The shirt choked a little, perverse laugh. "Till I get -over it." - -"Very well, we are going on, right now, to be married in San Carlos." - -"Oh, but--" - -"No 'buts.' We'll take no more chances." - -She hesitated and--gave in. "Oh, isn't it nice to have some one decide -for you?" - -Had the _arriero_ been consulted he could have told a tale. But Gordon -quite believed it. He was raising her face to his when her eyes -distended with a sudden sorrow. - -"Oh, poor Ramon! Whatever are we thinking of?" - -Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the _arriero_ had -finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent -her back into Gordon's arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the -_arriero_ took affairs into his own capable hands. - -"I shall take him home to the old seor, with this wicked one, and tell -him that he died in defense of thee." - -With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better. -"They will never--know," she sobbed, more quietly. "And--at the end--he -was sorry." - - - - -XXXV: WHY? - - -While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the -chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky -that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills. - -"The bandits moved toward the seor Lovell's." He answered. "Praise the -saints! the seoritas are both in El Paso." - -"Then they'll go straight on to Mary's!" The last vestige of color -drained from Bull's face. - -Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle -of foul humanity dribbling down upon the _rancho_. He saw Mary Mills on -the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and -trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating -the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty -dribble swept around her and the child. - -He turned to the agent. "My horse? Did they get him?" - -"No, seor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral." He -pointed eastward. "Come!" - -Half an hour later the _mozo_ shoved a shock head out of the chaparral -in answer to the agent's whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was -on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare -of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed -through his mind. - -In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and -Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden -agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. -But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he -would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end. -At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that -afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a -mountain ahead. - -He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson -to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line -with the widow's _rancho_ his fears crystallized around its slender -column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched -till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in -bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast. - - -Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always -timed Bull's arrival at the _rancho_ with the lowering of the sun. As he -urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow -lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the -ominous cloud had died on the mountain's high shoulder; but, more -ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though -prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the -place. - -The externals were the same--crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny -pastures. At this hour the widow's cattle were usually to be seen -forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now--in all the -wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, -lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills. - -The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the -evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with -purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that -stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that -shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, -Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle -and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then -a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer. - -A wild rush of hope swept his being--to die the next moment when, -rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio's woman. On her knees, hands raised -in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see -or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder. - -She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked -beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull's face. Though -she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that -follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only -the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half -vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections -of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at -him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a -passion of tears. - -At any other time Bull's dominant racial contempt would have caused him -to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his -sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion. - -"Aie!... Aie!" Soon she began to speak. "Aie! the poor seora ... and -the nia ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! -Aie! where were they?" - -A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited -with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man -on the train, to tell the tale in her own way. - -"They came in from all sides, seor." Her hands swept the round of the -hills. "Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, -escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The seora -was at breakfast with the nia in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came -running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White -as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. -But she shook it off, seor, went forward to meet them with smiles and -greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while -she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to -them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of -pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its -paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating -them off with her smiles. - -"'Enter, seores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.' -Thus she spoke them. - -"Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of -beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it -reeked with their evil presence. - -"At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the -sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in -place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so -their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, -soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad -talk, they proceeded to worse--entered her bedroom and the child's, -broke open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing. - -"For that she did not care--not for anything, could she but keep the -child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her -with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon -them. - -"'Get Betty away!' she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to -that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard. - -"Still she had hope--that, being fed and flattered and pleased with -their plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and -went among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and -pinches, she still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with -smiling reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from -her hand, and then--and then--how shall one tell it? - -"They demanded that the seorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At -first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her -'Linda' and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At -last one beast pulled her on to his knee. - -"To me, in the kitchen, came the child's scream and the seora's bitter -cry. 'For the sake of your mothers, seores!' followed by the crash of -furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor. - -"At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at -the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One! -Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went -down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the -ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I -gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward -upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams -of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of -God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?" - -Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she -cowered at Bull's feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame. - -"Go on!" He stooped and shook her violently. "Go on!" - -She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. "I was wrong, seor. -One mercy was granted--death! They murdered them ... murdered them! -Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them--the innocent -woman, sweet child!" - -"Yet you--escaped?" - -"Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was -almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, -they were gone--gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after -they have slain the white heifer of the plains." - -Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his -arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, -blind struggle filled his mind. - -The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in -a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this -horror? "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to -the fourth generation," says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills's -blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and -farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement? -And she--who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout -her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul? -Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration? - -Not in these clear terms did Bull's thought run. Blind anguish kept him -straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he -felt--felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any -doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it. - -While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his -consciousness a sound that rose above the woman's sobbing--the dry -murmur of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. -They were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone -forever beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! -Surely they were gone! Yet--the corruption of the tomb, mold of the -grave, would never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames -they had passed into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains -that he was, born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took -comfort in the thought. - -Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in -upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw -through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills's -face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a -timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then--with deep -thankfulness he realized it--now she would never know! never know how -far he had fallen below his resolves. - -Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did -enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, -was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own -sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they -were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, -he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary -way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his -breast the thought--now she would never know! - -From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, "Why?" He -had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is -merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this -terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in -their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him. -His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds -than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had -utterly failed in its duties to its own--the government that, with the -purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and -loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric -people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies. - -Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward. -Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by -diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern -nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged--across the -Rio Grande. - -"You done it!" His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the -force of his indictment. "Yes, _you_ done it!" - -The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his -attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still -forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he -knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to -supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from -sharing. - -When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the -sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains--and -revenge. - - - - -XXXVI: "IN THE MIDST OF LIFE--" - - -Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night -that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam -of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined -days before obscured by gathering dangers. - -Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his -arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in -their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos -nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the -railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it -had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed -like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a -picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise -counsel of Lee's good friends, the _jefe_ and priest, Gordon had -prevailed. - -"These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own," the -priest had advised. "Los Arboles needs a man's hardness." - -To which the _jefe_ had added his little joke, "Managing thee, nia, -will not be his lightest work." - -No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, -taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican -law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the -wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would -have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church -are on Cupid's side--well, there is no country on earth where his -business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that -shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and -Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, -according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures. - -Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl's -expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon's notice. -Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder. - -"I was thinking of the girl I left down there." She expressed the -feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they -have left their girlhood. "She meant well, but--was _so_ foolish. I was -just wondering if--if--" - -"Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton." He helped her out. "If -she isn't the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of -heaven"--he paused, grinning--"and hell--" - -"You didn't make _me_ suffer, of course!" She flashed up in quite the -old manner. "The way you carried on with that _dreadful_ girl. But there -goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning. -Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to. -Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose -her temper and--What are you laughing at? Don't you _want_ me to -reform?" - -"There! there!" Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second -laugh. "If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I'd--I'd -march you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the -service backward." Quite illogically he went on: "I, too, had a serious -hour with myself. I made up my mind--" - -He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. "Not -to change? Don't dare to say it!" - -Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change -is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion. - -"You won't, will you?" - -He assured her, of course, that he wouldn't--and believed it, no doubt. -So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to -remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they -turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went -with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid -underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and -valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, -midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the -mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on -a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter. - -In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by -sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining -along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in -many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It -looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon's beast dropped -hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still -longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes -Pedro's _jacal_ in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of -ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the _camisa_ and -_calzones_ of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old -fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a -welcoming grin. - -"He's really part of the scenery"--Lee communed aloud with -herself--"almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay. -But, no!" She shook her head. "I don't want any human being here but -ourselves. Oh, I know! We'll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to -Sliver and Jake." - -Neither would she--after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any -commerce with the _jacal_. "It isn't that it's dirty. Old Pedro is as -clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his -housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We'll camp by the stream at the -far end of the valley." - -She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated -a savory stew of _frijoles_ which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it -to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon -commandeered an old shot-gun. - -"What for?" Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his -eye proved him at one with her in spirit. "To kill the meat for our -first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of -any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in -this neck of the woods." - -"That will be fine!" Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not -clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. "The wood at the -end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They're just lovely broiled -over hot coals." - -"Broiled over hot coals?" he teased her. "Wild doves, the symbol of -love? What desecration!" - -"I don't care," she pouted. "One has to eat--and they're awfully good." - -Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down -a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went -after wild pigeon without compunction. - -After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath. - -It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak -had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to -gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches. -First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance -around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a -natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with -a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim. - -"Your turn, Dirty Man," she rallied him. "Go and take your bath." - -When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow -wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and -served the _frijoles_ on golden husks of corn from Pedro's garden. -Nature supplied the other utensils--fingers for forks, their sharp young -teeth for knives, bits of _tortilla_ to scoop up the stew. Both in its -preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first -meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a -dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all -sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to -help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down. - -"Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is _my_ work. You can -watch and smoke." - -Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a -cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation. - -"I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven't tried." The -confession was nullified by a little sigh. "But it always makes me sick. -You don't know how I envy Maria and Teresa!" Lighting it, she took a -couple of small puffs, then passed it on. "I always tried to get Bull -and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own -quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father's den -and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he -went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into -his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so -tobaccery and strong and--_manny_. It gave me the oddest sense of -comfort and protection." - -Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the -attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, -rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few -utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a -squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of -the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really -clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or -relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most -powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so -entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his -eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing -her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he -rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands. - -She came on a little run and thereafter--it was as she had wished it in -her girl's dreams--as far as dawn and dark from the conventional -marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed--the law older than -theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. -In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, -in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink -cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening -song of the insects, its sanctions were recited. - -In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all -things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a -cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, -supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature -to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of -pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the _blas_ modern -viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his -roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of -young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may -never know; and--your real philosopher will admit it--most divinely in -accord with the scheme of things. - -Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, -had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, -her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson -lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars -wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening -vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from -the rest of the world. - - -Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! -"In the midst of one we are in the other," and the friendly night that -wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar -of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles -whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, -incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon -dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It -also lit the march of Gonzales's bandits across the desert. - -Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the -stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary -splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face -and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the -preparation of their breakfast. - -In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on, -of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their -second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the -gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies. -Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee's -knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond -the rim. - -"Look!" - -Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out: -"It's the Millses' beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses! -Quick!" - - - - -XXXVII: THE THREE--AGAIN - - -Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering -knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He -returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she -looked up at his touch. - -"You heard them talking before--before--" - -"Si, seor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them -speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell -them at the border." - -Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the -ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a -voice called out, "Ole, seor!" - -Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes, -weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved -mistress--to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame. -From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father -of the woman. - -"I had thought thee one of those wicked ones." The old fellow slapped -the butt of an old musket. "Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but -by the mercy of God I waited. Si, seor, I saw them go. After I sent up -the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always -the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted -them when they passed; a full score, seor, and more, on their way by -the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the nia, seor? They -did not harm--" - -He stopped, halted by Bull's look, then cried aloud while the tears -coursed down his wrinkled face. "The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and -I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of -the best! I would go after them, seor, those wicked ones; but of what -use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The -biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take -thou my horse." - -Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the -smoldering beacon on the mountain's shoulder before daylight failed. -Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued -to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson -wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull -felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint -stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the -fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to -intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it -that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull -sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary -systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That -pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it, -this peace that quieted his troubled spirit. - -He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt -and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in -his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief. -He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a -clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the -sage. - - -Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had -been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough -to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained -the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of -the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee's note the preceding evening, -Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment's thought he voted -down Sliver's proposal to ride down for Gordon. - -"He'd come in handy. Kin shoot some an' his nerve's all right. But you -jes' kedn't shut her out. Better to leave them where she's safe." - -"That's right," Sliver had added. "An' it 'u'd shore be a shame to break -up their honeymoon." - -Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake -and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on -Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman's -yell issued simultaneously from their throats. - -"Why, you dolgorned old son of a--" Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he -saw Bull's face. "Why, hombre! What--" - -Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark -valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in -those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that -which is denied to speech--the soul agony of a strong man. Given that -blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest. - -"Murdered!... Mother and child!... Burned ... with the house!" - -To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in -readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the -news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the -darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining -a fray in his _riata_. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city -person would have been greatly shocked. - -"The poor damn kid!" - -"Hell, ain't it?" Jake's tone was quite indifferent. - -But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking -lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold, -snake sparkle in Jake's bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient. - -"They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail." After a long -silence he answered Jake's question concerning the raiders. "Must be -nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an'--" - -"They ain't there." Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. "They're--" -He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs. -Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon. - -Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had -weighed down the girl's spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot--for -the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him, -hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look. - -"Why--what--" Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, -their inaction, told all before he spoke. "Gone!--both!--burned with the -house!" Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to -Gordon. Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about -again and ran to Bull. - -"Oh, you poor, _poor_ man!" - -Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee -while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull -gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake -led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to -hear when she began to sob out a broken confession. - -"Oh, I feel--so wicked. While all this--was happening--I--I was--getting -married!" - -"Married?" - -"Yes--to Gordon." She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of -all that had happened since his departure--her abduction, Ramon's death, -Gordon's ultimatum. "He begged so hard--and the padre and the jefe -said--that I ought--and I wanted to, myself--and we were so happy -until--we saw the smoke. And now I--I feel like a criminal." - -"Then you needn't." He patted her shoulder. "The jefe was right. Never -again will you have more need of a man's strength." - -"But? At this time? While--" - -"How were you to know? An' remember how hard _she_ worked and wished to -bring this very thing about. 'Twould have filled her with joy to know -that it had come to pass. 'Deed, Missy, she does know an' is glad at -this very moment." With that mixture of rude faith and humility that -made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: "Sure she knows an' -some day she'll tell you so herself. 'Twon't be for me to hear it. My -kind don't go where she is. But you will, an', mark me, the first thing -she'll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage." - -"Oh, if I thought she would!" - -"Be certain of it, child." The last lights had now gone out on the -highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited -many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed. - -While he talked Lee's sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished. -"That makes me feel better. And _you_? You, too, think I did right?" - -She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. "For what d'you -s'pose I brought him here?" - -"Not to marry _me_?" She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment, -her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl -who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from -the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. "Oh, if I'd -only known it!" She added, with loving illogic, "I'm _so_ glad that I -didn't." - -"That's fine." He patted her head. "It will be easier, now, if you have -to live for a while in the States." - -"_The States?_" she repeated. - -In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson's death--she had enough to -bear--he described the scattering of Valles's army, concluding, "They're -wild against Americans." He nodded at the fire. "The men that did this -are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there." - -"My poor people!" she broke out, in sudden distress. "Gordon! Come -here!" When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried -it again: "Our poor, poor people! They are on their way--the raiders! To -Arboles! We must go--at once!" - -"Too late!" Bull spoke heavily. "Even an aeroplane couldn't get us there -in time." After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others -recent events, he went on: "I came back to bring you and Mary and the -child out. For them it's too late, but you must go at once--you an' your -husband an' Sliver an' Jake." - -"And you?" Lee questioned. - -"I'm going on." The statement in its simplicity carried more -significance than the wildest vow of revenge. - -"Alone?" Lee again demanded. "And you think we'd go slinking home to the -States and leave you to face that band yourself?" - -"It's my quarrel, my work." His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the -darkness. "You are young and have your husband. Your future is all -ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With -Sliver an' Jake to guard you--" - -But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver's voice rose in the -darkness. "An' there's nothing I'd like better 'n to look after -Lady-girl. But I ain't so much of a fool that I don't know the store she -sets by you, Bull, that's been father an' mother to her, now, for nigh -on a year. So it don't go that-a-way. It's me for Arboles while you-all -hit with them for the States." - -"Good enough!" Jake's acid tones trembled through the gloom. "With a -small amendment. You're that young an' foolish, Sliver, it 'u'd be a -shame to cut you off--worse 'n the green grass that goes to the oven. So -it stan's like this--you-all go back; I go on." - -"No, you don't." Gordon's quiet voice interrupted. "At any other time -I'd feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I -could never look my wife"--he felt her hand steal up into his--"I could -never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get -out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border--" - -"They won't--till we all go," Lee broke in. "It's easy to see that -you've all made up your minds to stay--and you'll need me to hold the -horses. We'd better be getting on." - -"But, Missy--" Bull began. - -But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse's hoofs returned -unmistakable answer. - - - - -XXXVIII: FIRE - - -Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee's right, but when the trail -permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded -his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the -mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of -creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail, -the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above -Antonio's _fonda_ when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an -exclamation. - -Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow -which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and -swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them -to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon -it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the -flames roaring through the Arboles _patio_, bursting from doors and -windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows -of adobes. - -"My poor people!" Lee sat her horse and gazed. - -The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality -strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up -in flames--her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects -and _hacienda_ stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of -old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately -connected with her father's memory. Surely a great loss! but if it -flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming -indignation--not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being -destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice, -ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand -such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with -its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver's voice broke in the darkness -behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock. - -"Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain't burn them yard-thick walls." - -"An' we left word for the _ancianos_ to drive the stock into the -mountains," Jake added. "Must ha' b'en cl'ar away long before they got -there." - -"It isn't that." She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper. -"My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they -escaped." As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added: -"There's only one thing left. We must--" - -Bull's heavy voice completed it for her,--"catch 'em before daylight." - -While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose -above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march -the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one -thing--they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock of -_aguardiente_! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep. -And then-- - -His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the -change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black -bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the -yellow walls of the _fonda_. It also restored a little color into the -bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children, -herded together like sheep around its blaze. - -When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy, -apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their -babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a _peon_ who -had run in from Lovell's _rancho_; second, that the _ancianos_ had -driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle -among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust -forward to tell his tale. - -He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with -that _peon_ indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of -raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep. -Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic -stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them -he recognized a _peon_ who had run away to the wars after being whipped -for some grossness by the seor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard -them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast -over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the -renegade's expressions of reassurance. - -"Si, seores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los -Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded -stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for -safe-keeping, 'twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret -pasture in the great Bowl." - -Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed -the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a -vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the -precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be -caught in the same way? Jake's remark expressed their joint conclusion. - -"It 'u'd be a _cinch_!" - -"Horses all tired out now, too," Sliver added. "If anythin' went wrong, -we'd have no getaway. Not that I'd care, but we kain't take no chances -with Lady-girl." - -Bull's word decided. He made his dispositions, sent the youth to sleep -out on the plains and bring early warning of the raiders' movements; -posted other sentries at intervals. Finally, he saw first to the horses, -that they were watered and fed and groomed; then to the serving of a -meal. - -He ate, but even his steady, methodical munching bespoke purpose, the -conserving of strength for his ends. As he sat, after the meal, gazing -into the fire, even Lee failed to discern much difference from his usual -self. But after the others, refugees and all, lay wrapped in their -serapes, dim, muffled figures under the red light of half a dozen fires, -he still sat, a somber figure in black outline against the glow. - -After Lee had cried herself to sleep he sat on. At midnight her -awakening eyes showed him still there. When she awoke again he was -gone--on the round of sentries. He returned before she fell asleep again -and sat on, staring into the fire, an ominous figure fraught with -danger. - - - - -XXXIX: "VENGEANCE IS MINE" - - -From the "hog's back" where Sliver had accidentally discovered Felicia -and the _fonda_, Lee, Gordon, and the Three watched a yellow dust cloud -rolling slowly across the plains. The occasional silver flash that -stabbed it through as the sun struck a saber or bayonet told that it -enveloped the raiders. Three hours ago Sliver had come galloping in from -a reconnaissance with the news of their advance. Instantly the refugees -had fled like frightened quail into the secret places of the hills. -After burying various bottles that contained the liquid abominations -wherewith he burned out the stomachs of his customers, Antonio had -followed. So for two hours the ravine had been untenanted. - -Even after the watchers sighted the dust, an hour passed before it -disappeared in the mouth of the ravine; for, as their few horses were -loaded down with loot, the raiders moved slowly. Another half-hour -dragged by before they appeared, filing like ragged ants up the path -along the silver stream. Sighting the _fonda_, they stopped, hastily -took cover behind some bushes, and held a hurried consultation. When the -file split and began to work its way through the chaparral on each side -of the ravine Jake interpreted the manoeuver. - -"Nobody home, amigos. Fooled this time." - -A hoarse yell presently confirmed his diagnosis. Its note changed almost -immediately to rage and disappointment, and presently a thin coil of -smoke issued from the doorway, followed by a bright flash of flame as -the fire licked up the dry thatch of the _ramada_. Like infuriated ants -the raiders ran next to fire the stables. They were within easy -rifle-shot and Sliver was drawing an experimental bead when Jake knocked -up his rifle. - -"One shot," he replied, to Sliver's grumble, "an' they'll go like a -flock of quail into the chaparral." - -Happening to glance at Bull just then, he nudged Sliver to look. - -On his knees, peering through a bush, the man looked for all the world -like some great animal, bear or black tiger, crouching for its prey. -Under dark brows, his coal eyes burned. Like some huge dog held in -leash, slow shivers coursed through his frame. Always the two had -recognized in him depths of feeling beyond them. The slow shake of the -head that passed between them expressed consciousness of a hurt beyond -their plumbing. They looked quickly away as Bull turned toward them. - -"Time to be moving. They'll be coming presently." - - -An hour later saw them all placed--Gordon in the chaparral at the top of -the trail; Bull, Sliver, and Jake at intervals of quarter of a mile down -the zigzag trail. - -"No shooting as they go down," Bull cautioned them. "Coming back, -they'll be among the horses without a chance to turn." - -The arrangement, while wise, was not altogether to Sliver's taste; he -grumbled to Jake as they moved on down to their places: "Fat chance for -us. He'll pick half of 'em off going up between him and Gordon, then -turn and plug the others. Any maverick that gets by to us will be that -riddled a bullet 'ull slip through him without t'eching." - -"Ain't it coming to him?" Jake scornfully questioned. "He's welcome to -my share--if it's any comfort. But listen, hombre--let me tell you that -the killing of every _revueltoso_ in Mexico ain't a-going to cure his -hurt." - -Leaving Sliver at his post, Jake moved on down, and after he also -disappeared in the chaparral silence spread a warm spell over valley and -mountain; golden, sunlit silence that was emphasized rather than broken -by the wild screech of a hawk. - -From above Gordon looked right down into the amber heart of the Bowl. -Almost beneath him, the _jacal_ rose like a doll's house out of the -vermilion splash of Pedro's ripe peppers. From it the green veining of -the stream ran through the tawny pastures that were spotted with black -dots, the feeding horses. Far down, just where the stream slipped out of -the Bowl, he could see the giant oak that marked their camp; and though -even his strong young eyes were unequal to the distance, imagination -supplied the ashes of their fire, the bed of leaves under the spreading -branches. - -Instantly he began reliving, tenderly reliving that happy day so -absorbed that he forgot for the moment the tragedy that had brought it -to a close. He did not notice a slight rustle in the chaparral nor catch -the gleam of peering eyes. Were it a raider, he had proved an easy prey. -But the eyes were soft; the hand that presently stole out of a bush and -shook his foot was small and white. Whirling, he came face to face with -Lee. - -"What are you doing here?" - -She placed her finger to her lip. "Hush! they are coming! I just -couldn't stand it, up there in the chaparral all alone. So I tied the -horses and--here I am." - -There was nothing that could be done--except to look stern. Reaching, he -pulled her down beside him, shook her a little, then spoiled the effect -by a kiss. Then, lying flat on their stomachs, they kept a joint watch -till the scrape of a hoof, rumble of voices, broke on the trail. - -Peeping cautiously, they saw a motley procession file on to the plateau. -Like the soldiers of Las Bocas, their clothing ran the gamut of the -service uniforms of Porfirio Diaz's army; the silver and gray of -_rurales_, red and blue of the infantry, variations from these of -cavalry and artillery, fatigue linen mixed in varying quantities with -_charro_ and _peon_ costumes. Accentuating this motley, their loose -gross mouths, blunt animal noses, lewd eyes in the midst of faces -swollen by last night's debauch, fully justified Gordon's judgment: - -"Gosh! what a gallows crew!" - -Weary and footsore after two days of heavy marching, neither their -appearance nor their spirits were improved by the fact that half of them -limped. Their voices had been raised in strident altercation. One -fellow's angry complaint carried across to Gordon and Lee. - -"The two gringo seoritas at the Lovell _rancho_, where were they?--fled -to El Paso. At the second we got what?--one woman, a child, and three -horses--and lost three men. At Los Arboles there were to be women, a -score at least, young and pretty; also a gringo girl with golden hair -and a skin of milk? And horses by the hundred, blooded beasts of fine -breeding? What got we?--an empty house! Thou art a pretty leader, -Filomena." - -"Si!" came a second growl. "And the _fonda_? 'Courage, seores,' he says -but two hours ago. 'In the barranca we shall find a _fonda_ with liquors -and a girl, none prettier in all Chihuahua.' And--" - -"Again an empty house!" - -By one and another it was kept up. "We limp like lame cats," the first -man spoke again. "If this business go like the first and there be no -horses--I know of one throat that will be cut." - -"And I of another!" The guide, an ugly, squat _peon_, turned on him with -a snarl. "Was it I that sent up the warning smoke? No? Then fasten your -tongue with your teeth. If you want women, they are to be had at San -Carlos, a few hours away, a fine town untouched by war." - -"Si, more marching," the first grumbler was beginning, when the other -cut him off. He had advanced to the edge of the plateau and stood -pointing down into the Bowl. - -"And horses, say you? There they are--scores! Si, hundreds! enough to -make us all rich when sold at the border." - -Success! the shibboleth of the modern world! Even among these scoundrels -it wrought the customary effect; turned malcontents into enthusiastic -friends. "Bueno!" He who had issued the sinister hint of cut throats was -the first to clap the guide on the back. "Bueno, amigo! thou art a -leader indeed. 'Twas no fault of thine that the white-skinned girl -escaped. I will slit the gizzard of the next that says it." - -On his part the guide swelled and ruffled in the flattering sunlight. "I -told ye. 'Leave it to Filomena,' said I. 'Leave it to him to show ye fat -booty.' Behold!" - -Also he assumed the airs and authority of real leadership. "The horses -we shall need to rope fresh mounts. Hide the stuff in the bushes till we -return. 'Twill be only for a couple of hours." - -Fired by the sight of the horses, the raiders fell feverishly to work -unloading their loot, which--Gordon noted it with satisfaction--was -largely provisions. Then, lameness and blisters forgotten, unaware of -the cold, fierce eyes watching from the bushes, they followed the -horsemen downhill, yelling and hooting, raising the echoes with snatches -of ribald song. - -A thin wisp of smoke above the _jacal_ followed by an explosive flash as -the dry thatch took fire announced their arrival at the bottom. From -above Gordon and Lee saw them move down the valley in a long line that -presently came sweeping back in a half-circle with the horses in its -belly. - -There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts -were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid -vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then -the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single -file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider -sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers -looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and -around the trail's yellow convolutions. - -After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose -to Jake's post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in -the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked -more like "The Python" he appeared in _peon_ eyes. And he had the -serpent's patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle -trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull's -shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward -grumblings as the file rose to him. - -"If 'twasn't for orders," he mentally harangued the first raider that -passed, "your black soul 'u'd be a-busting now on its way to hell!" - -High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes -transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But -his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic -vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine -across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift -of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow -winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a -vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray's "Elegy." In place -of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which -man's imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight -and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for -that peaceful contrast, he felt--felt with savage joy--Death, the grim -angel, hovering above. - -With her girl's strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the -wriggling black line rose up to Bull's station she leaned forward and -broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon's sighting. Yet, -in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a -black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon -drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands. - -And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line -of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain--the beast mouths, -blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in -the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish -spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was -the face of Death itself--the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near. - -In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic -emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles -too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the -bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a -flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when -nothing better offered. - -About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed -below. Instantly Bull's rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its -sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But -the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that -the last two raiders were still below Jake's station. - -He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let -three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the -action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the -world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a -haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for -the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a -fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the -edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a -mad stampede. - -A hoarse yell marked the first raider's realization of his danger. With -spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a -hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and -beast sideways over the cliff. - -Springing up as the mare whirled, Gordon saw laid out directly beneath -the course of the stampede down and around the stony staircases. At -first it stood out clearly as in those cinema pictures of galloping men -taken from a height. Following the first man's cry came the wild yells -of the second and third. One! two! three! he saw them squeezed out over -the cliff; saw them strike the next level and bound off and over on a -longer leap; saw them turn, slowly in midair till the horses showed like -fat slugs above the men; saw the final crash and disappearance in the -chaparral below. But when his glance came back the crystal clearness was -gone, obscured by yellow dust cloud from the bowels of which men and -horses were ejected sideways as the stampede whirled on down. - -Of the thirty raiders, but one had a chance--he who brought up the rear. -But as he turned to run he came face to face with Jake, who had sprung -up to see. Instantly Jake raised his gun, but there came a roar and -rattle of stones and hoofs. Before he could fire the dust cloud -swallowed the man. Three minutes later it rolled down the last night to -the pastures. - -Over the Bowl silence fell again, golden, sunlit silence broken only by -the screech of the hovering hawk. As before, the wind whispered in the -sage, the clouds marched slowly across the blue fields above, the bees -went busily upon their ways; but in the mean time--when the dust settled -there remained, of the two hundred horses and thirty men, only the few -animals that spread out fanwise as they galloped across the level -bottoms. - -With the swiftness, sureness of a lightning stroke in the night it had -come, the doom--so swiftly that Lee and Gordon above, Jake and Sliver -below, could only stand and stare, doubting their eyes. And Bull-- - -The instant the mare turned his mind leaped to the inevitable -conclusion. With a roar, bellow of rage, inchoate, wild as the snarl of -a balked tiger, he threw his hands on high, rifle waving like a reed in -one great fist. Crash! lock, stock, and barrel, it flew in a thousand -pieces as he brought it down on a rock! From the bank he leaped down to -the trail, in his hot mind some mad idea of stopping the rush. But -already the stampede had passed. He ran a few yards, as though to -overtake and pull it back. But it swept on and down beyond his speed. -Stopping, then, arms raised skyward, fists clenched, teeth bared, eyes -glaring in the midst of his swollen, purple face, he stood, a towering -figure of furious despair. - -Into those few minutes were compressed all the agonies he had endured in -the last few weeks--his trial, temptations, failure, bitter -disappointment, tragic grief, crowned by this, the robbing of his just -revenge. Swelling with a sense of vast injustice, the injustice that -created the world on a scheme of struggle and pain, he turned maniacal -eyes to the sky; stood shaking his bunched fists while a terrible -blasphemy rose to his lips. But it never issued. For in the moment that -it seemed his reason must crack there came slipping into his hot mind, -like a cooling breath, the old vision--of Mary and Betty as on that last -night. - -In the sunlight that wrapped the valley, just as in the vast world -loneliness under the quiet stars, he sensed her presence. His arms -dropped, the mad light died. Bowing his dark face in his hands, he shook -again with the throes of silent grief--but only for a short space. -Presently he looked up, the old humility restored, its expression on his -lips. - -"'Twasn't for me. I wasn't fit. 'Twas taken out of my hands." - -Quiet now, he watched the horses careering over the bottoms. When at -last Sliver joined him he gave quiet orders: "Go down, you an' Jake, an' -collect up their guns--an' ammunition. Bring up fresh horses for all of -us an' a couple for the packs. We'll have to light out for the border at -once." - - - - -XL: SLIVER "MAKES GOOD" - - -By the time Sliver and Jake returned the sun hung like a red-hot ball in -the smoke of the horizon. Even if the horses had not been tired, it was -too late to start that night. Accordingly, after loading the raiders' -provisions, they rode on down into the ravine and used the glowing -embers of the _fonda_ for their camp-fire. - -To them, sitting there, by ones and twos and threes the refugees came -straggling in to gather for the night around their own fires. Going from -one to another, Lee and Gordon dealt comfort and advice. They were to -reap the standing corn and sow again for their own use in the secret -places of the mountains. The _hacienda_ cattle they could herd in the -caons of the lower hills. Thus, with plenty of milk for butter and -cheese, corn, and beans, their own chickens, goats, and pigs, they would -be able to live in rude comfort till the coming of peace permitted Lee's -return. - -"The knowledge that they will not suffer makes it easier to bear." - -Lee spoke, looking back at the brown faces enlivened by the ruddy glare -of the fires. But when, next morning, they crowded around her, old men, -women, young girls, and little children, mixing prayers, blessings, and -lamentations with their good-bys, she was less philosophical. She was -still weeping when she looked back at those that had followed her as far -as the mouth of the ravine. - -"Oh, if our government could only see them! Surely they would help." - -Gordon looked for another outburst when, later, they sighted ruined -Arboles from the very spot he and Mary Mills had overlooked it. How well -he remembered it! The walls and courts, _patio_, rainbow adobes, a small -city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun; -the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy -of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far -horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into -the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by -laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. Now, roofless, windowless, its -blackened walls upreared in the midst of a wide, blurred smudge. Yet -though the contrast brought stinging tears to her eyes, Lee took it -calmly. - -"What does it matter? It can be rebuilt. But there are other -things"--her voice lowered and trailed away--"that can never be -replaced." - -They were both sad and sick at heart. Yet youth may not permanently be -cast down. When, riding on, they left the smoke-blacked ruin behind them -and passed from the dreary waste of burned pasture into golden plains -she began restoration. A native carpenter could replace every loved -beam; rebuild the massive old furniture just as it was. The _peones_ -would lime-wash the exterior in its usual rainbow color! Also, -restoration would give opportunity for remodeling and improvement. - -As she ran on Gordon sensed another motive; perceived that she was -striving to draw Bull out of his sorrow. Not a plan that did not include -him! A great fireplace, for use during the rains, was to have a -comfortable settle at one side, on which the Three could lounge and -smoke while basking in the blaze. Each was to have his own room. Thus -and so! Nor was her prattle without effect. Always sensitive where she -was concerned, Bull divined her motive, and, albeit with an effort great -as a physical strain, he responded, listened, and nodded acquiescence, -occasionally forced a smile. - -Only Sliver was fooled. "Say," he remarked to Jake, who rode with him in -the rear, "did you allow she'd have taken it so light?" - -But Jake, the keen, discerning critic, quickly opened his eyes. "Take it -light, you ----! ----! ----! ----!" The epithets, if printed, would -scorch a hole in the page. "Kain't you see she's grieving her little -heart out? She's doing it all for Bull." - -At any other time one of those epithets would probably have produced a -retort that would have tumbled Jake out of his saddle. But, -conscience-stricken, Sliver accepted all. With humility that was almost -pathetic, he actually put into words feeling that was, for him, quite -subtle. "'Tain't that I'd set in jedgment on Lady-girl, on'y--I reckon -it's so with all of us--I jes' kain't bear to see her say or do anything -that don't jes' fit." - -After a pause he went on: "About these plans o' her'n? If there warn't -no revolution, an' we ked stay along here without a break, an' they'd -destroy all the licker in the world an' forgit the art of making it, I -don't know but that we might live up to 'em. But I'm telling you, -hombre, it's been awful wearing an' I jes' know what a spell in El Paso -'ull do for me--I'll be that swinish I'll never dare to come near her -ag'in." - -When Jake had admitted like feelings Sliver continued: "Sure, under them -conditions, licker an' its makers being, so to say, put on the hog-train -an' run off the aidge of the earth, I'd hev' one chanst to make good. -But as 'tis, an' seeing that she's now settled with a fine young husband -an' kin get along very nicely, I'm sorter allowing that El Paso 'ull let -me out." While his eyes blinked guiltily and his lips quivered with -anticipatory thirst, he concluded, "Sure I'm that dry 'twon't take much -temptation for me to tell my troubles to a barkeep an' have him drown -'em in drink." - -"Nor me," Jake seconded. "Besides, my fingers is jes' itching to get -into a game." - -"Drink, cards, flat broke--back to rustling." Sliver laid down the law -of their being. "With me it runs like, the A-B-C." - -"I drink, you drink, he drinks, we drink," Jake chanted it _sotto voce_. -"If folks wasn't so onreasonable a feller might make an honest living. -But the best tinhorn that ever turned a card from the bottom is bound to -make a slip, an' when he does--whoosh! if he's lucky enough to make his -getaway, rustling's all that's left." - -"Bull?" Sliver nodded at the broad back ahead. "D'you allow he's a-going -to stay put?" - -Jake's shake of the head mixed doubt with concern. "If we meet up with -any Mex--we'll never get him away. He'll run amuck among 'em." - -Sliver's reckless eye lit with a fighting gleam. "An' the country's jes' -lousy with _revueltosos_? Hombre, it's a cinch! Not that I'd want it," -he hypocritically added, "Lady-girl being along. But if we do chance on -a few--hum! what's the exchange, jes' now, in Valles's money? Seven to -one, heigh? Well, we've three rifles apiece, counting the extras on the -pack-horses. One man with three rifles is as good as two men. Twice four -of us makes eight. At current exchange, one gringo for seven Mex, we -orter account for fifty-six." - -"There or thereabouts," Jake agreed. "But, as you say, Missy being -along, it's up to us to dodge 'em." - -"Five days?" Sliver hopefully repeated. "We'd jes' as well look out for -trouble." - - -Not till the morning of the third day did the "trouble" loom up over the -horizon. - -To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would -strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso. -Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a -few _peon_ herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But -while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them -away from water, the first necessity of desert travel. - -From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse -grass country dotted with _sahuaros_; thereafter into sage desert -sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same; -a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation, -its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only -by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs. -Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost -due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the -railroad. - -Dusk was falling when they--more correctly, the horses--found a small -_arroyo_. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they -might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They -did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too, -they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between -them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for -danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without -fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the -"trouble" showed up in form of a line of _sombreros_ behind the peak of -a limestone ridge--unfortunately, to the eastward. - -Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the -pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as -they rode, Gordon saw the line of _sombreros_ rise in correspondence as -the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the -ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief -against the sky-line. - -"They've seen us!" - -As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their -galloping hoofs. "Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!" - -A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets -chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew -overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main -wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards -away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the -ridge. - -Differing speed had strung the pursuers out in a scattering column, and -Sliver grinned his delight at the arrangement. "Like bowling at the -county fair. Miss one, you've still a chance at the next behind. Set 'em -up again!" he yelled as, following their volley, two men and a horse -plunged forward on the ground. - -"A bit lower, Son," Bull quietly admonished Gordon. "Aim at the jine of -man an' horse. That gives you a seven-foot target." - -"One cigar, one baby down!" - -Sliver's second yell marked the fall of two more horses and another -man--shot by Bull out of his saddle. Aiming and firing with the deadly -accuracy bred by years of just such fighting against more sagacious -foes, they dropped the leaders as fast as they came on; in three minutes -had drawn a dead-line of men and horses across their front. And that -deadly practice told. Brave enough, after their lights, the raiders were -not accustomed to such shooting. In the revolutionary wars their own -practice, like that of their opponents, was to spring up out of a -trench, yell "_Viva Mexico!_" fire in the enemy's direction, and drop -back again, trusting to the god of war to find a billet for the bullet. -Turning, they raced back for the opposite ridge, spurred on by the -galling shooting that emptied two more saddles. - -Bull's black glance following them with longing that confirmed Jake's -diagnosis--he would have "run amuck among 'em" if left to himself. The -more steadily, perhaps, for his deadly thirst to kill, he had aimed and -fired with automatic precision. Withal, he had found time to note -Gordon's steady shooting. - -"You done fine, lad," he commented. "If there was only ourselves, I'd be -in favor of carrying it to 'em. But"--his glance went to Lee, who was -holding the horses--"we'll have to fall back. They've had their lesson -an' ain't a-going to try any more fool charges. Now they'll try an' -flank us. While Sliver an' Jake hold 'em, we'll run back to the next -ridge." - -But Gordon, flushed with his taste of battle, rebelled. "What's the -matter with me staying? You fellows care for me like three hens -scratching for an orphan chicken. I'm tired of this sheltered life." - -"'Sheltered life'?" Communing with himself, Jake glanced at the grisly -dead-line. "'Sheltered life,' an' him with two stretched out down -there." - -"Comes o' being married," Sliver added. "No married man has a right to -run with batchelders." - -"That's right," Jake approved. "It's up to you to look after your wife." - -"Well?" Gordon protested. "How can I do it better than by staying here?" - -"What?" Sliver looked scandalized. "Us take a chanst of her being -widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree! -Git out." - -"Come on, Son, you're delaying the game." Bull had already joined Lee. -His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug, -Gordon obeyed. - -The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others -had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. "Bet you -they've split already an' are moving around us. Now if we do the same, -keeping well out of sight, we'll mebbe get another crack at 'em." - -And so it was. When, after a half-mile dtour through limestone and sage -chaparral, the halves of the raiders' party showed in the open two -rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless -horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From -the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back -and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the -nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an -occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead. - -While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its -southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like -an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge -behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But -with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in -unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely -upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only -roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would -bring forth no new enemy. - -Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut -the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered -more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an -impassable barrier, forcing a dtour. Worst of all, the denser growths -permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver, -midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than -two hundred yards away. - -"If 'twas on'y black powder they was using," Sliver bitterly complained, -"we'd stan' some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their -smoke." - -"You're onreasonable," Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting -from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los -Arboles: "In order that these here bandits kin exercise the 'sacred -right of revolution to reg'late their own internal affairs' your Uncle -Samuel has kindly supplied 'em with the latest smokeless cartridge. -Thanks to his benevolence, some one's going to get hurt pretty soon." - -He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they -evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down -Sliver's horse. Hanging on to Jake's stirrup leather, he made the next -ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load -abandoned. - -"An' this is on'y the beginning." Jake continued his remarks from the -next ridge. "The railroad's not far away, an' as I remember the country -hereabouts, she runs right out in the open, with nary a snitch of cover -for over twenty miles. There'll be nothing to stop 'em from shooting us -down by volleys at long range. So it all boils down to this--some one's -got to hold 'em at the next good stand while the others make their -getaway." - -They had been carrying two rifles apiece. Now Sliver quietly -appropriated Jake's extra weapon. "With three rifles I orter be good for -two hours." - -"When I said 'some one'"--Jake quietly repossessed himself of the -weapon--"I naterally allowed his name was Jake Evers. Git! before I bust -you over the head." - -"If 'twasn't for them"--Sliver's hard glance went out to the -chaparral--"there's nothing I'd like better 'n to take time to rub your -long hoss face in the dust." - -The threat, however, produced from Jake only his wolf grin. "You damned -fool! D'you know what's going to happen to the man that stays behind? -He's a-going to be what the society columns call 'the piece de -resistence' at a Mexican barbecure. There ain't a thing in the line of -torture that them bandits won't do to you." - -"You ked never stan' it." Sliver displayed great solicitude. "You're -getting along, Jake, an' your nerve ain't what it used to be." - -"You've said it." Jake's cold eye warmed. He placed a friendly hand on -Sliver's shoulder. "You're dead right, Son. I'm getting on. What's more, -I'm that dyed-in-the-wool with deviltry 'twon't hurt anybody when I -pinch out. But you're young yet. You'll--" - -"--hit El Paso an' go straight to the devil. You know it darned well. -We'll gamble for it." He spat on a pebble and threw it up. "Wet or dry, -which? Wet! I win!" - -"Jest my luck!" Jake's complaint was sincere as though, instead of death -or torture, life and fortune had been the hazard. "I don't have no -chance at all except with cards. What did I wanter go an' do that for, -anyway, an' me with a deck right here in my pocket?" - -"Too late!" Sliver pressed his triumph. "Now git!" - -But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the -stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon -were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it -loomed even more inaccessible. - -"'Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the -middle." - -Sliver's glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the -ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. "Don't tell -Lady-girl--that is, not jes' now. Let her think I'll make my getaway to -the northward. But some day, after she's safe in El Paso, you kin tell -her--that Sliver was on'y too damn glad to give his life for her'n." He -went on, dreamily: "'Course I knew it 'u'd be all off after I'd hit the -city. But I'd sorter thought, now an' then, that if the rangers didn't -get me too quick, some day I'd come back to Arboles, when her kids was -about hip-high, an' teach 'em to ride an' shoot. But that was jes' a -dream." - -Jake's glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the -_revueltosos_, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver's request -might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other -trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he -could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone. - -"Funny, ain't it? But that's just what I'd often thought myself. Sure -I'll tell her--if them devils don't down me on the next run. They're -damn close now, and they'll be up here before we're half-way across. -Against that limestone front we'll make some mark, an' with fifty of 'em -cracking at us it 'ull be the luck of hell if they don't down one or -both." - -Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the -boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering -behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks -or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless -scramble up the last steep two found their mark--one through Sliver's -knee, the other dropped Jake's horse. - -Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of -his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried -him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a -full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain -traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see--not the tracks; it -was too far away for that--a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine. -Bull and Gordon still lay answering the _revueltosos'_ fire. But Sliver -and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in -which the dead horse lay out of sight. - -"Hey!" Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. "Let 'em go! -You'll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I'm hurt. You -kin take my horse; on'y lift me down first an' prop me up among the -rocks where I kin lie comfortable an' pump a gun." - -Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his -rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well -and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him, -painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride -with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands, -shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring -raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the -memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other -beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends; -all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound -the "Three Bad Men of Las Bocas" closer than brothers--all this combined -in an emotion that revolted at desertion. - -"My _God_, hombre!" he broke out in protest. "I kain't leave you here, -wounded, to fall in the han's of them wolves!" - -"You kain't do nothing else!" Hard eyes flashing, Sliver went on: -"Didn't we gamble, jest now, for who was to stay? An' didn't I win? Now -you're trying to renig?" As he noted the sweat standing out on Jake's -brow, he went on more quietly: "Look at it sensible. What ked you-all do -with a wounded man? You'd on'y sign Lady-girl's death warrant. And don't -worry about them wolves. They ain't a-going to light no fires on my -belly nor burn my feet. If I don't get done up in the scrap--the last -bullet will be for myself." - -Also he turned an adamant face to a proposal that Jake should stay too. -"No, hombre, it's still over a hundred miles to the border, an' they -need you. There's nothing left for you but to take my horse an' git." - -It had all been said and done without strain, effort, or -self-consciousness; was entirely the expression of his hardy, careless -soul that had never known the vice of self-pity. But when Jake still -stood, his long, lean face working lugubriously in his attempts to hide -his grief, Sliver did that which, for him, was a miracle in -divination--entered into and felt the pain of another soul. - -"Oh, shore, hombre!" His face lit up with sympathy. "You orter be glad. -Ain't it better to die clean, this-a-way, than to choke slowly at the -end of some ranger's rope? Go on, now, an' catch up to 'em an' keep 'em -moving till night. With the least bit of luck, you'll pull through all -right." - - -As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver's -consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee -was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake's -departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; _i.e._, to -inflate to the limit the current exchange of one _gringo_ for seven -_revueltosos_. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark, -addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake -had left at his elbow. - -"Gosh, but I'd like a drink!" - -His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. "You're -going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You've taken your last." - -Pulling his Colt's .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle. -"Handy for the funeral." He uttered a second grim chuckle. - -The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he -lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge--so quiet that a -lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully -away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent -history so much firing had invariably brought food. - -From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly -rifles picked them off, the _revueltosos_ had learned caution, only -advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake -had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, the -_revueltosos_ remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple of -_sombreros_ rose cautiously out of a clump of sage. - -"Stuck up on sticks." Sliver criticized their wabbly motion. - -After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly -broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into -the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of -sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he -draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the -_revueltosos_ that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied -the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses -and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two -more as the _revueltosos_ raced back over the opposite ridge. - -"Six added to three I got makes nine!" Sliver grunted. "A few more an' I -kin afford to cash in." - -He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he -noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his -satisfaction. - -"You ain't a-going to try an' pass through me ag'in," he addressed the -invisible foe. "An' you ain't going to leave me here. It'll take you an -hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with -night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you--" - -The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series -designed to keep the _revueltosos'_ attention upon himself, and when, -half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep -face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded. - -"They reckon we're all here, trying to stick it out till night," he -correctly interpreted the movement. "It 'ull take 'em another half-hour -to find out." - -A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the -brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face -of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots -in both directions along the ridge. - -"Not that I'm expecting to bag any of youse," he addressed the unseen -enemy. "But just to slow you up a bit an' let you know I'm here. When -you get there"--his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that -commanded his post on both sides--"good-by an' _good_ night." - -Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to -wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver -stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he -counted each minute, each second in yards--the hundreds, scores of yards -Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day -in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. -While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched -slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge -oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed -neither fear nor softening in Sliver's face when, from the spot he had -long noted, a rifle spoke. - -It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks -about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that -time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff -of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many -years claimed the stakes. - -He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched -arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights, -his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out. - -Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low -sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child. - - - - -XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE "EXCHANGE" - - -By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being, -whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had -withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired -for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth -while to inquire. - -"_Him?_ Oh, he's back there a-holding 'em off while we gain a spell." - -Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not -altogether relieve her anxiety. "But--how will he find us again?" - -Jake's shrug was fine in its indifference. "He'll play a lone han', -Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he'll -likely beat us to it." - -"You really think so?" - -"He'll be there to meet us." - -Jake's tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not -deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of -the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the -knee--he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, -explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the _revueltosos_ came out -in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the -ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, -explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter's slow shake of the -head, signaled then that all was over. - -While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the -sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp -black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose -from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid -his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all -night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along -the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when -they began the fight that morning. - -The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range -glasses at the dark smoke plume. "Enjine an' five cars." - -He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter's keen sight the -lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle -on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay -_rebozos_ told they were mostly women, and that told all. "Nobody there -but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that's chasing us." - -"A hundred miles to El Paso," Jake spoke. "Three days' horseback? Three -hours with that old mogul?" - -"Golly!" The idea fastened on Gordon. "Couldn't we?" In place of their -present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past -as they sped northward in the engine. - -"On'y women and wounded?" Jake repeated it, musingly. - -"Dark in half an hour?" Bull added: "They kedn't tell us from their own. -'Course we should lose the horses." With his accustomed caution he read -the reverse of the shield. "If anything went wrong--we'd be left afoot -on the desert." - -"No worse than we are," Jake argued. "These beasts have been running -sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to -the mountains we're not sure of feed nor water--an' still a hundred -miles from the border." - -"But Sliver?" Lee protested. "We can't leave him." - -She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind -a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and -steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a -good end. "The last thing he tol' me, Missy, was not to wait. ''Twould -hinder me an' hinder you-all. I'll make my run alone.'" - -"Very well." Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that -her boy would be safer under her own eye. "Very well, but I _do_ wish he -were here." - -Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither -spoke. - -While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. "It 'ull be up to -you an' Missy," he told Gordon, "to take care of the engineer while Jake -an' me stan' off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you -pitch the stuff aboard." - -The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its -warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some -were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths -of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the -scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a -_revueltosos'_ train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their -knees at the _metates_, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all -gossiping at their work. Here and there a man's face showed in the fire -glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his -presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the -railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were -stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up -their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man -raised a gun, and as Bull's rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged -headlong from the top of the car to the ground. - -Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the -mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from -Gordon's gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. -Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with -Lee's gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their -stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots -along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened -wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward. - -The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman's shovel. "Here's -where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions." - -Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch -the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he -shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual -caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable -information with the muzzle of his gun. - -His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of -the speeding engine across the cab. "He says the half of Valles's army -is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what's left -he's making a las' stan' north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the -country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to -supply the new base!" The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. -"Hooray! the line's open clean to the border! He don't know of any -trains being run to-night! Thinks we'll have a clear track!" - -Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine -came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section -gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown -faces. - -They suggested Bull's question, "Ask him if there's any revueltosos on -the way." - -"At La Mancha!" Jake yelled back. "About thirty miles this side of the -border!... Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!" - -The _brigada_ Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of -Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull's dark face. His big hands -clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained -control of his voice. - -"Does he allow we kin run through there?" - -Jake nodded. "If we douse the headlight and race by afore they have time -to block us." - -Looking back, just then, at Gordon, now stripped to his undershirt and -growing sootier every minute, Lee heard the answer. She did not, -however, give it much thought. The hills and rocks that took on queer -shapes in the dim light of a rising moon, giant _sahuaros_ that went -slipping past like huge ghosts, the occasional fires and lights, -glimpses of strange brown faces, the rush and roar of the engine -speeding through mysterious night, held her senses. Yet it stuck in her -mind, came popping out when, as the engine rounded a sharp curve, the -headlight beam struck full on a sheaf of glittering wires. - -"Oh!" she called out in sudden alarm. "We ought to have cut the wires!" - -It was a vital error. Gordon's whistle expressed their joint dismay; but -Jake, with his intense practicability, recovered first. "Well, what's to -do--stop an' cut them?" - -Bull shook his head. "Too late! We've been running over an hour. Nothing -left but to take a chanst." - -Jake nodded. But presently he spoke again. "Chanst? If they pull up a -rail an' ditch us at La Mancha, I'd hardly call it a chanst with half of -the brigada Gonzales shooting us up from all around. We'd be pickled for -keeps." - -During their "rustler days" it had always been Jake's craft that pulled -them out of tight places. Habit held Bull silent till, after he had -spoken to the engineer, Jake went on: "He says the track runs two per -cent. down into La Mancha. We kin shut off steam an' pussy-foot it the -last few miles. So here's the dope. We drop you-all"--his glance took in -the others--"a mile this side of the station, give you two hours to go -around, then shoot ahead. If we get through, you-all strike a light an' -we'll stop and pick you up. If we don't--we don't. But you'll be less 'n -thirty miles from the border an' have all night to make your getaway." - -"But--" - -Gordon's objection, however, was nipped by Bull. "It goes." - -Lee, however, was not so easily silenced. Climbing down, she crossed the -wabbling cab with unsteady steps and caught Jake's arm. "Oh, don't take -the risk. We'll abandon the engine. Come with us!" - -Looking down into her face, Jake's bleak eyes were almost soft. He -gently patted her hand. "Now don't be jumping at conclusions, Missy. We -need the enjine to go on, but I ain't a-going to commit suicide. If the -tracks are blocked we'll back right off. Then I'll take to the bushes -an' follow you round." - -With that she had to be content. But, realizing the danger, she climbed -up and sat beside him while the mogul rolled and racked and plunged -forward through the night. She was still sitting there when, an hour -later, a headlight flashed up far away. - -"They've wired ahead!" Bull yelled across the cab. "Make him stop, Jake! -We'll take to the bushes here." - -"Oh! now you come with us!" Lee cried. - -But Jake's answer wiped out her happiness. "No, Missy, I'll pull 'em -along for a few miles while you-all make your getaway afore I drop off." - -Already the throttle was closed. Slowing under the brakes, the mogul -glided to a stop. Leaping down, Gordon caught the provisions, -ammunition, and rifles as Bull threw them down. Meanwhile Lee stood -looking up at Jake with wide, distressed eyes. - -"Come on, dear!" Gordon called up from below. - -"No time to waste." Bull touched her shoulder. - -Still she stood. "Oh, I hate to leave you. _Do_ come!" - -"Oh, shore!" Jake laughed, patting her cheek. "I'll jine you in a few -hours--or at El Paso, if I miss you here." - -Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the -least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed -beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her -hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his -cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon's arms. - -Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer -threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to -glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips -had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some -reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him -in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would -never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames. - -The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before -he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant -waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning -spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught -by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer. - -"What are you grinning at?" - -The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his -seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake. - -"The trouble with you, Alberto, ain't that you Mexicans are a dirty, -lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you're too plumb ignorant to -know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you -call a face there ain't a gleam to show you're sensible of the honor -you've jest been paid. You don't know it, Alberto, an' you probably -never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten -country 'twouldn't come near it. If I don't blow the top of your head -off during the next hour--which I likely will--you'll be able to tell it -to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they're -smart they won't believe you. But it's the closest to fame you'll ever -get, so play it for all it's worth. Now listen, Alberto"--he shook his -finger in the engineer's frightened face--"if you ever expect to hand it -down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to -business." - -Delivered in English, the harangue flew high over the Mexican's head. -But it did Jake lots of good. Having, as it were, palliated his shameful -emotions, he followed his own advice and turned to the business in hand. - -"How far is that enjine, Alberto?" He poked the question in with his -gun. - -"Five miles, seor." - -"Jest an enjine?" - -"No, seor, it rides too steadily. It draws two cars; no more or it -could not take the grade at this speed." - -"How long afore they catch us?" - -"Ten more miles, seor. They travel two to our one." - -"All right, slow up a bit." - -With hollow clank of drivers the mogul moved on at slackened speed until -less than half a mile intervened. It was running, of course, reversed, -and across the intervening space the headlights stared. When, obedient -to Jake's order, the throttle was thrown wide again the two engines ran -like giant insects through the night, one in chase of the other, -thundering across bridges, whizzing around curves, shooting through -cuts, chimneys spitting smoke and flame, headlights flashing defiance -like fiery eyes. - -All the while Jake timed the distance. "Cut her off a notch," he ordered -when the mogul began to gain. "I wanter draw 'em on as far as I kin." - -But out of the dim smoke that trailed behind the pursuing engine broke, -just then, a series of red flashes in furious staccato. The drumming -reports were drowned in the roar and clank of the racing engines; but -the hail of bullets that rattled and glanced from the mogul's side was -unmistakable. - -"Machine-guns!" Jake exclaimed. "Chuck her into high, Alberto!" As, -under a full head of steam, the engine picked up and ran through the -night like a frightened girl, he added: "Sheer accident, they hit us, -anyway. They kain't do it again." - -Proving his words, the next burst of firing went wide. Only one bullet -struck the cowcatcher, and, leaping like a horse from the spur, the -mogul launched in dizzy flight down grade; had drawn two miles ahead by -the time she took the next sharp curve. - -"Hold her at that," Jake ordered. - -But again he had failed to reckon with the wires, which, after blocking -their advance, now cut off retreat. Shortly thereafter came a flash of -light as the engine shot from a cut through the first of the series of -stations they had passed on their way up. - -In accordance with the inscrutable law which governs the location of -Mexican stations, it stood a half-mile from the little adobe town that -dragged its unclean, brown skirts across the tracks. If the inhabitants -thereof had been content to obey telegraphed orders to build an obstacle -and let it go at that, the mogul would probably have gone into the ditch -without a second's warning. But, desiring to see the smash, they had -lighted a huge fire alongside the tracks, and under its glare the pile -of ties, earth, and stones stood out plain as by day. Wheels grinding, -blue sparks shooting from the sanded rails, the mogul stopped within a -hundred yards. - -After he had closed the throttle and thrown on the brakes the engineer's -eye had gone to the cab door. Then it switched to the ugly, black muzzle -of Jake's gun. Releasing the brakes, he reversed and opened the -throttle. - -A sputter of musketry had followed the first yell of disappointment that -went up from the rabble of _peon_ watchers. Fired from ancient pieces, -however, the bullets fell short or rebounded like peas from the mogul's -sides. Picking up her stride, she outran their feeble pursuit in a -hundred yards. - -It was then that the engineer's voice rose in protest: "But, seor, we -shall run into the other train! Mira! Mira! it is now only a mile away!" - -Jake's eye measured the distance. Then, in dry soliloquy that, even if -it had not been couched in English, would still have gone over the -other's head, he spoke. "Do you know what a maquina loca is, Alberto? -You don't? You s'prise me." Scared out of his small wits, the poor devil -had not even answered. "It's the one great invention your pais has -produced. 'Twas first used by Mr. Orozco shortly after he graduated from -a mule's tail to be commander-in-chief of Madero's army. He designed it -for the extirpation of Huertistas that got to tagging after him like -these gents is trailing us. 'Twas very simple. He'd load up half a ton -of dynamite on an enjine cowcatcher an' turn her loose with the throttle -wide open jest where she'd catch a troop-train in a blind cut. Mighty -effective, it was, too. Some o' them Huertistas was so elevated above -their normal they hain't finished raining down yet. Of course we're shy -on the dynamite. But a forty-ton mogul careering along at sixty miles an -hour ain't to be despised. Anyway, we'll try it. At this gait we orter -catch 'em in the cut beyond the station. Hit her up." - -While talking he had not been idle. First he laid his rifle by the cab -door, ready to jump; then slipped over his head and shoulder the -bandoliers of cartridge-clips Gordon had left for him. Meanwhile the -Mexican's frightened glance swung between him and the tracks which were -slipping faster and faster under the mogul. Beyond the station a faint -glow, reflection from its headlight, marked the entrance of the -_revueltosos'_ train into the cut. In his mind the engineer's horror, -burning, mangling, scalding, fought for supremacy with his fear of -Jake--and won. Selecting the moment that the latter's two hands were -engaged with the bandoliers, the engineer crossed the cab in one leap -and plunged down and out. - -"You son of a gun!" Grabbing his rifle, Jake jumped after. - -But in the few seconds that elapsed between their leaps the mogul -carried Jake a hundred yards. A second to a bump and each roll as he -struck rebounded and turned over and over lost more time. A few more -were required before he picked himself up. Then his glance went after -the mogul, now shooting like a comet toward the cut from which the -_revueltosos'_ train had just emerged. In the glare of the headlights -each vividly illuminating the other, like two dragons breathing fire and -smoke, they flew at each other's throats. - -Came a yell! a crash! Then darkness, hazy with steam, wiped out all but -screams and agonized curses. - -"_God!_" It burst from Jake. "If Bull could on'y have been here!" - -Both while in the air and rolling over and over he had an impression -that he must have jumped almost on top of the engineer. But now, looking -around, he became aware--first, that he was standing directly opposite -the station; second, of a dark figure in the lighted doorway; third, of -a flash, pistol-crack, of a bullet singing by his ear; lastly of a -baker's dozen of other dark figures rushing at him from all around. - -In a pinch--how well Sliver and Bull had known it!--Jake could always be -counted upon to do the unexpected. Behind him stretched an open, moonlit -plain where he would be easily shot down or overtaken. Grabbing the bull -by the horns, he rushed straight at the figure in the doorway. Into its -dark midst went the butt of his rifle. Bang! he slammed the door, a -heavy, three-inch affair of oak that fitted against stone jambs and -lintels; was secured by iron swing-bars. As he dropped these in place -the panels quivered under the impact of many shoulders. Leaving the man -he had overthrown writhing and holding his middle, Jake crossed quickly -to the window. - -In readiness for just such contingencies, its iron grill had been set -out six inches to permit a raking fire along the wall, and shooting at -ten feet into the convulsive movement at the door Jake's first shot -dropped a man. As the others dodged around the corner a yell told of -another wounded. - -A smaller window commanded that side, and, crossing over, Jake raked the -fugitives in their flight with a galling fire till the last dim figure -disappeared in the brush. Then, after he had noted with satisfaction -that the window rose high above the ground, he turned to his captive, -who still lay groaning on the floor. - -"Git up!" - -Steel eyes and ugly pistol muzzle enforced the order. - -The man, a fat Mexican with a yellow, bilious face and small, beady -eyes, arose. "If you will only let me live, seor--" - -"Shut up!" Jake cut him off. "You're the station agent?" - -"Si, seor!" - -"What's in those boxes?" - -"Powder, seor, giant powder that was brought in by revueltosos from a -gringo mine. It is to be shipped on the train to-morrow to Valles, who -will have it made into bombs for use in his trenches." - -"Thought so." Jake grinned at the pile of boxes. "'Tain't no trick to -tell gringo dynamite. The markings fairly scream, 'Made in America!' So -Valles is going to make bombs of it? Well, well!" - -"Seor, you will--" - -"Now, Alberto, cut that out." Having thus transferred the cognomen from -the engineer to his present captive, Jake went on. "That precious -existence o' yourn depends altogether upon your paisanos outside. The -longer I hold 'em off the longer you live. Get it? Bueno! Now trot over -to the window. The second you see any one--yelp! If you don't--" He -tapped his gun significantly. - -The agent thus placed, he looked around the room, The blackened stone of -the walls told that it had already been burned in one or other of the -revolutions. He grinned again, noting that the original roof had been -replaced with laminated iron. "Kain't roast us out, anyway, Alberto." - -On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a -small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a -few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall. -Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent -watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid -block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window. - -Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight. -Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of -dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry, -command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst, -then dropped it again. - -"'Tain't square, shooting wounded." But there was no pity in his eyes. -His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: "I'd like to know jest -how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who's -here!" - -It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick -eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred -yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the -chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer. - -"Afraid I've spoiled another of your colleagues." He turned to the -agent. "They ain't very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It's -a cinch they're not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an' -I simply kain't waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep -watch, Alberto." - -Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and -laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after -game Jake's brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and -tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He -could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing -with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a -frontier bunk-house. - -In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face -loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held -him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff -of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he -watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the -gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having -compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung -poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak. - -Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and -looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A -stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing -in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled -in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak -now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded. - -Lee's face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her -arms around his neck, when he murmured, "On'y thirty miles to the -border, a clean getaway." - -Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range -that marked Sliver's last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face -turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small -nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness -settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a -sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the -shutters, he returned to the table--not any too soon; for as he sat down -and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range, -the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters. - -Through all, as a rat in a corner might watch a cat, the agent had -watched him with deadly fascination. From the north window where he -stood it was but a step to the door. Apparently Jake did not notice him -take it, for he did not look up--even when the agent's hand touched the -upper bar. - -"If I was you, Alberto, I'd come away from there." - -The agent froze. But Jake had spoken in English. The hand went again to -the bar, was slowly lifting it when, following a second splintering -crash, he fell forward on his face with a hollow cough. - -"Through the lungs, I reckon." Jake looked down at the gross body, -writhing in its death agony. "I told you to keep away, Alberto." - -The man's last convulsive clutch had swung the upper bar clear of its -sockets, but Jake did not move. The lower bar still held and, standing -up, he watched the oaken panels quiver and split under heavy blows. With -rhythmic regularity came the crash of volleys fired point-blank into the -shutters. Bullets, too, were spitting through the side window--to strike -and flatten on the opposite wall. Over all, above the crash of -rifle-fire, thud of the beam they were using on the door, rose the roar -and howl of a blood-mad _peon_ rabble. - -"The hull town has come to the funeral," Jake muttered. "Well, they'll -see some wake." - -As the door crashed in he stooped and blew out the light. Darkness fell -through the room--darkness that pulsed with convulsive movement. Over -the body of the agent the leaders tripped and fell. Upon them others -piled in a heap, yet under the pressure of the howling crowd outside -still others streamed in. Above the oaths, curses, mad howls, rose yells -for some one to bring a light. - -Presently it came, a piece of engine waste soaked in alcohol at the end -of a stick; and when it did, the rolling eyeballs, furious faces, -vicious mouths, stood out for a second, writhing in murderous lust, then -set in sudden horror. - -For the bluish flare fell full on a grim figure, tall, lean, topped with -a hard face, steel-point eyes. The muzzle of Jake's gun touched the top -layer of powder. Cold, weird, satanic, he must have loomed in their -vision as the Evil One in whose existence they all believed. Paralyzed -by the impending doom, some stood staring. Others, screaming hoarsely, -fought in vain to beat back through the crowd. Till the last moment, -yes, till one hardier scoundrel raised a gun, Jake held them in torture, -then-- - -Both shots were wiped out by the tremendous explosion whose thunder and -red sky-flash were heard and seen by Bull fifteen miles away. - - - - -XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - - -After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the -sage-brush while the _revueltoso_ engine approached. With a roar it came -at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead. -For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette -against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and -swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of -smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on -spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared -past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of -dust. - -Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while -they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away. - -"We'll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours," he -said. "We kain't afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we'll have to travel -at night an' hide up during the day--unless we chance on a _rancho_ -where we kin steal horses! Of course, it's terrible on you, Missy. But -if you kin stan' it for a little longer--" He stopped as Lee shook, as -he thought, with a sob. - -It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and -trouble. "It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own, -should have to turn rustler." With a little mothering pat that somehow -reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her -fostering care, she added: "Don't worry about me. If I could only make -you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a -rifle. I can at least carry something." - -But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and -provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding -through sage, _palo verde_, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure -hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they -obstinately refused--and it was well that they did. When Bull called a -halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and -swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock. - -"Don't dare to move," he ordered, "till I get you something to eat." - -They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt -meat. But after "Alberto" cut off the engine Gordon had "requisitioned" -his _tortillas_ and chile stew--plenty for three. Once again Lee wished -she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct -still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery _tortillas_ his -head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the -engine soot off his face. - -Neither did Bull escape. "There!" Bestowing a little, loving box on -Gordon's ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and -washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child. -Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction. - -"Well, you're _half_-clean, anyway." - -Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken -his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew -from Bull a grave smile. "Sleep, now, you kids," he admonished them. -"Two hours an' we'll have to be moving again." - -"You, too!" Lee insisted. - -Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at -once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower -rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet. -Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding -their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles -to the southward Jake was playing his last lone "hand." He was in Bull's -mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with -calcium red. - -"Something doing there." Though he could have no accurate knowledge, -Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. "Bet you Jake had a -finger in it." - -Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and -provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she -needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused -in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open. - -Yet she made light of it. "My feet seem to belong to some one else. All -the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!" - -It was the barbed thorn of a _nopal_, which hurt worse coming out than -it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, "cat's claws" and -"crucifixion thorns" lay everywhere in prickly ambush. "Spanish bayonet" -scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would -rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open -among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of -the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In -daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking. -When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once; -in five seconds were fast asleep. - -This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed -on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to -the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first -pale lights. - -Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and -scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee, -pale, tired, limping, but cheerful. - -She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. "To -be sure! We'll have all day to rest." - -"I didn't mean, though, for you to walk no more." Stooping suddenly, he -rose with her sitting on his shoulder. - -"Your weight ain't no more to me than a fly," he replied to her protest; -and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these -brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a _mesa_ that -raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the -boulders and sage. - -"'Tain't safe to go on," he said, setting her down. "You'd think, to -look around, there wasn't a living thing within a hundred thousand -miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without -being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard. -Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding -from the _rurales_; but there's always some one. We'll stop while it's -safe." - -He was right. Already they had been seen--by a _peon_ who had been -driven by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret -spring from _revueltoso_ lovers. But the tale of their passing did not -go forth by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of -their burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away -"Alberto," the engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop -of _revueltosos_ he had guided up the line. - -"Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet? -These little ones no larger than a child's are those of the woman." - -"A white girl, thou sayest?" the leader asked. - -"Si, seor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man's -riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate -for thee." - -"There should be _some_ pay." The _capitan_ went on, with a vile oath. -"Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us; -si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs -come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt -that gringo. But he goes out like"--he blew out the match with which he -was lighting his cigarette--"this! and takes a hundred more of us with -him. Bueno!" His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. "They -are gone, our compaeros, but we shall meet again--in hell. But these -others, the girl and her men, shall pay." - -At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of -which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to -the north and east as they went, they approached Bull's limestone castle -just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon. - -After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a -rough _ramada_ of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting -in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the _revueltoso_ -line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust -clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet -let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so -carefully that Lee slept on. - -"There ain't many of 'em," he whispered. "We must make 'em sick at the -first shooting. I'm going to slip along the ridge to get that second -man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin -see his eyes; then bust him where he's biggest." - -Yesterday's fighting had absorbed most of Gordon's thrills. But now, as -he lay looking down at the _revueltoso_ coming on a little, ambling jog, -he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and -fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed -different--as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon -instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When, -pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon -experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after -fair warning. - -But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened -him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting -from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired. - -At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the _ramada_, startled and -wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide -headlong to the ground. Bull's man was also down, and as the riderless -horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the -sage whirled back and combined half a mile away. - -By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at -a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. "That -is the Tejon Pass--about ten miles away. The American border is on'y -twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold 'em till -then we'll have all night to climb through the Pass." - -They made a good gain while the _revueltosos_ were recovering from that -first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle -around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller -elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further. - -Thus began a repetition of the previous day's fighting--with this -disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone -ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time -with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the -brush with their bullets to keep the _revueltosos_ from crawling up on -them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time -more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the _revueltosos_ -brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired -directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was -complete. - -It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the -circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he -sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into -the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up, -then fell forward. - -So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set -the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a -huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon's -dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance, -supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of -the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly -thereafter they entered the Pass. - -From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell, -hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool, -at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after -they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on -his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail -to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So -tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of -crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering -her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep. - -Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his -ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he -closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was -accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his -thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything, -it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal -perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed -down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the -hour. - -Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in -the curve of Gordon's arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces -turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl's -color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under -the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad, -low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier -mold of Gordon's features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose, -forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw, -supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the -other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in -spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long -limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly. - -In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower. -The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of -Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and -earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that -age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft -dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past -loves enveloped them sleeping there. - -"Jes' naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get -such a pair." - -Bull's murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world -to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of -health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to -degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the -world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a -thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature's intent so -completely fulfilled. - -To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and -to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at -Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the _portales_ many a -time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the -Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that -tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself -and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under -Bull's eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter -raised the echoes in the _patio_. Now they were young men and women! He -saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine -young fellows come in to woo and win Lee's girls. - -With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under -forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by -the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship -into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships -thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of -iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee's children, always strong, -always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In -legislature, church, halls of state, they took place--at first a few -white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race -drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors, -legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its -neighbor across the Rio Grande. - -It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately -consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in -the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull's -gaze came back to them. - -Surely they were "fit," the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long -process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained -children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste -the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought -about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and -complete. "Fit," morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the -term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more -ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the "fit" of ten -thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on -their lives. - -It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it--and died; as Jake had -sworn to it--and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation, -heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the -cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of -heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only -enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon's, he had to empty -his own. - -"Won't need it, anyway." - -Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last -evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley, -then on up here, he had searched for just such a place. - -"No, I won't need it." - -Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into -Lee's face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He -knew it for the last time--just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like -Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had -repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial -with a heavy shake of the head. - -"Twould on'y break them up an' do me no good." - -Very gently he woke up Gordon. "Don't wake her till I'm through telling. -It will soon be daylight. With it they'll be on top of us again. The -border's over there--on'y a few miles." With heavy steadiness he went on -with the last fine lie: "I'm keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an' -I'll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don't you wait for -me. She's well rested now; so keep going and going till you've crossed." - -Reaching up, Gordon took Bull's hand in a strong grip. "I suppose -there's no use asking you to let me stay?" - -"No." Bull shook his head. "An' if I would--she wouldn't! Now wake her -up." - -Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while -making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered -their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet -when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing -there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back. - -"Oh, won't you come?" she pleaded. - -"Sure, come on!" Gordon seconded her plea. "We can fight and run like -yesterday." - -"Yes, _do_?" Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him, -shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread -earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. "Oh, _won't_ -you come? I'm _so_ afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I'm -dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them--will happen to -you. And if it did--oh, what should I do? What _shall_ I do?" - -Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a -year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in -holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, "had walked in an' -come out again, sober, like a man," he might have given in; gone on in -her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the -desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake. - -She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through -events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne -herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to -restrain her tears. "There! there!" Gathering her to him, Bull patted -her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. "There! there! -In a few hours we'll be over the border, and 'twon't be long afore we'll -be back at Arboles, you an' Gordon an' me an' Sliver an' Jake." He said -more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life. -Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of -the pain it covered, he concluded: "So don't bother about me. There's -less risk here than in any of the stan's we made in the last three days. -I've got 'em all down below me an' there's on'y this trail. If they try -to come on, it 'ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I'll hold 'em -jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run -along." - -"You're sure?" - -"Sure!" He had to swallow his heart to say it. - -"Remember," she called back, moving away, "I'll be on pins and needles -till you come." - -Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer. -"I won't be here long." - -Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in -hand, he turned his face to the foe. - - - - -XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - -As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and -fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. -From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high -walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a -lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched -down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they -could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting -men. - -After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, -Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the -largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from -below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and -looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to -form in the pale dawn. - -Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so -fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity -or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who -shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first -pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their -great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of -rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in -the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the -emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a -man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was -strong upon him. - -In such moments a man's whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema -drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull's reflections began with -his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden -pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, -coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the -wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados. - -Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute -white fear on the opposite side of Carleton's death-bed. He saw her, -after the funeral, coming toward him through the _patio_ gateway, -swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis -Lovell's rich, dark beauty. - -Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her -diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded -some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. -All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of -match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his -thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one -scene. - -Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he -started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure -her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read -their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her -face buried itself in his breast. - -Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still -in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, -as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills _rancho_, memory leaped -the gap in time and distance--he was sitting in the widow's kitchen, -Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee's birthday -cake. - -From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last -tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her -pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the -bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he -was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm -in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into -dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always -in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through -the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that -his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her -ownership. - -"I shall expect you soon?" - -He heard, too, his own answer, "Sure, ma'am, I'll come straight to you." - -Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty's shoulder, -and--the bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty -windows that stared with fiery eyes from seared walls. - -In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dnouement came almost -with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony. - -While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and -strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the -rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple -shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow -interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam -of the sun. - -It announced the _revueltosos_ of the _brigada_ Gonzales! Her murderers! -Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew -into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac -glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a -club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he -peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now -wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was -again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the -_revueltosos_ in the _fonda_ caon. Big, black, burly, he looked more -like a bear than a man. - -If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the -long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that -sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his -care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives -to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his -revolver, a heavy Colt's .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised -them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and -climbed to the crest of the opposite bank. - -Lying there, he looked down on the _revueltosos_ who had begun to climb -up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was -impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high -and fired. - -The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the -_revueltosos_ tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared -with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the -"fight and run" of yesterday's warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they -moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from -which to return his fire. - -Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at -intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust -about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long -silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up. - -Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, -each recording a stage in Lee's advance toward safety. As clearly as -though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but -moving steadily on with Gordon's help. And his imaginings ran with the -facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, -down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the -plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that -marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently -grew into a United States cavalry patrol. - -Suspecting an ambush, the _revueltosos_ came forward slowly. Quarter of -an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the -opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long -silence, three appeared in the open. - -"They have gone! Bring up the horses!" - -The leader's call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they -waited, he heard their conversation: - -"If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, -we had caught them last night." - -"Si," came the answer. "But he wanted the girl for himself." - -"The swine!" The epithet was set in vile oaths. "But he is cured forever -of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The -bullet took him squarely between the eyes." - -There was more of it--their present hope to run the _gringos_ down with -horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition -they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black -eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, -hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of -the horses. - -A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and -sliding, most of the time on their beasts' haunches, down into the rock -pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. -Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage: - -"They are surely gone. Vamos!" - -A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room -for all in the "bore." He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing -of the first beast he waited, then--with a sudden pry of the -rifle-barrel he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast -as he could pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed -rifle waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth -bared, leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the -midst of the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among -them almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound -from the opposite hill. - -For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of -which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the -dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat -time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the -primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that -evil chaff, dropping them as they came on. - -And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds, -they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his -fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and _machetes_. Till -only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up -the hill Bull made no effort to follow. - -Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the -dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with -the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled -and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand -and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two _revueltosos_ -staring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his -rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white -cloud overhead. - -With such intensity did he stare, the second _revueltoso_ also looked -up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the -faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw; -clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills's voice: - -"I shall expect you soon?" - -The _revueltoso_ was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his -answer rang out, "Sure, ma'am, I'll come straight to you." - -The rifle cracked and "Bull" Perrin, the last of the "Three Bad Men of -Las Bocas," collapsed in a heap. - - - THE END. - - - - - ZANE GREY'S NOVELS - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list. - -THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS - - A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of - frontier warfare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she - is captured by bandits. A surprising climax brings the story to - a delightful close. - -THE RAINBOW TRAIL - - The story of a young clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the - great western uplands--until at last love and faith awake. - -DESERT GOLD - - The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and - ends with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had - willed to the girl who is the story's heroine. - -RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE - - A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago when - Mormon authority ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is - the theme of the story. - -THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN - - This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo - Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the - Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful country of deep - caons and giant pines." - -THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT - - A lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love - a young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands - that the girl shall become the second wife of one of the - Mormons-- Well, that's the problem of this great story. - -THE SHORT STOP - - The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win - fame and fortune as a professional ball player. His hard knocks - at the start are followed by such success as clean - sportsmanship, courage and honesty ought to win. - -BETTY ZANE - - This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the - beautiful young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest - pioneers. - -THE LONE STAR RANGER - - After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an - outlaw along the Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of - the river, he finds a young girl held prisoner, and in - attempting to rescue her, brings down upon himself the wrath of - her captors and henceforth is hunted on one side by honest men, - on the other by outlaws. - -THE BORDER LEGION - - Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a - lawless Western mining camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing - that she loved him--she followed him out. On her way, she is - captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots - Kells, the leader--and nurses him to health again. Here enters - another romance--when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes - Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A gold strike, a thrilling - robbery--gambling and gun play carry you along breathlessly. - -THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey - - The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill," as - told by his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in - Iowa and his first encounter with an Indian. We see "Bill" as a - pony express rider, then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the - Scouts, and later engaged in the most dangerous Indian - campaigns. There is also a very interesting account of the - travels of "The Wild West" Show. No character in public life - makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than - "Buffalo Bill," whose daring and bravery made him famous. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY - WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE - - HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list. - -MAVERICKS. - - A tale of the western frontier, where the "rustler," whose - depredations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the - range, abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told. - -A TEXAS RANGER. - - How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried - law into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a - series of thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, - and then passed through deadly peril to ultimate happiness. - -WYOMING. - - In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured - the breezy charm of "cattleland," and brings out the turbid life - of the frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor. - -RIDGWAY OF MONTANA. - - The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where - politics and mining industries are the religion of the country. - The political contest, the love scene, and the fine character - drawing give this story great strength and charm. - -BUCKY O'CONNOR. - - Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, replete - with the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash - and absorbing fascination of style and plot. - -CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT. - - A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a - bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is - a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination - that is fittingly characteristic of the great free West. - -BRAND BLOTTERS. - - A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid - life of the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with - a charming love interest running through its 320 pages. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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- float: left; - margin-right: 1em } - -.align-right { clear: right; - float: right; - margin-left: 1em } - -.align-center { margin-left: auto; - margin-right: auto } - -div.shrinkwrap { display: table; } - -/* SECTIONS */ - -body { margin: 5% 10% 5% 10% } - -/* compact list items containing just one p */ -li p.pfirst { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0 } - -.first { margin-top: 0 !important; - text-indent: 0 !important } -.last { margin-bottom: 0 !important } - -span.dropcap { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 1 } -img.dropcap { float: left; margin: 0 0.5em 0 0; max-width: 25% } -span.dropspan { font-variant: small-caps } - -.no-page-break { page-break-before: avoid !important } - -/* PAGINATION */ - -@media screen { - .coverpage, .frontispiece, .titlepage, .verso, .dedication, .plainpage - { margin: 10% 0; } - - div.clearpage, div.cleardoublepage - { margin: 10% 0; border: none; border-top: 1px solid gray; } - - .vfill { margin: 5% 10% } -} - -@media print { - div.clearpage { page-break-before: always; padding-top: 10% } - div.cleardoublepage { page-break-before: right; padding-top: 10% } - - .vfill { margin-top: 20% } - h2.title { margin-top: 20% } -} - -</style> -<title>OVER THE BORDER</title> -<meta name="PG.Rights" content="Public Domain" /> -<meta name="PG.Title" content="Over the Border" /> -<meta name="PG.Producer" content="Roger Frank" /> -<meta name="PG.Producer" content="the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net" /> -<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" /> -<meta name="DC.Creator" content="Herman Whitaker" /> -<meta name="DC.Created" content="1921" /> -<meta name="PG.Id" content="40600" /> -<meta name="PG.Released" content="2012-08-27" /> -<meta name="DC.Language" content="en" /> -<meta name="DC.Title" content="Over the Border" /> - -<link href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" rel="schema.DCTERMS" /> -<link href="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators" rel="schema.MARCREL" /> -<meta content="Over the Border" name="DCTERMS.title" /> -<meta content="oborder.rst" name="DCTERMS.source" /> -<meta content="en" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC4646" name="DCTERMS.language" /> -<meta content="2012-08-28T02:22:33.760005+00:00" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF" name="DCTERMS.modified" /> -<meta content="Project Gutenberg" name="DCTERMS.publisher" /> -<meta content="Public Domain in the USA." name="DCTERMS.rights" /> -<link href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600" rel="DCTERMS.isFormatOf" /> -<meta content="Herman Whitaker" name="DCTERMS.creator" /> -<meta content="2012-08-27" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF" name="DCTERMS.created" /> -<meta content="width=device-width" name="viewport" /> -<meta content="EpubMaker 0.3.19b4 by Marcello Perathoner <webmaster@gutenberg.org>" name="generator" /> -<style type="text/css"> -.pageno { position: absolute; right: 95%; font: medium sans-serif; text-indent: 0 } -.pageno:after { color: gray; content: '[' attr(title) ']' } -.lineno { position: absolute; left: 95%; font: medium sans-serif; text-indent: 0 } -.lineno:after { color: gray; content: '[' attr(title) ']' } -.toc-pageref { float: right } -pre { font-family: monospace; font-size: 0.9em; white-space: pre-wrap } -</style> -</head> -<body> -<div class="document" id="over-the-border"> -<h1 class="document-title level-1 pfirst title">OVER THE BORDER</h1> - -<!-- -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- --> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<!-- -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- --> -<div class="align-None container language-en noindent pgheader" id="pg-header" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> -<p class="noindent pfirst">This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the <a class="reference internal" href="#project-gutenberg-license">Project Gutenberg License</a> -included with this eBook or online at -<a class="reference external" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/license">http://www.gutenberg.org/license</a>.</p> -<p class="noindent pnext"></p> -<div class="noindent vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<div class="align-None container noindent white-space-pre-line" id="pg-machine-header"> -<p class="noindent pfirst white-space-pre-line"><span class="white-space-pre-line">Title: Over the Border<br /> -<br /> -Author: Herman Whitaker<br /> -<br /> -Release Date: August 27, 2012 [EBook #40600]<br /> -<br /> -Language: English<br /> -<br /> -Character set encoding: UTF-8</span></p> -</div> -<div class="noindent vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="noindent pfirst" id="pg-start-line">*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK <span>OVER THE BORDER</span> ***</p> -<div class="noindent vspace" style="height: 4em"> -</div> -<p class="noindent pfirst" id="pg-produced-by"><span>Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.</span></p> -<div class="noindent vspace" style="height: 1em"> -</div> -<p class="noindent pfirst"><span></span></p> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="align-None center container titlepage white-space-pre-line"> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line"><span class="larger white-space-pre-line">OVER THE BORDER</span></p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">A NOVEL</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 1em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line"><span class="smaller white-space-pre-line">BY</span></p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">HERMAN WHITAKER</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line"><span class="smaller white-space-pre-line">AUTHOR OF “THE SETTLER,” “THE PLANTER,” “THE PROBATIONER,” Etc.</span></p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">NEW YORK<br /> -GROSSET & DUNLAP<br /> -PUBLISHERS</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 1em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers</p> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="align-None center container verso white-space-pre-line"> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">Books by HERMAN WHITAKER</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">OVER THE BORDER<br /> -THE PROBATIONER<br /> -THE SETTLER<br /> -THE PLANTER<br /> -THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA<br /> -CROSS TRAILS</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK<br /> -Established 1817</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">Over The Border<br /> -Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers</p> -<div class="vspace white-space-pre-line" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">Printed in the United States of America<br /> -Published May, 1917</p> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="align-None center container dedication white-space-pre-line"> -<p class="pfirst white-space-pre-line">TO<br /> -<span class="larger white-space-pre-line">Jack London</span><br /> -IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP</p> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="align-center auto-scaled figure" style="width: 49%" id="figure-6"> -<img class="align-center" style="display: block; width: 100%" alt=" " src="images/illus-fpc.jpg" /> -<div class="caption figure"> -GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS</div> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="id1"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title">Contents</h2> -<div class="container contents"> -<ul class="compact simple toc-list"> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#i-the-three-bad-men-of-las-bocas" id="id2">I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#ii-over-the-border" id="id3">II: OVER THE BORDER</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#iii-even-a-rustler-has-his-troubles" id="id4">III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#iv-the-trail-of-the-colorados" id="id5">IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#v-the-hacienda-of-the-trees" id="id6">V: THE “HACIENDA OF THE TREES”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#vi-bull-turns-nurse" id="id7">VI: BULL TURNS NURSE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#vii-the-rustlers-are-adopted" id="id8">VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#viii-the-leopards-spots" id="id9">VIII: “THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#ix-a-party-and-its-consequences" id="id10">IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#x-wanteda-husband" id="id11">X: WANTED—A HUSBAND</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xi-gordons-debut" id="id12">XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xii-the-recruit-is-tried-outin-several-ways" id="id13">XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT—IN SEVERAL WAYS</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xiii-american-rustlers-vs-mexican-raiders" id="id14">XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS <em class="italics">VS.</em> MEXICAN RAIDERS</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xiv-nemesis-dogs-the-threeand-is-dogged-in-turn-by-lee" id="id15">XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE—AND IS “DOGGED,” IN TURN, BY LEE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xv-bull-and-the-widow-conspire" id="id16">XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xvi-one-man-can-take-a-horse-to-water-but" id="id17">XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT—</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xvii-but-twenty-cannot-make-him-drink" id="id18">XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xviii-the-wind-blows-contrary" id="id19">XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xix-a-kissits-consequences" id="id20">XIX: A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xx-sliver-is-duly-chastened" id="id21">XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxi-the-widow-to-the-rescue" id="id22">XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxii-lee-too-is-confessed" id="id23">XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxiii-in-which-the-widow-goes-and-sliver-comes" id="id24">XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxiv-understanding" id="id25">XXIV: UNDERSTANDING</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxv-love-and-business" id="id26">XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxvi-a-settlement" id="id27">XXVI: A SETTLEMENT</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxvii-an-old-acquaintance" id="id28">XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxviii-a-requisition" id="id29">XXVIII: A “REQUISITION”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxix-temptation" id="id30">XXIX: TEMPTATION</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxx-the-other-half-of-the-truth" id="id31">XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxi-brains-win" id="id32">XXXI: “BRAINS WIN”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxii-travail" id="id33">XXXII: TRAVAIL</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxiii-the-death-in-the-night" id="id34">XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxiv" id="id35">XXXIV: ---------------------?</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxv-why" id="id36">XXXV: WHY?</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxvi-in-the-midst-of-life" id="id37">XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxvii-the-threeagain" id="id38">XXXVII: THE THREE—AGAIN</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxviii-fire" id="id39">XXXVIII: FIRE</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xxxix-vengeance-is-mine" id="id40">XXXIX: “VENGEANCE IS MINE”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xl-sliver-makes-good" id="id41">XL: SLIVER “MAKES GOOD”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xli-jake-betters-the-exchange" id="id42">XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE”</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xlii-bull-dreams-a-dream" id="id43">XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM!</a></p> -</li> -<li class="level-2 toc-entry"><p class="first pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#xliii-the-last-of-the-three-bad-men" id="id44">XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN</a></p> -</li> -</ul> -</div> -</div> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="i-the-three-bad-men-of-las-bocas"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id2">I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">The Three had chosen their lair wisely.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the picturesque Spanish phrase, it “situated itself” midway of the -desert, the great Mexican desert that is more varied in its heated -monotony than a land of woods and fields and streams. Here it runs to -sparse grass land under upland <em class="italics">piñon</em>; there spreads over wide, clean -sands that reflect like burnished brass the intolerable glare of the -sun. Now it marches for leagues with the yuccas that fling crazed arms -and shrunken limbs like posturing dwarfs; again it is dotted with lonely -<em class="italics">mesas</em>, monolithic masses that raise orange and vermilion facades out -of a violet mirage. A magic land it is, made out of shattered rainbows, -girded with crimson-and-gold mountains that wear around their high -foreheads cooling bandages of snow; a land of deathless calms, cyclonic -storms, torrential rains, peopled only by the vultures that wheel -against the sky and the little golden dust-whorls which dance together -over its heated face. A country where dwells the very spirit of romance; -of which anything might be predicted and come to pass; therefore, as -before said, the very place for a lair.</p> -<p class="pnext">Secondly, the Three had shown a nice discrimination in the selection of -a site. Its capacities in the way of offense and defense would have -earned the instant commendation of a medieval baron, Mexican bandit, -revolutionist, or “movie” director in search of an ideal robber’s roost. -Years ago a Yankee “prospector” with more faith than sense and money -enough to have left prospecting severely alone, had kept a raft of -<em class="italics">peones</em> busy for the better part of two years ripping the heart out of -a mountain-top in a feverish search for fabulous gold. Rumors that still -linger in Sonora <em class="italics">jacales</em> tell that the <em class="italics">gringo</em> worked under the -direction of the spirits—or a spiritualist, which may or may not be -quite the same. The results—to wit, a huge gap in the mountain and an -abandoned adobe powder house, now serving as a residence for the Three -Bad Men—seem to favor the rumor. Spirits were never good miners. But -that is neither here nor there, the Three concerning themselves only -with the natural fortifications they thus inherited.</p> -<p class="pnext">The adobe stood well back in a semicircular gap, protected on three -sides by the curving walls of the excavation. Behind them, the mountain -dropped almost a thousand feet sheer, and the level bench in front of -the house could only be gained by a narrow path that fell like a yellow -snake down the steep slopes into thick chaparral. From its edge one -overlooked the vast reaches of the central Sonora desert, an ashen sea -of sage and mimosa shored in by far mountains that loomed dusky purple -or stood out stark yellow as they happened to lie to the sun. Since the -Yankee went back on his “controls,” or they on him, a <em class="italics">sahuaro</em> cactus -had raised its fluted barrel within the excavation, captaining a squad -of dwarf yuccas that poked grotesque arms in pathetic entreaty out of -the rubble. To these natural improvements the Three had added a -<em class="italics">ramada</em>, broad porch of poles and cornstalks, in the shade of which -they took their ease one hot nooning, two playing <em class="italics">pedro</em> at a rough -wooden table while the third dozed and nodded with stool tilted back -against the adobe wall.</p> -<p class="pnext">It did not require more than a cursory glance to know the Three for -members of that sad colony which is doomed by its past to remain on the -wrong side of the Mexican border. Beginning with Sliver Smith, the -sleeper; his drowsy lids hid blue eyes that were hard as chips of agate -and exactly fitted his reckless face. Just now sleep had softened its -lines and brought a certain underlying good-nature. But for the mouth -and deep creases down each side of the nose, which bespoke passions -violent and unrestrained, one would have put him down now for that which -he had been—a cowman from the New Mexican ranges.</p> -<p class="pnext">The other two, however, really looked the “bad man.” “Bull” Perrin, the -biggest and eldest, might have been especially cast by nature for the -part. Big, burly, black-visaged, and heavy-jowled, excessive drinking -had dyed his face out of all relation to the creamy skin the gods had -given him. The hot brown eyes under straight bushy brows bespoke a -cyclonic temper. But though Bull conveyed the impression of an “ugly -customer” at first sight, a physiognomist would have picked Jake Evers, -his partner, as a far more dangerous man. The cold, bleak sparks of eyes -in his lean, lantern-jawed face scintillated with cunning. But for a -certain humor that lurked about the corners of his mouth, his face would -have been utterly repulsive.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet after granting their “badness,” there was about them no taint of the -mean, rat-like wickedness of the city criminal. Their composite was of -strong impulses, misdirected forces gone to waste, of men cast by birth -in a wrong age. In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their -strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in -the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned -toad in the sand at Bull’s feet, as much as the lizard that coursed -swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper’s head; as much as the -<em class="italics">sahuaro</em> and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold -glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that—horses and cattle not -being in question—they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter -of its best traditions.</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking at Bull and Jake as they sat at play, the former might be -likened to a grizzly; the latter to a tiger, alert, stealthy, cunning, -ferocious; qualities which sprang into evidence with startling -suddenness when a shrill burst of woman’s scolding presently disrupted -the heated silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">Apparently the noise issued from a white cloud that hid the doorway; but -as this settled and cleared away, a buxom slattern of a Mexican girl -stood revealed. While flicking out the last dust of flour from an empty -sack she bitterly reviled the Three. Though delivered in Spanish, the -substance of her complaint was international and goes easily into -English.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Flojos! Lazy ones! how shall one cook without flour? The coffee, too, -is gone—and the sugar. Of lard or grease there is not a smear for the -pan. You must go forth, to-day.”</p> -<p class="pnext">This was merely the text. While she enlarged thereon with copious -illustrations to prove their worthlessness as providers, the two men at -the table proceeded quietly with their play. It was the third that -finally interrupted the harangue with the irascibility of one aroused -from pleasant sleep.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Shut up, Dove!”</p> -<p class="pnext">In its literal sense the word stands for the most innocent of birds. But -she chose to take the opposite meaning of the sarcastic Spanish.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señor! I am that or I should not be here now, cooking for three -beasts.” After a comparison between them and the lower animals that -greatly favored the latter, she ran on with increasing heat:</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Dove,’ indeed? Then where is my price? Where are they, the fine -clothes, the silks and satins and linen, the jewelry and laces you were -to gain for me? Was it by this I was bought?” She held out her dirty -black skirt. “I, that might be now sitting in the cantina of Ignacio -Flores at Las Bocas, selling aguardiente and anisette to his custom? Si, -señores, <em class="italics">where are they</em>, the velvets, ribands, and neck chains? I—”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was at this point that Jake displayed his quality. Swinging swiftly -around, he threw his knife, so hard and quickly that it stuck quivering -in the door lintel close to the girl’s throat before she had time to -close her mouth.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here! don’t be so careless.” Bull’s bushy brows drew down over his -burning eyes in quick reproof. But his next remark proved that the -interference was not based on altruism. “If you croak her, who’s to do -the cooking? Any corn left, Rosa?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Whereas Sliver’s rude interruption had merely stimulated her tongue; -whereas, also, she had stuck out that member at Jake the instant she -made sure the knife had missed, she now caught her breath with a little, -frightened gulp. “Si, señor.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then make some tortillas and serve them along with the jerky,” he -called after her. “And bring us out a drink.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At this Sliver, who had resumed his doze, sat up again. His lugubrious -exclamation, “Oh, <em class="italics">hell</em>!” caused the others to look up a moment later. -With an empty demijohn held upside down Rosa stood in the doorway. She -did not speak. But her tragic pose, vindictive nod, said quite plainly, -“Now will you go?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither did they speak. The situation was beyond revilings. Slowly Jake -picked up and pocketed the cards. Sliver rose to his feet. In single -file they marched down the path to find their horses. Indeed, they had -caught the animals, saddled up at the stable on the flat below and were -riding away through the chaparral before they recovered sufficiently to -attempt to fix the blame for the shortage.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver—who, by the way, had gained his nickname under the law of -opposites because he was short and stout—remembered that he had warned -them several times “notter hit it so hard.” But his testimony lost force -by reason of certain “lone drinks” in the absorption of which he had, by -the others, been caught. Jake, on the other hand, had pleaded for more -liquor and less flour the last time they stocked up at Las Bocas. By -frank confession, moreover, he reduced the force of Sliver’s charge that -he would never be satisfied with less liquor than “he ked swim in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right. I never really seen at one time more whisky than I felt I -c’d drink.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From this he went on with invectives against the wave of reform which, -by its sudden flooding of the “Territ’ries”—as he still called the -States of Arizona and New Mexico—might be held indirectly responsible -for his present thirst. “For a cowman, like Sliver here, it don’t matter -so much, him being used to dry spells out on the range. But for a man -that’s dealt faro in a s’loon for a spell of years with two fingers of -bourbon allus under his nose, it comes some bitter. Them was the golden -days. What a man made in beef cattle or gold was his’n to plank down on -a bar or place on a card. Till them pinch-faces from the Middle West -descended like locusts upon the lan’, drought was unknown save by a few -fool prospectors that got themselves lost in the desert. Locusts? I -wrong ’em! A locust does live up to its natural instincts. Locusts is a -blessing compared to pinch-faces. Why—” But certain lengthy reflections -that established the place of the “Middle-Wester” beneath even the lowly -bedbug in the scale of creation, must give place to his conclusion. “Si, -señores! ’twas them druv’ me to rustling. But for them I’d still be -living honest, dealing straight faro to all comers with on’y an -occasional turn from the bottom of the box for the good of the house.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Pity for you!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s pithy comment was enlarged upon by Sliver.</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ you-all needn’t to be howling so loud, either, about them dry -spells on the ranges. We allus had it in the bunk-houses an’ ’twas a -poor cook that couldn’t hide a keg in the chuck-wagon. As for your -faro—’twas to play the odd card you wolves dealt from the bottom that I -med my first rustle. But for you I’d be taking my copa right now out of -the cook’s keg instead of dying of thirst in this lousy desert.”</p> -<p class="pnext">There was real heat in the accusation, but the ex-gambler’s lean, -leathery face merely split in a dry grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If your mother bred you a fool, don’t blame me. The flea bit the dog, -the dog bit me; I kicked the dog an’ killed the flea. Take a drink of -water, Sliver; it all works out in the end. You next, Bull. Which was -it—water, wine, or weemen?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“None of ’em.” The big rustler shook his head. “Early piety did for me. -Prayers morning, noon, an’ night; grace before meals; two long sermons -on Sundays, an’ two hours, Sabbath-school, and what would you expect? I -was so well brought up I jest had to go wrong. But if we don’t jog along -we won’t make Las Bocas to-night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As Bull spurred on ahead, Sliver looked at Jake. “Say, he ain’t exactly -what you-all ’d call frank in his conversings. If there’s a thing he -don’t know about us—well, ’tain’t our fault. But him? When you come to -think of it did you ever hear him say how he kem to take up rustling?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The gambler shook his head. “In a gen’ral way—so gen’ral that I couldn’t -tell jest how I got it—I’ve sorter gathered that he once croaked a man. -But whether ’twas before or after he took up the profesh I couldn’t say. -In the natural order of things, a rustler’s bound, sooner or later, to -down some prying fool. There’s so many that try to mix in his business. -But if it was before, Bull done it—I’ll bet you the gent had it coming.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="ii-over-the-border"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id3">II: OVER THE BORDER</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">That night the Three put up at the <em class="italics">cantina</em> in the little adobe town of -Las Bocas, where, by reason of occasional largesses to the leader of the -revolutionary faction that happened to be on top, a welcome was always -certain. Just now it was more particularly so because the present -<em class="italics">jefe-politico</em>, a Carranzista, varied his political activities by -acting as “fence” in the disposal of their plunder.</p> -<p class="pnext">In accordance with his advice, the following afternoon found them -approaching the American border at a point far west of their usual -sphere of operations. While they journeyed the sun slid down its western -slant till it hung like a smoky lamp in the far dust of the desert. -Behind them the sea of sage still ran off to distant mountains, but the -sunset glow washed its dust away, draping the land in a royal robe. -Ahead the grade was rising imperceptibly but steadily to a sparse grass -country where the sage, <em class="italics">palo verde</em>, and yucca gave place to huge -<em class="italics">sahuaros</em> that strewed the plain with their fluted barrels like the -jade columns of some vast ruin. Among them roamed the flocks and herds -of a pink-walled <em class="italics">hacienda</em> that nestled in a grove of lordly -cottonwoods. As they rode past, the Three noted with appraising glances -the sleek hides of a fine bunch of steers.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Dress a thousand pounds of beef apiece,” Jake opined.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Worth eighty pesos, gold, on the hoof, in El Paso,” Sliver yearningly -added.</p> -<p class="pnext">But their interest went no further—for reasons that appeared when, at -sundown, they rode past the concrete pillar that marked the -international boundary. Rustler that he was, drunkard and gambler, -utterly worthless if the reports current on the New Mexican ranges were -to be believed, Sliver’s eye nevertheless lit up at the sight of it; the -glow on his hard face was not all sunset reflection.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The good old U.S.,” he commented. “<em class="italics">Some</em> country!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He wasn’t talking that way las’ time we crossed.” Jake winked at Bull.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Guess not. He was cussing Cristobel Columbo for ever having discovered -it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right,” Sliver admitted. “But I was what you-all might call in a -bit of a hurry with a squad of rangers streaking at my heels. Other -things being ekal—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Which they ain’t,” Jake interrupted. “Mexico’s good enough for me. -Mexico an’ revolution! For I tell you right now that if Porfirio Diaz -was still boss, his rurales would have taken right holt where the -rangers left off. Instead of dangling from a pine on the American side, -we’d hev’ finished with a fusillado on this. But with the government -switching every five minutes between Orozco, Villa, Huerta, Carranza, -an’ the jefe-politicos an’ governors slaughtering each other -between-whiles, it’s nobody’s business to look after us. We make our -little sneaks across the border an’ return in peace an’ quiet. So ‘Viva -la revolucion!’ That reminds me—where’re you heading, Bull?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Livingstone <em class="italics">rancho</em> on the Little Stoney.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say, but that’s horses! Don’t they run ’em into the corrals at night?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The big rustler nodded. “All the easier to find, an’ after you once get -them moving it don’t take three days to run ’em over the line. Besides, -Don Manuel tol’ me at Las Bocas yesterday that the Carranzistas are -needing heavy horses for their artillery over on the Coast. He’ll pay -fifty pesos apiece an’ take his chance on a five-thousand-per-cent -profit after the old gentleman grabs the presidential chair.” He -emphatically concluded, “<em class="italics">Horses</em>, you bet!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Some risky, cutting ’em out?” Sliver, too, looked dubious.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not as much as you think. Did you never have some flea-bitten son of a -gun rub down the bars while you slept plumb up against the corral an’ -wake next morning to find nary a head in sight? A horse don’t like a -corral any more’n a man loves prison. The bars once down, you kin trust -’em to soft-foot it out to the open. Why”—his grin at the remembrance -set a flash of good-nature in his hard face—“why, I’ve seen an old nag -look back at a colt that kicked the bars passing out just like he was -saying, ‘You damn young fool! now you’ve upset the soup!’ Leave it to -me. I’ll work ’em out on foot while you sit tight an’ hold my horse. -Moon’s going to be jest about right, too. She’ll be taking her first -peep about the time we get ’em out in the clear. It’ll be a pipe, then, -to saddle up fresh beasts an’ shoot ’em over the border.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">The <em class="italics">rancho</em> for which they were heading lay still two hours away, and -while they rode the <em class="italics">sahuaro</em> pillars gave place in turn to <em class="italics">piñon</em> and -juniper thinly strewn over rolling grassland. Before night settled down, -the wandering cattle-trails they had followed drew into the twin ruts of -a wagon-road. Their going was timed by the moon. But it stole out from -behind a low hill a trifle ahead of schedule. By its first dim radiance -they made out the dark mass of the <em class="italics">rancho</em> buildings, house, corrals, -stables, in a swale between two hills. It was, however, dark enough for -their purpose, and, leaving his horse with the others, Bull went forward -on foot.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was nervous work, sitting there watching the buildings take form -under the waxing moon. Their strained senses took every sound, smell, -and sight; a dog’s bark, click of horns as a steer scratched his -forehead on the top rail of a corral, the impatient pawing of a horse, -the warm cattle odor that floated on the night breeze. Dim, uncertain -shapes seemed to form and fade in the nearer gloom. They were nervous as -cats by the time a gun suddenly flashed under the dark porch of the -house.</p> -<p class="pnext">The croupy cough of a child plus the nervous fears of its mother did it. -Not that the woman saw Bull when she drew the curtain and peeped out. -But these days, with a new revolution breaking, as Jake put it, “every -five minutes” over the border, the American ranchers along the -international line slept always with an eye open for possible raids. So -far as Bull was concerned, her whisper was just as fatal as though she -had seen him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Pa! get up! I’m sure there’s some one out there!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps the rancher did see. Educated in objects moving through dusk, -his plainsman’s eye may have noticed movement. Or perhaps he shot on -chance. In either case he was quickly informed by the roar and clatter -of hoofs that followed, for though Bull did not expect, now, to get away -with a single head, pursuit would be blinded and divided by stampeding -the beasts. Dropping the bars while the gun continued to flash its -staccato warnings, he started the animals out, leaped on the back of -one; as soon as it cleared the huddle, went shooting down the trail, -guiding the animal with the swing of his body.</p> -<p class="pnext">Unfortunately, the whim that governs a stampede moved the other beasts -to follow. So when the rancher and his men—in shirts and trousers, but -not one without a gun—pulled their mounts out of the stables, their -pursuit was guided by the distant thunder of hoofs. Neither did Bull’s -quick change to his own beast divert the stampede. When the Three -galloped on, the scared animals still followed like dogs at their heels.</p> -<p class="pnext">“First time my prey ever chased me!” Jake laughed harshly, looking back -at the band. “If old man Livingstone don’t follow too close we’ll get -’em yet!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull shook his head. “Not with the moon sailing up to her full an’ the -critters leaving a trail broad as a pike road. Listen to that!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A sharp report punctuated the thud and clatter of the stampede; the -first shot of a fusillade that grew hotter and hotter as the horses -trailed off right and left, leaving the rustlers more exposed. As yet -they were running in the shadow of a long hill where the light was poor. -But half a mile ahead lay an open plain unbroken by cover.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They’ll shoot the lights outen us there!” Sliver prophesied. “Better -make a stan’ while we can.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“They <em class="italics">are</em> getting sassy,” Jake agreed, as a bullet whizzed under his -chin. “We’ll have to teach ’em this ain’t no turkey-shoot.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The deciding word came, as usual, from Bull. “They’d surround an’ hold -us for the posse. You ride on while I check ’em. If they try to round me -it’ll be up to you to take ’em from the rear. Get behind so’s they don’t -see me turn.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In the faint light his sudden whirl behind a bush went unnoticed. He had -already unshipped his rifle from the saddle slings, and through the -upper branches he took careful aim. A hundred yards away Livingstone was -coming at full gallop, about the same distance ahead of his men. Bull -waited till he could see the old fellow’s hair, silver in the moonlight, -framing his angry red face. Once the sights lined up level between the -eyes. But muttering, “I ked sure spoil your beauty, but—I won’t,” Bull -lowered them to the horse’s chest and fired.</p> -<p class="pnext">With the report the beast plunged forward, head and neck doubled under, -throwing his rider out in the clear. Though badly shaken, the old man -was up the next instant, and as he ran for cover his sudden change of -expression from anger to flustered surprise drew from Bull a grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Teach you not to get so fresh.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At the crack of the rifle the others had also darted for cover, and as -their guns began to spit and flash from the chaparral along the -hillside, Bull laughed outright. “Not a rifle among ’em. Easy going! -Hasta luego, señores! Some other time!”</p> -<p class="pnext">One or two bolder spirits emerged from the chaparral as Bull rode out in -the open. But they scuttled back like rabbits as he swung in the saddle -with leveled rifle. Though they followed till the boundary pillar stood -out, two hours later, a shining silver shaft under the brilliant moon, -they preserved always a safe distance, and Bull denied Sliver’s -suggestion to “chuck a volley” into the dim mass.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Kain’t you leave your Uncle Samuel sleep? He ain’t a-going to be moved -off his ‘watchful waiting’ by the loss of no horse, but if we go to -killing folks, he’s sure going to take time to catch our goat b’twixt -revolutions.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“To-morrow morning,” Jake commented, grinning, “the morning papers will -be running scareheads an inch high about the ‘Latest Border Outrage!’ -Meanwhile we’ll be jogging home—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—without the horses,” Bull dryly finished.</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ Rosa, back at the roost,” Sliver added, “howling for coffee an’ -flour an’ grease.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Which reminded Jake of their former argument: “I told you we orter ha’ -bought more whisky. Nothing left but to ride back to Las Bocas an’ hit -Don Miguel for credit.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="iii-even-a-rustler-has-his-troubles"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id4">III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Las Bocas was slowly stewing in its native filth when the Three sighted -it again at noon next day.</p> -<p class="pnext">In all the world nothing reflects its environment more faithfully than a -Mexican town. Southward, the great cities of Mexico and Guadalajara -testify with their stately cathedrals, ornate public buildings, -theaters, parks, and plazas, the flowering <em class="italics">patios</em> of lovely and -luxurious homes, first to the richness of the central Mexican plateau, -secondly to the fact that in normal times all the wealth of the republic -drains to them. Oppositely, the northern towns with their squalid adobe -streets, overrun with a plague of dirty children, dogs, vultures, pigs; -desiccated by fierce heat, drowned by torrential rains; these in their -place and turn are eminently characteristic of the arid desert. Save -that it was a little smaller, a little dirtier, perhaps a little richer -in the variety of its stenches, Las Bocas might serve as the type of all -Mexican frontier towns.</p> -<p class="pnext">As the wind blew their way, the Three smelled it from afar. But usage -breeds indifference even to evil odors. If not actually homesome, the -fetor bespoke a possible drink.</p> -<p class="pnext">A quarter mile before entering the town they crossed the <em class="italics">arroyo</em> that -gave it drink. Its waters also furnished an open-air laundry for two -brown girls who knelt by its edge, pounding their soiled linen on flat -boulders. These days of rampant revolution, a good girl had needs be -careful, and at sight of the Three, dusty, unkempt, bearded, and gaunt -from tire and travel, <em class="italics">gringos</em> at that, the two leaped up and fled -toward the town.</p> -<p class="pnext">Grinning at their fright, Bull and Sliver would have ridden on, but -Jake, who never missed a trick, reined in his beast and began to examine -the laundry with the eye of a connoisseur. Though the remainder of her -be clad in rags, the humblest <em class="italics">peona</em> will have her lace petticoat, and -the dozen or so pieces that were already spread out to dry on the -neighboring bushes were really very fine.</p> -<p class="pnext">“D’you allow to turn lady’s maid?” Sliver spoke, as Jake bent to stuff -the lingerie into his saddle-bags.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not till Rosa’s had the refusal of it. This orter keep her satisfied -for at least a month.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Grinning, the pair of rascals spurred their jaded beasts and overtook -Bull as he entered a narrow gut of a street that followed the -meanderings of the original cow-path to the <em class="italics">jefe’s</em> house, a plastered -adobe, limewashed in purple and gold, that faced the inevitable military -barracks across a sorry attempt at a plaza.</p> -<p class="pnext">If the small traders and artisans who constituted the bulk of the -population had been addicted to such flights of imagination, they might -have pictured the <em class="italics">jefatura’s</em> yawning gates as a huge gullet through -which, in normal times, their substance drained in taxes, fines, and -imposts to Mexico City, the nation’s stomach, there to be consumed by a -hungry tribe of official hookworms. Now, of course, it was being -deflected into the private pocket of the dominant revolutionary chief. -Lacking the imagination, they cursed beneath their breath and waited -patiently till the next revolution should bring a new tyrant to avenge -them on the present oppressor.</p> -<p class="pnext">The latest incumbent was at lunch under the peppertree in the <em class="italics">patio</em> -when the Three dismounted at the gates. Fat and sleek and brown, his -generally gross appearance was accentuated by pouched beady eyes, waxed -mustache, unhealthy, erupted skin. As he sat there, shoveling in -<em class="italics">frijoles</em> and <em class="italics">chile</em>, even a <em class="italics">peon’s</em> slack imaginings could have -easily established a resemblance—if not between him and a hookworm, at -least, to some greedy parasite. The irritability, blind individualism, -offensive conceit, treachery, too common to Mexicans, lay hidden under -the usual veneer of Spanish courtesy. The embraces, backpattings, -effusive greetings with which he welcomed the Three would have graced -the reception of a favorite son.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Enter, amigos!” His welcome buzzed through the <em class="italics">patio</em>. “Sit down and -eat. Afterward we shall look over the horses. You have bestowed -them—where?”</p> -<p class="pnext">But when he learned of their failure, the scorpion showed through the -glaze of courtesy like a fly in amber. “<em class="italics">Carambar-r-r-aa</em>, señores!” His -read wagged in a nasty way. “I had counted on the horses—to save your -alive. On my desk lies a requisition from your gringo border police, -demanding your bodies. Que desgracia!” The spite that scintillated in -his beads of eyes gave his words sinister significance. “One would -dislike to do it, if ’twere only through hate of your Government. But -one has to account to his chiefs. Already they have inquired for you, -and always I made answer, ‘These are good hombres, useful to our cause.’ -But deeds count more than words. Horses for their artilleria would have -proved your worth. But now—” a second nasty wag told that their failure -left them as other <em class="italics">gringos</em>, to be despised, hated, persecuted. Having -given the impression time to sink in, he suggested, “But there must be -others? You will try again?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No use.” Bull’s gloom emphasized the denial. “This is the second time -in a month that we’ve been chased across the border. They’re looking for -us all along the line.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si? Then must you go elsewhere. What of”—pausing, he looked cautiously -around—“what of this side? In central Chihuahua there are many -horse-ranchos, gringo ranches with fine blooded stock.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">The <em class="italics">jefe’s</em> shrug anticipated the objection. “Si, si! ’tis Mexico. That -is what I have always told my chief—‘these hombres bother only the -gringo pigs.’” With a covert grin at the safe insult, he continued, “But -a gringo is a gringo, whether here or in your United States. If they be -despoiled, we shall not shed many tears. There will be a complaint, of -course, to and from your Government, and much writing between -departments. In the mean time we have the horses. So—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But that’s Valles’s country, isn’t it?” Jake put in. “He’s a bad hombre -to fool with!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The <em class="italics">jefe</em> turned on him his evil grin. “What if the gringo ranchers had -caught you last night? Hanging, amigo, is a dog’s death. I would prefer -the fusilado of Valles’s men.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What if he kicks to your people? Puts in a claim for our heads? You’re -working together, ain’t you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Once again the <em class="italics">jefe</em> looked around. “Listen, amigos! Between friends -one may show the truth. Already there is a cloud, a little cloud, no -bigger than a child’s hand arisen between us and Valles. If the horses -are taken from a gringo <em class="italics">rancho</em> in Valles’s country, my chiefs will be -the better pleased. What they have Valles cannot get in the days when -the cloud grows big and black and bursts.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver, who understood more Spanish than he could speak, here nudged -Bull. “Ask him if he’ll grub-stake the deal.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ask nothing!” Bull’s hot eyes shot brown fire. “You heard him rubbing -it into us, didn’t you? If it wasn’t that we need him I’d wring the -little brown adder’s neck.” He went on, suavely, in Spanish, “My amigo -questions me of the price. It will be the same—fifty pesos apiece, -señor?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, the <em class="italics">jefe</em> glanced impatiently back at his lunch. He appeared -to have forgotten his invitation. Pleading an engagement, he bowed them -out through the gates, then returned to his gorging while, hungrier, and -even still thirstier, the Three rode down the street.</p> -<p class="pnext">Usually they were not averse to an exchange of glances, or a -flirtation—if the <em class="italics">hombre</em> was not in sight—with the brown girls who -watched them from their doorways. But now their glances sought only the -<em class="italics">cantinas</em>, whose open bars displayed a tempting array of bottles. While -they looked their progress grew constantly slower, finally stopped in -front of one whose owner was taking his <em class="italics">siesta</em> stretched out on the -bar.</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake looked from the sleeper to his companions, then at the bottles of -anisette and <em class="italics">tequila</em> on the rough wooden shelves. “If he was drunk it -’u’d be easy—” As the Mexican disposed of the doubt, just then, by -opening one excessively sober eye, Jake desperately concluded, “Say, -kain’t we raise the price among us?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull tapped his empty pockets.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver mourned, “All I’ve got is a Confederate five some one slipped me -during my last toot in El Paso. I’ve carried it sence for a lucky -piece.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ lucky it is!” Jake extended an eager hand. “After this -revolutionary currency that’s run off by the million on a newspaper -press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got -Jeff Davis’s picter on it? This fellow don’t know him from Abe Lincoln. -All gringo bills look alike to him. He’ll never know the diff.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the -bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two <em class="italics">pesos</em> and some -<em class="italics">centavos</em>, along with three stiff <em class="italics">copas</em>. Deceived by the size of the -roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the <em class="italics">tienda</em> behind the bar -coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa’s desire, and other -necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of <em class="italics">tequila</em>, it made a goodly -pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson -in finance—to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating -the <em class="italics">tequila</em> from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and -shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some <em class="italics">centavos</em> aforesaid -represented the value of either.</p> -<p class="pnext">From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the <em class="italics">tequila</em>; -then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck -of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver -happened to catch the merchant’s eye.</p> -<p class="pnext">He grinned, answering Sliver’s wink. “Si, señores, this time you shall -drink with me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting -out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began -to throw two kings and an ace in the “three-card trick.” So deftly he -did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a -dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed -the Mexican’s interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the -flying cards.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Looks easy, don’t it?” Bull suggested. “Here, Sliver, give this hombre -a chance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on -to try again. He could do it! He’d bet his <em class="italics">sombrero</em>, his horse, his -store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no -other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on -the counter, against their bottles of <em class="italics">tequila</em>—and lost! In the course -of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings, -there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original -thirty-two <em class="italics">pesos</em> and some <em class="italics">centavos</em>, a bolt of lace and linen for -Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged -them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost -his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable -interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three -packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way.</p> -<p class="pnext">As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine. -Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, the -<em class="italics">comerciante</em> would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so -his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser—perhaps because -she has usually no hand in the game—and as the Three rode off she let -loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art -lost in a siesta!” she assailed him. “After them, lazy one, and recover -our goods!”</p> -<p class="pnext">By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was -quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two -girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street -and added their outcries to the woman’s clamor. And now the Three were -surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme -had been making sheep’s eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the -saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They stole thy—” Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural indignation -increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up the street -and overtook the Three.</p> -<p class="pnext">Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish -punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his -discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull’s -bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the -man’s angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was -up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake’s bleak -eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull’s rifle was -aimed from the hip.</p> -<p class="pnext">To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If -one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a -company can—or a regiment. The man’s shrill whistle was really far more -dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the -next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally -brought from the <em class="italics">carcel</em> a squad on the run.</p> -<p class="pnext">By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with -rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human -kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was -gone. Jake’s long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver’s reckless -face had frozen in stone. Bull’s head and huge shoulders rose above his -breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as -trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers -brought an officer and company from the barracks.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican -comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery -set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of -Porfirio Diaz’s famed <em class="italics">rurales</em>, the blue and red stripes or fatigue -linen of the Federal Army, even the <em class="italics">charro</em> suits of Orozco’s -Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men -were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown -faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy -would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the -officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled -rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this -fundamental truth—whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not -worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Did I not see you, señor, at the jefatura just now?”</p> -<p class="pnext">With Bull’s nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on the -<em class="italics">comerciante</em> and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint. -“They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in -carcel.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the -merchant’s back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. “How know -ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed -while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be -friends of the jefe and no stealers of women’s fripperies.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away.</p> -<p class="pnext">Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way—to the -<em class="italics">cantina</em> where they usually put up.</p> -<p class="pnext">“All we’ve gotter do now,” Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the -street, “is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an’ Rosa’ll -be fixed for a month.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten, -followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural -“thirsts” turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course -they spent first the thirty-two <em class="italics">pesos</em> and some <em class="italics">centavos</em>, drank up -their own <em class="italics">tequila</em>, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more -liquor for the rabble of <em class="italics">peones</em> and brown girls that flocked to the -<em class="italics">cantina</em> like buzzards to carrion.</p> -<p class="pnext">The “drunk” went through the customary stages from boisterous -conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times -Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at -each other’s throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse, -because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the -other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad -shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary -throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past -tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep.</p> -<p class="pnext">As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was -nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a -likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside; -unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their -natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at -that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, <em class="italics">sans</em> -groceries, <em class="italics">sans tequila</em>, <em class="italics">sans</em> money, but plus three splitting -headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Tough on Rosa,” Jake said, with a rueful grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If she’s still there,” Sliver doubted. “An’ I’ll bet a peppercorn to a -toothpick she ain’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Chihuahua, now, or starve,” Bull succinctly summed the situation. He -added, grinning, “Anyway, we’ll travel light.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="iv-the-trail-of-the-colorados"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id5">IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the -first and greatest of the Chihuahua <em class="italics">haciendas</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of -the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled -on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train, -then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles -away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested -in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs -were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first -revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern -overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers, -artisans, <em class="italics">peones</em>, drew by his grace the very breath of life.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining -distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped <em class="italics">mesas</em> uplifted -their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away, -one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a -mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of -the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn -over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched -windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; -burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little -winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of -distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary -reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so -very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the -blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Vultures,” Sliver pointed. “Must be something dead over there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Or dying?” Bull questioned. “Otherwise the birds ’u’d settle. These -days it’s as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way.”</p> -<p class="pnext">And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of -encircling cactus into an open space around a giant <em class="italics">sahuaro</em>. Head -fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, -limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full -stretch of his arms around the <em class="italics">sahuaro’s</em> barrel. During the sixty -hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till -it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to -the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot -sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus. -Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow -roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the -approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling -the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s white! a gringo!” Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The poor devil!” Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, -limp body on his outspread coat.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on -the man’s swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the -wrists and cut away the cords.</p> -<p class="pnext">If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered -through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have -noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would -probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too -weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the -point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself.</p> -<p class="pnext">He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from -the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His -house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings -up there. If he could only get to it, he’d be all right.</p> -<p class="pnext">And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and -cradled like a child in the rustler’s great arms, he scarcely felt the -journey. Viewed as he hung on the <em class="italics">sahuaro</em>, dirty, bruised, shrunken by -fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, -washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky -and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical -American miner of middle age—short gray beard, hawk profile, high -cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked -for themselves—for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too -late to go on—he had recovered his voice and told them all.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It was the ‘Colorados’ that tied me up. I knew them by the ‘red hearts’ -on the breasts of their charro jackets.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the -terror associated with the name. Originally the “Colorados” had been -Orozco’s soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution -against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern -Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by -the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter -power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids.</p> -<p class="pnext">“But I was lucky to get off with that,” he said, after describing the -beating that had preceded the tying-up. “They cut the soles off the feet -of two of my <em class="italics">peones</em>, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky -chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death -where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn’t been -that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I’d -have got the same. They left me to raid some <em class="italics">rancho</em>, but swore they’d -come back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Riding in, they had passed the dead <em class="italics">peones</em>, and, bad man that he was, -Jake shuddered at the memory. “But why do you stay here, with that kind -of people running loose?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why do I stay?” The miner repeated the question, with heat. “The -American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man -stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties -that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had -been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, -and I’d worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to -come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose.</p> -<p class="pnext">“At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our -rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out—we that had invested -a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million -dollars’ worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it -all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned!</p> -<p class="pnext">“Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But -most of the others had. We’d thought, of course, that the mistreatment -of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans -till the thing had been done again and again. Since then—know what that -Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our -Government?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Your Government!’ he sneered. ‘We have killed your men, we have -ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me -what else we can do to make your Government fight?’”</p> -<p class="pnext">He concluded, with bitter sadness, “I was brought up to love and revere -the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it -floated. But, men! I’ve seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled -by filthy <em class="italics">peones</em>, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of -Americans who believed in its power to save.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered -principally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the -central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the -Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light,” Jake agreed. “He don’t -seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to -Mexico City.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of -tobacco smoke. “Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put -the Apaches outer the scalping business an’ got through spanking Johnny -Reb.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. “Jest wait! D’you-all -know what’s going to happen one o’ these days? That same Uncle Sam, he’s -mighty patient an’ he’s been handed a heap o’ bad counsel; but one of -these days he’s a-going to get mad. When he does—listen! he’s a-going to -walk down to the Mexican line an’ take a look at it with his nose all -crinkled up like he smelled something bad. ‘Things ain’t quite right -here!’ he’ll say, ca’m an’ deliberate, that-a-way. Then he’ll stoop an’ -pick up that line, an’ when he sots it down again—it ’ull be south of -Panama. Jest you-all wait an’ see!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Wait? Wait?’” the miner sarcastically repeated. “Seems as though I’d -heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me—one thing I know. Unless -your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there’ll be darned few -of us gringos left to see.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why not watch from the other side?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Watch hell!” The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that, -despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and -indignation over his fellows’ wrongs, that despite all the indomitable -American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquest -of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California -to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from -disintegration, the fine old spirit of ’76, still burned under all. -“Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed -protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we’re going to stay! -To-morrow I’ll get together my <em class="italics">peones</em> and go right to it again; only”—he -observed a significant pause—“the next time the Colorados come there’ll -be a machine-gun trained on ’em from up here on the bench. All I ask is -that the Lord sends me the same bunch again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about, -the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the -gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a -solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he -passed out of their lives—in person, but not in other ways. His was one -of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life -and, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing -had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull, -at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the -sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the -pommel as they rode along.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I was thinking of what that fellow said las’ night,” he replied to -Jake’s questioning look. “To think, after that, we’re out to rob our own -countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s so.” Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed -alacrity. “Damned if I seen it that way afore.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a -sudden injection of rustler’s sense. “Aw, come off! You fellows may be -out for Mexicans, but I’m for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the -other side of the line, an’ what’s wrong with robbing them on this? I -kain’t see the diff. Business is business; we’ve gotter eat.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right, too.” Sliver caught the sense of it. “We’ve sure gotter -eat.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Bull’s face grew blacker. The Colorado’s boast, “We’ve raped your -women, exterminated your brats,” had aroused in him instincts older than -the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling -hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind -at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the -entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal -women.</p> -<p class="pnext">He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become -a prey of <em class="italics">peon</em> bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his -black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered -with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in -the defense of a common cause. And yet—</p> -<p class="pnext">Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their -evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican -Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As -they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into -the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east -to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and -ruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of -twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated -carcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of -their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond -their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, and -crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the -<em class="italics">Nacional</em> railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of -the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown. -Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge -wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the -evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it -to save the station.</p> -<p class="pnext">While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle -sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen, -whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling like -a dusty brown blanket over the desert.</p> -<p class="pnext">As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in -surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some -thousand <em class="italics">peon</em> soldiers, part of Valles’s army on its way south to -pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction. -Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were -loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of -box-cars.</p> -<p class="pnext">In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with -tight <em class="italics">charro</em> suits and <em class="italics">peon</em> cottons, they were exceedingly -picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at -least fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges.</p> -<p class="pnext">Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their -brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on -earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the <em class="italics">frijoles</em> and -<em class="italics">chile</em> simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled, -smoked, or slept.</p> -<p class="pnext">Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs -dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal -drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets, -violets, blues, yellows of the women’s dresses and serapes, wreathed in -the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and -passed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor -to their roar and rattle.</p> -<p class="pnext">As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was -set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: “Come on, fellows! We’re -going to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men, -she who was largely responsible for their “rustlings,” investing it, as -she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through -hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede, -the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its -essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned -from it in disgust.</p> -<p class="pnext">If the train had stopped—perhaps their lives would have been deflected -into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the -trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it -vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in -the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they -were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be -had all over Mexico for “a cigarette and a smile.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While eating they extracted from their host, a simple <em class="italics">peon</em>, all the -information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid “requisitions” -payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press, -the <em class="italics">gringos hacendados</em> had driven their animals into the mountain -pastures three-quarters of a day’s ride east of the tracks. But omitting -the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grass -ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the -raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in -the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon.</p> -<p class="pnext">Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the -difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican -scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about -the same part in their operations as a “jimmy” in those of a burglar, -Bull exclaimed his admiration, “<em class="italics">Some horses!</em>”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But—” Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a -fast trot down the valley, “we’re out of luck.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull handed him the glasses. “See what you make of -’em.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Colorados!</em>” Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on -the blue <em class="italics">charro</em> jacket. “It’s the same outfit that tied up the miner, -too. Remember how he described the leader? ‘About twice as tall as a -common Mexican’? That fellow’s six-foot-two if he’s an inch.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The gall of him,” Sliver snorted. “What do you think o’ that? After -<em class="italics">our</em> horses! Well, they ’ain’t got ’em yet. We’ll jest ride along -behind the hill here an’—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted. -“No, you bet he hain’t. I’ve a hunch that the gent coming over the hill, -there, is the man that owns ’em.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause, -he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. “He’s -sure got his nerve.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Mebbe he don’t know they’re Colorados.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders’ backs were turned, the daring -rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the -marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them -opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here comes his army!” Jake croaked.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Only a lad.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, white -with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the -galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down -the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from -their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his -tracks. At the same moment the lad’s hat, a soft slouch, blew off, -loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill -scream would still have proclaimed the rider’s sex.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hell!” Bull’s astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. “It’s a -woman! a white girl—dressed in man’s riding-togs!”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="v-the-hacienda-of-the-trees"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id6">V: THE “HACIENDA OF THE TREES”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart, -two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be -deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance, -yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two -drops that join running in down a window-pane.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres, -and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would -appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun. -Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation -whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet—but let it suffice, for -the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the -<em class="italics">hacienda</em> Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the -crest of a grassy knoll that overlooked the buildings.</p> -<p class="pnext">A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait. -Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect -shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume; -riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man’s cambric shirt -with a negligée collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small -and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly <em class="italics">retroussé</em>. Her eyes, -large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly -contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was -wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response -to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that -curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, dad, isn’t it beautiful!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit -billows; but her eyes were on the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>—<em class="italics">Hacienda de los Arboles</em>, -named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it -pleasant shade.</p> -<p class="pnext">Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the -height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, -storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to -the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, -with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the -old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the -meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of -giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading -with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing -fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, -crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as -ever a man looked upon and called his home.</p> -<p class="pnext">Carleton smiled as she added, “I’d hate to have been brought up in El -Paso or any other prosy American city.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He might have replied that there were American cities she might find -less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as -she did.</p> -<p class="pnext">His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of -accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his -satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his -creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or -three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with -Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, -he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a “land-poor” Spanish owner.</p> -<p class="pnext">To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid -almost four centuries ago by one of Cortés’s <em class="italics">conquistadores</em> might have -meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From -a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a -story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its -massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during -her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very -being.</p> -<p class="pnext">They seldom overlooked the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>, as now, without making some -observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old -Dons, their <em class="italics">señoras</em>, <em class="italics">señoritas</em>, savage brown retainers, in the midst -of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it -were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to -think of himself as belonging to the family.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Great old fellows they were!” Though he spoke musingly, now, without -connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back. -“Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other -day, and the records read in princely fashion. ‘Between the rivers such -and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,’ that was a -favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like -cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few -square leagues.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And here comes one of them.” Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who -had just topped the opposite rise. “Doesn’t he look it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Surely he did. The <em class="italics">charro</em> suit of soft tanned deerskin with its -<em class="italics">bolero</em> jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the -lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes -that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced <em class="italics">sombrero</em>; the fine horse and -Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted <em class="italics">machete</em> -in its saddle sheath under the rider’s leg, even the rope <em class="italics">riata</em> coiled -around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in -that pageant of the past.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It is Ramon Icarza,” Carleton nodded. “He hasn’t been here for a long -time.” This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Attending to the herds and the horses, señor. As with you, the most of -our <em class="italics">peones</em> have run away to the wars. We have left only a few <em class="italics">ancianos</em> -too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the aid of the -women we manage. That last requisition for the”—his shrug was eloquent -in its disdain—“<em class="italics">cause</em>. You paid it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Had to—or be confiscated.” With a grin comical in its mixture of -amusement and anger, Carleton went on, “I raked up five thousand pesos -of Valles’s money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he -said? ‘I don’t want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute. -You must pay me in gold.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his -race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. “The devil take him! -Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us, -he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!” His hands and eyebrows -testified to Valles’s scandalous treatment of the merchants. “First he -demands a contribution to the <em class="italics">cause</em>. Those who refuse are foolish, for -first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the -poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the -money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left. -In the old days we used to curse the locusts, señor; but they, at least, -left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago, -that you and the señorita here and my venerable father would be reduced -to become herders of cattle?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, but it’s lots of fun!” Lee’s happy laugh bespoke sincerity. “I love -it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And -that reminds me that we’re almost due there for lunch.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’ll stay, of course, Ramon?” Pointing to a couple of mares with -foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton -added, “There’s still another over in the next valley. If you will take -these along, I’ll get her.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the -<em class="italics">hacienda</em>, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless -boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched -the girl’s maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly -knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she -exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, aren’t they pretty!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ramon agreed—as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila -monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors—that -is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by -the hundred miles—their childhood had compassed more than the usual -number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him -slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of -many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of -course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last -iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself -and clothes. Having passed favorably on the material, fit, and -trimmings, she reached for his <em class="italics">sombrero</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let -me look at it. What a beauty!”</p> -<p class="pnext">While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined -it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow -intensified in Ramon’s big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the -gold of his skin. His mouth—too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon -standards—drew into a tender smile.</p> -<p class="pnext">According to the cañons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black -or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, -with singular disregard, for writer’s law, Nature continued to weave for -Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee’s hair, rose blush -of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the -sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which -Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as -powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande.</p> -<p class="pnext">On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again, -Nature utterly ignored “best seller” conventions. Brought up among -Mexicans, counting Ramon’s sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial -prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal -health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After -sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on.</p> -<p class="pnext">“How does it look?”</p> -<p class="pnext">As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there -was no mistaking the “dare.” Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico, -Ramon caught the implication.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Pretty enough to—kiss!”</p> -<p class="pnext">With the word he reached swiftly for her neck, but caught only empty -air. Ducking with a touch of the spur, she shot from under his hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">The next second he was after her. Along the shallow valley for a -half-mile she led, then, whirling just as he rode alongside, she shot -back along the ridge. At the end he overtook her, and, anticipating her -whirl, caught her bridle rein. Leaning back, however, flat on her -beast’s back, laughing and panting, she was still out of his reach; and -when he began to travel, hand over hand, along the bridle, she leaped -down on the opposite side and dodged behind a lone <em class="italics">sahuaro</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sure of her now, he followed. But, dodging like a hare around the -<em class="italics">sahuaro</em>, she came racing back for the horses; might possibly have -gained them and made good her escape, if, glancing back over her -shoulder, she had not seen Ramon stumble, stop, then clasp his right -ankle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, is it sprained?” she cried, running back. Then, as, reaching -suddenly, he caught her, she burst out, “Cheat! oh, you miserable -cheat!”</p> -<p class="pnext">That all is fair in love and war, however, goes in all languages, and -while she punctuated the struggle with customary objections whereby -young maids enhance the value of a kiss, there was no anger in her -protests. Wrestling her back and down, he got, at last, the laughing -face upturned in the hollow of his arm; had almost reached her lips, -when, with force that sent Lee to the ground, he was seized and thrown -violently against the horse.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the excitement of the chase they had completely forgotten Carleton, -who had viewed its beginnings from the opposite ridge. By self-adoption -he had almost, as before said, identified himself with the Spanish -strain that had flowed for centuries through the <em class="italics">patios</em> and compound -of Los Arboles. He had even come to think in Spanish; in custom and -manner was almost Mexican. But in moments of anger habit gives place to -instinct. The instinct that first formed and later preserved the tribe, -pride of race, overpowered friendship. In one second the young Mexican, -whom he had regarded for years almost as a son, was transmuted into the -despised “greaser” of the border.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You—you—” Choking with anger, eyes bits of blue flame, he strode at -Ramon, fist bunched to strike.</p> -<p class="pnext">But the blow did not fall, for, scrambling up again, Lee seized his arm -from behind. “Oh, dad! dad!” Despite his struggles, she clung like a -cat, defeating his efforts to shake her off. “Oh, dad! It was only a bit -of fun! all my fault! I put on his hat! Please don’t!”</p> -<p class="pnext">If the young fellow had flinched, perhaps Carleton would have struck. -But, head erect, he quietly waited, and presently Carleton ceased -struggling.</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right! I’ll let him go—this time. But, remember”—bringing his -clenched fist in a heat of passion into the palm of the other hand, he -glared at the young man—“remember! when this girl is kissed—it will be -by a man of her own breed. Get off my land!” After helping Lee to mount, -he vaulted into his own saddle and rode away, driving the mares and -foals before them.</p> -<p class="pnext">In accordance with before-mentioned precedents, Ramon ought to have -folded his arms and hissed a threat through gritted teeth. Instead, he -stood very quietly, his face less angry than sad, watching them go. His -little nod, in its firmness, would have become any young American; went -very well with his thought.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We shall see.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Mounting, he rode away to the northward, and not till he had covered -many miles did he rein in his beast, so suddenly that it fell back on -its haunches. His dark face expressed vexation mixed with alarm. -“Maldito! I forgot to warn them that Colorados had been seen east of the -railroad. I must go back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">On their part, Lee and her father rode on toward the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>. Though -he glanced at her from time to time, it was always furtively, for with a -man’s dislike of scenes he made no reference to that which had just -passed. Nevertheless, it filled his mind. Man-like, he had watched her -develop into womanhood with scarcely a thought for her future. If he had -given the subject any consideration he would probably have concluded -that, sooner or later, she would choose a suitable mate from the -hundreds of American miners, railroad men, ranchers, and engineers that -had swarmed in the state of Chihuahua before the revolution.</p> -<p class="pnext">But with the clear vision of after sight he now saw that he had -unconsciously depended on the race pride which had just manifested -itself in himself to prevent her from contracting a mésalliance. Now, -with consternation, he faced the truth that racial pride is masculine; -contrary to both the feminine instinct and nature’s scheme of things.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I was a fool!” he berated himself. “A damned fool! She will have to go -north—live in the States for a while.”</p> -<p class="pnext">These and similar thoughts were whirling through his mind when they came -on a band of his horses at pasture under charge of an <em class="italics">anciano</em>, a -withered old <em class="italics">peon</em>, whose age and infirmities had estopped him from -joining the exodus to the wars. After cautioning the old fellow not to -allow the animals to stray too far, Carleton plunged again into deep -meditation.</p> -<p class="pnext">Had he not been thus preoccupied he would probably have long ago -discovered the five horsemen who were following at a distance, using the -natural cover afforded by the rolling land; for he always rode with a -powerful binocular in his holster, and often swept with it the prospect. -Several times the glass would have shown him a row of heads behind the -next ridge in rear. As it was, he had ridden to the crest of the rise -from which they had looked down on the <em class="italics">hacienda</em> before habit asserted -itself. He had no sooner leveled the glasses than an exclamation burst -from his lips. “My God!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What is it, dad?” Lee swung in her saddle, looking back at him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Raiders! They are attacking Francisco! He has nothing but his staff! -He’s fighting them like an old lion! My God, they’re chopping him with -their machetes.” It came out of him in staccato phrases. “Race in and -send out Juan, Lerdo, and Prudencia with rifles! Stay there! Don’t dare -to follow!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Digging in his spurs, he galloped away. For a moment the girl hesitated. -Her eyes went to the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>, still half a mile away, then back to -her father racing madly down the slope. There was no time to go for -help! Loosening the pistol in her holster, she drove in her spurs and -galloped after.</p> -<p class="pnext">From Carleton’s first appearance till the girl screamed all had passed -so quickly that the Three could only sit and gape. From their original -intent to rob Carleton it was a far cry to the reconstructed impulse to -succor and save him, and it speaks well for them that they accomplished -the revolution as soon as they did.</p> -<p class="pnext">The scream had not passed unnoticed by the Colorados. The leader, who -had turned to ride on, swung his beast, looked, then, as the girl -dropped from the saddle to her knees beside the wounded man, drove in -his spurs and galloped toward her. Heedless of her own danger, Lee was -trying to stanch with her handkerchief the bloodflow from Carleton’s -chest, so lost in her agonized grief that she did not look up till the -Colorado leaped down and seized her.</p> -<p class="pnext">In this world there are savages who would have respected, for the time -at least, her white grief. But this was the man who had tortured the -miner and his <em class="italics">peones</em>; driven the latter naked through spiky cactus -after he had cut the soles off their feet. She sprang up when he seized -her, and as she fought bitterly, beating away his black, evil face with -her little fists, his strident laughter mingled with her wild sobbing -and carried to Bull behind the ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">For three days this man’s boast had rung in his brain: “We’ve killed -your men, outraged your women!” But though anger blazed within him, his -tone was icy cold. “Look after the others. I’ll ’tend to him!”</p> -<p class="pnext">He had already pulled his rifle from the sling under his leg. Raising it -now, he lined the sights, the same sights that had directed a ball -through the brain of Livingstone’s horse. While Lee writhed and twisted -in the Colorado’s arms, he dared not shoot. He waited until, at the -double crack of his companions’ rifles, two of the other Colorados -pitched headlong from their saddles. Then, as their leader paused to -look and, with a swift wrench, Lee tore loose and let daylight between -them, the rifle spoke, sent its bullet whistling through his brain.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Keep after them!” Bull called back as he rode on over the ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">But already Jake and Sliver’s rifles were barking like hungry dogs. -Trained to a hair in guerrilla warfare, the remaining Colorados had -spurred their beasts behind the horse herd. At the first shot the band -had stampeded, and now, urged on by the yells of the fugitives, who rode -crouched on their horses’ necks, the scared animals coursed swiftly down -the valley.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The gall of them! <em class="italics">Our</em> horses!” Repeating his former observation, -Sliver would have ridden after.</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake caught his bridle. His bleak eyes were scintillating like -sunlit icicles. His lean, avid face quivered with subdued ferocity. -“Don’t be a damn fool! They’re only using ’em for cover! We’ll shoot -along this side of the ridge an’ catch ’em at the end of the valley!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Meanwhile Bull rode on down the slope. After a surprised stare that -showed her rescuers to be Americans, Lee had knelt again beside her -father. As before said, Bull was no beauty. His black beard, bushy -brows, hot red eyes, drink-blotched face, were of themselves sufficient -to frighten a woman. Yet when she looked up sympathy illumined his -countenance till it shone in her distressed sight as a clear lamp -radiating human feeling. Without fear or doubt she turned to him for -help.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s my father! I’m afraid—Can’t you do something?”</p> -<p class="pnext">So far Carleton had lain with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and -spoke in detached whispers as Bull knelt by his side. “You’re—American. -I told her not to follow. Don’t bother—with me. I’m shot—through lungs -and stomach—bleeding inside. Get Lee—back to the house.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Plenty of time,” Bull soothed him. As a crackle of rifle-fire turned -loose in the distance, followed by sudden silence, he added, “That ’ull -be the last o’ the Colorados. I’ll fix you a bit, an’ when my fellows -come back we’ll jest pack you home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With a plainsman’s skill in crude surgery, he tore up Carleton’s shirt -to make a pad and bandage which he twisted with a stick till the -blood-flow stopped. This was no more accomplished before Jake and Sliver -rode up, driving the horses ahead.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They won’t cut no more soles offen people’s feet,” Jake answered Bull’s -questioning look.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Fine and dandy.” Bull nodded. “You, Jake, rope a fresh horse outer the -band an’ ride like hell to the railroad an’ wire El Paso for a doctor.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No!” Lee eagerly suggested. “Wire the American Club at Chihuahua. These -dreadful days all gringos help one another.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Freshly horsed, five minutes thereafter, Jake galloped away—but not -before, cold, crafty, laconic, dissolute gambler as he was, he had left -a comforting word in the girl’s ear. “Don’t you be skeered, Miss. I’ll -bring out a doctor, if I have to ride inter El Paso an’ raid a -hospital.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As he went out of sight over the next roll Sliver, with the girl’s aid, -lifted the wounded man up to Bull in the saddle. So for the second time -within three days did the giant rustler bear like a child in his arms a -<em class="italics">gringo</em> victim of the Mexican revolution. To the leaven that had been -working within him was now added the most powerful influence that can be -brought to bear on a man—a woman’s heartbroken sobbing.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="vi-bull-turns-nurse"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id7">VI: BULL TURNS NURSE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old -Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on -herself. But now she burst out crying.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down, -and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have -tried to pursue them alone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He was old—an’ died a man’s death,” Bull offered her rough comfort. -“You couldn’t wish him a better ending.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was man’s reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman’s feelings, yet -it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull -suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room.</p> -<p class="pnext">By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off -his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into -unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. “Don’t you allow I’d better -leave ’em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an’—” He -stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull’s stare.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’re dead right! Don’t trouble to say it. I’d steal the horses offen -a hearse.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly, -he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: “Wait till he’s well -enough to fight for his own. Till then—we leave him alone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the <em class="italics">patio</em> -gateway. Within, arched <em class="italics">portales</em> ran around three sides, supporting -the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful -creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only -vigorous pruning kept it from burying the <em class="italics">portales</em> beneath. In the -center rose a great <em class="italics">arbol de fuego</em>, “tree of fire,” contrasting its -flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas.</p> -<p class="pnext">They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women, -house servants, and <em class="italics">peonas</em>; for of the scores of men who had worked -for Carleton before the wars there were left only three withered -<em class="italics">ancianos</em> to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that -caught the fresh breeze from the mountains.</p> -<p class="pnext">Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the -surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even -from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry -desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied -the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating -marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made -shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You she’d have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a -flip-flop onto him. Druv’ the pommel clean through his chest, it did. -Yet he was up an’ around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less ’n -five weeks.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her -father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was -announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had -achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from -a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to -bury its dead.</p> -<p class="pnext">The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull -picked him for a “colonist.” Just how, he himself could not have said. -His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to -overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been -cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows, -impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under -the <em class="italics">portales</em> while he ate.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say! but he’s whitish. Looks like he’d done time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He has,” Jake nodded. “I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in -Valles’s army that had got himself shot through both arms an’ was being -taken back to the base hospital with about a hun’red others. When I -landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out -of a box-car door, watching ’em bury his <em class="italics">compañeros</em> that had died on -the way.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Gotter do it quick,’ he says. ‘They don’t keep worth a darn in this -clime.’</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’d met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an’ ’twas him that sent the doctor -an’ tol’ me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he’d -belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies. -They’d insure some <em class="italics">peon</em> that was about ready to croak, paying the -premiums themselves an’ c’llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If -he lingered ’twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite -proved, most of ’em being too far gone to testify when they was -resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an’ as the -Mexicans ain’t so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was -sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he’d been Mexican they’d -have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good -greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He’d actually -served twelve years—think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican jail -before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their -hospital-trains.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Twelve years!” Sliver echoed it. “An’ just for croaking a few Mex? He -orter ha’ practised in New Mexico. They’d have give him a medal up -there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came -down. While eating he made his report. “If I could do any good I’d stay. -But he will surely die to-night. It’s going to be mighty hard on that -poor girl. Like most of us”—his glance took in all Three—“Carleton -didn’t come down here for his health. It’s bad form in Mexico to inquire -about a man’s past. Nevertheless, it’s pretty well known that he killed -the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four -years old. She’s never been away since, and has no kin that she knows -of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted -his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. “I’ve left an -opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don’t be -deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the -room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair -to the door, which opened out on the <em class="italics">corredor</em>, to secure the free air -his rustler’s lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the -moon’s pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its -maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains -loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid -chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet -and clear gold.</p> -<p class="pnext"><em class="italics">Gringo</em> as he was, his people had lived under Carleton’s hand fuller, -freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican -overlords, and, day or night, the <em class="italics">patio</em> had never lacked a dozen brown -<em class="italics">peonas</em> on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under the -<em class="italics">arbol de fuego</em> in the center of the <em class="italics">patio</em> below three old crones had -erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of -gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note -which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still -night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched -between prayers.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that -means?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si; they were devils come for a soul.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The señor was a -good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The señorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that -she also will be cast into hell?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty -centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her -soul’s sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor señor—” her pause -doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their -prayers for his saving.</p> -<p class="pnext">The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of -distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars, -combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle -of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate -the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed -heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed.</p> -<p class="pnext">In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw -Carleton’s face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both -were there.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Where is—Lee? Sleeping? Don’t wake her. Listen! She—must not—stay here. -Tell William Benson—he’s rough and a bully—but honest and good. Tell him -to get a permit—from the revolutionists—to drive my cattle and -horses—across to the States. They will bring enough—to keep Lee for -many—a year. Be sure—”</p> -<p class="pnext">The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a -stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the -moonlit plains.</p> -<p class="pnext">For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made -toward the door that led to the girl’s room. But as her tired face rose -before him he stopped and shook his head. “Let her finish her sleep.” -Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly -called the old women.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="vii-the-rustlers-are-adopted"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id8">VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">“Well, I reckon this about lets us out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The Three sat under the <em class="italics">portales</em>, heavily smoking. Bull puffed -meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed -absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had -trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all -necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands -were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental -concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the “this” alluded to -Carleton’s funeral, which had taken place the preceding day.</p> -<p class="pnext">It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor, -happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better -class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till -still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The -Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered <em class="italics">hacendado</em>, attended, with -Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American -rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds of -<em class="italics">gringos</em>, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come -in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton’s <em class="italics">peones</em>, and the Three, -had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little -adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus -consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways -and means.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, I s’pose we’ll have to move on.” If not actually dismal, Sliver’s -indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had -just then stepped out of her room across the <em class="italics">patio</em>. Phyllis, the -younger, was to stay for a week, while Phœbe, the elder, returned home -with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee -walked with her guests the length of the <em class="italics">patio</em> she took with her the -sympathetic glances of the Three.</p> -<p class="pnext">Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of -her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, -the sight of Carleton’s riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown -in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her -agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now -complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she -made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. -Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely -accidental, a natural trimming of her dress.</p> -<p class="pnext">Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American -born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, -dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee’s fairness. If -their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely -accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of -association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in -sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a -smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a -cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept -through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross -and passion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Adios, you fellows!” Lovell’s friendly voice came floating back from -the gate. “Come and see us at San Miguel.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of -suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man’s hand was -against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and -trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver’s muttered -exclamation: “Lordy! I’d like to! but—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—it’s no place for us.” Bull nodded toward Lee. “It ’u’d be easier if -she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an’ a new revolution -breaking every other day!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Pretty fierce,” Jake coincided. “But if ’twas left to that young Mex at -the funeral yesterday—Ramòn Icarza, wasn’t that what they called him? If -’twas left to him she’d soon be—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—damned an’ done for!” Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: -“Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex -that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. -Hell! if I thought she’d look twice his way, I’d croak him afore we -left.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It wouldn’t be unnatural, she being raised here an’ not knowing much -else.” Bull’s gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. “I’ll bet -you that’s what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an’ -get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so’s I could tell him -afore we left.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Tol’ her yet?” Sliver asked.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull nodded. “Las’ night. Said she hadn’t given any thought, yet, to the -future.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to -go down the opposite <em class="italics">portales</em>. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her -arm from the other girl’s waist, and came walking on alone.</p> -<p class="pnext">They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well -formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They -felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, shore!” with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her -attempts to thank them for their kindness. “We hain’t done nothing worth -while.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sliver’s right.” Jake’s bleak eyes had grown almost soft. “You don’t -owe us anything. All that’s bothering us is—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—that we kain’t jest see how you’re going to manage,” Bull finished. -“Your father’s idea—” He stopped.</p> -<p class="pnext">Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. “It -isn’t practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across -the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would—” Her -sweeping hand took in the sunlit <em class="italics">patio</em>, the brown <em class="italics">criadas</em> -soft-footing it along the <em class="italics">corredor</em>; the compound ablaze with barbaric -color; the <em class="italics">peonas</em> gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that -medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. “And if he -would—I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to -this. I’m part of it, and it of me,” she concluded, with a firm little -nod. “I shall carry on my father’s work.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The Three looked at one another. Bull’s troubled look, Jake’s dubious -brows, Sliver’s cough, all expressed their common doubt. “Can you do it, -Miss, alone?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I sha’n’t be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here -to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you—” she paused, -looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. “Of course, -that’s absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know -some one?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of -each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in -a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the -American border tightly closed; the <em class="italics">fusilado</em> against a ’dobe wall that -would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that -dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, -to do them justice, the girl’s helpless situation affected them most. If -they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new -path.</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake spoke first. “To tell the truth, Miss, we ain’t exactly what you’d -call rushed with business.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Like all of us—upset by the revolutions.” She jumped to the natural -conclusion, “Were you—mining?”</p> -<p class="pnext">A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before -all Three. Not without truth was Bull’s statement, “We ain’t worked it -much, of late.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?”</p> -<p class="pnext">A sudden memory of Rosa’s desertion permitted Sliver to say, “The las’ -we had left jest t’other day.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her pretty face brightened. “Then you mean to say that you are free for -the present?”</p> -<p class="pnext">That was exactly what they had!</p> -<p class="pnext">She went on, slowly: “I’ll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and -sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven’t been permitted -to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don’t know, -even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I -can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t you be bothering about that, Miss,” Bull broke in. “We’ll stay, -an’ when it comes that you don’t need us any longer—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—we ain’t a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages,” Sliver -concluded. “To tell you the truth, Miss, I’d be willing to work for my -board jest to feel at loose on a range ag’in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort, -it still added warmth to her words. “Then—now you are <em class="italics">my</em> men.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The accent on the “my” unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her -bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own -and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an -alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the -fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies -in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely -enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke -loose on the devoted heads of the Three.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">My</em> men!” It sealed their adoption.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Phyllis, come here!” She was eying them with that microscopic feminine -scrutiny that detects the minutest personal defect. Her gesture of -despair when the other girl came up was so lovingly insulting it could -not have been outdone by the best of mothers. “They are going to work -for me, so we’ll have to care for them. Do you suppose we can <em class="italics">ever</em> get -them to rights?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Phyllis wasn’t quite sure, but as her interest while real was more -casual, she held out hope. “They’ll look better, dear, after they’re -washed and mended.”</p> -<p class="pnext">That was too mild for Lee. Nothing but revolution, drastic and complete, -would satiate that hungry instinct. “No, they’ll have to have new -things. The store is run down badly, but it will supply their present -needs.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With something of the air of convicts arraigned before a stern judge the -Three listened to certain other frank comments upon their appearance. As -laid down, their reconstruction included shaves for Sliver and Jake, a -beard-trim for Bull, hair-cuts for all three. To this they meekly -agreed; took their new things with sheepish thanks when they were -brought from the store; endured all with resignation, if not -cheerfulness, up to the moment that she tried to quarter them in the -house. Then the last shreds of masculine independence asserted -themselves. They made a stand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If it’s all the same, Miss,” Jake pleaded, “we’d sooner bunk down in -one of those empty adobes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver supported the rebellion. “You see, Miss, we’re that rough an’ not -used to ladies’ society—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ we smoke something dreadful,” Bull added his bit. “You really -couldn’t stan’—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I wouldn’t mind it a bit. I love tobacco smoke. It’s half of -Mexico.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Deprived of their last weapon, the Three could only stand and fidget -till Phyllis came to the rescue. Her interest, as aforesaid, being -founded merely on the general principles of loyalty to her sex, she -could afford to be generous.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They’ll want to play cards and generally carry on,” she whispered. “Men -always do. Let them sleep in the adobe and take their meals with you at -the house.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A compromise thus effected, Lee marched the Three to their new abode. -But this was not the end. Just as they were about to settle therein she -turned loose upon them a veritable hornets’ nest of brown <em class="italics">criadas</em>. All -afternoon they found themselves encircled, as it were, by clouds of -flying skirts, and when the flutter subsided the adobe stood scrubbed -and dusted and furnished with <em class="italics">catres</em>, bed-clothing, wash-stands, -chairs, and a table for the “cards and general carrying on.” When the -invasion, brown and white, finally withdrew, and the suggested changes -in apparel and personal appearance were duly consummated, they were left -gazing with something of awe and a great deal of wonder at their -reconstructed selves.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You look almost human,” Jake gave his opinion of Bull. “A touch with a -powder-puff an’ I allow you might mash one o’ them criadas.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate. -“It’s dreadfully clean in here,” he remarked, coming back. “But I reckon -we’ll sorter get used to it. Now if we on’y had a bottle o’ aguardiente -to hold a bit of a house-warming, it ’u’d—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. “Look here! We’ve got the care -of a young girl on our han’s. There’s going to be no boozing—at least on -the premises. When you feel you kain’t stan’ it any longer, light out -somewheres an’ get it over.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right,” Jake lent support to the moralities. “Though it sorter -looks to me like she’d adopted us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As a matter of fact, the girls’ talk, walking back to the house, quite -favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had -obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at -Phyllis’s remark, “Aren’t they big and crude and funny?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I’ve had them a -month.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Won’t it be a little difficult? They’re grown up; can’t be treated like -babies.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not a bit.” Lee laughed softly again. “If one of them misbehaves, I -shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct -Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they’d see -through it at once. Being men, they’ll feel quite perked up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their -merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the -disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own -likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case, -as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a -crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="viii-the-leopards-spots"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id9">VIII: “THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">It was not done with malice aforethought, for Sliver had not quite -reached the point where “he couldn’t stan’ it any longer.” It just -happened. Heavy drinkers may be divided into three classes—to wit, the -sporadic, who break out in occasional wild debauches; the “steadies,” -who sop, sop, sop all the time; and a third class which combines the -traits of the other two. Of the Three, Bull represented the first, Jake -the second, Sliver the last and worst.</p> -<p class="pnext">If Sliver had not ridden his horse along the crest of a certain hog’s -back on the chance that the cattle he was hunting might be in the ravine -below, it might never have come to pass. If Napoleon Bonaparte, for -matter of that, hadn’t developed indigestion at Waterloo; if Christopher -Columbus had followed the Church instead of the sea; if Julius Cæsar had -been born a girl; if all the cats on all the famous fences of history -had happened to jump the other way—this world would be quite different. -So let it suffice that Sliver rode along the hog’s back.</p> -<p class="pnext">At its end the ridge ran out on a wide bench from which Sliver looked -over the foot-hills, rolling tumultuously under a black blanket of -chaparral out to the tawny valleys of the <em class="italics">hacienda</em> pastures. Below, he -could see a path that ran with a silver stream at the bottom of the -ravine. Its deep rut, no wider than the swing of a mule, marked it for -one of those ancient highways whose place had been usurped by the Diaz -railways. In its heyday the cañon had rung with the tinklings of the -mule-trains that transported <em class="italics">aguardiente</em>, maize, tobacco, serapes, and -cloths between Mexico City and Santa Fé. But of that great traffic there -now remained barely enough to support the little <em class="italics">fonda</em> that lay with -its mule <em class="italics">patio</em> almost at Sliver’s feet.</p> -<p class="pnext">Though no one was in sight, he set down certain moving black dots as -chickens, goats, or pigs. Thus assured of tenancy, and thinking that he -might pick up some news of his strays, he rode on down a trail that -zigzagged through the chaparral.</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking down from above, Sliver had noted the resemblance of the place -to the lair back on the miner’s bench in Sonora. The <em class="italics">ramada</em> of grass -and cornstalks might have been the same. Only that she was younger and -prettier, the Mexican girl who knelt before a <em class="italics">metate</em> grinding -<em class="italics">tortilla</em> paste could have passed for Rosa herself. Though Mexican -Indian, some vagrant Spanish strain had pushed up her brow, reduced her -cheek-bones, shortened her waist, and lengthened her limbs. Masses of -black hair framed her oval face. Her eyes were velvet pools; the nose -small and well shaped. Her bare arms tapered from fine shoulders to -small wrists, and if she followed Juno rather than Psyche in her -luxurious molding she was pliant as a willow, carried her shapely -poundage with an effect of slimness.</p> -<p class="pnext">If Sliver noted these desirable personal assets, his interest therein -disappeared after he had spied the sign, “Fonda,” over the door. True, -the month which had now elapsed since they entered Lee’s service had -not, however, been entirely “dry.” At the close of each day’s work the -Three took their <em class="italics">copa</em> with the <em class="italics">ancianos</em> at the <em class="italics">hacienda</em> store in -the Mexican fashion. But the application of liquor in such medicinal -doses to a thirst like Sliver’s was equivalent to the squirting of -gasolene upon a fire. Now, as he gazed at the sign, spirituous desires -flamed within him. It was with difficulty that his dry lips formed his -question to the girl.</p> -<p class="pnext">Was there a <em class="italics">copita</em> of <em class="italics">aguardiente</em> to be had?</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, she rose, and as she let down a small wooden door in the wall -Sliver’s glance licked the rows of bottles within.</p> -<p class="pnext"><em class="italics">Tequila</em>, anisette, <em class="italics">aguardiente</em>, <em class="italics">mescal</em>, every variety of liquid -fire with which the Mexican <em class="italics">peon</em> burns out his stomach, stood there in -deadly array. Beginning at one end, Sliver worked his way, during the -next two hours, along the row, and had just started back again when, -with some surprise, he noted a most curious phenomenon—to wit, the gray -hair and deep wrinkles the girl had suddenly acquired. Quite unaware -that she had resigned his thirst to her father, and was even then -vigorously rubbing <em class="italics">tortilla</em> paste behind his back, he solemnly studied -this startling metamorphosis. Drunk as he was, his cowman’s instinct had -kept him warned of the sun’s declension. Sure, now, that he had had -enough, he paid his score, gravely addressing his host, meanwhile, -concerning his changed appearance.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You she’dn’t do it. It’s—hard on the nerves. Keep it up an’—you’ll -drive your custom away.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Having climbed into the saddle, he remained there because of that -merciful provision of nature by which a man may ride long after he has -lost the power to walk. Realizing his condition, he left the business of -going home to his horse. While it carried him down the cañon and out -across the plains he concentrated his remaining energies on “The -Cowboy’s Lament,” howling its one hundred and one verses at the top of -his voice, sending warning of his coming a full mile ahead.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">In the mean time Bull with Lee, Jake “on his lonely,” had pursued the -search for the strays in other directions. It chanced that luck rode -with the former. Returning home at sundown, Jake saw them driving the -cattle along a shallow valley.</p> -<p class="pnext">During the month which had elapsed since her father’s death Lee had -taken the only real panacea for grief—hard work. In addition to the -management of the house <em class="italics">criadas</em>, she exercised a feudal overlordship -over the <em class="italics">hacienda peones</em>. Besides hiring and letting, leasing of lands -on charges, she acted as judge in their squabbles, adviser in their -small affairs, comforter in trouble. In addition, her womanhood brought -extra duties. She had to godmother the babes, attend christenings, -doctor the sick, lend her patronage to the <em class="italics">bailes</em> and <em class="italics">fiestas</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Most of these duties she discharged in the mornings. Afternoons she -donned her man’s riding-togs and rode out with the Three, rounding up -strays, new-born calves, and foals. At nights her fair head might be -seen under a golden aureole lent by the lamp, while she mended or made -for them and herself. If it lacked the stimulation and color of city -life, it was, at least, a healthy and honest existence. Already it had -restored her shocked nerves, given back her roses. She had never been -prettier than when, reining in, she looked back at Jake as he came up!</p> -<p class="pnext">“We found them! <em class="italics">we</em> found them!” Her pride in the fact provoked Jake’s -smile. “They were up in the Cañon del Norte. Whatever in the world is -that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">It might have been anything from the last puff of a worn-out calliope to -the yelp of a sick coyote, for at its best Sliver’s voice rarely came -within a quarter of a mile of a specified tune, and an hour’s steady -tearing into “The Cowboy’s Lament” had not improved its tone. As the -raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling -little laugh.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Mr. Sliver isn’t hardly what you could call a singer. Is he—often taken -like that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">They could have answered quite easily, Sliver’s vocal efforts being ever -timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank -disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs -and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to -the Cañon del Norte.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Piously drunk!” Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond -earshot. “Wonder where he got it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Search me,” Bull shrugged. “The question is how to stop him. You know -what to expect if he’s loose an’ drunk among all them <em class="italics">peonas</em>. You ride -on an’ head him off. Don’t stan’ any nonsense. Bat him over the can if -nec’ssary.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither -was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped -Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged -and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the -compound, had him lashed to his <em class="italics">catre</em> in their adobe before Lee and -Bull arrived.</p> -<p class="pnext">So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull -replied to Lee’s inquiry concerning Sliver’s absence that he “wasn’t -feeling well.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She jumped up at once. “Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he -can eat!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A vivid mental picture of the “poor fellow,” gagged and lashed to his -<em class="italics">catre</em>, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself -for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating -his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I wouldn’t—really, Miss.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She stopped, half-way along the <em class="italics">portales</em>. He had spoken so earnestly. -“Why not? Is it—catching?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further -complications. Jake shook his head. “No, it’s just chills an’ fever, a -sorter constitutional ague he’s taken with at this time o’ the year. -But—well, Miss, it’s this way, Sliver’s that bashful, though you -mightn’t think it to look at him, he’d die of shame if a young lady was -to see him in his bunk.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She hesitated, then came back. “But—he ought to be looked after.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He has been.” Jake clinched the victory. “A copa’s the finest thing in -the world for chills. He’s had a couple an’ was sleeping like a babe -when we came in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She gave in with a sigh. “Then we won’t wake him. But you must take him -a tray when you go out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it -broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain -have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded -portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee “shooed” him like -a sick chicken into a corner of the <em class="italics">patio</em>, there to be coddled and -doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every -mother’s daughter of whom had her own infallible “<em class="italics">remedio</em>.” His real -contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his -companions at meals.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Invalid looks a bit better,” Jake would opine.</p> -<p class="pnext">“A week’s careful nursing orter bring him around,” Bull would add. Then -while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned -his poor, burned-out stomach.</p> -<p class="pnext">That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they -got him alone in the adobe. “I s’pose neither of you saints would ha’ -stopped even to smell of it,” he sarcastically inquired, after -confessing how and where he obtained the liquor.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tain’t that,” Bull admonished him. “I’m pretty near due for a bust -myself. But when it hits, you bet I’ll go somewheres so’s the sight of -my hoggishness ain’t a-going to offend our girl. No, ’tain’t that you -acquired a bun we’re kicking at, but that you toted it back here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You bet y’u,” Jake added. “Next time you’re took that-a-way, have ’em -hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an’ don’t budge till -you’re through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you -forgot to drink?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!” Sliver groaned. “My liver’s burned right -out!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bueno!” Jake nodded his satisfaction. “Then if you’ve finished I’m free -to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. -That’s where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you’ve gotter do -is to find a bottle, but mine’s simply gotter have cards in it. I don’t -get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining -business of our’n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right, get it over,” Bull agreed, after a moment’s rumination. -“Tell her at breakfast. She’ll fix you up with the fare.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Tell her at breakfast’?” Jake looked his scorn. “An’ have her running -an’ fixing me out with socks an’ shirts an’ things like I was going off -on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable -and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an’ through, I -simply kain’t fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest -give me all you’ve got. With any kind of luck it’ll turn you big -interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so’s to catch an -early train.”</p> -<p class="pnext">So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But -thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed.</p> -<p class="pnext">When Jake arrived in El Paso—But the less said about his sojourn there -the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some -cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at -the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, -a week later, coming through the <em class="italics">patio</em> gateway.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you poor man!” she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. -“They must have worked you all night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Which they did work me overtime,” he confessed to Bull, in the adobe -that evening. “Five days an’ most of the nights I sat inter one game. -Look at this!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of -American dollars. “When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled -a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten -Miss Lee’s hand. He was a—</p> -<p class="pnext">“What are you crinkling your nose at?” he hotly demanded of Bull. “This -ain’t no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying -horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of ’em came from this very -ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better -right to their money than the little girl?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tain’t that.” Bull shook his head. “I was on’y thinking that I’d -liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don’t look like she’d take -easily to charity.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">That so?</em>” Jake regarded him cynically. “Now kain’t you jest hear me -a-saying, ‘Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?’ -But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple -of thousand in horses?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No; but she will.”</p> -<p class="pnext">And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three, -made his proposition, Lee shook her head. “It’s only a question of time -before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be -your two thousand dollars?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“In the same box with yours—stowed safely away where we can’t spend or -lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims,” Jake argued. “The -risk we’re willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that -account.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by -devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error, -turning evil to good, if only for once.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="ix-a-party-and-its-consequences"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id10">IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">“Lady-girl’s a-going to have a birthday.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house. -So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer -that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease -on their <em class="italics">catres</em>. But the title “Lady-girl,” Sliver’s especial name for -Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That so?” Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. “How’d you know?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“She asked me to write a piece, t’other day, in her birthday-album, an’ -looking through it I kem on her day.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“She asked me, too,” Jake admitted. “What did you write?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an’ so air you.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A real nice piece, too,” Jake commented upon this classic. “I like it -better ’n mine.” Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet, -he gave his own:</p> -<!-- | “When the distant sun is setting and| Your mind from care is free,| When of absent friends you’re thinking,| Will you sometimes think of me?” --> -<p class="pnext">Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. “I ked on’y -think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister’s album when I was -a kid. ’Tain’t near as good as yourn.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<div class="line-block outermost"> -<div class="line">“My pen is dull, my ink is pale;</div> -<div class="line">My love for you will never fail.”</div> -</div> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">“I think it’s pretty fine,” the others commended the effort.</p> -<p class="pnext">After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, “How -old is she, Sliver?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Rising twenty, be the date.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the ’casion—if -it’s on’y to keep her from feeling lonesome.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Little bit close on the funeral,” Jake tentatively suggested. “Jest -about three months, ain’t it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an’ -have ’em drop in that day.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“We might shoot things up a bit, too,” Sliver began, but Jake cut him -off with utter scorn.</p> -<p class="pnext">“This ain’t no cowman’s jamboree. Girls don’t like any shooting except -what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles ’u’d be -my idee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Cake’?” Sliver now returned the scorn. “Kain’t you see these Mexican -dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an’ -curran’s an’ cit-tron peel, an’ with spice fixin’s to it? An enchilada -stuffed with store prunes ’u’d be the best they ked do.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled -waters. “What about Mrs. Mills?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her -young daughter and a few <em class="italics">peones</em>, had kept their <em class="italics">rancho</em> going since -her husband’s death. “If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I’ll bet -you she’d fix up a cake, if ’twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for -candles, candles an’ beer-factories are the main products of Mexico.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward -consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull -delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the -following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe’s <em class="italics">fiancé</em>, a young mining -engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend, -a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded -to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza,” Phyllis warmly -declared. “She and Lee have always been such good friends.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Accordingly, a <em class="italics">mozo</em> delivered an invitation at the <em class="italics">Hacienda del Sol</em> -about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow’s <em class="italics">rancho</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated -former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating -supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he -developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered -on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her -small daughter.</p> -<p class="pnext">Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her -flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything, -the girl’s childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled -happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless -directness that sometimes proved embarrassing.</p> -<p class="pnext">Had he a father, mother, sister? Where did they live? What was his -business? Married? Why not? And when he returned the usual answer that -no one would have him she brought him to sudden and utter confusion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I’m so glad! Mother would take you, I’m sure. I’d just love to have -you for my father. Will you please marry her, then she will never be -anxious or fearful again?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her mother’s merry laugh helped to cool Bull’s blushes. “Don’t be -specially insulted. She says that to every one.” Then, brave little soul -though she was, she lifted a corner of the curtain that veiled an -ever-present fear. “It’s true that I get sometimes terribly anxious. -Mexicans are lovely people when they’re kept in their place. But since -Diaz was overthrown they’re like a school of naughty children, let loose -without morality, discipline, or guidance to protect them from -themselves. Sometimes I think we ought to leave, but if we did the place -would be sacked and burned before we reached the railroad. So I’d rather -take the risk than be a pauper in the United States. But there, I’m -ungrateful talking this way instead of thanking Providence we’ve got -along so well.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s the way to look at it, ma’am,” Bull encouraged her. While a -wicked flash shot from under his black brows he added, “If any one -bothers you jest send for us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oo-oh, but you looked fierce then!” the child gave a delighted shudder. -“Do it again.” Though a humorous twinkle sterilized the rehearsal, she -consoled herself with the reflection: “’Tisn’t the same. But I’ll bet -you’re muy malo when you fight.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s a good thing if he is.” From the sink, where she was washing -currants, her mother surveyed with approval Bull’s imposing bulk. “It -was a great relief when we heard that you and your friends were staying -with Lee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Later, when Bull’s shyness had somewhat abated, she spoke more -intimately. From Ramon himself she had learned of his expulsion from Los -Arboles. “Ramon is a nice boy, yet no one could blame Mr. Carleton,” she -said. “Yet what is Lee to do? Before the revolution she could have taken -her pick from scores of young Americans, but now they’re all gone.” -Laughing, she finished with a remark which was destined, later, to -produce unexpected results. “I guess we’ll have to import her a -husband.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s heavy rumble echoed her laugh. It broke out again when Betty -cried out: “While you’re at it get one for me. I simply won’t marry a -greaser.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Because of the unusual proceedings she was allowed to sit up. Caught -yawning while the cake was baking, she fled to Bull’s knee, from which -strategic position she defeated her mother’s best efforts to coax her to -bed. Whereafter she promptly celebrated her victory by falling asleep. -Curled against him in trustful comfort, she slept with her fair head -pillowed on his mighty chest till, the cake finished, he carried her to -bed. A <em class="italics">catre</em> had been moved out for him under the <em class="italics">portales</em>. But -after silence and sleep descended on the house he sat for a long time on -its edge, softly musing, the warmth of the child’s body enwrapping his -heart. Even Jake, whose sharp eyes had detected many an alien expression -on that scarred visage of late, would have wondered at its tenderness.</p> -<p class="pnext">Betty was still asleep when he mounted to leave next morning, but at the -beat of hoofs she came running, bare feet and legs flying under her -nightdress. Stooping, he swung her to the saddle before him. The -pressure of her warm arms around his neck, soft lips on his cheek, put a -thrill of earnestness into his farewell.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Remember, ma’am, we’ll come whenever you call.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A quarter-mile away he drew rein and looked back. Though smaller than -Los Arboles, the <em class="italics">rancho</em> buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of -the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea -vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against -the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed -in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed -the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a -dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes.</p> -<p class="pnext">Shaking his big head, he spoke aloud. “’Tain’t safe for them here, -’tain’t safe!”</p> -<p class="pnext">So vivid was that dread feeling, presage of evil, the sweat broke on his -brow. Into his mind shot a vivid picture of the miner hanging limply -from the <em class="italics">sahuaro</em>, face turned up to the torrid sun. Around it, as in a -whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders -of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern -horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive -indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the -long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon -it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again -and rode on.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets -and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. These tendencies are due to -the fact that a woman lives principally in the past and present, a man -in the future; while she observes past occasions, he creates new ones. -Whether she be looking forward with youthful joy, or looking back with -increasing regret, a woman specializes upon her birthdays. But, -accustomed to her father’s bad memory, Lee had not expected any one to -remember; was accordingly astonished and pleased when, coming to -breakfast that morning, she found the table decorated with trailing -vines and a bouquet of wild flowers at her plate that had been picked by -Sliver.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—” she gave a little gasp. Then her shining glance accused the -Three, whose sheepish grins loudly proclaimed their guilt. “How <em class="italics">did</em> -you know? What’s this?”</p> -<p class="pnext">While she was unwrapping the tissue-paper in which Mrs. Mills had -wrapped the cake the Three looked on with eager expectance, and were -treated to a second bath of sunshine. “A <em class="italics">real</em> cake! Where <em class="italics">did</em> you -get it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">In a country where cakes, if not actually hanging on every tree, may be -either home-grown or plucked from the counter of any pastry cook, her -joy might have seemed exaggerated. But in that alien desert, stripped of -its substance to the bare hot bones by repeated revolutions, the -conjunction of a sure-enough cake with a girl’s birthday verged on the -miraculous. Nor was Lee’s pleasure lessened after she heard at what -pains it had been produced.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was, of course, merely the first of the day’s surprises, some of -which were purely accidental, as when William Benson rode in at noon. As -a matter of fact, his visit pertained to a defensive alliance against -raiders, but, being warned in time, he straightway credited his visit to -the birthday. A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered -and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit -of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old -friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the <em class="italics">patio</em> when the -second irruption of the Lovells and their <em class="italics">fiancés</em>—for Phyllis had -conquered the smelter man in record time—occurred midway of the -afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the <em class="italics">portales</em> -before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under -the arched gateway into Lee’s arms.</p> -<p class="pnext">“But you surely did not come alone?” Though that was exactly what she -might have done herself, Lee looked at her in horror.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ah no, querida! Ramon escorted me, and will return to-morrow!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You don’t mean to say that he has—” Lee stopped, for she had caught, -just then, a glimpse of him riding away.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Your father—you remember—he thought—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Isabel stopped in her embarrassed explanations for, like a scared white -bird, Lee was flying through the gateway. Grabbing Isabel’s horse from -the <em class="italics">anciano</em> who was just about to lead it around to the compound, she -leaped into the saddle and went flying down the trail.</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning at the sound of hoofs, Ramon waited for her. It was the first -time they had met since the funeral, and though embarrassment would have -been quite natural, Lee’s frank greeting put him at once at his ease.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You were going away—on my saint’s day?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It was out of respect for—”</p> -<p class="pnext">She cut off his apology. “Yes, yes, but father was angry and unjust that -day. He would have acknowledged it himself, had he lived. You must come -back, at once, with me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Not knowing the cause of her sudden flight, Bull had followed to the -gateway. As he stood there watching the two returning, Benson’s voice -broke at his shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s the hell of raising a girl in this country. I spoke often to -Carleton about it, but he was a lonely man and couldn’t bear to have her -away. I suppose that he felt she was perfectly safe with him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Knowing him for Lee’s sincere friend, Bull did not scruple to hand on -the information he had gained from Mrs. Mills. Benson received it with a -low, shocked whistle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And the poor man had to meet death with that on his mind? She hasn’t -seen Ramon since the funeral, you say? That speaks well for him. He -tried to go, just now, too. He’s not half bad. But when it’s a question -of marrying Lee, no Mexican need apply. But come on back in. She’ll pick -out in a second that we’re talking about them.”</p> -<p class="pnext">During the lively chatter that whiled away the afternoon; at supper when -the cake appeared in a glory of radiant candles; while the young folks -laughed and chatted thereafter under the lighted <em class="italics">portales</em>, the two -stealthily watched Lee and Ramon. Sliver and Jake having retired early, -Bull and Benson engaged in an interminable game of poker which left them -free to discuss the proposed defensive alliance without neglecting their -watch.</p> -<p class="pnext">Before night fell the girls had distributed candles here and there among -the foliage which now transmuted their waxen gleam into a greenish -incandescence. Behind the creeper that fell in a cascade from the roof, -the lamplit <em class="italics">portales</em> gleamed in half-circles of gold. The massed -cluster of a bougainvillea dripped clotted blood down the façade of the -gate arch. As the girls moved under the golden arches opposite, their -white dresses might easily have been the fluttering wings of giant -tropical moths, and, noting it, Benson paused in filling his hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s like a beautiful stage setting.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s nod took in the bright faces, soft laughter, happy chatter. With -a slow, indulgent smile he musingly watched the secret glances between -the two pairs of lovers; artless subterfuges by which the girls achieved -small personal contacts.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t take much to make ’em happy, does it? A little laughter an’ a -little song; plenty of chatter an’ some pretty clothes; a baby to love -and a man to boss; ’tain’t much, but Lordy, how many of ’em don’t get -it. If men ’u’d on’y keep on admiring in their wives the things they -liked in their sweethearts, the divorce courts ’u’d go out of business. -If I had a daughter, I’d marry her to a boot-black that understood the -nature of women ahead of a merchant prince; for a man that says to his -wife at breakfast, ‘Why, how pretty you look this morning!’ is a-going -to get a reward that can’t be bought with a million.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Just then Phœbe Lovell’s clear voice floated across the <em class="italics">patio</em>. “What a -lovely night! Let’s go for a walk.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right. Wait till I get a shawl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As the others moved off, Lee ran back into her room. They had passed -through the gateway when she came out again, except Ramon, who took the -shawl and threw it over her shoulders. For a few moments they stood -talking under the lamplit <em class="italics">portal</em>, and, though the conversation was -quite ordinary, the glow in his big dark eyes was sufficiently -revealing. As Lee’s back was turned toward them, her face told nothing. -But just before they moved off she reached up and straightened the lapel -of Ramon’s coat.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull frowned. “D’you really think she’s in love?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson shrugged. “When a girl fusses with a young man’s clothes she -doesn’t hate him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull broke a second frowning pause. “You’ve knowed her almost all her -life. Kedn’t you put in a word?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The Englishman made a wry face. “I did, about six months ago, when I -first noticed this thing starting. But never again!” He laughed, a -little self-consciously. “I never had any one sauce me so in all my -life. Told me that it was none of my damn business; to go home and boss -my poor wife. Said that she preferred Mexicans to English, anyway. -Phe-e-ew! I never think of it, even now, without aching to spank her. -No, counsel wouldn’t help her.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But she simply kain’t be allowed to go ahead an’ marry him.” Bull’s -coal eyes flashed with the old wicked gleam. “Before that I’d—lay for -him an’ shoot him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson regarded him dryly. “Your plan has the advantage of finality, -but—it would lead to reprisals. Old Icarza stands well with Valles. If -anything happened to his beloved son we’d be wiped out so completely -there’d be no one left to mourn us. But why worry? We don’t know for -sure whether she even loves him. Give me two cards. I raise you three -blues.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For two hours thereafter the two played and talked, arranging a code of -smoke signals by day, beacons by night, to warn the <em class="italics">haciendas</em>. But -under it Bull’s thought still revolved around Lee and her problem. The -party had returned from the walk, and Lee was shooing all her guests off -to bed before his brow cleared and he uttered a low chuckle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What’s the matter?” Benson looked up in surprise.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, jest something I was thinking of. I raise you two reds.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Not until Jake woke up when Bull entered the bunkhouse did his secret -thought find expression. “Sure I noticed it,” he answered Jake’s remark -concerning Lee’s “likin’ for that Mexican.” “But leave it to me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What d’you allow to do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">This time Bull laughed outright. “Mrs. Mills was saying, t’other day, -that we’d have to import a rival. ’Tain’t sech a bad idea.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What d’you reckon to do—put an ad in the paper ‘Wanted, a husband’?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Never you mind,” Bull quietly replied to the cynical comment. “I’m -going, to-morrow, up to El Paso.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="x-wanteda-husband"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id11">X: WANTED—A HUSBAND</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Departures are usually cheerless affairs, but the morning sun loosed a -flood of gold into the <em class="italics">patio</em> where the party was in process of -dissolution. William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they -went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the -sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an -indulgent grin two small brown <em class="italics">criadas</em>, darting with needle and thread -and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the -transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the -beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love—set his big rough heart aglow. -The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. The young -men, with natural respect for quiet power, admired his kindliness and -strength. Their farewells and invitations were hearty and sincere.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’ve promised and promised and never come yet—that is, for a real -visit,” Phœbe and Phyllis rebuked him.</p> -<p class="pnext">The young men earnestly charged him, “We look to you to take care of our -girls till we’re in shape to look after them ourselves.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Not till the Icarzas bid him good-by did that kindly glow fade. Even -when Isabel slid a small soft hand into his huge paw and turned on him -the full power of her big Spanish eyes while uttering lovely felicities, -he remained non-committal. He frowned hearing Lee accept an invitation -for a visit in the near future. But when she came in, after they left, -the hostile look had faded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, didn’t we have a lovely time?” She patted his arm. “And it was all -due to you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And now I’ll take my pay. I want to go up to El Paso.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I’m so glad!” Darting into her room, she came running back with a -fat roll of bills. “I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr. -Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in -El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the -last thing in the world that Bull’s heart desired. But she looked so -pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled -through the <em class="italics">patio</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now that’s real nice of you. But back up at the mine we’ve all got -store clothes to burn. One o’ these days, when the work ain’t so -pressing, Sliver kin ride over an’ get ’em. Fifty’ll be all I’ll need.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh <em class="italics">dear</em>!” she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. “I did want -to do something; you’ve all been so kind.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his -comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then -bossed the job while her <em class="italics">criadas</em> brushed and curried and sponged him. -After tying one of her father’s cravats around his neck she turned him -round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed -him with a gentle pat.</p> -<p class="pnext">On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, “be how an’ -when,” but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger -at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform -to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the -mixture of <em class="italics">peones</em>, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican -<em class="italics">comerciantes</em> that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep -he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under -the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Morning, friend,” he greeted Bull, cordially. “My name is Naylor. -Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you’ll tip this water-bottle -for me, I’ll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer -of dust and cinders.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years -to establish in civilization’s cultured circles. Before it was over, -Bull had learned that his companion was “on a little <em class="italics">pasear</em> between -revolutionary battles,” and had given, in return, some inkling of his -own affairs. The young fellow’s lithe, spare figure, clean face, -fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled -along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he -eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last, -the other’s attention.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hey!” he demanded. “Is my nose out of plumb, or what?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull warded off offense with the truth. “I happened to be looking for a -man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That depends.” The correspondent answered, breezily, but with caution. -“Without being what you could call wedded to this sandy, thirsty, -cutthroat business of Mexican revolutions, I like it better than -anything else in sight. But what’s your lay? Ranching?” He repeated it -after Bull. “In central Chihuahua? Forget it, friend.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull eyed him wistfully. He fitted so closely to specifications. -Finally, in desperation, he opened his simple heart; was explaining his -quest when the young fellow burst out laughing.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I beg your pardon.” He raised a protesting hand against Bull’s black -glower, then went on with sympathetic seriousness: “But you’ll have to -admit that one doesn’t see a man of your build every day in this -matrimonial business. So there’s a damsel in distress, hey? That alters -the case. If it wasn’t for a little girl up in San Francisco that I -expect to marry some day when I become very rich and famous, I’d try and -help you out, for I know just how you feel. It would be a damned shame -to have her throw herself away on a Mexican. But you’ve laid yourself -out some job. Not that you won’t be able to find men, good-looking chaps -at that. But to get the right one calls for some picking and choosing. -But I tell you what I will do—I shall be up for a week and I’d love to -give you a hand.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure you kedn’t tackle it yourself?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The young fellow denied the wistful appeal. “Hombre! a million wouldn’t -release my girl’s mortgage.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With a regretful sigh Bull struck hands on the compact. While they were -talking the train had ambled through the brown adobe skirts of Juarez, -the squalid Mexican town across the Rio Grande, whence they were -presently shot by automobile over the international bridge into the -spacious bosom of El Paso’s largest hotel. Bull had calculated to go -out, at once, on his search, but while they sat at breakfast there -descended upon them a host of reporters and correspondents, ravenous for -news and aching to dispense hospitality.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Might as well put it off till to-morrow, Diogenes.” His friend had -already named Bull after the person who had such a deuce of a time -hunting an honest man among the grafters and ward heelers of ancient -Greece. “We’ll devote to-day to the irrigation of our desiccated -systems, then go to it mañana like hungry dogs. But safety first! Take a -ten out of your wad and give the rest to the clerk.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Instead of one day, however, three passed during which Bull’s huge bulk -upreared alongside a hundred bars. In all that time he never went to -bed, for, intensified by long abstinence, the outbreak proved unusually -virulent. Generally the conclusion of his debauches found him broke. -But, thanks to the correspondent’s prevision, he awoke on the fourth -morning, in bed at the hotel, with the bulk of his money still in the -office safe. While he was draining the water-jug according to -time-honored precedents, his friend appeared in the doorway of the -adjoining room. His own head was swathed in a wet towel that almost hid -his rueful grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“One never knows what one is starting. You certainly went the limit, -Diogenes. Are you quite sure you’re through?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull nodded and put down the jug with a satisfied sigh. “It’s a bit of a -strain, this fathering an’ mothering a lone girl, a feller’s gotter keep -so straight.” He added, apologetically, “I was jest plumb ripe for a -bust, but I reckon this orter hold me for another three months.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well, then, let’s get down to work. At intervals, while I could -still see, I kept one eye open for possibles. But it’s like looking for -gold or diamonds; the supply doesn’t touch the demand. The few prospects -all proved to have attachments in the shape of sweetheart or wife. Good -ones, I suppose, are so rare that the girls grab them at sight like -marked-down waists on a bargain-counter.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After two days of vain search through the plazas and parks, hotel -lobbies, streets, and bars of El Paso, Bull was almost driven to the -same conclusion. Short men, tall men, thin men, broad men; some that -were ugly, others handsome; well and ill clad from all walks of -life—passed under his observation. The few he trailed were either -engulfed within the sacred precincts of some bank or met at the doors of -suburban bungalows and there warmly kissed by young and pretty wives. -Without fulfilling the specifications called for in the potential -husband, it would have been difficult enough to have enlisted an -ordinary ranch hand for service across the line. At the close of the -second day Bull reported as much to the correspondent when they met in -the hotel lobby.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Guess I’ll have to give it up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now if <em class="italics">that</em> was only free.” The other bowed, just then, to a young -man who had just walked in from the street. “Look at him! Five-eleven in -his socks, hazel eyes, brown hair, good strong jaw, flat shoulders and -flanks, deep chest; walks the earth like he owned it. Some dresser, too. -That mixed plaid cost a hundred at his New York tailor’s.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Some banker’s son, I’ll bet you,” Bull grumbled.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That or better. I had a little chat with him this morning. A ’varsity -man by his accent and manner. Seemed to know the Mexican situation down -to the ground from the Wall Street end, so papa’s probably a broker. -Holy snakes! Look at that! Neat work! Neat work!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Walking up to the counter, the young man had held out his hand—evidently -for the key of his room—while his indifferent gaze traveled around the -lobby. The clerk, who departed in no wise from the casual specifications -of his supercilious breed, glanced at the hand contemptuously. Turning, -the young man spoke. Then as, without glancing up, the clerk answered, -he snatched, hauled that superior person across the counter, and slammed -him down hard on the floor. Next, as they came on, he felled one large -door porter and three oversized bell-boys who had answered the clerk’s -yell. This done, he waited, expectantly, quietly surveying the wreck, -the hazel eye admired by Naylor transmuted into hard steel flecked with -dots of brown light.</p> -<p class="pnext">Jaw, eyes, pose, all said, “Next!” But the “wreck” was complete. The -oversized bell-boys ran off to answer imaginary calls. An automobile -party at the door called for the porter’s attention. Deserted, the clerk -swiftly retreated behind his counter, behind which, from a safe -distance, he issued defiant mutterings. With a slight nod that expressed -comprehension and satisfaction, Hazel-Eyes sauntered across the lobby -out into the street.</p> -<p class="pnext">All had passed in the time required for the correspondent to reach the -desk. He was back again in five seconds. “He’s broke—owes two weeks’ -room rent. Clerk told him to get out; hence the scrap. Diogenes, we’re -in luck! Venus and Cupid are in the ascendant. He’s our meat.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Grabbing Bull’s arm, he hustled him outside, where they spied the quarry -turning up a cross-street that led to the plaza. When he finally settled -down on an empty bench, the correspondent nudged Bull in the ribs.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Look at them!” He indicated the hundreds of men idling on the benches -or sprawled out on the turf. “Last refuge of the broke, home of the -out-of-works. That settles it. Bet you he hasn’t the price of a meal. -But, say! he’s plucky. The beggar is actually smiling.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From the way in which the young fellow’s glance wandered around the -assembled out-of-works, it was easy to see that he rather enjoyed the -novel situation. When Bull had noted and commented on the fact, the -correspondent went on:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now, Diogenes, we must proceed with due regard for the traditions. When -grand dukes, princes, and caliphs in disguise befriend some worthy -person, they invariably begin by testing his honesty—see <em class="italics">Arabian -Nights</em> and other authorities. Split a couple of tens off your wad and -drop them as you stroll past him. I’ll stay here and watch lest he be -found wanting.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull managed it, too, quite cleverly, scraping the bills out of his -pocket along with his tobacco-pouch. Watching closely, the correspondent -saw the young fellow look, pick them up, then run and tap Bull’s -shoulder. Leaning back, he shook with silent laughter.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And they say romance is dead,” his thought ran. “<em class="italics">Dead!</em> while this -big, black giant stalks around like a knight of old seeking a perfect -husband for a girl he’s known only a few weeks. Diogenes, my friend, Don -Quixote had nothing on you. Of all the lovely, fine pieces of idiocy -that ever helped to raise us out of the muck of commercialism, this is -the very finest. And wouldn’t it be queer if it worked? It’s almost too -good to be true, and yet—a girl that can move a man to do things like -that must be remarkably worth while. Quien sabe? Perhaps it will end -like all true romances, with a happy marriage.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Till the two settled down side by side on a bench, the correspondent -watched. Then with a satisfied nod he rose and walked out of Bull’s life -in the same casual way he had entered it; to return once more, however, -at a critical juncture, many months later.</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with -diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual -observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor -conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated -astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was -remarkably well done.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">No-o-o!</em>” he protested.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure!” the other nodded. “I was turned out of my hotel only half an -hour ago.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended -doubt. “Broke, mebbe, but you don’t belong with these. What was it? -Wine, weemen, or cyards?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. “A woman, yes, but not in -the usual way. What would you think if I told you—But, pshaw! what’s the -use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work fairy-tale. -Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I’m here, busted and -broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gilt-edged -securities and real estate.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A hundred thousand!” Bull’s financial acquaintance having rarely risen -above the sixty-a-month class, he could not repress his surprise.</p> -<p class="pnext">“There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I -refused a hundred thousand—with a girl attached.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s face fell. “I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an’ you refused -beca’se you’d already picked one for yourself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The young man nodded. “Correct except in one or two particulars. I -disliked the girl so much that her money couldn’t tempt me. As for the -one I’ll marry, I haven’t picked her yet. But I mean to when I’m taken -that way.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s face lit up with hope again as, with naïve frankness, the young -fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a -marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only -daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all -that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there -was the hitch!</p> -<p class="pnext">“For a fellow doesn’t want to marry his sister,” he explained. “I know -her so well she hasn’t a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will -be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing -forever after. But the Relieving Officer”—he broke off, laughing at -Bull’s puzzled look—“that’s my name for my father. He was always coming -through when I got in debt at college, hence the title. He’s a good old -scout, but obstinate as—as—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—yourself?” Bull suggested.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits -the immovable obstacle—something busts. That was me. Without even the -last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama, -I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn’t have me suffer. He -supposed I’d presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just -for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So -here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the -result—pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, shore!” The caliph—that is, Bull—was proceeding very cautiously. -“You’ll get a job in some bank.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t believe it. You see, I’d just come home from Princeton and had no -commercial training. Anyway, I’d rather work in the open, ranching, or -something like that. If I had a little capital, I’d buy in. As I -haven’t, I’m open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I’ve got no -experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I’m afraid -it’s pick and shovel.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was -spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull -proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job—in fact, it was on -the same <em class="italics">hacienda</em> where he worked himself! Of course it had the -disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing -was certain but death and “requisitions”! And there was always the -chance of a scrap! He, Bull, wouldn’t advise any one to try it that had -too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one -might be launched into “Kingdom Come.” But for a man who liked action -and would take a fighting chance—so forth and so on.</p> -<p class="pnext">A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred -inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so—Bull did -not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic -outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken. -He had finished telling of Carleton’s death at the hands of the -Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his -<em class="italics">compañeros</em> had assumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow -thrust out his hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say, that’s fine, old man! I’d be proud to have you take me in. My name -is Nevil—Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Whenever the train goes, an’ that’s be guess an’ be God. It’s billed to -pull out from Juarez this evening, but we’ll be lucky if it leaves -before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an’ start almost on -time. So we’ll go aboard to-night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What about clothes?” The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay -at his fashionable tweeds. “I can’t punch cows in these.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hardly,” Bull grinned. “You’d come out from your first bunch of pear -chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an’ we’ll see about -an outfit.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon -changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army -shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman’s hat, -his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better -advantage. Bull’s expression, looking him over, would have fitted a -match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her début. His -comment, “You’ll do,” would have surprised the recipient could he have -divined all of its implications.</p> -<p class="pnext">Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon -stopped him. “Here, you can’t do that!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But you’re broke.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I still have these.” He held out the tweeds. “How much boot do I get, -Father Abraham?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he -stood for his tradition. “Only vot iss on your feet. These ain’d much -good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’ll chuck in that pair of chaps?”</p> -<p class="pnext">With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own -generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were -stowing away the <em class="italics">chaparros</em> and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out -a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner -read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very -cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents.</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon burst into a merry laugh. “Father Abraham isn’t on to real -clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xi-gordons-debut"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id12">XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Starting “be guess an’ be God,” the train left Juarez at five the next -morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull -had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by -the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first -“shoo-fly” around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over -the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could -never be obtained through a Pullman window.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern -experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, -tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly -revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in -purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun -rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its -nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also -revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with -grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, -startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Destruction’s the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys,” Bull -answered Gordon’s question. “You orter see them at it. They run the loop -of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, -then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, -spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. After cutting down -the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an’ yank a mile of it away -at a time. As wreckers, they can’t be beat, for in four years they’ve -completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property -that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty -years to build.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Are they still at it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The sudden illumination of the young man’s face so palpably expressed -hope that Bull had to grin. “Yes, farther south, where Valles is -fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it -pretty close. Still”—his nod went beyond the distant mountains—“it’s -pretty much all bandit out there. Now an’ then they attack the trains. -There’s allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That isn’t so bad.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to -the scenery.</p> -<p class="pnext">In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first -took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash -in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts -violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible -ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as -its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear -in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and -had his being.</p> -<p class="pnext">The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow -sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the -revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when -the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of -his hair.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like -the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the -feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal -expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled -away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by -deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him -always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the -hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican -<em class="italics">haciendas</em> did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the -scenery as such.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m glad we’re up here.” From the engine, puffing away at the head of a -dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far -to their rear. “I wouldn’t exchange this for a Pullman.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, don’t imagine that you’re traveling second-class,” Bull grinned. -“I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it’s worth it. You’d -suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some <em class="italics">peon</em> -spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it -an’ grin. Sure!” He answered the young fellow’s look of disgust. “That -is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you’re German or -English, or b’long to any other nationality that looks after its people, -you might resent it an’ get away. But, thanks to our Government’s -policy, it’s open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a -few, too, every so long.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Would <em class="italics">you</em> stand for that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull shrugged. “Kain’t say, till I’ve been tried. But it’s good advice, -nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don’t like it, you’d better be -toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here, here!” he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on -a telegraph-pole. “Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t’other -day for plugging insulators. Besides, it’s waste. Every bullet is worth -a life—mebbe your own.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Maybe his own!” Again Gordon felt the prickling hair—in fact, as they -rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that -failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a -few miserable <em class="italics">peonas</em>, ragged and half-starved, begging for <em class="italics">centavos</em>. -There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of -a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty -brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied -the details.</p> -<p class="pnext">Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of -war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! -That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye -sockets from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish -<em class="italics">hacendado</em> whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by -raiders. Death and torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed -and ruined, the full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. -Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, -the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit -tortures!</p> -<p class="pnext">He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before -he was aware of it the sun’s great red orb sank behind a huge black -mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a -while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark -pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them -rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the -running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a -luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at -the station at midnight.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’d better go right on,” Bull said. “We’d get no sleep here for the -fleas, an’ desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we’ll be into -the grass country an’ kin take a nap while the animals graze.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved -off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over -its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours’ more travel -brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and -Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, -just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in -chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. <em class="italics">Riata</em> swinging in -rhythm with her beast’s stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, -took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully -as any <em class="italics">vaquero</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Pretty neat!” Gordon exclaimed. “That boy can ride!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You bet you!” Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, “Sliver -himself, that was born with a rope in his han’, don’t throw a better -loop than Miss Lee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">What?</em>” As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a -clear cowman’s yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon -exclaimed, “Why, it—it <em class="italics">is</em> a girl! In this country do they usually -wear—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No more ’n they do in the Eastern States,” Bull dryly filled in the -hiatus. “On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican -Catholic—they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p’ints. Ever -sence the revolution, Miss Lee’s been doing vaquero’s work, an’ what -kind of a job d’you reckon she’d make of it going ’round in skirts? If -you don’t mind, I’ll ride on an’ help her with that critter.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The light that had flashed over the girl’s face at the sight of Bull -spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and -sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an -impulsive feeling.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I’m <em class="italics">so</em> glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Home!</em>” And she was happy because he, “Bull” Perrin, the notorious -rustler, had returned <em class="italics">home</em>! Earth held no terror that could have sent -that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he -controlled his voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Indeed, no!” She laughed, merrily. “They’re like two old hens ’tending -an orphan chick. But—well, you know a girl, even as independent as I, -must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant’s eyes. His -sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch. -Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be -forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of -sin. The shadow marked a resolution.</p> -<p class="pnext">He spoke very gently. “I hope that you’ll allus feel that way.” Then, -with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: “But what are -you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for -this.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She laughed saucily up in his face. “Then it is due to me. I gave them -the slip. Who is—” She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull briefly sketched his history. “Young chap I found dead broke in El -Paso. He’s the right sort.” Perhaps because he divined the probable -effect on her feminine psychology, he added: “He’s from the East—college -man—wealthy family—turned out because he refused to marry a fortune. I -tol’ him you’d likely hire him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I would in ordinary times.” She looked at Gordon, who had now reined -in. “But I cannot pay regular wages just now.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s willing to wait, like us,” Bull began. “He’s—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—out for experience,” Gordon put in. “To tell the truth, Miss Carleton, -I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you’ll find me worth my board.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet -reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which -she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke -out with a comical little laugh. “If it wasn’t so nice, it would be -ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking -for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is -the matter with you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She may have read the answer in Gordon’s eyes and resented the indignity -it offered her independence. Or the feeling underneath her sudden -stiffening may have rooted deeper. Be a young man ever so comely, a girl -ever so pretty, there will flash between them on first meeting the -subtle challenge of sex; instinctive defiance based through love’s -history to the far time when every girl ran like a deer from a possible -lover and only gave in after he had proved his manhood by carrying her -off. It passed in a flash, for, noticing her stiffen, Gordon reduced his -gaze to respectful attention.</p> -<p class="pnext">Subtle as it was, Bull had still noticed the by-play. “Looks like she’d -taken a down on him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But even as the doubt formed in his mind it was removed by her laughing -comment: “I suppose I’ll have to stand for it. But you must be starving. -Let us get on to the house.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As they rode along, moreover, Bull noted certain swift, stealthy glances -with which she took complete census of Gordon’s clean profile, strong -jaw, deep chest, flat flanks; signs of a secret and healthy curiosity.</p> -<p class="pnext">“She’s a-setting up an’ taking notice.” He winked, as it were, at -himself. “I reckon, Bull, you kin leave the rest to natur’.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xii-the-recruit-is-tried-outin-several-ways"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id13">XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT—IN SEVERAL WAYS</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">“Well, what do you-all think of him?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s question emerged from the thick tobacco reek which invariably -mitigated the severity of their evening deliberations.</p> -<p class="pnext">It pertained, of course, to the new recruit, concerning whose merits or -demerits Jake and Sliver had reserved judgment during this, his first -week. When they had come from supper straight to the bunk-house, Gordon -had taken his pipe and gone for a stroll around the compound, which was -never more interesting than when clothed in the mystery of a hot brown -dusk. The lights and fires, like golden or scarlet blossoms; the soft -brown faces glimpsed in cavernous interiors by the rich glow of a -<em class="italics">brasero</em>; the women’s subdued chatter; laughter wild and musical as the -cooing of wood-pigeons—all had for him perpetual fascination; and while -he sauntered here and there, looking, listening, the Three held session -on his case.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What do we think of him?” Jake slowly repeated the question. “It’s a -bit soon to jedge, but if he’s half as good as he looks, he orter do.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver, however, was more critical. “Too darned nice-looking fer me. I -hain’t got much use for these pretty boys.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Pretty</em> yourself!” Bull swelled like a huge toad with indignation. “He -ain’t no pretty boy! You-all orter ha’ seen him clan up that hotel lobby -in El Paso.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A <em class="italics">ho</em>-tel clerk, an’ some bell-hops!” Sliver sneered. “Why, a good -cowman ’u’d jest about as soon think of hitting a lady. ’Fore I allow -him even a look-in with Lady-girl, he’s gotter show me. If you-all ain’t -afraid he’ll spoil, jest send him an’ me out together to-morrow.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right, señor, he’s your meat.” Bull’s grin, provoked by a sudden -memory of the thwack with which the hotel clerk had hit the lobby floor, -was veiled by tobacco reek that reigned beyond the lamp’s golden -glimmer. “Only, don’t chew him. Kain’t afford to have his scenery -damaged.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nary a chew,” Sliver agreed. “Twon’t be necessary. I’ll take him in two -swallows.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In this wise was Gordon apprenticed to Sliver for the period of one day, -to learn, in course thereof, such lessons in cow and other kinds of -punching as it might bring forth. When they two rode out, armed -cap-a-pie as it were, with rifles, saddle <em class="italics">machetes</em>, and a brace of -Colt automatics, in addition to the usual cowman’s fixings, it is -doubtful whether North America held a happier young man than he. Out of -the thousand and one lovers who had awakened to the knowledge that this -was their wedding-day, some might have been equally happy. But none more -so, for Gordon was also espoused—to Adventure, the sweetest bride of -real men. It may be safely stated that no bride ever surveyed her -trousseau with more satisfaction than Gordon displayed in his “chaps,” -spurs, guns, and <em class="italics">riata</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He -wasn’t in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the -point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted -himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction -that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting, -park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman’s lope. In fact, so -quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the -course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with -thoughts of Lee.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Twon’t do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her,” he told -himself. “He’s gotter show me, an’ if he don’t—out he goes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse, -on Gordon’s part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with -brutal roughness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride -the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you’ll -have to try an’ look like a man.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon stared. It wasn’t so much the words as the accent that -established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes -were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown -specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden -disappointment when he rode on.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Santa Maria Marrissima Me!</em>” He swore to himself in sudden alarm. “Is -he a-going to swallow it?” But the next moment brought relief. Gordon -was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine.</p> -<p class="pnext">With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the -wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. “Calculated it would -get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He’s putting it up to me!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel, -there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he -began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of -riding. “Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank—”</p> -<p class="pnext">The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him -out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped -down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy -chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear.</p> -<p class="pnext">A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in -two words, “Poor McNab!” Sliver was almost as terse in describing his -defeat to Bull and Jake that evening.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Gentlemen, hush! He leaned over as I took my holt, grabbed me round the -waist from behind, straightened, an’ away I flew over his shoulder an’ -kem down spread-eagled all over the grass, plumb knocked out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Returning to the combat: When Sliver gathered his shocked wits together -and sat up, Gordon stood looking down upon him, hands on his hips, -quiet, determined, yet with an inquisitive twinkle in his eye.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver answered the twinkle. “Say, that was sure a lallapaloo. I’ve -wrestled with bears an’ once choked a cougar till he was gol-darned -anxious to quit. But I draw the line at earthquakes. If you-all ’ll -please to tell how you done it, I’ll shake han’s an’ call it squar’.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Done!” Gordon broke out in a merry laugh. “And I’ll promise, on my -part, never to ride like that again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“For which I’ll be greatly obliged; that hippity-haw, side-racking gait -does sure get on my nerves.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Striking hands upon it, they mounted and rode on.</p> -<p class="pnext">They were heading for a mountain valley, enormous green bowl hemmed in -on all sides, that could only be reached by a single rough trail. -Watered by a running stream and knee-deep in lush grass, the difficulty -of approach and sequestration rendered it almost raider-proof. But as it -afforded pasture for barely a third of Lee’s stock, it was their habit -to send the animals out in relays to remain under charge of an <em class="italics">anciano</em> -for a week at a time.</p> -<p class="pnext">As they rode along, Sliver’s secret satisfaction revealed itself in many -a stealthy glance. At first they expressed that feeling alone, but -presently there entered into them a leaven of doubt. Their way now led -along the foot of the hog’s back from the crest of which Sliver had -obtained his first view of the <em class="italics">fonda</em> on the other side, the discovery -of which caused his first lapse from grace. The slight doubt was -explained by the thought that accompanied his glance upward at the -ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s a fine upstan’ing lad an’ kin take his own part. But that ain’t -all. Supposing he drinks? We-all jest kedn’t stan’ for any young soak -around Lady-girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In view of his own shortcomings, his grave shake of the head was rather -comical. Nevertheless, it was quite sincere; likewise his emendation: -“’Course we wouldn’t have him no canting prig. He orter be able to take -his two fingers like a gentleman, then leave it alone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Reining in suddenly, he asked, “D’you ever take a drink?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon looked surprised. “Why, yes, on occasion. But you don’t mean to -say—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on!” Sliver’s manner was quite that of the “mysterious stranger” -of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to -befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, “It’s a -fine chance to try him out,” cloaked certain strong spirituous desires.</p> -<p class="pnext">Quarter of an hour’s heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks -brought them out in the <em class="italics">fonda</em> dooryard. From above Gordon had noted -its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His -eyes now went, first to the two <em class="italics">ancianos</em>, a wrinkled old man and -woman, who dozed in the shade of the <em class="italics">ramada</em>; then to the girl who -knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. -Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a -mule-train going up the cañon added the last touch, vividly raised in -his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker -colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of -their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With -unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window, -and set out a bottle of <em class="italics">tequila</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have -been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide -and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When -their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he -missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words.</p> -<p class="pnext">“She wants to know who you are an’ all about you,” he translated her -rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played -as large a part as her tongue. “She says her father an’ mother are about -ready to cash in. If you’ll stay here an’ be her man, you’ll stan’ right -in line for the <em class="italics">fonda</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. “Cash in?—the <em class="italics">fonda</em>? Say! -You’re fooling?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver raised his right hand. “Take my oath!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then <em class="italics">she’s</em> fooling.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nary!” Sliver grinned. “She’s serious as a New England housewife in -chase of a bedbug.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now Gordon’s merry laugh rang out. “Is this leap year, or does this sort -of thing go all the time down here? Her proposal calls for a priest, I -suppose, and a marriage license?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nary.” Sliver grinned again. “Ladies of her class get along very nicely -without them artificial aids to marriage. All she wants is for you to -settle down here with her to housekeeping.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—but—” He still half believed that Sliver was joking; but, looking -at the girl, he saw for himself the smoldering flame in her dusky eyes. -This time his laugh was a little confused. “Please tell her that I’m -dreadfully sorry, that I appreciate the high compliment, and if it -wasn’t for the fact that I don’t expect to stay long in this country I -would give her nice offer my most distinguished consideration.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Any further doubts that he might have entertained would have been -effectually dispersed by her dark disappointment when Sliver translated. -A touch of pity mingled with his amusement; moved him to add, “I hope -that you put it nicely.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure,” Sliver breezily answered. “I told her that you said for her to -go to hell.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, well”—Gordon recovered his breath again—“at least that puts the -whole business beyond further doubt.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t you believe it.” Sliver gave a third and last grin. “She says -that you-all kin always find her here if you happen to change your -mind.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now that’s very nice.” Really pleased under his amusement, Gordon -brought the little comedy to a graceful end. Unsnapping the leather -watch-fob that bore his initials worked in gold, he laid it in the -girl’s hand. “A fellow doesn’t get a proposal of marriage every day. -Tell her for a little remembrance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And now for another drink.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But as Sliver reached for the bottle Gordon seized his arm, and any -doubts as to his sobriety were removed then and there from the cowman’s -mind. “You’ve had two already, and I’m not going to stand by and see you -burn your stomach out. Come on, gol darn you! or I’ll hand you one.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His smiling good humor removed the offense. Nevertheless, the curious -brown specks were floating again in the blue of his eye.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver knew the threat was real. “Just this one?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, if you’ll down it quick and come on.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With feelings that had hovered between gratification at Gordon’s -sobriety and regret for his own, Sliver drank, bade the girl “Adios,” -and mounted again. Standing in the doorway, her glance followed them, -enwrapping Gordon’s upright figure with its dark caress. Just as they -crossed the stream at the foot of the path, her face lit with sudden -remembrance. Turning at her call they saw her coming at a breathless -run.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Kain’t bear the parting,” Sliver interpreted the action.</p> -<p class="pnext">But his grin faded as he listened to her voluble talk. “She says that -four strange Mexicans stayed here last night. They didn’t belong to this -country, an’ they questioned her closely about the different haciendas. -They were ’specially curious about our horses. Us being gringos an’ her -Mex, they naturally concluded she’d be ag’in us, and they would have -been right but for the fancy she’s taken to you. So they opened right -up; asked all about the mountain pastures an’ whether we kep’ a close -guard. She says they was heading for there. While I go after ’em, you -ride like the mill tails o’ hell an’ bring out Bull an’ Jake.”</p> -<p class="pnext">That crude but strong expression accurately described Gordon’s progress -homeward. While his beast scrambled like a cat up one side of the -ravine, slid like a four-footed avalanche down the other, and streaked -like a shooting star up and down the long earth rolls, he learned more -of horsemanship than during all his previous years. Lee, who saw him -coming from the upper gallery above the <em class="italics">patio</em>, nodded her approval. -Such haste, of course, had but one interpretation—raiders; and by the -time Gordon dashed into the compound she was already mounted and a fresh -beast waiting for him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They are up in the Cañon del Norte,” she answered his inquiry for Bull -and Jake. “Come on!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You are surely not thinking of—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Before he could finish, however, she shot under the gate arch; was off -at a speed that kept him galloping his hardest to keep her in sight. Not -until she slowed down on the rough trail that led into the cañon, within -sight of Bull and Jake, who had just roped a foal for branding, did he -catch her. But it was just as well, for that which he would have said -came with more authority from the lips of Bull.</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right, Missy. There’s on’y four, so you don’t need to be skeered. -You kin go right back home with Gordon an’ leave us to take keer of -them.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Indeed I won’t!” she exclaimed, hotly. “I’m going, too! I am! I am!” -She cut off his remonstrance. “I am! I am! <em class="italics">I am!</em>”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was the first time their wills had clashed. Bull glanced at Jake, who -shook his head—not that he required support or intended to waste time in -fruitless argument. “You mean that?” His glance, grave with stern -disapproval, came back to Lee.</p> -<p class="pnext">It hurt her. But though her lips quivered, she answered, doggedly: “I -do! I <em class="italics">won’t</em> go back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well. We’ve no time to waste. Ride on while I cut this foal -loose.” But as she obeyed, with one flick of the wrist he roped her -above the elbows from behind. Then, in spite of angry protests that -ended in tears, he cinched her little feet from stirrup to stirrup.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now take her home.” Handing the lead rope to Gordon, he leaped into the -saddle and galloped after Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">Till they disappeared, Lee looked after, wavering between anger and -tears. Tears won. Bowing her fair head, she wept unreservedly for fully -a minute. Realizing then that she was gaining nothing but swollen eyes -and a red nose, she stopped crying and turned to Gordon with a little -laugh.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Isn’t this ridiculous? Please untie me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But now she found herself gazing into the sullen face of a young man -who, through her, had been cut out of a real fight. He shook his head.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You <em class="italics">won’t</em>?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’d go after them.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They looked at each other. Her eyes were now gleaming brightly above two -red spots; but he met their gaze with stubborn obstinacy.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You mean to say that you are going to take me home tied up like a veal -calf?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He nodded.</p> -<p class="pnext">Biting her lips, she looked at him again. “Do you realize, sir, that you -never set eyes on me till a week ago?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Also that you are my hired man?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He nodded again.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well, you’re fired! Now untie this rope, then get off my land!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But even this was turned against her. “I don’t have to. I’m no longer -your servant. I’ll get off your land, yes—after I’ve delivered you at -your home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">If looks could kill, to use that hackneyed but still expressive term, he -would have died there and then. But they don’t, and, masking his own -disappointment with a hypocritically cheerful whistle, he turned his -beast and rode down the cañon, towing her behind.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was dreadfully humiliating, and, being a girl, she cried some -more—this time for sheer anger. But soon her tears dried and she fell -into deep musing. Soon a small smile restored its softness to her mouth. -Her voice, seductively pleasant, mingled with the tramp of hoofs. “Won’t -you <em class="italics">please</em> untie me? The rope is hurting my arms.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He stopped, pulled her horse up alongside, and as he began to fumble -with the ropes she turned her head so that he could not see her smile. -It was transmuted into a flash of fury when, finding the rope a little -loose, he drew it tighter.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I thought you were a gentleman!” she shot it viciously at his back as -he rode on. “Gentlemen don’t tie up ladies!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ladies don’t fire men for obeying orders. You needn’t think I’m -enjoying this. Just because you shoved in where you were not wanted, I -have to go back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She did not like that, either. What girl would? Once more she bit her -lip, yet, for all her anger, a touch of respect mingled with her -resentment. Concerned principally with his own disappointment, he rode -on without looking back and so missed the little persistent wriggles by -which she gradually freed one hand. Soon she was able, by leaning -forward, to reach and draw her saddle <em class="italics">machete</em>. Indeed, she worked with -such caution that he got his first warning when, with one slash, she cut -the rope between them. By the time he had swung his beast around she was -going like the wind back up the cañon.</p> -<p class="pnext">Her mocking laughter came floating back.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xiii-american-rustlers-vs-mexican-raiders"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id14">XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS <em class="italics">VS.</em> MEXICAN RAIDERS</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Shoving rapidly into the mountains, Sliver ascended with the trail in a -couple of hours through upland growth of <em class="italics">piñon</em> and juniper to the -height of land, a pass riven by earthquake or subsidence between twin -jagged peaks, from where he overlooked the valley pasture.</p> -<p class="pnext">Like a great jade bowl, bisected by the silver line of a stream, its -wide green circle, miles in diameter, lay within a broad ring of purple -chaparral. Over its surface black dots were scurrying toward the corrals -at the northern end, and under Sliver’s glass these resolved into horses -that were being rounded up by four Mexicans; for he could see their -peaked <em class="italics">sombreros</em>, tight <em class="italics">charro</em> suits, even at that distance. Turning -the glass on the <em class="italics">jacal</em>, a rude hut of poles and grass thatch near the -corrals, he looked for Pedro, the <em class="italics">anciano</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Poor old chap! they’ve sure got his goat.” While clucking his -commiseration, however, he shifted the glass to a patch of white on a -near-by tree, and it immediately resolved into the old fellow’s blouse -and <em class="italics">calzones</em>. “No, they’ve just tied him up. Then these ain’t no -Colorados. It’s Felicia’s gang, all right, all right.” He added, -chuckling, “Four nice little raiders in a pretty trap, along comes Jake -and Bull, then there was none.”</p> -<p class="pnext">And trapped they were. Except where the stream slipped out over a -precipice between two narrow walls, the mountains rose sheer around the -Bowl, unscalable save where the trail rose by precarious zigzags to -where Sliver held the pass a thousand feet above. At few places was it -possible for two horsemen to ride abreast. At that point there was -barely room for one; if necessary, he could have held it, alone, against -a score. But it was not. Watching closely, he saw the raiders first -drive the horses into the corrals, then settle down for a <em class="italics">siesta</em> in -the shade of the <em class="italics">jacal</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Going to bring ’em up at sundown,” he muttered, “in time to make the -first run by night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">So certain he was of it that he did not scruple to take a sleep himself; -cat-napped, with occasional squints down into the valley up to the -moment that he was awakened by the hoof-beats of Jake and Bull’s beasts. -The glass then showed the raiders working the horses out of the corrals. -As the herd thinned out to single file at the trail, one man took the -lead; a second and third fell in at even distances; the last brought up -the rear.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They know their business,” Bull commented on the manœuver. “It’s easier -to keep ’em moving.” He grimly added: “And easier for us. The line will -string out for a quarter-mile, so I’ll go down that distance an’ hide in -the chaparral. Let the last man pass me before you hold up the first. -Then, while one of you keeps him covered, t’other can take away his -tools. I’ll keep ’em moving on up till you’ve got the other three.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By -that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and, -peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow -black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear, -above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another. -Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see -the leader’s face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral -Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. Somewhere, -though he could not place it, he had seen the man before! He was still -puzzling over it when Jake’s command rang out in Spanish:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hands up!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The leader looked and complied, persuaded by the black muzzles, wicked -eyes, that looked down from the rock above. The second and third men did -try to turn, but were blocked by the file of animals. An attempt to pass -would have sent them down, bounding from level to level to the floor of -the valley below. The fourth man swung his beast around only to find -himself looking into Bull’s rifle. So while Jake covered the operation -from above and Bull from below, Sliver disarmed and bound the raiders.</p> -<p class="pnext">After the captives were arranged in line under a <em class="italics">copal</em> tree upon a -little plateau, where the trail began to fall downhill on the other -side, Bull stood frowning down from his height on the man whose face had -aroused that haunting memory. “I’ve a hunch that I’ve seen this chap -afore.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He would have been more certain of it had he noticed the fellow’s look -of recognition and fear only a moment before. But now his ugly -countenance was veiled in that ox-like stolidity which a Mexican <em class="italics">peon</em> -can so easily assume. He shook his head in dull negation to all of -Bull’s questions. He did not come from any of the neighboring -<em class="italics">haciendas</em>! They had never met before! His <em class="italics">pais</em> was far—it might have -been anywhere in a thousand-mile circle implied by the wave of his hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yet I could swear to him.” Bull looked musingly at Sliver. -“Pock-marked, too. Where have I seen him afore?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver shook his head. “Can’t prove it be me. All <em class="italics">peones</em> look like so -many peas in a pod; some mebbe a bit uglier than others; an’ pock-marks -ain’t no distinction with two-thirds of ’em pitted like a -nutmeg-grater.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That ain’t the question before the house, neither,” Jake put in. “All -I’m bothering about is whether to hang or shoot ’em. Hanging is what I -was brought up to, but shooting’s more fashionable down here. I’d allow -they’d likely prefer it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Shooting’s too good for ’em.” In a spasm of virtuous indignation, -Sliver shook his fist at the captives. “Hanging’s slower an’ hurts a -heap, an’ if it gets about that the gent that meddles with our stock is -in for a slow, choking they ain’t a-going to be near so careless.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“There’s something in that,” Jake conceded. “An’ this copal’s got nice -stout limbs. We kin use their own riatas, an’ that’ll be what the -Tombstone editor used to call ‘poetic justice.’ Hanging goes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull was still staring at the raider, but, taking his consent for -granted, they proceeded to fit the <em class="italics">riatas</em> around the prisoners’ necks. -Jake had, indeed, thrown the slack of the last over a bough when there -came a rattle of stones and scrape of hoofs on the trail below. Grabbing -his rifle, he slid with Bull and Sliver, each behind a tree. One second -thereafter their guns were trained on the spot where the trail debouched -on the plateau.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Meanwhile, with Gordon in pursuit, Lee had led the race into the hills. -Her blood mare was the fleetest animal she owned and, had she chosen, -Gordon would have soon dropped out of sight. But she contented herself -with just holding a lead.</p> -<p class="pnext">Unaware of this, Gordon made repeated attempts to catch her with sudden -bursts of speed. Perfectly aware of it, on her part, she would wait till -his horse’s head almost touched her leg, then shoot ahead with a little -laugh. Her face, looking back at him, was hard as her laugh—eyes bright -and shining, nose contemptuously tilted, mouth one scarlet line.</p> -<p class="pnext">To be defied, drawn on, mocked, and teased with low, derisive laughter -is not a situation that any man loves. But if thoroughly angry, mad -clear to the bone, Gordon’s face revealed only dogged hope. For Chance -was riding with him. If Lee’s beast slipped or tired. If she were a -second late with the spur. One of the three was fairly certain, and the -belief set a gleam in his eyes that caused her a quiver of apprehension.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, he’s mad enough to beat me!” she told it to herself. “I wonder if -he would.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, every time she looked back at that dogged face she felt a -sense of security. With raiders at large, it was just as well to have -him around! The thought was in her mind when, with him only a few feet -behind, she shot over the edge of the last steep out upon the plateau.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, my <em class="italics">goodness</em>!” It burst from her in sudden fright.</p> -<p class="pnext">The Three, of course, were out of sight. The natural droop of the -<em class="italics">copal’s</em> outer branches hid the halters, and she saw only the four -raiders, unevenly grouped, and three rifle-barrels aimed from behind the -tree. As she reined her beast back on its haunches Gordon swung his -animal sideways between her and the raiders, and, quite shamelessly, she -accepted the protection.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Beat it quick!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Already he had pulled his gun, and but for the fact that Bull just then -stepped out in the open the question of hanging or shooting would have -been decided for at least one of the thieves. As it was, his readiness -served one purpose—reduced the heat in Bull’s eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Put up your gun, Son, the job’s done.” Pointing at Lee, he sternly -inquired, “But what’s <em class="italics">she</em> doing here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now fright, plus Gordon’s chivalrous behavior, had driven the last -vestige of anger out of Lee. She spoke before he could answer. “Don’t -blame him. He did his best to take me in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then who shall I blame?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Me!” The coals of her anger sent forth a last flash that was -immediately quenched by her mischievous smile. “Or blame yourself for -leaving me the machete. I wiggled and wiggled till one hand was free, -then cut the rope.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Combined with the smile, her little illustrative wriggle completed his -rout. He turned to hide a grin, but was betrayed by his shaking -shoulders. Noting it, she flashed with feminine quickness from defendant -to accuser. She pointed at the halters.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">What are you going to do?</em>”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver and Jake had now come out. The former answered, “We was jest -about to bump ’em off, Miss.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What? <em class="italics">Hang</em> them?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now look a-here, Lady-girl!” Sliver burst forth in indignant -remonstrance. “Didn’t we catch ’em red-handed? An’ d’you allow we’re -a-going to let ’em loose to try again?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But <em class="italics">hang</em> them? Just for stealing? Of course, if they were Colorados, -but—” She stopped, clasping her hands in sudden fear. “Oh! they killed -him—poor Pedro?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nary; jes’ tied him up,” Sliver quickly reassured her. “I seen him -wiggling through the glass, an’ the big thief, there, says they didn’t -harm him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sighing with sudden relief, she returned to the charge. “Then if they -spared <em class="italics">him</em>, why are you going to kill <em class="italics">them</em>?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Look a-here, Missy,” Bull now intervened. “’Twas agreed between Benson -an’ all the hacendados to make an example of captured raiders. If you -once start letting ’em off, there won’t be a head of stock left in all -this country at the end of a year. That was why I wanted you to go back, -an’—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m glad that I didn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian -stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in -their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not -preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is -universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the -pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish.</p> -<p class="pnext">They were poor <em class="italics">hombres</em> with families back in their <em class="italics">pais</em> reduced to -the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they -would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted -to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For -themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there -would be an end! But their women? And the little <em class="italics">niñas</em>? These would be -left in continual suffering!</p> -<p class="pnext">Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep -instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she -began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women. -Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been -duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and -so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing -into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing. -Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and -reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they -related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces, -leaving them soft and human.</p> -<p class="pnext">Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk <em class="italics">jacales</em> with their -brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands -for their men’s return; their small, nude children playing in the hot -dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great <em class="italics">vaquero</em>, -roping chickens and cats with a string <em class="italics">riata</em>, then dragging them, -captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by -the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It -was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow.</p> -<p class="pnext">“This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They -were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us -might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would -you feel?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!</em>” -She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the -prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at -Sliver, who looked away.</p> -<p class="pnext">A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and -beyond the pleasant span of to-day’s existence the old rustler life of -yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was -now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely. -But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of -each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las -Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they -looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish -grins.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Under the same circumstances,” Bull answered, slowly and truthfully, -“<em class="italics">we-all ’u’d expect to hang</em>. But if you feel different”—his glance -interrogated Sliver and Jake—“it goes as you say. On’y, if you let ’em -go, we’ll have to run ’em out of the country in fairness to the other -haciendas.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Of course.” Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. “We’ll take them home -now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">This settled, and while Sliver rode on down into the valley to free the -<em class="italics">anciano</em>, Bull and Jake cinched the thieves securely in their saddles. -Then, driving them and the horses ahead, with Lee and Gordon following, -they started down the trail.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now the spectacle of four men trussed for hanging is not to be seen -every day—let us say, on the streets of New York—and though Gordon had -looked on with breathless interest, he could hardly believe that the -business would have been carried to a conclusion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Do you really think they would?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee looked at him in surprise. “Of course! You know Valles has issued -orders for hacendados to shoot raiders on sight; that is”—she added it -with a little sigh—“all but his own.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her tone was so casual, he felt convicted of vast and unlimited -greenness. But where, according to the lights under which he had been -raised, he ought to have suffered a severe revulsion, he actually -experienced a thrill. This juxtaposition of life and death, the violence -and quickness with which events rang their changes, somehow stripped -away the veils from the riddle of existence, reduced its complex terms -to their basic factors. Here in the mountains, desert, plains, they were -very simple—to eat well, sleep well, fight well, and die well, even as -these thieves, comprised the whole duty of man. The thrill recorded his -acceptance of the terms.</p> -<p class="pnext">While they were riding down and down the sun lowered its great crimson -orb till it hung, transfixed, on a distant peak. The mountain steeps -above, spurs, and ridges beneath, were washed in its dying crimson. Deep -purple filled the hollows; faint violet clothed the distant plains. Over -all a cloud-flecked sky spread its parti-colored glories. Mountain and -plain, cañon and deep ravine, it was a scene infinitely wild, infinitely -beautiful, and as he looked over it all Gordon took his breath in a deep -sigh.</p> -<p class="pnext">“This is life! I hate to leave it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Leave it?” If Lee’s surprise was assumed, it was exceedingly well done. -She went on, with a low laugh: “Oh, I see! Papa wins out. The prodigal -will return to marry the beautiful heiress and live happy ever -afterward.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Who told you? Oh, Bull, of course. Now that comes of owning a blabbing -tongue. Confound him! Well, since you want to know, I won’t. In my -present mood, New York is the last place in the world I want to see.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then you have tired of us—<em class="italics">so</em> soon?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Or you of me? You forget—<em class="italics">I’m</em> fired.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She noted the subtle accent, and equally subtle was her reply. “Why, -yes, so you <em class="italics">were</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Then, looking at each other, they both laughed.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xiv-nemesis-dogs-the-threeand-is-dogged-in-turn-by-lee"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id15">XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE—AND IS “DOGGED,” IN TURN, BY LEE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Midnight saw the prisoners safely bestowed in a ’dobe that had served -the old Spaniard, Carleton’s predecessor, for a jail. During the -remainder of the night the Three stood guard in turn and Gordon, who -relieved Sliver at daybreak, was still at the door when Lee came out of -her bedroom on the upper gallery.</p> -<p class="pnext">Goodness knows she was pretty enough in her man’s riding-togs, but now a -flowing kimono added the softness and mystery a man loves best in a -woman. As she moved forward to the rail and stretched, looking off and -away to the mountains, the loose sleeves fell away and Gordon obtained a -distracting glimpse of polished arms, small white teeth, in a round red -mouth, all set in the blazing gold of her hair. Seeing him, she cut off -the yawn and smiled.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You must be dreadfully hungry.” Her clear call floated across the -compound. “Come to breakfast. I’ll send Miguel to keep watch.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She was already seated at the table under the <em class="italics">portales</em> when he came -in, and as he took his seat Maria, the smaller of the two house -<em class="italics">criadas</em>, reported the Three as being still lost in sleep.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The poor fellows!” Lee commented, distressfully. “They must be dead. -Don’t awaken them.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus, after the crowding events of the previous day, which included a -fist fight, proposal of marriage from one girl, wild chase after -another, a bandit raid and lynching-party, all rendered more impressive -by the dark ride through warm, mysterious night, Gordon now sat -<em class="italics">tête-à-tête</em> with his pretty employer.</p> -<p class="pnext">The <em class="italics">patio</em>, with its arched <em class="italics">corredors</em>, cool as a grotto under -flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the -<em class="italics">arbol de fuego</em>; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a <em class="italics">criada</em> down -on her knees rubbing <em class="italics">tortilla</em> paste on a stone <em class="italics">metate</em>; the soft -stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these -helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee’s -small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and -gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came -still others.</p> -<p class="pnext">Two brown girls, who stood twisting their skirts in the gateway, moved -forward at Lee’s word.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They wish to take my advice about following their lovers to the wars,” -she summed for him their Spanish. “I explained the risks of hunting them -among twenty thousand revolutionists, and advised them to wait till they -came home. But they say that is too indefinite. They may be killed, and -there is no one to marry them here but the <em class="italics">ancianos</em>, and they already -have wives. So they are going—to join the rag and bobtail in the wake of -the revolution.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After the next client, a wrinkled old woman, had followed the girls out, -Lee burst out in merry laughter. “She was telling me of a miracle that -occurred at the funeral of her brother, who worked for William Benson. -It appears that he had only his dirty cotton calzones to be buried in, -so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson. The poor old -fellow had been reduced by sickness to a rack of bones, and you could -have rolled him in it like a blanket. And here came the miracle! The -weather, you know, was exceedingly hot last week, and instead of burying -him at once they waited till some relatives from a distance had arrived. -And when the coffin was opened for them to take a last look—lo! the -miracle!</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘For Saint Joseph,’ she said, just now, ‘had wrought a most wonderful -thing, señorita. Whereas Refugio had lain in the señor’s clothes like a -nut in a withered shell, he was now so large and handsome they fitted -him like his skin!’”</p> -<p class="pnext">He laughed so heartily she was drawn on to tell him more, and pleased -herself thereby as much as him. For to be really happy, a girl must have -exercise for her tongue, and with all their genuine devotion the Three -offered but a limited field for conversation. Naturally laconic, their -communications touched principally upon flocks and herds; and holding, -as they did, the traditional frontier viewpoint concerning Mexicans—to -wit, that they ranked in the scale of creation below the Gila -monster—they shared neither her affection for, nor understanding of, her -brown retainers.</p> -<p class="pnext">But Gordon, with his quick and reciprocal feeling, made an ideal -listener. From the “miracle” she ran on with anecdotes and happenings, -some quaint, others amusing, several tragic, that revealed with a -vividness beyond the power of description the mixture of love and -treachery, simplicity and savagery, ignorance and idealism, religious -faith and gross superstition, that go into the making of a Mexican. -While she talked and he listened, there was established a community of -feeling which was destined to produce immediate results.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What is it, Maria?” Pausing, she looked up at the <em class="italics">criada</em> who had just -carried the prisoners their breakfast.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They wish to speak to me,” she translated the girl’s answer, “alone. -They say it is very important.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Better let me go with you.” Gordon rose. “I can wait outside.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Surely.” She accepted, at once, his offer, and when, moreover, he -followed in after Miguel opened the prison door, she offered no -objection.</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither did the raiders—for reasons that quickly developed. “It matters -not, señorita.” The man whose face had caused Bull such disturbance -shrugged his indifference when Lee explained that Gordon spoke no -Spanish. “’Tis of the others, your servants, I would speak.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While crossing the compound she had puckered her smooth brow over the -mystery—without gaining any inkling to break the force of the -communication. While the fellow ran on, hands and shoulders helping out -his torrential Spanish, Gordon saw her expression pass through surprise, -incredulity, doubt, finally settle in deep concern, when, with emphasis -that carried conviction, the other three testified to the truth of their -fellow’s words.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I— Oh, do you know what they say?” Distressed, she turned to Gordon -with blind instinct for help. “I really don’t know whether I ought to -tell you. It so dreadfully, pitifully concerns our poor friends. You -have been here such a short time, yet—I feel that you can be trusted. -They say—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the tale, as elaborated and filled in by Gordon’s cross-examination, -is best summed. Not for nothing had been Bull’s “hunch.” The haunting -face fitted the <em class="italics">charro</em> who had held their horses that day at the -<em class="italics">jefe-politico’s</em> gate in Las Bocas. When the Three failed to return -with Carleton’s horses, that astute person—the “wicked one” of -yesterday’s talk—had sent out others. In return for the <em class="italics">señorita’s</em> -great kindness in saving their lives—but principally, if the truth be -known, because they feared to be sent out under convoy of Sliver and -Jake—they wished to make grateful return by warning her against these -evil ones; these wolves in sheep’s clothing that had slunk into her -fold! Followed a recital of their border raids that lost nothing by -reason of the details being filled in from imagination! They were -terrible <em class="italics">hombres</em>! <em class="italics">Muy malo</em>! greatly desired by the <em class="italics">gringo</em> police -for dreadful crimes!</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t you suppose they are lying?” Gordon suggested.</p> -<p class="pnext">She shook her head. “Their story is too literal. When a <em class="italics">peon</em> lies, he -goes the limit. Some terrible tale of atrocious murder and torture would -be the least; something beyond mere banditry, which is scarcely a crime -in their eyes. Then it is corroborated by a lot of little things. You -know they were riding my horses yesterday and were differently dressed, -yet this man described their horses and clothing as he saw them in Las -Bocas, just as they were the first day they came here. And do you -remember how they looked at one another yesterday when I said that any -of us might have done the same thing?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon nodded. “They did look queer, and do you recall Bull’s answer? -‘Under the same circumstances, we-all ’u’d expect to hang.’ He spoke so -slowly, looking at the others, and they both nodded.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then see how they came here—started up, as it were, out of the ground. -In Mexico one doesn’t ask strangers embarrassing questions. It would be -like throwing stones at random in a city of glass. But if they stay with -you, one generally learns something of their past. But theirs is wrapped -in mystery. I know no more of them than on the day they came. It is -probably true.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her tone was quiet, indeed so casual in its acceptance of the fact that -Gordon wondered. In El Paso he had been greatly impressed by the -knight-errantry of the Three in espousing the cause of a lonely girl. -During the last week he had seen for himself their simplicity of heart, -rough kindliness, genuine devotion; and now this land of surprises had -confounded him again with its juggler’s changes of good and evil. These -kindly fellows were, after all, cattle-rustlers, but one remove from -bandits.</p> -<p class="pnext">To him it was a most astonishing situation. In New York, where folks -were sharply divided into the sheep and the goats, it would have been -easily solved; one would have merely rung for the police. But here, -where everything seemed to go by contraries, anything might happen. -Accordingly, he looked at her and waited.</p> -<p class="pnext">But she did not answer his unspoken question. She was looking at him, -yes, with wide, distressed eyes. But he felt, without understanding, -that she was looking across that queer situation. He had a sudden, vivid -suspicion that he was on trial in her mind instead of the Three. He was -certain of it when she spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What would <em class="italics">you</em> do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ten days ago he would undoubtedly have viewed the case under his -previous lights and have pronounced it one for the police. Now he -answered from the larger charity that belonged to the land: “You -remember what you said yesterday and repeated a moment ago—under the -same circumstances we might have done the same thing? It isn’t what they -<em class="italics">were</em>; it’s what they <em class="italics">are</em> that counts.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I <em class="italics">knew</em> you would say it!” She impulsively thrust out her hand, -and as the small, firm fingers locked with his in a strong grip, he knew -that not only had he emerged victorious, but also that his answer had -established between them a real bond. Eyes shining, she ran on: “They -saved my life, helped to nurse my father, have been so kind and good and -dear! If they had been the vilest criminals it would make no difference -to me. They are my people, my <em class="italics">men</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Of course they are!” Gordon cordially agreed. “Now what about these -fellows? What will you tell them?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Doubt clouded her shining enthusiasm. “I don’t quite know. What do you -think would be best?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The truth. If what they say is true, and we believe it is, they can’t -be bluffed. But it won’t do to have them believe you knew nothing of -this. I’d hint that though you were not acquainted with the details, you -were perfectly aware of your servants’ past, but that they are now -leading honorable lives. Clinch it by adding that you hope they will do -half as well with their chance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Fine!” Her face lit up again, and when, having put it all into Spanish -for the thieves, they went outside, she thanked him for the counsel. “I -knew you could help me. Now just one more thing—this is all between you -and me. No one else must ever know—especially them.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’ll forget it ourselves.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Once more her small cool fingers locked with his, and, smiling brightly, -she went back to the house, leaving him to resume his guard till the -prisoners were taken away by Sliver and Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">After they were gone there entered into Gordon’s mind a small doubt. -Supposing the raiders talked? Spread their report of the Three through -the desert country? It remained, that little doubt, like a thorn in the -side till it was drawn by Sliver and Jake when they returned the -following night.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’d calc’lated to hand ’em over to the vaqueros at Hacienda El Reposo, -an’ have them chase ’em beyond their bounds,” Jake explained. “But at -the railroad we ran into a Valles colonel that was drumming up recruits. -He grabbed ’em offen our hands that quick they hadn’t time to kick.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“By now,” Sliver added, “they’re three hundred miles south on their way -to death an’ glory.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But the little girl mustn’t know that,” Bull’s heavy bass rose in -caution. “She was that sot on returning ’em to their women and children, -it ’u’d half break her heart.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not a whisper,” the two agreed, but Sliver added, with a chuckle, “Alle -same, they’ll stay put an’ trouble her no more.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Inwardly Gordon echoed it, “They’ll trouble <em class="italics">you</em> no more.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While the others were away Bull had also been doing some thinking, and -after Gordon went out for his evening stroll through the compound he -laid the results before them. “Say, I’ve placed that chap.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Which chap?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Fellow with the pock-marks. D’you remember the mozo that held our -horses at Don Miguel’s gate?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No-o-o—” Jake began, but with memory thus stimulated Sliver recalled -him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Julius Seize-her! you’re right!” As the possibilities of the late -situation flashed upon him he gave a low whistle. “What an escape! We’ve -had some close calls in our time, but none to beat it. ’Twas lucky he -didn’t recognize us, for he’d sure have peached, an’ I wouldn’t have -Lady-girl to know for a cold million.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nor me,” Jake added. “But it ain’t likely—now.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Thank God for that!” Sliver exclaimed it with almost religious fervor. -With deep thankfulness Bull repeated it in his mind.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xv-bull-and-the-widow-conspire"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id16">XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">“Ain’t that queer?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank -bench in front of their ’dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to -smoke in the house, they preferred it there—partly through a rooted -instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the -natural enemy of “Lady Nicotine,” regarding her always as a formidable -rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the -compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver’s remark broke -the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who -sat in the doorway of a ’dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of -three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ain’t what queer?” Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through -the warm air. “There’s so many queer things down here I’ll have to ask -you to come again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver nodded at Gordon. “Ain’t it odd how he cottons to them little -Mexes? To me they’re no more’ n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat -up night afore last with a sick one?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No-o-o-o!” Jake’s surprise knew no bounds.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat -there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he -did.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the -country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown -b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n -ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl -likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good -daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s -what they’re all a-wanting.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at -him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well -raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But -though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I -ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make -her sit up an’ take notice!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly—friendly as a brace -of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling, -evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like -clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing -an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as -you say—there’s nothing doing.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his -disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. -“Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As, -rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: -“I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while -I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that -clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this -month—once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was -rumored raiders had been seen around her <em class="italics">rancho</em>; now beca’se he wants -advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you -think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I -uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as -did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there -ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the -table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean, -sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and -left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old -hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d -try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But -I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m -talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my -fingers is itching to get into a game.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood. -“I’ll soon be due for a night at the <em class="italics">fonda</em>.” He added, with comical -pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish -Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so -when I’m through.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted -to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to -the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull—”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his -first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s <em class="italics">rancho</em>. The low sun -filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid -gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red -masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on -Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited -altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe -wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his -musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack -till a voice broke the golden silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It will pay you, señor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the -eyes out of you with perfect ease.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in -outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, -emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing -it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile -warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull’s question.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, the señora is there. Ride on, señor. I shall watch here for a -little while.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull’s knee, the widow explained -the apparition. “That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He’s very -faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times -in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used -to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on -his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, -almost shot to pieces. After I’d nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got -his pardon from Diaz on condition that he’d stay with us and behave. -That’s over ten years ago. He’s been with us ever since, and that old -bandit reputation of his has been our best protection.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bull made hearty comment. “It takes a bad man to -scare a bad man. I’ll feel easier for knowing this.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow had already dismissed Terrubio’s woman, who served as her -<em class="italics">criada</em>, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull’s -supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and -constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her -skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. -Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of -the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at -last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch -him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, -though he introduced it then.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Two months he’s been here, ma’am,” he concluded his tale of woe, “an’ -nary a thing doing.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why, what did you expect?” Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter -and Betty joined her childish merriment. “Did you think it would happen -in the first five minutes? Now just consider—what good would she ever -have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at -first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out -at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a -lasting love. It’s good that he isn’t impressionable, for he’ll go down -all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn’t have liked Lee to fall -in love with him at once. But she isn’t that easy kind. The man that -gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they -act?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull gave the diagnosis—they appeared to like each other! Were very -friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn’t think of anything -else!</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst -out laughing. “Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men -are! That isn’t much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she -him, accidental, as it were?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the -stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the -question. “Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t’other day. -It lashed out an’ upset them an’ for a minute they was that balled up -you kedn’t tell t’other from which. Didn’t seem a bit anxious to let go, -either.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s favorable,” the widow nodded thoughtfully. “Looking at it from a -distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It’s the -life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. -They’ll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up -like a wind, then—up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles -since Mr. Nevil came?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an’ Ramon -was gone afore we kem in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s a pity he hadn’t been there. He’d feel the same about as we do, -and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t try to cut Ramon out. Let me see.” -She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. -“I know! I’m having a birthday next week. I’ll make a little party and -invite Ramon and Lee. You’ll see to it that Gordon brings her here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But then Bull won’t be able to come,” Betty’s small voice piped, -indignantly. “And you told me only yesterday that you weren’t going to -ask any one but him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. “So I did, dear, and I’d -rather have him. But when Lee’s happiness is at stake we’ll have to give -up our own pleasure. And you mustn’t call him that. ’Tisn’t respectful. -Say Mr. Perrin.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could—didn’t you, Bull? There, -you see!” Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with further -revelations. “Mother will be thirty-sev—” when the widow clapped her -hand over the small, traitorous mouth.</p> -<p class="pnext">She broke into a little, conscious laugh. “I know it’s silly. But was -there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won’t -acknowledge to a day over thirty.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you look five years younger than that, ma’am,” Bull gallantly -replied.</p> -<p class="pnext">He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus -consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, -warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, -electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, -forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or -flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids -and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more -personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to -sleep in Bull’s arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the -soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not -of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he -dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment:</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tain’t for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own -hand.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He repeated it next morning, looking back on the <em class="italics">rancho</em> from the last -rise. “No, Son, ’tain’t for you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his -distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might -have read denial of his thought in both the child’s words and the -widow’s reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of -his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade -longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty’s words -with a sudden squeeze.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Mother, I just know he’s falling in love with you. Wouldn’t it be nice -if he asked—”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xvi-one-man-can-take-a-horse-to-water-but"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id17">XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT—</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow’s birthday. Not that -there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, -the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua—altogether too brightly for -a white man’s comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses -into the shade of the ’dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in -the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was -initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of “cat’s cradle” with a -loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house.</p> -<p class="pnext">At the sight of the two heads bent over the “cradle,” the girl’s face -lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. -“Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Is this she?” Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. “I had -just about made up my mind to adopt her myself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Let me see—” Lee’s smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. “She’s -about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been -born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I -cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. -Oh, you needn’t blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was -loud in your praises. ‘Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio’s sick babe all -night. What a husband for some happy señorita!’”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That was very nice of Maria.” He laughed. “Only, I’m afraid there’s -nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow -up—somehow I lose interest.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected -far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines -that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself -for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. -The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then -by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the -parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe -housekeeping around the corner.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the señorita,” came a voice, -gruff with masculine authority. “Only we be married.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But will they be married, Pancho?” piped a softer treble.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old ’Lupe -talking at the well. ‘Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman -with never a duenna to her name? ’Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood -runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, -this may not end without marriage.’ This is what old ’Lupe said to thy -mother.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Rich color swept from the roots of Lee’s hair down to her neck. She -hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; -then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky -sentences, she regained her composure.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Woman!” “Don Gor-r-r-don” was speaking again. “What is this—the -tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of -the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? ’Tis sour as swill, fit -only for swine.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then it should suit thee very well,” came the softer voice, with -unexpected spirit.</p> -<p class="pnext">“A-r-r-r-h!” It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which -Don Gor-r-r-don’s father resented household rebellions. “Thou wouldst -answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don -Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the -house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you,” she teased him. “They -were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he -handed Dolores one on the mouth.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He laughed. “The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the -proper relation of the sexes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again -and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the -saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased -surprise.</p> -<p class="pnext">Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value -these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician—the widow, for -instance—would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they -rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long -earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, -her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a -curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite -frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little -gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed -nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled—and -mishandled—man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the -wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private -chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded -being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends.</p> -<p class="pnext">He “lost interest in them after they grew up.” Indeed! Why, the -freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic -beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all -the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were -nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of -her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature’s -cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, -he did not know it. The “fire and tow” still lacked a “wind.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell’s -<em class="italics">rancho</em> to the widow’s; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. “It -is rougher,” she said, “with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both -shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded -cañon past a country <em class="italics">fonda</em>. There I’ll show you the prettiest Mexican -girl in all Chihuahua.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“At the <em class="italics">fonda</em>? Then I have seen her.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her quick look said quite plainly, “Oh, <em class="italics">you have</em>?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should -say!” He added, laughing, “She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, -adding the <em class="italics">fonda</em> as an extra inducement.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her expression now said, “Oh, she <em class="italics">did</em>?” But as she looked away, he -failed to see it, got only her words, “And you had the heart to refuse?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sad to relate.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you haven’t even been to see her again?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, -as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that -expressed—perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and -reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman -is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up -the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy -watch as they approached the <em class="italics">fonda</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“There’s your beauty—attired like a bride for her groom.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an <em class="italics">olla</em> -of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a -handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from -under the <em class="italics">olla</em>, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy -mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and -shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe -bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty -picture overmuch for his companion’s taste.</p> -<p class="pnext">His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, “Perhaps she hasn’t -lost hope?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. -While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with -seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient -because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came -hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that -followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl -reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s fob -dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads.</p> -<p class="pnext">At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under -pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette, -she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s -monogram in gold.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ah, <em class="italics">ha</em>! señor!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under -it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was -it the widow’s “wind” fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least -when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze -following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. -Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke:</p> -<p class="pnext">“I am yours!”</p> -<p class="pnext">After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling -after Gordon’s up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag -staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xvii-but-twenty-cannot-make-him-drink"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id18">XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">When they rode in to the <em class="italics">rancho</em> that afternoon, the “wind”—that is, -Ramon—had not yet “blown in”; so there were no complications to -interfere with the widow’s first attempts at diagnosis of the “case.” -She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and -Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the -pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her -across to the veranda.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Promising,” she inwardly commented.</p> -<p class="pnext">A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered -temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and -white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow’s -bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon is coming.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes? Isabel too?”</p> -<p class="pnext">An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills’s belief that the indifference -was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. “No, it was quite -accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along -their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and -show me to-day.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. “Never -missed a dab. William Benson’s a fool—though, of course, she may have -changed her mind.” This she proceeded to find out. “Your new man seems -nice?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He is.” Followed a long description of Gordon’s night vigil with the -child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, “But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But what?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s been going to see Felicia at the <em class="italics">fonda</em>. Sliver took him there, -one day, and he says that he has never been again. But—she’s wearing his -watch-fob in her bosom— Yes, yes! I know! A <em class="italics">peona</em> will beg the shoes off -any man’s feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously -made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in <em class="italics">peonas</em>’ bosoms, will -bear watching. “Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is -very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn’t he -twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh—”</p> -<p class="pnext">She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly -subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little -smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. “Oh, wouldn’t that be -just too lovely! Is it—settled?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow, of course, shook her head.</p> -<p class="pnext">“But it will be.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“How do you know?” She was quite willing to be convinced.</p> -<p class="pnext">“How do I know?” The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of -powder. “Just as if it depended on <em class="italics">him</em>. Just as if any woman—who -hasn’t a harelip—can’t marry any man she wants.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a “case,” Mrs. -Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so -self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an -honest person, she owned up with a hug.</p> -<p class="pnext">Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom -dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to -an equally keen if less discreet examination.</p> -<p class="pnext">Betty’s major premise agreed marvelously with Lee’s and was stated with -the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the -subject from different distances and points of view. “I like you—only -not so well as Bull. You’re nicer-looking, but—” A long pause emphasized -more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways. -“I’m going to marry him when I grow up—that is, if mother doesn’t beat -me to it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Any danger of that?” Gordon laughed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You bet there is. Bull’s dead in love with her, and she—of course, she -doesn’t admit it, but <em class="italics">I know</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, well, isn’t that fine!” Gordon really meant it. “Congratulations, -I suppose, are not yet in order.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I should say <em class="italics">not</em>!” Betty’s blue eyes widened with horror. “Don’t you -<em class="italics">dare</em>! I’m not too big, yet, to be spanked”—she wriggled, -reminiscently—“and when mother’s real mad she goes the limit. -Nevertheless, it’s true.” After a second calculating survey, she -concluded, “But if she grabs Bull, I <em class="italics">might</em> marry you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“If you only will,” he pleaded, “I’ll be <em class="italics">so-o</em> good! Can’t we consider -ourselves engaged?”</p> -<p class="pnext">After a moment’s thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. “No, I’m -afraid not.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Because.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Because doesn’t answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Because I’d only be disappointed again.” She added, with a little sigh: -“All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You’ll fall -in love with Lee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">I?</em> With <em class="italics">Lee</em>?” His real surprise showed how little that contingency -had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of -apprehension colored his accent. “Now how do you figure that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Because you’d be a fool if you didn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. “But—but, you -know, I am only her hired man?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That wouldn’t count—if she liked you.” After another examination: “And -she might do worse. <em class="italics">Gee!</em> if I were only a man!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes?” he prompted. “If you were a man?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her -mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. -Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with -plentiful food for thought.</p> -<p class="pnext">During the last two months he had seen Lee—riding the range, a pretty -lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in -her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a -girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the -sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it -with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there -something wrong with his head?</p> -<p class="pnext">Presently he gained an inkling—he had been wearing another’s colors! She -whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of -this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. -Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering -surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; -deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland -rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet—these and a -thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. -Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail!</p> -<p class="pnext">He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were -really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful -things! Come to think of it—Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! -He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant -tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the -gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the -upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding -her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall -dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the -course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the -earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not -belong.</p> -<p class="pnext">Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary -effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly -dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of -his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the <em class="italics">corredor</em> swung -in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, -stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!</p> -<p class="pnext">It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the -feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but -actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a -billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings -under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the -dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure -rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, -that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, -without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing -clothes!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of -course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, -badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under -all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she -reacted to it—though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who -had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam -still sparkled in her eye.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind.</p> -<p class="pnext">She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh! I’m <em class="italics">so</em> glad to see you!”</p> -<p class="pnext">With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the -<em class="italics">corredor</em>, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, -giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, -aunts, cousins—goodness knows! the category might have embraced every -one of his <em class="italics">peones</em> if she had not been warned by the deepening of the -young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You -are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she -managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr. -Nevil, our latest acquisition.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent -further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.</p> -<p class="pnext">On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two -men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, -was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever -with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His -great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced -<em class="italics">sombrero</em>; the <em class="italics">charro</em> suit of soft leather that so finely displayed -his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle—made such a -figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just -as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they -settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from -Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in -course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point -of view.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the -outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, -without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our -troubles ourselves—because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not -try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside—but that we -should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your -throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living -on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and -nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like -careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in -order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, -señor”—he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug—“we should -fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’—as your -political speakers would say—to cut one another’s throats and run off -with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years. -We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have -done our best to make up the arrears.”</p> -<p class="pnext">So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think -your father must be a bit of a cynic.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In -your schools—I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your -big military academies—you teach that every American boy has a chance to -be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your -one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine -million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no -chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the -belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill -all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the -throats of those who come between us and again what your political -speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many -millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to -result.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is -right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between -our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time -comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute -ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of -children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no -principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your -warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to -our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that -is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces -our <em class="italics">peones</em> live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and -drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their -bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least -desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your -system.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the -fire’?”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application -of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange -ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the -foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested -billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective -countries, you can never turn them out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set -back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its -ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a -detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why did we do it? <em class="italics">We</em> did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo -de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have -built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But -after him—Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his -cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them -out—now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed -Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time—we -shall fight.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let -alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee -returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In -fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she -addressed him half an hour later.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We are going for a little walk. You may come—if you choose.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He didn’t <em class="italics">choose</em>! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off -alongside the <em class="italics">charro</em> suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face -displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common -to two creatures under the sun—to wit, a bull being played with the -<em class="italics">capa</em> by a skilful <em class="italics">matador</em> and a man under torture by a woman.</p> -<p class="pnext">When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here -the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with -him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had -first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of -a—well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet -under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a -respectable blaze.</p> -<p class="pnext">If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their -relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, -Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned -almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the -going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted -shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. -In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, -at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he -started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her -well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, -threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. -But never for a moment was she deceived.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the -situation.</p> -<p class="pnext">With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at -the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer; -also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.</p> -<p class="pnext">A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her -inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction -not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into -her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the -door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, -thereby, from a correct judgment of results.</p> -<p class="pnext">“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I -wonder who will score to-morrow?”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was Lee.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. -“You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode -away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note -that contained—at least so she said—the recipe for a liniment Terrubio -used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.</p> -<p class="pnext">Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the -curtains. “That’s downright cruelty,” she scolded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well?” Lee shrugged. “Didn’t he say, yesterday morning, that he didn’t -take any interest in girls after they grew up?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But he does.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little -laugh, “I know it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure—that is, -they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the -path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. “Oh, he’s going back -by the <em class="italics">fonda</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ah-ha!” the widow mused. “Now we shall see.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee -routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xviii-the-wind-blows-contrary"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id19">XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.</p> -<p class="pnext">A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode -into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary -with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and -flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their -heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t -give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the -pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.</p> -<p class="pnext">The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden -impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty -ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let -go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on—madder -than ever. Also—but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed -to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw the -<em class="italics">fonda</em> lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly -reckless state.</p> -<p class="pnext">Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been -in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, -plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit -them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so -caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the -number shall never be told!</p> -<p class="pnext">In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed -up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget -it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the <em class="italics">fonda’s</em> liquors less -than to her.</p> -<p class="pnext">A <em class="italics">peona’s</em> life gravitates between her grinding at the <em class="italics">metate</em> and -laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between. -Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was -making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on -the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down -from above.</p> -<p class="pnext">From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around -a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the -satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl -would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat -out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, -led his horse in under the shady <em class="italics">ramada</em>, then proceeded calmly with -her toilet.</p> -<p class="pnext">Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the -dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and -arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! -eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that -would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start -out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.</p> -<p class="pnext">The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, -golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was -exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and -flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a -girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. -Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of -his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he -looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and -shoulders.</p> -<p class="pnext">Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the -cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled -two <em class="italics">copas</em> of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him -in Spanish.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Salud y pesitos, señor!” (Health and a little money!)</p> -<p class="pnext">In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the -contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a <em class="italics">peso</em> -note—even after he had filled and drunk again.</p> -<p class="pnext">A <em class="italics">peona</em> refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had -he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was -not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his -years. But being absolutely ignorant of <em class="italics">peona</em> nature, and in fine -fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and -chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.</p> -<p class="pnext">When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a -<em class="italics">diccionario</em> with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the -personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had -repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But -now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped -herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.</p> -<p class="pnext">To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and -burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so -delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the -“long-haired <em class="italics">diccionario</em>” was in constant use. While her father and -mother dozed under the <em class="italics">ramada</em> he consulted it about the scenery and -natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But -when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer -objects—fingers, eyes, hair—the lesson passed the boundaries of -etymology into the domain of love.</p> -<p class="pnext">He was well over that border before he realized it—how far he did not -guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” the -<em class="italics">diccionario</em> answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action -to illustrate it.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xix-a-kissits-consequences"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id20">XIX: A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the -cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling -like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a -binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in -that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both -the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the -“wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation—especially if the -party of the second part be of Latin blood—is apt to be disaster. Lee -was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up -and pressed down, last night’s consequences.</p> -<p class="pnext">With a girl’s keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and -had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, -that would have appeared ridiculous—besides, though she would not have -admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that <em class="italics">dreadful</em> -girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself -for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had -ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited -chatter—Ramon’s family, <em class="italics">hacienda</em> affairs, the scenery—while she dodged -like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing this -were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? Would -she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, -herself, what her answer might have been! But she <em class="italics">did</em> know that she -would have let him speak.</p> -<p class="pnext">If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride—bolstered by irritation, -for with a woman’s illogic she charged her present plight to him—her -pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her -from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort -great as a physical strain.</p> -<p class="pnext">But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the -mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And -their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to -check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently -leaped over and swept all before it.</p> -<p class="pnext">A remark of hers concerning his father’s age precipitated the flood. -“Si, he has many years.” Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran -on: “Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he -but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on”—he paused, -then added the <em class="italics">tu</em> of lovers—“on <em class="italics">thee</em>. If—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, Ramon!” she pleaded, in wild distress. “<em class="italics">Please</em>—don’t!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, -but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his -love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of -spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert—all -were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his -universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, -it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have -listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now—it filled her -with dismay.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you poor Ramon!” She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but -when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. “Oh no! -<em class="italics">no!</em> Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the -moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. “There is no hurry. I did not -intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou -hast always known it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh yes.” Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. “Yes, but—” Then -realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the -compromise. “No, I won’t answer now. Wait.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“If there be any one else—” His brow drew down over somber, threatening -eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, there isn’t!” She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she -repeated again. “There <em class="italics">isn’t</em>, Ramon!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bueno!” His face cleared. “Then I am content.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of -imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think.</p> -<p class="pnext">Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved -on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between -remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately -refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the cañon, -curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. -Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the -zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate.</p> -<p class="pnext">Their first view of the <em class="italics">fonda</em> showed, of course, only the roof and -walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon’s horse -tied to a post of the <em class="italics">ramada</em>, then the young man himself leaning at -ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of -the “long-haired <em class="italics">diccionario</em>,” which was now being consulted in the -matter of hair and eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The señor seems to be enjoying himself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not -see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, -she watched from across the stream the girl’s head go up and meet -Gordon’s in a kiss.</p> -<p class="pnext">For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. -The chrome-yellow walls of the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, toned under the eaves by Time’s -green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a -greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed -brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which -knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of -it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have -carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an -audience—in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of a -deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just sat -her beast.</p> -<p class="pnext">In taking the last turn, Ramon’s horse dislodged a pebble, and as it -rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl’s -clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon’s glance of startled -inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet.</p> -<p class="pnext">“My God, she saw it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change -wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had -assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. -Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole -world had gone to smithereens!</p> -<p class="pnext">“Competition is the life of love!” Mrs. Mills might have added—sometimes -its death. The “wind” had blown with a vengeance—from opposite ways. -Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon shivered. Though -only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and joined Ramon in -front of the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, it seemed to both a deathless age.</p> -<p class="pnext">After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, -and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the -girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee -stiffened and looked at Gordon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I am glad that we overtook you. Señor Icarza has asked me to marry him. -You shall be first to congratulate us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon’s glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then—the -tricks fancy plays us! <em class="italics">Fonda</em> and ravine faded into a glade in a Java -forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a -golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without -recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I wish you all happiness!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The crash of Lee’s glass as she threw it among the stones brought him -back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the cañon.</p> -<p class="pnext">Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder.</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon’s practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He -spoke very quietly. “We’d better catch her before she breaks her neck.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xx-sliver-is-duly-chastened"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id21">XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden -more recklessly.</p> -<p class="pnext">Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in -successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast -launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on -full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks -that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed -by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon and out upon the -plain.</p> -<p class="pnext">Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on -and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught -of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from -her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she -slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon’s, -to catch up.</p> -<p class="pnext">Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he -had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. “Little -Wicked One!” he called, coming up. “Have a care for my happiness if not -for your neck!” But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly -engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded -from his own. “Why, queridita? What—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I want you to leave me now.” She cut him abruptly off.</p> -<p class="pnext">His big eyes widened. “After raising me to heaven would you plunge me -in—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ah no, no!” She impulsively thrust out her hand. “You have earned far -more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si? But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">She gave him a little wan smile. “When you come to understand girls -better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a -thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the -cause.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon,” she looked at him with sweet severity, “if I had told you on -top of the mountain what I said back there—wouldn’t you have been -content?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Assuredly! It was only—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now—and stay till I either send -or come. It won’t be long—I promise.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his -beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off -to the north.</p> -<p class="pnext">His departure left her free to review the situation—with little -satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out—in a moment of pique -she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, -she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break -it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal; -accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable -<em class="italics">thing</em>, and now you’ll go through with it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might -be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with -her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of -comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. -She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal—the chief, if -unconscious, cause of it all—was getting along; and though he was too -far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting -dejection.</p> -<p class="pnext">As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as—as she could have -wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a -personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests -and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely -places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would -tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden -aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening -to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly -and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her -reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his -rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but—no -greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated -up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by -open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a -vagrant inclination—even if the latter were based on a sense of -injury—might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance. -Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across -which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed -their hopelessness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Poor girl!” he pitied her.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of -Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her -heroic mood. “Our friends”—she nodded toward the distant buildings—“are -quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to -yourself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the <em class="italics">patio</em> gate, Lee did -cheer up a little—partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, -more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. -Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the -droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom.</p> -<p class="pnext">He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow’s recipe for -“liniment,” after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the -stable. It ran:</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">“Dear Friend,—Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the <em class="italics">fonda</em> the -other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. It made her so -mad she flirted her head off with Ramon.” In her ignorance of later -developments, she had concluded: “But there is no harm done. She likes -Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, I am -sure things will turn out all right.”</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own -pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was -something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the -signature “Your friend, Mary Mills.” Gordon had almost finished caring -for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after -carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, -he fished for further information.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Any one else there?” he inquired, nonchalantly.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Young Mexican,” Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive -curtness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon Icarza, I reckon.” Bull went innocently on: “He an’ Miss Lee were -almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of -him—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No reason why she shouldn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee’s horse to hide a -chuckle. “Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary—” he paused, reddening, -for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated -it with lingering delight. “Mary—was right. We’ve sure stirred ’em up. -On’y we’ll have to ’tend to Felicia at once.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia’s solution with the -characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper -that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake -and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You-all never orter ha’ taken him there,” he charged Sliver. “Here we -go an’ import this young fellow at no end of trouble an’ expense, then -you herd him right into the arms of another girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Aw! she don’t count.” Sliver excused himself. “She’s Mex an’ wild -girl.” He sagely added: “You see, I was that anxious to make sure he -didn’t drink. We kain’t have no young soaks ’round Lady-girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His solicitude drew Jake’s satirical grin. “You wasn’t looking for a -drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an’ wild—you damn fool, -don’t you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He’s -be’n there once an’ he’ll go again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“If he ain’t stopped,” Bull qualified.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If he ain’t stopped,” Jake nodded. “An’ it’s up to you to do it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But how?” Sliver’s broad, round face struggled like a full moon in -clouds of helplessness. “How in the ’tarnal kin <em class="italics">I</em> stop him?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“By ’quiring vested rights in the premises,” Jake nodded sagely. “If you -marry her he kain’t come ’round.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Marry</em> her? <em class="italics">Me?</em> Marry a <em class="italics">Mex</em>?” Sliver almost yelled it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s what.” While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf -grin, Jake went on: “Anyhow, what’s your idee in shying an’ rearing -this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss ’n a colt at flying paper? Why, -other men rush for it like ’twas—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sticky fly-paper,” Sliver ungallantly supplied. “An’ once they’re -in—<em class="italics">good night</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake ignored the interruption. “You-all orter take shame to -yourself. Marriage is nature’s most holy an’ necessary ordinance. Don’t -all the preachers tell it? An’ what would become of the census without -it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an’ -thanking your stars that a girl can be found that’s damn fool enough to -take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an’ howling like a hungry -coyote.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While Jake thus orated, Sliver’s expression of obstinacy was leavened by -fleeting hope. “If you b’lieve all that—what’s the matter with you -marrying her yourself?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. “I’ve no calling -for it. You see I’m that soft by nat’er any woman could crush my tender -feelings. But one glance at your brutal count’nance would tell even a -blind man that your wife would be kep’ in her place. Besides—was it me -that took Gordon up there?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Quit your fooling,” Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of -the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his -cherished plan, he faced Sliver. “Yes or no—will you do it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, I’m da—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You won’t?” Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl, -knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of -corn fodder on which he was sitting. “You upset the beans we put to -b’ile an’ refuse to pick ’em up?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Almost as quickly Sliver’s knife took the lantern gleam, and as they -circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months -dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against -man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before -they could close, Bull’s bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great -hands sent them staggering back.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Cut it out! We can’t stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee.” -Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the -law. “You an’ us have ridden an’ fit together for many a year. So far -you’ve never failed us an’ I don’t believe you will. We brought this -young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an’ you’ve -sp’iled our game by throwing him in Felicia’s way. Now it’s up to you. -If you make good—we go on. If you don’t—there’s the trail.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked -only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife, -though, Sliver glared at Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’ll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the -range.” Addressing Bull, he went on: “Of course if it’s to help -Lady-girl, you bet I’ll go the limit. But what d’you-all expect? That -I’m a-going to cinch her with a priest an’ license?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’d be more loving-like; she’d appreciate it, too.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Shut up, Jake! We don’t care so long as you acquire enough title to -shoo Gordon off. Here’s fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio ’u’d -sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of -course you’ll have to live out there for a whiles—mebbe till this Ramon -business is knocked out of Miss Lee’s head.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What! An’ cut out the range?” Sliver exclaimed in horror. “Me hang -around there a-selling aguardiente to <em class="italics">peones</em>?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What’s left after you get through,” Jake began, but was cut off again.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, we can arrange the work so there’ll be plenty for you within easy -riding.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“So’s you won’t be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn’t -stan’ for that.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver’s answer transcends print. -He wound up with the complaint: “All right, I’ll go, but I see my -finish. I’ll die on Felicia’s grub.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Couldn’t be any worse than Rosa’s,” Jake comforted. “You managed to -live on that.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next -morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his -kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these -preliminaries, Sliver’s mien was rather that of chief mourner at a -funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left -him he even advanced a belated plea.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t you allow we ked get some one else?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“With all the men in the country off at the wars?” Bull shook his head. -“Besides, no <em class="italics">peon</em> could hold her down. She needs a strong hand.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s either you or Gordon,” Jake added. “You’ll have to sacrifice.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind -the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee. -“’Tain’t going to be so dreadful easy,” Bull frowned thoughtfully, “she -being a girl and prejudiced. She’d hardly cotton to sech primitive -nupt’als as Sliver is likely to consummate.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I she’d think not!” Jake looked his horror and scorn. “You’ll make a -mess of it. Better leave it to me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on -the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact -at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret -love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won, -ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for -feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved -how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the -former’s service.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, Missy, you ain’t a-going to lose him,” Bull answered, on his part, -Lee’s troubled question. “He’ll take care of things over that way.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well—” Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, “I hope he’ll be—happy.” -Then becoming conscious of Gordon’s gaze, she dropped her glance to her -plate. But not before he had read its meaning.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why hadn’t this happened a week ago!”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxi-the-widow-to-the-rescue"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id22">XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on -wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor?</p> -<p class="pnext">Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and -misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee’s flesh -during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy.</p> -<p class="pnext">Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman’s life is her feelings, and -if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a -certain mournful satisfaction—akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the -ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent -springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion -and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally -masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon -perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him -in a quiet, sisterly manner.</p> -<p class="pnext">A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between -desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of -which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has -to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine -precedent, returning for Lee’s sisterly solicitude more than the average -brotherly brusqueness.</p> -<p class="pnext">Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings -of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable. -Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with -neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place -her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon. -What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it.</p> -<p class="pnext">Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a <em class="italics">mozo</em> -rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon.</p> -<p class="pnext">Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, “May I -come?” and though she returned a single line, “I’m coming to see Isabel -next week,” the flower had done its work.</p> -<p class="pnext">The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination -and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her -eyes that, without understanding, Gordon’s sulks gave place to pity. -Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a <em class="italics">mozo</em> with a note to the -widow.</p> -<p class="pnext">Straight to the point the epistle ran:</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">Dear Ma’am,—The young man, he’s a-moping like a moulting chicken an’ -Miss Lee’s that peaked and pale and down-hearted you’d hardly know -her. T’other day a <em class="italics">mozo</em> brought her some sort of a package from -Ramon, and ever since she’s looked wild-eyed and scared as a canary in -fear of a cat. There’s something queer going on. It wouldn’t take you -more’n a minute to find it out, and you owe us about a dozen visits, -anyway. Couldn’t you take a day off and come?</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">She came, of course, the good, kind soul, with Betty, under guard of -Terrubio and the bandit reputation which gained so much from his weird -eyes. The gods and goddesses willed it that they fell in with Gordon -returning to the <em class="italics">hacienda</em> at the close of his day’s work, and the -widow seized the opportunity like a skilful general. After permitting -Betty and Terrubio to ride on beyond earshot over the slopes that were -dyed a glowing apricot by the low sun, she opened on Gordon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now tell me all about it, young man.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He looked at her, surprised, then laughed. “You mean all that I would -have said if I hadn’t been ordered home that morning? All right. Of -course I don’t have to tell you that I love you madly, and if it wasn’t -for the fact that Bull would wring my neck, I should propose at once. -Really—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nice boy!” She laughed merrily. “To comfort your poor mother. It was -simply disgraceful the way you flirted with me, almost compromised me -with my own offspring. ‘I was just ashamed of your dreadful behavior, -mama,’ Betty told me, afterward, ‘trying to take poor Lee’s beau from -her.’ Nevertheless, I found it very encouraging.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“My mother?” He achieved an excellent example of that species of -cachinnation known as the “horse laugh.” Then, with sincerity of accent -and feeling that caused her a little blush, he ran on: “My mother, -madam, is more than twenty-eight. Yes, I said twenty-eight. Add to that -eyes as clear and young as—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Make it Lee’s.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“As Betty’s. A fine, soft skin, pretty nose, figure—um! just right. -Why—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes! yes!” She held up her hand, laughing. “But we mustn’t waste time. -You know I’m on your side. Tell me—what happened?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s easy—she’s engaged herself to Ramon.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What?” Her shriek of horror and surprise caused Betty and Terrubio to -look back. Her next question showed the keenness of her intuition. “Why, -whatever did <em class="italics">you</em> do to her?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He told—of his anger, jealousy, pique, attempt to soothe his ruffled -vanity by flirting with Felicia. He told all with candor and humorous -insight into his own feelings that robbed the narrative of conceit. He -told even of the kiss and that Lee had seen it. “Though I don’t see how -that could have anything to do with her engagement, for she announced it -the next second.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“She sent him off within the next hour—with only a kiss of her -hand—hasn’t seen him since—nor communicated with him till the other -day—has looked like a frightened bird ever since.” She told off the -items with amused contempt. “How stupid men are! Why, it is plain as -day. He asked her to marry him, yes, on the way. How could she escape -after the way she had flirted? But she had either refused or held him -off. But when she saw you kiss—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“My God!” It burst on him. “What a fool I am! Why did I—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t blame, yourself. She was more in fault. The question is—not what -is done, but what to do.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I had thought, at first, of quitting this to join Valles. It would be -lots of fun and I was so darned mad—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And leave <em class="italics">her</em> to <em class="italics">him</em>?” She looked a little scornful. “Why—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But he cut in. “You bet I won’t! He’ll never marry her—if I have to -carry her off.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And I’d help you do it,” she warmly declared. “At present Ramon is all -right, and if you could put up, like preserves, so he’d keep, it -wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, he’s all right—but, so are the young of any -kind, a lamb or kid, little frog, tiny snake, and there’s nothing cuter -in the whole world than a baby pig. But after it grows up—good Lord -deliver us!</p> -<p class="pnext">“And it’s the same with Mexicans. They are the prettiest babies; nice -young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too -handsome to live just now. But after a while he’ll grow stout and lazy -from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks -like a scorched hide. Right now he’s so romantic he’d twang a guitar all -night under Lee’s window. After a while she wouldn’t be able to sleep -for his snores. Now he’d fly at her bidding. Later, she’d fly at his. -She would live behind bars while she was young; go without love in her -middle age, be tyrannized and bulldozed all the time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But do you think she would <em class="italics">really</em> do it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Indeed, yes! She’s highly idealistic, and was trained by her father in -the old ideas. Now that she has given her word, it will take wild horses -to pull her from it—or wild men.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above -the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: “Now -listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he’s sensitive as -a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she’s -promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance -so much as strays in any one else’s direction, he’ll be ready to kill. -It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will -either break the engagement or give her cause. In other words, you must -force him to play your hand.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She continued, with a little deprecatory laugh: “I know it’s a low-down -trick, but it may stave off something worse. Before he would let Lee -marry Ramon, I feel sure Mr. Perrin would kill him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A mischievous grin broke up Gordon’s grimness. “So we are not altogether -disinterested. We could never stand to see Bull get in bad.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She laughed softly, happily, looking away, and lapsed into silence which -endured while they rode up and over the last slope that laid the -<em class="italics">hacienda</em> at their feet.</p> -<p class="pnext">Its walls and courts, <em class="italics">patio</em>, painted adobes, lay, a small city of gold -magnificently blazoned by the rich red brush of the setting sun. The -glossy crests of the shading cottonwoods flamed a deep apricot under a -sky that spread its glories of saffron, and cinnabar purple, and umber, -down over the horizon. All about them the pastures laid an undulating -carpet, violet in the hollows, crimson on the hills. From the stubby -chimneys soft smoke pennons trailed away till lost in the smoldering -dusk of the east. Up through the clear air came a soft cooing of woman -voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild.</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow lowered her voice in harmony with the peace of it all. “It is -a great prize.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He nodded. “It’s beautiful, but—I’d love her as much in rags.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from -teasing. “Yet—a week ago you hardly gave her a thought.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He looked at her in naive wonder. “Isn’t it queer—how sudden it gets -you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She nodded. “That’s the beauty of it.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxii-lee-too-is-confessed"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id23">XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">As, in the seclusion of Lee’s bedroom that night, she and the widow sat -side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making -their night toilets, a “movie-man” would have given his head to -reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair, -filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these -may be left where they belong—behind the secure guard of Lee’s oaken -door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation.</p> -<p class="pnext">“So we’ve engaged ourself, have we?” As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went -straight to the bat.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—” Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked -her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. “Mary Mills! -<em class="italics">whoever</em> told you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“This and these would be enough.” The widow touched the girl’s pale -cheeks and shadowed eyes. “But I caught your young man, coming in, and -made him confess. So we got mad—because he kissed another girl, and took -it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little fool!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the -filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. “If it had been Phyllis -or Phœbe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn’t have cared. But—a -peona.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, what of it?” Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the -widow went confidently forward. “She’s mighty pretty.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But a <em class="italics">peona</em>! And you know <em class="italics">her</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, and I know <em class="italics">him</em>—better than you do. Now look here, my dear—” -Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had -profited by her married experience. “A man is a <em class="italics">man</em> and there’s no -sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she -excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a -man—while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see -beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to -stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I’d have allowed -you real reason. After thirty a man’s kisses mean something. But at -Gordon’s age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity -rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty -girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his -self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are -mostly to blame. Why—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal -applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. “<em class="italics">You</em> -didn’t flirt with <em class="italics">him</em>, of course.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Goodness, child! don’t bite me! I couldn’t see the poor boy crushed -into the face of the earth. Now listen.” After detailing Gordon’s -confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to -solace in Felicia’s smiles, she concluded, “But you—after driving him to -desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you think that was the way of it? That he didn’t really <em class="italics">mean</em> -anything?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Didn’t he tell me so himself?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well—” she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly -collapsed on the other’s warm shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad! I—I <em class="italics">hate</em> -him!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. “Of -course you do.” She gently fondled the fair head. “How much?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. “I hate him so much -I—I could just <em class="italics">kill</em> any other girl that tried to take him!” With a -wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, they’ll try, all right.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The head rose again, startled eyes, big and brown, staring from the -glass. “Do you—really think so?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What do you expect—a nice boy like that to mope and pine for the rest -of his life with ten million girls of marriageable age running loose in -the United States? What brought him here, anyway—bolting to escape one -girl’s noose. Take my advice and rope him quick.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But I’m promised, now, to Ramon.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Call it off.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh no.” Sitting up straight, she shook her head. “I cannot ruin his -life.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hum!” The widow coughed. “You cannot ruin his life? So you intend to -bless it by devoting to his service affections that belong to another? -Also to cut him off from the greatest thing in the world—the real love -of some other woman? Ruin his life, indeed? Lee, I always credited you -with a little sense.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“There is something in that.” She snatched at the hope. “The best thing -is to tell him I don’t love him and leave it to him to decide.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And he’ll do it, have no fear!” The widow tossed her head. “Ramon’s -nice, but he cannot rise above his race, and you know very well there’s -neither reason nor justice nor the instinct of fairness in it. Fancy a -Mexican giving up a girl because she loves another! He’d resent even the -suggestion, take his revenge after marriage.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The gleam of hope had died. She sighed. “I can try.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you little fool!” In her irritation the widow bestowed a smart slap -on the girl’s shoulder. But she spoiled the moral effect the next second -by gathering her in her arms. “Don’t you know that up in the States -girls take on a new beau every Saturday night and break the engagement -the following Sunday?”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the precedent produced only a second envious sigh. “I wish <em class="italics">I</em> could -do it. I guess I wasn’t brought up right.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tisn’t training; it’s heredity. You’re your father over again; will go -your own way. I wash my hands of you.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">That charitable process known as “washing one’s hands of anybody” was, -however, the last thing Mrs. Mills was capable of. The assertion simply -marked a change of plan which, rising early next morning, she -inaugurated when she caught Bull on his way to the stables.</p> -<p class="pnext">Though he had sat next to her during the long pleasant evening that -followed supper last night, the others’ presence had debarred private -communications. Content to hear her voice running with Lee’s in happy -chatter—so content, indeed, that he forgot for the time being the -impending trouble—Bull had smoked furiously in the dusk till they -retired to bed.</p> -<p class="pnext">He listened, now, in silence while the widow told of Lee’s engagement. -But the sudden lowering of his black brows was far more dangerous than -any threat. She laid her hand on his arm in sudden alarm.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Easy, my friend. Don’t be too quick. She isn’t married yet, and won’t -be—if you leave it to me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">More powerful than the plea was her gentle pressure. Apart from certain -accidental contacts, before mentioned, which had caused him such -pleasurable embarrassment, it was the first time she had actually -touched him. Big, burly, black giant that he was, he still trembled like -a school-girl; trembled so violently that she felt it and dropped both -her hand and her eyes. Transferring the embarrassment to herself, that -helped him mightily. He was the first to break a confused but happy -silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What do you want me to do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nothing, just now, except to let Gordon ride with me a piece of the way -home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was impossible to overlook his sudden disappointment. With -characteristic frankness she did not wait for him to tell it. “I’d -rather have you; there are so many things I want to consult you about. -Dear me!” Her little vexed face was very comforting; it expressed such -sincere feeling. “These young folks certainly do make one a lot of -trouble. Betty wanted you <em class="italics">so</em> badly at my party—and so did I; but we -just had to ask Gordon to help Lee out. But I’m going to settle this -business right quick. And when it is all over—you will come and make us -a real visit, won’t you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Wouldn’t he? His nod and effulgent grin expressed happiness in the -prospect beyond the powers of his slow tongue. Satisfied, she proceeded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“So let me have him this once. Lee is going to ride a few miles with us, -and before she comes back—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the matter of her communication is covered by her talk with Gordon, -whom she caught coming out of the bunk-house five minutes later.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I argued with her half the night,” she told him, walking along at his -side. “Goodness me, young man, you don’t know what you are up against! -Such obstinacy! Lucky for you that it is balanced by a sweet temper and -strong sense of justice. All I gained was her promise to beg off from -Ramon. She plans to go over and see him some time this week, and if she -does—well, with Isabel loving her to death, the old man tendering sage -advice, and Ramon passionately pleading his cause, they’ll have her to -the priest and married before she has time to think. She mustn’t go.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But if she is so obstinate—” Gordon began.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’ll take care of that. I shall call on Ramon on the way home and -explain the true state of his lady’s heart. Of course he’ll raise Cain -and probably damn me for a black-hearted liar, but I can stand it. The -point is—he will come right over here. In the mean time you must get -busy. A declaration in hand is worth two suspected, and though I’ve -hinted very strongly that you are not altogether indifferent to her -sweet self, it will make Ramon’s task ten times harder if she hears it -from your lips. Now listen!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The rest was plot, dark and devious. Lee had promised to ride with her a -few miles on the homeward journey, and Bull would detail him, Gordon, -for her escort. Coming back, he would have all the time in the world.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxiii-in-which-the-widow-goes-and-sliver-comes"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id24">XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">As thus arranged, the program was carried out after breakfast. Very -artfully Bull waited till the party was almost out of sight before he -sent Gordon galloping after. Even then the plot was endangered when, -turning at the sound of hoof-beats, Lee saw him coming. Her face clearly -expressed her determination to send him back, but in the nick of time -the widow spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, let him come! The poor fellow is suffering enough.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee’s nod and faint smile, riding on, revealed a queer mixture of -happiness and apprehension, which was wiped out by amused astonishment -when, just as Gordon came up, a lone figure hove in sight, coming from -the opposite direction.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—it’s Sliver!”</p> -<p class="pnext">And Sliver it was—though difficult to recognize by reason of a complex -embroidery of scratches, bumps, and bruises. His own broad grin broke -through, however, when Lee inquired after his wife.</p> -<p class="pnext">“She was fine an’ dandy when I seen her last, which, was in the shank of -the evening two nights ago.” Lovingly fingering a huge bump that -occupied a central position in his altered scenery, he went into the -intimate details of his matrimonial venture. “Till then it had all been -lovely. She’d sorter cut up a bit, at first, me an her padre having -fixed up the match without any of her ’sistance. But after I’d given her -a fair larruping with a saddle strap, jest to show who wore the pants, -as the saying goes, she come right into camp; snuggled in like a kitten. -Sure, she behaved real domestic till Fernando, that hawk-nosed arriero -from San Ramon, blew in with his mules two nights gone. I orter ’a’ -suspicioned him, he was that free in handing out drinks. But I -didn’t—leastways not till Felicia laid me out with one whack of a -cordwood stick from behind. The rest I got from the mirror an’ the padre -when I woke next morning and found him doctoring my map. She an’ -Fernando had gone off together.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“She’s gone!” Lee gave a little hysterical laugh. “For good?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ then some—they’re off to the wars.” Gently massaging the bump, -Sliver added: “She’ll stay there if she’s wise. It’ll be a ’tarnation -sight less risky than coming back. She was for cutting my throat, but -neither the padre nor Fernando would stan’ for that, they being afraid -of ‘The Black Devil’ an’ ‘The Python,’ which they call Bull an’ Jake. -‘For I knew, señor, that they would follow us to the ends of the earth -if any harm came to thee,’ the old fellow tol’. But they made her free -of my map, an’, as you see, she done a good job.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I’m so sorry! I must go back and care for your face.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With Lee’s exclamation the props trembled beneath the widow’s plot, but -Sliver restored their stability. “It’s cheap at the price. Many’s the -man up home that gets as bad or worse an’ is stuck, to boot, for -lawyer’s fees an’ al’mony. Don’t you bother ’bout me, Lady-girl. All I -need is a bit of salve, an’ Maria kin get me that.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As Sliver rode on, the widow looked at Lee, who returned her meaning -glance. Neither looked at Gordon, who discreetly watched Betty. But the -thought was the same in the minds of all three. “Thank goodness, she’s -gone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a while Lee hesitated and debated whether, after all, she ought not -to go back, and she reined in, startled, when a long howl presently -drifted over the rise behind which Sliver had disappeared. A coyote, in -its death agony, might have equaled the sound. But as, presently, the -tortured notes resolved into the opening bars of “The Cowboy’s Lament,” -she giggled and rode on for another five miles. Sliver was happy!</p> -<p class="pnext">While Lee was kissing Betty good-by the widow managed to pass a whisper -to Gordon. “Now don’t let her escape! And remember—look out for Ramon -to-morrow.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He nodded and, looking back from behind the crest of the next rise, she -saw for herself how well he obeyed. Lee had made to get off at a gallop, -but had reined in when he spoke, and now they were riding side by side, -deep in earnest conversation.</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, the widow rode on, but stopped again for a last look while she -could still see over the rise. She was practically invisible when Lee -looked back, protesting, as Gordon grabbed her bridle and pulled her -beast alongside. Her pointing finger said, quite plainly:</p> -<p class="pnext">“They will see!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The widow gasped, for with one swift reach he snatched Lee out of the -saddle and set her before him.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxiv-understanding"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id25">XXIV: UNDERSTANDING</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Had she heard the conversation which preceded that bold action, Mrs. -Mills would have been still more impressed. Determination is the natural -foe of diplomacy. Warned by one single, furtive glance that Lee intended -to make off, Gordon plunged at one smash through her fence of reserve.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Do you intend to keep that engagement?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Coming from a young man whom one hated so vindictively that one could -“just kill any other girl that tried to take him,” the question was well -calculated to arrest attention. Neither was its force lessened by the -fact that it was <em class="italics">his</em>, not <em class="italics">hers</em>—perish the thought!—outrageous -conduct which had caused said engagement!</p> -<p class="pnext">The audacity of it caused her first to gasp, then draw rein and stare at -him in utter surprise; finally to ride slowly on while preparing an -answer that should not only wither him, there, in the saddle, but also -hide the tumult of fright and pleasure in her own breast.</p> -<p class="pnext">Her glance said, “You certainly have got your gall with you!” But her -answer was much more dignified, “By what right do you ask?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The right of a man who loves you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her -affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient -court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so -conceded by one girl’s fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had -been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural -cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and -men, she proceeded to deny it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes?” she raised cool brows. “Judging by what I saw in the cañon—it -must be recent.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She looked for him to wither, but—the fellow refused! He did not even -flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness; -sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn’t -help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light -subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I thought so myself—but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful, -picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you, -but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn’t till you shot -that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke—awoke to the fact that -all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life -and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear.”</p> -<p class="pnext">This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he -built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played -with the coils of her <em class="italics">riata</em>. As an oratorical effort, it could not -compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon’s rhythmical -Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant -feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any -honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by -its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he -finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel.</p> -<p class="pnext">“When—when did you find this out?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little -hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her -hunger for more.</p> -<p class="pnext">Be certain she got it—in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of -poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had -ridden over to the widow’s together that the sunlight proceeded from her -hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of -the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation.</p> -<p class="pnext">There was also some mention of the hair in connection with a certain -Java forest, with passing reference to the Chinese Wall and a voyage he -had intended to make up the great Asian rivers. Not having personal -experience in their navigation, said references were rather vague, but -her imagination abundantly supplied the requisite flora and fauna from -magazine articles and pictures. Porcelain towers, orchids, giant palms; -deep jungle temples; the crowded boat life of the Yangtse-Kiang, junks -and sampans with their cargoes of saffron-faced, slant-eyed Celestials, -men, women, and children—especially children—her imagination improved on -the lovely dreams she had so cruelly disrupted. He concluded with that:</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you smashed it—all to smithereens.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a while she rode in silence. Apprehension and fright had given place -to sorrow that contended tumultuously with delight for possession of her -soul. “I’m sorry,” she spoke at last. “<em class="italics">So</em> sorry, but—you provoked it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why! How?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He was reminded, of course, that he “lost interest in girls after they -grew up.” She added, a little vindictively, “And <em class="italics">you</em> didn’t flirt with -Mrs. Mills?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Only in self-defense. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, -isn’t it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">But she denied this bit of ancient wisdom. “No, it isn’t! And—and you -<em class="italics">kissed</em> that dreadful girl! I—oh, I could have <em class="italics">killed</em> you!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She was looking at him now, and the compound of bright anger, pleading -and defiance, regret, love, hope, and despair that alternately flashed -and swam in the wet eyes gave sufficient answer. It was then he plucked -her from the saddle; crushed her to him with force that squeezed out, -for the moment, the anger, regret, despair, left only love and hope.</p> -<p class="pnext">Ensued the usual delirious moment when poor mortals conquer time and -eternity, set at naught the black riddle of existence. Her face buried -in his shoulder, his in her hair, they clung to each other while his -horse moved slowly forward and hers went careering on over the next -earth roll.</p> -<p class="pnext">Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were -coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; -feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of -them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue -loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one -another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that “cause”; -committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither -and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment -over these sunlit plains.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only -of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to -themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in -an illumined dream.</p> -<p class="pnext">It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face, -he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly -recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand -over his mouth.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You mustn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You forget—I am still engaged.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—so you are!” Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted -when he saw she was in earnest. “You surely don’t intend—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, indeed!” She read his thought. “I had believed, at first, that I -ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon -while—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“While I loved <em class="italics">you</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a girl who had just restated her engagement to another man, she -behaved most disgracefully during a long silence that was broken only by -the measured tread of the horse. Snuggling in closer, she re-entered -that illumined dream, and made no attempt to check the kisses he -showered on the soft palm of the restraining hand. It was, no doubt, -some realization of her misbehavior that caused her to sit up, -presently, and pull it away.</p> -<p class="pnext">“This won’t do. For the present we’ll have to behave like ordinary -persons.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But your horse is gone,” he protested when she gently put away his arm. -“You can’t walk.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, but I can ride behind you in the Mexican fashion. Stop, while I -change.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He would have preferred it as it was, but when, after mounting behind -him, she slid her arm about his waist, he had to concede the Mexican -habit its own delights. It was surely nice of her to allow him to cover -her hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The young people,” she explained, “are not allowed to do this—only -husbands and wives.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Poor young people!” he pitied. “But, on the whole, quite right. It -would never do to have them cavorting over the country like this; too -much of a strain on the conventions. Indeed, I think we ought to conform -ourselves at once.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“How?” Just as if she hadn’t known what he meant.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Let’s ride into San Carlos, get a license from the jefe and be married -at once?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The bold proposal drew only a soft laugh. “To think that, up to a week -ago, he didn’t even see me—except as part of the scenery. No, amigo, -till to-morrow we are to be ordinary persons. Then I shall go and tell -Ramon.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And if he refuses?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I shall break it myself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was in his mind to say that she could not go alone. But he remembered -that Ramon would probably arrive at Los Arboles before she started. He -turned again to the delightful present.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And after that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">A little pressure at his waist made answer.</p> -<p class="pnext">Reaching behind, he drew her other arm forward till her hands clasped in -front, then squeezed his own elbows down tight over hers. Thus, -oblivious once more of the toiling billions, revolutionists beyond the -mountain’s loom, they rode forward again in that illumined dream, two -foolish, happy souls at loose in the spheres.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxv-love-and-business"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id26">XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">In those days of raids and “requisitions,” the customary oversight of -the herds on the Chihuahua <em class="italics">haciendas</em> had grown of necessity into a -system of patrols. At Los Arboles not a day passed without Gordon and -the Three describing a circle around the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Riding south after the others left, Bull had covered only a few miles -before he spied a lone horseman topping a distant ridge. As the rider -drew near the first indefinite outlines resolved into the square, hard -figure of William Benson. Scarcely a week had passed without a visit -from the Englishman. From the first he had accorded Bull the respect due -to his quiet strength. Later, this had developed into a real liking -which showed in the smile that wiped out, for the moment, his native -harshness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Heard the news? The Carranzistas have given Valles a lovely trimming. -He didn’t stop running till he reached El Oro.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s black brows rose. “We’d allus allowed Valles could whip twice his -weight in Carranzistas. So long as they keep on killing one another off, -we sh’d worry.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, Benson went on. “Valles lost heavily in horses, and is looking -for fresh mounts. One of his colonels came to my place yesterday and -offered me a thousand pesos apiece for all I have.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Gold?</em>”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson’s big mouth split in a sardonic grin. “Valles money, amigo, -beautifully printed on butcher paper. He must have used up all the -newspaper stocks in northern Mexico.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you sold?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’d cut their throats first. It may come to that, but just now I see a -way—if not to pull even, at least to avoid complete loss. Between us we -can pretty nearly equip Valles with fresh mounts. The beggar has -gold—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in the El Paso banks, and -my idea is for us, you representing Lee, to go down to El Oro and offer -him all that we have for a low price in gold on condition that he permit -us to drive our other stock across the line. If he accepts, we then go -out of business till order is restored.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Fine idea!” Bull added. “Could you let Mrs. Mills in on it? She was -telling last night she didn’t know where to turn for living expenses.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson heartily agreed. “Only too glad!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And when do you start?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“To-morrow night. There’s a freight going down.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right. Pity you hadn’t come earlier. Mrs. Mills left only a couple -of hours ago. But I’ll ride over this afternoon, get her written -authority, then meet you at the railroad.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Riding back to Los Arboles, they perfected their plans. They were, -indeed, in sight of the buildings before Benson switched the -conversation to Lee. Her oldest and stanchest friend, it was his right -to know, and Bull told all, from his plotting with the widow down to the -disastrous ending in the sudden engagement.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The little spitfire!” Benson grinned. “Hello! What’s that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was Lee’s horse galloping down a distant slope toward the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>. -In that wild country a riderless beast generally bespoke tragedy. -Without a word they galloped off in the direction from which the beast -had come; rode at top speed until Benson, who had gained a lead, -suddenly reined in.</p> -<p class="pnext">A bunch of chaparral intervened, at first, between Bull and the object -at which the other was pointing. Then, rising in his stirrups, he saw -Lee and Gordon on the one horse; at least in Bull’s sight it was a -horse. In that of the lovers, horses, plains, <em class="italics">haciendas</em>, and other -commonplaces of ordinary existence had vanished, leaving them -unconscious of time and space, proceeding magically through the -aforesaid illumined dream.</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps some touch of their feeling wirelessed across the intervening -space, for Benson’s harshness melted, delight burst like sunlight -through Bull’s truculence.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s too good to spoil,” Benson whispered. “Let them go by.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They had passed over the next ridge before Bull spoke. “I tol’ you Mrs. -Mills could do it. She’s a right smart woman.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A fine woman!” Benson echoed. “I don’t know what you are thinking -about. Now if I were single——” He burst out laughing at Bull’s blush. -Instantly it was drowned in brighter scarlet. But this faded as Bull -noted the kindly twinkle in the other’s eye. He shook his head in -deprecation.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What c’d a nice woman do with a bear like me?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s her business. I’m not denying that it would some job.” Benson -critically surveyed Bull’s great bulk. “But if there’s anything in the -world a woman loves it is making a man over, like an old dress. After -she finishes, she generally realizes that she’s spoiled the material and -wishes him back as he was. But in the mean time she has had her fun. -I’ll bet Mary Mills is just itching to try her hand on you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Do you really mean that?” Bull looked up with sudden hope—that quickly -died. He shook his big head. “She deserves something better. I’d only -spoil her life.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, he relapsed into deep thought, returning only -monosyllables to Benson’s talk. The little seed thus planted rooted deep -in his silence.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Strange is first love with its intense desire for purity! Cleanliness is -next to Godliness, and Godliness is Love. Thus Cleanliness must be next -of kin to Love.</p> -<p class="pnext">If this be doubted, observe a ten-year-old boy, self-convicted of -water-marks on his neck and soil in his ears enough to grow potatoes. -See him scrub himself with profuse use of soap till his countenance -shines so that it might serve as a mirror for the small charmer who has -ensnared his budding affections with her bright curls. Watch him, later, -a man grown, solicitous about his daily tub, careful of his raiment, -choice in cravats! Later his wife shall drive him with revilings to his -bath! Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling -shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering -in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them -earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is -when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. So Lee, who was perhaps even -a bit more boyish than the average, came to lunch in a soft white dress -with a flower at her throat, powdered and delicately perfumed, bright -hair framing happy eyes, every soft line and fold proclaiming her -womanhood. Like an emanation, soft and effulgent as moonlit mist, the -fullness of her content proceeded from her, wrapped her in a bright -atmosphere in the midst of which she softly brooded. Not that she was -silent. She laughed and talked; seriously discussed Benson’s schemes. -But that was all of the surface. Behind the chatter she lived in the -enchantment of her dream.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was too marked to pass unnoticed. But if Bull and Benson saw the -clinging of glances, sensed the pulsing feeling, they observed with the -friendly indulgence of experience the young man’s honest devotion, the -girl’s shy happiness. During the long hour they sat talking after lunch, -no silly jest marred its beauty. Except for a greater kindliness of -manner, with delicacy quite foreign to his harsh exterior, Benson gave -no hint of his understanding up to the moment he rode away.</p> -<p class="pnext">Then for a brief moment Bull was taken into the dream. While Gordon went -for his horse, Lee packed his saddlebags with clean things for the -journey, and was giving him the usual last critical inspection. As he -stood smiling down on her, hugely pleased, her eyes rose from the tie -she was arranging to his; and as she read their sympathy and -intelligence, she clasped his neck and hid her face against his broad -breast.</p> -<p class="pnext">Until the beat of hoofs at the <em class="italics">patio</em> gate announced Gordon’s return, -he held her to him with one arm while the other hand gently patted her -shoulder. Neither spoke. Words would have told less. When she withdrew -and walked with him to the gate, she was soothed and comforted as any girl that -ever made a confidante of her mother.</p> -<p class="pnext">When she ran back after the quirt he had purposely left on the table, he -had time to pass a word to Gordon. “Remember, she don’t leave this house -to go <em class="italics">anywhere</em> alone!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon nodded, and, satisfied, he rode away with Lee’s last charge -floating after him, “Come home soon!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The words were still ringing in his ears, he still felt the firm, cool -clasp on his neck, when he drew rein at the first rise and looked back -at the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>. From one corner, where an <em class="italics">anciano</em> had burned some -rubbish, rose a lazy pennon of smoke, but the brown girls, women, and -children who usually filled the compound with restless life were in full -enjoyment of the noon <em class="italics">siesta</em>. Within its bright walls, the place dozed -in the pleasant shade of its towering cottonwoods.</p> -<p class="pnext">Somehow the stillness recalled to Bull’s mind the Spaniard’s house he -had shown Gordon from the railroad—sacked, burned, its vacant windows -staring like empty eyes over the desert. His face clouded. He moved -uneasily in his saddle, but presently the golden peace that incited the -memory worked its own remedy. Jake and Sliver and Gordon were there, and -the place was still far beyond the surge and swirl of the revolution.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And I’ll be home again in less than a week,” he encouraged himself.</p> -<p class="pnext">Home! It recalled again Lee’s words. He felt her clasp, thrilled at the -memory. He, “Bull” Perrin, the rustler! Around his neck that had been in -constant hazard of the halter for a dozen years, this fine, clean girl -had thrown her arms. His tender musing over the wonder would have -excited the scorn of a city man, <em class="italics">blasé</em> and stale from the constant -presence and attentions of pretty women. But it was sincere. While he -rode on over the hills and plains, the thought warmed his heart, -quickened the seed planted therein by Benson, freed his soul from the -bonds of his great humility.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Of course it’s damn foolish for you even to think of it,” he chid -himself. Nevertheless, he did, slowly, heavily, taking stock with minute -exactness of his own demerits. How great they were none knew better. The -rustling, of course, he had abandoned along with certain gross habits of -life. But the liquor? These periodical debauches? Was he strong enough -to conquer them?</p> -<p class="pnext">“If I c’d only ride into a town an’ either leave it alone or take a -man’s fair allowance,” he mused. “But kin I? Mebbe with a fine little -woman like that to help me.” But the next instant he shook his head. -“An’ have her take the chance? No, no, hombre, you’re crazy. You put all -that behind you by your own act years ago.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet this conclusion did not end the argument. When, at sundown, he drew -rein at the accustomed spot and looked down on the <em class="italics">rancho</em> buildings -now dyed a flaming apricot he took his breath deeply. With its -bougainvillea draping walls and porches in rich purple clusters, its -pretty <em class="italics">patio</em> and outside kitchen garden, it was just such a home as -would fit the dreams of a common man. Instantly his mind filled in the -picture, the man and woman sitting after supper on the veranda, he with -his pipe and paper, a child on his knee, she with her sewing. A thousand -intimacies were supplied by his lonely, hungry soul, and when the -picture stood complete he burst out with a great resolve.</p> -<p class="pnext">“By God, I’ll do it! You’re a-going to walk like a man into town an’ -come out without teching a drop!”</p> -<p class="pnext">From where he was sitting he usually could see—either Betty at play on -the veranda, her mother moving in and out, or Terrubio moving around the -stables. To-night silence wrapped the place. From the west, as on the -south where he sat, the land fell rapidly toward the <em class="italics">rancho</em>, and as he -rode forward, puzzled, the silence was explained. Over the western ridge -the widow, Terrubio, and Betty came riding, and reached the house just -as he rode up.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Though we brought bad news to his son,” she explained the delay, “the -old Icarza would not permit us to leave till we had broken his bread. -How did Ramon take it? Just as I said he would—out came the Mex in in -all of its nasty selfishness, blind conceit. She was promised to him and -he would hold her to it! He’d kill any one who interfered. Goodness! you -never <em class="italics">saw</em> such fireworks! He showed no trace of the real pride that -would have kept one of our boys from showing his hurt; and still less -consideration for Lee. It was”—she gave a little sniff of disgust—“just -sickening. I was almost sorry she couldn’t have been there, for it would -have effectually cured her remorse. But she’ll get it to-morrow, for -he’s going over to plead his own cause.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Unease swept Bull’s dark visage. After a brief statement of his mission -he voiced his apprehension. “But if he’s coming to-morrow, I don’t know -but I orter go back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nonsense!” Mrs. Mills pooh-poohed the idea. “It’s all fireworks—and -there’s Sliver and Gordon and Jake.”</p> -<p class="pnext">To which Betty added a direct command. “You are just going to stay here. -We haven’t seen you for ever so long, and mama is just dying to tell you -her troubles.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Tea and trouble,” the widow laughed. “A genuine woman’s party.”</p> -<p class="pnext">When he lifted and placed her with one swing on the veranda she allowed -one hand to remain on his shoulder, and he was not so ignorant of woman -nature as not to recognize the liking behind the action. While she -bustled around, adding dainties to the meal Terrubio’s woman had ready, -he watched her with an expression that she, on her part, could not fail -to interpret. And whereas, on previous visits, she had managed all kinds -of accidental contacts, watched with mischievous delight for the effect, -she was now filled with pleasurable confusion that manifested itself in -an almost girlish shyness.</p> -<p class="pnext">When, afterward, they moved out upon the veranda, Bull’s dream of an -hour ago was almost fulfilled. For Betty snuggled as usual in his arms, -while the widow busied herself with a bit of sewing—a fine excuse that -lent itself to the lowering of eyes, permitted stealthy glances.</p> -<p class="pnext">While they were at supper, the sun had slid down to the western horizon. -Pools of deep indigo now filled the hollows. Above them the plains ran, -a deep violet sea broken with apricot foam where the crests of the great -earth waves rolled high, ran off and away around the bases of gold and -crimson mountains.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was unearthly in its beauty, and while they could not have put their -feeling in words, it filled both with that sense of vastness before -which man in his littleness quails. Often the widow paused in her -sewing, and as Bull saw that infinite loneliness reflected in her face, -the big, simple soul of him melted with love and pity. Till the lights -faded and she no longer needed its excuse, she alternately sewed and -gazed; then when warm gloaming settled over all, wiped out the -loneliness with its friendly gloom, she recovered her voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I had almost forgotten.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was that which she had seen in the morning—to wit, Gordon snatching -Lee out of her saddle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And oh, isn’t it nice to think that she’ll be settled, at last, with -that fine boy!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Happy in the conclusion, she began to sketch a picture of them settled -happily at Los Arboles. Her voice, as she ran on, took a little quiver -that powerfully expressed her own loneliness, inspired in Bull an -intense desire to seize and squeeze it out. Instead his arms tightened -around the child.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not one marriage in a hundred turns out what it might be. But with the -exception, when respect, friendliness, affection, and a sense of duty -are reinforced by love—well, it’s the nearest to heaven that poor humans -ever gain.” She added, with a sigh: “Excepting that it gave me this -child, my own wasn’t all that it might have been. She’s been a joy and -comfort, but—in a few years more she’ll be marrying, herself. Then I’ll -be again alone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why did <em class="italics">you</em> never marry?” Betty’s small, soft voice stole out on the -darkness from the depths of Bull’s embrace.</p> -<p class="pnext">The stock excuses rose to his lips—but did not pass, for through the -friendly gloaming he was aware of a rustle. His face turned toward it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I never felt myself fit.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why, that’s just nonsense!” Betty indignantly declared. “Any woman that -wasn’t a downright fool would be glad to have you. I know one that would -give her best shoes—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Betty!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the small rebel ran on, “Well, she would—even if I can’t tell you -her name.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Once more Bull faced a stir in the darkness. “I’ve led a hard, rough, -bad life. No decent woman would ever want me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now he saw the dim whiteness of her face turning to him. Her quiet voice -took up the argument. “It’s a thin, pinched nature that’s always good. A -big, strong one is liable to be led astray by its own force before -wisdom comes to teach and chasten. In the long run I don’t know but that -it gains by it in charity and loving-kindness. Wickedness of the flesh -doesn’t count so much as wickedness of the heart; the inward vileness -that rots and corrupts; and I’ve seen as much of that in the churches as -among downright sinners.” She concluded with the very words that Gordon -had used with Lee. “It isn’t what you <em class="italics">were</em>, but what you <em class="italics">are</em> that -counts.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From a second warm silence issued Bull’s vibrant rumble. “You think a -man that has lived hard has a right to speak, to a good woman—providing -he’s put it all behind him?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Low, but confident and firm, her answer thrilled through the gloaming. -“I do, and—she’d <em class="italics">love</em> to help him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Almost without his volition, Bull’s huge paw stole out. He half hoped -she wouldn’t see it. He had begun to withdraw it when, like a dim white -dove, her hand came fluttering and nested in his.</p> -<p class="pnext">Every life has its golden hour. That was Bull’s, and, like a pearl -shining in the mire, it stood out from the blackness of his past life. -Though neither spoke, the peace and quiet, surety of perfect -understanding, settled upon them. When, presently, Betty resumed her -chatter, they listened or joined in. After she fell asleep they relapsed -again into happy silence; just sat like a shy boy and girl, hand in -hand, till she rose and carried the child off to her bed.</p> -<p class="pnext">To meet her, next morning, was to Bull something of an ordeal, but her -quiet smile restored at once the perfect understanding. Her sense of -proprietorship showed in the way she fussed over his coffee and eggs, -berated him for his lack of appetite. Her final inspection before he -left could not have been outdone in severity by Lee herself. But nothing -was said. She knew that he would speak in his own good time.</p> -<p class="pnext">Except that her hand clung a little in parting, it differed little from -their usual. “I shall look for you when you return.” Her call after him -reiterated ownership.</p> -<p class="pnext">His answer confirmed it. “I shall come here, ma’am, straight from the -station.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Indeed, the real parting came when, reining in at fifty yards, he looked -back over his shoulder. With both hands on Betty’s shoulders, slightly -dejected, yet with her honest, level gaze sending out trust and hope, -she stood watching him go, as the race of wives and mothers have stood -throughout the generations. And just as, throughout time, the sight of a -woman’s trust and child’s faith have urged real men on to big deeds, so -the sight of them set the ex-rustler’s heart swelling within him. As, -with a last wave of the hand, he turned again and rode on, the spirit -within him equaled in love and reverence that of an ancient -knight-errant starting out in pursuit of the Holy Grail.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxvi-a-settlement"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id27">XXVI: A SETTLEMENT</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">About the time Bull started, Lee and Gordon rose from the -breakfast-table under the Los Arboles <em class="italics">portales</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps with sympathetic intuition, for they exchanged an amiable grin, -Sliver and Jake had already passed out. It is true that Maria and -Teresa, the small brown <em class="italics">criadas</em>, were peeping from the crypt-like -depths of their kitchen. But even had she been aware of their vast -interest, Lee would not have withdrawn the hand which, as they rose, had -somehow tangled with Gordon’s. Reflected and thrown up from the yellow -wall, the strong morning lights bathed the flesh of her arms, face, and -neck with suffused amber, wove a soft glow in the mesh of her hair. So -different from her usual boyish activity, her gentle quiet, combined -with the warm air, suffused lights, to create a dreamy spell. Goodness -knows how long they would have stood if Maria had not come out to clear -the table.</p> -<p class="pnext">Then Lee spoke. “Such sloth! This will never do if I am to go to El Sol -and return to-day. While I dress will you please get my horse?”</p> -<p class="pnext">When Gordon reached the stable Sliver had already gone, but Jake had -lingered to say a word. It was very much to the point. “Say! Bull tipped -me off as how the young greaser was likely to show up an’ raise some -hell to-day. Don’t you allow I’d better hang around?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He nodded, however, when Gordon explained the situation. “Missy don’t -know he’s coming, hey?—thinks she’s going over there. Then they’ll meet -on the way. Mebbe I’d better tag along.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But to this Gordon’s pride would not consent. “Don’t you think I can -take care of her?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No one better,” Jake hastened to appease. “But, say! If he doesn’t show -up, don’t you let her go on over there—not if you have to rope an’ drag -her home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Like we did before?” He smiled at the memory. “This time I’ll not leave -her the saddle machete.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Little bit too smart for you that time,” Jake grinned in sympathy. -“Take care she don’t spring a new one. She ain’t so very slow.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, in the face of his apparent acquiescence, while apparently -heading out on his usual beat, he whirled behind the first ridge and, -proceeding at a fast lope, had covered five miles of the way to El Sol, -the Icarzas’ <em class="italics">hacienda</em>, by the time Lee came out. Slowing down, then, -he rode more leisurely, had covered another mile when, over the crest of -a ridge, he sighted Ramon coming at a gallop down the opposite slope. A -clump of mesquite and <em class="italics">palo verde</em> afforded convenient cover. Forcing -his beast in, Jake stooped low and watched Ramon go by, so close that -his stirrup whipped the bushes.</p> -<p class="pnext">It had never been Jake’s habit to notice Mexicans. But now he noted with -surprise the change in the young man’s face. The lines deeply plowed -down the nose under the cheeks, the hardening of the red, womanish lips, -the vindictive black sparkle that had contracted his great dusky eyes -into burning black dots, added ten years to his age.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The Mex is souring in him,” Jake inwardly commented. “That guinea’s -liable to try an’ hurt some one. Glad I came.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Allowing Ramon to pass on, Jake then rode after, and so, progressing -from ridge to ridge, keeping always the height of land between them, was -less than fifty yards behind when, peeping over the crest, he saw Lee -and Gordon coming up the slope.</p> -<p class="pnext">Another bunch of chaparral afforded cover, and after tying his horse in -it, Jake crawled up to the ridge and looked over.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">It was not without argument that Gordon had obtained Lee’s consent to -accompany her. When she found him standing with two horses at the gate, -her brows rose in a troubled arch.</p> -<p class="pnext">He understood that she hesitated to accuse him of bad taste, and quoted -Bull’s last orders to remove the impression. “He said that you were -never to ride alone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The responsibility being thus shifted, she felt able to speak. “It is -rather— Really, I don’t see how I can do anything else.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why go at all? Why not write?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She shook her head. “I’ve known him since childhood—and have treated him -badly. I owe him an apology and it will have to come from my own lips.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was reasonable enough from her point of view, but not from his. If -Ramon were an American he would have said, “Go, ahead; take your -medicine!” Being Mexican, discretion bade him remain.</p> -<p class="pnext">“At least let me ride with you part of the way. I will turn before you -reach El Sol.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, that will be all right,” she had conceded at once.</p> -<p class="pnext">He had felt certain, of course, that they would meet Ramon. But the -usual witcheries, sweep of the tawny earth-waves under the bright sun, -satisfying thud of hoofs on the trail, creak and smell of hot leather, -had combined to blind him to all but her presence. Now, before he could -turn, Ramon reined in before them.</p> -<p class="pnext">Like Jake, they noticed at once the sardonic furrows, set mouth, frown -above the glittering eyes. With his youth had vanished that veneer of -refinement which conceals natural Mexican grossness. Like veins in a -stratum revealed by a landslide, selfishness, conceit, violence, -revenge, lay exposed. With the natural instinct of good breeding, Gordon -had half turned to withdraw. But even if one glance at the passion-torn -face had not checked the impulse, it would have been killed when Lee -backed toward him. Shocked and a little afraid, she gazed at Ramon -before she spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Are you ill? You look so—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“So it was true, what the señora told me yesterday!” He spoke in low, -strained tones. “It was true, though I did not believe; refused to -believe. But now I see. It is true that you used me as bait for your -fishing.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon!” She raised her hand, but he switched suddenly from denunciation -to appeal.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No! it is not true! It cannot be! She lied! I will not believe it even -though you tell me yourself!”</p> -<p class="pnext">From this he ran on with an appeal, hysterical and disconnected, which -reflected as in a clear glass the nature of his love. In it was no -appreciation of the feminine personality with its delicacies of feeling, -refinements, inconsistencies, helplessness, all the illogicalities that -render it charming, as much or more than its faith and love. In terms of -blind egotism, it expressed only his passion and jealousy, fatuous -conceit. As in a clear glass, under a powerful light, he revealed -himself so that even a woman blinded by love could not have failed to -see. In the middle of it Gordon heard Lee take a long breath, and knew -it for thankfulness. Yet her relief did not kill her poignant regret for -the part she had played.</p> -<p class="pnext">She spoke softly, pityingly, when he stopped. “Ramon, I’m sorry. It was -wicked of me to draw you on. But to marry you would be far worse. What -can I do to make up?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He told, with anger and offense. She had promised to be his wife! It was -a betrothal! as binding in Mexican eyes as marriage! He had announced it -to his father, mother, sister, friends! His conceit cropped out again as -he pictured himself, jilted, in their eyes. Angered by his own -imaginings, he was growing abusive when she cut him quietly off.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I was on my way when we met, to own and ask pardon for my fault. I had -counted on our old friendship and your generosity to make it less -difficult. But I see, now, my error. There is nothing left but to bid -you good-by.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now came the ultimate revelation, that passion of furious jealousy which -drives the Mexican <em class="italics">peon</em> to cut off the hands, slash the face and -breast, of his love. His eyes narrowed to shifting, insane sparks. Hand -raised, as though to strike, he spurred his beast forward.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You—you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">He got no further, for one hard dig of the spur shot Gordon’s horse in -between. From English to Spanish the argument had run, but from Lee’s -answers Gordon had gathered enough. Though slower, his beast was heavier -than Ramon’s, and while forcing horse and rider sideways with a steady -pressure he issued his orders:</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s about enough for you! Get!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ramon’s hand flew to his saddle <em class="italics">machete</em>, but he did not draw, for -Gordon’s had gone to his gun. Leg pressed against leg, they manœuvered -their plunging beasts; without drawing a weapon fought the old fight of -the brown man and the white; the struggle which began when Cortés -imposed his will on the Aztec emperors; was continued by the Puritan -forefathers against the American Indian; which has been fought to the -same conclusion all over the world. And from the two faces—Gordon’s -cold, hard-eyed, Ramon’s distorted with black fury—the cause of that -inevitable ending might have been read.</p> -<p class="pnext">So close they were Gordon could see the palpitation of light from the -insane waverings of the other’s eyeballs steady under a doubt. He felt -rather than saw the Mexican’s sudden swift reach for his knife. Even -more swiftly he snatched, and with a sudden wrench of the other’s wrist -sent the knife flying and bore him back flat in the saddle. For a moment -he held him, then with a powerful shove his horse sent Ramon’s beast -stumbling sideways and broke the grip. Wheeling in a circle, Ramon faced -them again.</p> -<p class="pnext">So far Lee had looked on distressed. Now she spurred forward and caught -Gordon’s arm. “Let him go!—please!” Her anger gone now, sorrow quivering -in her voice, she added, “You will, won’t you, Ramon?”</p> -<p class="pnext">His fury, passion, wild jealousy had settled in dark calm. “Yes, I am -going <em class="italics">now</em>. But the next time—.” He wheeled and galloped off.</p> -<p class="pnext">Till the tip of his <em class="italics">sombrero</em> vanished behind the ridge Lee watched him -go, distress and relief mingling in a wintry smile.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t give him too much of your pity,” Gordon consoled. “One -disappointment doesn’t make much of a dent in such egotism as that. -After a while he’ll find some pretty señorita to take him at his own -valuation.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I hope so.” Her smile brightened. “Though I still feel guilty. But if -he hadn’t behaved so ridiculously I should feel much worse.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon nodded toward the ridge. “You heard his threat. Do you suppose -he’ll—-”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh no!” Her hair flew in a cloud under her vigorous shake. “After he’s -had time to cool off he’ll forget and forgive. But just to think”—her -glance displayed an even mixture of mischief and reproach—“just to think -that all this trouble was caused by you kissing that horrid girl!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—” he gasped, under the sudden attack. “Well, I’ll be— Say! Who -drove me to it with her disgraceful flirting?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Did it make you feel <em class="italics">awfully</em> bad?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Did it?” The thought of his miserable unhappiness was still powerful -enough to cloud his face, and she noted it with a little quiver of -satisfaction. “Let’s forget it.” Snatching her hand, he worked his horse -in against hers and tried to draw her to him. “There’s a momentous -question I wish to consult you about; one you refused to consider -yesterday. Will you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But she pulled away. “Not yet. First there’s something I want settled. -Was it really pique that—made you kiss her?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He wanted to laugh, but refrained, for under her smile he felt her -earnestness. “Nothing else.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’re sure?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Cross your heart to die?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He performed that solemn and ancient function, and if she still -entertained a doubt she stuffed it away down in consciousness.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well.” With a little sigh of content she let her head fall back on -his shoulder and a whisper escape from her upturned lips, “Now—you may.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">From his covert on the ridge Jake had observed the meeting, talk, -struggle, Ramon’s retreat, also something which was hidden from the -lovers in the valley below—the fact that, after crossing the ridge, -Ramon had dismounted, pulled his rifle from the saddle slings, and -crawled back on hands and knees to the edge of Jake’s covert. By that -time the little tilt concerning Felicia was over, and as Lee’s head went -to Gordon’s shoulder Ramon raised the rifle.</p> -<p class="pnext">A shot at that short distance would have pierced them both, but as -Ramon’s eye dropped to the sights a sharp order issued from the covert, -“Throw up your hands! damn quick!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A quick, startled glance showed Ramon the lean, grim face through a -break in the chaparral. Not for nothing had the <em class="italics">peones</em> named Jake “The -Python.” In moments such as this his lean personality, deadly eye, -conveyed that very impression—of a snake coiled to strike. As Ramon’s -hands went up, he stepped out and, crouching behind the ridge, took the -other’s rifle and drove him downhill to his horse.</p> -<p class="pnext">Having extracted the cartridge both from the rifle and from the revolver -in Ramon’s holster, he threw the weapon at his feet. “I reckon I orter -plug you, an’ I would for two cents. It’d be set down to raiders, which -fixes it very nice. Sure, I reckon I orter do it, but if you’ve got a -few thinks to the contrary spit ’em out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was no idle threat. The vicious gleam of the cold gray eye told that. -But in place of fear Ramon’s face showed almost relief. “Very good, -señor. There is nothing you could do that would suit me better.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The cold eye flickered. “Hell! you’re too anxious. I couldn’t make up my -mind to do it that quick—an’ there’s a few things I wanter find out. For -one, what’s your idee in wanting to drill them young folks?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ramon told—this time without the fireworks.</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake summed it briefly. “Promised you, then threw you down. That’s hard -luck. But there’s one thing you Mexes can never get into your hot -heads—the right of our little American queens to change their pretty -minds as often as they damn please without any gent’s consent. You was -damn lucky that she ever give you a smile. If I conclude to change my -mind on plugging you, have it writ up large in your family tree that -oncet an American girl let herself be engaged to you for nearly five -minutes. Now supposing I refrain from my desire to make you into a -corpse, d’you reckon you could keep a promise and not make any attempt -on their lives?”</p> -<p class="pnext">While he was talking Ramon’s face had stiffened in defiance. He shook -his head. But instead of anger, a small gleam of admiration lit Jake’s -hard eyes. Raising his gun, he aimed full at the other’s breast.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You have just two minutes to make up your mind.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“One minute!”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a time it seemed as though he would have to shoot. But just before -the time expired, Ramon spoke. “For myself, I do not care. But I have an -old father and mother, whom my death would surely kill. I promise.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right.” Jake dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm. “I allow -that I’m foolish for trusting a Mex, but the little Missy allus liked -you. On her account we’ll take one chance. Here’s your cartridge—only -don’t load till you’re off this range. An’ remember”—a cold flash -emphasized the order—“after this our boundary is your dead-line. Cross -it again—you’ll be shot like a panther, coyote, or other varmint.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Returning to his horse, he watched the other mount and ride away. A -glance in the opposite direction showed him Lee and Gordon, going hand -in hand up the opposite slope. Till they had gained across to the next -valley he remained where he was. Then, riding in their rear, with a -sharp eye always behind, keeping the width of a valley between them, he -followed home.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxvii-an-old-acquaintance"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id28">XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped -and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he -had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the -Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him -across the tracks.</p> -<p class="pnext">“There’s a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been -streaking through all day carrying Valles’s reserves from Chihuahua. Don -Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If -we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Half an hour?” Bull snorted. “That means half the night an’ then some. -We’ll have time for supper an’ a sleep.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the -crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the -train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail -of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on -top.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Must be yesterday’s train a bit overdue,” Bull defended his theory, as -the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. “The comandante’ll be in the -passenger-coach ahead. We’d better to mosey along an’ brace him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs -dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it -pan out?”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull’s friend and Cupid’s aide. As his -car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the -titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest -subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign -in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the -dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their -dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a -composite welcoming grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings.” The correspondent breezily -ran off the names. “There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles’s chief of -staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government -clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us, -but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room. -Come right up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A partition divided the car into kitchen and living-quarters. Bunks rose -in a tier of four at the end of the latter. Four more could be slept on -long lockers at each side of the table which was being set for supper by -the Chinese cook. From the oldest to the youngest, the correspondents -were on edge for the approaching battle. At supper their talk ran on its -possibilities.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If Valles is beaten again,” Weekes, the gray-haired dean, summed the -conversation, “our government will throw another of its silly flip-flops -and turn him down. And then—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—this corresponding job won’t make good insurance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And then—” the dean began again.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’ll hit for El Paso before Santos-Coy grabs us again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And then”—the dean triumphed over interruptions—“God pity the poor -gringos in northern Mexico.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s friend nodded. “Valles’s army will scatter into bands that will -rake the country with fine-tooth combs for the least bit of plunder. You -had better get your girl and her fellow, Diogenes, and come out with -us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Later, when they had all climbed up on the roof and sat watching the -oil-smoke from the laboring locomotive whirl and twist, then float away -and lay its great sable plumes against the rich reds and golds of the -evening sky, they gave expert opinion on Benson’s mission.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If Valles wins, so do you,” the dean opined. “He needs horses worse -than money, and, as you say, has slathers of it in the El Paso banks. -But if he loses—hit for the border at once. I saw him the other day -after the first defeat, and hell couldn’t produce his equal. He was -crazy; a maniac; a tiger gone stark, staring, frothing mad.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And lose he will. How do I know?” He answered a challenge. “It’s a mere -problem of mathematics, the first equation of which was worked out in -the battle the other day. Given two men of equal military ability, the -one with a trained mind is bound to win. The other fellow, as you know, -is a college man—a college man against a bandit.” He turned to Bull and -Benson. “It’s a cinch that he’ll win. If I were you, gentlemen, I’d wait -the event.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson shook his head. “If we see Valles now and strike a bargain, we -can get our cattle across the border before he’s all in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Good enough reasoning,” the dean admitted. “But—ever since the first -defeat he’s been in one of his towering rages. Even his own generals -hardly dare go near him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson shrugged; with British obstinacy he clung to his point. “It won’t -be the first time I’ve seen him in his rages. He may be dangerous—to -Americans, but John Bull looks after his people and even Valles is -careful of how he flies in the old fellow’s face. I shall go to see him -at once, and if he refuses—well”—his voice grew harsh and -menacing—“he’ll hear the truth about himself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Not knowing him, the correspondents received it in silence. While they -smoked Benson went on in his hard, rough voice. “I tell you, amigos, -that your people have made a sad mess of this whole Mexican business. -For three years, now, you have been trying to apply the principles of -your Declaration of Independence to a race which won’t have evolved to a -point where it has the faintest understanding of them for a thousand -years to come. You stand on your Monroe doctrine, but refuse to take up -its obligations and give alien nationals the protection you will not -allow their own government to extend. While your statesmen prattle about -the sacred right of revolution and Mexico’s ability to settle her own -affairs, the country is overrun with bandits and mobs of pelados who are -killing off the decent people and destroying billions in property they -never created.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bah!” he snorted his disgust. “Don’t talk to me of republics. Do you -suppose that either England or Germany would have stood for the anarchy -which rules here? For centuries John Bull has been ruling brown peoples -and he knows his job. ‘Be good and you’ll be happy!’ he tells them. If -they’re not—they get it, hot and heavy, on the spot where it will do -most good. The brown man is all right in his place—which isn’t on top of -the white man—but your government, so far, has failed to perceive it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He went on from a pause: “Republics are incapacitated by nature in any -case for the job. They are too divided in their counsels—swayed to-day -by capital that will accept any dishonor rather than jeopardize its -revenues; to-morrow by sentimentalists who hold up hands of horror at -the very thought of war; governed most of the time by a ridiculous -yellow press. Individually, you Yanks are good people, but taken -collectively, as represented by your government and papers, you are -hypocritical, weak, hysterical, sentimental, without dignity or force. -You are grown fat with wealth, soft with luxury, too lazy and -indifferent to undertake your responsibilities abroad, and if you were -not, you lack the first essentials—centralized federal authority and -military strength to enforce your will. If you do anything here it will -be accidental—such as when the blowing up of the <em class="italics">Maine</em> aroused one of -your periodical brainstorms, stung you into action. But in the mean time -the destruction of Mexico will be complete. There will be nothing left -of the civilization built up at such enormous pains by Diaz and which it -was your duty to maintain.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Silence followed, the uncomfortable silence that attends the digestion -of unpalatable truth. While they talked, the cars had resolved into dim -masses that swayed and swung through hot dusk that was splashed, here -and there, with the red glow of charcoal cooking fires. On those -immediately ahead and behind, dim sombreroed figures still loomed in -half-gloom. The flash of a match occasionally set a dark face out in -startling relief. The tinkle of a guitar accompanying a high, nasal <em class="italics">peon</em> -chant, mingled with the roar and rattle of wheels. For some time its -whine rose under the stars before the voice of the dean broke the -silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What you say is true—most of it. We have been tried in the balance and -found wanting. We’ve neglected our duty to the Mexicans and our own -people—that’s the hell of it! But nations, like individuals, learn their -lessons through painful mistakes. We’ve had bad leadership and worse -counsels—so much of it that it would almost seem that we were -irrevocably stamped as incapable. But it’s only a phase. Under it all -the heart of the people still beats sound and true. Sooner or later its -voice will be heard. And when it is—the bleating of the sentimentalists -will be drowned in the tramp of marching men.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You bet you!” It rolled out in chorus.</p> -<p class="pnext">“In the mean time,” a voice added, “what’s the matter with a little -drink?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Instantly the recumbent figures rose in a shadowy mass, and as its units -made their way down over the edge of the swaying car, the correspondent -jogged Bull’s elbow. “Come along, Diogenes!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But though a flame, sudden and fierce, had leaped within him; though he -trembled under the intensity of his desire, he shook his head. “Thanks, -I’m not drinking.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—Diogenes? Whatever is the matter? If parental responsibilities do -this, damned if I know whether I’ll ever dare to hook up—providing my -San Francisco girl ever consents. Is this straight?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Straight.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Warned, perhaps, by a certain earnestness, the other answered: “All -right, old man—only—if you change your mind, come on down.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull made no answer, could not, for as he lay there, huge bulk stretched -out on the running-board, face turned up to the stars, every ounce of -his energy, even the bit that would have been used up in speech, was -consumed in the fight against the furious desire that brought the sweat -starting on his brow, shook him like a leaf. Out of the rack and bang of -the swinging cars, click and roar of the wheels, his ear presently -picked the clink of glasses. Out through the lamp-lit doorway floated -Benson’s rough voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, here’s to Uncle Sam! wishing him better counselors and quicker -understanding!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull heard no more, for he had rolled over, buried his face in his arms -to hide from his snuffing nostrils whiffs of spirits. Once he half rose, -looking toward the ladder. But, strengthening his resolution, there rose -in his mind just then a picture of Betty and her mother as he had seen -them at parting—her hands on the child’s shoulders, stooped in slight -dejection, yet radiating faith and trust.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lying down again, he lay, hands clasped under his head, gazing up at the -fire of stars, while his mind traveled back to the <em class="italics">rancho</em>, lived over -and over again the slow, sweet hours of last night. Below, an undertone -to the roar of the speeding train, he now caught the hum of talk. But he -took no heed—even when it ceased. He dreamed on till a hand shook his -foot.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Aren’t you coming down to bed?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No; I reckon I’ll lay out here. It’s cooler.” He did not acknowledge to -himself his fear of sniffing the spirituous odors.</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right, only don’t roll off.” The correspondent paused on his way -back to the ladder. “Say! did your friend mean what he said? Or was it -just talk?”</p> -<p class="pnext">When Bull answered with a sketch of Benson’s violent temper, illustrated -by a few instances, the correspondent shook his head. “Well, don’t let -him see Valles alone.” Going down the ladder, he called back, “If you -should change your mind about the drink, you’ll find the jug on the -table.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Instantly it materialized in Bull’s vision, a round stone jug and -glasses, as solid and real as though it stood within the reach of his -hand. Nor could he shut out the vision, as he had the odor, by burying -his face. With the cars swinging and swaying through the night, shut -out, it stood forth clearer than ever. He saw himself snatching out the -cork; felt the burning liquid coursing down his throat.</p> -<p class="pnext">“My God! why did I come? I’ll never be able to stan’ it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The thought of the temptation, ever present, growing more powerful -through the coming days, gaining in strength while he grew weaker, -brought out of him a cry of dismay: “I’ll never be able to stan’ it!” -Then, very quickly, “I’ll have to! If I don’t—then I’m no fit man for -her!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The thought brought her face again in all its sweet wholesomeness. -Through the warm dusk, as it were beside him, he saw her hand fluttering -like a homing dove into his. He felt it lifting, raising him above his -temptation. The memory of its soft pressures strengthened and comforted. -Presently his fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the -running-board. Exhausted, he fell asleep.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxviii-a-requisition"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id29">XXVIII: A “REQUISITION”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Slipping in over the patio wall, a golden sunbeam struck behind where -Gordon sat writing and flooded the <em class="italics">portales</em> with topaz lights. From -the kitchen came the soft spat, spat of <em class="italics">tortillas</em> in the course of -shapement between Teresa’s palms, competing splash and flop of Maria’s -cloth as she washed off the brown-tiled floor. No other sound disturbed -the morning freshness, for Gordon had risen early to get off a letter -with Lovell, who had dropped in last night on his way to El Paso to -attend Phœbe’s wedding.</p> -<p class="pnext">So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung -across Lee’s bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The -rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of -white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair’s bright tousle, -round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily -dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono -and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back. -Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon’s first -notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could -feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore -it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom -she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the <em class="italics">ancianos</em>, he -was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of the -<em class="italics">hacienda</em> when she cut him off.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had -guessed right I might have given you a—”</p> -<p class="pnext">He took it—in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. “To my -father and mother,” he replied to her question. “I thought it was about -time I dropped them a line—haven’t written home since I came down.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What?” She uttered a small shocked scream. “You’ve let them suffer all -this time in suspense and alarm?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He looked up in innocent surprise. “Why should <em class="italics">they</em> suffer? I didn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext"><em class="italics">He hadn’t?</em> Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against -such utter lack of imagination—but dropped again quickly, owing to a -second base treachery on the part of the sleeves.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. <em class="italics">You</em> -didn’t suffer? <em class="italics">Oooooh!</em>” She pulled his ear till he yelled. “If you -ever dare to treat me like that!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she -asked: “But why this sudden plunge into correspondence—after such long -abstinence?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“To inform them,” he replied, with great dignity, “of a certain -momentous change impending in my condition.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you are telling them about—<em class="italics">me</em>? May I see what you have written?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that -his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes -passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against -his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it -had evolved into a bear hug.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, what a liar they will think you!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the -silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing’s believing.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Of course she declared it “wasn’t a bit like her” and the rest of it. -Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee, -picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for -the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally -and <em class="italics">in toto</em> denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor -panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Only you are so blind. They’ll hate me when they see it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Trust dad for that!” he laughed. “He still has a soft spot for a pretty -damsel. When he sees this—well, he’ll go straight out and buy a fatted -calf.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But your mother and sister? They’ll never forgive me for taking you -from that other girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Wrong again! They weren’t a bit anxious about it. It was all my -father—with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They’ll love you -as much as I—no, that’s impossible! But they’ll love you, all right.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. “That other girl? You -never told me about her. Did you ever—kiss her?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Lots of times.” Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. “At -parties, when I was a kid—and when we played ‘post-office’ and sich.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Never since you grew up?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Never.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, well,” she sighed, “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you since you -were so very small, and it’s such a long time ago I’ll really have -to—make up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she -had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. “And now—what -about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they -receive it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. “Such -impatience! Aren’t you happy?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Happy?” His voice rang with sincerity. “Happier than I ever thought -possible, but—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But—?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I want to be happier still.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He meant and thought it. But she with her woman’s intuition knew this, -their love time, for what it was—the flowerage of their lives. Later -would come the ripe fruit—content mixed with the joys and sorrows that -form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed -forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she -would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was -not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“After—after Bull comes home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the -shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped -in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time -before he spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made -it a double marriage. Why, what’s the matter?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She had sat up with a little shiver. “Oh no! I could never be happy in -one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!” Coiling up again, she -allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. “I never saw him, he who -was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon -behind a cloud, but he felt—like you. In my visions he always took me -into the wilds—the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and -gone down the length of the Sierra Madres—at first alone, later -traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then -down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only -the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that -impossible. But this we can do—go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, -who are both old friends of my father’s, to be married, then ride -straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by -ourselves till—till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you look -after the horses, and we can play that we are simple <em class="italics">peones</em> and be—oh, -<em class="italics">so</em> happy!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good -as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. “How perfectly lovely! Why -didn’t I think of that myself?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You would have, in time. Oh!” She sprang from his knee at a stir and -tinkle of water. “Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’ll go out with me to-day?” he called after her.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No.” She bent down over the rail to answer. “I promised Jake to go with -him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?” he -protested. “’Tisn’t fair.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out -from behind the sheet.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now -described about the <em class="italics">hacienda</em>, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise -from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had -become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with -Sliver or Jake—and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests -of great earth waves—then to sit and muse while the declining sun washed -the wide world with its resplendence.</p> -<p class="pnext">As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted -adobes, <em class="italics">patio</em>, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, -the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the -burning hills. But—in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and -wild—there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Beast! she is but a child!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses -standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a -flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the -adobes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Raiders!” he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, -“<em class="italics">Revueltosos!</em>”</p> -<p class="pnext">A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a -fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its -panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear -which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. -Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back -compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway -of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth.</p> -<p class="pnext">From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon’s sight, -blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the -half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw -a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a <em class="italics">revueltoso</em>. The elder -sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this -helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!”</p> -<p class="pnext">At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon’s spine. Blind, -breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and -tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man’s arms, and threw him -violently against the wall.</p> -<p class="pnext">So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the -fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming -imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired, -aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a -finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then, -stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll -over.</p> -<p class="pnext">Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely -surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he -stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the -mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them.</p> -<p class="pnext">The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a -heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed -to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick, -it withstood a violent hammering.</p> -<p class="pnext">The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit -under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse. -But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand, -the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood -very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the -burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They say to bring fire and burn down the door.” Her quick motion -simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame. -Whispering: “Tira! señor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!” she pointed at the -window.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside, -and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> were hugging -the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the -bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at -random, there followed a quick scurry of feet.</p> -<p class="pnext">Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in -swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they -could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back -before—zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in -through the window and plump in the back wall.</p> -<p class="pnext">Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above -the woman’s shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against -him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window, -they waited—in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So -still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman’s excited breathing and -an occasional sob under the bed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Tempting me to look out,” he read the silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet -and the voice of Maria, the little <em class="italics">criada</em>, called through the bars:</p> -<p class="pnext">“It ess good now, señor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with -those evil ones.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned, -first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them, -“Don” Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back -gate Sliver and two <em class="italics">ancianos</em> now stood with leveled rifles. Two more -poked deadly snouts over the low <em class="italics">patio</em> wall, Lee and Jake behind them. -And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets -out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, <em class="italics">machetes</em>, a -hysterical, dangerous mob.</p> -<p class="pnext">In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed -at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind -him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the -ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they -showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them -villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they -rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with -evil jokes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Drive back those women!” Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. “Then -bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over -here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding in reply to Gordon’s gesture, the leader followed him across the -compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly -cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome -Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the -ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such -reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature’s -mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales -and addressed Jake with an authoritative air:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now, señor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of -General Valles?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles -attacked my people!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man’s riding-clothes, and -the man’s surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy. -Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his -first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I did not know”—his bold glance wandered over her costume—“you will -pardon me, señorita?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time -that revolutionists had come with “requisitions” to Los Arboles. She -answered from experience.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You have a commission from General Valles?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language -that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to -contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, <em class="italics">el -capitan</em> Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or -other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with -his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles’s own -illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee handed it back. “This seems to be in legal form. That being the -case”—she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake -an appreciative nod “perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my -people!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I know of no attack except”—the straight brows knit over a black flash -at Gordon—“when this man killed one of my men.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: -“He shot in self-defense—to save one of my girls.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Santa Maria!” His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. “What -foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled -a dove. You Americanos take these <em class="italics">peonas</em> too seriously, fill them with -ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a -soldado for a sweetheart.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined -just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on -Gordon’s part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool -calculation by Jake as to the possibility of “getting away with it” -should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still -holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering -if he could send one bullet through all four heads.</p> -<p class="pnext">If the thoughts of the <em class="italics">peonas</em>—now gathered in a murmuring, -gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling -like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall—a composite of their -thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and -torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of -mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought -and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine -nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee’s voice:</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">You</em> say that? <em class="italics">You</em>, a follower of a man who was once himself a <em class="italics">peon</em>, -who boasts that his is the <em class="italics">peones’</em> cause? <em class="italics">You</em>, his representative, -sneer because we treat like human beings these poor creatures? If you -<em class="italics">do</em> represent him, then God help us, for we have little but violence to -expect from your cause.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the -strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but -little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused -even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the <em class="italics">peon</em> in all his ways, -to mutter: “You bet! they hain’t got nothing coming from him!” But in -the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by training -and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only surprise. Though -his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of her beauty. It was -to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, with a sudden -reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the shibboleths of his -“Cause.” Surely they were fighting for the <em class="italics">peon</em>; to obtain his rights -and restore the public lands alienated by the <em class="italics">hacendados</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If my hombre did as you say,” he concluded, “he earned his death. My -general would be the first to applaud it.” With a gesture that dismissed -the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: “So let us -say no more of that. My wish is to serve <em class="italics">you</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied -them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry -blood flooding Gordon’s face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing -his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Leave him to me,” she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in -the eye, she gave him his answer. “You wish to serve me? Very well, -señor, you may do so very easily—by removing yourself and your men off -my place.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise. -In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. “Si, señorita—after -you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new -levy for equipment and supplies. Also”—another black flash went to -Gordon—“it will be my duty to take this man to my general.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Perhaps I had better go,” Gordon whispered. “It may save you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee cut him off without looking around. “And shoot him the moment you -get him outside the gates?” She quoted the Mexican law of “The escape.” -“No, señor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him -with my own hands at your general’s call.” She added, after a -significant pause, “Along with the evidence of your own neglect in -permitting your men to attack my people.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of -effect—especially upon meddlesome consuls—it was the fashion in the -revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one -could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He -blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed -through his vicious look.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well, señorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the -horses. These I must have at once.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, think you’ve got ’em, an’ let it go at that!”</p> -<p class="pnext">While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her -meditation flashed a sharp question: “Were you at the hacienda of the -señor Benson last week?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The man’s dark brows rose. “No, señorita. If there was a requisition -served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“When did you leave the cuartel general?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other -side of the railroad. But what difference does it make—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A great deal.” She gave a little nod. “Since you left headquarters the -señor Benson, with my manager, the señor Perrin, has gone with an offer -of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter -may also be left with him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Which lets you out!” Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the -background, now burst out. “Now git! That’s what I said—an’ take your -dead hombre along.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the -man’s glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the -peonas who were now crowding the <em class="italics">patio</em> gates. Everywhere his glance -fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of -glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning -fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his -glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent -behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a -shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the <em class="italics">peonas</em> -opened.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the -<em class="italics">patio</em> wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and -Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his -<em class="italics">ancianos</em> still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret -mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it.</p> -<p class="pnext">As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they -passed out under the <em class="italics">patio</em> arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically, -then followed his men.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Saddle a fresh horse an’ go after them,” Jake ordered, when Sliver came -up. “Don’t let ’em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we’ll -have to keep one man circling the hills while the <em class="italics">ancianos</em> keep watch -an’ watch at the gates.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men -ride away. “I am sorry to have brought this on you,” he said, in low -tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added, -“Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. -Jake was shooing the <em class="italics">peonas</em> back to their quarters with much language -and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick -movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and -planted a swift kiss on his cheek.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I don’t want to be widowed—before I’m married.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At midnight Sliver brought in his report. “They’ve gone on to El Sol. -After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into ’em when they -stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood -quiet an’ the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. -The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn’t hear of it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘The damned gringos shoot straight,’ I heard one of ’em say. ‘Already -have they killed one of us, an’ now they be ready. Also the horses are -tired an’ we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.’ Then, after -some jawing, they moved on.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ they won’t come back,” Jake commented on the report. “Not so long -as they kin find something that looks easier.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Which was only half of the truth!</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxix-temptation"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id30">XXIX: TEMPTATION</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Bull’s eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted -pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering -mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half -conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence, -the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town -enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in -the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em>, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in -their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the -scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth -within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung -straight as strings in the crystal air.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Morning, Diogenes!” The correspondent’s cheerful face poked up from -under the edge of the car. “Some picturesque, heigh? Who’d think, to -look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the -destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But -that’s your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a -quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night -for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A -night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to -the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit -each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a -cheerful, ‘Adios, señor, it is time to begin fighting!’ they return to -their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the -midst of their dirt and disorder.” He added, thoughtfully, “I never see -them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children -shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the -powerful weapons we placed in their hands.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Picturesque? Yes,” he went on, from a pause. “But it’s mighty hard on -the common people. Look at that!”</p> -<p class="pnext">He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was -clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car.</p> -<p class="pnext">“She’s picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!” -Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: “If our wise men -in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are -doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! <em class="italics">The seed corn and -the brood mares!</em> You know what that means—famine! If I were a poet I’d -take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles’s -war horses—I’d take her for the symbol of Mexico—Mexico bleeding and -bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it’s -true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast -returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring -perpetually upon one another. Already—oh!” He descended to a homely but -vital conclusion. “They make me sick. God send us a <em class="italics">man</em>! A man with -sympathy and insight; understanding of this people’s failings and -necessities. God send us another Lincoln!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You bet it’s hell!” In spite of the profanity Bull’s laconic comment -was reverent in its essence as the most profound “Amen!”</p> -<p class="pnext">With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful -self. “I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Stepping from the ladder, Bull’s glance went, in spite of himself, to -the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone -jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his -back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look -when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his -sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and -when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town, -it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind.</p> -<p class="pnext">From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in -dirty streams of khaki and <em class="italics">peon mantas</em> splashed with the flash of -brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot -of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured -into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt -and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with -a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its -evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson’s remark as -they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified:</p> -<p class="pnext">“If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this -would be a safer, cleaner land.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet -odor of carrion hung thick in the air.</p> -<p class="pnext">“More Mexican efficiency,” the dean shrugged. “After the last scrap out -here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They’d pile -twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the -soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of -hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way—it’s -hard on a white man, though the Mexicans don’t seem to mind. Appeals to -the natural vulture in them, I suppose.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the -crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under -guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten -years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one -thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the -extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell—to be -picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and -hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ole, Enrico!” As they came opposite, Bull’s friend hailed the officer -in command.</p> -<p class="pnext">After walking a few feet with him, he came back. “They’re Spanish -storekeepers on the way to ‘the place designated,’ which is a -revolutionary euphemism for being shot. ‘The place’ is the cemetery -where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican -refinement, eh, making a man’s legs carry him to his own funeral? Their -crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in -contributing to the ‘Cause,’ been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps -have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters’ beds. -Even in this country”—he spoke with bitter irony—“there are still men to -be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are -Spanish. God knows, it’s enough. Valles never forgets that he is a <em class="italics">peon</em>. -After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children’s children -the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec forebears. -It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some justification -for it—if it were only a cause and effect. But”—his pitying glance -followed the stumbling boy—“it is rotten hard to watch.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while -running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing -glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As -the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of -Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an -interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> -would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest -from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at -the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter, -quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That isn’t quite so bad.” The correspondent nodded at one struggling -desperately with her captor. “She’ll soon give in and dry her tears. In -one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within -twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with -Valles’s soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by -a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it -doesn’t matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the -others—daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many -of them educated in Europe—well, during the sack of Durango forty girls -of the upper classes committed suicide.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and -turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old -Spanish mansion, with a great <em class="italics">patio</em> and interior garden, its high -walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The -glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which -flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun -blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by -contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet -demesne.</p> -<p class="pnext">As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in -earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest.</p> -<p class="pnext">“More victims of the ‘Cause.’” After he had greeted them, the consul, a -bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. “Valles has robbed churches, -seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with—this. Last -spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to -which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and -came here to-day to ask the priest—who is himself a refugee whom I saved -from a mob that was stoning him to death outside—to ask permission for -themselves and others to end their desecration by suicide. One would -think that such experiences would kill in any human being the belief in -a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good stuff. Sticks right -to his guns.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came -just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the -burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: “The life He gave -none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is -not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight. -It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness; -puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was -necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked -ones to their proper end? It may be”—he paused, shaking his old head, -tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks—“but it is not for us to attempt -answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have wished that -He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones of the mob. -But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait till His -brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the -children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of -mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty -four or five, raised her pale, olive face. “And may we love them, our -babes, when they come?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the -wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. “God is love, Sisters. He -would not wish otherwise.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were -wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked -slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost -pain. And yet—even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the -garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on -a small side-table. On their way they had passed <em class="italics">cantina</em> after -cantina, all thronged with half-drunken <em class="italics">revueltosos</em>, all exhaling a -thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the -drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul’s invitation, he walked out -on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in -time to hear the consul’s conclusion on Benson’s business.</p> -<p class="pnext">“As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was -never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn’t help -any for me to go with you, for I’ve been fighting him on other accounts -all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that -will secure your admittance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the <em class="italics">cantinas</em>. With -invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful -was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals; -seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd -that blocked always the gates of Valles’s headquarters—simple <em class="italics">peones</em> -who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of -obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a <em class="italics">peon</em> like themselves who had abased -the great <em class="italics">hacendados</em>, their taskmasters, confiscated their lands, -beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though he -shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw them; -had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming and -going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a secretary, -seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to what was going -on.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s ‘Matador’ Fero, Valles’s killer.” Benson nudged him as a man -looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a -suspicious stare. “He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon, -in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power -rifle. Looks it, doesn’t he?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black, -piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his -colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom -they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there -closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged -before the desk, and also the <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> officers who lounged on the -window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice.</p> -<p class="pnext">Fierce beast that the “Matador” was, Bull’s keen knowledge of men, -developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less -dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive -upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his -thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest, -sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither, -told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the -bandit <em class="italics">peon</em>, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they -entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand -nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling, -it would rise and fall with a bang.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You may tell your papers, señores, the reverse of the other day was -sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow—you have seen my -reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?—to-morrow I -shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot -wind. And you can tell them”—he observed a sinister pause—“you may tell -them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is now -giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American lives -and property in the country I control, but if your government allies -itself with my enemies—” His big fist struck the table with force that -emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet, pulsing with vindictive anger, the exhibition paled by contrast -with his furious attack on one of his own officers who came in as the -correspondents filed out. The fact that he had been wounded and had gone -on, alone, when his command refused to face a galling fire, made no -difference. Beast mouth stretched to a gorilla grin, every line of his -face writhing in an awful smile, Valles scored him with coarse insult -and seething invective while his hand toyed thirstily with the hilt of -his knife.</p> -<p class="pnext">Flushing and paling, the man stood with hanging head till an order -issued from the last furious burst. “Go, now, and shoot every tenth man -in your command. I will teach them that I am more to be feared than the -damned Carranzistas!”</p> -<p class="pnext">In the midst of it Bull nudged Benson. “Don’t you allow we better leave -him cool for a while?”</p> -<p class="pnext">But the Englishman’s obstinate jaw set hard. “I’m not afraid of him. -Besides”—the secretary stood again in the doorway—“it is too late.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A curt nod marked Valles’s recognition of Benson as they followed in. -Then, as his tigerish eyes took in Bull, they lit with quick -appreciation of his bulk, then went off again on their suspicious -questing. While Benson talked, he beat again a soft tattoo with the heel -of his hand; then, rising, he walked off into another room.</p> -<p class="pnext">The secretary followed, and through the closed door they caught the -harsh, throaty monotone. When it ceased the secretary came out.</p> -<p class="pnext">“My general says that all of your property is subject to requisition to -be paid for in legal currency issued by him as the chief of the -republican armies.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And he thinks we’ll stand for that?” His eyes flashing under bent -brows, harsh face burning with anger, Benson stepped toward the door. -“I’ll—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But as he moved the “Matador” stepped in between. Half a dozen lounging -officers, too, came hurrying from the balconies.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It would do no good, señor.” The secretary’s shoulders rose in a shrug. -“Wait a more favorable time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Benson stared down upon him, big fists clenched, face purple with -furious passion. Thinking he was about to strike, Bull put out his hand. -But, turning suddenly, Benson strode out of the room, throwing his -defiance back over his shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He can’t bluff a British subject that way! He’ll give me his answer -<em class="italics">himself</em>—and he’ll give it <em class="italics">to-day</em>.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As Bull followed out a hand touched his shoulder. Thinking it was the -secretary, he turned—then stood staring at the sentry on guard at the -door, who returned a sheepish grin. Though the face seemed familiar, he -did not recognize the man for one of the raiders Lee had saved from -hanging till he spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ah, señor, ’tis fine to see an old face. The señorita, she that saved -us from your just anger, she is well? Tell her that fine mercy was -defeated by the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> who took us from her servants. Ask if she -will in her great kindness have the general set us free that we may -return to our wives and babes in Las Bocas.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In spite of his own stress, Bull could not but grin. “Was the jefe of -Las Bocas a better master than Valles?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A master is always a master.” The man shrugged. “But one’s pais is -one’s pais and the niñas, the flesh of one’s body, blood of his blood, -cannot be forgotten. Thou wilt speak to her, señor?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The tear that trickled down his villainous face earned him a civil -answer. Though he knew the futility of it, Bull nodded. “Si, I will -speak.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Below he found Benson shoving like an angry bull through the <em class="italics">peon</em> -crowd. On its outskirts he turned and shook his fist at the building.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m going back to the consul—to tell him something that he’ll take -better alone. Where shall I meet you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, I can’t tell how long I may be. Make it after lunch at the car.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull nodded. Then remembering the correspondent’s warning, he called -after him, “I’d like to be there when you tackle him again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, Benson walked on. Left alone, Bull sat down on a bench in the -plaza. Already the drink desire was returned upon him. And as he sat -there, in the grip of his mortal weakness, three soldiers seated -themselves on the same bench and proceeded to pass a bottle of -<em class="italics">tequila</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">Before he even saw it Bull’s mutinous nostrils snuffed the odor. Looking -away, he tried to think, to recall the vision that strengthened and -cooled him in his hour of torture last night. But now, the stronger for -his long abstinence, that enormous desire inflamed his brain; enveloped -it in heated mists through which the pretty, wholesome faces loomed dim -and indefinite. And then—</p> -<p class="pnext">After a curious glance up at the huge figure, the nearest soldier tapped -his arm. “You will drink with us, señor?”</p> -<p class="pnext">What it cost him to refuse and walk away! Men have gone down in history -as martyrs by the exercise of no more effort. But just as pressure -enough will snap a bone, as persistent fatigue will paralyze a muscle, -so the effort weakened his will, broke his resolution. Feeling curiously -weak, utterly exhausted, he stopped at the plaza corner and gazed at a -<em class="italics">cantina</em> across the road.</p> -<p class="pnext">Even then he did not give in. Hands writhing behind his back, face one -purple suffusion, he circled and recircled the plaza half a dozen times -before he stopped at the same spot again. In that time desire has no -height he did not reach; passion no heat, hell no torture, he did not -endure. And while he stood watching the <em class="italics">cantina’s</em> roaring trade, -reluctant but conscious in his soul that the end was come, a hand -dropped with a hearty slap on his back.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on, Diogenes, you’re just in time. We’ve discovered some beer, -good cold beer, down at the German Club. Counting the consul, there’s -only two Dutchmen left in the town, but trust them to have their beer. -Don’t waste time in astonishment. Come right along.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In his mortal weakness Bull snatched at the straw. He could drink a -barrel of the thin Mexican stuff without knowing it—at least he felt he -could! But while, for an hour thereafter, they sat in a cool <em class="italics">patio</em> -talking and sipping, the despised brew was still potent enough to loose -the mad rustler spirit that hearkened only to the voice of desire.</p> -<p class="pnext">When the correspondents left to file their despatches, he remained.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m waiting for Benson,” he told them. “If you see him, tell him I’m -here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While they walked down the <em class="italics">patio</em> and out through the bar into the -street, he sat nervously making rings with his beer-glass. Then, -trembling with eagerness, he called the waiter.</p> -<p class="pnext">“This stuff hasn’t a kick in it. Bring me a bottle of whisky!”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxx-the-other-half-of-the-truth"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id31">XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">As they sat at breakfast Gordon’s glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her -smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in -his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day,” she told Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver’s nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement. -“It’s a cinch,” he chuckled. “’Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never -seen two folks more sot on each other.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. “An’ who in hell might they be?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other -like two stamps at the end of a day’s ride in a sweaty pocket; allus -that close up walkin’, standin’ or settin’, you had to walk around ’em -twice to find the jine.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ after they was married?” Jake questioned.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver scratched his head. “You-all mightn’t believe it, but you c’d -have fired a charge of buckshot between ’em at long range without -hittin’ either.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake nodded. “I’d have allowed as much. But these ain’t that kind. Did -you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she’ll keep him -on aidge that-a-way all his life. He’ll never get all at once; never -quite reach the end. They’ll allus be something beyond.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say!” Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. “Fer an old bachelor you -know a heap. Where’d you learn it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Where any man learns it—from a woman.” A shadow swept, for a moment, -the reckless face. “On’y—I didn’t have sense enough to stay be my -teacher.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up—for -it was his day on guard—Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover, -he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon -ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his -being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had -somehow failed to fill.</p> -<p class="pnext">Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in -morals which has puzzled wiser heads. “Ain’t Natur’ the fickle jade, -a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he’s still -terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn’t she a’ b’en more single-minded?”</p> -<p class="pnext">His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a -flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were -now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at -correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver’s could easily have -perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the -attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Say,” he called down, “d’you allow it’s all right for them two to go -off that-a-way by themselves?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake snorted. “Didn’t she ride with you yesterday an’ me the day afore?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, but she’s our boss an’—well, they love each other a whole lot.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“So that’s what’s biting you?” In one sentence Jake countered heavily on -the common view of things. “She kin ride with tough guys like you an’ me -an’ it’s all right; but she mustn’t go out with the man that loves her -more ’n anything on earth. Where’s your sense?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing, -he made weak answer, “I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a -chapperonny.” Vanquished by Jake’s disgusted snort, he withdrew and went -down to close the gates.</p> -<p class="pnext">Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise, -from where she and her father had overlooked the <em class="italics">hacienda</em> on that last -fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge -painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As -then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant -cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range -rolling in bright billows to the far hills.</p> -<p class="pnext">Her cry was the same: “Oh, isn’t it beautiful? Soon the rains will come -and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be -had anywhere, but these golds—that is Mexico.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her -father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges, -scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and -their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential -calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the -soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and -grace of its flexures from her man’s riding-clothes, the mobile face, -molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest -subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when -she showed signs of stopping.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I’m so glad that you love it!” she sighed, happily. “It would have -been such a disappointment if you— But that is so silly, because it -wouldn’t have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark -evenings after”—she went on with a little flourish—“I shall read you -stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old -leather trunk. It will be lots of fun.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where -she left off, he began. “Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big -streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees -this—well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled -down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary -nonsense, we’ll—”</p> -<p class="pnext">The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his -imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid, -healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot -she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy -pause.</p> -<p class="pnext">Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to -their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged -in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a -trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods -freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly -scheme of things according to their hearts’ desire, the gods in -resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were -to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from -the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently -joined hands and rode on.</p> -<p class="pnext">At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher’s purpose. After they -passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always -out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the -mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their -course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went -after them at a gallop.</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and, -as he drew nearer, she recognized the <em class="italics">mozo</em> who had brought Ramon’s -message from El Sol.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Que? Filomena?”</p> -<p class="pnext">As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her -happiness. “Oh, Betty is ill!” she translated for Gordon. “Mary Mills -sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as -my escort, so it won’t be necessary for you—” She paused, anticipating -rebellion.</p> -<p class="pnext">It came. “Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn’t let -you, anyway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. “That’s what -one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I’ll have to put up with it.” -Turning to the <em class="italics">mozo</em>, she gave him his orders in Spanish: “The señor -will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the -gringo señor, where we have gone.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Disconcertion showed through the man’s <em class="italics">peon</em> immobility. But with an -obsequious “Si, señorita!” he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, -dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to -be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight -he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he -built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the -succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet.</p> -<p class="pnext">Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it -soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and -lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke -puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, -mounted and rode away.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight -embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the <em class="italics">fonda</em>. But in -place of Felicia’s smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of -old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an -<em class="italics">arriero</em> whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream.</p> -<p class="pnext">As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her -glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, -she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled -around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the -kiss, into neutral territory.</p> -<p class="pnext">Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the -night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge -to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and -violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that -undulated like a woman’s mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the -hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with -green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and -plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in -one mood as the other.</p> -<p class="pnext">“A wonderful land!” Gordon breathed it.</p> -<p class="pnext">Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and -its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across -brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; -then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, -and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the -mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, -rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in -the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, -richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled -Garden of Eden—could he have done all this, even then imagination would -have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to -prophecy.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this -is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth.”</p> -<p class="pnext">That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet -brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration -but an eagle’s flight away. Following battle and retreat across -sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was -scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon’s blast over the face of the -land to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue -range columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning -<em class="italics">haciendas</em>. With them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and -cries of the wounded and tortured, wailing of ravished women.</p> -<p class="pnext">In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that -had spied the <em class="italics">mozo’s</em> signal and were now watching them from the -chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">“Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease.”</p> -<p class="pnext">If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few -hundred yards away, might have heard the argument.</p> -<p class="pnext">She would easily have recognized Ramon’s voice. “True, amigo, and I love -him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his -compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it—to make no -attempt on their lives.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A promise?” A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. “What is it but a -deadfall for one’s enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, -women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it -to find a hot enough corner in hell. But <em class="italics">I</em> gave no promise—and he -killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to -me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, no!” Ramon’s voice rose in quick protest. “His killing would still -be at my hands. Also”—the addition came in lower tones—“I would rather -he lived—to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in -my arms. No, señor, we will rope him from behind.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bueno! Have it thy—” A sharp hiss cut them off.</p> -<p class="pnext">Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of -a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through -thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, -with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with -the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men -before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above.</p> -<p class="pnext">She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her -stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. “I’ll go down first. If I break my -neck you can pick up the remains.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way -on her beast’s haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with -skilful use of the bridle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on!” she called back, laughing.</p> -<p class="pnext">But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the -noose of a <em class="italics">riata</em> writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and -was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a -man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under -her horse’s belly.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Run!” From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her -shoulder. “Run! Oh, <em class="italics">run</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">He could not—had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had barely -time to use the spur, and if Ramon’s cast had been made a second sooner -he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the loop -settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next -second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. -While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. -Now he turned it loose downhill.</p> -<p class="pnext">That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker’s boast, -and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious -through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, -shooting close to the ground.</p> -<p class="pnext">His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging -of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, -the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the -leader’s head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm -in against his body.</p> -<p class="pnext">At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. “He -has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them -snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill.</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only -have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while -the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness -and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break -his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee’s voice, shrill in its -mortal terror, rang out:</p> -<p class="pnext">“If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!”</p> -<p class="pnext">To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, -like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, -but without answer raised a warning hand. “The gringo is not to be -harmed, hombre.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compañero.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own -life in the hollow of his hand.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. -Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in -all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a -<em class="italics">peon</em>. Behind them rose a coarse laugh.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou -forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave -thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? -As for Tomas—I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us to -divide this señor’s money.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. “Bueno, Rafael, -bueno!” Another called: “Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man’s -shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas’s throat it flashed at -last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to -back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon -pulled a roll of notes from his breast.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here, hombre.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The man’s huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his -share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee’s horse by the -bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last -odd note, she spoke in English.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against -me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster.” From which she ran -on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of -memory—their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her -own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. “And now would you -destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And -what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked -and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes -stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic -fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the -hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its -grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took -out of bitter anger.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What have I to gain?” He threw up his head in defiance. “You! with love -or without it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent -outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon, what are you going to do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. -“Take you to San Angel—to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and -priest.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known -me from childhood—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“They are Mexican—would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like -themselves. They will do as I say. If not”—his nod carried a sinister -significance—“so much the worse for you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the -brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his -insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned -away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its -mate.</p> -<p class="pnext">She bent her head in sudden shame. “Ramon, please take me home.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, to <em class="italics">ours</em>.” He snatched her bridle. “Come! already we have wasted -too much time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. “You -stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember -she is no <em class="italics">peona</em>, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you will -be called to account by our government.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Your government?” Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. “Your -government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and -hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a -villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the -massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and -obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government—for -the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it -has lodged—complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us—nor help -<em class="italics">you</em>. Come on, hombre!”</p> -<p class="pnext">As he moved off, leading Lee’s beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to -break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to -his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking -back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the -moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm, -her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then -the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair.</p> -<p class="pnext">Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot -swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The -revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at -him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Going to cut my throat, now he’s gone,” Gordon read it—and did not -care.</p> -<p class="pnext">But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts -even a bandit nature. “We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him.” -Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the -others. “Let us lift him over there in the shade.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tis hard on thee, amigo,” the fellow went on, after they moved him. -“’Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no fear”—though -he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the gestures, helped out -by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning on his meaning—“we -will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to the strong. He has -not got her yet. Adios—and better luck!”</p> -<p class="pnext">As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored, -for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear, -cold vision to face its dread facts—the tragic realities even then in -course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In -agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them -go.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxi-brains-win"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id32">XXXI: “BRAINS WIN”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken -faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad -phantasmagoria, devil’s dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting. -As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a -window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More -clearly, a second picture stood out—of a big black rustler—to wit, -himself—set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the -rifles aimed, and yet—his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he -lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet -across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the <em class="italics">patio</em> of -the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the -staccato pulsations of rifle-fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The battle’s on!”</p> -<p class="pnext">As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony, -poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and -covered his face, but could not shut out despair. “My God! I’ve fallen -down!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood, -face buried in his hands, till he recognized the “dean’s” voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, come on, fellows! They’re going to it again. Let’s get out where -we can see.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’ll take a look at Diogenes first,” came the voice of his friend. “You -chaps go on. I’ll catch up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the -correspondent’s gaze. “Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went -it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but—last night!” He shook his head in mock -reproof.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What did you do? What didn’t you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then -went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in -business—those you didn’t break up. It took a troop to round you up. -They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. -Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, I’m sorry! damned sorry that he did!” Bull shrugged. “On’y to be -shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother -in the gutter.”</p> -<p class="pnext">His bitterness touched the other. “Look here, old man, don’t take it so -hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and -go on again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling -had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, -as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent’s face grew grave. -Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Where’s Benson?” He looked up. “Did he go again to Valles?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it—without avail. -What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he -said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done -much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. ‘So if the -son of a gun kills me,’ he told him, ‘the boys will know it for murder.’ -He must have had a hunch, for he never came back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Dead?” Bull broke a shocked silence.</p> -<p class="pnext">The other nodded. “They acknowledge it—say he tried to kill Valles, -which is, of course, all rot.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had leaped up. “Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It’s -no use.” He waved away expostulations. “You yourself warned me not to -let him go alone!” He started out the door.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here!” the correspondent seized him. “Where are you going?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Out—to get drunk—get killed if I kin!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the -correspondent stuck. “All right! all right! But what’s your hurry? -You’ll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with -me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Through Bull’s black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. “Humph! Stand on -a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that’s -exactly the crack Valles made about ‘gringo correspondents’ and -‘long-distance reporting.’ I’m going to show the beggar. It’s me for the -outposts where folks get killed.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. “Don’t be a fool! You’re paid -to get the news, not to do Valles’s fighting.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not -repress a grin. “What’s sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have -a right to get yourself killed, so have I.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The black shadow again wrapped Bull. “I’ve good reason. If I kin git -myself shot, like a man, I’m just that much ahead. But you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away -with a crack like that? We’re doing too much talking. Come on!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’d—” Bull hesitated. “I’d like to see—<em class="italics">his</em> consul first. His -wife—she’d naterally like to know. She’s in El Paso, just now, an’ I -know her address.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don’t -turn up, I wouldn’t want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too -long.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. “You needn’t to be scairt.” He -answered the other’s look. “My thirst’s over—for a while. But I need a -bracer.” Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier -significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return -to the old life.</p> -<p class="pnext">Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet -of despair he listened while the consul talked.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I’d -succeeded. If it hadn’t been that he was seen going in, he would simply -have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several -stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he -carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being -placed under arrest. Lastly—to satisfy me and give his murder the -semblance of a military execution—that he was tried by drumhead -court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general. -But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin”—he went on from a heavy -pause—“this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon my -records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one year—it -may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come up again. -No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may have -fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite the -name of William Benson in our archives, ‘The murderer was brought to -justice.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among -wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented -thereon in his breezy fashion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than -hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up -goes a regiment and decimates the tribe—or a brigade, or an army, if -necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a -British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat -old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He’d make shorter work -of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the -Hindu rajahs.”</p> -<p class="pnext">In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally -impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet -square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the -United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a -letter.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!” He coughed -ironically. “Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact -that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and -in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle -Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial -ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or -property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save -this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints! -Oyez! Oyez! Frankly,” he turned to the consul, “what do you think of -it?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The consul shrugged his shoulders. “You wish to register?”</p> -<p class="pnext">His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the -correspondent’s name and commission. “Anybody else you wish to notify?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then -he reached for the letter the correspondent handed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The pen scratched Lee’s name and address.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Anything to send?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nothing!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well, gentlemen!” His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his -handshake—the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. “I shall -observe your wishes—if possible. Well—” His shoulders rose again. “Hasta -luego! Till we meet again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A brave man in a weak place!” The correspondent rightfully placed him, -outside. “Now, Diogenes, for the front.”</p> -<p class="pnext">An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last -quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and -rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of -stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the -flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a -battery of French “threes” was spitting shrapnel with the feverish -energy of an angry cat.</p> -<p class="pnext">Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, -whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot -through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile -in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting -that flank.</p> -<p class="pnext">Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were -to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in -a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista -positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the -ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would -strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping -through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.</p> -<p class="pnext">Seizing the dead man’s rifle, Bull stepped into his place.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would -have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment’s -surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights -and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler -spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his -<em class="italics">vaqueros</em> on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every -other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully -as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter -puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, -grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the -dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he’ll soon get over it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and -began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The -spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling -rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of -the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture -of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy.</p> -<p class="pnext">A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her -heels patting out <em class="italics">tortillas</em> while she gossiped with another girl, in -complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was -indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her -coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face -convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while -screaming frightful curses.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Damned dogs of Carranzistas!” she finished with her last, spent breath. -“Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with -tails between the legs!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The -fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. -“Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my -first prisoner.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while -making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards -separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that -burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, -shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its -mark; she collapsed in a heap.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent’s -yell: “Come back, you fool! She’s dead! shot through the head!” he ran -out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall.</p> -<p class="pnext">As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept -space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was -not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a -while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes -flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic -curses at the distant line.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day -shall be my lover!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And here comes he that will do it!” The man on Bull’s left touched his -shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling -gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great -black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance -the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, -rifle-fire, booming guns.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s Valles!”</p> -<p class="pnext">As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black -horse launched out and shot up the hill.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Make way, hombres, for the guns!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken -vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the -correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension -flashed in his hot eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ole, compañero!” His wave of the hand took in all. “Hot work! but -nothing to that which is to come. Mira!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of -dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. -“Carranzista cavalry! But—look again!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, -brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the -west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. -Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching -as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles -shook his fist at the distant dust.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse -with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling -bullets, he directed their emplacement. “To the left, hombres! a little -more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!” The last one set, he -rasped out a last command: “Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!” Then -followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He bears a charmed life!” The man next Bull spoke again. “Out of a -hundred battles he has come with never a hurt.” He added, with a wink, -“An’ it was not always from his front the bullets came.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit -with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The -artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up -his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, -the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to -the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What are you trying to do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Justice on that grinning devil.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Good job no one saw you.” A quick glance around showed the artillerymen -and revolutionists absorbed in their own work “Do you know what they -would have done to both of us—skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or -something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don’t care yourself, just -think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, ‘Having -toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I hadn’t thought of that. But if I’d been alone—”</p> -<p class="pnext">He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to -his loophole.</p> -<p class="pnext">On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the -massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown -blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and -sabers, <em class="italics">machetes</em>, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then -the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, -like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. -Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that -other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud -rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Weekes was wrong!” It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. -“He’s smashed ’em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!” But as the -cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, “That is, if -Valles stops and comes back.”</p> -<p class="pnext">When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved -into criticism. “Whatever is he thinking of? There he’s gone with all -the cavalry and left his flank exposed!”</p> -<p class="pnext">At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with -greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand -drums. Answering the “threes,” shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking -curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next -wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next -to Bull collapsed without a groan.</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps -where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill -came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of -their guns! They’ve drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they’ll -flank us! My God! there they come!”</p> -<p class="pnext">From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of -smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. -He leaped and caught Bull’s arm.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on! Let’s get while we can!”</p> -<p class="pnext">They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, -maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Man! Valles is defeated!” The other seized and shook him. “Do you know -what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. -If you won’t consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to -leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against -Americans?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and -smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, -there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; -then the feel of Lee’s soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, -the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden -their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain -of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and -low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the -dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his -jokes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!” he gasped. “Gosh! but that -chaparral is going faster the other way!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that -dire moment he remained his cheerful self.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they’d ever get -me. Here’s my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck -’em on to the wires. Now, <em class="italics">run like hell</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">And Bull did “run like hell”—with the correspondent across his -shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded -out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the -knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief -twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his -saddle, arms around his horse’s neck, he headed for the town.</p> -<p class="pnext">As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging -yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. -Followed the terrible roar of a rout—yells, shrieks, curses, victorious -shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it -caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated -above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked -with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted -adobe streets to the railroad yards.</p> -<p class="pnext">There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains -and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the -hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, -then—the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass be-spattered -with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, sentient human -beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with Valles’s own -guns.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’re farther up!” the correspondent whispered through white, drawn -lips. “We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main -line to insure our getaway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile. -“That’s queer. It stood about here, yet I don’t see the placards. -Perhaps we have overshot.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car -ahead. “Here, señores! This way!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Just then, too, the door rolled back and the “dean” looked out. “Hurry -up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales -Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick -sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out. -We’re traveling, for the present, incognito. You’re hurt! Here, you -fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!”</p> -<p class="pnext">After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the “dean” turned to -Bull. “That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning, -looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the -Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome -accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang, -and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine’s tug.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxii-travail"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id33">XXXII: TRAVAIL</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">The instant she passed from Gordon’s sight Lee’s smile went out, -quenched by mortal fear. For years tales that defied by their black -horror exaggeration by even the fervid <em class="italics">peon</em> minds had filtered into Los -Arboles, and, more vividly than Gordon, she realized her danger.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was not so much Ramon. At San Carlos she would have a fighting -chance; stood ready to match her woman’s wit against his man’s strength. -Her fear centered on the men.</p> -<p class="pnext">As, overtaking them, he rode by on the narrow path, Ilarian pressed -close against her. “Cheer up, little one! ’Tis the fighting cock that -wins his hen. ’Tis the way of the world, and what matter it so long as -she be won? ’Tis his turn now, but later ’twill be for thee to keep him -itching.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Laughing hoarsely, he rode on, but in passing his rude fingers searched -the softness of her arm and she caught the bold look into her eyes of -his grinning fellow. Thereafter she felt their glances touching, -plucking at her like fumbling fingers. Now glowing with shame, again -frozen with terror, she endured it—to her it seemed hours before she -spoke to Ramon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m afraid of those men. Can’t you—send them away?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He shrugged. “You have more reason to be afraid of me.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You?” In spite of the deadly chill at her heart she managed a little -laugh. “That is impossible.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Fear one’s oldest friend?” Already, with intuitive guile, she was -laying the foundations of her defense. Though he looked at her with -quick suspicion, she returned the innocent eyes nature has given woman -for her chief protection. “For you—a man of whom I have known only good? -But these men fill me with fear.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Suspicion clouded, for a moment, his eyes. Passing, it left his gloom -lighter. Reassurance softened his tone. “Don’t be afraid. They will -leave us at San Carlos.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But, Ramon, it is now noon. If we ride hard we cannot get there before -dark.” She shuddered at the thought.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You would rather we were alone?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A thousand times.” She returned to his gaze the same innocent eyes—and -once more his gloom lightened a shade.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They are going to San Carlos anyway, so I can hardly send them away. -But I am armed, and there is no necessity for you to be afraid. Also—you -said that the jefe and priest at San Carlos would refuse to marry us. If -so, these are the men who can help me compel.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ramon!” she spoke with dread earnestness, “look quickly behind you!”</p> -<p class="pnext">He did, and his quick frown told that he was not pleased. Dismounting -under a pretext of cinching up his saddle, he motioned for the two men -behind to pass ahead.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You saw!” she said, riding on. “You are armed, but they are four to -one; may take you unawares. I ask only one thing. Keep my feet bound, -take any other precaution you choose, but unfasten my hands and—lend me -your knife.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“To use on <em class="italics">me</em>, if you get the chance?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not on you nor them!” Her steady look carried her meaning.</p> -<p class="pnext">His glance went forward to the revolutionists, who broke out, just then, -in uproarious laughter.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If I thought—” His hand went to his gun, then fell again. “No! they are -rough and coarse, but they know well that my father is Valles’s friend; -that if they lifted a hand against me he would flay them alive. Really, -there is no danger, yet—if it will make you less fearful. But you -promise—to return it, the knife, at San Carlos?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I promise.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I never knew you to lie, and I—” His face lost a little of its -hardness. “I would prefer to be gentle.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Leaning over, he unbound her arms, then gave her the case-knife that -hung at his hip. “I suppose I’m a fool,” he said as she slid it under -her belt inside her shirt.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Indeed you are not!” she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a -picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned -her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead -rope and go galloping back.</p> -<p class="pnext">The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse. -Also, with a woman’s self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the -thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on -till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her -again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the -afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and -rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley, -thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them. -While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows -drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which -men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped, -suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with -apprehension.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The beasts are tired, señor, and this is a good place to camp,” a voice -came back.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, don’t! Let us keep on!” she pleaded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The animals are tired and must be fed,” Ramon answered. “After they are -rested we will go on.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a -wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been -possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a -match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her -down and seated her close to the fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her -swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet—all -the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror. -Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from -his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her, -she broke out with a sudden scream:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Take care!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him, -pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee -leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started -toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his -pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the -wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and -pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white -shoulder and threw her to the ground.</p> -<p class="pnext">She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish -face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark -lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay -till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, no!” The snatch of the second man loosened the other’s grip so that -she fell between them to the ground. “No, hombre, fair play between -compañeros. We shall gamble for her. The winner, if he choose, can then -sell his chance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The fighting, writhing mass at the other side of the fire now -straightened out, and as they rose, leaving Ramon securely bound on the -ground, the other two added their protests. “Si, hombre, we will not -stand for that. She goes first to the winner, according to our custom. -Bring her back to the fire.”</p> -<p class="pnext">To avoid their handling, she rose and walked herself. As she came where -the light fell on Ramon she saw that he had managed to struggle up on -his knees. Now he began to speak, pleading, arguing, threatening his -captors with the displeasure of their general.</p> -<p class="pnext">But he drew only jokes and laughter. “Valles?” Ilarian answered him. “He -was defeated by the Carranzistas, and has trouble enough to care for -himself. The requisition el capitan showed was made out months before -the battle. Had the señor, your father, been fool enough to fill it, we -should have taken the horses for ourselves.” With a shove that sent -Ramon flat on his back, he added: “Lie down, hombre! For these many -years thou and thy fathers laid the whip on our backs. While we starved -they fed fat and made free with our women. Now it is for thee to watch -us at the eating and loving.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Laughing, he caught Lee again with a sudden snatch, was forcing her head -back, when Rafael again interfered. “Hands off, hombre, till the cards -say she is thine!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, muddle not the waters for our drinking,” the others added. “Let us -eat, then get to the cards.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The bride? She must not go hungry at the wedding feast.” The fourth man -offered her food. “Here, little one.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Weak and faint, she was backing away, but stopped with a sudden -inspiration. “If I may share it with him?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Seguro.” Rising, the man dragged Ramon a few feet away and set him up, -back propped against a tree. “Only take care he bite not thy pretty -fingers.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Laughing, he went back to the fire, leaving her to sit and watch their -feeding of meat and <em class="italics">tortillas</em>, with gulps of liquor from clay bottles.</p> -<p class="pnext">Between her and them yawned a gap in time wider than the centuries that -intervened between herself and her wode-stained ancestors running wild -in the woods of Britain. Their low, sloping foreheads, unbalanced heads -with all the weight below; their loose mouths, brute jaws, dark skin, -nature’s infallible stigma of inferiority, pronounced them half a -million years behind her, the last-bloom of a higher race.</p> -<p class="pnext">In her a solitary youth had intensified the delicate fancies, -sensitiveness, timorous imaginings, shrinkings, and retreats that mark a -young girl’s first reachings toward love. And now—her idealizations were -suddenly confronted with the caveman’s brutal practice. Sitting there, -she endured a thousand tortures. Worse than their coarse jests were -their glances. She shrank under them in hot shame; to escape them took -the food they offered, moved over and knelt beside Ramon.</p> -<p class="pnext">He was sitting, head hanging, but as, now, he looked up the firelight -showed the sweat in beads on his brow. “<em class="italics">You</em> bring <em class="italics">me</em> food?” His -accent carried more than a thousand self-reproaches.</p> -<p class="pnext">She did not attempt consolation she did not feel. “Pretend to eat.” She -spoke in English. “They are watching, now. But soon they will -gamble”—she shuddered, thinking of the stake—“will see only the cards. I -still have your knife. When the time serves I will cut you loose. Their -rifles are piled behind us with the saddles. They may shoot you down -from the fire. But to reach them is our only chance.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He lowered his head to hide a sudden flash of hope. “I will do anything, -take any chance. Greater punishment no man could suffer than I am -enduring. But it has made me think—realize my blind selfishness. I can -only ask your forgiveness.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now, compañeros, the cards! Cut and shuffle for love!” A hoarse voice -came from the fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">While the first hand of a game she did not understand was being dealt -she watched the flying cards with dread interest; was still watching -when Ramon whispered:</p> -<p class="pnext">“I know that game. Five minutes will see it finished. By leaning a -little to one side, your body will cover my elbows. One cut will set -them free. I will still sit as I am, and when I whisper slash the riata -at my feet, then run! run into the depths of the woods. From here to San -Carlos is but a couple of leagues. Once there—with the jefe, you will be -safe.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ilarian’s bellowing laugh rang out, just then, marking the close of the -first hand. “One to me, little one! Be not impatient. The luck is with -us. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“If he wins again it will be over in a minute,” Ramon whispered, while -the cards were fluttering around again. As the men bent over them, -thumbing their hands, he gave the word, “Now!”</p> -<p class="pnext">With two slashes she did it, one at his arms, the other at his feet. But -swift as was the movement, Rafael caught it in the tail of his eye. When -he turned she had dropped the knife in the grass and, though her heart -stood still, she resumed her pretense of feeding Ramon. As he watched -her the suspicion died out of the man’s stare. He was just about to turn -again to the game when, as Ramon leaned forward to take the bite she was -offering, the severed <em class="italics">riata</em> fell from his elbows.</p> -<p class="pnext">Given two men in a sudden juncture, the one with a definite plan wins -the lead. As the man jumped up, pointing, Ramon sprang, reached the -rifles, aimed and shot him down. The others looked up, startled, and as -he aimed again they pulled and fired.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Run, querida, run!” Ramon had called it, leaping up. As he collapsed on -the heap of saddles it issued again on his last dry whisper, “Run!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It had all happened while she was scrambling up. Naturally she turned -when Ramon fell and paused, horror-stricken. Not till the others were -almost upon her did she turn and run—too late.</p> -<p class="pnext">As, heart fluttering like that of a frightened quail, she ran for the -wood Ilarian seized her. Wildly beating the brutal, pock-marked face, -she writhed helplessly in his arms.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxiii-the-death-in-the-night"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id34">XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">During the rest of the day, while the train rolled and rattled and -jolted its slow way over the heated face of the desert, the -correspondents stewed with Bull in their own juices in semi-darkness. At -intervals there would come a stop. With the mad, blind selfishness of -panic the <em class="italics">brigada</em> Gonzales had burned the watering-tanks as they -passed. So those that followed had to draw for the engine with buckets -from wells. Also there were occasional rails to be replaced which, with -equal selfishness, they tore up again the moment the train passed over.</p> -<p class="pnext">When the sun finally set in a fiery conflagration and dusk brought some -cess of the heat the conductor came in with tales of wholesale -desertions from the <em class="italics">brigada</em> Gonzales, and shortly thereafter began the -dispersion of their own men. As they approached familiar country, or -tempted by tales of rich loot to be taken from near-by <em class="italics">haciendas</em>, they -began to drop off in fives, fifties, tens. Of those that had kept the -corrugated-iron roof beating like a drum with their stampings and -shufflings throughout the afternoon, there remained only a single -solitary figure when, after dark, Bull climbed up on top to air his -choked lungs.</p> -<p class="pnext">As he sat down on the running-board the figure looked up, then moved -closer. “It is thee, señor?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Peering, Bull made out the face. It was the sentry who had spoken to him -at Valles’s door. As his mind associated what the “dean” had said with -the recognition he spoke quickly. “The señor Benson? Didst thou see—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señor.” His head moved in the gloom. In the rambling <em class="italics">peon</em> fashion -he ran on: “‘The close mouth admits no flies,’ said Matador. ‘Keep thine -shut and we shall make thee a captain to-morrow.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A captain of what, señor? Of ghosts? For I was not deceived. He that -was sentry when they killed the German? He became a captain? Also they -that helped to roast the Spaniard till he told where he had hidden his -gold? And the three that killed el presidente for Huerta? Captains and -majors and colonels were they—of the dead. Si, among the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> it -is become a saying, ‘Be not a captain till thou hast grown lieutenant’s -spurs.’ Si, I knew that I should be dead before the eve of another day, -so I fled my guard, señor, and came straight to thee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though he was on fire to hear, Bull knew better than to bring his crude -thought into confusion by interruption. While the train ambled along he -let the narrative take its own course.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘A captain?’ said Matador!” His eloquent shoulders quivered in the -gloom. “Better to be a live mozo at the tail of Don Miguel’s horses in -Las Bocas.”</p> -<p class="pnext">From a second pause he ran on: “He came to the cuartel general, the -señor Benson, while I was sentry of the second watch at the door of my -general. He was in there, Valles, with a girl. I had seen her go in—such -a girl! tall and straight, with eyes misty as twin nights, teeth white -as bleached bone, hair thick and black as the pine forests that clothe -the Sierra Madras! Santisimo, señor! such a girl as one may have when he -has combed a country and taken first pick of its women! I could hear her -laughing in there when the señor Benson came striding up the stairs.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I saw, when he drew near, that his face was flushed, but there was no -smell of liquor upon him. ’Twas the red of the great anger that burned -in his veins, kept his head shaking like that of a tormented bull. When -I barred the way he looked at me with eyes that snapped like living -sparks, shoved me aside into the corner with one sweep of his arm, -before I could stop him had opened the door and walked in—walked in, -señor, through the anteroom into the private office where Valles was at -play with the girl!</p> -<p class="pnext">“El Matador himself had warned me, ‘Let no man pass!’ But when I had -picked myself out of the corner and followed in, there he stood in front -of Valles, who had dropped the girl and leaped to his feet. Surprise and -fear showed on his face—the fear of bullet, knife, and poison that dogs -him everywhere. But it changed at once to a grin—the terrible grin his -people fear. His glance at me said, ‘Stay!’ and as I stood, waiting in -fear and trembling, he spoke with a voice that cut like a knife.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘It is my amigo, the señor Benson.’</p> -<p class="pnext">“Señor, I have seen his generals tremble when he spoke like that. Even -el Matador, tiger that he is, would slink before him like a whipped cat. -For all the pesos in all the world I would not have taken his place. Yet -that great Englishman stood before him solid and square as a stone; -answered with a voice of a hacendado in speech with a <em class="italics">peon</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘I came to tell you, Valles’—just like that he spoke, señor, without -even a ‘my general’—‘I came to tell you that I do not take my answers -from secretaries. The offer I made you this morning was fair and square -and good business for both of us. It deserved more than a threat of -‘requisitions.’ You’ll never get my horses that way—if I have to cut -their throats. If you want them, say so—yes or no.’</p> -<p class="pnext">“He got it, the ‘no,’ quick and hard. Then the great anger that was in -him burst forth like a river in flood. Like bear and tiger they -quarreled, the señor threatening Valles with the power and vengeance of -his government, Valles snarling defiance, their passions feeding each -other as brands burn together in a fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">“One other thing, and you will have a picture of it, señor—the two at -their furious talk, the girl against the wall behind Valles, one hand -held out, fear in her great eyes, and a fourth; for as they wrangled -there came a stir behind me. So quietly that I, whom he touched in -passing, did not hear, el Matador came into the room. One second he -stood, watching them from narrow eyes, then, slowly and quietly as a -snake slipping through grass, he drew up behind the señor. I have shot -men in this war. At home in Las Bocas I have drawn the knife in passion. -But the cold glittering of his eyes, slow snake crawl, chilled the blood -of me.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He had gained knifing distance when the señor roared in disgust. ‘Bah! -Why do I waste words on a <em class="italics">peon</em>? My general, is it? I have had such -generals whipped on my place! General? A bandit <em class="italics">peon</em> who steals horses -in place of the chickens with which he began his thieveries!’</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Bandit <em class="italics">peon</em>? Stealer of chickens?’ This, señor, to Valles that had -killed a hundred men with his own hand before the wars ever began? The -yellow eyes of him seemed to leap out of his face. At the sight of him, -frothing like a mad tiger in lust to kill, the girl screamed, hiding her -face! At his belt hung pearl-jeweled pistols, the best of their kind. -But with the instinct of his old trade the hand of the butcher flew to -his knife.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They say that the señor tried to kill him. It is a lie! Even when the -knife flashed in his eyes he still stood at his distance, shaking his -big fist, growling his threats, angry but unafraid; so big, strong, -masterful, that Valles, even in his fury, hesitated. But not el Matador! -Looking back as she ran out of the room, the girl saw as I saw; screamed -aloud as the knife passed, once! twice! with a hiss and ’heigh! -splitting the backbone, piercing the heart.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With that strong sense of the dramatic which makes the <em class="italics">peon</em> a born -story-teller he stopped. For a moment the flash of a match lifted the -brown, hard face from the gloom under a tattered <em class="italics">sombrero</em>, lighting -the faded red of his blanket serape. Then they faded again into a dim, -huddled figure that swayed with the rack and swing of the cars.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had unconsciously suspended his breath. Now it expired in a sigh. -“His disposal. Know you aught of that?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The shrug quivered again in the darkness. “There is little more that I -saw. Across the body el Matador looked at me, and I chilled with the -sure knowledge that I should never see my niñas again. He even stepped, -then Valles spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘This is a good hombre. He will help thee with—that!’ He followed the -girl into the next room.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Between us, el Matador and I, we rolled the señor in serapes, binding -them with cords so that the face should not be seen by them that carried -him out to the secret place; and it was then that he spoke of my -captaincy.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Go now to thy quarters, señor.’ He clapped me on both shoulders. ‘And -dream of the stars the morning sun will see flashing here.’</p> -<p class="pnext">“But lest I sleep too well, señor, I came from the cuartel here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">For a full minute, while Bull chewed the bitter cud of remorse, the cars -racked on through the night. Then he spoke. “There is one in El Oro, the -consul Ingles, that would have given many pesos—not the currency of -Valles, but real pesos of silver and gold—for thee to set thy name to -this!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si!” His cigarette glowed in the midst of a shrug. “Of what use pesos, -even silver and gold, when the sight is darkened and the mouth shut? -When one may no longer see the niñas at play, watch the dancing of -girls? When the taste of good food is gone from the mouth, the feel of -warm liquor from the throat? He that betrays Valles will have no more -use of these.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But in El Paso,” Bull urged, “one would be beyond the reach of his -hand. There, also, is a consul Ingles.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“One’s pais? The rise and set of sun across the desert beyond Las Bocas; -the chatter of the women at their washing by the stream; the soft -laughter of girls; one’s children watching at dusk for the return—these -are not to be bought with pesos. One’s pais is one’s pais. To it one -always returns.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si,” Bull acknowledged the call, the most powerful in the feeling of a -Mexican. “But from El Paso one could go by the ferrocarril Americano. In -one day he could cross from El Paso to Nogales, thence south to Las -Bocas and live in plenty beyond the reach of Valles. And one’s woman and -niñas—would smile the sweeter at the sight of a bulging pocket.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The cigarette glowed again, this time without the shrug. “There is -something in that. Si, señor, I will do it!—go to the consul Ingles in -El Paso.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Just then the Chinaman called for Bull to come down to supper. He was -not hungry, but he had food handed up for the man, who, after eating it, -rolled up in his serape and went to sleep. Then, while he snored and the -train racked slowly along the chain of fires, each a station that lay -like red beads on the desert’s dark breast, Bull lay suffering agonies -of shame and remorse that grew more vivid as the miles lessened between -him and home.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was long after midnight before he fell into troubled sleep. When he -woke, at gray dawn, the revolutionist was gone.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Homesick and scared out!” Bull shrugged—and what did it matter? That -which was done was done!</p> -<p class="pnext">Nor was he the only deserter. All through the night the train had -dribbled away its evil freight in trickles that would spread through the -land till it was inundated with a flood of carnage, robbery, rape. Of -the clustering brown swarm on the roof there remained only a few dozens -scattered in heavy sleep throughout the train’s length.</p> -<p class="pnext">Across the brightening east the mountains now laid a familiar pattern. -Beyond—the <em class="italics">patio</em> and compound of Los Arboles were lying still and gray -under the dawn. Bull saw, with the distinctness of vision, the sheet -across Lee’s doorway quiver under the breath of dawn. Then it faded, -gave place to the Mills <em class="italics">rancho</em>, equally still, equally silent; its -warm gold walls pale gray, the clustering bougainvilleas dark as clotted -blood.</p> -<p class="pnext">That feeling analogous to the chill of death which envelops a sleeping -house held him in thrall. While he gazed, there appeared on the veranda -the familiar vision. But he shut it out, tightly closing the eyes of his -mind. He turned his face to a dark dot, walls of the burned station, -that appeared to be moving toward him across the desert’s grays. -Climbing down over the end, he passed through the Chinaman’s kitchen -into the car.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was still dusk in there, but he could hear the deep breathing of -correspondents, sleeping heavily after the exhaustion of the hot night. -Quietly he gathered his belongings, had shoved open the door -sufficiently to pass out, when a whisper came from behind:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Adios, Diogenes!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning, he saw the correspondent leaning out of his bunk.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t take that little slip too seriously, old man,” he whispered as -they shook hands. “Try again. If it wasn’t for this”—he tapped his -knee—“I’d have helped you to get out your girl. But you’ll make it all -right. Only don’t dally. There’s going to be hell to pay.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The engine was whistling for the station. Though it did not stop, Bull -jumped and, if a bit shaken, landed unhurt. He was watching the train -recede, his hand still tingling, heart warmed by the strong pressure of -his friend’s hand, when his name was called.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It is you, señor Perrin?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Drowsy and heavy-eyed from lost sleep, the Mexican agent stood in the -doorway of his box-car station. Anxiety and fear shadowed his face.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Wicked times, señor. Up and down the line they are robbing and -murdering, Valles’s defeated soldados. Many gringos have been slain. -Early in the night a company of fifty dropped off here and are gone, mad -with hate, to loot the gringo haciendas.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Appalled, Bull stared at the distant mountains.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxiv"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id35">XXXIV: ---------------------?</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Left alone on the trail, Gordon suffered his own agonies—the poignant -anguishes of youth unmitigated by the fatalism or philosophy of -experience. Time and again his spirit rose in furious rebellion against -the frightful injustice of fate. Eyes starting with the strain, sweat -pouring from his brow, he rolled in successive paroxysms, vainly -striving to burst his bonds—only to subside each time into a coma of -utter despair. Then, as the very violence of his exertions cleared the -blood from his brain, he did that which an older head would have done at -first—lay still and began to think.</p> -<p class="pnext">How to get loose! There must be some way! He had once seen a prisoner in -a “movie” burn off his bonds with a fire of hay started by the coals -from his pipe. But if it were possible—outside of a “movie”—where were -the hay and pipe? An attempt to cut the <em class="italics">riata</em> by abrasion on a stone -behind him produced only a sore on his wrists. Yet there must be some -way! If he could only loosen them by flexing and reflexing his muscles! -He stopped thinking, at this point, and lay staring downhill.</p> -<p class="pnext">His struggles had carried him to within a few feet of the dead -revolutionist. Before leaving, his followers had looted the body of its -guns, bandolier of cartridges, but had left the belt. Under the body -Gordon now caught a glimpse of his knife.</p> -<p class="pnext">To roll downhill was simple. With his butting shoulders, it was no trick -to move the body till the knife came up into position where he could -draw it with his teeth. But thereafter—a knife in the teeth could not be -used to free hands bound behind one’s back!</p> -<p class="pnext">He looked about him. The problem was simple. If the knife could be held -firmly so that he could turn and rub the wrist-cords against the edge. -Presently his eye lit on the stump of a <em class="italics">palo verde</em> that had been -bruised and split off by the slip of some passing beast. Working his way -over to it, he bent and carefully placed the horn handle in the split, -edge up, point resting at an angle of forty-five on the ground. Then, -shuffling around, he felt delicately till the razor edge came squarely -between his wrists. Very lightly, in mortal dread of a miscarriage, he -sawed, sawed, sawed until his hands suddenly split apart. One slash at -his ankles and he was upon his feet.</p> -<p class="pnext">His first thought was to run, wildly, madly, after Lee. Then his usual -good judgment resumed command. The revolutionists were mounted and had -an hour’s start! He must have a horse! And with the thought there rose a -mental picture of the <em class="italics">arriero</em> they had seen at the <em class="italics">fonda</em>.</p> -<p class="pnext">A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from -the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee -had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to -help.</p> -<p class="pnext">He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now -the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he -came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose -out of the cañon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the -<em class="italics">arriero’s</em> sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling -up out on the level.</p> -<p class="pnext">The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top -speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the <em class="italics">arriero</em> only one -thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his -rifle across the animal’s back showed how he came to be still riding the -trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and “requisitions.” -As he had seen Lee pass the <em class="italics">fonda</em> with Gordon, one word, -“revolutionists,” fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got -only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his -clucks of commiseration.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied -remedies to my own niñas when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will -cry her eyes out over this!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the -hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule -crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of -serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his -questions with frightful oaths.</p> -<p class="pnext">“How many were they, señor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That -leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all -with one flick of my knife! Take thou this.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own -riding-mule, he ran on:</p> -<p class="pnext">“You shall ride her, señor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats -of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding. -But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse’s two. An -hour’s start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in -five, or less if they camp at dark.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol -cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back -down the ravine to the lush grass by the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, where old Antonio -would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle -across his arm, saddle <em class="italics">machete</em> and knife close to his hand, black eyes -glittering under his <em class="italics">sombrero</em>, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready -for the start.</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did -Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made -up in utility. Justifying its owner’s boast, it navigated steeps, slid -down into cañons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the -opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking -pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free -wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds, -now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again -hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would -easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained -steadily upon the first.</p> -<p class="pnext">Fast as the little beasts traveled, however, their pace appeared like an -insect’s crawl when measured by Gordon’s fears. Action, at first, -brought relief. Later he fell again a prey to anguish. The threat of the -revolutionists filled him with horror through which, as in a dreadful -nightmare, he saw Lee struggling frantically. Of Ramon he never even -thought. It was always the men. Yet he managed to hold himself in hand; -refrained from lashing the mule into the furious pace that would, while -killing it, have still lagged far behind his fears.</p> -<p class="pnext">And he had always at his side the <em class="italics">arriero</em>, with his repeated, “Do not -trouble, señor; they will keep traveling till dark!” to cheer him.</p> -<p class="pnext">The latter’s sharp glance it was that picked out the sign where the -revolutionists had swung on to the San Carlos trail. His hawk eyes -found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the -opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn -veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists’ -fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly, -it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them, -after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently -shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light -of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside -Ramon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“One to me, little one,” Ilarian’s bellow just then rang out. “Be not -impatient. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At the sight of Ramon, the <em class="italics">arriero’s</em> brows had gone up under the roots -of his hair, for, had he wished it, Gordon’s Spanish would not have -permitted a full explanation. Now he touched Gordon, pointing. Nodding, -he nipped off a few leaves, then leveled the long Colt, aiming at the -nearest man. A glance to his right showed him the <em class="italics">arriero</em> slowly -shoving his rifle-barrel through the leaves. Then, turning again to his -aim, he was just in time to see Lee slash Ramon’s bonds.</p> -<p class="pnext">The next instant the latter sprang for the rifles. Lee was up and -standing almost in line with the man he had covered. He dared not shoot, -and in the next five seconds, before they could readjust themselves to -the rapid change, the situation had flashed into its final stage—Ramon -had fallen with one revolutionist; the others were rushing at Lee across -the firelit space.</p> -<p class="pnext">By that time Gordon had risen. As, standing, he fired from the edge of -the wood a second man fell forward upon his face. The <em class="italics">arriero’s</em> rifle -cracked sharply, and there remained only Ilarian. Swinging with Lee, -still in his arms, he faced Gordon charging across the firelit space.</p> -<p class="pnext">Usually Gordon could be depended upon to keep his head. But Lee’s bitter -cry, the sight of her helplessness, combined with the awful strain of -the afternoon, produced in him a berserker rage. Teeth bared in a snarl, -his gun completely forgotten, he seized Ilarian with his naked hands -just as he dropped Lee; threw him with such violence that his feet rose -in the air and he struck shoulders first on the ground. Then, without -even a second glance, he lifted and gathered Lee in his arms.</p> -<p class="pnext">Fortunately, the <em class="italics">arriero</em> not only kept his wits, but was working them -overtime. As, rolling over, Ilarian pulled and pointed his gun the -<em class="italics">arriero’s</em> second bullet plumped between his shoulders.</p> -<p class="pnext">It is doubtful whether Gordon heard the shot. His face in Lee’s hair, -hers hidden in his breast, they remained without looking around even -when the <em class="italics">arriero</em> spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Warm work, señor!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Receiving no answer, he grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose. -“They are all that way—at first,” he confided in the stars. “But wait -till the priest ties them so that neither can wriggle without the other. -Wait!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A cough also passing unnoticed, he walked over and knelt beside Ramon. -With a heavy shake of the head, he passed to the revolutionists. Three -were dead, but, though unconscious, Ilarian still breathed stertorously.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The worse for thee, amigo,” the <em class="italics">arriero</em> addressed him. “The old señor -Icarza will pay well to do thy killing with his own hands. By sunrise, -mañana, I should have thee to him, and then”—he gave a little sinister -nod at the dead—“and then thou wilt be envying these.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A glance at the lovers having shown them to be, to all intents and -purposes, still alone under the stars, he went off, shaking his head, to -bring up the mules. “Santa Maria Marisima! to think that I, also, was -once so foolish!”</p> -<p class="pnext">On his return he gathered up the arms, belts, knives, bandoliers of -cartridges, guns—it has to be written, also stripping the khaki coats -and riding-boots from the dead. “They will serve thee no more after the -old señor finishes,” he addressed the unconscious Ilarian, as he tore -off his.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he was packing his loot in an orderly and methodical manner on the -mules a murmur of talk rose behind him. But as it was couched in English -he was saved from further reflections.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh—<em class="italics">dear!</em>” Lee’s exclamations, partially smothered in a rough and -dirty shirt, still conveyed a curious mixture of confidence and fear, -regret, relief, sorrow, and happiness, hope and doubt. “Oh—<em class="italics">dear!</em> I -used to be so independent and fearless. Now—I feel so weak.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Time you did.” A hug mitigated the severity of the comment. “After this -perhaps you will let me do a little of your thinking?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“For a while.” The shirt choked a little, perverse laugh. “Till I get -over it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well, we are going on, right now, to be married in San Carlos.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, but—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No ‘buts.’ We’ll take no more chances.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She hesitated and—gave in. “Oh, isn’t it nice to have some one decide -for you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Had the <em class="italics">arriero</em> been consulted he could have told a tale. But Gordon -quite believed it. He was raising her face to his when her eyes -distended with a sudden sorrow.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, poor Ramon! Whatever are we thinking of?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the <em class="italics">arriero</em> had -finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent -her back into Gordon’s arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the -<em class="italics">arriero</em> took affairs into his own capable hands.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I shall take him home to the old señor, with this wicked one, and tell -him that he died in defense of thee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better. -“They will never—know,” she sobbed, more quietly. “And—at the end—he was -sorry.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxv-why"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id36">XXXV: WHY?</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the -chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky -that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The bandits moved toward the señor Lovell’s.” He answered. “Praise the -saints! the señoritas are both in El Paso.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then they’ll go straight on to Mary’s!” The last vestige of color -drained from Bull’s face.</p> -<p class="pnext">Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle -of foul humanity dribbling down upon the <em class="italics">rancho</em>. He saw Mary Mills on -the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and -trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating -the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty -dribble swept around her and the child.</p> -<p class="pnext">He turned to the agent. “My horse? Did they get him?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, señor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral.” He -pointed eastward. “Come!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Half an hour later the <em class="italics">mozo</em> shoved a shock head out of the chaparral -in answer to the agent’s whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was -on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare -of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed -through his mind.</p> -<p class="pnext">In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and -Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden -agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. -But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he -would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end. -At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that -afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a -mountain ahead.</p> -<p class="pnext">He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson -to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line -with the widow’s <em class="italics">rancho</em> his fears crystallized around its slender -column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched -till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in -bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always -timed Bull’s arrival at the <em class="italics">rancho</em> with the lowering of the sun. As he -urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow -lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the -ominous cloud had died on the mountain’s high shoulder; but, more -ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though -prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the -place.</p> -<p class="pnext">The externals were the same—crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny -pastures. At this hour the widow’s cattle were usually to be seen -forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now—in all the -wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, -lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills.</p> -<p class="pnext">The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the -evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with -purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that -stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that -shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, -Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle -and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then -a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer.</p> -<p class="pnext">A wild rush of hope swept his being—to die the next moment when, -rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio’s woman. On her knees, hands raised -in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see -or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked -beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull’s face. Though -she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that -follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only -the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half -vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections -of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at -him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a -passion of tears.</p> -<p class="pnext">At any other time Bull’s dominant racial contempt would have caused him -to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his -sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Aie!... Aie!” Soon she began to speak. “Aie! the poor señora ... and -the niña ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! -Aie! where were they?”</p> -<p class="pnext">A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited -with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man -on the train, to tell the tale in her own way.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They came in from all sides, señor.” Her hands swept the round of the -hills. “Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, -escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The señora -was at breakfast with the niña in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came -running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White -as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. -But she shook it off, señor, went forward to meet them with smiles and -greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while -she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to -them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of -pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its -paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating -them off with her smiles.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Enter, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.’ -Thus she spoke them.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of -beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it -reeked with their evil presence.</p> -<p class="pnext">“At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the -sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in -place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so -their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, -soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad -talk, they proceeded to worse—entered her bedroom and the child’s, broke -open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing.</p> -<p class="pnext">“For that she did not care—not for anything, could she but keep the -child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her -with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon -them.</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Get Betty away!’ she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to -that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Still she had hope—that, being fed and flattered and pleased with their -plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and went -among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and pinches, she -still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with smiling -reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from her hand, -and then—and then—how shall one tell it?</p> -<p class="pnext">“They demanded that the señorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At -first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her -‘Linda’ and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At -last one beast pulled her on to his knee.</p> -<p class="pnext">“To me, in the kitchen, came the child’s scream and the señora’s bitter -cry. ‘For the sake of your mothers, señores!’ followed by the crash of -furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor.</p> -<p class="pnext">“At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at -the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One! -Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went -down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the -ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I -gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward -upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams -of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of -God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she -cowered at Bull’s feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Go on!” He stooped and shook her violently. “Go on!”</p> -<p class="pnext">She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. “I was wrong, señor. -One mercy was granted—death! They murdered them ... murdered them! -Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them—the innocent -woman, sweet child!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yet you—escaped?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was -almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, -they were gone—gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after -they have slain the white heifer of the plains.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his -arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, -blind struggle filled his mind.</p> -<p class="pnext">The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in -a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this -horror? “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to -the fourth generation,” says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills’s -blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and -farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement? -And she—who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout -her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul? -Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration?</p> -<p class="pnext">Not in these clear terms did Bull’s thought run. Blind anguish kept him -straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he -felt—felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any -doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his -consciousness a sound that rose above the woman’s sobbing—the dry murmur -of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. They -were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone forever -beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! Surely -they were gone! Yet—the corruption of the tomb, mold of the grave, would -never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames they had passed -into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains that he was, -born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took comfort in the -thought.</p> -<p class="pnext">Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in -upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw -through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills’s -face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a -timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then—with deep -thankfulness he realized it—now she would never know! never know how far -he had fallen below his resolves.</p> -<p class="pnext">Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did -enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, -was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own -sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they -were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, -he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary -way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his -breast the thought—now she would never know!</p> -<p class="pnext">From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, “Why?” He -had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is -merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this -terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in -their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him. -His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds -than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had -utterly failed in its duties to its own—the government that, with the -purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and -loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric -people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies.</p> -<p class="pnext">Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward. -Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by -diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern -nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged—across the -Rio Grande.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You done it!” His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the -force of his indictment. “Yes, <em class="italics">you</em> done it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his -attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still -forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he -knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to -supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from -sharing.</p> -<p class="pnext">When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the -sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains—and -revenge.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxvi-in-the-midst-of-life"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id37">XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night -that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam -of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined -days before obscured by gathering dangers.</p> -<p class="pnext">Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his -arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in -their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos -nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the -railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it -had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed -like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a -picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise -counsel of Lee’s good friends, the <em class="italics">jefe</em> and priest, Gordon had -prevailed.</p> -<p class="pnext">“These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own,” the -priest had advised. “Los Arboles needs a man’s hardness.”</p> -<p class="pnext">To which the <em class="italics">jefe</em> had added his little joke, “Managing thee, niña, -will not be his lightest work.”</p> -<p class="pnext">No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, -taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican -law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the -wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would -have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church -are on Cupid’s side—well, there is no country on earth where his -business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that -shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and -Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, -according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl’s -expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon’s notice. -Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I was thinking of the girl I left down there.” She expressed the -feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they -have left their girlhood. “She meant well, but—was <em class="italics">so</em> foolish. I was -just wondering if—if—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton.” He helped her out. “If -she isn’t the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of -heaven”—he paused, grinning—“and hell—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You didn’t make <em class="italics">me</em> suffer, of course!” She flashed up in quite the -old manner. “The way you carried on with that <em class="italics">dreadful</em> girl. But there -goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning. -Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to. -Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose -her temper and—What are you laughing at? Don’t you <em class="italics">want</em> me to reform?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“There! there!” Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second -laugh. “If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I’d—I’d march -you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the service -backward.” Quite illogically he went on: “I, too, had a serious hour -with myself. I made up my mind—”</p> -<p class="pnext">He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. “Not -to change? Don’t dare to say it!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change -is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You won’t, will you?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He assured her, of course, that he wouldn’t—and believed it, no doubt. -So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to -remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they -turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went -with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid -underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and -valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, -midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the -mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on -a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter.</p> -<p class="pnext">In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by -sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining -along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in -many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It -looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon’s beast dropped -hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still -longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes -Pedro’s <em class="italics">jacal</em> in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of -ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the <em class="italics">camisa</em> and -<em class="italics">calzones</em> of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old -fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a -welcoming grin.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’s really part of the scenery”—Lee communed aloud with -herself—“almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay. -But, no!” She shook her head. “I don’t want any human being here but -ourselves. Oh, I know! We’ll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to -Sliver and Jake.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither would she—after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any -commerce with the <em class="italics">jacal</em>. “It isn’t that it’s dirty. Old Pedro is as -clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his -housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We’ll camp by the stream at the -far end of the valley.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated -a savory stew of <em class="italics">frijoles</em> which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it -to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon -commandeered an old shot-gun.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What for?” Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his -eye proved him at one with her in spirit. “To kill the meat for our -first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of -any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in -this neck of the woods.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That will be fine!” Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not -clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. “The wood at the -end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They’re just lovely broiled -over hot coals.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Broiled over hot coals?” he teased her. “Wild doves, the symbol of -love? What desecration!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I don’t care,” she pouted. “One has to eat—and they’re awfully good.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down -a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went -after wild pigeon without compunction.</p> -<p class="pnext">After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak -had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to -gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches. -First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance -around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a -natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with -a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Your turn, Dirty Man,” she rallied him. “Go and take your bath.”</p> -<p class="pnext">When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow -wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and -served the <em class="italics">frijoles</em> on golden husks of corn from Pedro’s garden. -Nature supplied the other utensils—fingers for forks, their sharp young -teeth for knives, bits of <em class="italics">tortilla</em> to scoop up the stew. Both in its -preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first -meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a -dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all -sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to -help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is <em class="italics">my</em> work. You can -watch and smoke.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a -cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven’t tried.” The -confession was nullified by a little sigh. “But it always makes me sick. -You don’t know how I envy Maria and Teresa!” Lighting it, she took a -couple of small puffs, then passed it on. “I always tried to get Bull -and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own -quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father’s den -and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he -went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into -his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so -tobaccery and strong and—<em class="italics">manny</em>. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort -and protection.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the -attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, -rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few -utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a -squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of -the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really -clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or -relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most -powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so -entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his -eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing -her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he -rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands.</p> -<p class="pnext">She came on a little run and thereafter—it was as she had wished it in -her girl’s dreams—as far as dawn and dark from the conventional -marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed—the law older than -theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. -In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, -in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink -cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening -song of the insects, its sanctions were recited.</p> -<p class="pnext">In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all -things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a -cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, -supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature -to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of -pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the <em class="italics">blasé</em> modern -viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his -roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of -young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may -never know; and—your real philosopher will admit it—most divinely in -accord with the scheme of things.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, -had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, -her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson -lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars -wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening -vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from -the rest of the world.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! -“In the midst of one we are in the other,” and the friendly night that -wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar -of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles -whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, -incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon -dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It -also lit the march of Gonzales’s bandits across the desert.</p> -<p class="pnext">Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the -stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary -splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face -and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the -preparation of their breakfast.</p> -<p class="pnext">In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on, -of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their -second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the -gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies. -Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee’s -knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond -the rim.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Look!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out: -“It’s the Millses’ beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses! -Quick!”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxvii-the-threeagain"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id38">XXXVII: THE THREE—AGAIN</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering -knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He -returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she -looked up at his touch.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You heard them talking before—before—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them -speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell -them at the border.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the -ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a -voice called out, “Ole, señor!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes, -weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved -mistress—to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame. -From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father -of the woman.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I had thought thee one of those wicked ones.” The old fellow slapped -the butt of an old musket. “Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but -by the mercy of God I waited. Si, señor, I saw them go. After I sent up -the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always -the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted -them when they passed; a full score, señor, and more, on their way by -the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the niña, señor? They -did not harm—”</p> -<p class="pnext">He stopped, halted by Bull’s look, then cried aloud while the tears -coursed down his wrinkled face. “The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and -I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of -the best! I would go after them, señor, those wicked ones; but of what -use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The -biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take -thou my horse.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the -smoldering beacon on the mountain’s shoulder before daylight failed. -Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued -to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson -wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull -felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint -stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the -fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to -intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it -that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull -sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary -systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That -pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it, -this peace that quieted his troubled spirit.</p> -<p class="pnext">He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt -and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in -his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief. -He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a -clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the -sage.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had -been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough -to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained -the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of -the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee’s note the preceding evening, -Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment’s thought he voted -down Sliver’s proposal to ride down for Gordon.</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’d come in handy. Kin shoot some an’ his nerve’s all right. But you -jes’ kedn’t shut her out. Better to leave them where she’s safe.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right,” Sliver had added. “An’ it ’u’d shore be a shame to break -up their honeymoon.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake -and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on -Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman’s -yell issued simultaneously from their throats.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why, you dolgorned old son of a—” Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he -saw Bull’s face. “Why, hombre! What—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark -valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in -those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that -which is denied to speech—the soul agony of a strong man. Given that -blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Murdered!... Mother and child!... Burned ... with the house!”</p> -<p class="pnext">To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in -readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the -news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the -darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining -a fray in his <em class="italics">riata</em>. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city -person would have been greatly shocked.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The poor damn kid!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hell, ain’t it?” Jake’s tone was quite indifferent.</p> -<p class="pnext">But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking -lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold, -snake sparkle in Jake’s bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail.” After a long -silence he answered Jake’s question concerning the raiders. “Must be -nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an’—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“They ain’t there.” Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. “They’re—” -He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs. -Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon.</p> -<p class="pnext">Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had -weighed down the girl’s spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot—for -the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him, -hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Why—what—” Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, their -inaction, told all before he spoke. “Gone!—both!—burned with the house!” -Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to Gordon. -Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about again and -ran to Bull.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, you poor, <em class="italics">poor</em> man!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee -while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull -gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake -led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to -hear when she began to sob out a broken confession.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, I feel—so wicked. While all this—was happening—I—I was—getting -married!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Married?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes—to Gordon.” She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of all -that had happened since his departure—her abduction, Ramon’s death, -Gordon’s ultimatum. “He begged so hard—and the padre and the jefe -said—that I ought—and I wanted to, myself—and we were so happy until—we -saw the smoke. And now I—I feel like a criminal.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Then you needn’t.” He patted her shoulder. “The jefe was right. Never -again will you have more need of a man’s strength.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But? At this time? While—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“How were you to know? An’ remember how hard <em class="italics">she</em> worked and wished to -bring this very thing about. ’Twould have filled her with joy to know -that it had come to pass. ’Deed, Missy, she does know an’ is glad at -this very moment.” With that mixture of rude faith and humility that -made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: “Sure she knows an’ -some day she’ll tell you so herself. ’Twon’t be for me to hear it. My -kind don’t go where she is. But you will, an’, mark me, the first thing -she’ll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, if I thought she would!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Be certain of it, child.” The last lights had now gone out on the -highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited -many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he talked Lee’s sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished. -“That makes me feel better. And <em class="italics">you</em>? You, too, think I did right?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. “For what d’you -s’pose I brought him here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not to marry <em class="italics">me</em>?” She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment, -her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl -who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from -the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. “Oh, if I’d -only known it!” She added, with loving illogic, “I’m <em class="italics">so</em> glad that I -didn’t.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s fine.” He patted her head. “It will be easier, now, if you have -to live for a while in the States.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">The States?</em>” she repeated.</p> -<p class="pnext">In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson’s death—she had enough to -bear—he described the scattering of Valles’s army, concluding, “They’re -wild against Americans.” He nodded at the fire. “The men that did this -are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“My poor people!” she broke out, in sudden distress. “Gordon! Come -here!” When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried -it again: “Our poor, poor people! They are on their way—the raiders! To -Arboles! We must go—at once!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Too late!” Bull spoke heavily. “Even an aeroplane couldn’t get us there -in time.” After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others -recent events, he went on: “I came back to bring you and Mary and the -child out. For them it’s too late, but you must go at once—you an’ your -husband an’ Sliver an’ Jake.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And you?” Lee questioned.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I’m going on.” The statement in its simplicity carried more -significance than the wildest vow of revenge.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Alone?” Lee again demanded. “And you think we’d go slinking home to the -States and leave you to face that band yourself?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It’s my quarrel, my work.” His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the -darkness. “You are young and have your husband. Your future is all -ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With -Sliver an’ Jake to guard you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver’s voice rose in the -darkness. “An’ there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to look after -Lady-girl. But I ain’t so much of a fool that I don’t know the store she -sets by you, Bull, that’s been father an’ mother to her, now, for nigh -on a year. So it don’t go that-a-way. It’s me for Arboles while you-all -hit with them for the States.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Good enough!” Jake’s acid tones trembled through the gloom. “With a -small amendment. You’re that young an’ foolish, Sliver, it ’u’d be a -shame to cut you off—worse ’n the green grass that goes to the oven. So -it stan’s like this—you-all go back; I go on.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, you don’t.” Gordon’s quiet voice interrupted. “At any other time -I’d feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I -could never look my wife”—he felt her hand steal up into his—“I could -never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get -out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“They won’t—till we all go,” Lee broke in. “It’s easy to see that you’ve -all made up your minds to stay—and you’ll need me to hold the horses. -We’d better be getting on.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But, Missy—” Bull began.</p> -<p class="pnext">But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse’s hoofs returned -unmistakable answer.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxviii-fire"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id39">XXXVIII: FIRE</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee’s right, but when the trail -permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded -his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the -mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of -creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail, -the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above -Antonio’s <em class="italics">fonda</em> when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an -exclamation.</p> -<p class="pnext">Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow -which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and -swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them -to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon -it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the -flames roaring through the Arboles <em class="italics">patio</em>, bursting from doors and -windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows -of adobes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“My poor people!” Lee sat her horse and gazed.</p> -<p class="pnext">The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality -strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up -in flames—her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects -and <em class="italics">hacienda</em> stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of -old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately -connected with her father’s memory. Surely a great loss! but if it -flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming -indignation—not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being -destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice, -ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand -such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with -its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver’s voice broke in the darkness -behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain’t burn them yard-thick walls.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ we left word for the <em class="italics">ancianos</em> to drive the stock into the -mountains,” Jake added. “Must ha’ b’en cl’ar away long before they got -there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“It isn’t that.” She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper. -“My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they -escaped.” As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added: -“There’s only one thing left. We must—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s heavy voice completed it for her,—“catch ’em before daylight.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose -above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march -the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one -thing—they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock of -<em class="italics">aguardiente</em>! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep. -And then—</p> -<p class="pnext">His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the -change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black -bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the -yellow walls of the <em class="italics">fonda</em>. It also restored a little color into the -bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children, -herded together like sheep around its blaze.</p> -<p class="pnext">When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy, -apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their -babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a <em class="italics">peon</em> who -had run in from Lovell’s <em class="italics">rancho</em>; second, that the <em class="italics">ancianos</em> had -driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle -among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust -forward to tell his tale.</p> -<p class="pnext">He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with -that <em class="italics">peon</em> indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of -raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep. -Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic -stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them -he recognized a <em class="italics">peon</em> who had run away to the wars after being whipped -for some grossness by the señor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard -them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast -over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the -renegade’s expressions of reassurance.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los -Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded -stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for -safe-keeping, ’twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret -pasture in the great Bowl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed -the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a -vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the -precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be -caught in the same way? Jake’s remark expressed their joint conclusion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“It ’u’d be a <em class="italics">cinch</em>!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Horses all tired out now, too,” Sliver added. “If anythin’ went wrong, -we’d have no getaway. Not that I’d care, but we kain’t take no chances -with Lady-girl.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s word decided. He made his dispositions, sent the youth to sleep -out on the plains and bring early warning of the raiders’ movements; -posted other sentries at intervals. Finally, he saw first to the horses, -that they were watered and fed and groomed; then to the serving of a -meal.</p> -<p class="pnext">He ate, but even his steady, methodical munching bespoke purpose, the -conserving of strength for his ends. As he sat, after the meal, gazing -into the fire, even Lee failed to discern much difference from his usual -self. But after the others, refugees and all, lay wrapped in their -serapes, dim, muffled figures under the red light of half a dozen fires, -he still sat, a somber figure in black outline against the glow.</p> -<p class="pnext">After Lee had cried herself to sleep he sat on. At midnight her -awakening eyes showed him still there. When she awoke again he was -gone—on the round of sentries. He returned before she fell asleep again -and sat on, staring into the fire, an ominous figure fraught with -danger.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xxxix-vengeance-is-mine"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id40">XXXIX: “VENGEANCE IS MINE”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">From the “hog’s back” where Sliver had accidentally discovered Felicia -and the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, Lee, Gordon, and the Three watched a yellow dust cloud -rolling slowly across the plains. The occasional silver flash that -stabbed it through as the sun struck a saber or bayonet told that it -enveloped the raiders. Three hours ago Sliver had come galloping in from -a reconnaissance with the news of their advance. Instantly the refugees -had fled like frightened quail into the secret places of the hills. -After burying various bottles that contained the liquid abominations -wherewith he burned out the stomachs of his customers, Antonio had -followed. So for two hours the ravine had been untenanted.</p> -<p class="pnext">Even after the watchers sighted the dust, an hour passed before it -disappeared in the mouth of the ravine; for, as their few horses were -loaded down with loot, the raiders moved slowly. Another half-hour -dragged by before they appeared, filing like ragged ants up the path -along the silver stream. Sighting the <em class="italics">fonda</em>, they stopped, hastily -took cover behind some bushes, and held a hurried consultation. When the -file split and began to work its way through the chaparral on each side -of the ravine Jake interpreted the manœuver.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nobody home, amigos. Fooled this time.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A hoarse yell presently confirmed his diagnosis. Its note changed almost -immediately to rage and disappointment, and presently a thin coil of -smoke issued from the doorway, followed by a bright flash of flame as -the fire licked up the dry thatch of the <em class="italics">ramada</em>. Like infuriated ants -the raiders ran next to fire the stables. They were within easy -rifle-shot and Sliver was drawing an experimental bead when Jake knocked -up his rifle.</p> -<p class="pnext">“One shot,” he replied, to Sliver’s grumble, “an’ they’ll go like a -flock of quail into the chaparral.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Happening to glance at Bull just then, he nudged Sliver to look.</p> -<p class="pnext">On his knees, peering through a bush, the man looked for all the world -like some great animal, bear or black tiger, crouching for its prey. -Under dark brows, his coal eyes burned. Like some huge dog held in -leash, slow shivers coursed through his frame. Always the two had -recognized in him depths of feeling beyond them. The slow shake of the -head that passed between them expressed consciousness of a hurt beyond -their plumbing. They looked quickly away as Bull turned toward them.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Time to be moving. They’ll be coming presently.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">An hour later saw them all placed—Gordon in the chaparral at the top of -the trail; Bull, Sliver, and Jake at intervals of quarter of a mile down -the zigzag trail.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No shooting as they go down,” Bull cautioned them. “Coming back, -they’ll be among the horses without a chance to turn.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The arrangement, while wise, was not altogether to Sliver’s taste; he -grumbled to Jake as they moved on down to their places: “Fat chance for -us. He’ll pick half of ’em off going up between him and Gordon, then -turn and plug the others. Any maverick that gets by to us will be that -riddled a bullet ’ull slip through him without t’eching.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ain’t it coming to him?” Jake scornfully questioned. “He’s welcome to -my share—if it’s any comfort. But listen, hombre—let me tell you that -the killing of every <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> in Mexico ain’t a-going to cure his -hurt.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Leaving Sliver at his post, Jake moved on down, and after he also -disappeared in the chaparral silence spread a warm spell over valley and -mountain; golden, sunlit silence that was emphasized rather than broken -by the wild screech of a hawk.</p> -<p class="pnext">From above Gordon looked right down into the amber heart of the Bowl. -Almost beneath him, the <em class="italics">jacal</em> rose like a doll’s house out of the -vermilion splash of Pedro’s ripe peppers. From it the green veining of -the stream ran through the tawny pastures that were spotted with black -dots, the feeding horses. Far down, just where the stream slipped out of -the Bowl, he could see the giant oak that marked their camp; and though -even his strong young eyes were unequal to the distance, imagination -supplied the ashes of their fire, the bed of leaves under the spreading -branches.</p> -<p class="pnext">Instantly he began reliving, tenderly reliving that happy day so -absorbed that he forgot for the moment the tragedy that had brought it -to a close. He did not notice a slight rustle in the chaparral nor catch -the gleam of peering eyes. Were it a raider, he had proved an easy prey. -But the eyes were soft; the hand that presently stole out of a bush and -shook his foot was small and white. Whirling, he came face to face with -Lee.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What are you doing here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">She placed her finger to her lip. “Hush! they are coming! I just -couldn’t stand it, up there in the chaparral all alone. So I tied the -horses and—here I am.”</p> -<p class="pnext">There was nothing that could be done—except to look stern. Reaching, he -pulled her down beside him, shook her a little, then spoiled the effect -by a kiss. Then, lying flat on their stomachs, they kept a joint watch -till the scrape of a hoof, rumble of voices, broke on the trail.</p> -<p class="pnext">Peeping cautiously, they saw a motley procession file on to the plateau. -Like the soldiers of Las Bocas, their clothing ran the gamut of the -service uniforms of Porfirio Diaz’s army; the silver and gray of -<em class="italics">rurales</em>, red and blue of the infantry, variations from these of -cavalry and artillery, fatigue linen mixed in varying quantities with -<em class="italics">charro</em> and <em class="italics">peon</em> costumes. Accentuating this motley, their loose -gross mouths, blunt animal noses, lewd eyes in the midst of faces -swollen by last night’s debauch, fully justified Gordon’s judgment:</p> -<p class="pnext">“Gosh! what a gallows crew!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Weary and footsore after two days of heavy marching, neither their -appearance nor their spirits were improved by the fact that half of them -limped. Their voices had been raised in strident altercation. One -fellow’s angry complaint carried across to Gordon and Lee.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The two gringo señoritas at the Lovell <em class="italics">rancho</em>, where were they?—fled to -El Paso. At the second we got what?—one woman, a child, and three -horses—and lost three men. At Los Arboles there were to be women, a -score at least, young and pretty; also a gringo girl with golden hair -and a skin of milk? And horses by the hundred, blooded beasts of fine -breeding? What got we?—an empty house! Thou art a pretty leader, -Filomena.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si!” came a second growl. “And the <em class="italics">fonda</em>? ‘Courage, señores,’ he says -but two hours ago. ‘In the barranca we shall find a <em class="italics">fonda</em> with liquors -and a girl, none prettier in all Chihuahua.’ And—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Again an empty house!”</p> -<p class="pnext">By one and another it was kept up. “We limp like lame cats,” the first -man spoke again. “If this business go like the first and there be no -horses—I know of one throat that will be cut.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“And I of another!” The guide, an ugly, squat <em class="italics">peon</em>, turned on him with -a snarl. “Was it I that sent up the warning smoke? No? Then fasten your -tongue with your teeth. If you want women, they are to be had at San -Carlos, a few hours away, a fine town untouched by war.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, more marching,” the first grumbler was beginning, when the other -cut him off. He had advanced to the edge of the plateau and stood -pointing down into the Bowl.</p> -<p class="pnext">“And horses, say you? There they are—scores! Si, hundreds! enough to -make us all rich when sold at the border.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Success! the shibboleth of the modern world! Even among these scoundrels -it wrought the customary effect; turned malcontents into enthusiastic -friends. “Bueno!” He who had issued the sinister hint of cut throats was -the first to clap the guide on the back. “Bueno, amigo! thou art a -leader indeed. ’Twas no fault of thine that the white-skinned girl -escaped. I will slit the gizzard of the next that says it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">On his part the guide swelled and ruffled in the flattering sunlight. “I -told ye. ‘Leave it to Filomena,’ said I. ‘Leave it to him to show ye fat -booty.’ Behold!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Also he assumed the airs and authority of real leadership. “The horses -we shall need to rope fresh mounts. Hide the stuff in the bushes till we -return. ’Twill be only for a couple of hours.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Fired by the sight of the horses, the raiders fell feverishly to work -unloading their loot, which—Gordon noted it with satisfaction—was -largely provisions. Then, lameness and blisters forgotten, unaware of -the cold, fierce eyes watching from the bushes, they followed the -horsemen downhill, yelling and hooting, raising the echoes with snatches -of ribald song.</p> -<p class="pnext">A thin wisp of smoke above the <em class="italics">jacal</em> followed by an explosive flash as -the dry thatch took fire announced their arrival at the bottom. From -above Gordon and Lee saw them move down the valley in a long line that -presently came sweeping back in a half-circle with the horses in its -belly.</p> -<p class="pnext">There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts -were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid -vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then -the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single -file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider -sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers -looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and -around the trail’s yellow convolutions.</p> -<p class="pnext">After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose -to Jake’s post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in -the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked -more like “The Python” he appeared in <em class="italics">peon</em> eyes. And he had the -serpent’s patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle -trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull’s -shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward -grumblings as the file rose to him.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If ’twasn’t for orders,” he mentally harangued the first raider that -passed, “your black soul ’u’d be a-busting now on its way to hell!”</p> -<p class="pnext">High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes -transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But -his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic -vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine -across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift -of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow -winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a -vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray’s “Elegy.” In place -of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which -man’s imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight -and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for -that peaceful contrast, he felt—felt with savage joy—Death, the grim -angel, hovering above.</p> -<p class="pnext">With her girl’s strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the -wriggling black line rose up to Bull’s station she leaned forward and -broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon’s sighting. Yet, -in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a -black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon -drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands.</p> -<p class="pnext">And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line -of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain—the beast mouths, -blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in -the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish -spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was -the face of Death itself—the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic -emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles -too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the -bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a -flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when -nothing better offered.</p> -<p class="pnext">About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed -below. Instantly Bull’s rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its -sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But -the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that -the last two raiders were still below Jake’s station.</p> -<p class="pnext">He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let -three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the -action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the -world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a -haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for -the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a -fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the -edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a -mad stampede.</p> -<p class="pnext">A hoarse yell marked the first raider’s realization of his danger. With -spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a -hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and -beast sideways over the cliff.</p> -<p class="pnext">Springing up as the mare whirled, Gordon saw laid out directly beneath -the course of the stampede down and around the stony staircases. At -first it stood out clearly as in those cinema pictures of galloping men -taken from a height. Following the first man’s cry came the wild yells -of the second and third. One! two! three! he saw them squeezed out over -the cliff; saw them strike the next level and bound off and over on a -longer leap; saw them turn, slowly in midair till the horses showed like -fat slugs above the men; saw the final crash and disappearance in the -chaparral below. But when his glance came back the crystal clearness was -gone, obscured by yellow dust cloud from the bowels of which men and -horses were ejected sideways as the stampede whirled on down.</p> -<p class="pnext">Of the thirty raiders, but one had a chance—he who brought up the rear. -But as he turned to run he came face to face with Jake, who had sprung -up to see. Instantly Jake raised his gun, but there came a roar and -rattle of stones and hoofs. Before he could fire the dust cloud -swallowed the man. Three minutes later it rolled down the last night to -the pastures.</p> -<p class="pnext">Over the Bowl silence fell again, golden, sunlit silence broken only by -the screech of the hovering hawk. As before, the wind whispered in the -sage, the clouds marched slowly across the blue fields above, the bees -went busily upon their ways; but in the mean time—when the dust settled -there remained, of the two hundred horses and thirty men, only the few -animals that spread out fanwise as they galloped across the level -bottoms.</p> -<p class="pnext">With the swiftness, sureness of a lightning stroke in the night it had -come, the doom—so swiftly that Lee and Gordon above, Jake and Sliver -below, could only stand and stare, doubting their eyes. And Bull—</p> -<p class="pnext">The instant the mare turned his mind leaped to the inevitable -conclusion. With a roar, bellow of rage, inchoate, wild as the snarl of -a balked tiger, he threw his hands on high, rifle waving like a reed in -one great fist. Crash! lock, stock, and barrel, it flew in a thousand -pieces as he brought it down on a rock! From the bank he leaped down to -the trail, in his hot mind some mad idea of stopping the rush. But -already the stampede had passed. He ran a few yards, as though to -overtake and pull it back. But it swept on and down beyond his speed. -Stopping, then, arms raised skyward, fists clenched, teeth bared, eyes -glaring in the midst of his swollen, purple face, he stood, a towering -figure of furious despair.</p> -<p class="pnext">Into those few minutes were compressed all the agonies he had endured in -the last few weeks—his trial, temptations, failure, bitter -disappointment, tragic grief, crowned by this, the robbing of his just -revenge. Swelling with a sense of vast injustice, the injustice that -created the world on a scheme of struggle and pain, he turned maniacal -eyes to the sky; stood shaking his bunched fists while a terrible -blasphemy rose to his lips. But it never issued. For in the moment that -it seemed his reason must crack there came slipping into his hot mind, -like a cooling breath, the old vision—of Mary and Betty as on that last -night.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the sunlight that wrapped the valley, just as in the vast world -loneliness under the quiet stars, he sensed her presence. His arms -dropped, the mad light died. Bowing his dark face in his hands, he shook -again with the throes of silent grief—but only for a short space. -Presently he looked up, the old humility restored, its expression on his -lips.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Twasn’t for me. I wasn’t fit. ’Twas taken out of my hands.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Quiet now, he watched the horses careering over the bottoms. When at -last Sliver joined him he gave quiet orders: “Go down, you an’ Jake, an’ -collect up their guns—an’ ammunition. Bring up fresh horses for all of -us an’ a couple for the packs. We’ll have to light out for the border at -once.”</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xl-sliver-makes-good"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id41">XL: SLIVER “MAKES GOOD”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">By the time Sliver and Jake returned the sun hung like a red-hot ball in -the smoke of the horizon. Even if the horses had not been tired, it was -too late to start that night. Accordingly, after loading the raiders’ -provisions, they rode on down into the ravine and used the glowing -embers of the <em class="italics">fonda</em> for their camp-fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">To them, sitting there, by ones and twos and threes the refugees came -straggling in to gather for the night around their own fires. Going from -one to another, Lee and Gordon dealt comfort and advice. They were to -reap the standing corn and sow again for their own use in the secret -places of the mountains. The <em class="italics">hacienda</em> cattle they could herd in the -cañons of the lower hills. Thus, with plenty of milk for butter and -cheese, corn, and beans, their own chickens, goats, and pigs, they would -be able to live in rude comfort till the coming of peace permitted Lee’s -return.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The knowledge that they will not suffer makes it easier to bear.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee spoke, looking back at the brown faces enlivened by the ruddy glare -of the fires. But when, next morning, they crowded around her, old men, -women, young girls, and little children, mixing prayers, blessings, and -lamentations with their good-bys, she was less philosophical. She was -still weeping when she looked back at those that had followed her as far -as the mouth of the ravine.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, if our government could only see them! Surely they would help.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon looked for another outburst when, later, they sighted ruined -Arboles from the very spot he and Mary Mills had overlooked it. How well -he remembered it! The walls and courts, <em class="italics">patio</em>, rainbow adobes, a small -city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun; -the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy -of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far -horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into -the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by -laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. Now, roofless, windowless, its -blackened walls upreared in the midst of a wide, blurred smudge. Yet -though the contrast brought stinging tears to her eyes, Lee took it -calmly.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What does it matter? It can be rebuilt. But there are other things”—her -voice lowered and trailed away—“that can never be replaced.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They were both sad and sick at heart. Yet youth may not permanently be -cast down. When, riding on, they left the smoke-blacked ruin behind them -and passed from the dreary waste of burned pasture into golden plains -she began restoration. A native carpenter could replace every loved -beam; rebuild the massive old furniture just as it was. The <em class="italics">peones</em> -would lime-wash the exterior in its usual rainbow color! Also, -restoration would give opportunity for remodeling and improvement.</p> -<p class="pnext">As she ran on Gordon sensed another motive; perceived that she was -striving to draw Bull out of his sorrow. Not a plan that did not include -him! A great fireplace, for use during the rains, was to have a -comfortable settle at one side, on which the Three could lounge and -smoke while basking in the blaze. Each was to have his own room. Thus -and so! Nor was her prattle without effect. Always sensitive where she -was concerned, Bull divined her motive, and, albeit with an effort great -as a physical strain, he responded, listened, and nodded acquiescence, -occasionally forced a smile.</p> -<p class="pnext">Only Sliver was fooled. “Say,” he remarked to Jake, who rode with him in -the rear, “did you allow she’d have taken it so light?”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake, the keen, discerning critic, quickly opened his eyes. “Take -it light, you ——! ——! ——! ——!” The epithets, if printed, would -scorch a hole in the page. “Kain’t you see she’s grieving her little -heart out? She’s doing it all for Bull.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At any other time one of those epithets would probably have produced a -retort that would have tumbled Jake out of his saddle. But, -conscience-stricken, Sliver accepted all. With humility that was almost -pathetic, he actually put into words feeling that was, for him, quite -subtle. “’Tain’t that I’d set in jedgment on Lady-girl, on’y—I reckon -it’s so with all of us—I jes’ kain’t bear to see her say or do anything -that don’t jes’ fit.”</p> -<p class="pnext">After a pause he went on: “About these plans o’ her’n? If there warn’t -no revolution, an’ we ked stay along here without a break, an’ they’d -destroy all the licker in the world an’ forgit the art of making it, I -don’t know but that we might live up to ’em. But I’m telling you, -hombre, it’s been awful wearing an’ I jes’ know what a spell in El Paso -’ull do for me—I’ll be that swinish I’ll never dare to come near her -ag’in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">When Jake had admitted like feelings Sliver continued: “Sure, under them -conditions, licker an’ its makers being, so to say, put on the hog-train -an’ run off the aidge of the earth, I’d hev’ one chanst to make good. -But as ’tis, an’ seeing that she’s now settled with a fine young husband -an’ kin get along very nicely, I’m sorter allowing that El Paso ’ull let -me out.” While his eyes blinked guiltily and his lips quivered with -anticipatory thirst, he concluded, “Sure I’m that dry ’twon’t take much -temptation for me to tell my troubles to a barkeep an’ have him drown -’em in drink.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Nor me,” Jake seconded. “Besides, my fingers is jes’ itching to get -into a game.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Drink, cards, flat broke—back to rustling.” Sliver laid down the law of -their being. “With me it runs like, the A-B-C.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I drink, you drink, he drinks, we drink,” Jake chanted it <em class="italics">sotto voce</em>. -“If folks wasn’t so onreasonable a feller might make an honest living. -But the best tinhorn that ever turned a card from the bottom is bound to -make a slip, an’ when he does—whoosh! if he’s lucky enough to make his -getaway, rustling’s all that’s left.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Bull?” Sliver nodded at the broad back ahead. “D’you allow he’s a-going -to stay put?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s shake of the head mixed doubt with concern. “If we meet up with -any Mex—we’ll never get him away. He’ll run amuck among ’em.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver’s reckless eye lit with a fighting gleam. “An’ the country’s jes’ -lousy with <em class="italics">revueltosos</em>? Hombre, it’s a cinch! Not that I’d want it,” he -hypocritically added, “Lady-girl being along. But if we do chance on a -few—hum! what’s the exchange, jes’ now, in Valles’s money? Seven to one, -heigh? Well, we’ve three rifles apiece, counting the extras on the -pack-horses. One man with three rifles is as good as two men. Twice four -of us makes eight. At current exchange, one gringo for seven Mex, we -orter account for fifty-six.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“There or thereabouts,” Jake agreed. “But, as you say, Missy being -along, it’s up to us to dodge ’em.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Five days?” Sliver hopefully repeated. “We’d jes’ as well look out for -trouble.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">Not till the morning of the third day did the “trouble” loom up over the -horizon.</p> -<p class="pnext">To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would -strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso. -Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a -few <em class="italics">peon</em> herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But -while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them -away from water, the first necessity of desert travel.</p> -<p class="pnext">From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse -grass country dotted with <em class="italics">sahuaros</em>; thereafter into sage desert -sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same; -a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation, -its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only -by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs. -Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost -due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the -railroad.</p> -<p class="pnext">Dusk was falling when they—more correctly, the horses—found a small -<em class="italics">arroyo</em>. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they -might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They -did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too, -they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between -them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for -danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without -fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the -“trouble” showed up in form of a line of <em class="italics">sombreros</em> behind the peak of -a limestone ridge—unfortunately, to the eastward.</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the -pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as -they rode, Gordon saw the line of <em class="italics">sombreros</em> rise in correspondence as -the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the -ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief -against the sky-line.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They’ve seen us!”</p> -<p class="pnext">As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their -galloping hoofs. “Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets -chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew -overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main -wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards -away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the -ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">Differing speed had strung the pursuers out in a scattering column, and -Sliver grinned his delight at the arrangement. “Like bowling at the -county fair. Miss one, you’ve still a chance at the next behind. Set ’em -up again!” he yelled as, following their volley, two men and a horse -plunged forward on the ground.</p> -<p class="pnext">“A bit lower, Son,” Bull quietly admonished Gordon. “Aim at the jine of -man an’ horse. That gives you a seven-foot target.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“One cigar, one baby down!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver’s second yell marked the fall of two more horses and another -man—shot by Bull out of his saddle. Aiming and firing with the deadly -accuracy bred by years of just such fighting against more sagacious -foes, they dropped the leaders as fast as they came on; in three minutes -had drawn a dead-line of men and horses across their front. And that -deadly practice told. Brave enough, after their lights, the raiders were -not accustomed to such shooting. In the revolutionary wars their own -practice, like that of their opponents, was to spring up out of a -trench, yell “<em class="italics">Viva Mexico!</em>” fire in the enemy’s direction, and drop -back again, trusting to the god of war to find a billet for the bullet. -Turning, they raced back for the opposite ridge, spurred on by the -galling shooting that emptied two more saddles.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s black glance following them with longing that confirmed Jake’s -diagnosis—he would have “run amuck among ’em” if left to himself. The -more steadily, perhaps, for his deadly thirst to kill, he had aimed and -fired with automatic precision. Withal, he had found time to note -Gordon’s steady shooting.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You done fine, lad,” he commented. “If there was only ourselves, I’d be -in favor of carrying it to ’em. But”—his glance went to Lee, who was -holding the horses—“we’ll have to fall back. They’ve had their lesson -an’ ain’t a-going to try any more fool charges. Now they’ll try an’ -flank us. While Sliver an’ Jake hold ’em, we’ll run back to the next -ridge.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Gordon, flushed with his taste of battle, rebelled. “What’s the -matter with me staying? You fellows care for me like three hens -scratching for an orphan chicken. I’m tired of this sheltered life.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“‘Sheltered life’?” Communing with himself, Jake glanced at the grisly -dead-line. “‘Sheltered life,’ an’ him with two stretched out down -there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Comes o’ being married,” Sliver added. “No married man has a right to -run with batchelders.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“That’s right,” Jake approved. “It’s up to you to look after your wife.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well?” Gordon protested. “How can I do it better than by staying here?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What?” Sliver looked scandalized. “Us take a chanst of her being -widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree! -Git out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on, Son, you’re delaying the game.” Bull had already joined Lee. -His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug, -Gordon obeyed.</p> -<p class="pnext">The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others -had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. “Bet you -they’ve split already an’ are moving around us. Now if we do the same, -keeping well out of sight, we’ll mebbe get another crack at ’em.”</p> -<p class="pnext">And so it was. When, after a half-mile détour through limestone and sage -chaparral, the halves of the raiders’ party showed in the open two -rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless -horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From -the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back -and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the -nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an -occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead.</p> -<p class="pnext">While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its -southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like -an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge -behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But -with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in -unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely -upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only -roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would -bring forth no new enemy.</p> -<p class="pnext">Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut -the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered -more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an -impassable barrier, forcing a détour. Worst of all, the denser growths -permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver, -midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than -two hundred yards away.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If ’twas on’y black powder they was using,” Sliver bitterly complained, -“we’d stan’ some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their -smoke.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’re onreasonable,” Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting -from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los -Arboles: “In order that these here bandits kin exercise the ‘sacred -right of revolution to reg’late their own internal affairs’ your Uncle -Samuel has kindly supplied ’em with the latest smokeless cartridge. -Thanks to his benevolence, some one’s going to get hurt pretty soon.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they -evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down -Sliver’s horse. Hanging on to Jake’s stirrup leather, he made the next -ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load -abandoned.</p> -<p class="pnext">“An’ this is on’y the beginning.” Jake continued his remarks from the -next ridge. “The railroad’s not far away, an’ as I remember the country -hereabouts, she runs right out in the open, with nary a snitch of cover -for over twenty miles. There’ll be nothing to stop ’em from shooting us -down by volleys at long range. So it all boils down to this—some one’s -got to hold ’em at the next good stand while the others make their -getaway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They had been carrying two rifles apiece. Now Sliver quietly -appropriated Jake’s extra weapon. “With three rifles I orter be good for -two hours.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“When I said ‘some one’”—Jake quietly repossessed himself of the -weapon—“I naterally allowed his name was Jake Evers. Git! before I bust -you over the head.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“If ’twasn’t for them”—Sliver’s hard glance went out to the -chaparral—“there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to take time to rub your -long hoss face in the dust.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The threat, however, produced from Jake only his wolf grin. “You damned -fool! D’you know what’s going to happen to the man that stays behind? -He’s a-going to be what the society columns call ‘the piece de -resistence’ at a Mexican barbecure. There ain’t a thing in the line of -torture that them bandits won’t do to you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You ked never stan’ it.” Sliver displayed great solicitude. “You’re -getting along, Jake, an’ your nerve ain’t what it used to be.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’ve said it.” Jake’s cold eye warmed. He placed a friendly hand on -Sliver’s shoulder. “You’re dead right, Son. I’m getting on. What’s more, -I’m that dyed-in-the-wool with deviltry ’twon’t hurt anybody when I -pinch out. But you’re young yet. You’ll—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“—hit El Paso an’ go straight to the devil. You know it darned well. -We’ll gamble for it.” He spat on a pebble and threw it up. “Wet or dry, -which? Wet! I win!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Jest my luck!” Jake’s complaint was sincere as though, instead of death -or torture, life and fortune had been the hazard. “I don’t have no -chance at all except with cards. What did I wanter go an’ do that for, -anyway, an’ me with a deck right here in my pocket?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Too late!” Sliver pressed his triumph. “Now git!”</p> -<p class="pnext">But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the -stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon -were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it -loomed even more inaccessible.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the -middle.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver’s glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the -ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. “Don’t tell -Lady-girl—that is, not jes’ now. Let her think I’ll make my getaway to -the northward. But some day, after she’s safe in El Paso, you kin tell -her—that Sliver was on’y too damn glad to give his life for her’n.” He -went on, dreamily: “’Course I knew it ’u’d be all off after I’d hit the -city. But I’d sorter thought, now an’ then, that if the rangers didn’t -get me too quick, some day I’d come back to Arboles, when her kids was -about hip-high, an’ teach ’em to ride an’ shoot. But that was jes’ a -dream.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em>, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver’s request -might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other -trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he -could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Funny, ain’t it? But that’s just what I’d often thought myself. Sure -I’ll tell her—if them devils don’t down me on the next run. They’re damn -close now, and they’ll be up here before we’re half-way across. Against -that limestone front we’ll make some mark, an’ with fifty of ’em -cracking at us it ’ull be the luck of hell if they don’t down one or -both.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the -boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering -behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks -or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless -scramble up the last steep two found their mark—one through Sliver’s -knee, the other dropped Jake’s horse.</p> -<p class="pnext">Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of -his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried -him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a -full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain -traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see—not the tracks; it -was too far away for that—a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine. -Bull and Gordon still lay answering the <em class="italics">revueltosos’</em> fire. But Sliver -and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in -which the dead horse lay out of sight.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hey!” Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. “Let ’em go! -You’ll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I’m hurt. You -kin take my horse; on’y lift me down first an’ prop me up among the -rocks where I kin lie comfortable an’ pump a gun.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his -rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well -and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him, -painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride -with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands, -shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring -raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the -memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other -beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends; -all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound -the “Three Bad Men of Las Bocas” closer than brothers—all this combined -in an emotion that revolted at desertion.</p> -<p class="pnext">“My <em class="italics">God</em>, hombre!” he broke out in protest. “I kain’t leave you here, -wounded, to fall in the han’s of them wolves!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You kain’t do nothing else!” Hard eyes flashing, Sliver went on: -“Didn’t we gamble, jest now, for who was to stay? An’ didn’t I win? Now -you’re trying to renig?” As he noted the sweat standing out on Jake’s -brow, he went on more quietly: “Look at it sensible. What ked you-all do -with a wounded man? You’d on’y sign Lady-girl’s death warrant. And don’t -worry about them wolves. They ain’t a-going to light no fires on my -belly nor burn my feet. If I don’t get done up in the scrap—the last -bullet will be for myself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Also he turned an adamant face to a proposal that Jake should stay too. -“No, hombre, it’s still over a hundred miles to the border, an’ they -need you. There’s nothing left for you but to take my horse an’ git.”</p> -<p class="pnext">It had all been said and done without strain, effort, or -self-consciousness; was entirely the expression of his hardy, careless -soul that had never known the vice of self-pity. But when Jake still -stood, his long, lean face working lugubriously in his attempts to hide -his grief, Sliver did that which, for him, was a miracle in -divination—entered into and felt the pain of another soul.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, shore, hombre!” His face lit up with sympathy. “You orter be glad. -Ain’t it better to die clean, this-a-way, than to choke slowly at the -end of some ranger’s rope? Go on, now, an’ catch up to ’em an’ keep ’em -moving till night. With the least bit of luck, you’ll pull through all -right.”</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver’s -consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee -was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake’s -departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; <em class="italics">i.e.</em>, to -inflate to the limit the current exchange of one <em class="italics">gringo</em> for seven -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em>. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark, -addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake -had left at his elbow.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Gosh, but I’d like a drink!”</p> -<p class="pnext">His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. “You’re -going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You’ve taken your last.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Pulling his Colt’s .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle. -“Handy for the funeral.” He uttered a second grim chuckle.</p> -<p class="pnext">The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he -lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge—so quiet that a -lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully -away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent -history so much firing had invariably brought food.</p> -<p class="pnext">From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly -rifles picked them off, the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> had learned caution, only -advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake -had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, the -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em> remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple of -<em class="italics">sombreros</em> rose cautiously out of a clump of sage.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Stuck up on sticks.” Sliver criticized their wabbly motion.</p> -<p class="pnext">After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly -broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into -the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of -sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he -draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em> that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied -the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses -and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two -more as the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> raced back over the opposite ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Six added to three I got makes nine!” Sliver grunted. “A few more an’ I -kin afford to cash in.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he -noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his -satisfaction.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You ain’t a-going to try an’ pass through me ag’in,” he addressed the -invisible foe. “An’ you ain’t going to leave me here. It’ll take you an -hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with -night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you—”</p> -<p class="pnext">The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series -designed to keep the <em class="italics">revueltosos’</em> attention upon himself, and when, -half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep -face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They reckon we’re all here, trying to stick it out till night,” he -correctly interpreted the movement. “It ’ull take ’em another half-hour -to find out.”</p> -<p class="pnext">A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the -brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face -of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots -in both directions along the ridge.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Not that I’m expecting to bag any of youse,” he addressed the unseen -enemy. “But just to slow you up a bit an’ let you know I’m here. When -you get there”—his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that -commanded his post on both sides—“good-by an’ <em class="italics">good</em> night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to -wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver -stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he -counted each minute, each second in yards—the hundreds, scores of yards -Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day -in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. -While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched -slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge -oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed -neither fear nor softening in Sliver’s face when, from the spot he had -long noted, a rifle spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks -about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that -time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff -of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many -years claimed the stakes.</p> -<p class="pnext">He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched -arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights, -his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out.</p> -<p class="pnext">Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low -sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xli-jake-betters-the-exchange"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id42">XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE”</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being, -whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had -withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired -for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth -while to inquire.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">Him?</em> Oh, he’s back there a-holding ’em off while we gain a spell.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not -altogether relieve her anxiety. “But—how will he find us again?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s shrug was fine in its indifference. “He’ll play a lone han’, -Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he’ll -likely beat us to it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You really think so?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“He’ll be there to meet us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not -deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of -the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the -knee—he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, -explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> came out -in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the -ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, -explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter’s slow shake of the -head, signaled then that all was over.</p> -<p class="pnext">While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the -sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp -black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose -from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid -his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all -night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along -the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when -they began the fight that morning.</p> -<p class="pnext">The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range -glasses at the dark smoke plume. “Enjine an’ five cars.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter’s keen sight the -lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle -on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay -<em class="italics">rebozos</em> told they were mostly women, and that told all. “Nobody there -but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that’s chasing us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A hundred miles to El Paso,” Jake spoke. “Three days’ horseback? Three -hours with that old mogul?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Golly!” The idea fastened on Gordon. “Couldn’t we?” In place of their -present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past -as they sped northward in the engine.</p> -<p class="pnext">“On’y women and wounded?” Jake repeated it, musingly.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Dark in half an hour?” Bull added: “They kedn’t tell us from their own. -’Course we should lose the horses.” With his accustomed caution he read -the reverse of the shield. “If anything went wrong—we’d be left afoot on -the desert.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No worse than we are,” Jake argued. “These beasts have been running -sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to -the mountains we’re not sure of feed nor water—an’ still a hundred miles -from the border.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But Sliver?” Lee protested. “We can’t leave him.”</p> -<p class="pnext">She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind -a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and -steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a -good end. “The last thing he tol’ me, Missy, was not to wait. ‘’Twould -hinder me an’ hinder you-all. I’ll make my run alone.’”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Very well.” Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that -her boy would be safer under her own eye. “Very well, but I <em class="italics">do</em> wish he -were here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither -spoke.</p> -<p class="pnext">While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. “It ’ull be up to -you an’ Missy,” he told Gordon, “to take care of the engineer while Jake -an’ me stan’ off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you -pitch the stuff aboard.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its -warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some -were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths -of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the -scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a -<em class="italics">revueltosos’</em> train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their -knees at the <em class="italics">metates</em>, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all -gossiping at their work. Here and there a man’s face showed in the fire -glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his -presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the -railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were -stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up -their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man -raised a gun, and as Bull’s rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged -headlong from the top of the car to the ground.</p> -<p class="pnext">Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the -mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from -Gordon’s gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. -Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with -Lee’s gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their -stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots -along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened -wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward.</p> -<p class="pnext">The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman’s shovel. “Here’s -where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch -the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he -shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual -caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable -information with the muzzle of his gun.</p> -<p class="pnext">His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of -the speeding engine across the cab. “He says the half of Valles’s army -is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what’s left -he’s making a las’ stan’ north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the -country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to -supply the new base!” The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. -“Hooray! the line’s open clean to the border! He don’t know of any -trains being run to-night! Thinks we’ll have a clear track!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine -came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section -gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown -faces.</p> -<p class="pnext">They suggested Bull’s question, “Ask him if there’s any revueltosos on -the way.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“At La Mancha!” Jake yelled back. “About thirty miles this side of the -border!... Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The <em class="italics">brigada</em> Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of -Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull’s dark face. His big hands -clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained -control of his voice.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Does he allow we kin run through there?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake nodded. “If we douse the headlight and race by afore they have time -to block us.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking back, just then, at Gordon, now stripped to his undershirt and -growing sootier every minute, Lee heard the answer. She did not, -however, give it much thought. The hills and rocks that took on queer -shapes in the dim light of a rising moon, giant <em class="italics">sahuaros</em> that went -slipping past like huge ghosts, the occasional fires and lights, -glimpses of strange brown faces, the rush and roar of the engine -speeding through mysterious night, held her senses. Yet it stuck in her -mind, came popping out when, as the engine rounded a sharp curve, the -headlight beam struck full on a sheaf of glittering wires.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh!” she called out in sudden alarm. “We ought to have cut the wires!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was a vital error. Gordon’s whistle expressed their joint dismay; but -Jake, with his intense practicability, recovered first. “Well, what’s to -do—stop an’ cut them?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull shook his head. “Too late! We’ve been running over an hour. Nothing -left but to take a chanst.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake nodded. But presently he spoke again. “Chanst? If they pull up a -rail an’ ditch us at La Mancha, I’d hardly call it a chanst with half of -the brigada Gonzales shooting us up from all around. We’d be pickled for -keeps.”</p> -<p class="pnext">During their “rustler days” it had always been Jake’s craft that pulled -them out of tight places. Habit held Bull silent till, after he had -spoken to the engineer, Jake went on: “He says the track runs two per -cent. down into La Mancha. We kin shut off steam an’ pussy-foot it the -last few miles. So here’s the dope. We drop you-all”—his glance took in -the others—“a mile this side of the station, give you two hours to go -around, then shoot ahead. If we get through, you-all strike a light an’ -we’ll stop and pick you up. If we don’t—we don’t. But you’ll be less ’n -thirty miles from the border an’ have all night to make your getaway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“But—”</p> -<p class="pnext">Gordon’s objection, however, was nipped by Bull. “It goes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee, however, was not so easily silenced. Climbing down, she crossed the -wabbling cab with unsteady steps and caught Jake’s arm. “Oh, don’t take -the risk. We’ll abandon the engine. Come with us!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Looking down into her face, Jake’s bleak eyes were almost soft. He -gently patted her hand. “Now don’t be jumping at conclusions, Missy. We -need the enjine to go on, but I ain’t a-going to commit suicide. If the -tracks are blocked we’ll back right off. Then I’ll take to the bushes -an’ follow you round.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With that she had to be content. But, realizing the danger, she climbed -up and sat beside him while the mogul rolled and racked and plunged -forward through the night. She was still sitting there when, an hour -later, a headlight flashed up far away.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They’ve wired ahead!” Bull yelled across the cab. “Make him stop, Jake! -We’ll take to the bushes here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh! now you come with us!” Lee cried.</p> -<p class="pnext">But Jake’s answer wiped out her happiness. “No, Missy, I’ll pull ’em -along for a few miles while you-all make your getaway afore I drop off.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Already the throttle was closed. Slowing under the brakes, the mogul -glided to a stop. Leaping down, Gordon caught the provisions, -ammunition, and rifles as Bull threw them down. Meanwhile Lee stood -looking up at Jake with wide, distressed eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Come on, dear!” Gordon called up from below.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No time to waste.” Bull touched her shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">Still she stood. “Oh, I hate to leave you. <em class="italics">Do</em> come!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, shore!” Jake laughed, patting her cheek. “I’ll jine you in a few -hours—or at El Paso, if I miss you here.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the -least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed -beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her -hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his -cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon’s arms.</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer -threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to -glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips -had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some -reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him -in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would -never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames.</p> -<p class="pnext">The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before -he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant -waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning -spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught -by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer.</p> -<p class="pnext">“What are you grinning at?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his -seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The trouble with you, Alberto, ain’t that you Mexicans are a dirty, -lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you’re too plumb ignorant to -know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you -call a face there ain’t a gleam to show you’re sensible of the honor -you’ve jest been paid. You don’t know it, Alberto, an’ you probably -never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten -country ’twouldn’t come near it. If I don’t blow the top of your head -off during the next hour—which I likely will—you’ll be able to tell it -to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they’re -smart they won’t believe you. But it’s the closest to fame you’ll ever -get, so play it for all it’s worth. Now listen, Alberto”—he shook his -finger in the engineer’s frightened face—“if you ever expect to hand it -down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to -business.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Delivered in English, the harangue flew high over the Mexican’s head. -But it did Jake lots of good. Having, as it were, palliated his shameful -emotions, he followed his own advice and turned to the business in hand.</p> -<p class="pnext">“How far is that enjine, Alberto?” He poked the question in with his -gun.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Five miles, señor.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Jest an enjine?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, señor, it rides too steadily. It draws two cars; no more or it -could not take the grade at this speed.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“How long afore they catch us?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Ten more miles, señor. They travel two to our one.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“All right, slow up a bit.”</p> -<p class="pnext">With hollow clank of drivers the mogul moved on at slackened speed until -less than half a mile intervened. It was running, of course, reversed, -and across the intervening space the headlights stared. When, obedient -to Jake’s order, the throttle was thrown wide again the two engines ran -like giant insects through the night, one in chase of the other, -thundering across bridges, whizzing around curves, shooting through -cuts, chimneys spitting smoke and flame, headlights flashing defiance -like fiery eyes.</p> -<p class="pnext">All the while Jake timed the distance. “Cut her off a notch,” he ordered -when the mogul began to gain. “I wanter draw ’em on as far as I kin.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But out of the dim smoke that trailed behind the pursuing engine broke, -just then, a series of red flashes in furious staccato. The drumming -reports were drowned in the roar and clank of the racing engines; but -the hail of bullets that rattled and glanced from the mogul’s side was -unmistakable.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Machine-guns!” Jake exclaimed. “Chuck her into high, Alberto!” As, -under a full head of steam, the engine picked up and ran through the -night like a frightened girl, he added: “Sheer accident, they hit us, -anyway. They kain’t do it again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Proving his words, the next burst of firing went wide. Only one bullet -struck the cowcatcher, and, leaping like a horse from the spur, the -mogul launched in dizzy flight down grade; had drawn two miles ahead by -the time she took the next sharp curve.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Hold her at that,” Jake ordered.</p> -<p class="pnext">But again he had failed to reckon with the wires, which, after blocking -their advance, now cut off retreat. Shortly thereafter came a flash of -light as the engine shot from a cut through the first of the series of -stations they had passed on their way up.</p> -<p class="pnext">In accordance with the inscrutable law which governs the location of -Mexican stations, it stood a half-mile from the little adobe town that -dragged its unclean, brown skirts across the tracks. If the inhabitants -thereof had been content to obey telegraphed orders to build an obstacle -and let it go at that, the mogul would probably have gone into the ditch -without a second’s warning. But, desiring to see the smash, they had -lighted a huge fire alongside the tracks, and under its glare the pile -of ties, earth, and stones stood out plain as by day. Wheels grinding, -blue sparks shooting from the sanded rails, the mogul stopped within a -hundred yards.</p> -<p class="pnext">After he had closed the throttle and thrown on the brakes the engineer’s -eye had gone to the cab door. Then it switched to the ugly, black muzzle -of Jake’s gun. Releasing the brakes, he reversed and opened the -throttle.</p> -<p class="pnext">A sputter of musketry had followed the first yell of disappointment that -went up from the rabble of <em class="italics">peon</em> watchers. Fired from ancient pieces, -however, the bullets fell short or rebounded like peas from the mogul’s -sides. Picking up her stride, she outran their feeble pursuit in a -hundred yards.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was then that the engineer’s voice rose in protest: “But, señor, we -shall run into the other train! Mira! Mira! it is now only a mile away!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Jake’s eye measured the distance. Then, in dry soliloquy that, even if -it had not been couched in English, would still have gone over the -other’s head, he spoke. “Do you know what a maquina loca is, Alberto? -You don’t? You s’prise me.” Scared out of his small wits, the poor devil -had not even answered. “It’s the one great invention your pais has -produced. ’Twas first used by Mr. Orozco shortly after he graduated from -a mule’s tail to be commander-in-chief of Madero’s army. He designed it -for the extirpation of Huertistas that got to tagging after him like -these gents is trailing us. ’Twas very simple. He’d load up half a ton -of dynamite on an enjine cowcatcher an’ turn her loose with the throttle -wide open jest where she’d catch a troop-train in a blind cut. Mighty -effective, it was, too. Some o’ them Huertistas was so elevated above -their normal they hain’t finished raining down yet. Of course we’re shy -on the dynamite. But a forty-ton mogul careering along at sixty miles an -hour ain’t to be despised. Anyway, we’ll try it. At this gait we orter -catch ’em in the cut beyond the station. Hit her up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">While talking he had not been idle. First he laid his rifle by the cab -door, ready to jump; then slipped over his head and shoulder the -bandoliers of cartridge-clips Gordon had left for him. Meanwhile the -Mexican’s frightened glance swung between him and the tracks which were -slipping faster and faster under the mogul. Beyond the station a faint -glow, reflection from its headlight, marked the entrance of the -<em class="italics">revueltosos’</em> train into the cut. In his mind the engineer’s horror, -burning, mangling, scalding, fought for supremacy with his fear of -Jake—and won. Selecting the moment that the latter’s two hands were -engaged with the bandoliers, the engineer crossed the cab in one leap -and plunged down and out.</p> -<p class="pnext">“You son of a gun!” Grabbing his rifle, Jake jumped after.</p> -<p class="pnext">But in the few seconds that elapsed between their leaps the mogul -carried Jake a hundred yards. A second to a bump and each roll as he -struck rebounded and turned over and over lost more time. A few more -were required before he picked himself up. Then his glance went after -the mogul, now shooting like a comet toward the cut from which the -<em class="italics">revueltosos’</em> train had just emerged. In the glare of the headlights -each vividly illuminating the other, like two dragons breathing fire and -smoke, they flew at each other’s throats.</p> -<p class="pnext">Came a yell! a crash! Then darkness, hazy with steam, wiped out all but -screams and agonized curses.</p> -<p class="pnext">“<em class="italics">God!</em>” It burst from Jake. “If Bull could on’y have been here!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Both while in the air and rolling over and over he had an impression -that he must have jumped almost on top of the engineer. But now, looking -around, he became aware—first, that he was standing directly opposite -the station; second, of a dark figure in the lighted doorway; third, of -a flash, pistol-crack, of a bullet singing by his ear; lastly of a -baker’s dozen of other dark figures rushing at him from all around.</p> -<p class="pnext">In a pinch—how well Sliver and Bull had known it!—Jake could always be -counted upon to do the unexpected. Behind him stretched an open, moonlit -plain where he would be easily shot down or overtaken. Grabbing the bull -by the horns, he rushed straight at the figure in the doorway. Into its -dark midst went the butt of his rifle. Bang! he slammed the door, a -heavy, three-inch affair of oak that fitted against stone jambs and -lintels; was secured by iron swing-bars. As he dropped these in place -the panels quivered under the impact of many shoulders. Leaving the man -he had overthrown writhing and holding his middle, Jake crossed quickly -to the window.</p> -<p class="pnext">In readiness for just such contingencies, its iron grill had been set -out six inches to permit a raking fire along the wall, and shooting at -ten feet into the convulsive movement at the door Jake’s first shot -dropped a man. As the others dodged around the corner a yell told of -another wounded.</p> -<p class="pnext">A smaller window commanded that side, and, crossing over, Jake raked the -fugitives in their flight with a galling fire till the last dim figure -disappeared in the brush. Then, after he had noted with satisfaction -that the window rose high above the ground, he turned to his captive, -who still lay groaning on the floor.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Git up!”</p> -<p class="pnext">Steel eyes and ugly pistol muzzle enforced the order.</p> -<p class="pnext">The man, a fat Mexican with a yellow, bilious face and small, beady -eyes, arose. “If you will only let me live, señor—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Shut up!” Jake cut him off. “You’re the station agent?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señor!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“What’s in those boxes?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Powder, señor, giant powder that was brought in by revueltosos from a -gringo mine. It is to be shipped on the train to-morrow to Valles, who -will have it made into bombs for use in his trenches.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Thought so.” Jake grinned at the pile of boxes. “’Tain’t no trick to -tell gringo dynamite. The markings fairly scream, ‘Made in America!’ So -Valles is going to make bombs of it? Well, well!”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Señor, you will—”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Now, Alberto, cut that out.” Having thus transferred the cognomen from -the engineer to his present captive, Jake went on. “That precious -existence o’ yourn depends altogether upon your paisanos outside. The -longer I hold ’em off the longer you live. Get it? Bueno! Now trot over -to the window. The second you see any one—yelp! If you don’t—” He tapped -his gun significantly.</p> -<p class="pnext">The agent thus placed, he looked around the room, The blackened stone of -the walls told that it had already been burned in one or other of the -revolutions. He grinned again, noting that the original roof had been -replaced with laminated iron. “Kain’t roast us out, anyway, Alberto.”</p> -<p class="pnext">On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a -small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a -few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall. -Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent -watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid -block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window.</p> -<p class="pnext">Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight. -Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of -dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry, -command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst, -then dropped it again.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tain’t square, shooting wounded.” But there was no pity in his eyes. -His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: “I’d like to know jest -how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who’s -here!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick -eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred -yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the -chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Afraid I’ve spoiled another of your colleagues.” He turned to the -agent. “They ain’t very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It’s -a cinch they’re not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an’ -I simply kain’t waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep -watch, Alberto.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and -laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after -game Jake’s brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and -tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He -could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing -with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a -frontier bunk-house.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face -loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held -him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff -of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he -watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the -gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having -compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung -poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak.</p> -<p class="pnext">Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and -looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A -stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing -in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled -in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak -now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lee’s face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her -arms around his neck, when he murmured, “On’y thirty miles to the -border, a clean getaway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range -that marked Sliver’s last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face -turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small -nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness -settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a -sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the -shutters, he returned to the table—not any too soon; for as he sat down -and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range, -the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters.</p> -<p class="pnext">Through all, as a rat in a corner might watch a cat, the agent had -watched him with deadly fascination. From the north window where he -stood it was but a step to the door. Apparently Jake did not notice him -take it, for he did not look up—even when the agent’s hand touched the -upper bar.</p> -<p class="pnext">“If I was you, Alberto, I’d come away from there.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The agent froze. But Jake had spoken in English. The hand went again to -the bar, was slowly lifting it when, following a second splintering -crash, he fell forward on his face with a hollow cough.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Through the lungs, I reckon.” Jake looked down at the gross body, -writhing in its death agony. “I told you to keep away, Alberto.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The man’s last convulsive clutch had swung the upper bar clear of its -sockets, but Jake did not move. The lower bar still held and, standing -up, he watched the oaken panels quiver and split under heavy blows. With -rhythmic regularity came the crash of volleys fired point-blank into the -shutters. Bullets, too, were spitting through the side window—to strike -and flatten on the opposite wall. Over all, above the crash of -rifle-fire, thud of the beam they were using on the door, rose the roar -and howl of a blood-mad <em class="italics">peon</em> rabble.</p> -<p class="pnext">“The hull town has come to the funeral,” Jake muttered. “Well, they’ll -see some wake.”</p> -<p class="pnext">As the door crashed in he stooped and blew out the light. Darkness fell -through the room—darkness that pulsed with convulsive movement. Over the -body of the agent the leaders tripped and fell. Upon them others piled -in a heap, yet under the pressure of the howling crowd outside still -others streamed in. Above the oaths, curses, mad howls, rose yells for -some one to bring a light.</p> -<p class="pnext">Presently it came, a piece of engine waste soaked in alcohol at the end -of a stick; and when it did, the rolling eyeballs, furious faces, -vicious mouths, stood out for a second, writhing in murderous lust, then -set in sudden horror.</p> -<p class="pnext">For the bluish flare fell full on a grim figure, tall, lean, topped with -a hard face, steel-point eyes. The muzzle of Jake’s gun touched the top -layer of powder. Cold, weird, satanic, he must have loomed in their -vision as the Evil One in whose existence they all believed. Paralyzed -by the impending doom, some stood staring. Others, screaming hoarsely, -fought in vain to beat back through the crowd. Till the last moment, -yes, till one hardier scoundrel raised a gun, Jake held them in torture, -then—</p> -<p class="pnext">Both shots were wiped out by the tremendous explosion whose thunder and -red sky-flash were heard and seen by Bull fifteen miles away.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xlii-bull-dreams-a-dream"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id43">XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM!</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the -sage-brush while the <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> engine approached. With a roar it came -at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead. -For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette -against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and -swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of -smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on -spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared -past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of -dust.</p> -<p class="pnext">Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while -they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away.</p> -<p class="pnext">“We’ll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours,” he -said. “We kain’t afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we’ll have to travel -at night an’ hide up during the day—unless we chance on a <em class="italics">rancho</em> where -we kin steal horses! Of course, it’s terrible on you, Missy. But if you -kin stan’ it for a little longer—” He stopped as Lee shook, as he -thought, with a sob.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and -trouble. “It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own, -should have to turn rustler.” With a little mothering pat that somehow -reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her -fostering care, she added: “Don’t worry about me. If I could only make -you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a -rifle. I can at least carry something.”</p> -<p class="pnext">But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and -provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding -through sage, <em class="italics">palo verde</em>, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure -hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they -obstinately refused—and it was well that they did. When Bull called a -halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and -swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Don’t dare to move,” he ordered, “till I get you something to eat.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt -meat. But after “Alberto” cut off the engine Gordon had “requisitioned” -his <em class="italics">tortillas</em> and chile stew—plenty for three. Once again Lee wished -she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct -still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery <em class="italics">tortillas</em> his -head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the -engine soot off his face.</p> -<p class="pnext">Neither did Bull escape. “There!” Bestowing a little, loving box on -Gordon’s ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and -washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child. -Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Well, you’re <em class="italics">half</em>-clean, anyway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken -his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew -from Bull a grave smile. “Sleep, now, you kids,” he admonished them. -“Two hours an’ we’ll have to be moving again.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You, too!” Lee insisted.</p> -<p class="pnext">Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at -once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower -rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet. -Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding -their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles -to the southward Jake was playing his last lone “hand.” He was in Bull’s -mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with -calcium red.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Something doing there.” Though he could have no accurate knowledge, -Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. “Bet you Jake had a -finger in it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and -provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she -needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused -in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open.</p> -<p class="pnext">Yet she made light of it. “My feet seem to belong to some one else. All -the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!”</p> -<p class="pnext">It was the barbed thorn of a <em class="italics">nopal</em>, which hurt worse coming out than -it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, “cat’s claws” and -“crucifixion thorns” lay everywhere in prickly ambush. “Spanish bayonet” -scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would -rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open -among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of -the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In -daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking. -When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once; -in five seconds were fast asleep.</p> -<p class="pnext">This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed -on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to -the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first -pale lights.</p> -<p class="pnext">Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and -scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee, -pale, tired, limping, but cheerful.</p> -<p class="pnext">She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. “To -be sure! We’ll have all day to rest.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“I didn’t mean, though, for you to walk no more.” Stooping suddenly, he -rose with her sitting on his shoulder.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Your weight ain’t no more to me than a fly,” he replied to her protest; -and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these -brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a <em class="italics">mesa</em> that -raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the -boulders and sage.</p> -<p class="pnext">“’Tain’t safe to go on,” he said, setting her down. “You’d think, to -look around, there wasn’t a living thing within a hundred thousand -miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without -being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard. -Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding -from the <em class="italics">rurales</em>; but there’s always some one. We’ll stop while it’s -safe.”</p> -<p class="pnext">He was right. Already they had been seen—by a <em class="italics">peon</em> who had been driven -by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret spring -from <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> lovers. But the tale of their passing did not go forth -by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of their -burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away “Alberto,” the -engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop of -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em> he had guided up the line.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet? -These little ones no larger than a child’s are those of the woman.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“A white girl, thou sayest?” the leader asked.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si, señor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man’s -riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate -for thee.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“There should be <em class="italics">some</em> pay.” The <em class="italics">capitan</em> went on, with a vile oath. -“Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us; -si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs -come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt -that gringo. But he goes out like”—he blew out the match with which he -was lighting his cigarette—“this! and takes a hundred more of us with -him. Bueno!” His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. “They -are gone, our compañeros, but we shall meet again—in hell. But these -others, the girl and her men, shall pay.”</p> -<p class="pnext">At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of -which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to -the north and east as they went, they approached Bull’s limestone castle -just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon.</p> -<p class="pnext">After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a -rough <em class="italics">ramada</em> of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting -in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> -line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust -clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet -let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so -carefully that Lee slept on.</p> -<p class="pnext">“There ain’t many of ’em,” he whispered. “We must make ’em sick at the -first shooting. I’m going to slip along the ridge to get that second -man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin -see his eyes; then bust him where he’s biggest.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Yesterday’s fighting had absorbed most of Gordon’s thrills. But now, as -he lay looking down at the <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> coming on a little, ambling jog, -he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and -fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed -different—as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon -instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When, -pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon -experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after -fair warning.</p> -<p class="pnext">But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened -him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting -from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired.</p> -<p class="pnext">At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the <em class="italics">ramada</em>, startled and -wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide -headlong to the ground. Bull’s man was also down, and as the riderless -horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the -sage whirled back and combined half a mile away.</p> -<p class="pnext">By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at -a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. “That -is the Tejon Pass—about ten miles away. The American border is on’y -twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold ’em till -then we’ll have all night to climb through the Pass.”</p> -<p class="pnext">They made a good gain while the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> were recovering from that -first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle -around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller -elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further.</p> -<p class="pnext">Thus began a repetition of the previous day’s fighting—with this -disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone -ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time -with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the -brush with their bullets to keep the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> from crawling up on -them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time -more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> -brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired -directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was -complete.</p> -<p class="pnext">It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the -circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he -sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into -the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up, -then fell forward.</p> -<p class="pnext">So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set -the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a -huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon’s -dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance, -supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of -the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly -thereafter they entered the Pass.</p> -<p class="pnext">From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell, -hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool, -at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after -they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on -his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail -to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So -tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of -crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering -her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep.</p> -<p class="pnext">Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his -ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he -closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was -accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his -thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything, -it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal -perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed -down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the -hour.</p> -<p class="pnext">Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in -the curve of Gordon’s arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces -turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl’s -color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under -the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad, -low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier -mold of Gordon’s features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose, -forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw, -supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the -other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in -spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long -limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly.</p> -<p class="pnext">In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower. -The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of -Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and -earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that -age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft -dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past -loves enveloped them sleeping there.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Jes’ naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get -such a pair.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Bull’s murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world -to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of -health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to -degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the -world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a -thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature’s intent so -completely fulfilled.</p> -<p class="pnext">To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and -to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at -Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the <em class="italics">portales</em> many a -time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the -Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that -tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself -and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under -Bull’s eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter -raised the echoes in the <em class="italics">patio</em>. Now they were young men and women! He -saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine -young fellows come in to woo and win Lee’s girls.</p> -<p class="pnext">With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under -forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by -the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship -into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships -thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of -iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee’s children, always strong, -always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In -legislature, church, halls of state, they took place—at first a few -white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race -drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors, -legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its -neighbor across the Rio Grande.</p> -<p class="pnext">It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately -consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in -the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull’s -gaze came back to them.</p> -<p class="pnext">Surely they were “fit,” the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long -process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained -children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste -the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought -about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and -complete. “Fit,” morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the -term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more -ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the “fit” of ten -thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on -their lives.</p> -<p class="pnext">It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it—and died; as Jake had -sworn to it—and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation, -heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the -cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of -heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only -enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon’s, he had to empty -his own.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Won’t need it, anyway.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last -evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley, -then on up here, he had searched for just such a place.</p> -<p class="pnext">“No, I won’t need it.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into -Lee’s face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He -knew it for the last time—just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like -Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had -repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial -with a heavy shake of the head.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Twould on’y break them up an’ do me no good.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Very gently he woke up Gordon. “Don’t wake her till I’m through telling. -It will soon be daylight. With it they’ll be on top of us again. The -border’s over there—on’y a few miles.” With heavy steadiness he went on -with the last fine lie: “I’m keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an’ -I’ll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don’t you wait for -me. She’s well rested now; so keep going and going till you’ve crossed.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Reaching up, Gordon took Bull’s hand in a strong grip. “I suppose -there’s no use asking you to let me stay?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“No.” Bull shook his head. “An’ if I would—she wouldn’t! Now wake her -up.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while -making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered -their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet -when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing -there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Oh, won’t you come?” she pleaded.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure, come on!” Gordon seconded her plea. “We can fight and run like -yesterday.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Yes, <em class="italics">do</em>?” Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him, -shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread -earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. “Oh, <em class="italics">won’t</em> -you come? I’m <em class="italics">so</em> afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I’m -dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them—will happen to -you. And if it did—oh, what should I do? What <em class="italics">shall</em> I do?”</p> -<p class="pnext">Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a -year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in -holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, “had walked in an’ -come out again, sober, like a man,” he might have given in; gone on in -her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the -desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake.</p> -<p class="pnext">She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through -events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne -herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to -restrain her tears. “There! there!” Gathering her to him, Bull patted -her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. “There! there! -In a few hours we’ll be over the border, and ’twon’t be long afore we’ll -be back at Arboles, you an’ Gordon an’ me an’ Sliver an’ Jake.” He said -more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life. -Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of -the pain it covered, he concluded: “So don’t bother about me. There’s -less risk here than in any of the stan’s we made in the last three days. -I’ve got ’em all down below me an’ there’s on’y this trail. If they try -to come on, it ’ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I’ll hold ’em -jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run -along.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“You’re sure?”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Sure!” He had to swallow his heart to say it.</p> -<p class="pnext">“Remember,” she called back, moving away, “I’ll be on pins and needles -till you come.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer. -“I won’t be here long.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in -hand, he turned his face to the foe.</p> -</div> -<div class="level-2 section" id="xliii-the-last-of-the-three-bad-men"> -<h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id44">XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN</a></h2> -<p class="pfirst">As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and -fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. -From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high -walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a -lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched -down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they -could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting -men.</p> -<p class="pnext">After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, -Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the -largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from -below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and -looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to -form in the pale dawn.</p> -<p class="pnext">Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so -fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity -or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who -shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first -pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their -great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of -rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in -the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the -emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a -man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was -strong upon him.</p> -<p class="pnext">In such moments a man’s whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema -drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull’s reflections began with -his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden -pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, -coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the -wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados.</p> -<p class="pnext">Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute -white fear on the opposite side of Carleton’s death-bed. He saw her, -after the funeral, coming toward him through the <em class="italics">patio</em> gateway, -swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis -Lovell’s rich, dark beauty.</p> -<p class="pnext">Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her -diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded -some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. -All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of -match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his -thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one -scene.</p> -<p class="pnext">Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he -started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure -her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read -their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her -face buried itself in his breast.</p> -<p class="pnext">Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still -in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, -as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills <em class="italics">rancho</em>, memory leaped -the gap in time and distance—he was sitting in the widow’s kitchen, -Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee’s birthday -cake.</p> -<p class="pnext">From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last -tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her -pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the -bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he -was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm -in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into -dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always -in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through -the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that -his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her -ownership.</p> -<p class="pnext">“I shall expect you soon?”</p> -<p class="pnext">He heard, too, his own answer, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty’s shoulder, and—the -bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty windows that -stared with fiery eyes from seared walls.</p> -<p class="pnext">In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dénouement came almost -with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony.</p> -<p class="pnext">While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and -strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the -rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple -shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow -interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam -of the sun.</p> -<p class="pnext">It announced the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> of the <em class="italics">brigada</em> Gonzales! Her murderers! -Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew -into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac -glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a -club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he -peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now -wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was -again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em> in the <em class="italics">fonda</em> cañon. Big, black, burly, he looked more -like a bear than a man.</p> -<p class="pnext">If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the -long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that -sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his -care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives -to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his -revolver, a heavy Colt’s .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised -them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and -climbed to the crest of the opposite bank.</p> -<p class="pnext">Lying there, he looked down on the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> who had begun to climb -up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was -impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high -and fired.</p> -<p class="pnext">The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the -<em class="italics">revueltosos</em> tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared -with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the -“fight and run” of yesterday’s warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they -moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from -which to return his fire.</p> -<p class="pnext">Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at -intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust -about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long -silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up.</p> -<p class="pnext">Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, -each recording a stage in Lee’s advance toward safety. As clearly as -though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but -moving steadily on with Gordon’s help. And his imaginings ran with the -facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, -down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the -plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that -marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently -grew into a United States cavalry patrol.</p> -<p class="pnext">Suspecting an ambush, the <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> came forward slowly. Quarter of -an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the -opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long -silence, three appeared in the open.</p> -<p class="pnext">“They have gone! Bring up the horses!”</p> -<p class="pnext">The leader’s call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they -waited, he heard their conversation:</p> -<p class="pnext">“If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, -we had caught them last night.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“Si,” came the answer. “But he wanted the girl for himself.”</p> -<p class="pnext">“The swine!” The epithet was set in vile oaths. “But he is cured forever -of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The -bullet took him squarely between the eyes.”</p> -<p class="pnext">There was more of it—their present hope to run the <em class="italics">gringos</em> down with -horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition -they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black -eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, -hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of -the horses.</p> -<p class="pnext">A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and -sliding, most of the time on their beasts’ haunches, down into the rock -pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. -Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage:</p> -<p class="pnext">“They are surely gone. Vamos!”</p> -<p class="pnext">A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room -for all in the “bore.” He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing -of the first beast he waited, then—with a sudden pry of the rifle-barrel -he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast as he could -pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed rifle -waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth bared, -leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the midst of -the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among them -almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound from -the opposite hill.</p> -<p class="pnext">For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of -which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the -dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat -time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the -primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that -evil chaff, dropping them as they came on.</p> -<p class="pnext">And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds, -they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his -fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and <em class="italics">machetes</em>. Till -only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up -the hill Bull made no effort to follow.</p> -<p class="pnext">Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the -dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with -the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled -and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand -and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two <em class="italics">revueltosos</em> -staring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his -rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white -cloud overhead.</p> -<p class="pnext">With such intensity did he stare, the second <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> also looked -up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the -faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw; -clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills’s voice:</p> -<p class="pnext">“I shall expect you soon?”</p> -<p class="pnext">The <em class="italics">revueltoso</em> was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his -answer rang out, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”</p> -<p class="pnext">The rifle cracked and “Bull” Perrin, the last of the “Three Bad Men of -Las Bocas,” collapsed in a heap.</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em"> -</div> -<p class="center pfirst small">THE END.</p> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="center line-block noindent outermost"> -<div class="line"><span class="larger">ZANE GREY’S NOVELS</span></div> -<div class="line"> </div> -<div class="line">May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list.</div> -</div> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of -frontier warfare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she is -captured by bandits. A surprising climax brings the story to a -delightful close.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE RAINBOW TRAIL</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">The story of a young clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the great -western uplands—until at last love and faith awake.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">DESERT GOLD</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and ends -with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had willed to the -girl who is the story’s heroine.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago when Mormon -authority ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is the theme of -the story.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo Jones, -known as the preserver of the American bison, across the Arizona -desert and of a hunt in “that wonderful country of deep cañons and -giant pines.”</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love a -young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands that the -girl shall become the second wife of one of the Mormons— Well, that’s -the problem of this great story.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE SHORT STOP</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win fame -and fortune as a professional ball player. His hard knocks at the -start are followed by such success as clean sportsmanship, courage and -honesty ought to win.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">BETTY ZANE</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beautiful -young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest pioneers.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE LONE STAR RANGER</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an outlaw -along the Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of the river, he -finds a young girl held prisoner, and in attempting to rescue her, -brings down upon himself the wrath of her captors and henceforth is -hunted on one side by honest men, on the other by outlaws.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE BORDER LEGION</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a lawless -Western mining camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing that she -loved him—she followed him out. On her way, she is captured by a -bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots Kells, the leader—and -nurses him to health again. Here enters another romance—when Joan, -disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A -gold strike, a thrilling robbery—gambling and gun play carry you along -breathlessly.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” as told by -his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in Iowa and his -first encounter with an Indian. We see “Bill” as a pony express rider, -then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the Scouts, and later engaged in the -most dangerous Indian campaigns. There is also a very interesting -account of the travels of “The Wild West” Show. No character in public -life makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than -“Buffalo Bill,” whose daring and bravery made him famous.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="center pfirst">Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York</p> -<div class="clearpage"> -</div> -<div class="center line-block noindent outermost"> -<div class="line">NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY</div> -<div class="line"><span class="larger">WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE</span></div> -<div class="line"> </div> -<div class="line">HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED.</div> -<div class="line"> </div> -<div class="line">May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap’s list.</div> -</div> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst">MAVERICKS.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A tale of the western frontier, where the “rustler,” whose -depredations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the -range, abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">A TEXAS RANGER.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried law -into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a series of -thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, and then passed -through deadly peril to ultimate happiness.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">WYOMING.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured the -breezy charm of “cattleland,” and brings out the turbid life of the -frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">RIDGWAY OF MONTANA.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where politics and -mining industries are the religion of the country. The political -contest, the love scene, and the fine character drawing give this -story great strength and charm.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">BUCKY O’CONNOR.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, replete with -the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash and -absorbing fascination of style and plot.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a -bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is a -most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination that is -fittingly characteristic of the great free West.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="pfirst">BRAND BLOTTERS.</p> -<blockquote> -<div> -<p class="pfirst">A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid life of -the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with a charming -love interest running through its 320 pages.</p> -</div> -</blockquote> -<p class="center pfirst">Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York</p> -<div class="vspace" style="height: 6em"> -</div> -<!-- -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- --> -<div class="backmatter"> -</div> -<p class="pfirst" id="pg-end-line">*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK <span>OVER THE BORDER</span> ***</p> -<div class="cleardoublepage"> -</div> -</div> -<div class="language-en level-2 pgfooter section" id="a-word-from-project-gutenberg" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> -<span id="pg-footer"></span><h2 class="level-2 pfirst section-title title">A Word from Project Gutenberg</h2> -<p class="pfirst">We will update this book if we find any errors.</p> -<p class="pnext">This book can be found under: <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600"><span>http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600</span></a></p> -<p class="pnext">Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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-
-===============
-OVER THE BORDER
-===============
-
-.. meta::
- :PG.Title: Over the Border
- :PG.Id: 40600
- :PG.Released: 2012-08-27
- :PG.Rights: Public Domain
- :PG.Producer: Roger Frank
- :PG.Producer: the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
- :DC.Creator: Herman Whitaker
- :DC.Title: Over the Border
- :DC.Language: en
- :DC.Created: 1921
- :coverpage: images/cover.jpg
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. pgheader::
-
-.. role:: lg
- :class: larger
-
-.. role:: sm
- :class: smaller
-
-.. |hs| unicode:: 0xA0 .. non-collapsing white-space
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line
-
- :lg:`OVER THE BORDER`
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- A NOVEL
-
- .. vspace:: 1
-
- :sm:`BY`
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- HERMAN WHITAKER
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- :sm:`AUTHOR OF “THE SETTLER,” “THE PLANTER,” “THE PROBATIONER,” Etc.`
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- NEW YORK
- GROSSET & DUNLAP
- PUBLISHERS
-
- .. vspace:: 1
-
- Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. container:: verso center white-space-pre-line
-
- Books by HERMAN WHITAKER
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- OVER THE BORDER
- THE PROBATIONER
- THE SETTLER
- THE PLANTER
- THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA
- CROSS TRAILS
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK
- Established 1817
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- Over The Border
- Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
-
- .. vspace:: 2
-
- Printed in the United States of America
- Published May, 1917
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. container:: dedication center white-space-pre-line
-
- TO
- :lg:`Jack London`
- IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. figure:: images/illus-fpc.jpg
- :align: center
- :alt: GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS
-
- GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. contents:: Contents
- :depth: 1
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS
-=================================
-
-The Three had chosen their lair wisely.
-
-In the picturesque Spanish phrase, it “situated itself” midway of the
-desert, the great Mexican desert that is more varied in its heated
-monotony than a land of woods and fields and streams. Here it runs to
-sparse grass land under upland *piñon*; there spreads over wide, clean
-sands that reflect like burnished brass the intolerable glare of the
-sun. Now it marches for leagues with the yuccas that fling crazed arms
-and shrunken limbs like posturing dwarfs; again it is dotted with lonely
-*mesas*, monolithic masses that raise orange and vermilion facades out
-of a violet mirage. A magic land it is, made out of shattered rainbows,
-girded with crimson-and-gold mountains that wear around their high
-foreheads cooling bandages of snow; a land of deathless calms, cyclonic
-storms, torrential rains, peopled only by the vultures that wheel
-against the sky and the little golden dust-whorls which dance together
-over its heated face. A country where dwells the very spirit of romance;
-of which anything might be predicted and come to pass; therefore, as
-before said, the very place for a lair.
-
-Secondly, the Three had shown a nice discrimination in the selection of
-a site. Its capacities in the way of offense and defense would have
-earned the instant commendation of a medieval baron, Mexican bandit,
-revolutionist, or “movie” director in search of an ideal robber’s roost.
-Years ago a Yankee “prospector” with more faith than sense and money
-enough to have left prospecting severely alone, had kept a raft of
-*peones* busy for the better part of two years ripping the heart out of
-a mountain-top in a feverish search for fabulous gold. Rumors that still
-linger in Sonora *jacales* tell that the *gringo* worked under the
-direction of the spirits—or a spiritualist, which may or may not be
-quite the same. The results—to wit, a huge gap in the mountain and an
-abandoned adobe powder house, now serving as a residence for the Three
-Bad Men—seem to favor the rumor. Spirits were never good miners. But
-that is neither here nor there, the Three concerning themselves only
-with the natural fortifications they thus inherited.
-
-The adobe stood well back in a semicircular gap, protected on three
-sides by the curving walls of the excavation. Behind them, the mountain
-dropped almost a thousand feet sheer, and the level bench in front of
-the house could only be gained by a narrow path that fell like a yellow
-snake down the steep slopes into thick chaparral. From its edge one
-overlooked the vast reaches of the central Sonora desert, an ashen sea
-of sage and mimosa shored in by far mountains that loomed dusky purple
-or stood out stark yellow as they happened to lie to the sun. Since the
-Yankee went back on his “controls,” or they on him, a *sahuaro* cactus
-had raised its fluted barrel within the excavation, captaining a squad
-of dwarf yuccas that poked grotesque arms in pathetic entreaty out of
-the rubble. To these natural improvements the Three had added a
-*ramada*, broad porch of poles and cornstalks, in the shade of which
-they took their ease one hot nooning, two playing *pedro* at a rough
-wooden table while the third dozed and nodded with stool tilted back
-against the adobe wall.
-
-It did not require more than a cursory glance to know the Three for
-members of that sad colony which is doomed by its past to remain on the
-wrong side of the Mexican border. Beginning with Sliver Smith, the
-sleeper; his drowsy lids hid blue eyes that were hard as chips of agate
-and exactly fitted his reckless face. Just now sleep had softened its
-lines and brought a certain underlying good-nature. But for the mouth
-and deep creases down each side of the nose, which bespoke passions
-violent and unrestrained, one would have put him down now for that which
-he had been—a cowman from the New Mexican ranges.
-
-The other two, however, really looked the “bad man.” “Bull” Perrin, the
-biggest and eldest, might have been especially cast by nature for the
-part. Big, burly, black-visaged, and heavy-jowled, excessive drinking
-had dyed his face out of all relation to the creamy skin the gods had
-given him. The hot brown eyes under straight bushy brows bespoke a
-cyclonic temper. But though Bull conveyed the impression of an “ugly
-customer” at first sight, a physiognomist would have picked Jake Evers,
-his partner, as a far more dangerous man. The cold, bleak sparks of eyes
-in his lean, lantern-jawed face scintillated with cunning. But for a
-certain humor that lurked about the corners of his mouth, his face would
-have been utterly repulsive.
-
-Yet after granting their “badness,” there was about them no taint of the
-mean, rat-like wickedness of the city criminal. Their composite was of
-strong impulses, misdirected forces gone to waste, of men cast by birth
-in a wrong age. In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their
-strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in
-the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned
-toad in the sand at Bull’s feet, as much as the lizard that coursed
-swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper’s head; as much as the
-*sahuaro* and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold
-glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that—horses and cattle not
-being in question—they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter
-of its best traditions.
-
-Looking at Bull and Jake as they sat at play, the former might be
-likened to a grizzly; the latter to a tiger, alert, stealthy, cunning,
-ferocious; qualities which sprang into evidence with startling
-suddenness when a shrill burst of woman’s scolding presently disrupted
-the heated silence.
-
-Apparently the noise issued from a white cloud that hid the doorway; but
-as this settled and cleared away, a buxom slattern of a Mexican girl
-stood revealed. While flicking out the last dust of flour from an empty
-sack she bitterly reviled the Three. Though delivered in Spanish, the
-substance of her complaint was international and goes easily into
-English.
-
-“Flojos! Lazy ones! how shall one cook without flour? The coffee, too,
-is gone—and the sugar. Of lard or grease there is not a smear for the
-pan. You must go forth, to-day.”
-
-This was merely the text. While she enlarged thereon with copious
-illustrations to prove their worthlessness as providers, the two men at
-the table proceeded quietly with their play. It was the third that
-finally interrupted the harangue with the irascibility of one aroused
-from pleasant sleep.
-
-“Shut up, Dove!”
-
-In its literal sense the word stands for the most innocent of birds. But
-she chose to take the opposite meaning of the sarcastic Spanish.
-
-“Si, señor! I am that or I should not be here now, cooking for three
-beasts.” After a comparison between them and the lower animals that
-greatly favored the latter, she ran on with increasing heat:
-
-“‘Dove,’ indeed? Then where is my price? Where are they, the fine
-clothes, the silks and satins and linen, the jewelry and laces you were
-to gain for me? Was it by this I was bought?” She held out her dirty
-black skirt. “I, that might be now sitting in the cantina of Ignacio
-Flores at Las Bocas, selling aguardiente and anisette to his custom? Si,
-señores, *where are they*, the velvets, ribands, and neck chains? I—”
-
-It was at this point that Jake displayed his quality. Swinging swiftly
-around, he threw his knife, so hard and quickly that it stuck quivering
-in the door lintel close to the girl’s throat before she had time to
-close her mouth.
-
-“Here! don’t be so careless.” Bull’s bushy brows drew down over his
-burning eyes in quick reproof. But his next remark proved that the
-interference was not based on altruism. “If you croak her, who’s to do
-the cooking? Any corn left, Rosa?”
-
-Whereas Sliver’s rude interruption had merely stimulated her tongue;
-whereas, also, she had stuck out that member at Jake the instant she
-made sure the knife had missed, she now caught her breath with a little,
-frightened gulp. “Si, señor.”
-
-“Then make some tortillas and serve them along with the jerky,” he
-called after her. “And bring us out a drink.”
-
-At this Sliver, who had resumed his doze, sat up again. His lugubrious
-exclamation, “Oh, *hell*!” caused the others to look up a moment later.
-With an empty demijohn held upside down Rosa stood in the doorway. She
-did not speak. But her tragic pose, vindictive nod, said quite plainly,
-“Now will you go?”
-
-Neither did they speak. The situation was beyond revilings. Slowly Jake
-picked up and pocketed the cards. Sliver rose to his feet. In single
-file they marched down the path to find their horses. Indeed, they had
-caught the animals, saddled up at the stable on the flat below and were
-riding away through the chaparral before they recovered sufficiently to
-attempt to fix the blame for the shortage.
-
-Sliver—who, by the way, had gained his nickname under the law of
-opposites because he was short and stout—remembered that he had warned
-them several times “notter hit it so hard.” But his testimony lost force
-by reason of certain “lone drinks” in the absorption of which he had, by
-the others, been caught. Jake, on the other hand, had pleaded for more
-liquor and less flour the last time they stocked up at Las Bocas. By
-frank confession, moreover, he reduced the force of Sliver’s charge that
-he would never be satisfied with less liquor than “he ked swim in.”
-
-“That’s right. I never really seen at one time more whisky than I felt I
-c’d drink.”
-
-From this he went on with invectives against the wave of reform which,
-by its sudden flooding of the “Territ’ries”—as he still called the
-States of Arizona and New Mexico—might be held indirectly responsible
-for his present thirst. “For a cowman, like Sliver here, it don’t matter
-so much, him being used to dry spells out on the range. But for a man
-that’s dealt faro in a s’loon for a spell of years with two fingers of
-bourbon allus under his nose, it comes some bitter. Them was the golden
-days. What a man made in beef cattle or gold was his’n to plank down on
-a bar or place on a card. Till them pinch-faces from the Middle West
-descended like locusts upon the lan’, drought was unknown save by a few
-fool prospectors that got themselves lost in the desert. Locusts? I
-wrong ’em! A locust does live up to its natural instincts. Locusts is a
-blessing compared to pinch-faces. Why—” But certain lengthy reflections
-that established the place of the “Middle-Wester” beneath even the lowly
-bedbug in the scale of creation, must give place to his conclusion. “Si,
-señores! ’twas them druv’ me to rustling. But for them I’d still be
-living honest, dealing straight faro to all comers with on’y an
-occasional turn from the bottom of the box for the good of the house.”
-
-“Pity for you!”
-
-Bull’s pithy comment was enlarged upon by Sliver.
-
-“An’ you-all needn’t to be howling so loud, either, about them dry
-spells on the ranges. We allus had it in the bunk-houses an’ ’twas a
-poor cook that couldn’t hide a keg in the chuck-wagon. As for your
-faro—’twas to play the odd card you wolves dealt from the bottom that I
-med my first rustle. But for you I’d be taking my copa right now out of
-the cook’s keg instead of dying of thirst in this lousy desert.”
-
-There was real heat in the accusation, but the ex-gambler’s lean,
-leathery face merely split in a dry grin.
-
-“If your mother bred you a fool, don’t blame me. The flea bit the dog,
-the dog bit me; I kicked the dog an’ killed the flea. Take a drink of
-water, Sliver; it all works out in the end. You next, Bull. Which was
-it—water, wine, or weemen?”
-
-“None of ’em.” The big rustler shook his head. “Early piety did for me.
-Prayers morning, noon, an’ night; grace before meals; two long sermons
-on Sundays, an’ two hours, Sabbath-school, and what would you expect? I
-was so well brought up I jest had to go wrong. But if we don’t jog along
-we won’t make Las Bocas to-night.”
-
-As Bull spurred on ahead, Sliver looked at Jake. “Say, he ain’t exactly
-what you-all ’d call frank in his conversings. If there’s a thing he
-don’t know about us—well, ’tain’t our fault. But him? When you come to
-think of it did you ever hear him say how he kem to take up rustling?”
-
-The gambler shook his head. “In a gen’ral way—so gen’ral that I couldn’t
-tell jest how I got it—I’ve sorter gathered that he once croaked a man.
-But whether ’twas before or after he took up the profesh I couldn’t say.
-In the natural order of things, a rustler’s bound, sooner or later, to
-down some prying fool. There’s so many that try to mix in his business.
-But if it was before, Bull done it—I’ll bet you the gent had it coming.”
-
-
-II: OVER THE BORDER
-===================
-
-That night the Three put up at the *cantina* in the little adobe town of
-Las Bocas, where, by reason of occasional largesses to the leader of the
-revolutionary faction that happened to be on top, a welcome was always
-certain. Just now it was more particularly so because the present
-*jefe-politico*, a Carranzista, varied his political activities by
-acting as “fence” in the disposal of their plunder.
-
-In accordance with his advice, the following afternoon found them
-approaching the American border at a point far west of their usual
-sphere of operations. While they journeyed the sun slid down its western
-slant till it hung like a smoky lamp in the far dust of the desert.
-Behind them the sea of sage still ran off to distant mountains, but the
-sunset glow washed its dust away, draping the land in a royal robe.
-Ahead the grade was rising imperceptibly but steadily to a sparse grass
-country where the sage, *palo verde*, and yucca gave place to huge
-*sahuaros* that strewed the plain with their fluted barrels like the
-jade columns of some vast ruin. Among them roamed the flocks and herds
-of a pink-walled *hacienda* that nestled in a grove of lordly
-cottonwoods. As they rode past, the Three noted with appraising glances
-the sleek hides of a fine bunch of steers.
-
-“Dress a thousand pounds of beef apiece,” Jake opined.
-
-“Worth eighty pesos, gold, on the hoof, in El Paso,” Sliver yearningly
-added.
-
-But their interest went no further—for reasons that appeared when, at
-sundown, they rode past the concrete pillar that marked the
-international boundary. Rustler that he was, drunkard and gambler,
-utterly worthless if the reports current on the New Mexican ranges were
-to be believed, Sliver’s eye nevertheless lit up at the sight of it; the
-glow on his hard face was not all sunset reflection.
-
-“The good old U.S.,” he commented. “*Some* country!”
-
-“He wasn’t talking that way las’ time we crossed.” Jake winked at Bull.
-
-“Guess not. He was cussing Cristobel Columbo for ever having discovered
-it.”
-
-“That’s right,” Sliver admitted. “But I was what you-all might call in a
-bit of a hurry with a squad of rangers streaking at my heels. Other
-things being ekal—”
-
-“Which they ain’t,” Jake interrupted. “Mexico’s good enough for me.
-Mexico an’ revolution! For I tell you right now that if Porfirio Diaz
-was still boss, his rurales would have taken right holt where the
-rangers left off. Instead of dangling from a pine on the American side,
-we’d hev’ finished with a fusillado on this. But with the government
-switching every five minutes between Orozco, Villa, Huerta, Carranza,
-an’ the jefe-politicos an’ governors slaughtering each other
-between-whiles, it’s nobody’s business to look after us. We make our
-little sneaks across the border an’ return in peace an’ quiet. So ‘Viva
-la revolucion!’ That reminds me—where’re you heading, Bull?”
-
-“Livingstone *rancho* on the Little Stoney.”
-
-“Say, but that’s horses! Don’t they run ’em into the corrals at night?”
-
-The big rustler nodded. “All the easier to find, an’ after you once get
-them moving it don’t take three days to run ’em over the line. Besides,
-Don Manuel tol’ me at Las Bocas yesterday that the Carranzistas are
-needing heavy horses for their artillery over on the Coast. He’ll pay
-fifty pesos apiece an’ take his chance on a five-thousand-per-cent
-profit after the old gentleman grabs the presidential chair.” He
-emphatically concluded, “*Horses*, you bet!”
-
-“Some risky, cutting ’em out?” Sliver, too, looked dubious.
-
-“Not as much as you think. Did you never have some flea-bitten son of a
-gun rub down the bars while you slept plumb up against the corral an’
-wake next morning to find nary a head in sight? A horse don’t like a
-corral any more’n a man loves prison. The bars once down, you kin trust
-’em to soft-foot it out to the open. Why”—his grin at the remembrance
-set a flash of good-nature in his hard face—“why, I’ve seen an old nag
-look back at a colt that kicked the bars passing out just like he was
-saying, ‘You damn young fool! now you’ve upset the soup!’ Leave it to
-me. I’ll work ’em out on foot while you sit tight an’ hold my horse.
-Moon’s going to be jest about right, too. She’ll be taking her first
-peep about the time we get ’em out in the clear. It’ll be a pipe, then,
-to saddle up fresh beasts an’ shoot ’em over the border.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-The *rancho* for which they were heading lay still two hours away, and
-while they rode the *sahuaro* pillars gave place in turn to *piñon* and
-juniper thinly strewn over rolling grassland. Before night settled down,
-the wandering cattle-trails they had followed drew into the twin ruts of
-a wagon-road. Their going was timed by the moon. But it stole out from
-behind a low hill a trifle ahead of schedule. By its first dim radiance
-they made out the dark mass of the *rancho* buildings, house, corrals,
-stables, in a swale between two hills. It was, however, dark enough for
-their purpose, and, leaving his horse with the others, Bull went forward
-on foot.
-
-It was nervous work, sitting there watching the buildings take form
-under the waxing moon. Their strained senses took every sound, smell,
-and sight; a dog’s bark, click of horns as a steer scratched his
-forehead on the top rail of a corral, the impatient pawing of a horse,
-the warm cattle odor that floated on the night breeze. Dim, uncertain
-shapes seemed to form and fade in the nearer gloom. They were nervous as
-cats by the time a gun suddenly flashed under the dark porch of the
-house.
-
-The croupy cough of a child plus the nervous fears of its mother did it.
-Not that the woman saw Bull when she drew the curtain and peeped out.
-But these days, with a new revolution breaking, as Jake put it, “every
-five minutes” over the border, the American ranchers along the
-international line slept always with an eye open for possible raids. So
-far as Bull was concerned, her whisper was just as fatal as though she
-had seen him.
-
-“Pa! get up! I’m sure there’s some one out there!”
-
-Perhaps the rancher did see. Educated in objects moving through dusk,
-his plainsman’s eye may have noticed movement. Or perhaps he shot on
-chance. In either case he was quickly informed by the roar and clatter
-of hoofs that followed, for though Bull did not expect, now, to get away
-with a single head, pursuit would be blinded and divided by stampeding
-the beasts. Dropping the bars while the gun continued to flash its
-staccato warnings, he started the animals out, leaped on the back of
-one; as soon as it cleared the huddle, went shooting down the trail,
-guiding the animal with the swing of his body.
-
-Unfortunately, the whim that governs a stampede moved the other beasts
-to follow. So when the rancher and his men—in shirts and trousers, but
-not one without a gun—pulled their mounts out of the stables, their
-pursuit was guided by the distant thunder of hoofs. Neither did Bull’s
-quick change to his own beast divert the stampede. When the Three
-galloped on, the scared animals still followed like dogs at their heels.
-
-“First time my prey ever chased me!” Jake laughed harshly, looking back
-at the band. “If old man Livingstone don’t follow too close we’ll get
-’em yet!”
-
-Bull shook his head. “Not with the moon sailing up to her full an’ the
-critters leaving a trail broad as a pike road. Listen to that!”
-
-A sharp report punctuated the thud and clatter of the stampede; the
-first shot of a fusillade that grew hotter and hotter as the horses
-trailed off right and left, leaving the rustlers more exposed. As yet
-they were running in the shadow of a long hill where the light was poor.
-But half a mile ahead lay an open plain unbroken by cover.
-
-“They’ll shoot the lights outen us there!” Sliver prophesied. “Better
-make a stan’ while we can.”
-
-“They *are* getting sassy,” Jake agreed, as a bullet whizzed under his
-chin. “We’ll have to teach ’em this ain’t no turkey-shoot.”
-
-The deciding word came, as usual, from Bull. “They’d surround an’ hold
-us for the posse. You ride on while I check ’em. If they try to round me
-it’ll be up to you to take ’em from the rear. Get behind so’s they don’t
-see me turn.”
-
-In the faint light his sudden whirl behind a bush went unnoticed. He had
-already unshipped his rifle from the saddle slings, and through the
-upper branches he took careful aim. A hundred yards away Livingstone was
-coming at full gallop, about the same distance ahead of his men. Bull
-waited till he could see the old fellow’s hair, silver in the moonlight,
-framing his angry red face. Once the sights lined up level between the
-eyes. But muttering, “I ked sure spoil your beauty, but—I won’t,” Bull
-lowered them to the horse’s chest and fired.
-
-With the report the beast plunged forward, head and neck doubled under,
-throwing his rider out in the clear. Though badly shaken, the old man
-was up the next instant, and as he ran for cover his sudden change of
-expression from anger to flustered surprise drew from Bull a grin.
-
-“Teach you not to get so fresh.”
-
-At the crack of the rifle the others had also darted for cover, and as
-their guns began to spit and flash from the chaparral along the
-hillside, Bull laughed outright. “Not a rifle among ’em. Easy going!
-Hasta luego, señores! Some other time!”
-
-One or two bolder spirits emerged from the chaparral as Bull rode out in
-the open. But they scuttled back like rabbits as he swung in the saddle
-with leveled rifle. Though they followed till the boundary pillar stood
-out, two hours later, a shining silver shaft under the brilliant moon,
-they preserved always a safe distance, and Bull denied Sliver’s
-suggestion to “chuck a volley” into the dim mass.
-
-“Kain’t you leave your Uncle Samuel sleep? He ain’t a-going to be moved
-off his ‘watchful waiting’ by the loss of no horse, but if we go to
-killing folks, he’s sure going to take time to catch our goat b’twixt
-revolutions.”
-
-“To-morrow morning,” Jake commented, grinning, “the morning papers will
-be running scareheads an inch high about the ‘Latest Border Outrage!’
-Meanwhile we’ll be jogging home—”
-
-“—without the horses,” Bull dryly finished.
-
-“An’ Rosa, back at the roost,” Sliver added, “howling for coffee an’
-flour an’ grease.”
-
-Which reminded Jake of their former argument: “I told you we orter ha’
-bought more whisky. Nothing left but to ride back to Las Bocas an’ hit
-Don Miguel for credit.”
-
-
-III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES
-====================================
-
-Las Bocas was slowly stewing in its native filth when the Three sighted
-it again at noon next day.
-
-In all the world nothing reflects its environment more faithfully than a
-Mexican town. Southward, the great cities of Mexico and Guadalajara
-testify with their stately cathedrals, ornate public buildings,
-theaters, parks, and plazas, the flowering *patios* of lovely and
-luxurious homes, first to the richness of the central Mexican plateau,
-secondly to the fact that in normal times all the wealth of the republic
-drains to them. Oppositely, the northern towns with their squalid adobe
-streets, overrun with a plague of dirty children, dogs, vultures, pigs;
-desiccated by fierce heat, drowned by torrential rains; these in their
-place and turn are eminently characteristic of the arid desert. Save
-that it was a little smaller, a little dirtier, perhaps a little richer
-in the variety of its stenches, Las Bocas might serve as the type of all
-Mexican frontier towns.
-
-As the wind blew their way, the Three smelled it from afar. But usage
-breeds indifference even to evil odors. If not actually homesome, the
-fetor bespoke a possible drink.
-
-A quarter mile before entering the town they crossed the *arroyo* that
-gave it drink. Its waters also furnished an open-air laundry for two
-brown girls who knelt by its edge, pounding their soiled linen on flat
-boulders. These days of rampant revolution, a good girl had needs be
-careful, and at sight of the Three, dusty, unkempt, bearded, and gaunt
-from tire and travel, *gringos* at that, the two leaped up and fled
-toward the town.
-
-Grinning at their fright, Bull and Sliver would have ridden on, but
-Jake, who never missed a trick, reined in his beast and began to examine
-the laundry with the eye of a connoisseur. Though the remainder of her
-be clad in rags, the humblest *peona* will have her lace petticoat, and
-the dozen or so pieces that were already spread out to dry on the
-neighboring bushes were really very fine.
-
-“D’you allow to turn lady’s maid?” Sliver spoke, as Jake bent to stuff
-the lingerie into his saddle-bags.
-
-“Not till Rosa’s had the refusal of it. This orter keep her satisfied
-for at least a month.”
-
-Grinning, the pair of rascals spurred their jaded beasts and overtook
-Bull as he entered a narrow gut of a street that followed the
-meanderings of the original cow-path to the *jefe’s* house, a plastered
-adobe, limewashed in purple and gold, that faced the inevitable military
-barracks across a sorry attempt at a plaza.
-
-If the small traders and artisans who constituted the bulk of the
-population had been addicted to such flights of imagination, they might
-have pictured the *jefatura’s* yawning gates as a huge gullet through
-which, in normal times, their substance drained in taxes, fines, and
-imposts to Mexico City, the nation’s stomach, there to be consumed by a
-hungry tribe of official hookworms. Now, of course, it was being
-deflected into the private pocket of the dominant revolutionary chief.
-Lacking the imagination, they cursed beneath their breath and waited
-patiently till the next revolution should bring a new tyrant to avenge
-them on the present oppressor.
-
-The latest incumbent was at lunch under the peppertree in the *patio*
-when the Three dismounted at the gates. Fat and sleek and brown, his
-generally gross appearance was accentuated by pouched beady eyes, waxed
-mustache, unhealthy, erupted skin. As he sat there, shoveling in
-*frijoles* and *chile*, even a *peon’s* slack imaginings could have
-easily established a resemblance—if not between him and a hookworm, at
-least, to some greedy parasite. The irritability, blind individualism,
-offensive conceit, treachery, too common to Mexicans, lay hidden under
-the usual veneer of Spanish courtesy. The embraces, backpattings,
-effusive greetings with which he welcomed the Three would have graced
-the reception of a favorite son.
-
-“Enter, amigos!” His welcome buzzed through the *patio*. “Sit down and
-eat. Afterward we shall look over the horses. You have bestowed
-them—where?”
-
-But when he learned of their failure, the scorpion showed through the
-glaze of courtesy like a fly in amber. “*Carambar-r-r-aa*, señores!” His
-read wagged in a nasty way. “I had counted on the horses—to save your
-alive. On my desk lies a requisition from your gringo border police,
-demanding your bodies. Que desgracia!” The spite that scintillated in
-his beads of eyes gave his words sinister significance. “One would
-dislike to do it, if ’twere only through hate of your Government. But
-one has to account to his chiefs. Already they have inquired for you,
-and always I made answer, ‘These are good hombres, useful to our cause.’
-But deeds count more than words. Horses for their artilleria would have
-proved your worth. But now—” a second nasty wag told that their failure
-left them as other *gringos*, to be despised, hated, persecuted. Having
-given the impression time to sink in, he suggested, “But there must be
-others? You will try again?”
-
-“No use.” Bull’s gloom emphasized the denial. “This is the second time
-in a month that we’ve been chased across the border. They’re looking for
-us all along the line.”
-
-“Si? Then must you go elsewhere. What of”—pausing, he looked cautiously
-around—“what of this side? In central Chihuahua there are many
-horse-ranchos, gringo ranches with fine blooded stock.”
-
-“But—”
-
-The *jefe’s* shrug anticipated the objection. “Si, si! ’tis Mexico. That
-is what I have always told my chief—‘these hombres bother only the
-gringo pigs.’” With a covert grin at the safe insult, he continued, “But
-a gringo is a gringo, whether here or in your United States. If they be
-despoiled, we shall not shed many tears. There will be a complaint, of
-course, to and from your Government, and much writing between
-departments. In the mean time we have the horses. So—”
-
-“But that’s Valles’s country, isn’t it?” Jake put in. “He’s a bad hombre
-to fool with!”
-
-The *jefe* turned on him his evil grin. “What if the gringo ranchers had
-caught you last night? Hanging, amigo, is a dog’s death. I would prefer
-the fusilado of Valles’s men.”
-
-“What if he kicks to your people? Puts in a claim for our heads? You’re
-working together, ain’t you?”
-
-Once again the *jefe* looked around. “Listen, amigos! Between friends
-one may show the truth. Already there is a cloud, a little cloud, no
-bigger than a child’s hand arisen between us and Valles. If the horses
-are taken from a gringo *rancho* in Valles’s country, my chiefs will be
-the better pleased. What they have Valles cannot get in the days when
-the cloud grows big and black and bursts.”
-
-Sliver, who understood more Spanish than he could speak, here nudged
-Bull. “Ask him if he’ll grub-stake the deal.”
-
-“Ask nothing!” Bull’s hot eyes shot brown fire. “You heard him rubbing
-it into us, didn’t you? If it wasn’t that we need him I’d wring the
-little brown adder’s neck.” He went on, suavely, in Spanish, “My amigo
-questions me of the price. It will be the same—fifty pesos apiece,
-señor?”
-
-Nodding, the *jefe* glanced impatiently back at his lunch. He appeared
-to have forgotten his invitation. Pleading an engagement, he bowed them
-out through the gates, then returned to his gorging while, hungrier, and
-even still thirstier, the Three rode down the street.
-
-Usually they were not averse to an exchange of glances, or a
-flirtation—if the *hombre* was not in sight—with the brown girls who
-watched them from their doorways. But now their glances sought only the
-*cantinas*, whose open bars displayed a tempting array of bottles. While
-they looked their progress grew constantly slower, finally stopped in
-front of one whose owner was taking his *siesta* stretched out on the
-bar.
-
-Jake looked from the sleeper to his companions, then at the bottles of
-anisette and *tequila* on the rough wooden shelves. “If he was drunk it
-’u’d be easy—” As the Mexican disposed of the doubt, just then, by
-opening one excessively sober eye, Jake desperately concluded, “Say,
-kain’t we raise the price among us?”
-
-Bull tapped his empty pockets.
-
-Sliver mourned, “All I’ve got is a Confederate five some one slipped me
-during my last toot in El Paso. I’ve carried it sence for a lucky
-piece.”
-
-“An’ lucky it is!” Jake extended an eager hand. “After this
-revolutionary currency that’s run off by the million on a newspaper
-press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got
-Jeff Davis’s picter on it? This fellow don’t know him from Abe Lincoln.
-All gringo bills look alike to him. He’ll never know the diff.”
-
-Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the
-bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two *pesos* and some
-*centavos*, along with three stiff *copas*. Deceived by the size of the
-roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the *tienda* behind the bar
-coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa’s desire, and other
-necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of *tequila*, it made a goodly
-pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson
-in finance—to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating
-the *tequila* from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and
-shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some *centavos* aforesaid
-represented the value of either.
-
-From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the *tequila*;
-then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck
-of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver
-happened to catch the merchant’s eye.
-
-He grinned, answering Sliver’s wink. “Si, señores, this time you shall
-drink with me.”
-
-That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting
-out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began
-to throw two kings and an ace in the “three-card trick.” So deftly he
-did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a
-dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed
-the Mexican’s interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the
-flying cards.
-
-“Looks easy, don’t it?” Bull suggested. “Here, Sliver, give this hombre
-a chance.”
-
-Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on
-to try again. He could do it! He’d bet his *sombrero*, his horse, his
-store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no
-other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on
-the counter, against their bottles of *tequila*—and lost! In the course
-of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings,
-there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original
-thirty-two *pesos* and some *centavos*, a bolt of lace and linen for
-Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged
-them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost
-his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable
-interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three
-packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way.
-
-As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine.
-Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, the
-*comerciante* would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so
-his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser—perhaps because
-she has usually no hand in the game—and as the Three rode off she let
-loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner.
-
-“It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art
-lost in a siesta!” she assailed him. “After them, lazy one, and recover
-our goods!”
-
-By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was
-quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two
-girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street
-and added their outcries to the woman’s clamor. And now the Three were
-surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme
-had been making sheep’s eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the
-saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor.
-
-“They stole thy—” Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural indignation
-increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up the street
-and overtook the Three.
-
-Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish
-punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his
-discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull’s
-bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the
-man’s angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was
-up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake’s bleak
-eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull’s rifle was
-aimed from the hip.
-
-To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If
-one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a
-company can—or a regiment. The man’s shrill whistle was really far more
-dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the
-next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally
-brought from the *carcel* a squad on the run.
-
-By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with
-rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human
-kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was
-gone. Jake’s long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver’s reckless
-face had frozen in stone. Bull’s head and huge shoulders rose above his
-breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as
-trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers
-brought an officer and company from the barracks.
-
-Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican
-comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery
-set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of
-Porfirio Diaz’s famed *rurales*, the blue and red stripes or fatigue
-linen of the Federal Army, even the *charro* suits of Orozco’s
-Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men
-were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown
-faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy
-would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the
-officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled
-rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this
-fundamental truth—whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not
-worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull.
-
-“Did I not see you, señor, at the jefatura just now?”
-
-With Bull’s nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on the
-*comerciante* and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint.
-“They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in
-carcel.”
-
-Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the
-merchant’s back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. “How know
-ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed
-while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be
-friends of the jefe and no stealers of women’s fripperies.”
-
-Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away.
-
-Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way—to the
-*cantina* where they usually put up.
-
-“All we’ve gotter do now,” Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the
-street, “is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an’ Rosa’ll
-be fixed for a month.”
-
-But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten,
-followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural
-“thirsts” turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course
-they spent first the thirty-two *pesos* and some *centavos*, drank up
-their own *tequila*, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more
-liquor for the rabble of *peones* and brown girls that flocked to the
-*cantina* like buzzards to carrion.
-
-The “drunk” went through the customary stages from boisterous
-conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times
-Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at
-each other’s throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse,
-because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the
-other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad
-shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary
-throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past
-tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep.
-
-As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was
-nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a
-likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside;
-unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their
-natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at
-that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, *sans*
-groceries, *sans tequila*, *sans* money, but plus three splitting
-headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor.
-
-“Tough on Rosa,” Jake said, with a rueful grin.
-
-“If she’s still there,” Sliver doubted. “An’ I’ll bet a peppercorn to a
-toothpick she ain’t.”
-
-“Chihuahua, now, or starve,” Bull succinctly summed the situation. He
-added, grinning, “Anyway, we’ll travel light.”
-
-
-IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS
-==============================
-
-Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the
-first and greatest of the Chihuahua *haciendas*.
-
-Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of
-the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled
-on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train,
-then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles
-away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested
-in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs
-were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first
-revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern
-overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers,
-artisans, *peones*, drew by his grace the very breath of life.
-
-“Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that.”
-
-Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining
-distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped *mesas* uplifted
-their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away,
-one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a
-mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of
-the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn
-over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched
-windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere;
-burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little
-winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of
-distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary
-reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so
-very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the
-blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post.
-
-“Vultures,” Sliver pointed. “Must be something dead over there.”
-
-“Or dying?” Bull questioned. “Otherwise the birds ’u’d settle. These
-days it’s as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way.”
-
-And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of
-encircling cactus into an open space around a giant *sahuaro*. Head
-fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed,
-limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full
-stretch of his arms around the *sahuaro’s* barrel. During the sixty
-hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till
-it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to
-the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot
-sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus.
-Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow
-roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the
-approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling
-the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings.
-
-“He’s white! a gringo!” Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords.
-
-“The poor devil!” Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor,
-limp body on his outspread coat.
-
-While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on
-the man’s swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the
-wrists and cut away the cords.
-
-If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered
-through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have
-noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would
-probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too
-weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the
-point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself.
-
-He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from
-the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His
-house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings
-up there. If he could only get to it, he’d be all right.
-
-And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and
-cradled like a child in the rustler’s great arms, he scarcely felt the
-journey. Viewed as he hung on the *sahuaro*, dirty, bruised, shrunken by
-fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed,
-washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky
-and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical
-American miner of middle age—short gray beard, hawk profile, high
-cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked
-for themselves—for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too
-late to go on—he had recovered his voice and told them all.
-
-“It was the ‘Colorados’ that tied me up. I knew them by the ‘red hearts’
-on the breasts of their charro jackets.”
-
-Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the
-terror associated with the name. Originally the “Colorados” had been
-Orozco’s soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution
-against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern
-Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by
-the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter
-power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids.
-
-“But I was lucky to get off with that,” he said, after describing the
-beating that had preceded the tying-up. “They cut the soles off the feet
-of two of my *peones*, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky
-chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death
-where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn’t been
-that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I’d
-have got the same. They left me to raid some *rancho*, but swore they’d
-come back.”
-
-Riding in, they had passed the dead *peones*, and, bad man that he was,
-Jake shuddered at the memory. “But why do you stay here, with that kind
-of people running loose?”
-
-“Why do I stay?” The miner repeated the question, with heat. “The
-American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man
-stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties
-that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had
-been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine,
-and I’d worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to
-come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose.
-
-“At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our
-rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out—we that had invested
-a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million
-dollars’ worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it
-all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned!
-
-“Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But
-most of the others had. We’d thought, of course, that the mistreatment
-of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans
-till the thing had been done again and again. Since then—know what that
-Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our
-Government?”
-
-“‘Your Government!’ he sneered. ‘We have killed your men, we have
-ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me
-what else we can do to make your Government fight?’”
-
-He concluded, with bitter sadness, “I was brought up to love and revere
-the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it
-floated. But, men! I’ve seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled
-by filthy *peones*, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of
-Americans who believed in its power to save.”
-
-In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered
-principally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the
-central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the
-Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief.
-
-“It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light,” Jake agreed. “He don’t
-seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to
-Mexico City.”
-
-Bull’s big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of
-tobacco smoke. “Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put
-the Apaches outer the scalping business an’ got through spanking Johnny
-Reb.”
-
-Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. “Jest wait! D’you-all
-know what’s going to happen one o’ these days? That same Uncle Sam, he’s
-mighty patient an’ he’s been handed a heap o’ bad counsel; but one of
-these days he’s a-going to get mad. When he does—listen! he’s a-going to
-walk down to the Mexican line an’ take a look at it with his nose all
-crinkled up like he smelled something bad. ‘Things ain’t quite right
-here!’ he’ll say, ca’m an’ deliberate, that-a-way. Then he’ll stoop an’
-pick up that line, an’ when he sots it down again—it ’ull be south of
-Panama. Jest you-all wait an’ see!”
-
-“‘Wait? Wait?’” the miner sarcastically repeated. “Seems as though I’d
-heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me—one thing I know. Unless
-your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there’ll be darned few
-of us gringos left to see.”
-
-“Why not watch from the other side?”
-
-“Watch hell!” The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that,
-despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and
-indignation over his fellows’ wrongs, that despite all the indomitable
-American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquest
-of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California
-to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from
-disintegration, the fine old spirit of ’76, still burned under all.
-“Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed
-protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we’re going to stay!
-To-morrow I’ll get together my *peones* and go right to it again; only”—he
-observed a significant pause—“the next time the Colorados come there’ll
-be a machine-gun trained on ’em from up here on the bench. All I ask is
-that the Lord sends me the same bunch again.”
-
-In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about,
-the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the
-gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a
-solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he
-passed out of their lives—in person, but not in other ways. His was one
-of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life
-and, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing
-had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull,
-at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the
-sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the
-pommel as they rode along.
-
-“I was thinking of what that fellow said las’ night,” he replied to
-Jake’s questioning look. “To think, after that, we’re out to rob our own
-countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser.”
-
-“That’s so.” Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed
-alacrity. “Damned if I seen it that way afore.”
-
-But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a
-sudden injection of rustler’s sense. “Aw, come off! You fellows may be
-out for Mexicans, but I’m for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the
-other side of the line, an’ what’s wrong with robbing them on this? I
-kain’t see the diff. Business is business; we’ve gotter eat.”
-
-“That’s right, too.” Sliver caught the sense of it. “We’ve sure gotter
-eat.”
-
-But Bull’s face grew blacker. The Colorado’s boast, “We’ve raped your
-women, exterminated your brats,” had aroused in him instincts older than
-the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling
-hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind
-at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the
-entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal
-women.
-
-He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become
-a prey of *peon* bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his
-black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered
-with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in
-the defense of a common cause. And yet—
-
-Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their
-evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican
-Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As
-they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into
-the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east
-to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and
-ruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes.
-
-Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of
-twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated
-carcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of
-their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond
-their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, and
-crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the
-*Nacional* railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of
-the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown.
-Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge
-wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the
-evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it
-to save the station.
-
-While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle
-sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen,
-whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling like
-a dusty brown blanket over the desert.
-
-As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in
-surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some
-thousand *peon* soldiers, part of Valles’s army on its way south to
-pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction.
-Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were
-loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of
-box-cars.
-
-In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with
-tight *charro* suits and *peon* cottons, they were exceedingly
-picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at
-least fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges.
-
-Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their
-brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on
-earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the *frijoles* and
-*chile* simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled,
-smoked, or slept.
-
-Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs
-dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal
-drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets,
-violets, blues, yellows of the women’s dresses and serapes, wreathed in
-the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and
-passed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor
-to their roar and rattle.
-
-As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was
-set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: “Come on, fellows! We’re
-going to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!”
-
-It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men,
-she who was largely responsible for their “rustlings,” investing it, as
-she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through
-hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede,
-the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its
-essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned
-from it in disgust.
-
-If the train had stopped—perhaps their lives would have been deflected
-into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the
-trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it
-vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in
-the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they
-were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be
-had all over Mexico for “a cigarette and a smile.”
-
-While eating they extracted from their host, a simple *peon*, all the
-information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid “requisitions”
-payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press,
-the *gringos hacendados* had driven their animals into the mountain
-pastures three-quarters of a day’s ride east of the tracks. But omitting
-the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grass
-ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the
-raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in
-the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon.
-
-Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the
-difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican
-scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about
-the same part in their operations as a “jimmy” in those of a burglar,
-Bull exclaimed his admiration, “*Some horses!*”
-
-“But—” Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a
-fast trot down the valley, “we’re out of luck.”
-
-“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull handed him the glasses. “See what you make of
-’em.”
-
-“*Colorados!*” Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on
-the blue *charro* jacket. “It’s the same outfit that tied up the miner,
-too. Remember how he described the leader? ‘About twice as tall as a
-common Mexican’? That fellow’s six-foot-two if he’s an inch.”
-
-“The gall of him,” Sliver snorted. “What do you think o’ that? After
-*our* horses! Well, they ’ain’t got ’em yet. We’ll jest ride along
-behind the hill here an’—”
-
-But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted.
-“No, you bet he hain’t. I’ve a hunch that the gent coming over the hill,
-there, is the man that owns ’em.”
-
-As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause,
-he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. “He’s
-sure got his nerve.”
-
-“Mebbe he don’t know they’re Colorados.”
-
-Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders’ backs were turned, the daring
-rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the
-marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them
-opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired.
-
-“Here comes his army!” Jake croaked.
-
-“Only a lad.”
-
-Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, white
-with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the
-galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down
-the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from
-their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his
-tracks. At the same moment the lad’s hat, a soft slouch, blew off,
-loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill
-scream would still have proclaimed the rider’s sex.
-
-“Hell!” Bull’s astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. “It’s a
-woman! a white girl—dressed in man’s riding-togs!”
-
-
-V: THE “HACIENDA OF THE TREES”
-==============================
-
-Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart,
-two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be
-deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance,
-yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two
-drops that join running in down a window-pane.
-
-Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres,
-and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would
-appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun.
-Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation
-whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet—but let it suffice, for
-the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the
-*hacienda* Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the
-crest of a grassy knoll that overlooked the buildings.
-
-A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait.
-Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect
-shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume;
-riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man’s cambric shirt
-with a negligée collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small
-and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly *retroussé*. Her eyes,
-large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly
-contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was
-wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response
-to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that
-curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling.
-
-“Oh, dad, isn’t it beautiful!”
-
-The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit
-billows; but her eyes were on the *hacienda*—*Hacienda de los Arboles*,
-named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it
-pleasant shade.
-
-Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the
-height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages,
-storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to
-the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry,
-with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the
-old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the
-meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of
-giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading
-with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing
-fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet,
-crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as
-ever a man looked upon and called his home.
-
-Carleton smiled as she added, “I’d hate to have been brought up in El
-Paso or any other prosy American city.”
-
-He might have replied that there were American cities she might find
-less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as
-she did.
-
-His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of
-accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his
-satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his
-creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or
-three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with
-Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last,
-he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a “land-poor” Spanish owner.
-
-To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid
-almost four centuries ago by one of Cortés’s *conquistadores* might have
-meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From
-a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a
-story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its
-massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during
-her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very
-being.
-
-They seldom overlooked the *hacienda*, as now, without making some
-observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old
-Dons, their *señoras*, *señoritas*, savage brown retainers, in the midst
-of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it
-were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to
-think of himself as belonging to the family.
-
-“Great old fellows they were!” Though he spoke musingly, now, without
-connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back.
-“Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other
-day, and the records read in princely fashion. ‘Between the rivers such
-and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,’ that was a
-favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like
-cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few
-square leagues.”
-
-“And here comes one of them.” Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who
-had just topped the opposite rise. “Doesn’t he look it?”
-
-Surely he did. The *charro* suit of soft tanned deerskin with its
-*bolero* jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the
-lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes
-that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced *sombrero*; the fine horse and
-Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted *machete*
-in its saddle sheath under the rider’s leg, even the rope *riata* coiled
-around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in
-that pageant of the past.
-
-“It is Ramon Icarza,” Carleton nodded. “He hasn’t been here for a long
-time.” This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up.
-
-“Attending to the herds and the horses, señor. As with you, the most of
-our *peones* have run away to the wars. We have left only a few *ancianos*
-too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the aid of the
-women we manage. That last requisition for the”—his shrug was eloquent
-in its disdain—“*cause*. You paid it?”
-
-“Had to—or be confiscated.” With a grin comical in its mixture of
-amusement and anger, Carleton went on, “I raked up five thousand pesos
-of Valles’s money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he
-said? ‘I don’t want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute.
-You must pay me in gold.’”
-
-Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his
-race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. “The devil take him!
-Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us,
-he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!” His hands and eyebrows
-testified to Valles’s scandalous treatment of the merchants. “First he
-demands a contribution to the *cause*. Those who refuse are foolish, for
-first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the
-poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the
-money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left.
-In the old days we used to curse the locusts, señor; but they, at least,
-left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago,
-that you and the señorita here and my venerable father would be reduced
-to become herders of cattle?”
-
-“Oh, but it’s lots of fun!” Lee’s happy laugh bespoke sincerity. “I love
-it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And
-that reminds me that we’re almost due there for lunch.”
-
-“You’ll stay, of course, Ramon?” Pointing to a couple of mares with
-foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton
-added, “There’s still another over in the next valley. If you will take
-these along, I’ll get her.”
-
-Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the
-*hacienda*, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless
-boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched
-the girl’s maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly
-knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she
-exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty.
-
-“Oh, aren’t they pretty!”
-
-Ramon agreed—as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila
-monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors—that
-is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by
-the hundred miles—their childhood had compassed more than the usual
-number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him
-slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of
-many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of
-course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last
-iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself
-and clothes. Having passed favorably on the material, fit, and
-trimmings, she reached for his *sombrero*.
-
-“You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let
-me look at it. What a beauty!”
-
-While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined
-it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow
-intensified in Ramon’s big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the
-gold of his skin. His mouth—too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon
-standards—drew into a tender smile.
-
-According to the cañons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black
-or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet,
-with singular disregard, for writer’s law, Nature continued to weave for
-Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee’s hair, rose blush
-of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the
-sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which
-Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as
-powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande.
-
-On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again,
-Nature utterly ignored “best seller” conventions. Brought up among
-Mexicans, counting Ramon’s sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial
-prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal
-health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After
-sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on.
-
-“How does it look?”
-
-As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there
-was no mistaking the “dare.” Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico,
-Ramon caught the implication.
-
-“Pretty enough to—kiss!”
-
-With the word he reached swiftly for her neck, but caught only empty
-air. Ducking with a touch of the spur, she shot from under his hand.
-
-The next second he was after her. Along the shallow valley for a
-half-mile she led, then, whirling just as he rode alongside, she shot
-back along the ridge. At the end he overtook her, and, anticipating her
-whirl, caught her bridle rein. Leaning back, however, flat on her
-beast’s back, laughing and panting, she was still out of his reach; and
-when he began to travel, hand over hand, along the bridle, she leaped
-down on the opposite side and dodged behind a lone *sahuaro*.
-
-Sure of her now, he followed. But, dodging like a hare around the
-*sahuaro*, she came racing back for the horses; might possibly have
-gained them and made good her escape, if, glancing back over her
-shoulder, she had not seen Ramon stumble, stop, then clasp his right
-ankle.
-
-“Oh, is it sprained?” she cried, running back. Then, as, reaching
-suddenly, he caught her, she burst out, “Cheat! oh, you miserable
-cheat!”
-
-That all is fair in love and war, however, goes in all languages, and
-while she punctuated the struggle with customary objections whereby
-young maids enhance the value of a kiss, there was no anger in her
-protests. Wrestling her back and down, he got, at last, the laughing
-face upturned in the hollow of his arm; had almost reached her lips,
-when, with force that sent Lee to the ground, he was seized and thrown
-violently against the horse.
-
-In the excitement of the chase they had completely forgotten Carleton,
-who had viewed its beginnings from the opposite ridge. By self-adoption
-he had almost, as before said, identified himself with the Spanish
-strain that had flowed for centuries through the *patios* and compound
-of Los Arboles. He had even come to think in Spanish; in custom and
-manner was almost Mexican. But in moments of anger habit gives place to
-instinct. The instinct that first formed and later preserved the tribe,
-pride of race, overpowered friendship. In one second the young Mexican,
-whom he had regarded for years almost as a son, was transmuted into the
-despised “greaser” of the border.
-
-“You—you—” Choking with anger, eyes bits of blue flame, he strode at
-Ramon, fist bunched to strike.
-
-But the blow did not fall, for, scrambling up again, Lee seized his arm
-from behind. “Oh, dad! dad!” Despite his struggles, she clung like a
-cat, defeating his efforts to shake her off. “Oh, dad! It was only a bit
-of fun! all my fault! I put on his hat! Please don’t!”
-
-If the young fellow had flinched, perhaps Carleton would have struck.
-But, head erect, he quietly waited, and presently Carleton ceased
-struggling.
-
-“All right! I’ll let him go—this time. But, remember”—bringing his
-clenched fist in a heat of passion into the palm of the other hand, he
-glared at the young man—“remember! when this girl is kissed—it will be
-by a man of her own breed. Get off my land!” After helping Lee to mount,
-he vaulted into his own saddle and rode away, driving the mares and
-foals before them.
-
-In accordance with before-mentioned precedents, Ramon ought to have
-folded his arms and hissed a threat through gritted teeth. Instead, he
-stood very quietly, his face less angry than sad, watching them go. His
-little nod, in its firmness, would have become any young American; went
-very well with his thought.
-
-“We shall see.”
-
-Mounting, he rode away to the northward, and not till he had covered
-many miles did he rein in his beast, so suddenly that it fell back on
-its haunches. His dark face expressed vexation mixed with alarm.
-“Maldito! I forgot to warn them that Colorados had been seen east of the
-railroad. I must go back.”
-
-On their part, Lee and her father rode on toward the *hacienda*. Though
-he glanced at her from time to time, it was always furtively, for with a
-man’s dislike of scenes he made no reference to that which had just
-passed. Nevertheless, it filled his mind. Man-like, he had watched her
-develop into womanhood with scarcely a thought for her future. If he had
-given the subject any consideration he would probably have concluded
-that, sooner or later, she would choose a suitable mate from the
-hundreds of American miners, railroad men, ranchers, and engineers that
-had swarmed in the state of Chihuahua before the revolution.
-
-But with the clear vision of after sight he now saw that he had
-unconsciously depended on the race pride which had just manifested
-itself in himself to prevent her from contracting a mésalliance. Now,
-with consternation, he faced the truth that racial pride is masculine;
-contrary to both the feminine instinct and nature’s scheme of things.
-
-“I was a fool!” he berated himself. “A damned fool! She will have to go
-north—live in the States for a while.”
-
-These and similar thoughts were whirling through his mind when they came
-on a band of his horses at pasture under charge of an *anciano*, a
-withered old *peon*, whose age and infirmities had estopped him from
-joining the exodus to the wars. After cautioning the old fellow not to
-allow the animals to stray too far, Carleton plunged again into deep
-meditation.
-
-Had he not been thus preoccupied he would probably have long ago
-discovered the five horsemen who were following at a distance, using the
-natural cover afforded by the rolling land; for he always rode with a
-powerful binocular in his holster, and often swept with it the prospect.
-Several times the glass would have shown him a row of heads behind the
-next ridge in rear. As it was, he had ridden to the crest of the rise
-from which they had looked down on the *hacienda* before habit asserted
-itself. He had no sooner leveled the glasses than an exclamation burst
-from his lips. “My God!”
-
-“What is it, dad?” Lee swung in her saddle, looking back at him.
-
-“Raiders! They are attacking Francisco! He has nothing but his staff!
-He’s fighting them like an old lion! My God, they’re chopping him with
-their machetes.” It came out of him in staccato phrases. “Race in and
-send out Juan, Lerdo, and Prudencia with rifles! Stay there! Don’t dare
-to follow!”
-
-Digging in his spurs, he galloped away. For a moment the girl hesitated.
-Her eyes went to the *hacienda*, still half a mile away, then back to
-her father racing madly down the slope. There was no time to go for
-help! Loosening the pistol in her holster, she drove in her spurs and
-galloped after.
-
-From Carleton’s first appearance till the girl screamed all had passed
-so quickly that the Three could only sit and gape. From their original
-intent to rob Carleton it was a far cry to the reconstructed impulse to
-succor and save him, and it speaks well for them that they accomplished
-the revolution as soon as they did.
-
-The scream had not passed unnoticed by the Colorados. The leader, who
-had turned to ride on, swung his beast, looked, then, as the girl
-dropped from the saddle to her knees beside the wounded man, drove in
-his spurs and galloped toward her. Heedless of her own danger, Lee was
-trying to stanch with her handkerchief the bloodflow from Carleton’s
-chest, so lost in her agonized grief that she did not look up till the
-Colorado leaped down and seized her.
-
-In this world there are savages who would have respected, for the time
-at least, her white grief. But this was the man who had tortured the
-miner and his *peones*; driven the latter naked through spiky cactus
-after he had cut the soles off their feet. She sprang up when he seized
-her, and as she fought bitterly, beating away his black, evil face with
-her little fists, his strident laughter mingled with her wild sobbing
-and carried to Bull behind the ridge.
-
-For three days this man’s boast had rung in his brain: “We’ve killed
-your men, outraged your women!” But though anger blazed within him, his
-tone was icy cold. “Look after the others. I’ll ’tend to him!”
-
-He had already pulled his rifle from the sling under his leg. Raising it
-now, he lined the sights, the same sights that had directed a ball
-through the brain of Livingstone’s horse. While Lee writhed and twisted
-in the Colorado’s arms, he dared not shoot. He waited until, at the
-double crack of his companions’ rifles, two of the other Colorados
-pitched headlong from their saddles. Then, as their leader paused to
-look and, with a swift wrench, Lee tore loose and let daylight between
-them, the rifle spoke, sent its bullet whistling through his brain.
-
-“Keep after them!” Bull called back as he rode on over the ridge.
-
-But already Jake and Sliver’s rifles were barking like hungry dogs.
-Trained to a hair in guerrilla warfare, the remaining Colorados had
-spurred their beasts behind the horse herd. At the first shot the band
-had stampeded, and now, urged on by the yells of the fugitives, who rode
-crouched on their horses’ necks, the scared animals coursed swiftly down
-the valley.
-
-“The gall of them! *Our* horses!” Repeating his former observation,
-Sliver would have ridden after.
-
-But Jake caught his bridle. His bleak eyes were scintillating like
-sunlit icicles. His lean, avid face quivered with subdued ferocity.
-“Don’t be a damn fool! They’re only using ’em for cover! We’ll shoot
-along this side of the ridge an’ catch ’em at the end of the valley!”
-
-Meanwhile Bull rode on down the slope. After a surprised stare that
-showed her rescuers to be Americans, Lee had knelt again beside her
-father. As before said, Bull was no beauty. His black beard, bushy
-brows, hot red eyes, drink-blotched face, were of themselves sufficient
-to frighten a woman. Yet when she looked up sympathy illumined his
-countenance till it shone in her distressed sight as a clear lamp
-radiating human feeling. Without fear or doubt she turned to him for
-help.
-
-“It’s my father! I’m afraid—Can’t you do something?”
-
-So far Carleton had lain with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and
-spoke in detached whispers as Bull knelt by his side. “You’re—American.
-I told her not to follow. Don’t bother—with me. I’m shot—through lungs
-and stomach—bleeding inside. Get Lee—back to the house.”
-
-“Plenty of time,” Bull soothed him. As a crackle of rifle-fire turned
-loose in the distance, followed by sudden silence, he added, “That ’ull
-be the last o’ the Colorados. I’ll fix you a bit, an’ when my fellows
-come back we’ll jest pack you home.”
-
-With a plainsman’s skill in crude surgery, he tore up Carleton’s shirt
-to make a pad and bandage which he twisted with a stick till the
-blood-flow stopped. This was no more accomplished before Jake and Sliver
-rode up, driving the horses ahead.
-
-“They won’t cut no more soles offen people’s feet,” Jake answered Bull’s
-questioning look.
-
-“Fine and dandy.” Bull nodded. “You, Jake, rope a fresh horse outer the
-band an’ ride like hell to the railroad an’ wire El Paso for a doctor.”
-
-“No!” Lee eagerly suggested. “Wire the American Club at Chihuahua. These
-dreadful days all gringos help one another.”
-
-Freshly horsed, five minutes thereafter, Jake galloped away—but not
-before, cold, crafty, laconic, dissolute gambler as he was, he had left
-a comforting word in the girl’s ear. “Don’t you be skeered, Miss. I’ll
-bring out a doctor, if I have to ride inter El Paso an’ raid a
-hospital.”
-
-As he went out of sight over the next roll Sliver, with the girl’s aid,
-lifted the wounded man up to Bull in the saddle. So for the second time
-within three days did the giant rustler bear like a child in his arms a
-*gringo* victim of the Mexican revolution. To the leaven that had been
-working within him was now added the most powerful influence that can be
-brought to bear on a man—a woman’s heartbroken sobbing.
-
-
-VI: BULL TURNS NURSE
-====================
-
-Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old
-Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on
-herself. But now she burst out crying.
-
-“The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down,
-and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have
-tried to pursue them alone.”
-
-“He was old—an’ died a man’s death,” Bull offered her rough comfort.
-“You couldn’t wish him a better ending.”
-
-It was man’s reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman’s feelings, yet
-it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull
-suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room.
-
-By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off
-his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into
-unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. “Don’t you allow I’d better
-leave ’em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an’—” He
-stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull’s stare.
-
-“You’re dead right! Don’t trouble to say it. I’d steal the horses offen
-a hearse.”
-
-Bull’s glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly,
-he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: “Wait till he’s well
-enough to fight for his own. Till then—we leave him alone.”
-
-Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the *patio*
-gateway. Within, arched *portales* ran around three sides, supporting
-the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful
-creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only
-vigorous pruning kept it from burying the *portales* beneath. In the
-center rose a great *arbol de fuego*, “tree of fire,” contrasting its
-flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas.
-
-They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women,
-house servants, and *peonas*; for of the scores of men who had worked
-for Carleton before the wars there were left only three withered
-*ancianos* to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that
-caught the fresh breeze from the mountains.
-
-Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the
-surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even
-from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry
-desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied
-the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch.
-
-Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating
-marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made
-shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache.
-
-“You she’d have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a
-flip-flop onto him. Druv’ the pommel clean through his chest, it did.
-Yet he was up an’ around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less ’n
-five weeks.”
-
-Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her
-father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was
-announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had
-achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from
-a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to
-bury its dead.
-
-The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull
-picked him for a “colonist.” Just how, he himself could not have said.
-His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to
-overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been
-cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows,
-impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under
-the *portales* while he ate.
-
-“Say! but he’s whitish. Looks like he’d done time.”
-
-“He has,” Jake nodded. “I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in
-Valles’s army that had got himself shot through both arms an’ was being
-taken back to the base hospital with about a hun’red others. When I
-landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out
-of a box-car door, watching ’em bury his *compañeros* that had died on
-the way.
-
-“‘Gotter do it quick,’ he says. ‘They don’t keep worth a darn in this
-clime.’
-
-“He’d met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an’ ’twas him that sent the doctor
-an’ tol’ me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he’d
-belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies.
-They’d insure some *peon* that was about ready to croak, paying the
-premiums themselves an’ c’llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If
-he lingered ’twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite
-proved, most of ’em being too far gone to testify when they was
-resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an’ as the
-Mexicans ain’t so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was
-sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he’d been Mexican they’d
-have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good
-greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He’d actually
-served twelve years—think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican jail
-before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their
-hospital-trains.”
-
-“Twelve years!” Sliver echoed it. “An’ just for croaking a few Mex? He
-orter ha’ practised in New Mexico. They’d have give him a medal up
-there.”
-
-After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came
-down. While eating he made his report. “If I could do any good I’d stay.
-But he will surely die to-night. It’s going to be mighty hard on that
-poor girl. Like most of us”—his glance took in all Three—“Carleton
-didn’t come down here for his health. It’s bad form in Mexico to inquire
-about a man’s past. Nevertheless, it’s pretty well known that he killed
-the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four
-years old. She’s never been away since, and has no kin that she knows
-of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl.”
-
-His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted
-his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. “I’ve left an
-opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don’t be
-deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the
-room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair
-to the door, which opened out on the *corredor*, to secure the free air
-his rustler’s lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the
-moon’s pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its
-maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains
-loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid
-chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet
-and clear gold.
-
-*Gringo* as he was, his people had lived under Carleton’s hand fuller,
-freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican
-overlords, and, day or night, the *patio* had never lacked a dozen brown
-*peonas* on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under the
-*arbol de fuego* in the center of the *patio* below three old crones had
-erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of
-gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note
-which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still
-night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched
-between prayers.
-
-“Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that
-means?”
-
-“Si; they were devils come for a soul.”
-
-“’Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The señor was a
-good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard.”
-
-“The señorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that
-she also will be cast into hell?”
-
-“Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty
-centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her
-soul’s sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor señor—” her pause
-doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their
-prayers for his saving.
-
-The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of
-distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars,
-combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle
-of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate
-the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed
-heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed.
-
-In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw
-Carleton’s face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both
-were there.
-
-“Where is—Lee? Sleeping? Don’t wake her. Listen! She—must not—stay here.
-Tell William Benson—he’s rough and a bully—but honest and good. Tell him
-to get a permit—from the revolutionists—to drive my cattle and
-horses—across to the States. They will bring enough—to keep Lee for
-many—a year. Be sure—”
-
-The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a
-stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the
-moonlit plains.
-
-For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made
-toward the door that led to the girl’s room. But as her tired face rose
-before him he stopped and shook his head. “Let her finish her sleep.”
-Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly
-called the old women.
-
-
-VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED
-=============================
-
-“Well, I reckon this about lets us out.”
-
-The Three sat under the *portales*, heavily smoking. Bull puffed
-meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed
-absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had
-trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all
-necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands
-were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental
-concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the “this” alluded to
-Carleton’s funeral, which had taken place the preceding day.
-
-It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor,
-happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better
-class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till
-still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The
-Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered *hacendado*, attended, with
-Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American
-rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds of
-*gringos*, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come
-in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton’s *peones*, and the Three,
-had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little
-adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus
-consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways
-and means.
-
-“Yes, I s’pose we’ll have to move on.” If not actually dismal, Sliver’s
-indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction.
-
-Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had
-just then stepped out of her room across the *patio*. Phyllis, the
-younger, was to stay for a week, while Phœbe, the elder, returned home
-with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee
-walked with her guests the length of the *patio* she took with her the
-sympathetic glances of the Three.
-
-Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of
-her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later,
-the sight of Carleton’s riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown
-in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her
-agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now
-complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she
-made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief.
-Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely
-accidental, a natural trimming of her dress.
-
-Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American
-born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes,
-dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee’s fairness. If
-their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely
-accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of
-association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in
-sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a
-smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a
-cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept
-through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross
-and passion.
-
-“Adios, you fellows!” Lovell’s friendly voice came floating back from
-the gate. “Come and see us at San Miguel.”
-
-It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of
-suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man’s hand was
-against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and
-trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver’s muttered
-exclamation: “Lordy! I’d like to! but—”
-
-“—it’s no place for us.” Bull nodded toward Lee. “It ’u’d be easier if
-she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an’ a new revolution
-breaking every other day!”
-
-“Pretty fierce,” Jake coincided. “But if ’twas left to that young Mex at
-the funeral yesterday—Ramòn Icarza, wasn’t that what they called him? If
-’twas left to him she’d soon be—”
-
-“—damned an’ done for!” Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added:
-“Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex
-that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl.
-Hell! if I thought she’d look twice his way, I’d croak him afore we
-left.”
-
-“It wouldn’t be unnatural, she being raised here an’ not knowing much
-else.” Bull’s gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. “I’ll bet
-you that’s what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an’
-get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so’s I could tell him
-afore we left.”
-
-“Tol’ her yet?” Sliver asked.
-
-Bull nodded. “Las’ night. Said she hadn’t given any thought, yet, to the
-future.”
-
-The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to
-go down the opposite *portales*. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her
-arm from the other girl’s waist, and came walking on alone.
-
-They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well
-formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They
-felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness.
-
-“Oh, shore!” with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her
-attempts to thank them for their kindness. “We hain’t done nothing worth
-while.”
-
-“Sliver’s right.” Jake’s bleak eyes had grown almost soft. “You don’t
-owe us anything. All that’s bothering us is—”
-
-“—that we kain’t jest see how you’re going to manage,” Bull finished.
-“Your father’s idea—” He stopped.
-
-Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. “It
-isn’t practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across
-the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would—” Her
-sweeping hand took in the sunlit *patio*, the brown *criadas*
-soft-footing it along the *corredor*; the compound ablaze with barbaric
-color; the *peonas* gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that
-medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. “And if he
-would—I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to
-this. I’m part of it, and it of me,” she concluded, with a firm little
-nod. “I shall carry on my father’s work.”
-
-The Three looked at one another. Bull’s troubled look, Jake’s dubious
-brows, Sliver’s cough, all expressed their common doubt. “Can you do it,
-Miss, alone?”
-
-“I sha’n’t be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here
-to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you—” she paused,
-looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. “Of course,
-that’s absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know
-some one?”
-
-The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of
-each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in
-a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the
-American border tightly closed; the *fusilado* against a ’dobe wall that
-would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that
-dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet,
-to do them justice, the girl’s helpless situation affected them most. If
-they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new
-path.
-
-Jake spoke first. “To tell the truth, Miss, we ain’t exactly what you’d
-call rushed with business.”
-
-“Like all of us—upset by the revolutions.” She jumped to the natural
-conclusion, “Were you—mining?”
-
-A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before
-all Three. Not without truth was Bull’s statement, “We ain’t worked it
-much, of late.”
-
-“Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?”
-
-A sudden memory of Rosa’s desertion permitted Sliver to say, “The las’
-we had left jest t’other day.”
-
-Her pretty face brightened. “Then you mean to say that you are free for
-the present?”
-
-That was exactly what they had!
-
-She went on, slowly: “I’ll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and
-sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven’t been permitted
-to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don’t know,
-even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I
-can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten—”
-
-“Don’t you be bothering about that, Miss,” Bull broke in. “We’ll stay,
-an’ when it comes that you don’t need us any longer—”
-
-“—we ain’t a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages,” Sliver
-concluded. “To tell you the truth, Miss, I’d be willing to work for my
-board jest to feel at loose on a range ag’in.”
-
-His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort,
-it still added warmth to her words. “Then—now you are *my* men.”
-
-The accent on the “my” unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her
-bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own
-and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an
-alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the
-fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies
-in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely
-enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke
-loose on the devoted heads of the Three.
-
-“*My* men!” It sealed their adoption.
-
-“Phyllis, come here!” She was eying them with that microscopic feminine
-scrutiny that detects the minutest personal defect. Her gesture of
-despair when the other girl came up was so lovingly insulting it could
-not have been outdone by the best of mothers. “They are going to work
-for me, so we’ll have to care for them. Do you suppose we can *ever* get
-them to rights?”
-
-Phyllis wasn’t quite sure, but as her interest while real was more
-casual, she held out hope. “They’ll look better, dear, after they’re
-washed and mended.”
-
-That was too mild for Lee. Nothing but revolution, drastic and complete,
-would satiate that hungry instinct. “No, they’ll have to have new
-things. The store is run down badly, but it will supply their present
-needs.”
-
-With something of the air of convicts arraigned before a stern judge the
-Three listened to certain other frank comments upon their appearance. As
-laid down, their reconstruction included shaves for Sliver and Jake, a
-beard-trim for Bull, hair-cuts for all three. To this they meekly
-agreed; took their new things with sheepish thanks when they were
-brought from the store; endured all with resignation, if not
-cheerfulness, up to the moment that she tried to quarter them in the
-house. Then the last shreds of masculine independence asserted
-themselves. They made a stand.
-
-“If it’s all the same, Miss,” Jake pleaded, “we’d sooner bunk down in
-one of those empty adobes.”
-
-Sliver supported the rebellion. “You see, Miss, we’re that rough an’ not
-used to ladies’ society—”
-
-“An’ we smoke something dreadful,” Bull added his bit. “You really
-couldn’t stan’—”
-
-“Oh, I wouldn’t mind it a bit. I love tobacco smoke. It’s half of
-Mexico.”
-
-Deprived of their last weapon, the Three could only stand and fidget
-till Phyllis came to the rescue. Her interest, as aforesaid, being
-founded merely on the general principles of loyalty to her sex, she
-could afford to be generous.
-
-“They’ll want to play cards and generally carry on,” she whispered. “Men
-always do. Let them sleep in the adobe and take their meals with you at
-the house.”
-
-A compromise thus effected, Lee marched the Three to their new abode.
-But this was not the end. Just as they were about to settle therein she
-turned loose upon them a veritable hornets’ nest of brown *criadas*. All
-afternoon they found themselves encircled, as it were, by clouds of
-flying skirts, and when the flutter subsided the adobe stood scrubbed
-and dusted and furnished with *catres*, bed-clothing, wash-stands,
-chairs, and a table for the “cards and general carrying on.” When the
-invasion, brown and white, finally withdrew, and the suggested changes
-in apparel and personal appearance were duly consummated, they were left
-gazing with something of awe and a great deal of wonder at their
-reconstructed selves.
-
-“You look almost human,” Jake gave his opinion of Bull. “A touch with a
-powder-puff an’ I allow you might mash one o’ them criadas.”
-
-Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate.
-“It’s dreadfully clean in here,” he remarked, coming back. “But I reckon
-we’ll sorter get used to it. Now if we on’y had a bottle o’ aguardiente
-to hold a bit of a house-warming, it ’u’d—”
-
-Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. “Look here! We’ve got the care
-of a young girl on our han’s. There’s going to be no boozing—at least on
-the premises. When you feel you kain’t stan’ it any longer, light out
-somewheres an’ get it over.”
-
-“That’s right,” Jake lent support to the moralities. “Though it sorter
-looks to me like she’d adopted us.”
-
-As a matter of fact, the girls’ talk, walking back to the house, quite
-favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had
-obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at
-Phyllis’s remark, “Aren’t they big and crude and funny?”
-
-“Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I’ve had them a
-month.”
-
-“Won’t it be a little difficult? They’re grown up; can’t be treated like
-babies.”
-
-“Not a bit.” Lee laughed softly again. “If one of them misbehaves, I
-shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct
-Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they’d see
-through it at once. Being men, they’ll feel quite perked up.”
-
-Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their
-merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the
-disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own
-likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case,
-as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a
-crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again.
-
-
-VIII: “THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS”
-===========================
-
-It was not done with malice aforethought, for Sliver had not quite
-reached the point where “he couldn’t stan’ it any longer.” It just
-happened. Heavy drinkers may be divided into three classes—to wit, the
-sporadic, who break out in occasional wild debauches; the “steadies,”
-who sop, sop, sop all the time; and a third class which combines the
-traits of the other two. Of the Three, Bull represented the first, Jake
-the second, Sliver the last and worst.
-
-If Sliver had not ridden his horse along the crest of a certain hog’s
-back on the chance that the cattle he was hunting might be in the ravine
-below, it might never have come to pass. If Napoleon Bonaparte, for
-matter of that, hadn’t developed indigestion at Waterloo; if Christopher
-Columbus had followed the Church instead of the sea; if Julius Cæsar had
-been born a girl; if all the cats on all the famous fences of history
-had happened to jump the other way—this world would be quite different.
-So let it suffice that Sliver rode along the hog’s back.
-
-At its end the ridge ran out on a wide bench from which Sliver looked
-over the foot-hills, rolling tumultuously under a black blanket of
-chaparral out to the tawny valleys of the *hacienda* pastures. Below, he
-could see a path that ran with a silver stream at the bottom of the
-ravine. Its deep rut, no wider than the swing of a mule, marked it for
-one of those ancient highways whose place had been usurped by the Diaz
-railways. In its heyday the cañon had rung with the tinklings of the
-mule-trains that transported *aguardiente*, maize, tobacco, serapes, and
-cloths between Mexico City and Santa Fé. But of that great traffic there
-now remained barely enough to support the little *fonda* that lay with
-its mule *patio* almost at Sliver’s feet.
-
-Though no one was in sight, he set down certain moving black dots as
-chickens, goats, or pigs. Thus assured of tenancy, and thinking that he
-might pick up some news of his strays, he rode on down a trail that
-zigzagged through the chaparral.
-
-Looking down from above, Sliver had noted the resemblance of the place
-to the lair back on the miner’s bench in Sonora. The *ramada* of grass
-and cornstalks might have been the same. Only that she was younger and
-prettier, the Mexican girl who knelt before a *metate* grinding
-*tortilla* paste could have passed for Rosa herself. Though Mexican
-Indian, some vagrant Spanish strain had pushed up her brow, reduced her
-cheek-bones, shortened her waist, and lengthened her limbs. Masses of
-black hair framed her oval face. Her eyes were velvet pools; the nose
-small and well shaped. Her bare arms tapered from fine shoulders to
-small wrists, and if she followed Juno rather than Psyche in her
-luxurious molding she was pliant as a willow, carried her shapely
-poundage with an effect of slimness.
-
-If Sliver noted these desirable personal assets, his interest therein
-disappeared after he had spied the sign, “Fonda,” over the door. True,
-the month which had now elapsed since they entered Lee’s service had
-not, however, been entirely “dry.” At the close of each day’s work the
-Three took their *copa* with the *ancianos* at the *hacienda* store in
-the Mexican fashion. But the application of liquor in such medicinal
-doses to a thirst like Sliver’s was equivalent to the squirting of
-gasolene upon a fire. Now, as he gazed at the sign, spirituous desires
-flamed within him. It was with difficulty that his dry lips formed his
-question to the girl.
-
-Was there a *copita* of *aguardiente* to be had?
-
-Nodding, she rose, and as she let down a small wooden door in the wall
-Sliver’s glance licked the rows of bottles within.
-
-*Tequila*, anisette, *aguardiente*, *mescal*, every variety of liquid
-fire with which the Mexican *peon* burns out his stomach, stood there in
-deadly array. Beginning at one end, Sliver worked his way, during the
-next two hours, along the row, and had just started back again when,
-with some surprise, he noted a most curious phenomenon—to wit, the gray
-hair and deep wrinkles the girl had suddenly acquired. Quite unaware
-that she had resigned his thirst to her father, and was even then
-vigorously rubbing *tortilla* paste behind his back, he solemnly studied
-this startling metamorphosis. Drunk as he was, his cowman’s instinct had
-kept him warned of the sun’s declension. Sure, now, that he had had
-enough, he paid his score, gravely addressing his host, meanwhile,
-concerning his changed appearance.
-
-“You she’dn’t do it. It’s—hard on the nerves. Keep it up an’—you’ll
-drive your custom away.”
-
-Having climbed into the saddle, he remained there because of that
-merciful provision of nature by which a man may ride long after he has
-lost the power to walk. Realizing his condition, he left the business of
-going home to his horse. While it carried him down the cañon and out
-across the plains he concentrated his remaining energies on “The
-Cowboy’s Lament,” howling its one hundred and one verses at the top of
-his voice, sending warning of his coming a full mile ahead.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-In the mean time Bull with Lee, Jake “on his lonely,” had pursued the
-search for the strays in other directions. It chanced that luck rode
-with the former. Returning home at sundown, Jake saw them driving the
-cattle along a shallow valley.
-
-During the month which had elapsed since her father’s death Lee had
-taken the only real panacea for grief—hard work. In addition to the
-management of the house *criadas*, she exercised a feudal overlordship
-over the *hacienda peones*. Besides hiring and letting, leasing of lands
-on charges, she acted as judge in their squabbles, adviser in their
-small affairs, comforter in trouble. In addition, her womanhood brought
-extra duties. She had to godmother the babes, attend christenings,
-doctor the sick, lend her patronage to the *bailes* and *fiestas*.
-
-Most of these duties she discharged in the mornings. Afternoons she
-donned her man’s riding-togs and rode out with the Three, rounding up
-strays, new-born calves, and foals. At nights her fair head might be
-seen under a golden aureole lent by the lamp, while she mended or made
-for them and herself. If it lacked the stimulation and color of city
-life, it was, at least, a healthy and honest existence. Already it had
-restored her shocked nerves, given back her roses. She had never been
-prettier than when, reining in, she looked back at Jake as he came up!
-
-“We found them! *we* found them!” Her pride in the fact provoked Jake’s
-smile. “They were up in the Cañon del Norte. Whatever in the world is
-that?”
-
-It might have been anything from the last puff of a worn-out calliope to
-the yelp of a sick coyote, for at its best Sliver’s voice rarely came
-within a quarter of a mile of a specified tune, and an hour’s steady
-tearing into “The Cowboy’s Lament” had not improved its tone. As the
-raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling
-little laugh.
-
-“Mr. Sliver isn’t hardly what you could call a singer. Is he—often taken
-like that?”
-
-They could have answered quite easily, Sliver’s vocal efforts being ever
-timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank
-disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs
-and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to
-the Cañon del Norte.
-
-“Piously drunk!” Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond
-earshot. “Wonder where he got it!”
-
-“Search me,” Bull shrugged. “The question is how to stop him. You know
-what to expect if he’s loose an’ drunk among all them *peonas*. You ride
-on an’ head him off. Don’t stan’ any nonsense. Bat him over the can if
-nec’ssary.”
-
-The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither
-was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped
-Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged
-and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the
-compound, had him lashed to his *catre* in their adobe before Lee and
-Bull arrived.
-
-So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull
-replied to Lee’s inquiry concerning Sliver’s absence that he “wasn’t
-feeling well.”
-
-She jumped up at once. “Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he
-can eat!”
-
-A vivid mental picture of the “poor fellow,” gagged and lashed to his
-*catre*, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself
-for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating
-his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it.
-
-“I wouldn’t—really, Miss.”
-
-She stopped, half-way along the *portales*. He had spoken so earnestly.
-“Why not? Is it—catching?”
-
-Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further
-complications. Jake shook his head. “No, it’s just chills an’ fever, a
-sorter constitutional ague he’s taken with at this time o’ the year.
-But—well, Miss, it’s this way, Sliver’s that bashful, though you
-mightn’t think it to look at him, he’d die of shame if a young lady was
-to see him in his bunk.”
-
-She hesitated, then came back. “But—he ought to be looked after.”
-
-“He has been.” Jake clinched the victory. “A copa’s the finest thing in
-the world for chills. He’s had a couple an’ was sleeping like a babe
-when we came in.”
-
-She gave in with a sigh. “Then we won’t wake him. But you must take him
-a tray when you go out.”
-
-But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it
-broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain
-have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded
-portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee “shooed” him like
-a sick chicken into a corner of the *patio*, there to be coddled and
-doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every
-mother’s daughter of whom had her own infallible “*remedio*.” His real
-contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his
-companions at meals.
-
-“Invalid looks a bit better,” Jake would opine.
-
-“A week’s careful nursing orter bring him around,” Bull would add. Then
-while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned
-his poor, burned-out stomach.
-
-That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they
-got him alone in the adobe. “I s’pose neither of you saints would ha’
-stopped even to smell of it,” he sarcastically inquired, after
-confessing how and where he obtained the liquor.
-
-“’Tain’t that,” Bull admonished him. “I’m pretty near due for a bust
-myself. But when it hits, you bet I’ll go somewheres so’s the sight of
-my hoggishness ain’t a-going to offend our girl. No, ’tain’t that you
-acquired a bun we’re kicking at, but that you toted it back here.”
-
-“You bet y’u,” Jake added. “Next time you’re took that-a-way, have ’em
-hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an’ don’t budge till
-you’re through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you
-forgot to drink?”
-
-“Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!” Sliver groaned. “My liver’s burned right
-out!”
-
-“Bueno!” Jake nodded his satisfaction. “Then if you’ve finished I’m free
-to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week.
-That’s where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you’ve gotter do
-is to find a bottle, but mine’s simply gotter have cards in it. I don’t
-get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining
-business of our’n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow.”
-
-“All right, get it over,” Bull agreed, after a moment’s rumination.
-“Tell her at breakfast. She’ll fix you up with the fare.”
-
-“‘Tell her at breakfast’?” Jake looked his scorn. “An’ have her running
-an’ fixing me out with socks an’ shirts an’ things like I was going off
-on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable
-and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an’ through, I
-simply kain’t fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest
-give me all you’ve got. With any kind of luck it’ll turn you big
-interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so’s to catch an
-early train.”
-
-So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But
-thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed.
-
-When Jake arrived in El Paso—But the less said about his sojourn there
-the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some
-cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at
-the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him,
-a week later, coming through the *patio* gateway.
-
-“Oh, you poor man!” she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face.
-“They must have worked you all night.”
-
-“Which they did work me overtime,” he confessed to Bull, in the adobe
-that evening. “Five days an’ most of the nights I sat inter one game.
-Look at this!”
-
-The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of
-American dollars. “When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled
-a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten
-Miss Lee’s hand. He was a—
-
-“What are you crinkling your nose at?” he hotly demanded of Bull. “This
-ain’t no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying
-horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of ’em came from this very
-ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better
-right to their money than the little girl?”
-
-“’Tain’t that.” Bull shook his head. “I was on’y thinking that I’d
-liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don’t look like she’d take
-easily to charity.”
-
-“*That so?*” Jake regarded him cynically. “Now kain’t you jest hear me
-a-saying, ‘Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?’
-But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple
-of thousand in horses?”
-
-“No; but she will.”
-
-And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three,
-made his proposition, Lee shook her head. “It’s only a question of time
-before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be
-your two thousand dollars?”
-
-“In the same box with yours—stowed safely away where we can’t spend or
-lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims,” Jake argued. “The
-risk we’re willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that
-account.”
-
-At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by
-devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error,
-turning evil to good, if only for once.
-
-
-IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
-================================
-
-“Lady-girl’s a-going to have a birthday.”
-
-The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house.
-So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer
-that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease
-on their *catres*. But the title “Lady-girl,” Sliver’s especial name for
-Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him.
-
-“That so?” Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. “How’d you know?”
-
-“She asked me to write a piece, t’other day, in her birthday-album, an’
-looking through it I kem on her day.”
-
-“She asked me, too,” Jake admitted. “What did you write?”
-
-“‘Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an’ so air you.’”
-
-“A real nice piece, too,” Jake commented upon this classic. “I like it
-better ’n mine.” Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet,
-he gave his own:
-
-..
- | “When the distant sun is setting and
- | Your mind from care is free,
- | When of absent friends you’re thinking,
- | Will you sometimes think of me?”
-
-Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. “I ked on’y
-think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister’s album when I was
-a kid. ’Tain’t near as good as yourn.
-
- | “My pen is dull, my ink is pale;
- | My love for you will never fail.”
-
-“I think it’s pretty fine,” the others commended the effort.
-
-After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, “How
-old is she, Sliver?”
-
-“Rising twenty, be the date.”
-
-“Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the ’casion—if
-it’s on’y to keep her from feeling lonesome.”
-
-“Little bit close on the funeral,” Jake tentatively suggested. “Jest
-about three months, ain’t it?”
-
-“Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an’
-have ’em drop in that day.”
-
-“We might shoot things up a bit, too,” Sliver began, but Jake cut him
-off with utter scorn.
-
-“This ain’t no cowman’s jamboree. Girls don’t like any shooting except
-what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles ’u’d be
-my idee.”
-
-“‘Cake’?” Sliver now returned the scorn. “Kain’t you see these Mexican
-dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an’
-curran’s an’ cit-tron peel, an’ with spice fixin’s to it? An enchilada
-stuffed with store prunes ’u’d be the best they ked do.”
-
-“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled
-waters. “What about Mrs. Mills?”
-
-He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her
-young daughter and a few *peones*, had kept their *rancho* going since
-her husband’s death. “If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I’ll bet
-you she’d fix up a cake, if ’twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for
-candles, candles an’ beer-factories are the main products of Mexico.”
-
-Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward
-consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull
-delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the
-following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe’s *fiancé*, a young mining
-engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend,
-a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded
-to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on.
-
-“It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza,” Phyllis warmly
-declared. “She and Lee have always been such good friends.”
-
-Accordingly, a *mozo* delivered an invitation at the *Hacienda del Sol*
-about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow’s *rancho*.
-
-The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated
-former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating
-supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he
-developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered
-on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her
-small daughter.
-
-Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her
-flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything,
-the girl’s childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled
-happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless
-directness that sometimes proved embarrassing.
-
-Had he a father, mother, sister? Where did they live? What was his
-business? Married? Why not? And when he returned the usual answer that
-no one would have him she brought him to sudden and utter confusion.
-
-“Oh, I’m so glad! Mother would take you, I’m sure. I’d just love to have
-you for my father. Will you please marry her, then she will never be
-anxious or fearful again?”
-
-Her mother’s merry laugh helped to cool Bull’s blushes. “Don’t be
-specially insulted. She says that to every one.” Then, brave little soul
-though she was, she lifted a corner of the curtain that veiled an
-ever-present fear. “It’s true that I get sometimes terribly anxious.
-Mexicans are lovely people when they’re kept in their place. But since
-Diaz was overthrown they’re like a school of naughty children, let loose
-without morality, discipline, or guidance to protect them from
-themselves. Sometimes I think we ought to leave, but if we did the place
-would be sacked and burned before we reached the railroad. So I’d rather
-take the risk than be a pauper in the United States. But there, I’m
-ungrateful talking this way instead of thanking Providence we’ve got
-along so well.”
-
-“That’s the way to look at it, ma’am,” Bull encouraged her. While a
-wicked flash shot from under his black brows he added, “If any one
-bothers you jest send for us.”
-
-“Oo-oh, but you looked fierce then!” the child gave a delighted shudder.
-“Do it again.” Though a humorous twinkle sterilized the rehearsal, she
-consoled herself with the reflection: “’Tisn’t the same. But I’ll bet
-you’re muy malo when you fight.”
-
-“It’s a good thing if he is.” From the sink, where she was washing
-currants, her mother surveyed with approval Bull’s imposing bulk. “It
-was a great relief when we heard that you and your friends were staying
-with Lee.”
-
-Later, when Bull’s shyness had somewhat abated, she spoke more
-intimately. From Ramon himself she had learned of his expulsion from Los
-Arboles. “Ramon is a nice boy, yet no one could blame Mr. Carleton,” she
-said. “Yet what is Lee to do? Before the revolution she could have taken
-her pick from scores of young Americans, but now they’re all gone.”
-Laughing, she finished with a remark which was destined, later, to
-produce unexpected results. “I guess we’ll have to import her a
-husband.”
-
-Bull’s heavy rumble echoed her laugh. It broke out again when Betty
-cried out: “While you’re at it get one for me. I simply won’t marry a
-greaser.”
-
-Because of the unusual proceedings she was allowed to sit up. Caught
-yawning while the cake was baking, she fled to Bull’s knee, from which
-strategic position she defeated her mother’s best efforts to coax her to
-bed. Whereafter she promptly celebrated her victory by falling asleep.
-Curled against him in trustful comfort, she slept with her fair head
-pillowed on his mighty chest till, the cake finished, he carried her to
-bed. A *catre* had been moved out for him under the *portales*. But
-after silence and sleep descended on the house he sat for a long time on
-its edge, softly musing, the warmth of the child’s body enwrapping his
-heart. Even Jake, whose sharp eyes had detected many an alien expression
-on that scarred visage of late, would have wondered at its tenderness.
-
-Betty was still asleep when he mounted to leave next morning, but at the
-beat of hoofs she came running, bare feet and legs flying under her
-nightdress. Stooping, he swung her to the saddle before him. The
-pressure of her warm arms around his neck, soft lips on his cheek, put a
-thrill of earnestness into his farewell.
-
-“Remember, ma’am, we’ll come whenever you call.”
-
-A quarter-mile away he drew rein and looked back. Though smaller than
-Los Arboles, the *rancho* buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of
-the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea
-vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against
-the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed
-in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed
-the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a
-dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes.
-
-Shaking his big head, he spoke aloud. “’Tain’t safe for them here,
-’tain’t safe!”
-
-So vivid was that dread feeling, presage of evil, the sweat broke on his
-brow. Into his mind shot a vivid picture of the miner hanging limply
-from the *sahuaro*, face turned up to the torrid sun. Around it, as in a
-whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders
-of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern
-horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive
-indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the
-long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon
-it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again
-and rode on.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets
-and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. These tendencies are due to
-the fact that a woman lives principally in the past and present, a man
-in the future; while she observes past occasions, he creates new ones.
-Whether she be looking forward with youthful joy, or looking back with
-increasing regret, a woman specializes upon her birthdays. But,
-accustomed to her father’s bad memory, Lee had not expected any one to
-remember; was accordingly astonished and pleased when, coming to
-breakfast that morning, she found the table decorated with trailing
-vines and a bouquet of wild flowers at her plate that had been picked by
-Sliver.
-
-“Why—” she gave a little gasp. Then her shining glance accused the
-Three, whose sheepish grins loudly proclaimed their guilt. “How *did*
-you know? What’s this?”
-
-While she was unwrapping the tissue-paper in which Mrs. Mills had
-wrapped the cake the Three looked on with eager expectance, and were
-treated to a second bath of sunshine. “A *real* cake! Where *did* you
-get it?”
-
-In a country where cakes, if not actually hanging on every tree, may be
-either home-grown or plucked from the counter of any pastry cook, her
-joy might have seemed exaggerated. But in that alien desert, stripped of
-its substance to the bare hot bones by repeated revolutions, the
-conjunction of a sure-enough cake with a girl’s birthday verged on the
-miraculous. Nor was Lee’s pleasure lessened after she heard at what
-pains it had been produced.
-
-It was, of course, merely the first of the day’s surprises, some of
-which were purely accidental, as when William Benson rode in at noon. As
-a matter of fact, his visit pertained to a defensive alliance against
-raiders, but, being warned in time, he straightway credited his visit to
-the birthday. A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered
-and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit
-of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old
-friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the *patio* when the
-second irruption of the Lovells and their *fiancés*—for Phyllis had
-conquered the smelter man in record time—occurred midway of the
-afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the *portales*
-before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under
-the arched gateway into Lee’s arms.
-
-“But you surely did not come alone?” Though that was exactly what she
-might have done herself, Lee looked at her in horror.
-
-“Ah no, querida! Ramon escorted me, and will return to-morrow!”
-
-“You don’t mean to say that he has—” Lee stopped, for she had caught,
-just then, a glimpse of him riding away.
-
-“Your father—you remember—he thought—”
-
-Isabel stopped in her embarrassed explanations for, like a scared white
-bird, Lee was flying through the gateway. Grabbing Isabel’s horse from
-the *anciano* who was just about to lead it around to the compound, she
-leaped into the saddle and went flying down the trail.
-
-Turning at the sound of hoofs, Ramon waited for her. It was the first
-time they had met since the funeral, and though embarrassment would have
-been quite natural, Lee’s frank greeting put him at once at his ease.
-
-“You were going away—on my saint’s day?”
-
-“It was out of respect for—”
-
-She cut off his apology. “Yes, yes, but father was angry and unjust that
-day. He would have acknowledged it himself, had he lived. You must come
-back, at once, with me.”
-
-Not knowing the cause of her sudden flight, Bull had followed to the
-gateway. As he stood there watching the two returning, Benson’s voice
-broke at his shoulder.
-
-“That’s the hell of raising a girl in this country. I spoke often to
-Carleton about it, but he was a lonely man and couldn’t bear to have her
-away. I suppose that he felt she was perfectly safe with him.”
-
-Knowing him for Lee’s sincere friend, Bull did not scruple to hand on
-the information he had gained from Mrs. Mills. Benson received it with a
-low, shocked whistle.
-
-“And the poor man had to meet death with that on his mind? She hasn’t
-seen Ramon since the funeral, you say? That speaks well for him. He
-tried to go, just now, too. He’s not half bad. But when it’s a question
-of marrying Lee, no Mexican need apply. But come on back in. She’ll pick
-out in a second that we’re talking about them.”
-
-During the lively chatter that whiled away the afternoon; at supper when
-the cake appeared in a glory of radiant candles; while the young folks
-laughed and chatted thereafter under the lighted *portales*, the two
-stealthily watched Lee and Ramon. Sliver and Jake having retired early,
-Bull and Benson engaged in an interminable game of poker which left them
-free to discuss the proposed defensive alliance without neglecting their
-watch.
-
-Before night fell the girls had distributed candles here and there among
-the foliage which now transmuted their waxen gleam into a greenish
-incandescence. Behind the creeper that fell in a cascade from the roof,
-the lamplit *portales* gleamed in half-circles of gold. The massed
-cluster of a bougainvillea dripped clotted blood down the façade of the
-gate arch. As the girls moved under the golden arches opposite, their
-white dresses might easily have been the fluttering wings of giant
-tropical moths, and, noting it, Benson paused in filling his hand.
-
-“It’s like a beautiful stage setting.”
-
-Bull’s nod took in the bright faces, soft laughter, happy chatter. With
-a slow, indulgent smile he musingly watched the secret glances between
-the two pairs of lovers; artless subterfuges by which the girls achieved
-small personal contacts.
-
-“Don’t take much to make ’em happy, does it? A little laughter an’ a
-little song; plenty of chatter an’ some pretty clothes; a baby to love
-and a man to boss; ’tain’t much, but Lordy, how many of ’em don’t get
-it. If men ’u’d on’y keep on admiring in their wives the things they
-liked in their sweethearts, the divorce courts ’u’d go out of business.
-If I had a daughter, I’d marry her to a boot-black that understood the
-nature of women ahead of a merchant prince; for a man that says to his
-wife at breakfast, ‘Why, how pretty you look this morning!’ is a-going
-to get a reward that can’t be bought with a million.”
-
-Just then Phœbe Lovell’s clear voice floated across the *patio*. “What a
-lovely night! Let’s go for a walk.”
-
-“All right. Wait till I get a shawl.”
-
-As the others moved off, Lee ran back into her room. They had passed
-through the gateway when she came out again, except Ramon, who took the
-shawl and threw it over her shoulders. For a few moments they stood
-talking under the lamplit *portal*, and, though the conversation was
-quite ordinary, the glow in his big dark eyes was sufficiently
-revealing. As Lee’s back was turned toward them, her face told nothing.
-But just before they moved off she reached up and straightened the lapel
-of Ramon’s coat.
-
-Bull frowned. “D’you really think she’s in love?”
-
-Benson shrugged. “When a girl fusses with a young man’s clothes she
-doesn’t hate him.”
-
-Bull broke a second frowning pause. “You’ve knowed her almost all her
-life. Kedn’t you put in a word?”
-
-The Englishman made a wry face. “I did, about six months ago, when I
-first noticed this thing starting. But never again!” He laughed, a
-little self-consciously. “I never had any one sauce me so in all my
-life. Told me that it was none of my damn business; to go home and boss
-my poor wife. Said that she preferred Mexicans to English, anyway.
-Phe-e-ew! I never think of it, even now, without aching to spank her.
-No, counsel wouldn’t help her.”
-
-“But she simply kain’t be allowed to go ahead an’ marry him.” Bull’s
-coal eyes flashed with the old wicked gleam. “Before that I’d—lay for
-him an’ shoot him.”
-
-Benson regarded him dryly. “Your plan has the advantage of finality,
-but—it would lead to reprisals. Old Icarza stands well with Valles. If
-anything happened to his beloved son we’d be wiped out so completely
-there’d be no one left to mourn us. But why worry? We don’t know for
-sure whether she even loves him. Give me two cards. I raise you three
-blues.”
-
-For two hours thereafter the two played and talked, arranging a code of
-smoke signals by day, beacons by night, to warn the *haciendas*. But
-under it Bull’s thought still revolved around Lee and her problem. The
-party had returned from the walk, and Lee was shooing all her guests off
-to bed before his brow cleared and he uttered a low chuckle.
-
-“What’s the matter?” Benson looked up in surprise.
-
-“Oh, jest something I was thinking of. I raise you two reds.”
-
-Not until Jake woke up when Bull entered the bunkhouse did his secret
-thought find expression. “Sure I noticed it,” he answered Jake’s remark
-concerning Lee’s “likin’ for that Mexican.” “But leave it to me.”
-
-“What d’you allow to do?”
-
-This time Bull laughed outright. “Mrs. Mills was saying, t’other day,
-that we’d have to import a rival. ’Tain’t sech a bad idea.”
-
-“What d’you reckon to do—put an ad in the paper ‘Wanted, a husband’?”
-
-“Never you mind,” Bull quietly replied to the cynical comment. “I’m
-going, to-morrow, up to El Paso.”
-
-
-X: WANTED—A HUSBAND
-===================
-
-Departures are usually cheerless affairs, but the morning sun loosed a
-flood of gold into the *patio* where the party was in process of
-dissolution. William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they
-went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone.
-
-It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the
-sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an
-indulgent grin two small brown *criadas*, darting with needle and thread
-and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the
-transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the
-beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love—set his big rough heart aglow.
-The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. The young
-men, with natural respect for quiet power, admired his kindliness and
-strength. Their farewells and invitations were hearty and sincere.
-
-“You’ve promised and promised and never come yet—that is, for a real
-visit,” Phœbe and Phyllis rebuked him.
-
-The young men earnestly charged him, “We look to you to take care of our
-girls till we’re in shape to look after them ourselves.”
-
-Not till the Icarzas bid him good-by did that kindly glow fade. Even
-when Isabel slid a small soft hand into his huge paw and turned on him
-the full power of her big Spanish eyes while uttering lovely felicities,
-he remained non-committal. He frowned hearing Lee accept an invitation
-for a visit in the near future. But when she came in, after they left,
-the hostile look had faded.
-
-“Oh, didn’t we have a lovely time?” She patted his arm. “And it was all
-due to you.”
-
-“And now I’ll take my pay. I want to go up to El Paso.”
-
-“Oh, I’m so glad!” Darting into her room, she came running back with a
-fat roll of bills. “I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr.
-Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in
-El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece.”
-
-Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the
-last thing in the world that Bull’s heart desired. But she looked so
-pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled
-through the *patio*.
-
-“Now that’s real nice of you. But back up at the mine we’ve all got
-store clothes to burn. One o’ these days, when the work ain’t so
-pressing, Sliver kin ride over an’ get ’em. Fifty’ll be all I’ll need.”
-
-“Oh *dear*!” she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. “I did want
-to do something; you’ve all been so kind.”
-
-But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his
-comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then
-bossed the job while her *criadas* brushed and curried and sponged him.
-After tying one of her father’s cravats around his neck she turned him
-round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed
-him with a gentle pat.
-
-On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, “be how an’
-when,” but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger
-at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform
-to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the
-mixture of *peones*, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican
-*comerciantes* that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep
-he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under
-the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent.
-
-“’Morning, friend,” he greeted Bull, cordially. “My name is Naylor.
-Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you’ll tip this water-bottle
-for me, I’ll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer
-of dust and cinders.”
-
-The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years
-to establish in civilization’s cultured circles. Before it was over,
-Bull had learned that his companion was “on a little *pasear* between
-revolutionary battles,” and had given, in return, some inkling of his
-own affairs. The young fellow’s lithe, spare figure, clean face,
-fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled
-along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he
-eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last,
-the other’s attention.
-
-“Hey!” he demanded. “Is my nose out of plumb, or what?”
-
-Bull warded off offense with the truth. “I happened to be looking for a
-man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?”
-
-“That depends.” The correspondent answered, breezily, but with caution.
-“Without being what you could call wedded to this sandy, thirsty,
-cutthroat business of Mexican revolutions, I like it better than
-anything else in sight. But what’s your lay? Ranching?” He repeated it
-after Bull. “In central Chihuahua? Forget it, friend.”
-
-Bull eyed him wistfully. He fitted so closely to specifications.
-Finally, in desperation, he opened his simple heart; was explaining his
-quest when the young fellow burst out laughing.
-
-“I beg your pardon.” He raised a protesting hand against Bull’s black
-glower, then went on with sympathetic seriousness: “But you’ll have to
-admit that one doesn’t see a man of your build every day in this
-matrimonial business. So there’s a damsel in distress, hey? That alters
-the case. If it wasn’t for a little girl up in San Francisco that I
-expect to marry some day when I become very rich and famous, I’d try and
-help you out, for I know just how you feel. It would be a damned shame
-to have her throw herself away on a Mexican. But you’ve laid yourself
-out some job. Not that you won’t be able to find men, good-looking chaps
-at that. But to get the right one calls for some picking and choosing.
-But I tell you what I will do—I shall be up for a week and I’d love to
-give you a hand.”
-
-“Sure you kedn’t tackle it yourself?”
-
-The young fellow denied the wistful appeal. “Hombre! a million wouldn’t
-release my girl’s mortgage.”
-
-With a regretful sigh Bull struck hands on the compact. While they were
-talking the train had ambled through the brown adobe skirts of Juarez,
-the squalid Mexican town across the Rio Grande, whence they were
-presently shot by automobile over the international bridge into the
-spacious bosom of El Paso’s largest hotel. Bull had calculated to go
-out, at once, on his search, but while they sat at breakfast there
-descended upon them a host of reporters and correspondents, ravenous for
-news and aching to dispense hospitality.
-
-“Might as well put it off till to-morrow, Diogenes.” His friend had
-already named Bull after the person who had such a deuce of a time
-hunting an honest man among the grafters and ward heelers of ancient
-Greece. “We’ll devote to-day to the irrigation of our desiccated
-systems, then go to it mañana like hungry dogs. But safety first! Take a
-ten out of your wad and give the rest to the clerk.”
-
-Instead of one day, however, three passed during which Bull’s huge bulk
-upreared alongside a hundred bars. In all that time he never went to
-bed, for, intensified by long abstinence, the outbreak proved unusually
-virulent. Generally the conclusion of his debauches found him broke.
-But, thanks to the correspondent’s prevision, he awoke on the fourth
-morning, in bed at the hotel, with the bulk of his money still in the
-office safe. While he was draining the water-jug according to
-time-honored precedents, his friend appeared in the doorway of the
-adjoining room. His own head was swathed in a wet towel that almost hid
-his rueful grin.
-
-“One never knows what one is starting. You certainly went the limit,
-Diogenes. Are you quite sure you’re through?”
-
-Bull nodded and put down the jug with a satisfied sigh. “It’s a bit of a
-strain, this fathering an’ mothering a lone girl, a feller’s gotter keep
-so straight.” He added, apologetically, “I was jest plumb ripe for a
-bust, but I reckon this orter hold me for another three months.”
-
-“Very well, then, let’s get down to work. At intervals, while I could
-still see, I kept one eye open for possibles. But it’s like looking for
-gold or diamonds; the supply doesn’t touch the demand. The few prospects
-all proved to have attachments in the shape of sweetheart or wife. Good
-ones, I suppose, are so rare that the girls grab them at sight like
-marked-down waists on a bargain-counter.”
-
-After two days of vain search through the plazas and parks, hotel
-lobbies, streets, and bars of El Paso, Bull was almost driven to the
-same conclusion. Short men, tall men, thin men, broad men; some that
-were ugly, others handsome; well and ill clad from all walks of
-life—passed under his observation. The few he trailed were either
-engulfed within the sacred precincts of some bank or met at the doors of
-suburban bungalows and there warmly kissed by young and pretty wives.
-Without fulfilling the specifications called for in the potential
-husband, it would have been difficult enough to have enlisted an
-ordinary ranch hand for service across the line. At the close of the
-second day Bull reported as much to the correspondent when they met in
-the hotel lobby.
-
-“Guess I’ll have to give it up.”
-
-“Now if *that* was only free.” The other bowed, just then, to a young
-man who had just walked in from the street. “Look at him! Five-eleven in
-his socks, hazel eyes, brown hair, good strong jaw, flat shoulders and
-flanks, deep chest; walks the earth like he owned it. Some dresser, too.
-That mixed plaid cost a hundred at his New York tailor’s.”
-
-“Some banker’s son, I’ll bet you,” Bull grumbled.
-
-“That or better. I had a little chat with him this morning. A ’varsity
-man by his accent and manner. Seemed to know the Mexican situation down
-to the ground from the Wall Street end, so papa’s probably a broker.
-Holy snakes! Look at that! Neat work! Neat work!”
-
-Walking up to the counter, the young man had held out his hand—evidently
-for the key of his room—while his indifferent gaze traveled around the
-lobby. The clerk, who departed in no wise from the casual specifications
-of his supercilious breed, glanced at the hand contemptuously. Turning,
-the young man spoke. Then as, without glancing up, the clerk answered,
-he snatched, hauled that superior person across the counter, and slammed
-him down hard on the floor. Next, as they came on, he felled one large
-door porter and three oversized bell-boys who had answered the clerk’s
-yell. This done, he waited, expectantly, quietly surveying the wreck,
-the hazel eye admired by Naylor transmuted into hard steel flecked with
-dots of brown light.
-
-Jaw, eyes, pose, all said, “Next!” But the “wreck” was complete. The
-oversized bell-boys ran off to answer imaginary calls. An automobile
-party at the door called for the porter’s attention. Deserted, the clerk
-swiftly retreated behind his counter, behind which, from a safe
-distance, he issued defiant mutterings. With a slight nod that expressed
-comprehension and satisfaction, Hazel-Eyes sauntered across the lobby
-out into the street.
-
-All had passed in the time required for the correspondent to reach the
-desk. He was back again in five seconds. “He’s broke—owes two weeks’
-room rent. Clerk told him to get out; hence the scrap. Diogenes, we’re
-in luck! Venus and Cupid are in the ascendant. He’s our meat.”
-
-Grabbing Bull’s arm, he hustled him outside, where they spied the quarry
-turning up a cross-street that led to the plaza. When he finally settled
-down on an empty bench, the correspondent nudged Bull in the ribs.
-
-“Look at them!” He indicated the hundreds of men idling on the benches
-or sprawled out on the turf. “Last refuge of the broke, home of the
-out-of-works. That settles it. Bet you he hasn’t the price of a meal.
-But, say! he’s plucky. The beggar is actually smiling.”
-
-From the way in which the young fellow’s glance wandered around the
-assembled out-of-works, it was easy to see that he rather enjoyed the
-novel situation. When Bull had noted and commented on the fact, the
-correspondent went on:
-
-“Now, Diogenes, we must proceed with due regard for the traditions. When
-grand dukes, princes, and caliphs in disguise befriend some worthy
-person, they invariably begin by testing his honesty—see *Arabian
-Nights* and other authorities. Split a couple of tens off your wad and
-drop them as you stroll past him. I’ll stay here and watch lest he be
-found wanting.”
-
-Bull managed it, too, quite cleverly, scraping the bills out of his
-pocket along with his tobacco-pouch. Watching closely, the correspondent
-saw the young fellow look, pick them up, then run and tap Bull’s
-shoulder. Leaning back, he shook with silent laughter.
-
-“And they say romance is dead,” his thought ran. “*Dead!* while this
-big, black giant stalks around like a knight of old seeking a perfect
-husband for a girl he’s known only a few weeks. Diogenes, my friend, Don
-Quixote had nothing on you. Of all the lovely, fine pieces of idiocy
-that ever helped to raise us out of the muck of commercialism, this is
-the very finest. And wouldn’t it be queer if it worked? It’s almost too
-good to be true, and yet—a girl that can move a man to do things like
-that must be remarkably worth while. Quien sabe? Perhaps it will end
-like all true romances, with a happy marriage.”
-
-Till the two settled down side by side on a bench, the correspondent
-watched. Then with a satisfied nod he rose and walked out of Bull’s life
-in the same casual way he had entered it; to return once more, however,
-at a critical juncture, many months later.
-
-Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with
-diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual
-observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor
-conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated
-astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was
-remarkably well done.
-
-“*No-o-o!*” he protested.
-
-“Sure!” the other nodded. “I was turned out of my hotel only half an
-hour ago.”
-
-Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended
-doubt. “Broke, mebbe, but you don’t belong with these. What was it?
-Wine, weemen, or cyards?”
-
-The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. “A woman, yes, but not in
-the usual way. What would you think if I told you—But, pshaw! what’s the
-use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work fairy-tale.
-Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I’m here, busted and
-broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gilt-edged
-securities and real estate.”
-
-“A hundred thousand!” Bull’s financial acquaintance having rarely risen
-above the sixty-a-month class, he could not repress his surprise.
-
-“There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I
-refused a hundred thousand—with a girl attached.”
-
-Bull’s face fell. “I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an’ you refused
-beca’se you’d already picked one for yourself.”
-
-The young man nodded. “Correct except in one or two particulars. I
-disliked the girl so much that her money couldn’t tempt me. As for the
-one I’ll marry, I haven’t picked her yet. But I mean to when I’m taken
-that way.”
-
-Bull’s face lit up with hope again as, with naïve frankness, the young
-fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a
-marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only
-daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all
-that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there
-was the hitch!
-
-“For a fellow doesn’t want to marry his sister,” he explained. “I know
-her so well she hasn’t a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will
-be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing
-forever after. But the Relieving Officer”—he broke off, laughing at
-Bull’s puzzled look—“that’s my name for my father. He was always coming
-through when I got in debt at college, hence the title. He’s a good old
-scout, but obstinate as—as—”
-
-“—yourself?” Bull suggested.
-
-“Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits
-the immovable obstacle—something busts. That was me. Without even the
-last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama,
-I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn’t have me suffer. He
-supposed I’d presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just
-for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So
-here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the
-result—pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future.”
-
-“Oh, shore!” The caliph—that is, Bull—was proceeding very cautiously.
-“You’ll get a job in some bank.”
-
-“Don’t believe it. You see, I’d just come home from Princeton and had no
-commercial training. Anyway, I’d rather work in the open, ranching, or
-something like that. If I had a little capital, I’d buy in. As I
-haven’t, I’m open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I’ve got no
-experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I’m afraid
-it’s pick and shovel.”
-
-The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was
-spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull
-proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job—in fact, it was on
-the same *hacienda* where he worked himself! Of course it had the
-disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing
-was certain but death and “requisitions”! And there was always the
-chance of a scrap! He, Bull, wouldn’t advise any one to try it that had
-too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one
-might be launched into “Kingdom Come.” But for a man who liked action
-and would take a fighting chance—so forth and so on.
-
-A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred
-inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so—Bull did
-not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic
-outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken.
-He had finished telling of Carleton’s death at the hands of the
-Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his
-*compañeros* had assumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow
-thrust out his hand.
-
-“Say, that’s fine, old man! I’d be proud to have you take me in. My name
-is Nevil—Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?”
-
-“Whenever the train goes, an’ that’s be guess an’ be God. It’s billed to
-pull out from Juarez this evening, but we’ll be lucky if it leaves
-before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an’ start almost on
-time. So we’ll go aboard to-night.”
-
-“What about clothes?” The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay
-at his fashionable tweeds. “I can’t punch cows in these.”
-
-“Hardly,” Bull grinned. “You’d come out from your first bunch of pear
-chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an’ we’ll see about
-an outfit.”
-
-It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon
-changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army
-shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman’s hat,
-his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better
-advantage. Bull’s expression, looking him over, would have fitted a
-match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her début. His
-comment, “You’ll do,” would have surprised the recipient could he have
-divined all of its implications.
-
-Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon
-stopped him. “Here, you can’t do that!”
-
-“But you’re broke.”
-
-“I still have these.” He held out the tweeds. “How much boot do I get,
-Father Abraham?”
-
-Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he
-stood for his tradition. “Only vot iss on your feet. These ain’d much
-good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade.”
-
-“You’ll chuck in that pair of chaps?”
-
-With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own
-generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were
-stowing away the *chaparros* and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out
-a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner
-read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very
-cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents.
-
-Gordon burst into a merry laugh. “Father Abraham isn’t on to real
-clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York.”
-
-
-XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT
-==================
-
-Starting “be guess an’ be God,” the train left Juarez at five the next
-morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull
-had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by
-the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first
-“shoo-fly” around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over
-the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could
-never be obtained through a Pullman window.
-
-It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern
-experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night,
-tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly
-revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in
-purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun
-rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its
-nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also
-revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with
-grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train,
-startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land.
-
-“Destruction’s the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys,” Bull
-answered Gordon’s question. “You orter see them at it. They run the loop
-of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine,
-then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour,
-spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. After cutting down
-the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an’ yank a mile of it away
-at a time. As wreckers, they can’t be beat, for in four years they’ve
-completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property
-that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty
-years to build.”
-
-“Are they still at it?”
-
-The sudden illumination of the young man’s face so palpably expressed
-hope that Bull had to grin. “Yes, farther south, where Valles is
-fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it
-pretty close. Still”—his nod went beyond the distant mountains—“it’s
-pretty much all bandit out there. Now an’ then they attack the trains.
-There’s allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap.”
-
-“That isn’t so bad.”
-
-Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to
-the scenery.
-
-In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first
-took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash
-in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts
-violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible
-ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as
-its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear
-in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and
-had his being.
-
-The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow
-sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the
-revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when
-the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of
-his hair.
-
-It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like
-the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the
-feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal
-expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled
-away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by
-deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him
-always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the
-hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican
-*haciendas* did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the
-scenery as such.
-
-“I’m glad we’re up here.” From the engine, puffing away at the head of a
-dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far
-to their rear. “I wouldn’t exchange this for a Pullman.”
-
-“Well, don’t imagine that you’re traveling second-class,” Bull grinned.
-“I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it’s worth it. You’d
-suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some *peon*
-spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it
-an’ grin. Sure!” He answered the young fellow’s look of disgust. “That
-is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you’re German or
-English, or b’long to any other nationality that looks after its people,
-you might resent it an’ get away. But, thanks to our Government’s
-policy, it’s open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a
-few, too, every so long.”
-
-“Would *you* stand for that?”
-
-Bull shrugged. “Kain’t say, till I’ve been tried. But it’s good advice,
-nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don’t like it, you’d better be
-toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home.
-
-“Here, here!” he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on
-a telegraph-pole. “Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t’other
-day for plugging insulators. Besides, it’s waste. Every bullet is worth
-a life—mebbe your own.”
-
-“Maybe his own!” Again Gordon felt the prickling hair—in fact, as they
-rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that
-failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a
-few miserable *peonas*, ragged and half-starved, begging for *centavos*.
-There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of
-a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty
-brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied
-the details.
-
-Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of
-war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels!
-That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye
-sockets from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish
-*hacendado* whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by
-raiders. Death and torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed
-and ruined, the full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape.
-
-Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic.
-Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton,
-the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit
-tortures!
-
-He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before
-he was aware of it the sun’s great red orb sank behind a huge black
-mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a
-while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark
-pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them
-rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the
-running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a
-luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at
-the station at midnight.
-
-“We’d better go right on,” Bull said. “We’d get no sleep here for the
-fleas, an’ desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we’ll be into
-the grass country an’ kin take a nap while the animals graze.”
-
-With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved
-off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over
-its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours’ more travel
-brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and
-Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when,
-just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in
-chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. *Riata* swinging in
-rhythm with her beast’s stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast,
-took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully
-as any *vaquero*.
-
-“Pretty neat!” Gordon exclaimed. “That boy can ride!”
-
-“You bet you!” Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, “Sliver
-himself, that was born with a rope in his han’, don’t throw a better
-loop than Miss Lee.”
-
-“*What?*” As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a
-clear cowman’s yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon
-exclaimed, “Why, it—it *is* a girl! In this country do they usually
-wear—”
-
-“No more ’n they do in the Eastern States,” Bull dryly filled in the
-hiatus. “On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican
-Catholic—they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p’ints. Ever
-sence the revolution, Miss Lee’s been doing vaquero’s work, an’ what
-kind of a job d’you reckon she’d make of it going ’round in skirts? If
-you don’t mind, I’ll ride on an’ help her with that critter.”
-
-The light that had flashed over the girl’s face at the sight of Bull
-spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and
-sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an
-impulsive feeling.
-
-“Oh, I’m *so* glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully.”
-
-“*Home!*” And she was happy because he, “Bull” Perrin, the notorious
-rustler, had returned *home*! Earth held no terror that could have sent
-that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he
-controlled his voice.
-
-“Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?”
-
-“Indeed, no!” She laughed, merrily. “They’re like two old hens ’tending
-an orphan chick. But—well, you know a girl, even as independent as I,
-must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone.”
-
-A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant’s eyes. His
-sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch.
-Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be
-forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of
-sin. The shadow marked a resolution.
-
-He spoke very gently. “I hope that you’ll allus feel that way.” Then,
-with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: “But what are
-you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for
-this.”
-
-She laughed saucily up in his face. “Then it is due to me. I gave them
-the slip. Who is—” She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up.
-
-Bull briefly sketched his history. “Young chap I found dead broke in El
-Paso. He’s the right sort.” Perhaps because he divined the probable
-effect on her feminine psychology, he added: “He’s from the East—college
-man—wealthy family—turned out because he refused to marry a fortune. I
-tol’ him you’d likely hire him.”
-
-“I would in ordinary times.” She looked at Gordon, who had now reined
-in. “But I cannot pay regular wages just now.”
-
-“He’s willing to wait, like us,” Bull began. “He’s—”
-
-“—out for experience,” Gordon put in. “To tell the truth, Miss Carleton,
-I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you’ll find me worth my board.”
-
-He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet
-reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which
-she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke
-out with a comical little laugh. “If it wasn’t so nice, it would be
-ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking
-for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is
-the matter with you?”
-
-She may have read the answer in Gordon’s eyes and resented the indignity
-it offered her independence. Or the feeling underneath her sudden
-stiffening may have rooted deeper. Be a young man ever so comely, a girl
-ever so pretty, there will flash between them on first meeting the
-subtle challenge of sex; instinctive defiance based through love’s
-history to the far time when every girl ran like a deer from a possible
-lover and only gave in after he had proved his manhood by carrying her
-off. It passed in a flash, for, noticing her stiffen, Gordon reduced his
-gaze to respectful attention.
-
-Subtle as it was, Bull had still noticed the by-play. “Looks like she’d
-taken a down on him.”
-
-But even as the doubt formed in his mind it was removed by her laughing
-comment: “I suppose I’ll have to stand for it. But you must be starving.
-Let us get on to the house.”
-
-As they rode along, moreover, Bull noted certain swift, stealthy glances
-with which she took complete census of Gordon’s clean profile, strong
-jaw, deep chest, flat flanks; signs of a secret and healthy curiosity.
-
-“She’s a-setting up an’ taking notice.” He winked, as it were, at
-himself. “I reckon, Bull, you kin leave the rest to natur’.”
-
-
-XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT—IN SEVERAL WAYS
-=============================================
-
-“Well, what do you-all think of him?”
-
-Bull’s question emerged from the thick tobacco reek which invariably
-mitigated the severity of their evening deliberations.
-
-It pertained, of course, to the new recruit, concerning whose merits or
-demerits Jake and Sliver had reserved judgment during this, his first
-week. When they had come from supper straight to the bunk-house, Gordon
-had taken his pipe and gone for a stroll around the compound, which was
-never more interesting than when clothed in the mystery of a hot brown
-dusk. The lights and fires, like golden or scarlet blossoms; the soft
-brown faces glimpsed in cavernous interiors by the rich glow of a
-*brasero*; the women’s subdued chatter; laughter wild and musical as the
-cooing of wood-pigeons—all had for him perpetual fascination; and while
-he sauntered here and there, looking, listening, the Three held session
-on his case.
-
-“What do we think of him?” Jake slowly repeated the question. “It’s a
-bit soon to jedge, but if he’s half as good as he looks, he orter do.”
-
-Sliver, however, was more critical. “Too darned nice-looking fer me. I
-hain’t got much use for these pretty boys.”
-
-“*Pretty* yourself!” Bull swelled like a huge toad with indignation. “He
-ain’t no pretty boy! You-all orter ha’ seen him clan up that hotel lobby
-in El Paso.”
-
-“A *ho*-tel clerk, an’ some bell-hops!” Sliver sneered. “Why, a good
-cowman ’u’d jest about as soon think of hitting a lady. ’Fore I allow
-him even a look-in with Lady-girl, he’s gotter show me. If you-all ain’t
-afraid he’ll spoil, jest send him an’ me out together to-morrow.”
-
-“All right, señor, he’s your meat.” Bull’s grin, provoked by a sudden
-memory of the thwack with which the hotel clerk had hit the lobby floor,
-was veiled by tobacco reek that reigned beyond the lamp’s golden
-glimmer. “Only, don’t chew him. Kain’t afford to have his scenery
-damaged.”
-
-“Nary a chew,” Sliver agreed. “Twon’t be necessary. I’ll take him in two
-swallows.”
-
-In this wise was Gordon apprenticed to Sliver for the period of one day,
-to learn, in course thereof, such lessons in cow and other kinds of
-punching as it might bring forth. When they two rode out, armed
-cap-a-pie as it were, with rifles, saddle *machetes*, and a brace of
-Colt automatics, in addition to the usual cowman’s fixings, it is
-doubtful whether North America held a happier young man than he. Out of
-the thousand and one lovers who had awakened to the knowledge that this
-was their wedding-day, some might have been equally happy. But none more
-so, for Gordon was also espoused—to Adventure, the sweetest bride of
-real men. It may be safely stated that no bride ever surveyed her
-trousseau with more satisfaction than Gordon displayed in his “chaps,”
-spurs, guns, and *riata*.
-
-This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He
-wasn’t in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the
-point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted
-himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction
-that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting,
-park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman’s lope. In fact, so
-quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the
-course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with
-thoughts of Lee.
-
-“’Twon’t do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her,” he told
-himself. “He’s gotter show me, an’ if he don’t—out he goes.”
-
-Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse,
-on Gordon’s part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with
-brutal roughness.
-
-“Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride
-the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you’ll
-have to try an’ look like a man.”
-
-Gordon stared. It wasn’t so much the words as the accent that
-established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes
-were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown
-specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden
-disappointment when he rode on.
-
-“*Santa Maria Marrissima Me!*” He swore to himself in sudden alarm. “Is
-he a-going to swallow it?” But the next moment brought relief. Gordon
-was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine.
-
-With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the
-wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. “Calculated it would
-get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He’s putting it up to me!”
-
-Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel,
-there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he
-began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of
-riding. “Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank—”
-
-The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him
-out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped
-down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy
-chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear.
-
-A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in
-two words, “Poor McNab!” Sliver was almost as terse in describing his
-defeat to Bull and Jake that evening.
-
-“Gentlemen, hush! He leaned over as I took my holt, grabbed me round the
-waist from behind, straightened, an’ away I flew over his shoulder an’
-kem down spread-eagled all over the grass, plumb knocked out.”
-
-Returning to the combat: When Sliver gathered his shocked wits together
-and sat up, Gordon stood looking down upon him, hands on his hips,
-quiet, determined, yet with an inquisitive twinkle in his eye.
-
-Sliver answered the twinkle. “Say, that was sure a lallapaloo. I’ve
-wrestled with bears an’ once choked a cougar till he was gol-darned
-anxious to quit. But I draw the line at earthquakes. If you-all ’ll
-please to tell how you done it, I’ll shake han’s an’ call it squar’.”
-
-“Done!” Gordon broke out in a merry laugh. “And I’ll promise, on my
-part, never to ride like that again.”
-
-“For which I’ll be greatly obliged; that hippity-haw, side-racking gait
-does sure get on my nerves.”
-
-Striking hands upon it, they mounted and rode on.
-
-They were heading for a mountain valley, enormous green bowl hemmed in
-on all sides, that could only be reached by a single rough trail.
-Watered by a running stream and knee-deep in lush grass, the difficulty
-of approach and sequestration rendered it almost raider-proof. But as it
-afforded pasture for barely a third of Lee’s stock, it was their habit
-to send the animals out in relays to remain under charge of an *anciano*
-for a week at a time.
-
-As they rode along, Sliver’s secret satisfaction revealed itself in many
-a stealthy glance. At first they expressed that feeling alone, but
-presently there entered into them a leaven of doubt. Their way now led
-along the foot of the hog’s back from the crest of which Sliver had
-obtained his first view of the *fonda* on the other side, the discovery
-of which caused his first lapse from grace. The slight doubt was
-explained by the thought that accompanied his glance upward at the
-ridge.
-
-“He’s a fine upstan’ing lad an’ kin take his own part. But that ain’t
-all. Supposing he drinks? We-all jest kedn’t stan’ for any young soak
-around Lady-girl.”
-
-In view of his own shortcomings, his grave shake of the head was rather
-comical. Nevertheless, it was quite sincere; likewise his emendation:
-“’Course we wouldn’t have him no canting prig. He orter be able to take
-his two fingers like a gentleman, then leave it alone.”
-
-Reining in suddenly, he asked, “D’you ever take a drink?”
-
-Gordon looked surprised. “Why, yes, on occasion. But you don’t mean to
-say—”
-
-“Come on!” Sliver’s manner was quite that of the “mysterious stranger”
-of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to
-befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, “It’s a
-fine chance to try him out,” cloaked certain strong spirituous desires.
-
-Quarter of an hour’s heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks
-brought them out in the *fonda* dooryard. From above Gordon had noted
-its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His
-eyes now went, first to the two *ancianos*, a wrinkled old man and
-woman, who dozed in the shade of the *ramada*; then to the girl who
-knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders.
-Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a
-mule-train going up the cañon added the last touch, vividly raised in
-his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker
-colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of
-their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With
-unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window,
-and set out a bottle of *tequila*.
-
-Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have
-been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide
-and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When
-their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he
-missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words.
-
-“She wants to know who you are an’ all about you,” he translated her
-rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played
-as large a part as her tongue. “She says her father an’ mother are about
-ready to cash in. If you’ll stay here an’ be her man, you’ll stan’ right
-in line for the *fonda*.”
-
-It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. “Cash in?—the *fonda*? Say!
-You’re fooling?”
-
-Sliver raised his right hand. “Take my oath!”
-
-“Then *she’s* fooling.”
-
-“Nary!” Sliver grinned. “She’s serious as a New England housewife in
-chase of a bedbug.”
-
-Now Gordon’s merry laugh rang out. “Is this leap year, or does this sort
-of thing go all the time down here? Her proposal calls for a priest, I
-suppose, and a marriage license?”
-
-“Nary.” Sliver grinned again. “Ladies of her class get along very nicely
-without them artificial aids to marriage. All she wants is for you to
-settle down here with her to housekeeping.”
-
-“Why—but—” He still half believed that Sliver was joking; but, looking
-at the girl, he saw for himself the smoldering flame in her dusky eyes.
-This time his laugh was a little confused. “Please tell her that I’m
-dreadfully sorry, that I appreciate the high compliment, and if it
-wasn’t for the fact that I don’t expect to stay long in this country I
-would give her nice offer my most distinguished consideration.”
-
-Any further doubts that he might have entertained would have been
-effectually dispersed by her dark disappointment when Sliver translated.
-A touch of pity mingled with his amusement; moved him to add, “I hope
-that you put it nicely.”
-
-“Sure,” Sliver breezily answered. “I told her that you said for her to
-go to hell.”
-
-“Oh, well”—Gordon recovered his breath again—“at least that puts the
-whole business beyond further doubt.”
-
-“Don’t you believe it.” Sliver gave a third and last grin. “She says
-that you-all kin always find her here if you happen to change your
-mind.”
-
-“Now that’s very nice.” Really pleased under his amusement, Gordon
-brought the little comedy to a graceful end. Unsnapping the leather
-watch-fob that bore his initials worked in gold, he laid it in the
-girl’s hand. “A fellow doesn’t get a proposal of marriage every day.
-Tell her for a little remembrance.”
-
-“And now for another drink.”
-
-But as Sliver reached for the bottle Gordon seized his arm, and any
-doubts as to his sobriety were removed then and there from the cowman’s
-mind. “You’ve had two already, and I’m not going to stand by and see you
-burn your stomach out. Come on, gol darn you! or I’ll hand you one.”
-
-His smiling good humor removed the offense. Nevertheless, the curious
-brown specks were floating again in the blue of his eye.
-
-Sliver knew the threat was real. “Just this one?”
-
-“Well, if you’ll down it quick and come on.”
-
-With feelings that had hovered between gratification at Gordon’s
-sobriety and regret for his own, Sliver drank, bade the girl “Adios,”
-and mounted again. Standing in the doorway, her glance followed them,
-enwrapping Gordon’s upright figure with its dark caress. Just as they
-crossed the stream at the foot of the path, her face lit with sudden
-remembrance. Turning at her call they saw her coming at a breathless
-run.
-
-“Kain’t bear the parting,” Sliver interpreted the action.
-
-But his grin faded as he listened to her voluble talk. “She says that
-four strange Mexicans stayed here last night. They didn’t belong to this
-country, an’ they questioned her closely about the different haciendas.
-They were ’specially curious about our horses. Us being gringos an’ her
-Mex, they naturally concluded she’d be ag’in us, and they would have
-been right but for the fancy she’s taken to you. So they opened right
-up; asked all about the mountain pastures an’ whether we kep’ a close
-guard. She says they was heading for there. While I go after ’em, you
-ride like the mill tails o’ hell an’ bring out Bull an’ Jake.”
-
-That crude but strong expression accurately described Gordon’s progress
-homeward. While his beast scrambled like a cat up one side of the
-ravine, slid like a four-footed avalanche down the other, and streaked
-like a shooting star up and down the long earth rolls, he learned more
-of horsemanship than during all his previous years. Lee, who saw him
-coming from the upper gallery above the *patio*, nodded her approval.
-Such haste, of course, had but one interpretation—raiders; and by the
-time Gordon dashed into the compound she was already mounted and a fresh
-beast waiting for him.
-
-“They are up in the Cañon del Norte,” she answered his inquiry for Bull
-and Jake. “Come on!”
-
-“You are surely not thinking of—”
-
-Before he could finish, however, she shot under the gate arch; was off
-at a speed that kept him galloping his hardest to keep her in sight. Not
-until she slowed down on the rough trail that led into the cañon, within
-sight of Bull and Jake, who had just roped a foal for branding, did he
-catch her. But it was just as well, for that which he would have said
-came with more authority from the lips of Bull.
-
-“All right, Missy. There’s on’y four, so you don’t need to be skeered.
-You kin go right back home with Gordon an’ leave us to take keer of
-them.”
-
-“Indeed I won’t!” she exclaimed, hotly. “I’m going, too! I am! I am!”
-She cut off his remonstrance. “I am! I am! *I am!*”
-
-It was the first time their wills had clashed. Bull glanced at Jake, who
-shook his head—not that he required support or intended to waste time in
-fruitless argument. “You mean that?” His glance, grave with stern
-disapproval, came back to Lee.
-
-It hurt her. But though her lips quivered, she answered, doggedly: “I
-do! I *won’t* go back.”
-
-“Very well. We’ve no time to waste. Ride on while I cut this foal
-loose.” But as she obeyed, with one flick of the wrist he roped her
-above the elbows from behind. Then, in spite of angry protests that
-ended in tears, he cinched her little feet from stirrup to stirrup.
-
-“Now take her home.” Handing the lead rope to Gordon, he leaped into the
-saddle and galloped after Jake.
-
-Till they disappeared, Lee looked after, wavering between anger and
-tears. Tears won. Bowing her fair head, she wept unreservedly for fully
-a minute. Realizing then that she was gaining nothing but swollen eyes
-and a red nose, she stopped crying and turned to Gordon with a little
-laugh.
-
-“Isn’t this ridiculous? Please untie me.”
-
-But now she found herself gazing into the sullen face of a young man
-who, through her, had been cut out of a real fight. He shook his head.
-
-“You *won’t*?”
-
-“No.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“You’d go after them.”
-
-They looked at each other. Her eyes were now gleaming brightly above two
-red spots; but he met their gaze with stubborn obstinacy.
-
-“You mean to say that you are going to take me home tied up like a veal
-calf?”
-
-He nodded.
-
-Biting her lips, she looked at him again. “Do you realize, sir, that you
-never set eyes on me till a week ago?”
-
-“Sure!”
-
-“Also that you are my hired man?”
-
-He nodded again.
-
-“Very well, you’re fired! Now untie this rope, then get off my land!”
-
-But even this was turned against her. “I don’t have to. I’m no longer
-your servant. I’ll get off your land, yes—after I’ve delivered you at
-your home.”
-
-If looks could kill, to use that hackneyed but still expressive term, he
-would have died there and then. But they don’t, and, masking his own
-disappointment with a hypocritically cheerful whistle, he turned his
-beast and rode down the cañon, towing her behind.
-
-It was dreadfully humiliating, and, being a girl, she cried some
-more—this time for sheer anger. But soon her tears dried and she fell
-into deep musing. Soon a small smile restored its softness to her mouth.
-Her voice, seductively pleasant, mingled with the tramp of hoofs. “Won’t
-you *please* untie me? The rope is hurting my arms.”
-
-He stopped, pulled her horse up alongside, and as he began to fumble
-with the ropes she turned her head so that he could not see her smile.
-It was transmuted into a flash of fury when, finding the rope a little
-loose, he drew it tighter.
-
-“I thought you were a gentleman!” she shot it viciously at his back as
-he rode on. “Gentlemen don’t tie up ladies!”
-
-“Ladies don’t fire men for obeying orders. You needn’t think I’m
-enjoying this. Just because you shoved in where you were not wanted, I
-have to go back.”
-
-She did not like that, either. What girl would? Once more she bit her
-lip, yet, for all her anger, a touch of respect mingled with her
-resentment. Concerned principally with his own disappointment, he rode
-on without looking back and so missed the little persistent wriggles by
-which she gradually freed one hand. Soon she was able, by leaning
-forward, to reach and draw her saddle *machete*. Indeed, she worked with
-such caution that he got his first warning when, with one slash, she cut
-the rope between them. By the time he had swung his beast around she was
-going like the wind back up the cañon.
-
-Her mocking laughter came floating back.
-
-
-XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS *VS.* MEXICAN RAIDERS
-=============================================
-
-Shoving rapidly into the mountains, Sliver ascended with the trail in a
-couple of hours through upland growth of *piñon* and juniper to the
-height of land, a pass riven by earthquake or subsidence between twin
-jagged peaks, from where he overlooked the valley pasture.
-
-Like a great jade bowl, bisected by the silver line of a stream, its
-wide green circle, miles in diameter, lay within a broad ring of purple
-chaparral. Over its surface black dots were scurrying toward the corrals
-at the northern end, and under Sliver’s glass these resolved into horses
-that were being rounded up by four Mexicans; for he could see their
-peaked *sombreros*, tight *charro* suits, even at that distance. Turning
-the glass on the *jacal*, a rude hut of poles and grass thatch near the
-corrals, he looked for Pedro, the *anciano*.
-
-“Poor old chap! they’ve sure got his goat.” While clucking his
-commiseration, however, he shifted the glass to a patch of white on a
-near-by tree, and it immediately resolved into the old fellow’s blouse
-and *calzones*. “No, they’ve just tied him up. Then these ain’t no
-Colorados. It’s Felicia’s gang, all right, all right.” He added,
-chuckling, “Four nice little raiders in a pretty trap, along comes Jake
-and Bull, then there was none.”
-
-And trapped they were. Except where the stream slipped out over a
-precipice between two narrow walls, the mountains rose sheer around the
-Bowl, unscalable save where the trail rose by precarious zigzags to
-where Sliver held the pass a thousand feet above. At few places was it
-possible for two horsemen to ride abreast. At that point there was
-barely room for one; if necessary, he could have held it, alone, against
-a score. But it was not. Watching closely, he saw the raiders first
-drive the horses into the corrals, then settle down for a *siesta* in
-the shade of the *jacal*.
-
-“Going to bring ’em up at sundown,” he muttered, “in time to make the
-first run by night.”
-
-So certain he was of it that he did not scruple to take a sleep himself;
-cat-napped, with occasional squints down into the valley up to the
-moment that he was awakened by the hoof-beats of Jake and Bull’s beasts.
-The glass then showed the raiders working the horses out of the corrals.
-As the herd thinned out to single file at the trail, one man took the
-lead; a second and third fell in at even distances; the last brought up
-the rear.
-
-“They know their business,” Bull commented on the manœuver. “It’s easier
-to keep ’em moving.” He grimly added: “And easier for us. The line will
-string out for a quarter-mile, so I’ll go down that distance an’ hide in
-the chaparral. Let the last man pass me before you hold up the first.
-Then, while one of you keeps him covered, t’other can take away his
-tools. I’ll keep ’em moving on up till you’ve got the other three.”
-
-While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By
-that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and,
-peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow
-black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear,
-above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another.
-Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see
-the leader’s face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral
-Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. Somewhere,
-though he could not place it, he had seen the man before! He was still
-puzzling over it when Jake’s command rang out in Spanish:
-
-“Hands up!”
-
-The leader looked and complied, persuaded by the black muzzles, wicked
-eyes, that looked down from the rock above. The second and third men did
-try to turn, but were blocked by the file of animals. An attempt to pass
-would have sent them down, bounding from level to level to the floor of
-the valley below. The fourth man swung his beast around only to find
-himself looking into Bull’s rifle. So while Jake covered the operation
-from above and Bull from below, Sliver disarmed and bound the raiders.
-
-After the captives were arranged in line under a *copal* tree upon a
-little plateau, where the trail began to fall downhill on the other
-side, Bull stood frowning down from his height on the man whose face had
-aroused that haunting memory. “I’ve a hunch that I’ve seen this chap
-afore.”
-
-He would have been more certain of it had he noticed the fellow’s look
-of recognition and fear only a moment before. But now his ugly
-countenance was veiled in that ox-like stolidity which a Mexican *peon*
-can so easily assume. He shook his head in dull negation to all of
-Bull’s questions. He did not come from any of the neighboring
-*haciendas*! They had never met before! His *pais* was far—it might have
-been anywhere in a thousand-mile circle implied by the wave of his hand.
-
-“Yet I could swear to him.” Bull looked musingly at Sliver.
-“Pock-marked, too. Where have I seen him afore?”
-
-Sliver shook his head. “Can’t prove it be me. All *peones* look like so
-many peas in a pod; some mebbe a bit uglier than others; an’ pock-marks
-ain’t no distinction with two-thirds of ’em pitted like a
-nutmeg-grater.”
-
-“That ain’t the question before the house, neither,” Jake put in. “All
-I’m bothering about is whether to hang or shoot ’em. Hanging is what I
-was brought up to, but shooting’s more fashionable down here. I’d allow
-they’d likely prefer it.”
-
-“Shooting’s too good for ’em.” In a spasm of virtuous indignation,
-Sliver shook his fist at the captives. “Hanging’s slower an’ hurts a
-heap, an’ if it gets about that the gent that meddles with our stock is
-in for a slow, choking they ain’t a-going to be near so careless.”
-
-“There’s something in that,” Jake conceded. “An’ this copal’s got nice
-stout limbs. We kin use their own riatas, an’ that’ll be what the
-Tombstone editor used to call ‘poetic justice.’ Hanging goes.”
-
-Bull was still staring at the raider, but, taking his consent for
-granted, they proceeded to fit the *riatas* around the prisoners’ necks.
-Jake had, indeed, thrown the slack of the last over a bough when there
-came a rattle of stones and scrape of hoofs on the trail below. Grabbing
-his rifle, he slid with Bull and Sliver, each behind a tree. One second
-thereafter their guns were trained on the spot where the trail debouched
-on the plateau.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Meanwhile, with Gordon in pursuit, Lee had led the race into the hills.
-Her blood mare was the fleetest animal she owned and, had she chosen,
-Gordon would have soon dropped out of sight. But she contented herself
-with just holding a lead.
-
-Unaware of this, Gordon made repeated attempts to catch her with sudden
-bursts of speed. Perfectly aware of it, on her part, she would wait till
-his horse’s head almost touched her leg, then shoot ahead with a little
-laugh. Her face, looking back at him, was hard as her laugh—eyes bright
-and shining, nose contemptuously tilted, mouth one scarlet line.
-
-To be defied, drawn on, mocked, and teased with low, derisive laughter
-is not a situation that any man loves. But if thoroughly angry, mad
-clear to the bone, Gordon’s face revealed only dogged hope. For Chance
-was riding with him. If Lee’s beast slipped or tired. If she were a
-second late with the spur. One of the three was fairly certain, and the
-belief set a gleam in his eyes that caused her a quiver of apprehension.
-
-“Oh, he’s mad enough to beat me!” she told it to herself. “I wonder if
-he would.”
-
-Nevertheless, every time she looked back at that dogged face she felt a
-sense of security. With raiders at large, it was just as well to have
-him around! The thought was in her mind when, with him only a few feet
-behind, she shot over the edge of the last steep out upon the plateau.
-
-“Oh, my *goodness*!” It burst from her in sudden fright.
-
-The Three, of course, were out of sight. The natural droop of the
-*copal’s* outer branches hid the halters, and she saw only the four
-raiders, unevenly grouped, and three rifle-barrels aimed from behind the
-tree. As she reined her beast back on its haunches Gordon swung his
-animal sideways between her and the raiders, and, quite shamelessly, she
-accepted the protection.
-
-“Beat it quick!”
-
-Already he had pulled his gun, and but for the fact that Bull just then
-stepped out in the open the question of hanging or shooting would have
-been decided for at least one of the thieves. As it was, his readiness
-served one purpose—reduced the heat in Bull’s eyes.
-
-“Put up your gun, Son, the job’s done.” Pointing at Lee, he sternly
-inquired, “But what’s *she* doing here?”
-
-Now fright, plus Gordon’s chivalrous behavior, had driven the last
-vestige of anger out of Lee. She spoke before he could answer. “Don’t
-blame him. He did his best to take me in.”
-
-“Then who shall I blame?”
-
-“Me!” The coals of her anger sent forth a last flash that was
-immediately quenched by her mischievous smile. “Or blame yourself for
-leaving me the machete. I wiggled and wiggled till one hand was free,
-then cut the rope.”
-
-Combined with the smile, her little illustrative wriggle completed his
-rout. He turned to hide a grin, but was betrayed by his shaking
-shoulders. Noting it, she flashed with feminine quickness from defendant
-to accuser. She pointed at the halters.
-
-“*What are you going to do?*”
-
-Sliver and Jake had now come out. The former answered, “We was jest
-about to bump ’em off, Miss.”
-
-“What? *Hang* them?”
-
-“Now look a-here, Lady-girl!” Sliver burst forth in indignant
-remonstrance. “Didn’t we catch ’em red-handed? An’ d’you allow we’re
-a-going to let ’em loose to try again?”
-
-“But *hang* them? Just for stealing? Of course, if they were Colorados,
-but—” She stopped, clasping her hands in sudden fear. “Oh! they killed
-him—poor Pedro?”
-
-“Nary; jes’ tied him up,” Sliver quickly reassured her. “I seen him
-wiggling through the glass, an’ the big thief, there, says they didn’t
-harm him.”
-
-Sighing with sudden relief, she returned to the charge. “Then if they
-spared *him*, why are you going to kill *them*?”
-
-“Look a-here, Missy,” Bull now intervened. “’Twas agreed between Benson
-an’ all the hacendados to make an example of captured raiders. If you
-once start letting ’em off, there won’t be a head of stock left in all
-this country at the end of a year. That was why I wanted you to go back,
-an’—”
-
-“I’m glad that I didn’t.”
-
-Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian
-stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in
-their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not
-preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is
-universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the
-pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish.
-
-They were poor *hombres* with families back in their *pais* reduced to
-the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they
-would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted
-to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For
-themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there
-would be an end! But their women? And the little *niñas*? These would be
-left in continual suffering!
-
-Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep
-instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she
-began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women.
-Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been
-duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and
-so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing
-into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing.
-Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and
-reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they
-related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces,
-leaving them soft and human.
-
-Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk *jacales* with their
-brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands
-for their men’s return; their small, nude children playing in the hot
-dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great *vaquero*,
-roping chickens and cats with a string *riata*, then dragging them,
-captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by
-the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It
-was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow.
-
-“This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They
-were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us
-might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would
-you feel?”
-
-“*Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!*”
-She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the
-prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at
-Sliver, who looked away.
-
-A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and
-beyond the pleasant span of to-day’s existence the old rustler life of
-yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was
-now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely.
-But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of
-each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las
-Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they
-looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish
-grins.
-
-“Under the same circumstances,” Bull answered, slowly and truthfully,
-“*we-all ’u’d expect to hang*. But if you feel different”—his glance
-interrogated Sliver and Jake—“it goes as you say. On’y, if you let ’em
-go, we’ll have to run ’em out of the country in fairness to the other
-haciendas.”
-
-“Of course.” Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. “We’ll take them home
-now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out.”
-
-This settled, and while Sliver rode on down into the valley to free the
-*anciano*, Bull and Jake cinched the thieves securely in their saddles.
-Then, driving them and the horses ahead, with Lee and Gordon following,
-they started down the trail.
-
-Now the spectacle of four men trussed for hanging is not to be seen
-every day—let us say, on the streets of New York—and though Gordon had
-looked on with breathless interest, he could hardly believe that the
-business would have been carried to a conclusion.
-
-“Do you really think they would?”
-
-Lee looked at him in surprise. “Of course! You know Valles has issued
-orders for hacendados to shoot raiders on sight; that is”—she added it
-with a little sigh—“all but his own.”
-
-Her tone was so casual, he felt convicted of vast and unlimited
-greenness. But where, according to the lights under which he had been
-raised, he ought to have suffered a severe revulsion, he actually
-experienced a thrill. This juxtaposition of life and death, the violence
-and quickness with which events rang their changes, somehow stripped
-away the veils from the riddle of existence, reduced its complex terms
-to their basic factors. Here in the mountains, desert, plains, they were
-very simple—to eat well, sleep well, fight well, and die well, even as
-these thieves, comprised the whole duty of man. The thrill recorded his
-acceptance of the terms.
-
-While they were riding down and down the sun lowered its great crimson
-orb till it hung, transfixed, on a distant peak. The mountain steeps
-above, spurs, and ridges beneath, were washed in its dying crimson. Deep
-purple filled the hollows; faint violet clothed the distant plains. Over
-all a cloud-flecked sky spread its parti-colored glories. Mountain and
-plain, cañon and deep ravine, it was a scene infinitely wild, infinitely
-beautiful, and as he looked over it all Gordon took his breath in a deep
-sigh.
-
-“This is life! I hate to leave it.”
-
-“Leave it?” If Lee’s surprise was assumed, it was exceedingly well done.
-She went on, with a low laugh: “Oh, I see! Papa wins out. The prodigal
-will return to marry the beautiful heiress and live happy ever
-afterward.”
-
-“Who told you? Oh, Bull, of course. Now that comes of owning a blabbing
-tongue. Confound him! Well, since you want to know, I won’t. In my
-present mood, New York is the last place in the world I want to see.”
-
-“Then you have tired of us—*so* soon?”
-
-“Or you of me? You forget—*I’m* fired.”
-
-She noted the subtle accent, and equally subtle was her reply. “Why,
-yes, so you *were*.”
-
-Then, looking at each other, they both laughed.
-
-
-XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE—AND IS “DOGGED,” IN TURN, BY LEE
-============================================================
-
-Midnight saw the prisoners safely bestowed in a ’dobe that had served
-the old Spaniard, Carleton’s predecessor, for a jail. During the
-remainder of the night the Three stood guard in turn and Gordon, who
-relieved Sliver at daybreak, was still at the door when Lee came out of
-her bedroom on the upper gallery.
-
-Goodness knows she was pretty enough in her man’s riding-togs, but now a
-flowing kimono added the softness and mystery a man loves best in a
-woman. As she moved forward to the rail and stretched, looking off and
-away to the mountains, the loose sleeves fell away and Gordon obtained a
-distracting glimpse of polished arms, small white teeth, in a round red
-mouth, all set in the blazing gold of her hair. Seeing him, she cut off
-the yawn and smiled.
-
-“You must be dreadfully hungry.” Her clear call floated across the
-compound. “Come to breakfast. I’ll send Miguel to keep watch.”
-
-She was already seated at the table under the *portales* when he came
-in, and as he took his seat Maria, the smaller of the two house
-*criadas*, reported the Three as being still lost in sleep.
-
-“The poor fellows!” Lee commented, distressfully. “They must be dead.
-Don’t awaken them.”
-
-Thus, after the crowding events of the previous day, which included a
-fist fight, proposal of marriage from one girl, wild chase after
-another, a bandit raid and lynching-party, all rendered more impressive
-by the dark ride through warm, mysterious night, Gordon now sat
-*tête-à-tête* with his pretty employer.
-
-The *patio*, with its arched *corredors*, cool as a grotto under
-flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the
-*arbol de fuego*; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a *criada* down
-on her knees rubbing *tortilla* paste on a stone *metate*; the soft
-stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these
-helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee’s
-small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and
-gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came
-still others.
-
-Two brown girls, who stood twisting their skirts in the gateway, moved
-forward at Lee’s word.
-
-“They wish to take my advice about following their lovers to the wars,”
-she summed for him their Spanish. “I explained the risks of hunting them
-among twenty thousand revolutionists, and advised them to wait till they
-came home. But they say that is too indefinite. They may be killed, and
-there is no one to marry them here but the *ancianos*, and they already
-have wives. So they are going—to join the rag and bobtail in the wake of
-the revolution.”
-
-After the next client, a wrinkled old woman, had followed the girls out,
-Lee burst out in merry laughter. “She was telling me of a miracle that
-occurred at the funeral of her brother, who worked for William Benson.
-It appears that he had only his dirty cotton calzones to be buried in,
-so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson. The poor old
-fellow had been reduced by sickness to a rack of bones, and you could
-have rolled him in it like a blanket. And here came the miracle! The
-weather, you know, was exceedingly hot last week, and instead of burying
-him at once they waited till some relatives from a distance had arrived.
-And when the coffin was opened for them to take a last look—lo! the
-miracle!
-
-“‘For Saint Joseph,’ she said, just now, ‘had wrought a most wonderful
-thing, señorita. Whereas Refugio had lain in the señor’s clothes like a
-nut in a withered shell, he was now so large and handsome they fitted
-him like his skin!’”
-
-He laughed so heartily she was drawn on to tell him more, and pleased
-herself thereby as much as him. For to be really happy, a girl must have
-exercise for her tongue, and with all their genuine devotion the Three
-offered but a limited field for conversation. Naturally laconic, their
-communications touched principally upon flocks and herds; and holding,
-as they did, the traditional frontier viewpoint concerning Mexicans—to
-wit, that they ranked in the scale of creation below the Gila
-monster—they shared neither her affection for, nor understanding of, her
-brown retainers.
-
-But Gordon, with his quick and reciprocal feeling, made an ideal
-listener. From the “miracle” she ran on with anecdotes and happenings,
-some quaint, others amusing, several tragic, that revealed with a
-vividness beyond the power of description the mixture of love and
-treachery, simplicity and savagery, ignorance and idealism, religious
-faith and gross superstition, that go into the making of a Mexican.
-While she talked and he listened, there was established a community of
-feeling which was destined to produce immediate results.
-
-“What is it, Maria?” Pausing, she looked up at the *criada* who had just
-carried the prisoners their breakfast.
-
-“They wish to speak to me,” she translated the girl’s answer, “alone.
-They say it is very important.”
-
-“Better let me go with you.” Gordon rose. “I can wait outside.”
-
-“Surely.” She accepted, at once, his offer, and when, moreover, he
-followed in after Miguel opened the prison door, she offered no
-objection.
-
-Neither did the raiders—for reasons that quickly developed. “It matters
-not, señorita.” The man whose face had caused Bull such disturbance
-shrugged his indifference when Lee explained that Gordon spoke no
-Spanish. “’Tis of the others, your servants, I would speak.”
-
-While crossing the compound she had puckered her smooth brow over the
-mystery—without gaining any inkling to break the force of the
-communication. While the fellow ran on, hands and shoulders helping out
-his torrential Spanish, Gordon saw her expression pass through surprise,
-incredulity, doubt, finally settle in deep concern, when, with emphasis
-that carried conviction, the other three testified to the truth of their
-fellow’s words.
-
-“I— Oh, do you know what they say?” Distressed, she turned to Gordon
-with blind instinct for help. “I really don’t know whether I ought to
-tell you. It so dreadfully, pitifully concerns our poor friends. You
-have been here such a short time, yet—I feel that you can be trusted.
-They say—”
-
-But the tale, as elaborated and filled in by Gordon’s cross-examination,
-is best summed. Not for nothing had been Bull’s “hunch.” The haunting
-face fitted the *charro* who had held their horses that day at the
-*jefe-politico’s* gate in Las Bocas. When the Three failed to return
-with Carleton’s horses, that astute person—the “wicked one” of
-yesterday’s talk—had sent out others. In return for the *señorita’s*
-great kindness in saving their lives—but principally, if the truth be
-known, because they feared to be sent out under convoy of Sliver and
-Jake—they wished to make grateful return by warning her against these
-evil ones; these wolves in sheep’s clothing that had slunk into her
-fold! Followed a recital of their border raids that lost nothing by
-reason of the details being filled in from imagination! They were
-terrible *hombres*! *Muy malo*! greatly desired by the *gringo* police
-for dreadful crimes!
-
-“Don’t you suppose they are lying?” Gordon suggested.
-
-She shook her head. “Their story is too literal. When a *peon* lies, he
-goes the limit. Some terrible tale of atrocious murder and torture would
-be the least; something beyond mere banditry, which is scarcely a crime
-in their eyes. Then it is corroborated by a lot of little things. You
-know they were riding my horses yesterday and were differently dressed,
-yet this man described their horses and clothing as he saw them in Las
-Bocas, just as they were the first day they came here. And do you
-remember how they looked at one another yesterday when I said that any
-of us might have done the same thing?”
-
-Gordon nodded. “They did look queer, and do you recall Bull’s answer?
-‘Under the same circumstances, we-all ’u’d expect to hang.’ He spoke so
-slowly, looking at the others, and they both nodded.”
-
-“Then see how they came here—started up, as it were, out of the ground.
-In Mexico one doesn’t ask strangers embarrassing questions. It would be
-like throwing stones at random in a city of glass. But if they stay with
-you, one generally learns something of their past. But theirs is wrapped
-in mystery. I know no more of them than on the day they came. It is
-probably true.”
-
-Her tone was quiet, indeed so casual in its acceptance of the fact that
-Gordon wondered. In El Paso he had been greatly impressed by the
-knight-errantry of the Three in espousing the cause of a lonely girl.
-During the last week he had seen for himself their simplicity of heart,
-rough kindliness, genuine devotion; and now this land of surprises had
-confounded him again with its juggler’s changes of good and evil. These
-kindly fellows were, after all, cattle-rustlers, but one remove from
-bandits.
-
-To him it was a most astonishing situation. In New York, where folks
-were sharply divided into the sheep and the goats, it would have been
-easily solved; one would have merely rung for the police. But here,
-where everything seemed to go by contraries, anything might happen.
-Accordingly, he looked at her and waited.
-
-But she did not answer his unspoken question. She was looking at him,
-yes, with wide, distressed eyes. But he felt, without understanding,
-that she was looking across that queer situation. He had a sudden, vivid
-suspicion that he was on trial in her mind instead of the Three. He was
-certain of it when she spoke.
-
-“What would *you* do?”
-
-Ten days ago he would undoubtedly have viewed the case under his
-previous lights and have pronounced it one for the police. Now he
-answered from the larger charity that belonged to the land: “You
-remember what you said yesterday and repeated a moment ago—under the
-same circumstances we might have done the same thing? It isn’t what they
-*were*; it’s what they *are* that counts.”
-
-“Oh, I *knew* you would say it!” She impulsively thrust out her hand,
-and as the small, firm fingers locked with his in a strong grip, he knew
-that not only had he emerged victorious, but also that his answer had
-established between them a real bond. Eyes shining, she ran on: “They
-saved my life, helped to nurse my father, have been so kind and good and
-dear! If they had been the vilest criminals it would make no difference
-to me. They are my people, my *men*!”
-
-“Of course they are!” Gordon cordially agreed. “Now what about these
-fellows? What will you tell them?”
-
-Doubt clouded her shining enthusiasm. “I don’t quite know. What do you
-think would be best?”
-
-“The truth. If what they say is true, and we believe it is, they can’t
-be bluffed. But it won’t do to have them believe you knew nothing of
-this. I’d hint that though you were not acquainted with the details, you
-were perfectly aware of your servants’ past, but that they are now
-leading honorable lives. Clinch it by adding that you hope they will do
-half as well with their chance.”
-
-“Fine!” Her face lit up again, and when, having put it all into Spanish
-for the thieves, they went outside, she thanked him for the counsel. “I
-knew you could help me. Now just one more thing—this is all between you
-and me. No one else must ever know—especially them.”
-
-“We’ll forget it ourselves.”
-
-Once more her small cool fingers locked with his, and, smiling brightly,
-she went back to the house, leaving him to resume his guard till the
-prisoners were taken away by Sliver and Jake.
-
-After they were gone there entered into Gordon’s mind a small doubt.
-Supposing the raiders talked? Spread their report of the Three through
-the desert country? It remained, that little doubt, like a thorn in the
-side till it was drawn by Sliver and Jake when they returned the
-following night.
-
-“We’d calc’lated to hand ’em over to the vaqueros at Hacienda El Reposo,
-an’ have them chase ’em beyond their bounds,” Jake explained. “But at
-the railroad we ran into a Valles colonel that was drumming up recruits.
-He grabbed ’em offen our hands that quick they hadn’t time to kick.”
-
-“By now,” Sliver added, “they’re three hundred miles south on their way
-to death an’ glory.”
-
-“But the little girl mustn’t know that,” Bull’s heavy bass rose in
-caution. “She was that sot on returning ’em to their women and children,
-it ’u’d half break her heart.”
-
-“Not a whisper,” the two agreed, but Sliver added, with a chuckle, “Alle
-same, they’ll stay put an’ trouble her no more.”
-
-Inwardly Gordon echoed it, “They’ll trouble *you* no more.”
-
-While the others were away Bull had also been doing some thinking, and
-after Gordon went out for his evening stroll through the compound he
-laid the results before them. “Say, I’ve placed that chap.”
-
-“Which chap?”
-
-“Fellow with the pock-marks. D’you remember the mozo that held our
-horses at Don Miguel’s gate?”
-
-“No-o-o—” Jake began, but with memory thus stimulated Sliver recalled
-him.
-
-“Julius Seize-her! you’re right!” As the possibilities of the late
-situation flashed upon him he gave a low whistle. “What an escape! We’ve
-had some close calls in our time, but none to beat it. ’Twas lucky he
-didn’t recognize us, for he’d sure have peached, an’ I wouldn’t have
-Lady-girl to know for a cold million.”
-
-“Nor me,” Jake added. “But it ain’t likely—now.”
-
-“Thank God for that!” Sliver exclaimed it with almost religious fervor.
-With deep thankfulness Bull repeated it in his mind.
-
-
-XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE
-===============================
-
-“Ain’t that queer?”
-
-The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank
-bench in front of their ’dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to
-smoke in the house, they preferred it there—partly through a rooted
-instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the
-natural enemy of “Lady Nicotine,” regarding her always as a formidable
-rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the
-compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver’s remark broke
-the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who
-sat in the doorway of a ’dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of
-three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile.
-
-“Ain’t what queer?” Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through
-the warm air. “There’s so many queer things down here I’ll have to ask
-you to come again.”
-
-Sliver nodded at Gordon. “Ain’t it odd how he cottons to them little
-Mexes? To me they’re no more’ n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat
-up night afore last with a sick one?”
-
-“No-o-o-o!” Jake’s surprise knew no bounds.
-
-“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat
-there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he
-did.”
-
-“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the
-country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown
-b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n
-ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl
-likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good
-daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s
-what they’re all a-wanting.”
-
-“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at
-him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well
-raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But
-though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I
-ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make
-her sit up an’ take notice!”
-
-Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly—friendly as a brace
-of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling,
-evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like
-clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing
-an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as
-you say—there’s nothing doing.”
-
-Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his
-disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration.
-“Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As,
-rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added:
-“I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while
-I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that
-clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.”
-
-“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this
-month—once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was
-rumored raiders had been seen around her *rancho*; now beca’se he wants
-advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you
-think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’—”
-
-“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I
-uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as
-did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there
-ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the
-table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean,
-sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and
-left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old
-hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d
-try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But
-I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m
-talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my
-fingers is itching to get into a game.”
-
-“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood.
-“I’ll soon be due for a night at the *fonda*.” He added, with comical
-pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish
-Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so
-when I’m through.”
-
-“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted
-to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to
-the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull—”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his
-first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s *rancho*. The low sun
-filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid
-gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red
-masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on
-Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited
-altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe
-wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his
-musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack
-till a voice broke the golden silence.
-
-“It will pay you, señor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the
-eyes out of you with perfect ease.”
-
-As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in
-outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight,
-emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing
-it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile
-warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull’s question.
-
-“Si, the señora is there. Ride on, señor. I shall watch here for a
-little while.”
-
-Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull’s knee, the widow explained
-the apparition. “That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He’s very
-faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times
-in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used
-to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on
-his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning,
-almost shot to pieces. After I’d nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got
-his pardon from Diaz on condition that he’d stay with us and behave.
-That’s over ten years ago. He’s been with us ever since, and that old
-bandit reputation of his has been our best protection.”
-
-“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bull made hearty comment. “It takes a bad man to
-scare a bad man. I’ll feel easier for knowing this.”
-
-The widow had already dismissed Terrubio’s woman, who served as her
-*criada*, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull’s
-supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and
-constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her
-skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled.
-Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of
-the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at
-last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch
-him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business,
-though he introduced it then.
-
-“Two months he’s been here, ma’am,” he concluded his tale of woe, “an’
-nary a thing doing.”
-
-“Why, what did you expect?” Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter
-and Betty joined her childish merriment. “Did you think it would happen
-in the first five minutes? Now just consider—what good would she ever
-have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at
-first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out
-at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a
-lasting love. It’s good that he isn’t impressionable, for he’ll go down
-all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn’t have liked Lee to fall
-in love with him at once. But she isn’t that easy kind. The man that
-gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they
-act?”
-
-Bull gave the diagnosis—they appeared to like each other! Were very
-friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn’t think of anything
-else!
-
-The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst
-out laughing. “Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men
-are! That isn’t much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she
-him, accidental, as it were?”
-
-Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the
-stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the
-question. “Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t’other day.
-It lashed out an’ upset them an’ for a minute they was that balled up
-you kedn’t tell t’other from which. Didn’t seem a bit anxious to let go,
-either.”
-
-“That’s favorable,” the widow nodded thoughtfully. “Looking at it from a
-distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It’s the
-life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow.
-They’ll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up
-like a wind, then—up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles
-since Mr. Nevil came?”
-
-“A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an’ Ramon
-was gone afore we kem in.”
-
-“It’s a pity he hadn’t been there. He’d feel the same about as we do,
-and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t try to cut Ramon out. Let me see.”
-She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up.
-“I know! I’m having a birthday next week. I’ll make a little party and
-invite Ramon and Lee. You’ll see to it that Gordon brings her here?”
-
-“But then Bull won’t be able to come,” Betty’s small voice piped,
-indignantly. “And you told me only yesterday that you weren’t going to
-ask any one but him.”
-
-Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. “So I did, dear, and I’d
-rather have him. But when Lee’s happiness is at stake we’ll have to give
-up our own pleasure. And you mustn’t call him that. ’Tisn’t respectful.
-Say Mr. Perrin.”
-
-“But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could—didn’t you, Bull? There,
-you see!” Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with further
-revelations. “Mother will be thirty-sev—” when the widow clapped her
-hand over the small, traitorous mouth.
-
-She broke into a little, conscious laugh. “I know it’s silly. But was
-there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won’t
-acknowledge to a day over thirty.”
-
-“And you look five years younger than that, ma’am,” Bull gallantly
-replied.
-
-He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus
-consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks,
-warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic,
-electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains,
-forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or
-flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids
-and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more
-personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations.
-
-In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to
-sleep in Bull’s arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the
-soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not
-of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he
-dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment:
-
-“’Tain’t for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own
-hand.”
-
-He repeated it next morning, looking back on the *rancho* from the last
-rise. “No, Son, ’tain’t for you.”
-
-At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his
-distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might
-have read denial of his thought in both the child’s words and the
-widow’s reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of
-his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade
-longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty’s words
-with a sudden squeeze.
-
-“Mother, I just know he’s falling in love with you. Wouldn’t it be nice
-if he asked—”
-
-
-XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT—
-============================================
-
-The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow’s birthday. Not that
-there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season,
-the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua—altogether too brightly for
-a white man’s comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses
-into the shade of the ’dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in
-the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was
-initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of “cat’s cradle” with a
-loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house.
-
-At the sight of the two heads bent over the “cradle,” the girl’s face
-lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity.
-“Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?”
-
-“Is this she?” Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. “I had
-just about made up my mind to adopt her myself.”
-
-“Let me see—” Lee’s smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. “She’s
-about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been
-born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I
-cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night.
-Oh, you needn’t blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was
-loud in your praises. ‘Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio’s sick babe all
-night. What a husband for some happy señorita!’”
-
-“That was very nice of Maria.” He laughed. “Only, I’m afraid there’s
-nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow
-up—somehow I lose interest.”
-
-It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected
-far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines
-that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself
-for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled.
-The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then
-by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the
-parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe
-housekeeping around the corner.
-
-“Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the señorita,” came a voice,
-gruff with masculine authority. “Only we be married.”
-
-“But will they be married, Pancho?” piped a softer treble.
-
-“Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old ’Lupe
-talking at the well. ‘Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman
-with never a duenna to her name? ’Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood
-runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot,
-this may not end without marriage.’ This is what old ’Lupe said to thy
-mother.”
-
-Rich color swept from the roots of Lee’s hair down to her neck. She
-hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part;
-then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky
-sentences, she regained her composure.
-
-“Woman!” “Don Gor-r-r-don” was speaking again. “What is this—the
-tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of
-the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? ’Tis sour as swill, fit
-only for swine.”
-
-“Then it should suit thee very well,” came the softer voice, with
-unexpected spirit.
-
-“A-r-r-r-h!” It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which
-Don Gor-r-r-don’s father resented household rebellions. “Thou wouldst
-answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!”
-
-Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don
-Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the
-house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon.
-
-“Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you,” she teased him. “They
-were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he
-handed Dolores one on the mouth.”
-
-He laughed. “The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the
-proper relation of the sexes.”
-
-This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again
-and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the
-saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased
-surprise.
-
-Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value
-these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician—the widow, for
-instance—would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they
-rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long
-earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead,
-her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a
-curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite
-frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little
-gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed
-nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled—and
-mishandled—man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the
-wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private
-chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded
-being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends.
-
-He “lost interest in them after they grew up.” Indeed! Why, the
-freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic
-beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all
-the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were
-nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of
-her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature’s
-cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet,
-he did not know it. The “fire and tow” still lacked a “wind.”
-
-They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell’s
-*rancho* to the widow’s; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. “It
-is rougher,” she said, “with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both
-shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded
-cañon past a country *fonda*. There I’ll show you the prettiest Mexican
-girl in all Chihuahua.”
-
-“At the *fonda*? Then I have seen her.”
-
-Her quick look said quite plainly, “Oh, *you have*?”
-
-“Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should
-say!” He added, laughing, “She made me a very nice proposal of marriage,
-adding the *fonda* as an extra inducement.”
-
-Her expression now said, “Oh, she *did*?” But as she looked away, he
-failed to see it, got only her words, “And you had the heart to refuse?”
-
-“Sad to relate.”
-
-“And you haven’t even been to see her again?”
-
-“No time.”
-
-She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet,
-as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that
-expressed—perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and
-reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman
-is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up
-the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy
-watch as they approached the *fonda*.
-
-“There’s your beauty—attired like a bride for her groom.”
-
-Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an *olla*
-of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a
-handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from
-under the *olla*, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy
-mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and
-shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe
-bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty
-picture overmuch for his companion’s taste.
-
-His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, “Perhaps she hasn’t
-lost hope?”
-
-She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious.
-While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with
-seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient
-because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came
-hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that
-followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl
-reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s fob
-dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads.
-
-At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under
-pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette,
-she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s
-monogram in gold.
-
-“Ah, *ha*! señor!”
-
-Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under
-it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was
-it the widow’s “wind” fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least
-when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze
-following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness.
-Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke:
-
-“I am yours!”
-
-After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling
-after Gordon’s up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag
-staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question.
-
-
-XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK
-=======================================
-
-When they rode in to the *rancho* that afternoon, the “wind”—that is,
-Ramon—had not yet “blown in”; so there were no complications to
-interfere with the widow’s first attempts at diagnosis of the “case.”
-She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and
-Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the
-pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her
-across to the veranda.
-
-“Promising,” she inwardly commented.
-
-A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered
-temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and
-white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow’s
-bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:
-
-“Ramon is coming.”
-
-“Yes? Isabel too?”
-
-An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills’s belief that the indifference
-was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. “No, it was quite
-accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along
-their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and
-show me to-day.”
-
-“Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy.”
-
-She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. “Never
-missed a dab. William Benson’s a fool—though, of course, she may have
-changed her mind.” This she proceeded to find out. “Your new man seems
-nice?”
-
-“He is.” Followed a long description of Gordon’s night vigil with the
-child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, “But—”
-
-“But what?”
-
-“He’s been going to see Felicia at the *fonda*. Sliver took him there,
-one day, and he says that he has never been again. But—she’s wearing his
-watch-fob in her bosom— Yes, yes! I know! A *peona* will beg the shoes off
-any man’s feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But—”
-
-Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously
-made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in *peonas*’ bosoms, will
-bear watching. “Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is
-very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn’t he
-twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh—”
-
-She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly
-subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little
-smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.
-
-Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. “Oh, wouldn’t that be
-just too lovely! Is it—settled?”
-
-The widow, of course, shook her head.
-
-“But it will be.”
-
-“How do you know?” She was quite willing to be convinced.
-
-“How do I know?” The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of
-powder. “Just as if it depended on *him*. Just as if any woman—who
-hasn’t a harelip—can’t marry any man she wants.”
-
-Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a “case,” Mrs.
-Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so
-self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an
-honest person, she owned up with a hug.
-
-Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom
-dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to
-an equally keen if less discreet examination.
-
-Betty’s major premise agreed marvelously with Lee’s and was stated with
-the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the
-subject from different distances and points of view. “I like you—only
-not so well as Bull. You’re nicer-looking, but—” A long pause emphasized
-more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways.
-“I’m going to marry him when I grow up—that is, if mother doesn’t beat
-me to it!”
-
-“Any danger of that?” Gordon laughed.
-
-“You bet there is. Bull’s dead in love with her, and she—of course, she
-doesn’t admit it, but *I know*.”
-
-“Well, well, isn’t that fine!” Gordon really meant it. “Congratulations,
-I suppose, are not yet in order.”
-
-“I should say *not*!” Betty’s blue eyes widened with horror. “Don’t you
-*dare*! I’m not too big, yet, to be spanked”—she wriggled,
-reminiscently—“and when mother’s real mad she goes the limit.
-Nevertheless, it’s true.” After a second calculating survey, she
-concluded, “But if she grabs Bull, I *might* marry you.”
-
-“If you only will,” he pleaded, “I’ll be *so-o* good! Can’t we consider
-ourselves engaged?”
-
-After a moment’s thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. “No, I’m
-afraid not.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“Because.”
-
-“Because doesn’t answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why.”
-
-“Because I’d only be disappointed again.” She added, with a little sigh:
-“All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You’ll fall
-in love with Lee.”
-
-“*I?* With *Lee*?” His real surprise showed how little that contingency
-had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of
-apprehension colored his accent. “Now how do you figure that?”
-
-“Because you’d be a fool if you didn’t.”
-
-The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. “But—but, you
-know, I am only her hired man?”
-
-“That wouldn’t count—if she liked you.” After another examination: “And
-she might do worse. *Gee!* if I were only a man!”
-
-“Yes?” he prompted. “If you were a man?”
-
-“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d—”
-
-But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her
-mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue.
-Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with
-plentiful food for thought.
-
-During the last two months he had seen Lee—riding the range, a pretty
-lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in
-her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a
-girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the
-sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it
-with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there
-something wrong with his head?
-
-Presently he gained an inkling—he had been wearing another’s colors! She
-whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of
-this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view.
-Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering
-surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons;
-deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland
-rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet—these and a
-thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain.
-Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail!
-
-He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were
-really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful
-things! Come to think of it—Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest!
-He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant
-tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the
-gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the
-upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding
-her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall
-dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the
-course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the
-earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not
-belong.
-
-Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary
-effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly
-dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of
-his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the *corredor* swung
-in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh,
-stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!
-
-It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the
-feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but
-actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a
-billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings
-under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the
-dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure
-rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps,
-that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which,
-without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.
-
-“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing
-clothes!”
-
-“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.”
-
-Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of
-course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary,
-badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under
-all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she
-reacted to it—though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who
-had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam
-still sparkled in her eye.
-
-“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind.
-
-She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.”
-
-“Oh! I’m *so* glad to see you!”
-
-With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the
-*corredor*, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then,
-giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel,
-aunts, cousins—goodness knows! the category might have embraced every
-one of his *peones* if she had not been warned by the deepening of the
-young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go.
-
-“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You
-are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.”
-
-“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she
-managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr.
-Nevil, our latest acquisition.”
-
-“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent
-further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.
-
-On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two
-men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner,
-was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever
-with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His
-great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced
-*sombrero*; the *charro* suit of soft leather that so finely displayed
-his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle—made such a
-figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.
-
-Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just
-as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they
-settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from
-Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in
-course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point
-of view.
-
-“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the
-outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise,
-without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our
-troubles ourselves—because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not
-try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside—but that we
-should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your
-throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living
-on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and
-nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like
-careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in
-order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth,
-señor”—he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug—“we should
-fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’—as your
-political speakers would say—to cut one another’s throats and run off
-with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years.
-We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have
-done our best to make up the arrears.”
-
-So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think
-your father must be a bit of a cynic.”
-
-“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In
-your schools—I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your
-big military academies—you teach that every American boy has a chance to
-be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your
-one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine
-million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no
-chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the
-belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill
-all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the
-throats of those who come between us and again what your political
-speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many
-millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to
-result.
-
-“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is
-right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between
-our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time
-comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute
-ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of
-children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no
-principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your
-warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to
-our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that
-is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces
-our *peones* live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and
-drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their
-bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least
-desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your
-system.”
-
-“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the
-fire’?”
-
-For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application
-of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?”
-
-“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange
-ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the
-foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested
-billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective
-countries, you can never turn them out.”
-
-Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set
-back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its
-ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a
-detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.
-
-“Why did we do it? *We* did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo
-de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have
-built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But
-after him—Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his
-cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them
-out—now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed
-Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time—we
-shall fight.”
-
-From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let
-alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee
-returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In
-fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she
-addressed him half an hour later.
-
-“We are going for a little walk. You may come—if you choose.”
-
-He didn’t *choose*! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off
-alongside the *charro* suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face
-displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common
-to two creatures under the sun—to wit, a bull being played with the
-*capa* by a skilful *matador* and a man under torture by a woman.
-
-When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here
-the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with
-him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had
-first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of
-a—well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet
-under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a
-respectable blaze.
-
-If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their
-relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight,
-Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned
-almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the
-going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted
-shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases.
-In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions,
-at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he
-started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her
-well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part,
-threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out.
-But never for a moment was she deceived.
-
-“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the
-situation.
-
-With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at
-the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer;
-also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.
-
-A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her
-inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction
-not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into
-her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the
-door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented,
-thereby, from a correct judgment of results.
-
-“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I
-wonder who will score to-morrow?”
-
-It was Lee.
-
-“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast.
-“You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.”
-
-There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode
-away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note
-that contained—at least so she said—the recipe for a liniment Terrubio
-used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.
-
-Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the
-curtains. “That’s downright cruelty,” she scolded.
-
-“Well?” Lee shrugged. “Didn’t he say, yesterday morning, that he didn’t
-take any interest in girls after they grew up?”
-
-“But he does.”
-
-Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little
-laugh, “I know it.”
-
-Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure—that is,
-they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the
-path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. “Oh, he’s going back
-by the *fonda*!”
-
-“Ah-ha!” the widow mused. “Now we shall see.”
-
-She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee
-routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.
-
-
-XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY
-================================
-
-In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.
-
-A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode
-into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary
-with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and
-flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their
-heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t
-give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the
-pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.
-
-The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden
-impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty
-ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let
-go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!”
-
-Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on—madder
-than ever. Also—but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed
-to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw the
-*fonda* lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly
-reckless state.
-
-Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been
-in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love,
-plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit
-them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so
-caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the
-number shall never be told!
-
-In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed
-up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget
-it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the *fonda’s* liquors less
-than to her.
-
-A *peona’s* life gravitates between her grinding at the *metate* and
-laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between.
-Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was
-making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on
-the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down
-from above.
-
-From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around
-a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the
-satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl
-would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat
-out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile,
-led his horse in under the shady *ramada*, then proceeded calmly with
-her toilet.
-
-Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the
-dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and
-arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked!
-eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that
-would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start
-out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.
-
-The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands,
-golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was
-exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and
-flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a
-girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery.
-Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of
-his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he
-looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and
-shoulders.
-
-Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the
-cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled
-two *copas* of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him
-in Spanish.
-
-“Salud y pesitos, señor!” (Health and a little money!)
-
-In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the
-contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a *peso*
-note—even after he had filled and drunk again.
-
-A *peona* refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had
-he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was
-not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his
-years. But being absolutely ignorant of *peona* nature, and in fine
-fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and
-chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.
-
-When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a
-*diccionario* with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the
-personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had
-repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But
-now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped
-herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.
-
-To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and
-burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so
-delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the
-“long-haired *diccionario*” was in constant use. While her father and
-mother dozed under the *ramada* he consulted it about the scenery and
-natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But
-when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer
-objects—fingers, eyes, hair—the lesson passed the boundaries of
-etymology into the domain of love.
-
-He was well over that border before he realized it—how far he did not
-guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” the
-*diccionario* answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action
-to illustrate it.
-
-
-XIX: A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES
-============================
-
-If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the
-cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling
-like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a
-binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in
-that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both
-the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the
-“wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation—especially if the
-party of the second part be of Latin blood—is apt to be disaster. Lee
-was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up
-and pressed down, last night’s consequences.
-
-With a girl’s keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and
-had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon,
-that would have appeared ridiculous—besides, though she would not have
-admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that *dreadful*
-girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself
-for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had
-ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited
-chatter—Ramon’s family, *hacienda* affairs, the scenery—while she dodged
-like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing this
-were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? Would
-she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say,
-herself, what her answer might have been! But she *did* know that she
-would have let him speak.
-
-If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride—bolstered by irritation,
-for with a woman’s illogic she charged her present plight to him—her
-pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her
-from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort
-great as a physical strain.
-
-But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the
-mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And
-their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to
-check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently
-leaped over and swept all before it.
-
-A remark of hers concerning his father’s age precipitated the flood.
-“Si, he has many years.” Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran
-on: “Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he
-but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on”—he paused,
-then added the *tu* of lovers—“on *thee*. If—”
-
-“Oh, Ramon!” she pleaded, in wild distress. “*Please*—don’t!”
-
-But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English,
-but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his
-love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of
-spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert—all
-were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his
-universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him,
-it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have
-listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now—it filled her
-with dismay.
-
-“Oh, you poor Ramon!” She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but
-when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. “Oh no!
-*no!* Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played—”
-
-But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the
-moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. “There is no hurry. I did not
-intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou
-hast always known it.”
-
-“Oh yes.” Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. “Yes, but—” Then
-realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the
-compromise. “No, I won’t answer now. Wait.”
-
-“If there be any one else—” His brow drew down over somber, threatening
-eyes.
-
-“Oh, there isn’t!” She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she
-repeated again. “There *isn’t*, Ramon!”
-
-“Bueno!” His face cleared. “Then I am content.”
-
-Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of
-imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think.
-
-Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved
-on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between
-remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately
-refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the cañon,
-curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension.
-Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the
-zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate.
-
-Their first view of the *fonda* showed, of course, only the roof and
-walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon’s horse
-tied to a post of the *ramada*, then the young man himself leaning at
-ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of
-the “long-haired *diccionario*,” which was now being consulted in the
-matter of hair and eyes.
-
-“The señor seems to be enjoying himself.”
-
-His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not
-see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue,
-she watched from across the stream the girl’s head go up and meet
-Gordon’s in a kiss.
-
-For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest.
-The chrome-yellow walls of the *fonda*, toned under the eaves by Time’s
-green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a
-greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed
-brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which
-knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of
-it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have
-carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an
-audience—in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of a
-deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just sat
-her beast.
-
-In taking the last turn, Ramon’s horse dislodged a pebble, and as it
-rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl’s
-clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon’s glance of startled
-inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet.
-
-“My God, she saw it!”
-
-Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change
-wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had
-assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls.
-Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole
-world had gone to smithereens!
-
-“Competition is the life of love!” Mrs. Mills might have added—sometimes
-its death. The “wind” had blown with a vengeance—from opposite ways.
-Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon shivered. Though
-only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and joined Ramon in
-front of the *fonda*, it seemed to both a deathless age.
-
-After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink,
-and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the
-girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee
-stiffened and looked at Gordon.
-
-“I am glad that we overtook you. Señor Icarza has asked me to marry him.
-You shall be first to congratulate us.”
-
-Gordon’s glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then—the
-tricks fancy plays us! *Fonda* and ravine faded into a glade in a Java
-forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a
-golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without
-recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice.
-
-“I wish you all happiness!”
-
-The crash of Lee’s glass as she threw it among the stones brought him
-back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the cañon.
-
-Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder.
-
-Gordon’s practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He
-spoke very quietly. “We’d better catch her before she breaks her neck.”
-
-
-XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED
-============================
-
-Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden
-more recklessly.
-
-Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in
-successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast
-launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on
-full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks
-that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed
-by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon and out upon the
-plain.
-
-Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on
-and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught
-of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from
-her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she
-slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon’s,
-to catch up.
-
-Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he
-had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. “Little
-Wicked One!” he called, coming up. “Have a care for my happiness if not
-for your neck!” But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly
-engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded
-from his own. “Why, queridita? What—”
-
-“I want you to leave me now.” She cut him abruptly off.
-
-His big eyes widened. “After raising me to heaven would you plunge me
-in—”
-
-“Ah no, no!” She impulsively thrust out her hand. “You have earned far
-more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But—”
-
-“Si? But—”
-
-She gave him a little wan smile. “When you come to understand girls
-better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a
-thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the
-cause.”
-
-“But—”
-
-“Ramon,” she looked at him with sweet severity, “if I had told you on
-top of the mountain what I said back there—wouldn’t you have been
-content?”
-
-“Assuredly! It was only—”
-
-“Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now—and stay till I either send
-or come. It won’t be long—I promise.”
-
-“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!”
-
-Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his
-beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off
-to the north.
-
-His departure left her free to review the situation—with little
-satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out—in a moment of pique
-she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been,
-she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break
-it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.
-
-“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal;
-accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable
-*thing*, and now you’ll go through with it.”
-
-It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might
-be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with
-her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of
-comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice.
-She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal—the chief, if
-unconscious, cause of it all—was getting along; and though he was too
-far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting
-dejection.
-
-As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as—as she could have
-wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a
-personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests
-and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely
-places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would
-tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden
-aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening
-to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly
-and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her
-reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his
-rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.
-
-“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but—no
-greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated
-up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.”
-
-For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by
-open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a
-vagrant inclination—even if the latter were based on a sense of
-injury—might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance.
-Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across
-which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed
-their hopelessness.
-
-“Poor girl!” he pitied her.
-
-“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.
-
-Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of
-Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her
-heroic mood. “Our friends”—she nodded toward the distant buildings—“are
-quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to
-yourself.”
-
-He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.
-
-At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the *patio* gate, Lee did
-cheer up a little—partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt,
-more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave.
-Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the
-droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom.
-
-He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.”
-
-He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow’s recipe for
-“liniment,” after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the
-stable. It ran:
-
- “Dear Friend,—Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the *fonda* the
- other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. It made her so
- mad she flirted her head off with Ramon.” In her ignorance of later
- developments, she had concluded: “But there is no harm done. She likes
- Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the *fonda*, I am
- sure things will turn out all right.”
-
-Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own
-pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was
-something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the
-signature “Your friend, Mary Mills.” Gordon had almost finished caring
-for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after
-carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed,
-he fished for further information.
-
-“Any one else there?” he inquired, nonchalantly.
-
-“Young Mexican,” Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive
-curtness.
-
-“Ramon Icarza, I reckon.” Bull went innocently on: “He an’ Miss Lee were
-almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of
-him—”
-
-“No reason why she shouldn’t.”
-
-Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee’s horse to hide a
-chuckle. “Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary—” he paused, reddening,
-for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated
-it with lingering delight. “Mary—was right. We’ve sure stirred ’em up.
-On’y we’ll have to ’tend to Felicia at once.”
-
-His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia’s solution with the
-characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper
-that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake
-and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light.
-
-“You-all never orter ha’ taken him there,” he charged Sliver. “Here we
-go an’ import this young fellow at no end of trouble an’ expense, then
-you herd him right into the arms of another girl.”
-
-“Aw! she don’t count.” Sliver excused himself. “She’s Mex an’ wild
-girl.” He sagely added: “You see, I was that anxious to make sure he
-didn’t drink. We kain’t have no young soaks ’round Lady-girl.”
-
-His solicitude drew Jake’s satirical grin. “You wasn’t looking for a
-drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an’ wild—you damn fool,
-don’t you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He’s
-be’n there once an’ he’ll go again.”
-
-“If he ain’t stopped,” Bull qualified.
-
-“If he ain’t stopped,” Jake nodded. “An’ it’s up to you to do it.”
-
-“But how?” Sliver’s broad, round face struggled like a full moon in
-clouds of helplessness. “How in the ’tarnal kin *I* stop him?”
-
-“By ’quiring vested rights in the premises,” Jake nodded sagely. “If you
-marry her he kain’t come ’round.”
-
-“*Marry* her? *Me?* Marry a *Mex*?” Sliver almost yelled it.
-
-“That’s what.” While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf
-grin, Jake went on: “Anyhow, what’s your idee in shying an’ rearing
-this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss ’n a colt at flying paper? Why,
-other men rush for it like ’twas—”
-
-“Sticky fly-paper,” Sliver ungallantly supplied. “An’ once they’re
-in—*good night*!”
-
-But Jake ignored the interruption. “You-all orter take shame to
-yourself. Marriage is nature’s most holy an’ necessary ordinance. Don’t
-all the preachers tell it? An’ what would become of the census without
-it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an’
-thanking your stars that a girl can be found that’s damn fool enough to
-take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an’ howling like a hungry
-coyote.”
-
-While Jake thus orated, Sliver’s expression of obstinacy was leavened by
-fleeting hope. “If you b’lieve all that—what’s the matter with you
-marrying her yourself?”
-
-Jake’s thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. “I’ve no calling
-for it. You see I’m that soft by nat’er any woman could crush my tender
-feelings. But one glance at your brutal count’nance would tell even a
-blind man that your wife would be kep’ in her place. Besides—was it me
-that took Gordon up there?”
-
-“Quit your fooling,” Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of
-the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his
-cherished plan, he faced Sliver. “Yes or no—will you do it?”
-
-“No, I’m da—”
-
-“You won’t?” Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl,
-knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of
-corn fodder on which he was sitting. “You upset the beans we put to
-b’ile an’ refuse to pick ’em up?”
-
-Almost as quickly Sliver’s knife took the lantern gleam, and as they
-circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months
-dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against
-man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before
-they could close, Bull’s bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great
-hands sent them staggering back.
-
-“Cut it out! We can’t stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee.”
-Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the
-law. “You an’ us have ridden an’ fit together for many a year. So far
-you’ve never failed us an’ I don’t believe you will. We brought this
-young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an’ you’ve
-sp’iled our game by throwing him in Felicia’s way. Now it’s up to you.
-If you make good—we go on. If you don’t—there’s the trail.”
-
-He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked
-only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife,
-though, Sliver glared at Jake.
-
-“I’ll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the
-range.” Addressing Bull, he went on: “Of course if it’s to help
-Lady-girl, you bet I’ll go the limit. But what d’you-all expect? That
-I’m a-going to cinch her with a priest an’ license?”
-
-“That’d be more loving-like; she’d appreciate it, too.”
-
-“Shut up, Jake! We don’t care so long as you acquire enough title to
-shoo Gordon off. Here’s fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio ’u’d
-sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of
-course you’ll have to live out there for a whiles—mebbe till this Ramon
-business is knocked out of Miss Lee’s head.”
-
-“What! An’ cut out the range?” Sliver exclaimed in horror. “Me hang
-around there a-selling aguardiente to *peones*?”
-
-“What’s left after you get through,” Jake began, but was cut off again.
-
-“No, we can arrange the work so there’ll be plenty for you within easy
-riding.”
-
-“So’s you won’t be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn’t
-stan’ for that.”
-
-Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver’s answer transcends print.
-He wound up with the complaint: “All right, I’ll go, but I see my
-finish. I’ll die on Felicia’s grub.”
-
-“Couldn’t be any worse than Rosa’s,” Jake comforted. “You managed to
-live on that.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next
-morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his
-kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these
-preliminaries, Sliver’s mien was rather that of chief mourner at a
-funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left
-him he even advanced a belated plea.
-
-“Don’t you allow we ked get some one else?”
-
-“With all the men in the country off at the wars?” Bull shook his head.
-“Besides, no *peon* could hold her down. She needs a strong hand.”
-
-“It’s either you or Gordon,” Jake added. “You’ll have to sacrifice.”
-
-Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind
-the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee.
-“’Tain’t going to be so dreadful easy,” Bull frowned thoughtfully, “she
-being a girl and prejudiced. She’d hardly cotton to sech primitive
-nupt’als as Sliver is likely to consummate.”
-
-“I she’d think not!” Jake looked his horror and scorn. “You’ll make a
-mess of it. Better leave it to me.”
-
-Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on
-the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact
-at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret
-love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won,
-ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for
-feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved
-how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the
-former’s service.
-
-“No, Missy, you ain’t a-going to lose him,” Bull answered, on his part,
-Lee’s troubled question. “He’ll take care of things over that way.”
-
-“Well—” Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, “I hope he’ll be—happy.”
-Then becoming conscious of Gordon’s gaze, she dropped her glance to her
-plate. But not before he had read its meaning.
-
-“Why hadn’t this happened a week ago!”
-
-
-XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE
-============================
-
-Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on
-wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor?
-
-Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and
-misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee’s flesh
-during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy.
-
-Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman’s life is her feelings, and
-if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a
-certain mournful satisfaction—akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the
-ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent
-springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion
-and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally
-masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon
-perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him
-in a quiet, sisterly manner.
-
-A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between
-desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of
-which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has
-to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine
-precedent, returning for Lee’s sisterly solicitude more than the average
-brotherly brusqueness.
-
-Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings
-of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable.
-Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with
-neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place
-her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon.
-What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it.
-
-Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a *mozo*
-rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon.
-
-Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, “May I
-come?” and though she returned a single line, “I’m coming to see Isabel
-next week,” the flower had done its work.
-
-The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination
-and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her
-eyes that, without understanding, Gordon’s sulks gave place to pity.
-Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a *mozo* with a note to the
-widow.
-
-Straight to the point the epistle ran:
-
- Dear Ma’am,—The young man, he’s a-moping like a moulting chicken an’
- Miss Lee’s that peaked and pale and down-hearted you’d hardly know
- her. T’other day a *mozo* brought her some sort of a package from
- Ramon, and ever since she’s looked wild-eyed and scared as a canary in
- fear of a cat. There’s something queer going on. It wouldn’t take you
- more’n a minute to find it out, and you owe us about a dozen visits,
- anyway. Couldn’t you take a day off and come?
-
-She came, of course, the good, kind soul, with Betty, under guard of
-Terrubio and the bandit reputation which gained so much from his weird
-eyes. The gods and goddesses willed it that they fell in with Gordon
-returning to the *hacienda* at the close of his day’s work, and the
-widow seized the opportunity like a skilful general. After permitting
-Betty and Terrubio to ride on beyond earshot over the slopes that were
-dyed a glowing apricot by the low sun, she opened on Gordon.
-
-“Now tell me all about it, young man.”
-
-He looked at her, surprised, then laughed. “You mean all that I would
-have said if I hadn’t been ordered home that morning? All right. Of
-course I don’t have to tell you that I love you madly, and if it wasn’t
-for the fact that Bull would wring my neck, I should propose at once.
-Really—”
-
-“Nice boy!” She laughed merrily. “To comfort your poor mother. It was
-simply disgraceful the way you flirted with me, almost compromised me
-with my own offspring. ‘I was just ashamed of your dreadful behavior,
-mama,’ Betty told me, afterward, ‘trying to take poor Lee’s beau from
-her.’ Nevertheless, I found it very encouraging.”
-
-“My mother?” He achieved an excellent example of that species of
-cachinnation known as the “horse laugh.” Then, with sincerity of accent
-and feeling that caused her a little blush, he ran on: “My mother,
-madam, is more than twenty-eight. Yes, I said twenty-eight. Add to that
-eyes as clear and young as—”
-
-“Make it Lee’s.”
-
-“As Betty’s. A fine, soft skin, pretty nose, figure—um! just right.
-Why—”
-
-“Yes! yes!” She held up her hand, laughing. “But we mustn’t waste time.
-You know I’m on your side. Tell me—what happened?”
-
-“That’s easy—she’s engaged herself to Ramon.”
-
-“What?” Her shriek of horror and surprise caused Betty and Terrubio to
-look back. Her next question showed the keenness of her intuition. “Why,
-whatever did *you* do to her?”
-
-He told—of his anger, jealousy, pique, attempt to soothe his ruffled
-vanity by flirting with Felicia. He told all with candor and humorous
-insight into his own feelings that robbed the narrative of conceit. He
-told even of the kiss and that Lee had seen it. “Though I don’t see how
-that could have anything to do with her engagement, for she announced it
-the next second.”
-
-“She sent him off within the next hour—with only a kiss of her
-hand—hasn’t seen him since—nor communicated with him till the other
-day—has looked like a frightened bird ever since.” She told off the
-items with amused contempt. “How stupid men are! Why, it is plain as
-day. He asked her to marry him, yes, on the way. How could she escape
-after the way she had flirted? But she had either refused or held him
-off. But when she saw you kiss—”
-
-“My God!” It burst on him. “What a fool I am! Why did I—”
-
-“Don’t blame, yourself. She was more in fault. The question is—not what
-is done, but what to do.”
-
-“I had thought, at first, of quitting this to join Valles. It would be
-lots of fun and I was so darned mad—”
-
-“And leave *her* to *him*?” She looked a little scornful. “Why—”
-
-But he cut in. “You bet I won’t! He’ll never marry her—if I have to
-carry her off.”
-
-“And I’d help you do it,” she warmly declared. “At present Ramon is all
-right, and if you could put up, like preserves, so he’d keep, it
-wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, he’s all right—but, so are the young of any
-kind, a lamb or kid, little frog, tiny snake, and there’s nothing cuter
-in the whole world than a baby pig. But after it grows up—good Lord
-deliver us!
-
-“And it’s the same with Mexicans. They are the prettiest babies; nice
-young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too
-handsome to live just now. But after a while he’ll grow stout and lazy
-from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks
-like a scorched hide. Right now he’s so romantic he’d twang a guitar all
-night under Lee’s window. After a while she wouldn’t be able to sleep
-for his snores. Now he’d fly at her bidding. Later, she’d fly at his.
-She would live behind bars while she was young; go without love in her
-middle age, be tyrannized and bulldozed all the time.”
-
-“But do you think she would *really* do it?”
-
-“Indeed, yes! She’s highly idealistic, and was trained by her father in
-the old ideas. Now that she has given her word, it will take wild horses
-to pull her from it—or wild men.”
-
-After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above
-the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: “Now
-listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he’s sensitive as
-a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she’s
-promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance
-so much as strays in any one else’s direction, he’ll be ready to kill.
-It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will
-either break the engagement or give her cause. In other words, you must
-force him to play your hand.”
-
-She continued, with a little deprecatory laugh: “I know it’s a low-down
-trick, but it may stave off something worse. Before he would let Lee
-marry Ramon, I feel sure Mr. Perrin would kill him.”
-
-A mischievous grin broke up Gordon’s grimness. “So we are not altogether
-disinterested. We could never stand to see Bull get in bad.”
-
-She laughed softly, happily, looking away, and lapsed into silence which
-endured while they rode up and over the last slope that laid the
-*hacienda* at their feet.
-
-Its walls and courts, *patio*, painted adobes, lay, a small city of gold
-magnificently blazoned by the rich red brush of the setting sun. The
-glossy crests of the shading cottonwoods flamed a deep apricot under a
-sky that spread its glories of saffron, and cinnabar purple, and umber,
-down over the horizon. All about them the pastures laid an undulating
-carpet, violet in the hollows, crimson on the hills. From the stubby
-chimneys soft smoke pennons trailed away till lost in the smoldering
-dusk of the east. Up through the clear air came a soft cooing of woman
-voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild.
-
-The widow lowered her voice in harmony with the peace of it all. “It is
-a great prize.”
-
-He nodded. “It’s beautiful, but—I’d love her as much in rags.”
-
-Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from
-teasing. “Yet—a week ago you hardly gave her a thought.”
-
-He looked at her in naive wonder. “Isn’t it queer—how sudden it gets
-you?”
-
-She nodded. “That’s the beauty of it.”
-
-
-XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED
-============================
-
-As, in the seclusion of Lee’s bedroom that night, she and the widow sat
-side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making
-their night toilets, a “movie-man” would have given his head to
-reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair,
-filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these
-may be left where they belong—behind the secure guard of Lee’s oaken
-door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation.
-
-“So we’ve engaged ourself, have we?” As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went
-straight to the bat.
-
-“Why—” Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked
-her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. “Mary Mills!
-*whoever* told you?”
-
-“This and these would be enough.” The widow touched the girl’s pale
-cheeks and shadowed eyes. “But I caught your young man, coming in, and
-made him confess. So we got mad—because he kissed another girl, and took
-it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little fool!”
-
-Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the
-filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. “If it had been Phyllis
-or Phœbe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn’t have cared. But—a
-peona.”
-
-“Well, what of it?” Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the
-widow went confidently forward. “She’s mighty pretty.”
-
-“But a *peona*! And you know *her*.”
-
-“Yes, and I know *him*—better than you do. Now look here, my dear—”
-Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had
-profited by her married experience. “A man is a *man* and there’s no
-sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she
-excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a
-man—while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see
-beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to
-stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I’d have allowed
-you real reason. After thirty a man’s kisses mean something. But at
-Gordon’s age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity
-rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty
-girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his
-self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are
-mostly to blame. Why—”
-
-Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal
-applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. “*You*
-didn’t flirt with *him*, of course.”
-
-“Goodness, child! don’t bite me! I couldn’t see the poor boy crushed
-into the face of the earth. Now listen.” After detailing Gordon’s
-confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to
-solace in Felicia’s smiles, she concluded, “But you—after driving him to
-desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life.”
-
-“And you think that was the way of it? That he didn’t really *mean*
-anything?”
-
-“Didn’t he tell me so himself?”
-
-“Well—” she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly
-collapsed on the other’s warm shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad! I—I *hate*
-him!”
-
-The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. “Of
-course you do.” She gently fondled the fair head. “How much?”
-
-The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. “I hate him so much
-I—I could just *kill* any other girl that tried to take him!” With a
-wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder.
-
-“Well, they’ll try, all right.”
-
-The head rose again, startled eyes, big and brown, staring from the
-glass. “Do you—really think so?”
-
-“What do you expect—a nice boy like that to mope and pine for the rest
-of his life with ten million girls of marriageable age running loose in
-the United States? What brought him here, anyway—bolting to escape one
-girl’s noose. Take my advice and rope him quick.”
-
-“But I’m promised, now, to Ramon.”
-
-“Call it off.”
-
-“Oh no.” Sitting up straight, she shook her head. “I cannot ruin his
-life.”
-
-“Hum!” The widow coughed. “You cannot ruin his life? So you intend to
-bless it by devoting to his service affections that belong to another?
-Also to cut him off from the greatest thing in the world—the real love
-of some other woman? Ruin his life, indeed? Lee, I always credited you
-with a little sense.”
-
-“There is something in that.” She snatched at the hope. “The best thing
-is to tell him I don’t love him and leave it to him to decide.”
-
-“And he’ll do it, have no fear!” The widow tossed her head. “Ramon’s
-nice, but he cannot rise above his race, and you know very well there’s
-neither reason nor justice nor the instinct of fairness in it. Fancy a
-Mexican giving up a girl because she loves another! He’d resent even the
-suggestion, take his revenge after marriage.”
-
-The gleam of hope had died. She sighed. “I can try.”
-
-“Oh, you little fool!” In her irritation the widow bestowed a smart slap
-on the girl’s shoulder. But she spoiled the moral effect the next second
-by gathering her in her arms. “Don’t you know that up in the States
-girls take on a new beau every Saturday night and break the engagement
-the following Sunday?”
-
-But the precedent produced only a second envious sigh. “I wish *I* could
-do it. I guess I wasn’t brought up right.”
-
-“’Tisn’t training; it’s heredity. You’re your father over again; will go
-your own way. I wash my hands of you.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-That charitable process known as “washing one’s hands of anybody” was,
-however, the last thing Mrs. Mills was capable of. The assertion simply
-marked a change of plan which, rising early next morning, she
-inaugurated when she caught Bull on his way to the stables.
-
-Though he had sat next to her during the long pleasant evening that
-followed supper last night, the others’ presence had debarred private
-communications. Content to hear her voice running with Lee’s in happy
-chatter—so content, indeed, that he forgot for the time being the
-impending trouble—Bull had smoked furiously in the dusk till they
-retired to bed.
-
-He listened, now, in silence while the widow told of Lee’s engagement.
-But the sudden lowering of his black brows was far more dangerous than
-any threat. She laid her hand on his arm in sudden alarm.
-
-“Easy, my friend. Don’t be too quick. She isn’t married yet, and won’t
-be—if you leave it to me.”
-
-More powerful than the plea was her gentle pressure. Apart from certain
-accidental contacts, before mentioned, which had caused him such
-pleasurable embarrassment, it was the first time she had actually
-touched him. Big, burly, black giant that he was, he still trembled like
-a school-girl; trembled so violently that she felt it and dropped both
-her hand and her eyes. Transferring the embarrassment to herself, that
-helped him mightily. He was the first to break a confused but happy
-silence.
-
-“What do you want me to do?”
-
-“Nothing, just now, except to let Gordon ride with me a piece of the way
-home.”
-
-It was impossible to overlook his sudden disappointment. With
-characteristic frankness she did not wait for him to tell it. “I’d
-rather have you; there are so many things I want to consult you about.
-Dear me!” Her little vexed face was very comforting; it expressed such
-sincere feeling. “These young folks certainly do make one a lot of
-trouble. Betty wanted you *so* badly at my party—and so did I; but we
-just had to ask Gordon to help Lee out. But I’m going to settle this
-business right quick. And when it is all over—you will come and make us
-a real visit, won’t you?”
-
-Wouldn’t he? His nod and effulgent grin expressed happiness in the
-prospect beyond the powers of his slow tongue. Satisfied, she proceeded.
-
-“So let me have him this once. Lee is going to ride a few miles with us,
-and before she comes back—”
-
-But the matter of her communication is covered by her talk with Gordon,
-whom she caught coming out of the bunk-house five minutes later.
-
-“I argued with her half the night,” she told him, walking along at his
-side. “Goodness me, young man, you don’t know what you are up against!
-Such obstinacy! Lucky for you that it is balanced by a sweet temper and
-strong sense of justice. All I gained was her promise to beg off from
-Ramon. She plans to go over and see him some time this week, and if she
-does—well, with Isabel loving her to death, the old man tendering sage
-advice, and Ramon passionately pleading his cause, they’ll have her to
-the priest and married before she has time to think. She mustn’t go.”
-
-“But if she is so obstinate—” Gordon began.
-
-“I’ll take care of that. I shall call on Ramon on the way home and
-explain the true state of his lady’s heart. Of course he’ll raise Cain
-and probably damn me for a black-hearted liar, but I can stand it. The
-point is—he will come right over here. In the mean time you must get
-busy. A declaration in hand is worth two suspected, and though I’ve
-hinted very strongly that you are not altogether indifferent to her
-sweet self, it will make Ramon’s task ten times harder if she hears it
-from your lips. Now listen!”
-
-The rest was plot, dark and devious. Lee had promised to ride with her a
-few miles on the homeward journey, and Bull would detail him, Gordon,
-for her escort. Coming back, he would have all the time in the world.
-
-
-XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES
-===============================================
-
-As thus arranged, the program was carried out after breakfast. Very
-artfully Bull waited till the party was almost out of sight before he
-sent Gordon galloping after. Even then the plot was endangered when,
-turning at the sound of hoof-beats, Lee saw him coming. Her face clearly
-expressed her determination to send him back, but in the nick of time
-the widow spoke.
-
-“Oh, let him come! The poor fellow is suffering enough.”
-
-Lee’s nod and faint smile, riding on, revealed a queer mixture of
-happiness and apprehension, which was wiped out by amused astonishment
-when, just as Gordon came up, a lone figure hove in sight, coming from
-the opposite direction.
-
-“Why—it’s Sliver!”
-
-And Sliver it was—though difficult to recognize by reason of a complex
-embroidery of scratches, bumps, and bruises. His own broad grin broke
-through, however, when Lee inquired after his wife.
-
-“She was fine an’ dandy when I seen her last, which, was in the shank of
-the evening two nights ago.” Lovingly fingering a huge bump that
-occupied a central position in his altered scenery, he went into the
-intimate details of his matrimonial venture. “Till then it had all been
-lovely. She’d sorter cut up a bit, at first, me an her padre having
-fixed up the match without any of her ’sistance. But after I’d given her
-a fair larruping with a saddle strap, jest to show who wore the pants,
-as the saying goes, she come right into camp; snuggled in like a kitten.
-Sure, she behaved real domestic till Fernando, that hawk-nosed arriero
-from San Ramon, blew in with his mules two nights gone. I orter ’a’
-suspicioned him, he was that free in handing out drinks. But I
-didn’t—leastways not till Felicia laid me out with one whack of a
-cordwood stick from behind. The rest I got from the mirror an’ the padre
-when I woke next morning and found him doctoring my map. She an’
-Fernando had gone off together.”
-
-“She’s gone!” Lee gave a little hysterical laugh. “For good?”
-
-“An’ then some—they’re off to the wars.” Gently massaging the bump,
-Sliver added: “She’ll stay there if she’s wise. It’ll be a ’tarnation
-sight less risky than coming back. She was for cutting my throat, but
-neither the padre nor Fernando would stan’ for that, they being afraid
-of ‘The Black Devil’ an’ ‘The Python,’ which they call Bull an’ Jake.
-‘For I knew, señor, that they would follow us to the ends of the earth
-if any harm came to thee,’ the old fellow tol’. But they made her free
-of my map, an’, as you see, she done a good job.”
-
-“Oh, I’m so sorry! I must go back and care for your face.”
-
-With Lee’s exclamation the props trembled beneath the widow’s plot, but
-Sliver restored their stability. “It’s cheap at the price. Many’s the
-man up home that gets as bad or worse an’ is stuck, to boot, for
-lawyer’s fees an’ al’mony. Don’t you bother ’bout me, Lady-girl. All I
-need is a bit of salve, an’ Maria kin get me that.”
-
-As Sliver rode on, the widow looked at Lee, who returned her meaning
-glance. Neither looked at Gordon, who discreetly watched Betty. But the
-thought was the same in the minds of all three. “Thank goodness, she’s
-gone.”
-
-For a while Lee hesitated and debated whether, after all, she ought not
-to go back, and she reined in, startled, when a long howl presently
-drifted over the rise behind which Sliver had disappeared. A coyote, in
-its death agony, might have equaled the sound. But as, presently, the
-tortured notes resolved into the opening bars of “The Cowboy’s Lament,”
-she giggled and rode on for another five miles. Sliver was happy!
-
-While Lee was kissing Betty good-by the widow managed to pass a whisper
-to Gordon. “Now don’t let her escape! And remember—look out for Ramon
-to-morrow.”
-
-He nodded and, looking back from behind the crest of the next rise, she
-saw for herself how well he obeyed. Lee had made to get off at a gallop,
-but had reined in when he spoke, and now they were riding side by side,
-deep in earnest conversation.
-
-Nodding, the widow rode on, but stopped again for a last look while she
-could still see over the rise. She was practically invisible when Lee
-looked back, protesting, as Gordon grabbed her bridle and pulled her
-beast alongside. Her pointing finger said, quite plainly:
-
-“They will see!”
-
-The widow gasped, for with one swift reach he snatched Lee out of the
-saddle and set her before him.
-
-
-XXIV: UNDERSTANDING
-===================
-
-Had she heard the conversation which preceded that bold action, Mrs.
-Mills would have been still more impressed. Determination is the natural
-foe of diplomacy. Warned by one single, furtive glance that Lee intended
-to make off, Gordon plunged at one smash through her fence of reserve.
-
-“Do you intend to keep that engagement?”
-
-Coming from a young man whom one hated so vindictively that one could
-“just kill any other girl that tried to take him,” the question was well
-calculated to arrest attention. Neither was its force lessened by the
-fact that it was *his*, not *hers*—perish the thought!—outrageous
-conduct which had caused said engagement!
-
-The audacity of it caused her first to gasp, then draw rein and stare at
-him in utter surprise; finally to ride slowly on while preparing an
-answer that should not only wither him, there, in the saddle, but also
-hide the tumult of fright and pleasure in her own breast.
-
-Her glance said, “You certainly have got your gall with you!” But her
-answer was much more dignified, “By what right do you ask?”
-
-“The right of a man who loves you.”
-
-It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her
-affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient
-court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so
-conceded by one girl’s fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had
-been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural
-cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and
-men, she proceeded to deny it.
-
-“Yes?” she raised cool brows. “Judging by what I saw in the cañon—it
-must be recent.”
-
-She looked for him to wither, but—the fellow refused! He did not even
-flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness;
-sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn’t
-help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light
-subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness.
-
-“I thought so myself—but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful,
-picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you,
-but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn’t till you shot
-that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke—awoke to the fact that
-all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life
-and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear.”
-
-This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he
-built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played
-with the coils of her *riata*. As an oratorical effort, it could not
-compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon’s rhythmical
-Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant
-feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any
-honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by
-its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he
-finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel.
-
-“When—when did you find this out?”
-
-She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little
-hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her
-hunger for more.
-
-Be certain she got it—in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of
-poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had
-ridden over to the widow’s together that the sunlight proceeded from her
-hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of
-the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation.
-
-There was also some mention of the hair in connection with a certain
-Java forest, with passing reference to the Chinese Wall and a voyage he
-had intended to make up the great Asian rivers. Not having personal
-experience in their navigation, said references were rather vague, but
-her imagination abundantly supplied the requisite flora and fauna from
-magazine articles and pictures. Porcelain towers, orchids, giant palms;
-deep jungle temples; the crowded boat life of the Yangtse-Kiang, junks
-and sampans with their cargoes of saffron-faced, slant-eyed Celestials,
-men, women, and children—especially children—her imagination improved on
-the lovely dreams she had so cruelly disrupted. He concluded with that:
-
-“And you smashed it—all to smithereens.”
-
-For a while she rode in silence. Apprehension and fright had given place
-to sorrow that contended tumultuously with delight for possession of her
-soul. “I’m sorry,” she spoke at last. “*So* sorry, but—you provoked it.”
-
-“Why! How?”
-
-He was reminded, of course, that he “lost interest in girls after they
-grew up.” She added, a little vindictively, “And *you* didn’t flirt with
-Mrs. Mills?”
-
-“Only in self-defense. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,
-isn’t it?”
-
-But she denied this bit of ancient wisdom. “No, it isn’t! And—and you
-*kissed* that dreadful girl! I—oh, I could have *killed* you!”
-
-“Why?”
-
-She was looking at him now, and the compound of bright anger, pleading
-and defiance, regret, love, hope, and despair that alternately flashed
-and swam in the wet eyes gave sufficient answer. It was then he plucked
-her from the saddle; crushed her to him with force that squeezed out,
-for the moment, the anger, regret, despair, left only love and hope.
-
-Ensued the usual delirious moment when poor mortals conquer time and
-eternity, set at naught the black riddle of existence. Her face buried
-in his shoulder, his in her hair, they clung to each other while his
-horse moved slowly forward and hers went careering on over the next
-earth roll.
-
-Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were
-coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter;
-feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of
-them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue
-loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one
-another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that “cause”;
-committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither
-and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment
-over these sunlit plains.
-
-Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only
-of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to
-themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in
-an illumined dream.
-
-It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face,
-he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly
-recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand
-over his mouth.
-
-“You mustn’t.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“You forget—I am still engaged.”
-
-“Why—so you are!” Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted
-when he saw she was in earnest. “You surely don’t intend—”
-
-“No, indeed!” She read his thought. “I had believed, at first, that I
-ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon
-while—”
-
-“Say it.”
-
-“While I loved *you*.”
-
-For a girl who had just restated her engagement to another man, she
-behaved most disgracefully during a long silence that was broken only by
-the measured tread of the horse. Snuggling in closer, she re-entered
-that illumined dream, and made no attempt to check the kisses he
-showered on the soft palm of the restraining hand. It was, no doubt,
-some realization of her misbehavior that caused her to sit up,
-presently, and pull it away.
-
-“This won’t do. For the present we’ll have to behave like ordinary
-persons.”
-
-“But your horse is gone,” he protested when she gently put away his arm.
-“You can’t walk.”
-
-“No, but I can ride behind you in the Mexican fashion. Stop, while I
-change.”
-
-He would have preferred it as it was, but when, after mounting behind
-him, she slid her arm about his waist, he had to concede the Mexican
-habit its own delights. It was surely nice of her to allow him to cover
-her hand.
-
-“The young people,” she explained, “are not allowed to do this—only
-husbands and wives.”
-
-“Poor young people!” he pitied. “But, on the whole, quite right. It
-would never do to have them cavorting over the country like this; too
-much of a strain on the conventions. Indeed, I think we ought to conform
-ourselves at once.”
-
-“How?” Just as if she hadn’t known what he meant.
-
-“Let’s ride into San Carlos, get a license from the jefe and be married
-at once?”
-
-The bold proposal drew only a soft laugh. “To think that, up to a week
-ago, he didn’t even see me—except as part of the scenery. No, amigo,
-till to-morrow we are to be ordinary persons. Then I shall go and tell
-Ramon.”
-
-“And if he refuses?”
-
-“I shall break it myself.”
-
-It was in his mind to say that she could not go alone. But he remembered
-that Ramon would probably arrive at Los Arboles before she started. He
-turned again to the delightful present.
-
-“And after that?”
-
-A little pressure at his waist made answer.
-
-Reaching behind, he drew her other arm forward till her hands clasped in
-front, then squeezed his own elbows down tight over hers. Thus,
-oblivious once more of the toiling billions, revolutionists beyond the
-mountain’s loom, they rode forward again in that illumined dream, two
-foolish, happy souls at loose in the spheres.
-
-
-XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS
-======================
-
-In those days of raids and “requisitions,” the customary oversight of
-the herds on the Chihuahua *haciendas* had grown of necessity into a
-system of patrols. At Los Arboles not a day passed without Gordon and
-the Three describing a circle around the *hacienda*.
-
-Riding south after the others left, Bull had covered only a few miles
-before he spied a lone horseman topping a distant ridge. As the rider
-drew near the first indefinite outlines resolved into the square, hard
-figure of William Benson. Scarcely a week had passed without a visit
-from the Englishman. From the first he had accorded Bull the respect due
-to his quiet strength. Later, this had developed into a real liking
-which showed in the smile that wiped out, for the moment, his native
-harshness.
-
-“Heard the news? The Carranzistas have given Valles a lovely trimming.
-He didn’t stop running till he reached El Oro.”
-
-Bull’s black brows rose. “We’d allus allowed Valles could whip twice his
-weight in Carranzistas. So long as they keep on killing one another off,
-we sh’d worry.”
-
-Nodding, Benson went on. “Valles lost heavily in horses, and is looking
-for fresh mounts. One of his colonels came to my place yesterday and
-offered me a thousand pesos apiece for all I have.”
-
-“*Gold?*”
-
-Benson’s big mouth split in a sardonic grin. “Valles money, amigo,
-beautifully printed on butcher paper. He must have used up all the
-newspaper stocks in northern Mexico.”
-
-“And you sold?”
-
-“I’d cut their throats first. It may come to that, but just now I see a
-way—if not to pull even, at least to avoid complete loss. Between us we
-can pretty nearly equip Valles with fresh mounts. The beggar has
-gold—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in the El Paso banks, and
-my idea is for us, you representing Lee, to go down to El Oro and offer
-him all that we have for a low price in gold on condition that he permit
-us to drive our other stock across the line. If he accepts, we then go
-out of business till order is restored.”
-
-“Fine idea!” Bull added. “Could you let Mrs. Mills in on it? She was
-telling last night she didn’t know where to turn for living expenses.”
-
-Benson heartily agreed. “Only too glad!”
-
-“And when do you start?”
-
-“To-morrow night. There’s a freight going down.”
-
-“All right. Pity you hadn’t come earlier. Mrs. Mills left only a couple
-of hours ago. But I’ll ride over this afternoon, get her written
-authority, then meet you at the railroad.”
-
-Riding back to Los Arboles, they perfected their plans. They were,
-indeed, in sight of the buildings before Benson switched the
-conversation to Lee. Her oldest and stanchest friend, it was his right
-to know, and Bull told all, from his plotting with the widow down to the
-disastrous ending in the sudden engagement.
-
-“The little spitfire!” Benson grinned. “Hello! What’s that?”
-
-It was Lee’s horse galloping down a distant slope toward the *hacienda*.
-In that wild country a riderless beast generally bespoke tragedy.
-Without a word they galloped off in the direction from which the beast
-had come; rode at top speed until Benson, who had gained a lead,
-suddenly reined in.
-
-A bunch of chaparral intervened, at first, between Bull and the object
-at which the other was pointing. Then, rising in his stirrups, he saw
-Lee and Gordon on the one horse; at least in Bull’s sight it was a
-horse. In that of the lovers, horses, plains, *haciendas*, and other
-commonplaces of ordinary existence had vanished, leaving them
-unconscious of time and space, proceeding magically through the
-aforesaid illumined dream.
-
-Perhaps some touch of their feeling wirelessed across the intervening
-space, for Benson’s harshness melted, delight burst like sunlight
-through Bull’s truculence.
-
-“That’s too good to spoil,” Benson whispered. “Let them go by.”
-
-They had passed over the next ridge before Bull spoke. “I tol’ you Mrs.
-Mills could do it. She’s a right smart woman.”
-
-“A fine woman!” Benson echoed. “I don’t know what you are thinking
-about. Now if I were single——” He burst out laughing at Bull’s blush.
-Instantly it was drowned in brighter scarlet. But this faded as Bull
-noted the kindly twinkle in the other’s eye. He shook his head in
-deprecation.
-
-“What c’d a nice woman do with a bear like me?”
-
-“That’s her business. I’m not denying that it would some job.” Benson
-critically surveyed Bull’s great bulk. “But if there’s anything in the
-world a woman loves it is making a man over, like an old dress. After
-she finishes, she generally realizes that she’s spoiled the material and
-wishes him back as he was. But in the mean time she has had her fun.
-I’ll bet Mary Mills is just itching to try her hand on you.”
-
-“Do you really mean that?” Bull looked up with sudden hope—that quickly
-died. He shook his big head. “She deserves something better. I’d only
-spoil her life.”
-
-Nevertheless, he relapsed into deep thought, returning only
-monosyllables to Benson’s talk. The little seed thus planted rooted deep
-in his silence.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Strange is first love with its intense desire for purity! Cleanliness is
-next to Godliness, and Godliness is Love. Thus Cleanliness must be next
-of kin to Love.
-
-If this be doubted, observe a ten-year-old boy, self-convicted of
-water-marks on his neck and soil in his ears enough to grow potatoes.
-See him scrub himself with profuse use of soap till his countenance
-shines so that it might serve as a mirror for the small charmer who has
-ensnared his budding affections with her bright curls. Watch him, later,
-a man grown, solicitous about his daily tub, careful of his raiment,
-choice in cravats! Later his wife shall drive him with revilings to his
-bath! Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling
-shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt.
-
-Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering
-in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them
-earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is
-when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. So Lee, who was perhaps even
-a bit more boyish than the average, came to lunch in a soft white dress
-with a flower at her throat, powdered and delicately perfumed, bright
-hair framing happy eyes, every soft line and fold proclaiming her
-womanhood. Like an emanation, soft and effulgent as moonlit mist, the
-fullness of her content proceeded from her, wrapped her in a bright
-atmosphere in the midst of which she softly brooded. Not that she was
-silent. She laughed and talked; seriously discussed Benson’s schemes.
-But that was all of the surface. Behind the chatter she lived in the
-enchantment of her dream.
-
-It was too marked to pass unnoticed. But if Bull and Benson saw the
-clinging of glances, sensed the pulsing feeling, they observed with the
-friendly indulgence of experience the young man’s honest devotion, the
-girl’s shy happiness. During the long hour they sat talking after lunch,
-no silly jest marred its beauty. Except for a greater kindliness of
-manner, with delicacy quite foreign to his harsh exterior, Benson gave
-no hint of his understanding up to the moment he rode away.
-
-Then for a brief moment Bull was taken into the dream. While Gordon went
-for his horse, Lee packed his saddlebags with clean things for the
-journey, and was giving him the usual last critical inspection. As he
-stood smiling down on her, hugely pleased, her eyes rose from the tie
-she was arranging to his; and as she read their sympathy and
-intelligence, she clasped his neck and hid her face against his broad
-breast.
-
-Until the beat of hoofs at the *patio* gate announced Gordon’s return,
-he held her to him with one arm while the other hand gently patted her
-shoulder. Neither spoke. Words would have told less. When she withdrew
-and walked with him to the gate, she was soothed and comforted as any girl that
-ever made a confidante of her mother.
-
-When she ran back after the quirt he had purposely left on the table, he
-had time to pass a word to Gordon. “Remember, she don’t leave this house
-to go *anywhere* alone!”
-
-Gordon nodded, and, satisfied, he rode away with Lee’s last charge
-floating after him, “Come home soon!”
-
-The words were still ringing in his ears, he still felt the firm, cool
-clasp on his neck, when he drew rein at the first rise and looked back
-at the *hacienda*. From one corner, where an *anciano* had burned some
-rubbish, rose a lazy pennon of smoke, but the brown girls, women, and
-children who usually filled the compound with restless life were in full
-enjoyment of the noon *siesta*. Within its bright walls, the place dozed
-in the pleasant shade of its towering cottonwoods.
-
-Somehow the stillness recalled to Bull’s mind the Spaniard’s house he
-had shown Gordon from the railroad—sacked, burned, its vacant windows
-staring like empty eyes over the desert. His face clouded. He moved
-uneasily in his saddle, but presently the golden peace that incited the
-memory worked its own remedy. Jake and Sliver and Gordon were there, and
-the place was still far beyond the surge and swirl of the revolution.
-
-“And I’ll be home again in less than a week,” he encouraged himself.
-
-Home! It recalled again Lee’s words. He felt her clasp, thrilled at the
-memory. He, “Bull” Perrin, the rustler! Around his neck that had been in
-constant hazard of the halter for a dozen years, this fine, clean girl
-had thrown her arms. His tender musing over the wonder would have
-excited the scorn of a city man, *blasé* and stale from the constant
-presence and attentions of pretty women. But it was sincere. While he
-rode on over the hills and plains, the thought warmed his heart,
-quickened the seed planted therein by Benson, freed his soul from the
-bonds of his great humility.
-
-“Of course it’s damn foolish for you even to think of it,” he chid
-himself. Nevertheless, he did, slowly, heavily, taking stock with minute
-exactness of his own demerits. How great they were none knew better. The
-rustling, of course, he had abandoned along with certain gross habits of
-life. But the liquor? These periodical debauches? Was he strong enough
-to conquer them?
-
-“If I c’d only ride into a town an’ either leave it alone or take a
-man’s fair allowance,” he mused. “But kin I? Mebbe with a fine little
-woman like that to help me.” But the next instant he shook his head.
-“An’ have her take the chance? No, no, hombre, you’re crazy. You put all
-that behind you by your own act years ago.”
-
-Yet this conclusion did not end the argument. When, at sundown, he drew
-rein at the accustomed spot and looked down on the *rancho* buildings
-now dyed a flaming apricot he took his breath deeply. With its
-bougainvillea draping walls and porches in rich purple clusters, its
-pretty *patio* and outside kitchen garden, it was just such a home as
-would fit the dreams of a common man. Instantly his mind filled in the
-picture, the man and woman sitting after supper on the veranda, he with
-his pipe and paper, a child on his knee, she with her sewing. A thousand
-intimacies were supplied by his lonely, hungry soul, and when the
-picture stood complete he burst out with a great resolve.
-
-“By God, I’ll do it! You’re a-going to walk like a man into town an’
-come out without teching a drop!”
-
-From where he was sitting he usually could see—either Betty at play on
-the veranda, her mother moving in and out, or Terrubio moving around the
-stables. To-night silence wrapped the place. From the west, as on the
-south where he sat, the land fell rapidly toward the *rancho*, and as he
-rode forward, puzzled, the silence was explained. Over the western ridge
-the widow, Terrubio, and Betty came riding, and reached the house just
-as he rode up.
-
-“Though we brought bad news to his son,” she explained the delay, “the
-old Icarza would not permit us to leave till we had broken his bread.
-How did Ramon take it? Just as I said he would—out came the Mex in in
-all of its nasty selfishness, blind conceit. She was promised to him and
-he would hold her to it! He’d kill any one who interfered. Goodness! you
-never *saw* such fireworks! He showed no trace of the real pride that
-would have kept one of our boys from showing his hurt; and still less
-consideration for Lee. It was”—she gave a little sniff of disgust—“just
-sickening. I was almost sorry she couldn’t have been there, for it would
-have effectually cured her remorse. But she’ll get it to-morrow, for
-he’s going over to plead his own cause.”
-
-Unease swept Bull’s dark visage. After a brief statement of his mission
-he voiced his apprehension. “But if he’s coming to-morrow, I don’t know
-but I orter go back.”
-
-“Nonsense!” Mrs. Mills pooh-poohed the idea. “It’s all fireworks—and
-there’s Sliver and Gordon and Jake.”
-
-To which Betty added a direct command. “You are just going to stay here.
-We haven’t seen you for ever so long, and mama is just dying to tell you
-her troubles.”
-
-“Tea and trouble,” the widow laughed. “A genuine woman’s party.”
-
-When he lifted and placed her with one swing on the veranda she allowed
-one hand to remain on his shoulder, and he was not so ignorant of woman
-nature as not to recognize the liking behind the action. While she
-bustled around, adding dainties to the meal Terrubio’s woman had ready,
-he watched her with an expression that she, on her part, could not fail
-to interpret. And whereas, on previous visits, she had managed all kinds
-of accidental contacts, watched with mischievous delight for the effect,
-she was now filled with pleasurable confusion that manifested itself in
-an almost girlish shyness.
-
-When, afterward, they moved out upon the veranda, Bull’s dream of an
-hour ago was almost fulfilled. For Betty snuggled as usual in his arms,
-while the widow busied herself with a bit of sewing—a fine excuse that
-lent itself to the lowering of eyes, permitted stealthy glances.
-
-While they were at supper, the sun had slid down to the western horizon.
-Pools of deep indigo now filled the hollows. Above them the plains ran,
-a deep violet sea broken with apricot foam where the crests of the great
-earth waves rolled high, ran off and away around the bases of gold and
-crimson mountains.
-
-It was unearthly in its beauty, and while they could not have put their
-feeling in words, it filled both with that sense of vastness before
-which man in his littleness quails. Often the widow paused in her
-sewing, and as Bull saw that infinite loneliness reflected in her face,
-the big, simple soul of him melted with love and pity. Till the lights
-faded and she no longer needed its excuse, she alternately sewed and
-gazed; then when warm gloaming settled over all, wiped out the
-loneliness with its friendly gloom, she recovered her voice.
-
-“Oh, I had almost forgotten.”
-
-It was that which she had seen in the morning—to wit, Gordon snatching
-Lee out of her saddle.
-
-“And oh, isn’t it nice to think that she’ll be settled, at last, with
-that fine boy!”
-
-Happy in the conclusion, she began to sketch a picture of them settled
-happily at Los Arboles. Her voice, as she ran on, took a little quiver
-that powerfully expressed her own loneliness, inspired in Bull an
-intense desire to seize and squeeze it out. Instead his arms tightened
-around the child.
-
-“Not one marriage in a hundred turns out what it might be. But with the
-exception, when respect, friendliness, affection, and a sense of duty
-are reinforced by love—well, it’s the nearest to heaven that poor humans
-ever gain.” She added, with a sigh: “Excepting that it gave me this
-child, my own wasn’t all that it might have been. She’s been a joy and
-comfort, but—in a few years more she’ll be marrying, herself. Then I’ll
-be again alone.”
-
-“Why did *you* never marry?” Betty’s small, soft voice stole out on the
-darkness from the depths of Bull’s embrace.
-
-The stock excuses rose to his lips—but did not pass, for through the
-friendly gloaming he was aware of a rustle. His face turned toward it.
-
-“I never felt myself fit.”
-
-“Why, that’s just nonsense!” Betty indignantly declared. “Any woman that
-wasn’t a downright fool would be glad to have you. I know one that would
-give her best shoes—”
-
-“Betty!”
-
-But the small rebel ran on, “Well, she would—even if I can’t tell you
-her name.”
-
-Once more Bull faced a stir in the darkness. “I’ve led a hard, rough,
-bad life. No decent woman would ever want me.”
-
-Now he saw the dim whiteness of her face turning to him. Her quiet voice
-took up the argument. “It’s a thin, pinched nature that’s always good. A
-big, strong one is liable to be led astray by its own force before
-wisdom comes to teach and chasten. In the long run I don’t know but that
-it gains by it in charity and loving-kindness. Wickedness of the flesh
-doesn’t count so much as wickedness of the heart; the inward vileness
-that rots and corrupts; and I’ve seen as much of that in the churches as
-among downright sinners.” She concluded with the very words that Gordon
-had used with Lee. “It isn’t what you *were*, but what you *are* that
-counts.”
-
-From a second warm silence issued Bull’s vibrant rumble. “You think a
-man that has lived hard has a right to speak, to a good woman—providing
-he’s put it all behind him?”
-
-Low, but confident and firm, her answer thrilled through the gloaming.
-“I do, and—she’d *love* to help him.”
-
-Almost without his volition, Bull’s huge paw stole out. He half hoped
-she wouldn’t see it. He had begun to withdraw it when, like a dim white
-dove, her hand came fluttering and nested in his.
-
-Every life has its golden hour. That was Bull’s, and, like a pearl
-shining in the mire, it stood out from the blackness of his past life.
-Though neither spoke, the peace and quiet, surety of perfect
-understanding, settled upon them. When, presently, Betty resumed her
-chatter, they listened or joined in. After she fell asleep they relapsed
-again into happy silence; just sat like a shy boy and girl, hand in
-hand, till she rose and carried the child off to her bed.
-
-To meet her, next morning, was to Bull something of an ordeal, but her
-quiet smile restored at once the perfect understanding. Her sense of
-proprietorship showed in the way she fussed over his coffee and eggs,
-berated him for his lack of appetite. Her final inspection before he
-left could not have been outdone in severity by Lee herself. But nothing
-was said. She knew that he would speak in his own good time.
-
-Except that her hand clung a little in parting, it differed little from
-their usual. “I shall look for you when you return.” Her call after him
-reiterated ownership.
-
-His answer confirmed it. “I shall come here, ma’am, straight from the
-station.”
-
-Indeed, the real parting came when, reining in at fifty yards, he looked
-back over his shoulder. With both hands on Betty’s shoulders, slightly
-dejected, yet with her honest, level gaze sending out trust and hope,
-she stood watching him go, as the race of wives and mothers have stood
-throughout the generations. And just as, throughout time, the sight of a
-woman’s trust and child’s faith have urged real men on to big deeds, so
-the sight of them set the ex-rustler’s heart swelling within him. As,
-with a last wave of the hand, he turned again and rode on, the spirit
-within him equaled in love and reverence that of an ancient
-knight-errant starting out in pursuit of the Holy Grail.
-
-
-XXVI: A SETTLEMENT
-==================
-
-About the time Bull started, Lee and Gordon rose from the
-breakfast-table under the Los Arboles *portales*.
-
-Perhaps with sympathetic intuition, for they exchanged an amiable grin,
-Sliver and Jake had already passed out. It is true that Maria and
-Teresa, the small brown *criadas*, were peeping from the crypt-like
-depths of their kitchen. But even had she been aware of their vast
-interest, Lee would not have withdrawn the hand which, as they rose, had
-somehow tangled with Gordon’s. Reflected and thrown up from the yellow
-wall, the strong morning lights bathed the flesh of her arms, face, and
-neck with suffused amber, wove a soft glow in the mesh of her hair. So
-different from her usual boyish activity, her gentle quiet, combined
-with the warm air, suffused lights, to create a dreamy spell. Goodness
-knows how long they would have stood if Maria had not come out to clear
-the table.
-
-Then Lee spoke. “Such sloth! This will never do if I am to go to El Sol
-and return to-day. While I dress will you please get my horse?”
-
-When Gordon reached the stable Sliver had already gone, but Jake had
-lingered to say a word. It was very much to the point. “Say! Bull tipped
-me off as how the young greaser was likely to show up an’ raise some
-hell to-day. Don’t you allow I’d better hang around?”
-
-He nodded, however, when Gordon explained the situation. “Missy don’t
-know he’s coming, hey?—thinks she’s going over there. Then they’ll meet
-on the way. Mebbe I’d better tag along.”
-
-But to this Gordon’s pride would not consent. “Don’t you think I can
-take care of her?”
-
-“No one better,” Jake hastened to appease. “But, say! If he doesn’t show
-up, don’t you let her go on over there—not if you have to rope an’ drag
-her home.”
-
-“Like we did before?” He smiled at the memory. “This time I’ll not leave
-her the saddle machete.”
-
-“Little bit too smart for you that time,” Jake grinned in sympathy.
-“Take care she don’t spring a new one. She ain’t so very slow.”
-
-Nevertheless, in the face of his apparent acquiescence, while apparently
-heading out on his usual beat, he whirled behind the first ridge and,
-proceeding at a fast lope, had covered five miles of the way to El Sol,
-the Icarzas’ *hacienda*, by the time Lee came out. Slowing down, then,
-he rode more leisurely, had covered another mile when, over the crest of
-a ridge, he sighted Ramon coming at a gallop down the opposite slope. A
-clump of mesquite and *palo verde* afforded convenient cover. Forcing
-his beast in, Jake stooped low and watched Ramon go by, so close that
-his stirrup whipped the bushes.
-
-It had never been Jake’s habit to notice Mexicans. But now he noted with
-surprise the change in the young man’s face. The lines deeply plowed
-down the nose under the cheeks, the hardening of the red, womanish lips,
-the vindictive black sparkle that had contracted his great dusky eyes
-into burning black dots, added ten years to his age.
-
-“The Mex is souring in him,” Jake inwardly commented. “That guinea’s
-liable to try an’ hurt some one. Glad I came.”
-
-Allowing Ramon to pass on, Jake then rode after, and so, progressing
-from ridge to ridge, keeping always the height of land between them, was
-less than fifty yards behind when, peeping over the crest, he saw Lee
-and Gordon coming up the slope.
-
-Another bunch of chaparral afforded cover, and after tying his horse in
-it, Jake crawled up to the ridge and looked over.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-It was not without argument that Gordon had obtained Lee’s consent to
-accompany her. When she found him standing with two horses at the gate,
-her brows rose in a troubled arch.
-
-He understood that she hesitated to accuse him of bad taste, and quoted
-Bull’s last orders to remove the impression. “He said that you were
-never to ride alone.”
-
-The responsibility being thus shifted, she felt able to speak. “It is
-rather— Really, I don’t see how I can do anything else.”
-
-“Why go at all? Why not write?”
-
-She shook her head. “I’ve known him since childhood—and have treated him
-badly. I owe him an apology and it will have to come from my own lips.”
-
-It was reasonable enough from her point of view, but not from his. If
-Ramon were an American he would have said, “Go, ahead; take your
-medicine!” Being Mexican, discretion bade him remain.
-
-“At least let me ride with you part of the way. I will turn before you
-reach El Sol.”
-
-“Oh, that will be all right,” she had conceded at once.
-
-He had felt certain, of course, that they would meet Ramon. But the
-usual witcheries, sweep of the tawny earth-waves under the bright sun,
-satisfying thud of hoofs on the trail, creak and smell of hot leather,
-had combined to blind him to all but her presence. Now, before he could
-turn, Ramon reined in before them.
-
-Like Jake, they noticed at once the sardonic furrows, set mouth, frown
-above the glittering eyes. With his youth had vanished that veneer of
-refinement which conceals natural Mexican grossness. Like veins in a
-stratum revealed by a landslide, selfishness, conceit, violence,
-revenge, lay exposed. With the natural instinct of good breeding, Gordon
-had half turned to withdraw. But even if one glance at the passion-torn
-face had not checked the impulse, it would have been killed when Lee
-backed toward him. Shocked and a little afraid, she gazed at Ramon
-before she spoke.
-
-“Are you ill? You look so—”
-
-“So it was true, what the señora told me yesterday!” He spoke in low,
-strained tones. “It was true, though I did not believe; refused to
-believe. But now I see. It is true that you used me as bait for your
-fishing.”
-
-“Ramon!” She raised her hand, but he switched suddenly from denunciation
-to appeal.
-
-“No! it is not true! It cannot be! She lied! I will not believe it even
-though you tell me yourself!”
-
-From this he ran on with an appeal, hysterical and disconnected, which
-reflected as in a clear glass the nature of his love. In it was no
-appreciation of the feminine personality with its delicacies of feeling,
-refinements, inconsistencies, helplessness, all the illogicalities that
-render it charming, as much or more than its faith and love. In terms of
-blind egotism, it expressed only his passion and jealousy, fatuous
-conceit. As in a clear glass, under a powerful light, he revealed
-himself so that even a woman blinded by love could not have failed to
-see. In the middle of it Gordon heard Lee take a long breath, and knew
-it for thankfulness. Yet her relief did not kill her poignant regret for
-the part she had played.
-
-She spoke softly, pityingly, when he stopped. “Ramon, I’m sorry. It was
-wicked of me to draw you on. But to marry you would be far worse. What
-can I do to make up?”
-
-He told, with anger and offense. She had promised to be his wife! It was
-a betrothal! as binding in Mexican eyes as marriage! He had announced it
-to his father, mother, sister, friends! His conceit cropped out again as
-he pictured himself, jilted, in their eyes. Angered by his own
-imaginings, he was growing abusive when she cut him quietly off.
-
-“I was on my way when we met, to own and ask pardon for my fault. I had
-counted on our old friendship and your generosity to make it less
-difficult. But I see, now, my error. There is nothing left but to bid
-you good-by.”
-
-Now came the ultimate revelation, that passion of furious jealousy which
-drives the Mexican *peon* to cut off the hands, slash the face and
-breast, of his love. His eyes narrowed to shifting, insane sparks. Hand
-raised, as though to strike, he spurred his beast forward.
-
-“You—you—”
-
-He got no further, for one hard dig of the spur shot Gordon’s horse in
-between. From English to Spanish the argument had run, but from Lee’s
-answers Gordon had gathered enough. Though slower, his beast was heavier
-than Ramon’s, and while forcing horse and rider sideways with a steady
-pressure he issued his orders:
-
-“That’s about enough for you! Get!”
-
-Ramon’s hand flew to his saddle *machete*, but he did not draw, for
-Gordon’s had gone to his gun. Leg pressed against leg, they manœuvered
-their plunging beasts; without drawing a weapon fought the old fight of
-the brown man and the white; the struggle which began when Cortés
-imposed his will on the Aztec emperors; was continued by the Puritan
-forefathers against the American Indian; which has been fought to the
-same conclusion all over the world. And from the two faces—Gordon’s
-cold, hard-eyed, Ramon’s distorted with black fury—the cause of that
-inevitable ending might have been read.
-
-So close they were Gordon could see the palpitation of light from the
-insane waverings of the other’s eyeballs steady under a doubt. He felt
-rather than saw the Mexican’s sudden swift reach for his knife. Even
-more swiftly he snatched, and with a sudden wrench of the other’s wrist
-sent the knife flying and bore him back flat in the saddle. For a moment
-he held him, then with a powerful shove his horse sent Ramon’s beast
-stumbling sideways and broke the grip. Wheeling in a circle, Ramon faced
-them again.
-
-So far Lee had looked on distressed. Now she spurred forward and caught
-Gordon’s arm. “Let him go!—please!” Her anger gone now, sorrow quivering
-in her voice, she added, “You will, won’t you, Ramon?”
-
-His fury, passion, wild jealousy had settled in dark calm. “Yes, I am
-going *now*. But the next time—.” He wheeled and galloped off.
-
-Till the tip of his *sombrero* vanished behind the ridge Lee watched him
-go, distress and relief mingling in a wintry smile.
-
-“Don’t give him too much of your pity,” Gordon consoled. “One
-disappointment doesn’t make much of a dent in such egotism as that.
-After a while he’ll find some pretty señorita to take him at his own
-valuation.”
-
-“I hope so.” Her smile brightened. “Though I still feel guilty. But if
-he hadn’t behaved so ridiculously I should feel much worse.”
-
-Gordon nodded toward the ridge. “You heard his threat. Do you suppose
-he’ll—-”
-
-“Oh no!” Her hair flew in a cloud under her vigorous shake. “After he’s
-had time to cool off he’ll forget and forgive. But just to think”—her
-glance displayed an even mixture of mischief and reproach—“just to think
-that all this trouble was caused by you kissing that horrid girl!”
-
-“Why—” he gasped, under the sudden attack. “Well, I’ll be— Say! Who
-drove me to it with her disgraceful flirting?”
-
-“Did it make you feel *awfully* bad?”
-
-“Did it?” The thought of his miserable unhappiness was still powerful
-enough to cloud his face, and she noted it with a little quiver of
-satisfaction. “Let’s forget it.” Snatching her hand, he worked his horse
-in against hers and tried to draw her to him. “There’s a momentous
-question I wish to consult you about; one you refused to consider
-yesterday. Will you—”
-
-But she pulled away. “Not yet. First there’s something I want settled.
-Was it really pique that—made you kiss her?”
-
-He wanted to laugh, but refrained, for under her smile he felt her
-earnestness. “Nothing else.”
-
-“You’re sure?”
-
-“Sure!”
-
-“Cross your heart to die?”
-
-He performed that solemn and ancient function, and if she still
-entertained a doubt she stuffed it away down in consciousness.
-
-“Very well.” With a little sigh of content she let her head fall back on
-his shoulder and a whisper escape from her upturned lips, “Now—you may.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-From his covert on the ridge Jake had observed the meeting, talk,
-struggle, Ramon’s retreat, also something which was hidden from the
-lovers in the valley below—the fact that, after crossing the ridge,
-Ramon had dismounted, pulled his rifle from the saddle slings, and
-crawled back on hands and knees to the edge of Jake’s covert. By that
-time the little tilt concerning Felicia was over, and as Lee’s head went
-to Gordon’s shoulder Ramon raised the rifle.
-
-A shot at that short distance would have pierced them both, but as
-Ramon’s eye dropped to the sights a sharp order issued from the covert,
-“Throw up your hands! damn quick!”
-
-A quick, startled glance showed Ramon the lean, grim face through a
-break in the chaparral. Not for nothing had the *peones* named Jake “The
-Python.” In moments such as this his lean personality, deadly eye,
-conveyed that very impression—of a snake coiled to strike. As Ramon’s
-hands went up, he stepped out and, crouching behind the ridge, took the
-other’s rifle and drove him downhill to his horse.
-
-Having extracted the cartridge both from the rifle and from the revolver
-in Ramon’s holster, he threw the weapon at his feet. “I reckon I orter
-plug you, an’ I would for two cents. It’d be set down to raiders, which
-fixes it very nice. Sure, I reckon I orter do it, but if you’ve got a
-few thinks to the contrary spit ’em out.”
-
-It was no idle threat. The vicious gleam of the cold gray eye told that.
-But in place of fear Ramon’s face showed almost relief. “Very good,
-señor. There is nothing you could do that would suit me better.”
-
-The cold eye flickered. “Hell! you’re too anxious. I couldn’t make up my
-mind to do it that quick—an’ there’s a few things I wanter find out. For
-one, what’s your idee in wanting to drill them young folks?”
-
-Ramon told—this time without the fireworks.
-
-Jake summed it briefly. “Promised you, then threw you down. That’s hard
-luck. But there’s one thing you Mexes can never get into your hot
-heads—the right of our little American queens to change their pretty
-minds as often as they damn please without any gent’s consent. You was
-damn lucky that she ever give you a smile. If I conclude to change my
-mind on plugging you, have it writ up large in your family tree that
-oncet an American girl let herself be engaged to you for nearly five
-minutes. Now supposing I refrain from my desire to make you into a
-corpse, d’you reckon you could keep a promise and not make any attempt
-on their lives?”
-
-While he was talking Ramon’s face had stiffened in defiance. He shook
-his head. But instead of anger, a small gleam of admiration lit Jake’s
-hard eyes. Raising his gun, he aimed full at the other’s breast.
-
-“You have just two minutes to make up your mind.”
-
-“One minute!”
-
-For a time it seemed as though he would have to shoot. But just before
-the time expired, Ramon spoke. “For myself, I do not care. But I have an
-old father and mother, whom my death would surely kill. I promise.”
-
-“All right.” Jake dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm. “I allow
-that I’m foolish for trusting a Mex, but the little Missy allus liked
-you. On her account we’ll take one chance. Here’s your cartridge—only
-don’t load till you’re off this range. An’ remember”—a cold flash
-emphasized the order—“after this our boundary is your dead-line. Cross
-it again—you’ll be shot like a panther, coyote, or other varmint.”
-
-Returning to his horse, he watched the other mount and ride away. A
-glance in the opposite direction showed him Lee and Gordon, going hand
-in hand up the opposite slope. Till they had gained across to the next
-valley he remained where he was. Then, riding in their rear, with a
-sharp eye always behind, keeping the width of a valley between them, he
-followed home.
-
-
-XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
-==========================
-
-Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped
-and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he
-had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the
-Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him
-across the tracks.
-
-“There’s a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been
-streaking through all day carrying Valles’s reserves from Chihuahua. Don
-Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If
-we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along.”
-
-“Half an hour?” Bull snorted. “That means half the night an’ then some.
-We’ll have time for supper an’ a sleep.”
-
-But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the
-crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the
-train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail
-of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on
-top.
-
-“Must be yesterday’s train a bit overdue,” Bull defended his theory, as
-the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. “The comandante’ll be in the
-passenger-coach ahead. We’d better to mosey along an’ brace him.”
-
-But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs
-dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop.
-
-“Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it
-pan out?”
-
-It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull’s friend and Cupid’s aide. As his
-car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the
-titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest
-subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign
-in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the
-dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their
-dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a
-composite welcoming grin.
-
-“Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings.” The correspondent breezily
-ran off the names. “There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles’s chief of
-staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government
-clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us,
-but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room.
-Come right up.”
-
-A partition divided the car into kitchen and living-quarters. Bunks rose
-in a tier of four at the end of the latter. Four more could be slept on
-long lockers at each side of the table which was being set for supper by
-the Chinese cook. From the oldest to the youngest, the correspondents
-were on edge for the approaching battle. At supper their talk ran on its
-possibilities.
-
-“If Valles is beaten again,” Weekes, the gray-haired dean, summed the
-conversation, “our government will throw another of its silly flip-flops
-and turn him down. And then—”
-
-“—this corresponding job won’t make good insurance.”
-
-“And then—” the dean began again.
-
-“We’ll hit for El Paso before Santos-Coy grabs us again.”
-
-“And then”—the dean triumphed over interruptions—“God pity the poor
-gringos in northern Mexico.”
-
-Bull’s friend nodded. “Valles’s army will scatter into bands that will
-rake the country with fine-tooth combs for the least bit of plunder. You
-had better get your girl and her fellow, Diogenes, and come out with
-us.”
-
-Later, when they had all climbed up on the roof and sat watching the
-oil-smoke from the laboring locomotive whirl and twist, then float away
-and lay its great sable plumes against the rich reds and golds of the
-evening sky, they gave expert opinion on Benson’s mission.
-
-“If Valles wins, so do you,” the dean opined. “He needs horses worse
-than money, and, as you say, has slathers of it in the El Paso banks.
-But if he loses—hit for the border at once. I saw him the other day
-after the first defeat, and hell couldn’t produce his equal. He was
-crazy; a maniac; a tiger gone stark, staring, frothing mad.
-
-“And lose he will. How do I know?” He answered a challenge. “It’s a mere
-problem of mathematics, the first equation of which was worked out in
-the battle the other day. Given two men of equal military ability, the
-one with a trained mind is bound to win. The other fellow, as you know,
-is a college man—a college man against a bandit.” He turned to Bull and
-Benson. “It’s a cinch that he’ll win. If I were you, gentlemen, I’d wait
-the event.”
-
-Benson shook his head. “If we see Valles now and strike a bargain, we
-can get our cattle across the border before he’s all in.”
-
-“Good enough reasoning,” the dean admitted. “But—ever since the first
-defeat he’s been in one of his towering rages. Even his own generals
-hardly dare go near him.”
-
-Benson shrugged; with British obstinacy he clung to his point. “It won’t
-be the first time I’ve seen him in his rages. He may be dangerous—to
-Americans, but John Bull looks after his people and even Valles is
-careful of how he flies in the old fellow’s face. I shall go to see him
-at once, and if he refuses—well”—his voice grew harsh and
-menacing—“he’ll hear the truth about himself.”
-
-Not knowing him, the correspondents received it in silence. While they
-smoked Benson went on in his hard, rough voice. “I tell you, amigos,
-that your people have made a sad mess of this whole Mexican business.
-For three years, now, you have been trying to apply the principles of
-your Declaration of Independence to a race which won’t have evolved to a
-point where it has the faintest understanding of them for a thousand
-years to come. You stand on your Monroe doctrine, but refuse to take up
-its obligations and give alien nationals the protection you will not
-allow their own government to extend. While your statesmen prattle about
-the sacred right of revolution and Mexico’s ability to settle her own
-affairs, the country is overrun with bandits and mobs of pelados who are
-killing off the decent people and destroying billions in property they
-never created.
-
-“Bah!” he snorted his disgust. “Don’t talk to me of republics. Do you
-suppose that either England or Germany would have stood for the anarchy
-which rules here? For centuries John Bull has been ruling brown peoples
-and he knows his job. ‘Be good and you’ll be happy!’ he tells them. If
-they’re not—they get it, hot and heavy, on the spot where it will do
-most good. The brown man is all right in his place—which isn’t on top of
-the white man—but your government, so far, has failed to perceive it.”
-
-He went on from a pause: “Republics are incapacitated by nature in any
-case for the job. They are too divided in their counsels—swayed to-day
-by capital that will accept any dishonor rather than jeopardize its
-revenues; to-morrow by sentimentalists who hold up hands of horror at
-the very thought of war; governed most of the time by a ridiculous
-yellow press. Individually, you Yanks are good people, but taken
-collectively, as represented by your government and papers, you are
-hypocritical, weak, hysterical, sentimental, without dignity or force.
-You are grown fat with wealth, soft with luxury, too lazy and
-indifferent to undertake your responsibilities abroad, and if you were
-not, you lack the first essentials—centralized federal authority and
-military strength to enforce your will. If you do anything here it will
-be accidental—such as when the blowing up of the *Maine* aroused one of
-your periodical brainstorms, stung you into action. But in the mean time
-the destruction of Mexico will be complete. There will be nothing left
-of the civilization built up at such enormous pains by Diaz and which it
-was your duty to maintain.”
-
-Silence followed, the uncomfortable silence that attends the digestion
-of unpalatable truth. While they talked, the cars had resolved into dim
-masses that swayed and swung through hot dusk that was splashed, here
-and there, with the red glow of charcoal cooking fires. On those
-immediately ahead and behind, dim sombreroed figures still loomed in
-half-gloom. The flash of a match occasionally set a dark face out in
-startling relief. The tinkle of a guitar accompanying a high, nasal *peon*
-chant, mingled with the roar and rattle of wheels. For some time its
-whine rose under the stars before the voice of the dean broke the
-silence.
-
-“What you say is true—most of it. We have been tried in the balance and
-found wanting. We’ve neglected our duty to the Mexicans and our own
-people—that’s the hell of it! But nations, like individuals, learn their
-lessons through painful mistakes. We’ve had bad leadership and worse
-counsels—so much of it that it would almost seem that we were
-irrevocably stamped as incapable. But it’s only a phase. Under it all
-the heart of the people still beats sound and true. Sooner or later its
-voice will be heard. And when it is—the bleating of the sentimentalists
-will be drowned in the tramp of marching men.”
-
-“You bet you!” It rolled out in chorus.
-
-“In the mean time,” a voice added, “what’s the matter with a little
-drink?”
-
-Instantly the recumbent figures rose in a shadowy mass, and as its units
-made their way down over the edge of the swaying car, the correspondent
-jogged Bull’s elbow. “Come along, Diogenes!”
-
-But though a flame, sudden and fierce, had leaped within him; though he
-trembled under the intensity of his desire, he shook his head. “Thanks,
-I’m not drinking.”
-
-“Why—Diogenes? Whatever is the matter? If parental responsibilities do
-this, damned if I know whether I’ll ever dare to hook up—providing my
-San Francisco girl ever consents. Is this straight?”
-
-“Straight.”
-
-Warned, perhaps, by a certain earnestness, the other answered: “All
-right, old man—only—if you change your mind, come on down.”
-
-Bull made no answer, could not, for as he lay there, huge bulk stretched
-out on the running-board, face turned up to the stars, every ounce of
-his energy, even the bit that would have been used up in speech, was
-consumed in the fight against the furious desire that brought the sweat
-starting on his brow, shook him like a leaf. Out of the rack and bang of
-the swinging cars, click and roar of the wheels, his ear presently
-picked the clink of glasses. Out through the lamp-lit doorway floated
-Benson’s rough voice.
-
-“Well, here’s to Uncle Sam! wishing him better counselors and quicker
-understanding!”
-
-Bull heard no more, for he had rolled over, buried his face in his arms
-to hide from his snuffing nostrils whiffs of spirits. Once he half rose,
-looking toward the ladder. But, strengthening his resolution, there rose
-in his mind just then a picture of Betty and her mother as he had seen
-them at parting—her hands on the child’s shoulders, stooped in slight
-dejection, yet radiating faith and trust.
-
-Lying down again, he lay, hands clasped under his head, gazing up at the
-fire of stars, while his mind traveled back to the *rancho*, lived over
-and over again the slow, sweet hours of last night. Below, an undertone
-to the roar of the speeding train, he now caught the hum of talk. But he
-took no heed—even when it ceased. He dreamed on till a hand shook his
-foot.
-
-“Aren’t you coming down to bed?”
-
-“No; I reckon I’ll lay out here. It’s cooler.” He did not acknowledge to
-himself his fear of sniffing the spirituous odors.
-
-“All right, only don’t roll off.” The correspondent paused on his way
-back to the ladder. “Say! did your friend mean what he said? Or was it
-just talk?”
-
-When Bull answered with a sketch of Benson’s violent temper, illustrated
-by a few instances, the correspondent shook his head. “Well, don’t let
-him see Valles alone.” Going down the ladder, he called back, “If you
-should change your mind about the drink, you’ll find the jug on the
-table.”
-
-Instantly it materialized in Bull’s vision, a round stone jug and
-glasses, as solid and real as though it stood within the reach of his
-hand. Nor could he shut out the vision, as he had the odor, by burying
-his face. With the cars swinging and swaying through the night, shut
-out, it stood forth clearer than ever. He saw himself snatching out the
-cork; felt the burning liquid coursing down his throat.
-
-“My God! why did I come? I’ll never be able to stan’ it!”
-
-The thought of the temptation, ever present, growing more powerful
-through the coming days, gaining in strength while he grew weaker,
-brought out of him a cry of dismay: “I’ll never be able to stan’ it!”
-Then, very quickly, “I’ll have to! If I don’t—then I’m no fit man for
-her!”
-
-The thought brought her face again in all its sweet wholesomeness.
-Through the warm dusk, as it were beside him, he saw her hand fluttering
-like a homing dove into his. He felt it lifting, raising him above his
-temptation. The memory of its soft pressures strengthened and comforted.
-Presently his fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the
-running-board. Exhausted, he fell asleep.
-
-
-XXVIII: A “REQUISITION”
-=======================
-
-Slipping in over the patio wall, a golden sunbeam struck behind where
-Gordon sat writing and flooded the *portales* with topaz lights. From
-the kitchen came the soft spat, spat of *tortillas* in the course of
-shapement between Teresa’s palms, competing splash and flop of Maria’s
-cloth as she washed off the brown-tiled floor. No other sound disturbed
-the morning freshness, for Gordon had risen early to get off a letter
-with Lovell, who had dropped in last night on his way to El Paso to
-attend Phœbe’s wedding.
-
-So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung
-across Lee’s bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The
-rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of
-white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair’s bright tousle,
-round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily
-dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono
-and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back.
-Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon’s first
-notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes.
-
-With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could
-feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore
-it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom
-she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the *ancianos*, he
-was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of the
-*hacienda* when she cut him off.
-
-“Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had
-guessed right I might have given you a—”
-
-He took it—in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. “To my
-father and mother,” he replied to her question. “I thought it was about
-time I dropped them a line—haven’t written home since I came down.”
-
-“What?” She uttered a small shocked scream. “You’ve let them suffer all
-this time in suspense and alarm?”
-
-He looked up in innocent surprise. “Why should *they* suffer? I didn’t.”
-
-*He hadn’t?* Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against
-such utter lack of imagination—but dropped again quickly, owing to a
-second base treachery on the part of the sleeves.
-
-“Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. *You*
-didn’t suffer? *Oooooh!*” She pulled his ear till he yelled. “If you
-ever dare to treat me like that!”
-
-“That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together.”
-
-After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she
-asked: “But why this sudden plunge into correspondence—after such long
-abstinence?”
-
-“To inform them,” he replied, with great dignity, “of a certain
-momentous change impending in my condition.”
-
-“Oh, you are telling them about—*me*? May I see what you have written?”
-
-She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that
-his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes
-passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against
-his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it
-had evolved into a bear hug.
-
-“Oh, what a liar they will think you!”
-
-“To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the
-silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing’s believing.”
-
-Of course she declared it “wasn’t a bit like her” and the rest of it.
-Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee,
-picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for
-the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally
-and *in toto* denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor
-panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent.
-
-“Only you are so blind. They’ll hate me when they see it.”
-
-“Trust dad for that!” he laughed. “He still has a soft spot for a pretty
-damsel. When he sees this—well, he’ll go straight out and buy a fatted
-calf.”
-
-“But your mother and sister? They’ll never forgive me for taking you
-from that other girl.”
-
-“Wrong again! They weren’t a bit anxious about it. It was all my
-father—with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They’ll love you
-as much as I—no, that’s impossible! But they’ll love you, all right.”
-
-A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. “That other girl? You
-never told me about her. Did you ever—kiss her?”
-
-“Lots of times.” Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. “At
-parties, when I was a kid—and when we played ‘post-office’ and sich.”
-
-“Never since you grew up?”
-
-“Never.”
-
-“Oh, well,” she sighed, “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you since you
-were so very small, and it’s such a long time ago I’ll really have
-to—make up.”
-
-Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she
-had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. “And now—what
-about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they
-receive it?”
-
-Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. “Such
-impatience! Aren’t you happy?”
-
-“Happy?” His voice rang with sincerity. “Happier than I ever thought
-possible, but—”
-
-“But—?”
-
-“I want to be happier still.”
-
-He meant and thought it. But she with her woman’s intuition knew this,
-their love time, for what it was—the flowerage of their lives. Later
-would come the ripe fruit—content mixed with the joys and sorrows that
-form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed
-forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she
-would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was
-not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it.
-
-“After—after Bull comes home.”
-
-In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the
-shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped
-in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time
-before he spoke.
-
-“If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made
-it a double marriage. Why, what’s the matter?”
-
-She had sat up with a little shiver. “Oh no! I could never be happy in
-one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!” Coiling up again, she
-allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. “I never saw him, he who
-was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon
-behind a cloud, but he felt—like you. In my visions he always took me
-into the wilds—the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go.
-
-“It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and
-gone down the length of the Sierra Madres—at first alone, later
-traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then
-down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only
-the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that
-impossible. But this we can do—go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos,
-who are both old friends of my father’s, to be married, then ride
-straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by
-ourselves till—till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you look
-after the horses, and we can play that we are simple *peones* and be—oh,
-*so* happy!”
-
-Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good
-as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. “How perfectly lovely! Why
-didn’t I think of that myself?”
-
-“You would have, in time. Oh!” She sprang from his knee at a stir and
-tinkle of water. “Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress.”
-
-“You’ll go out with me to-day?” he called after her.
-
-“No.” She bent down over the rail to answer. “I promised Jake to go with
-him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts.”
-
-“Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?” he
-protested. “’Tisn’t fair.”
-
-But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out
-from behind the sheet.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now
-described about the *hacienda*, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise
-from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had
-become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with
-Sliver or Jake—and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests
-of great earth waves—then to sit and muse while the declining sun washed
-the wide world with its resplendence.
-
-As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted
-adobes, *patio*, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then,
-the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the
-burning hills. But—in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and
-wild—there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry.
-
-“Beast! she is but a child!”
-
-Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses
-standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a
-flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the
-adobes.
-
-“Raiders!” he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to,
-“*Revueltosos!*”
-
-A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a
-fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its
-panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear
-which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd.
-Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back
-compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway
-of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth.
-
-From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon’s sight,
-blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the
-half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw
-a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a *revueltoso*. The elder
-sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this
-helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing.
-
-“Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!”
-
-At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon’s spine. Blind,
-breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and
-tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man’s arms, and threw him
-violently against the wall.
-
-So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the
-fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming
-imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired,
-aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a
-finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then,
-stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll
-over.
-
-Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely
-surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he
-stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the
-mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them.
-
-The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a
-heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed
-to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick,
-it withstood a violent hammering.
-
-The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit
-under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse.
-But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand,
-the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood
-very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the
-burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning.
-
-“They say to bring fire and burn down the door.” Her quick motion
-simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame.
-Whispering: “Tira! señor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!” she pointed at the
-window.
-
-It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside,
-and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the *revueltosos* were hugging
-the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the
-bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at
-random, there followed a quick scurry of feet.
-
-Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in
-swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they
-could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back
-before—zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in
-through the window and plump in the back wall.
-
-Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above
-the woman’s shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against
-him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window,
-they waited—in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So
-still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman’s excited breathing and
-an occasional sob under the bed.
-
-“Tempting me to look out,” he read the silence.
-
-But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet
-and the voice of Maria, the little *criada*, called through the bars:
-
-“It ess good now, señor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with
-those evil ones.”
-
-The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned,
-first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them,
-“Don” Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back
-gate Sliver and two *ancianos* now stood with leveled rifles. Two more
-poked deadly snouts over the low *patio* wall, Lee and Jake behind them.
-And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets
-out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, *machetes*, a
-hysterical, dangerous mob.
-
-In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed
-at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind
-him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the
-ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they
-showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them
-villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they
-rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with
-evil jokes.
-
-“Drive back those women!” Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. “Then
-bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over
-here.”
-
-Nodding in reply to Gordon’s gesture, the leader followed him across the
-compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly
-cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome
-Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the
-ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such
-reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature’s
-mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales
-and addressed Jake with an authoritative air:
-
-“Now, señor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of
-General Valles?”
-
-“Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles
-attacked my people!”
-
-It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man’s riding-clothes, and
-the man’s surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy.
-Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his
-first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair.
-
-“I did not know”—his bold glance wandered over her costume—“you will
-pardon me, señorita?”
-
-Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time
-that revolutionists had come with “requisitions” to Los Arboles. She
-answered from experience.
-
-“You have a commission from General Valles?”
-
-He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language
-that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to
-contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, *el
-capitan* Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or
-other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with
-his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles’s own
-illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal.
-
-Lee handed it back. “This seems to be in legal form. That being the
-case”—she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake
-an appreciative nod “perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my
-people!”
-
-“I know of no attack except”—the straight brows knit over a black flash
-at Gordon—“when this man killed one of my men.”
-
-Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once:
-“He shot in self-defense—to save one of my girls.”
-
-“Santa Maria!” His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. “What
-foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled
-a dove. You Americanos take these *peonas* too seriously, fill them with
-ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a
-soldado for a sweetheart.”
-
-Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined
-just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on
-Gordon’s part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool
-calculation by Jake as to the possibility of “getting away with it”
-should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still
-holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering
-if he could send one bullet through all four heads.
-
-If the thoughts of the *peonas*—now gathered in a murmuring,
-gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling
-like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall—a composite of their
-thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and
-torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of
-mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought
-and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine
-nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee’s voice:
-
-“*You* say that? *You*, a follower of a man who was once himself a *peon*,
-who boasts that his is the *peones’* cause? *You*, his representative,
-sneer because we treat like human beings these poor creatures? If you
-*do* represent him, then God help us, for we have little but violence to
-expect from your cause.”
-
-It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the
-strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but
-little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused
-even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the *peon* in all his ways,
-to mutter: “You bet! they hain’t got nothing coming from him!” But in
-the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by training
-and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only surprise. Though
-his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of her beauty. It was
-to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, with a sudden
-reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the shibboleths of his
-“Cause.” Surely they were fighting for the *peon*; to obtain his rights
-and restore the public lands alienated by the *hacendados*.
-
-“If my hombre did as you say,” he concluded, “he earned his death. My
-general would be the first to applaud it.” With a gesture that dismissed
-the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: “So let us
-say no more of that. My wish is to serve *you*!”
-
-Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied
-them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry
-blood flooding Gordon’s face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing
-his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture.
-
-“Leave him to me,” she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in
-the eye, she gave him his answer. “You wish to serve me? Very well,
-señor, you may do so very easily—by removing yourself and your men off
-my place.”
-
-For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise.
-In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. “Si, señorita—after
-you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new
-levy for equipment and supplies. Also”—another black flash went to
-Gordon—“it will be my duty to take this man to my general.”
-
-“Perhaps I had better go,” Gordon whispered. “It may save you—”
-
-Lee cut him off without looking around. “And shoot him the moment you
-get him outside the gates?” She quoted the Mexican law of “The escape.”
-“No, señor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him
-with my own hands at your general’s call.” She added, after a
-significant pause, “Along with the evidence of your own neglect in
-permitting your men to attack my people.”
-
-For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of
-effect—especially upon meddlesome consuls—it was the fashion in the
-revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one
-could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He
-blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed
-through his vicious look.
-
-“Very well, señorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the
-horses. These I must have at once.”
-
-“Well, think you’ve got ’em, an’ let it go at that!”
-
-While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her
-meditation flashed a sharp question: “Were you at the hacienda of the
-señor Benson last week?”
-
-The man’s dark brows rose. “No, señorita. If there was a requisition
-served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez.”
-
-“When did you leave the cuartel general?”
-
-“Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other
-side of the railroad. But what difference does it make—”
-
-“A great deal.” She gave a little nod. “Since you left headquarters the
-señor Benson, with my manager, the señor Perrin, has gone with an offer
-of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter
-may also be left with him.”
-
-“Which lets you out!” Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the
-background, now burst out. “Now git! That’s what I said—an’ take your
-dead hombre along.”
-
-From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the
-man’s glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the
-peonas who were now crowding the *patio* gates. Everywhere his glance
-fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of
-glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning
-fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his
-glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent
-behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a
-shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the *peonas*
-opened.
-
-While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the
-*patio* wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and
-Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his
-*ancianos* still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret
-mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it.
-
-As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they
-passed out under the *patio* arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically,
-then followed his men.
-
-“Saddle a fresh horse an’ go after them,” Jake ordered, when Sliver came
-up. “Don’t let ’em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we’ll
-have to keep one man circling the hills while the *ancianos* keep watch
-an’ watch at the gates.”
-
-With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men
-ride away. “I am sorry to have brought this on you,” he said, in low
-tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added,
-“Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him.”
-
-A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables.
-Jake was shooing the *peonas* back to their quarters with much language
-and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick
-movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and
-planted a swift kiss on his cheek.
-
-“I don’t want to be widowed—before I’m married.”
-
-At midnight Sliver brought in his report. “They’ve gone on to El Sol.
-After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into ’em when they
-stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood
-quiet an’ the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling.
-The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn’t hear of it.
-
-“‘The damned gringos shoot straight,’ I heard one of ’em say. ‘Already
-have they killed one of us, an’ now they be ready. Also the horses are
-tired an’ we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.’ Then, after
-some jawing, they moved on.”
-
-“An’ they won’t come back,” Jake commented on the report. “Not so long
-as they kin find something that looks easier.”
-
-Which was only half of the truth!
-
-
-XXIX: TEMPTATION
-================
-
-Bull’s eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted
-pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering
-mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half
-conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence,
-the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth.
-
-Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town
-enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in
-the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand
-*revueltosos*, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in
-their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the
-scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth
-within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung
-straight as strings in the crystal air.
-
-“’Morning, Diogenes!” The correspondent’s cheerful face poked up from
-under the edge of the car. “Some picturesque, heigh? Who’d think, to
-look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the
-destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But
-that’s your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a
-quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night
-for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A
-night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to
-the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit
-each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a
-cheerful, ‘Adios, señor, it is time to begin fighting!’ they return to
-their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the
-midst of their dirt and disorder.” He added, thoughtfully, “I never see
-them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children
-shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the
-powerful weapons we placed in their hands.”
-
-“Picturesque? Yes,” he went on, from a pause. “But it’s mighty hard on
-the common people. Look at that!”
-
-He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was
-clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car.
-
-“She’s picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!”
-Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: “If our wise men
-in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are
-doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! *The seed corn and
-the brood mares!* You know what that means—famine! If I were a poet I’d
-take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles’s
-war horses—I’d take her for the symbol of Mexico—Mexico bleeding and
-bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed.
-
-“It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it’s
-true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast
-returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring
-perpetually upon one another. Already—oh!” He descended to a homely but
-vital conclusion. “They make me sick. God send us a *man*! A man with
-sympathy and insight; understanding of this people’s failings and
-necessities. God send us another Lincoln!”
-
-“You bet it’s hell!” In spite of the profanity Bull’s laconic comment
-was reverent in its essence as the most profound “Amen!”
-
-With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful
-self. “I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast.”
-
-Stepping from the ladder, Bull’s glance went, in spite of himself, to
-the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone
-jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his
-back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look
-when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his
-sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and
-when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town,
-it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind.
-
-From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in
-dirty streams of khaki and *peon mantas* splashed with the flash of
-brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot
-of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured
-into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt
-and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with
-a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its
-evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson’s remark as
-they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified:
-
-“If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this
-would be a safer, cleaner land.”
-
-Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet
-odor of carrion hung thick in the air.
-
-“More Mexican efficiency,” the dean shrugged. “After the last scrap out
-here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They’d pile
-twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the
-soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of
-hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way—it’s
-hard on a white man, though the Mexicans don’t seem to mind. Appeals to
-the natural vulture in them, I suppose.”
-
-While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the
-crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under
-guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten
-years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one
-thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the
-extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell—to be
-picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and
-hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd.
-
-“Ole, Enrico!” As they came opposite, Bull’s friend hailed the officer
-in command.
-
-After walking a few feet with him, he came back. “They’re Spanish
-storekeepers on the way to ‘the place designated,’ which is a
-revolutionary euphemism for being shot. ‘The place’ is the cemetery
-where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican
-refinement, eh, making a man’s legs carry him to his own funeral? Their
-crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in
-contributing to the ‘Cause,’ been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps
-have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters’ beds.
-Even in this country”—he spoke with bitter irony—“there are still men to
-be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are
-Spanish. God knows, it’s enough. Valles never forgets that he is a *peon*.
-After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children’s children
-the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec forebears.
-It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some justification
-for it—if it were only a cause and effect. But”—his pitying glance
-followed the stumbling boy—“it is rotten hard to watch.”
-
-It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while
-running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing
-glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As
-the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of
-Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an
-interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a *revueltoso*
-would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest
-from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at
-the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter,
-quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand.
-
-“That isn’t quite so bad.” The correspondent nodded at one struggling
-desperately with her captor. “She’ll soon give in and dry her tears. In
-one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within
-twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with
-Valles’s soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by
-a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it
-doesn’t matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the
-others—daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many
-of them educated in Europe—well, during the sack of Durango forty girls
-of the upper classes committed suicide.”
-
-After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and
-turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old
-Spanish mansion, with a great *patio* and interior garden, its high
-walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The
-glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which
-flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun
-blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by
-contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet
-demesne.
-
-As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in
-earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest.
-
-“More victims of the ‘Cause.’” After he had greeted them, the consul, a
-bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. “Valles has robbed churches,
-seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with—this. Last
-spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to
-which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and
-came here to-day to ask the priest—who is himself a refugee whom I saved
-from a mob that was stoning him to death outside—to ask permission for
-themselves and others to end their desecration by suicide. One would
-think that such experiences would kill in any human being the belief in
-a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good stuff. Sticks right
-to his guns.”
-
-Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came
-just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the
-burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: “The life He gave
-none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is
-not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight.
-It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness;
-puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was
-necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked
-ones to their proper end? It may be”—he paused, shaking his old head,
-tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks—“but it is not for us to attempt
-answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have wished that
-He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones of the mob.
-But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait till His
-brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision.”
-
-Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the
-children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of
-mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty
-four or five, raised her pale, olive face. “And may we love them, our
-babes, when they come?”
-
-The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the
-wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. “God is love, Sisters. He
-would not wish otherwise.”
-
-In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were
-wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked
-slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house.
-
-Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost
-pain. And yet—even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the
-garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on
-a small side-table. On their way they had passed *cantina* after
-cantina, all thronged with half-drunken *revueltosos*, all exhaling a
-thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the
-drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul’s invitation, he walked out
-on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in
-time to hear the consul’s conclusion on Benson’s business.
-
-“As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was
-never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn’t help
-any for me to go with you, for I’ve been fighting him on other accounts
-all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that
-will secure your admittance.”
-
-On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the *cantinas*. With
-invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful
-was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals;
-seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd
-that blocked always the gates of Valles’s headquarters—simple *peones*
-who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of
-obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a *peon* like themselves who had abased
-the great *hacendados*, their taskmasters, confiscated their lands,
-beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though he
-shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw them;
-had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming and
-going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a secretary,
-seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to what was going
-on.
-
-“That’s ‘Matador’ Fero, Valles’s killer.” Benson nudged him as a man
-looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a
-suspicious stare. “He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon,
-in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power
-rifle. Looks it, doesn’t he?”
-
-He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black,
-piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his
-colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom
-they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there
-closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged
-before the desk, and also the *revueltoso* officers who lounged on the
-window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice.
-
-Fierce beast that the “Matador” was, Bull’s keen knowledge of men,
-developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less
-dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive
-upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his
-thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest,
-sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither,
-told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the
-bandit *peon*, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they
-entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand
-nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling,
-it would rise and fall with a bang.
-
-“You may tell your papers, señores, the reverse of the other day was
-sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow—you have seen my
-reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?—to-morrow I
-shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot
-wind. And you can tell them”—he observed a sinister pause—“you may tell
-them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is now
-giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American lives
-and property in the country I control, but if your government allies
-itself with my enemies—” His big fist struck the table with force that
-emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes.
-
-Yet, pulsing with vindictive anger, the exhibition paled by contrast
-with his furious attack on one of his own officers who came in as the
-correspondents filed out. The fact that he had been wounded and had gone
-on, alone, when his command refused to face a galling fire, made no
-difference. Beast mouth stretched to a gorilla grin, every line of his
-face writhing in an awful smile, Valles scored him with coarse insult
-and seething invective while his hand toyed thirstily with the hilt of
-his knife.
-
-Flushing and paling, the man stood with hanging head till an order
-issued from the last furious burst. “Go, now, and shoot every tenth man
-in your command. I will teach them that I am more to be feared than the
-damned Carranzistas!”
-
-In the midst of it Bull nudged Benson. “Don’t you allow we better leave
-him cool for a while?”
-
-But the Englishman’s obstinate jaw set hard. “I’m not afraid of him.
-Besides”—the secretary stood again in the doorway—“it is too late.”
-
-A curt nod marked Valles’s recognition of Benson as they followed in.
-Then, as his tigerish eyes took in Bull, they lit with quick
-appreciation of his bulk, then went off again on their suspicious
-questing. While Benson talked, he beat again a soft tattoo with the heel
-of his hand; then, rising, he walked off into another room.
-
-The secretary followed, and through the closed door they caught the
-harsh, throaty monotone. When it ceased the secretary came out.
-
-“My general says that all of your property is subject to requisition to
-be paid for in legal currency issued by him as the chief of the
-republican armies.”
-
-“And he thinks we’ll stand for that?” His eyes flashing under bent
-brows, harsh face burning with anger, Benson stepped toward the door.
-“I’ll—”
-
-But as he moved the “Matador” stepped in between. Half a dozen lounging
-officers, too, came hurrying from the balconies.
-
-“It would do no good, señor.” The secretary’s shoulders rose in a shrug.
-“Wait a more favorable time.”
-
-Benson stared down upon him, big fists clenched, face purple with
-furious passion. Thinking he was about to strike, Bull put out his hand.
-But, turning suddenly, Benson strode out of the room, throwing his
-defiance back over his shoulder.
-
-“He can’t bluff a British subject that way! He’ll give me his answer
-*himself*—and he’ll give it *to-day*.”
-
-As Bull followed out a hand touched his shoulder. Thinking it was the
-secretary, he turned—then stood staring at the sentry on guard at the
-door, who returned a sheepish grin. Though the face seemed familiar, he
-did not recognize the man for one of the raiders Lee had saved from
-hanging till he spoke.
-
-“Ah, señor, ’tis fine to see an old face. The señorita, she that saved
-us from your just anger, she is well? Tell her that fine mercy was
-defeated by the *revueltosos* who took us from her servants. Ask if she
-will in her great kindness have the general set us free that we may
-return to our wives and babes in Las Bocas.”
-
-In spite of his own stress, Bull could not but grin. “Was the jefe of
-Las Bocas a better master than Valles?”
-
-“A master is always a master.” The man shrugged. “But one’s pais is
-one’s pais and the niñas, the flesh of one’s body, blood of his blood,
-cannot be forgotten. Thou wilt speak to her, señor?”
-
-The tear that trickled down his villainous face earned him a civil
-answer. Though he knew the futility of it, Bull nodded. “Si, I will
-speak.”
-
-Below he found Benson shoving like an angry bull through the *peon*
-crowd. On its outskirts he turned and shook his fist at the building.
-
-“I’m going back to the consul—to tell him something that he’ll take
-better alone. Where shall I meet you?”
-
-“Here?”
-
-“No, I can’t tell how long I may be. Make it after lunch at the car.”
-
-Bull nodded. Then remembering the correspondent’s warning, he called
-after him, “I’d like to be there when you tackle him again.”
-
-Nodding, Benson walked on. Left alone, Bull sat down on a bench in the
-plaza. Already the drink desire was returned upon him. And as he sat
-there, in the grip of his mortal weakness, three soldiers seated
-themselves on the same bench and proceeded to pass a bottle of
-*tequila*.
-
-Before he even saw it Bull’s mutinous nostrils snuffed the odor. Looking
-away, he tried to think, to recall the vision that strengthened and
-cooled him in his hour of torture last night. But now, the stronger for
-his long abstinence, that enormous desire inflamed his brain; enveloped
-it in heated mists through which the pretty, wholesome faces loomed dim
-and indefinite. And then—
-
-After a curious glance up at the huge figure, the nearest soldier tapped
-his arm. “You will drink with us, señor?”
-
-What it cost him to refuse and walk away! Men have gone down in history
-as martyrs by the exercise of no more effort. But just as pressure
-enough will snap a bone, as persistent fatigue will paralyze a muscle,
-so the effort weakened his will, broke his resolution. Feeling curiously
-weak, utterly exhausted, he stopped at the plaza corner and gazed at a
-*cantina* across the road.
-
-Even then he did not give in. Hands writhing behind his back, face one
-purple suffusion, he circled and recircled the plaza half a dozen times
-before he stopped at the same spot again. In that time desire has no
-height he did not reach; passion no heat, hell no torture, he did not
-endure. And while he stood watching the *cantina’s* roaring trade,
-reluctant but conscious in his soul that the end was come, a hand
-dropped with a hearty slap on his back.
-
-“Come on, Diogenes, you’re just in time. We’ve discovered some beer,
-good cold beer, down at the German Club. Counting the consul, there’s
-only two Dutchmen left in the town, but trust them to have their beer.
-Don’t waste time in astonishment. Come right along.”
-
-In his mortal weakness Bull snatched at the straw. He could drink a
-barrel of the thin Mexican stuff without knowing it—at least he felt he
-could! But while, for an hour thereafter, they sat in a cool *patio*
-talking and sipping, the despised brew was still potent enough to loose
-the mad rustler spirit that hearkened only to the voice of desire.
-
-When the correspondents left to file their despatches, he remained.
-
-“I’m waiting for Benson,” he told them. “If you see him, tell him I’m
-here.”
-
-While they walked down the *patio* and out through the bar into the
-street, he sat nervously making rings with his beer-glass. Then,
-trembling with eagerness, he called the waiter.
-
-“This stuff hasn’t a kick in it. Bring me a bottle of whisky!”
-
-
-XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH
-================================
-
-As they sat at breakfast Gordon’s glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her
-smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in
-his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal.
-
-“I’m going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day,” she told Jake.
-
-Sliver’s nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement.
-“It’s a cinch,” he chuckled. “’Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never
-seen two folks more sot on each other.”
-
-Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. “An’ who in hell might they be?”
-
-“Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other
-like two stamps at the end of a day’s ride in a sweaty pocket; allus
-that close up walkin’, standin’ or settin’, you had to walk around ’em
-twice to find the jine.”
-
-“An’ after they was married?” Jake questioned.
-
-Sliver scratched his head. “You-all mightn’t believe it, but you c’d
-have fired a charge of buckshot between ’em at long range without
-hittin’ either.”
-
-Jake nodded. “I’d have allowed as much. But these ain’t that kind. Did
-you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she’ll keep him
-on aidge that-a-way all his life. He’ll never get all at once; never
-quite reach the end. They’ll allus be something beyond.”
-
-“Say!” Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. “Fer an old bachelor you
-know a heap. Where’d you learn it?”
-
-“Where any man learns it—from a woman.” A shadow swept, for a moment,
-the reckless face. “On’y—I didn’t have sense enough to stay be my
-teacher.”
-
-Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up—for
-it was his day on guard—Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover,
-he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon
-ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his
-being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had
-somehow failed to fill.
-
-Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in
-morals which has puzzled wiser heads. “Ain’t Natur’ the fickle jade,
-a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he’s still
-terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn’t she a’ b’en more single-minded?”
-
-His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a
-flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were
-now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at
-correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver’s could easily have
-perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the
-attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch.
-
-“Say,” he called down, “d’you allow it’s all right for them two to go
-off that-a-way by themselves?”
-
-Jake snorted. “Didn’t she ride with you yesterday an’ me the day afore?”
-
-“Yes, but she’s our boss an’—well, they love each other a whole lot.”
-
-“So that’s what’s biting you?” In one sentence Jake countered heavily on
-the common view of things. “She kin ride with tough guys like you an’ me
-an’ it’s all right; but she mustn’t go out with the man that loves her
-more ’n anything on earth. Where’s your sense?”
-
-Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing,
-he made weak answer, “I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a
-chapperonny.” Vanquished by Jake’s disgusted snort, he withdrew and went
-down to close the gates.
-
-Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise,
-from where she and her father had overlooked the *hacienda* on that last
-fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge
-painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As
-then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant
-cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range
-rolling in bright billows to the far hills.
-
-Her cry was the same: “Oh, isn’t it beautiful? Soon the rains will come
-and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be
-had anywhere, but these golds—that is Mexico.”
-
-Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her
-father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges,
-scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and
-their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential
-calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the
-soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and
-grace of its flexures from her man’s riding-clothes, the mobile face,
-molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest
-subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when
-she showed signs of stopping.
-
-“Oh, I’m so glad that you love it!” she sighed, happily. “It would have
-been such a disappointment if you— But that is so silly, because it
-wouldn’t have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark
-evenings after”—she went on with a little flourish—“I shall read you
-stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old
-leather trunk. It will be lots of fun.”
-
-Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where
-she left off, he began. “Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big
-streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees
-this—well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled
-down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary
-nonsense, we’ll—”
-
-The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his
-imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid,
-healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot
-she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy
-pause.
-
-Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to
-their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged
-in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a
-trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods
-freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly
-scheme of things according to their hearts’ desire, the gods in
-resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were
-to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from
-the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently
-joined hands and rode on.
-
-At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher’s purpose. After they
-passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always
-out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the
-mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their
-course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went
-after them at a gallop.
-
-Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and,
-as he drew nearer, she recognized the *mozo* who had brought Ramon’s
-message from El Sol.
-
-“Que? Filomena?”
-
-As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her
-happiness. “Oh, Betty is ill!” she translated for Gordon. “Mary Mills
-sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as
-my escort, so it won’t be necessary for you—” She paused, anticipating
-rebellion.
-
-It came. “Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn’t let
-you, anyway.”
-
-If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. “That’s what
-one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I’ll have to put up with it.”
-Turning to the *mozo*, she gave him his orders in Spanish: “The señor
-will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the
-gringo señor, where we have gone.”
-
-Disconcertion showed through the man’s *peon* immobility. But with an
-obsequious “Si, señorita!” he rode on, but stopped over the next rise,
-dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly.
-
-Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to
-be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight
-he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he
-built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the
-succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet.
-
-Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it
-soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and
-lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke
-puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning,
-mounted and rode away.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight
-embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the *fonda*. But in
-place of Felicia’s smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of
-old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an
-*arriero* whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream.
-
-As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her
-glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed,
-she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled
-around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the
-kiss, into neutral territory.
-
-Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the
-night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge
-to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and
-violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that
-undulated like a woman’s mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the
-hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with
-green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and
-plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in
-one mood as the other.
-
-“A wonderful land!” Gordon breathed it.
-
-Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and
-its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across
-brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres;
-then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn,
-and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the
-mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa,
-rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in
-the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety,
-richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled
-Garden of Eden—could he have done all this, even then imagination would
-have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to
-prophecy.
-
-“Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this
-is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth.”
-
-That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet
-brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration
-but an eagle’s flight away. Following battle and retreat across
-sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was
-scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon’s blast over the face of the
-land to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue
-range columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning
-*haciendas*. With them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and
-cries of the wounded and tortured, wailing of ravished women.
-
-In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that
-had spied the *mozo’s* signal and were now watching them from the
-chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-“Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease.”
-
-If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few
-hundred yards away, might have heard the argument.
-
-She would easily have recognized Ramon’s voice. “True, amigo, and I love
-him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his
-compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it—to make no
-attempt on their lives.”
-
-“A promise?” A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. “What is it but a
-deadfall for one’s enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed,
-women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it
-to find a hot enough corner in hell. But *I* gave no promise—and he
-killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to
-me.”
-
-“No, no!” Ramon’s voice rose in quick protest. “His killing would still
-be at my hands. Also”—the addition came in lower tones—“I would rather
-he lived—to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in
-my arms. No, señor, we will rope him from behind.”
-
-“Bueno! Have it thy—” A sharp hiss cut them off.
-
-Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of
-a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through
-thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon,
-with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with
-the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men
-before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above.
-
-She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her
-stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. “I’ll go down first. If I break my
-neck you can pick up the remains.”
-
-Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way
-on her beast’s haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with
-skilful use of the bridle.
-
-“Come on!” she called back, laughing.
-
-But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the
-noose of a *riata* writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and
-was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a
-man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under
-her horse’s belly.
-
-“Run!” From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her
-shoulder. “Run! Oh, *run*!”
-
-He could not—had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had barely
-time to use the spur, and if Ramon’s cast had been made a second sooner
-he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the loop
-settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next
-second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily.
-While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun.
-Now he turned it loose downhill.
-
-That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker’s boast,
-and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious
-through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip,
-shooting close to the ground.
-
-His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging
-of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle,
-the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the
-leader’s head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm
-in against his body.
-
-At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. “He
-has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!”
-
-Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them
-snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill.
-
-Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only
-have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while
-the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness
-and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break
-his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee’s voice, shrill in its
-mortal terror, rang out:
-
-“If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!”
-
-To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing,
-like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked,
-but without answer raised a warning hand. “The gringo is not to be
-harmed, hombre.”
-
-“But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compañero.”
-
-“The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own
-life in the hollow of his hand.”
-
-Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife.
-Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in
-all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a
-*peon*. Behind them rose a coarse laugh.
-
-“Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou
-forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave
-thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo?
-As for Tomas—I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us to
-divide this señor’s money.”
-
-The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. “Bueno, Rafael,
-bueno!” Another called: “Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man’s
-shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas’s throat it flashed at
-last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee.”
-
-The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to
-back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon
-pulled a roll of notes from his breast.
-
-“Here, hombre.”
-
-The man’s huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his
-share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee’s horse by the
-bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last
-odd note, she spoke in English.
-
-“I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against
-me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster.” From which she ran
-on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of
-memory—their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her
-own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. “And now would you
-destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And
-what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love.”
-
-She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked
-and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes
-stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic
-fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the
-hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its
-grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took
-out of bitter anger.
-
-“What have I to gain?” He threw up his head in defiance. “You! with love
-or without it!”
-
-By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent
-outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear.
-
-“Ramon, what are you going to do?”
-
-Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences.
-“Take you to San Angel—to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and
-priest.”
-
-“Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known
-me from childhood—”
-
-“They are Mexican—would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like
-themselves. They will do as I say. If not”—his nod carried a sinister
-significance—“so much the worse for you.”
-
-Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the
-brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his
-insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned
-away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its
-mate.
-
-She bent her head in sudden shame. “Ramon, please take me home.”
-
-“Yes, to *ours*.” He snatched her bridle. “Come! already we have wasted
-too much time.”
-
-As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. “You
-stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember
-she is no *peona*, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you will
-be called to account by our government.”
-
-“Your government?” Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. “Your
-government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and
-hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a
-villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the
-massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and
-obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government—for
-the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it
-has lodged—complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us—nor help
-*you*. Come on, hombre!”
-
-As he moved off, leading Lee’s beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to
-break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to
-his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking
-back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the
-moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm,
-her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then
-the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair.
-
-Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot
-swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The
-revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at
-him.
-
-“Going to cut my throat, now he’s gone,” Gordon read it—and did not
-care.
-
-But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts
-even a bandit nature. “We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him.”
-Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the
-others. “Let us lift him over there in the shade.”
-
-“’Tis hard on thee, amigo,” the fellow went on, after they moved him.
-“’Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no fear”—though
-he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the gestures, helped out
-by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning on his meaning—“we
-will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to the strong. He has
-not got her yet. Adios—and better luck!”
-
-As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored,
-for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear,
-cold vision to face its dread facts—the tragic realities even then in
-course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In
-agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them
-go.
-
-
-XXXI: “BRAINS WIN”
-==================
-
-Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken
-faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad
-phantasmagoria, devil’s dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting.
-As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a
-window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More
-clearly, a second picture stood out—of a big black rustler—to wit,
-himself—set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the
-rifles aimed, and yet—his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he
-lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet
-across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the *patio* of
-the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the
-staccato pulsations of rifle-fire.
-
-“The battle’s on!”
-
-As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony,
-poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and
-covered his face, but could not shut out despair. “My God! I’ve fallen
-down!”
-
-Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood,
-face buried in his hands, till he recognized the “dean’s” voice.
-
-“Well, come on, fellows! They’re going to it again. Let’s get out where
-we can see.”
-
-“I’ll take a look at Diogenes first,” came the voice of his friend. “You
-chaps go on. I’ll catch up.”
-
-Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the
-correspondent’s gaze. “Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went
-it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but—last night!” He shook his head in mock
-reproof.
-
-“What did you do? What didn’t you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then
-went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in
-business—those you didn’t break up. It took a troop to round you up.
-They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along.
-Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here.”
-
-“Well, I’m sorry! damned sorry that he did!” Bull shrugged. “On’y to be
-shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother
-in the gutter.”
-
-His bitterness touched the other. “Look here, old man, don’t take it so
-hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and
-go on again.”
-
-Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling
-had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now,
-as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent’s face grew grave.
-Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way.
-
-“Where’s Benson?” He looked up. “Did he go again to Valles?”
-
-“Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it—without avail.
-What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he
-said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done
-much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. ‘So if the
-son of a gun kills me,’ he told him, ‘the boys will know it for murder.’
-He must have had a hunch, for he never came back.”
-
-“Dead?” Bull broke a shocked silence.
-
-The other nodded. “They acknowledge it—say he tried to kill Valles,
-which is, of course, all rot.”
-
-Bull had leaped up. “Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It’s
-no use.” He waved away expostulations. “You yourself warned me not to
-let him go alone!” He started out the door.
-
-“Here!” the correspondent seized him. “Where are you going?”
-
-“Out—to get drunk—get killed if I kin!”
-
-Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the
-correspondent stuck. “All right! all right! But what’s your hurry?
-You’ll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with
-me.”
-
-Through Bull’s black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. “Humph! Stand on
-a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?”
-
-“Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that’s
-exactly the crack Valles made about ‘gringo correspondents’ and
-‘long-distance reporting.’ I’m going to show the beggar. It’s me for the
-outposts where folks get killed.”
-
-Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. “Don’t be a fool! You’re paid
-to get the news, not to do Valles’s fighting.”
-
-The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not
-repress a grin. “What’s sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have
-a right to get yourself killed, so have I.”
-
-The black shadow again wrapped Bull. “I’ve good reason. If I kin git
-myself shot, like a man, I’m just that much ahead. But you—”
-
-“Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away
-with a crack like that? We’re doing too much talking. Come on!”
-
-“I’d—” Bull hesitated. “I’d like to see—*his* consul first. His
-wife—she’d naterally like to know. She’s in El Paso, just now, an’ I
-know her address.”
-
-“We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don’t
-turn up, I wouldn’t want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too
-long.”
-
-Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. “You needn’t to be scairt.” He
-answered the other’s look. “My thirst’s over—for a while. But I need a
-bracer.” Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier
-significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return
-to the old life.
-
-Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet
-of despair he listened while the consul talked.
-
-“I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I’d
-succeeded. If it hadn’t been that he was seen going in, he would simply
-have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several
-stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he
-carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being
-placed under arrest. Lastly—to satisfy me and give his murder the
-semblance of a military execution—that he was tried by drumhead
-court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general.
-But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin”—he went on from a heavy
-pause—“this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon my
-records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one year—it
-may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come up again.
-No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may have
-fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite the
-name of William Benson in our archives, ‘The murderer was brought to
-justice.’”
-
-The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among
-wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented
-thereon in his breezy fashion.
-
-“That’s Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than
-hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up
-goes a regiment and decimates the tribe—or a brigade, or an army, if
-necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a
-British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat
-old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He’d make shorter work
-of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the
-Hindu rajahs.”
-
-In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally
-impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet
-square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the
-United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a
-letter.
-
-“Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!” He coughed
-ironically. “Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact
-that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and
-in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle
-Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial
-ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or
-property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save
-this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints!
-Oyez! Oyez! Frankly,” he turned to the consul, “what do you think of
-it?”
-
-The consul shrugged his shoulders. “You wish to register?”
-
-His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the
-correspondent’s name and commission. “Anybody else you wish to notify?”
-
-The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then
-he reached for the letter the correspondent handed.
-
-“To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?”
-
-The pen scratched Lee’s name and address.
-
-“Anything to send?”
-
-“Nothing!”
-
-“Very well, gentlemen!” His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his
-handshake—the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. “I shall
-observe your wishes—if possible. Well—” His shoulders rose again. “Hasta
-luego! Till we meet again.”
-
-“A brave man in a weak place!” The correspondent rightfully placed him,
-outside. “Now, Diogenes, for the front.”
-
-An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last
-quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and
-rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of
-stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the
-flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a
-battery of French “threes” was spitting shrapnel with the feverish
-energy of an angry cat.
-
-Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists,
-whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot
-through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile
-in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting
-that flank.
-
-Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were
-to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in
-a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista
-positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the
-ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would
-strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping
-through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.
-
-Seizing the dead man’s rifle, Bull stepped into his place.
-
-It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would
-have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment’s
-surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights
-and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler
-spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his
-*vaqueros* on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every
-other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully
-as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter
-puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire,
-grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the
-dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction.
-
-“Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he’ll soon get over it.”
-
-Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and
-began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The
-spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling
-rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of
-the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture
-of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy.
-
-A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her
-heels patting out *tortillas* while she gossiped with another girl, in
-complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was
-indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her
-coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face
-convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while
-screaming frightful curses.
-
-“Damned dogs of Carranzistas!” she finished with her last, spent breath.
-“Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with
-tails between the legs!”
-
-Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The
-fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face.
-“Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my
-first prisoner.”
-
-Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while
-making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards
-separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that
-burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift,
-shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its
-mark; she collapsed in a heap.
-
-Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent’s
-yell: “Come back, you fool! She’s dead! shot through the head!” he ran
-out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall.
-
-As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept
-space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was
-not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a
-while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes
-flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic
-curses at the distant line.
-
-“Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day
-shall be my lover!”
-
-“And here comes he that will do it!” The man on Bull’s left touched his
-shoulder.
-
-Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling
-gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great
-black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance
-the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers,
-rifle-fire, booming guns.
-
-“It’s Valles!”
-
-As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black
-horse launched out and shot up the hill.
-
-“Make way, hombres, for the guns!”
-
-Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken
-vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the
-correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension
-flashed in his hot eyes.
-
-“Ole, compañero!” His wave of the hand took in all. “Hot work! but
-nothing to that which is to come. Mira!”
-
-Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of
-dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank.
-“Carranzista cavalry! But—look again!”
-
-Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry,
-brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the
-west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass.
-Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching
-as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles
-shook his fist at the distant dust.
-
-“Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!”
-
-The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse
-with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling
-bullets, he directed their emplacement. “To the left, hombres! a little
-more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!” The last one set, he
-rasped out a last command: “Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!” Then
-followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.
-
-“He bears a charmed life!” The man next Bull spoke again. “Out of a
-hundred battles he has come with never a hurt.” He added, with a wink,
-“An’ it was not always from his front the bullets came.”
-
-Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit
-with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The
-artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up
-his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back,
-the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to
-the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.
-
-“What are you trying to do?”
-
-“Justice on that grinning devil.”
-
-“Good job no one saw you.” A quick glance around showed the artillerymen
-and revolutionists absorbed in their own work “Do you know what they
-would have done to both of us—skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or
-something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don’t care yourself, just
-think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, ‘Having
-toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.’”
-
-“I hadn’t thought of that. But if I’d been alone—”
-
-He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to
-his loophole.
-
-On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the
-massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown
-blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and
-sabers, *machetes*, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then
-the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which,
-like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs.
-Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that
-other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud
-rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.
-
-“Weekes was wrong!” It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell.
-“He’s smashed ’em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!” But as the
-cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, “That is, if
-Valles stops and comes back.”
-
-When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved
-into criticism. “Whatever is he thinking of? There he’s gone with all
-the cavalry and left his flank exposed!”
-
-At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with
-greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand
-drums. Answering the “threes,” shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking
-curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next
-wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next
-to Bull collapsed without a groan.
-
-Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps
-where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill
-came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns.
-
-“Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of
-their guns! They’ve drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they’ll
-flank us! My God! there they come!”
-
-From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of
-smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men.
-He leaped and caught Bull’s arm.
-
-“Come on! Let’s get while we can!”
-
-They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild,
-maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head.
-
-“Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself.”
-
-“Man! Valles is defeated!” The other seized and shook him. “Do you know
-what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico.
-If you won’t consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to
-leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against
-Americans?”
-
-Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and
-smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells,
-there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills;
-then the feel of Lee’s soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten,
-the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.
-
-“Come on!”
-
-Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden
-their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain
-of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and
-low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the
-dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his
-jokes.
-
-“Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!” he gasped. “Gosh! but that
-chaparral is going faster the other way!”
-
-A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that
-dire moment he remained his cheerful self.
-
-“Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they’d ever get
-me. Here’s my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck
-’em on to the wires. Now, *run like hell*!”
-
-And Bull did “run like hell”—with the correspondent across his
-shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded
-out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the
-knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief
-twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his
-saddle, arms around his horse’s neck, he headed for the town.
-
-As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging
-yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches.
-Followed the terrible roar of a rout—yells, shrieks, curses, victorious
-shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it
-caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated
-above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked
-with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted
-adobe streets to the railroad yards.
-
-There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains
-and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the
-hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell,
-then—the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass be-spattered
-with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, sentient human
-beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with Valles’s own
-guns.
-
-“We’re farther up!” the correspondent whispered through white, drawn
-lips. “We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main
-line to insure our getaway.”
-
-He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile.
-“That’s queer. It stood about here, yet I don’t see the placards.
-Perhaps we have overshot.”
-
-But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car
-ahead. “Here, señores! This way!”
-
-Just then, too, the door rolled back and the “dean” looked out. “Hurry
-up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales
-Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick
-sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out.
-We’re traveling, for the present, incognito. You’re hurt! Here, you
-fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!”
-
-After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the “dean” turned to
-Bull. “That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning,
-looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the
-Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants.”
-
-But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome
-accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang,
-and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine’s tug.
-
-
-XXXII: TRAVAIL
-==============
-
-The instant she passed from Gordon’s sight Lee’s smile went out,
-quenched by mortal fear. For years tales that defied by their black
-horror exaggeration by even the fervid *peon* minds had filtered into Los
-Arboles, and, more vividly than Gordon, she realized her danger.
-
-It was not so much Ramon. At San Carlos she would have a fighting
-chance; stood ready to match her woman’s wit against his man’s strength.
-Her fear centered on the men.
-
-As, overtaking them, he rode by on the narrow path, Ilarian pressed
-close against her. “Cheer up, little one! ’Tis the fighting cock that
-wins his hen. ’Tis the way of the world, and what matter it so long as
-she be won? ’Tis his turn now, but later ’twill be for thee to keep him
-itching.”
-
-Laughing hoarsely, he rode on, but in passing his rude fingers searched
-the softness of her arm and she caught the bold look into her eyes of
-his grinning fellow. Thereafter she felt their glances touching,
-plucking at her like fumbling fingers. Now glowing with shame, again
-frozen with terror, she endured it—to her it seemed hours before she
-spoke to Ramon.
-
-“I’m afraid of those men. Can’t you—send them away?”
-
-He shrugged. “You have more reason to be afraid of me.”
-
-“You?” In spite of the deadly chill at her heart she managed a little
-laugh. “That is impossible.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“Fear one’s oldest friend?” Already, with intuitive guile, she was
-laying the foundations of her defense. Though he looked at her with
-quick suspicion, she returned the innocent eyes nature has given woman
-for her chief protection. “For you—a man of whom I have known only good?
-But these men fill me with fear.”
-
-Suspicion clouded, for a moment, his eyes. Passing, it left his gloom
-lighter. Reassurance softened his tone. “Don’t be afraid. They will
-leave us at San Carlos.”
-
-“But, Ramon, it is now noon. If we ride hard we cannot get there before
-dark.” She shuddered at the thought.
-
-“You would rather we were alone?”
-
-“A thousand times.” She returned to his gaze the same innocent eyes—and
-once more his gloom lightened a shade.
-
-“They are going to San Carlos anyway, so I can hardly send them away.
-But I am armed, and there is no necessity for you to be afraid. Also—you
-said that the jefe and priest at San Carlos would refuse to marry us. If
-so, these are the men who can help me compel.”
-
-“Ramon!” she spoke with dread earnestness, “look quickly behind you!”
-
-He did, and his quick frown told that he was not pleased. Dismounting
-under a pretext of cinching up his saddle, he motioned for the two men
-behind to pass ahead.
-
-“You saw!” she said, riding on. “You are armed, but they are four to
-one; may take you unawares. I ask only one thing. Keep my feet bound,
-take any other precaution you choose, but unfasten my hands and—lend me
-your knife.”
-
-“To use on *me*, if you get the chance?”
-
-“Not on you nor them!” Her steady look carried her meaning.
-
-His glance went forward to the revolutionists, who broke out, just then,
-in uproarious laughter.
-
-“If I thought—” His hand went to his gun, then fell again. “No! they are
-rough and coarse, but they know well that my father is Valles’s friend;
-that if they lifted a hand against me he would flay them alive. Really,
-there is no danger, yet—if it will make you less fearful. But you
-promise—to return it, the knife, at San Carlos?”
-
-“I promise.”
-
-“I never knew you to lie, and I—” His face lost a little of its
-hardness. “I would prefer to be gentle.”
-
-Leaning over, he unbound her arms, then gave her the case-knife that
-hung at his hip. “I suppose I’m a fool,” he said as she slid it under
-her belt inside her shirt.
-
-“Indeed you are not!” she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a
-picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned
-her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead
-rope and go galloping back.
-
-The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse.
-Also, with a woman’s self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the
-thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on
-till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her
-again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the
-afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and
-rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley,
-thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them.
-While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows
-drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which
-men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped,
-suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with
-apprehension.
-
-“The beasts are tired, señor, and this is a good place to camp,” a voice
-came back.
-
-“Oh, don’t! Let us keep on!” she pleaded.
-
-“The animals are tired and must be fed,” Ramon answered. “After they are
-rested we will go on.”
-
-As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a
-wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been
-possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a
-match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her
-down and seated her close to the fire.
-
-Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her
-swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet—all
-the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror.
-Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from
-his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her,
-she broke out with a sudden scream:
-
-“Take care!”
-
-Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him,
-pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee
-leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started
-toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his
-pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the
-wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and
-pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white
-shoulder and threw her to the ground.
-
-She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish
-face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark
-lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay
-till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily.
-
-“No, no!” The snatch of the second man loosened the other’s grip so that
-she fell between them to the ground. “No, hombre, fair play between
-compañeros. We shall gamble for her. The winner, if he choose, can then
-sell his chance.”
-
-The fighting, writhing mass at the other side of the fire now
-straightened out, and as they rose, leaving Ramon securely bound on the
-ground, the other two added their protests. “Si, hombre, we will not
-stand for that. She goes first to the winner, according to our custom.
-Bring her back to the fire.”
-
-To avoid their handling, she rose and walked herself. As she came where
-the light fell on Ramon she saw that he had managed to struggle up on
-his knees. Now he began to speak, pleading, arguing, threatening his
-captors with the displeasure of their general.
-
-But he drew only jokes and laughter. “Valles?” Ilarian answered him. “He
-was defeated by the Carranzistas, and has trouble enough to care for
-himself. The requisition el capitan showed was made out months before
-the battle. Had the señor, your father, been fool enough to fill it, we
-should have taken the horses for ourselves.” With a shove that sent
-Ramon flat on his back, he added: “Lie down, hombre! For these many
-years thou and thy fathers laid the whip on our backs. While we starved
-they fed fat and made free with our women. Now it is for thee to watch
-us at the eating and loving.”
-
-Laughing, he caught Lee again with a sudden snatch, was forcing her head
-back, when Rafael again interfered. “Hands off, hombre, till the cards
-say she is thine!”
-
-“Si, muddle not the waters for our drinking,” the others added. “Let us
-eat, then get to the cards.”
-
-“The bride? She must not go hungry at the wedding feast.” The fourth man
-offered her food. “Here, little one.”
-
-Weak and faint, she was backing away, but stopped with a sudden
-inspiration. “If I may share it with him?”
-
-“Seguro.” Rising, the man dragged Ramon a few feet away and set him up,
-back propped against a tree. “Only take care he bite not thy pretty
-fingers.”
-
-Laughing, he went back to the fire, leaving her to sit and watch their
-feeding of meat and *tortillas*, with gulps of liquor from clay bottles.
-
-Between her and them yawned a gap in time wider than the centuries that
-intervened between herself and her wode-stained ancestors running wild
-in the woods of Britain. Their low, sloping foreheads, unbalanced heads
-with all the weight below; their loose mouths, brute jaws, dark skin,
-nature’s infallible stigma of inferiority, pronounced them half a
-million years behind her, the last-bloom of a higher race.
-
-In her a solitary youth had intensified the delicate fancies,
-sensitiveness, timorous imaginings, shrinkings, and retreats that mark a
-young girl’s first reachings toward love. And now—her idealizations were
-suddenly confronted with the caveman’s brutal practice. Sitting there,
-she endured a thousand tortures. Worse than their coarse jests were
-their glances. She shrank under them in hot shame; to escape them took
-the food they offered, moved over and knelt beside Ramon.
-
-He was sitting, head hanging, but as, now, he looked up the firelight
-showed the sweat in beads on his brow. “*You* bring *me* food?” His
-accent carried more than a thousand self-reproaches.
-
-She did not attempt consolation she did not feel. “Pretend to eat.” She
-spoke in English. “They are watching, now. But soon they will
-gamble”—she shuddered, thinking of the stake—“will see only the cards. I
-still have your knife. When the time serves I will cut you loose. Their
-rifles are piled behind us with the saddles. They may shoot you down
-from the fire. But to reach them is our only chance.”
-
-He lowered his head to hide a sudden flash of hope. “I will do anything,
-take any chance. Greater punishment no man could suffer than I am
-enduring. But it has made me think—realize my blind selfishness. I can
-only ask your forgiveness.”
-
-“Now, compañeros, the cards! Cut and shuffle for love!” A hoarse voice
-came from the fire.
-
-While the first hand of a game she did not understand was being dealt
-she watched the flying cards with dread interest; was still watching
-when Ramon whispered:
-
-“I know that game. Five minutes will see it finished. By leaning a
-little to one side, your body will cover my elbows. One cut will set
-them free. I will still sit as I am, and when I whisper slash the riata
-at my feet, then run! run into the depths of the woods. From here to San
-Carlos is but a couple of leagues. Once there—with the jefe, you will be
-safe.”
-
-Ilarian’s bellowing laugh rang out, just then, marking the close of the
-first hand. “One to me, little one! Be not impatient. The luck is with
-us. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.”
-
-“If he wins again it will be over in a minute,” Ramon whispered, while
-the cards were fluttering around again. As the men bent over them,
-thumbing their hands, he gave the word, “Now!”
-
-With two slashes she did it, one at his arms, the other at his feet. But
-swift as was the movement, Rafael caught it in the tail of his eye. When
-he turned she had dropped the knife in the grass and, though her heart
-stood still, she resumed her pretense of feeding Ramon. As he watched
-her the suspicion died out of the man’s stare. He was just about to turn
-again to the game when, as Ramon leaned forward to take the bite she was
-offering, the severed *riata* fell from his elbows.
-
-Given two men in a sudden juncture, the one with a definite plan wins
-the lead. As the man jumped up, pointing, Ramon sprang, reached the
-rifles, aimed and shot him down. The others looked up, startled, and as
-he aimed again they pulled and fired.
-
-“Run, querida, run!” Ramon had called it, leaping up. As he collapsed on
-the heap of saddles it issued again on his last dry whisper, “Run!”
-
-It had all happened while she was scrambling up. Naturally she turned
-when Ramon fell and paused, horror-stricken. Not till the others were
-almost upon her did she turn and run—too late.
-
-As, heart fluttering like that of a frightened quail, she ran for the
-wood Ilarian seized her. Wildly beating the brutal, pock-marked face,
-she writhed helplessly in his arms.
-
-XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT
-==============================
-
-During the rest of the day, while the train rolled and rattled and
-jolted its slow way over the heated face of the desert, the
-correspondents stewed with Bull in their own juices in semi-darkness. At
-intervals there would come a stop. With the mad, blind selfishness of
-panic the *brigada* Gonzales had burned the watering-tanks as they
-passed. So those that followed had to draw for the engine with buckets
-from wells. Also there were occasional rails to be replaced which, with
-equal selfishness, they tore up again the moment the train passed over.
-
-When the sun finally set in a fiery conflagration and dusk brought some
-cess of the heat the conductor came in with tales of wholesale
-desertions from the *brigada* Gonzales, and shortly thereafter began the
-dispersion of their own men. As they approached familiar country, or
-tempted by tales of rich loot to be taken from near-by *haciendas*, they
-began to drop off in fives, fifties, tens. Of those that had kept the
-corrugated-iron roof beating like a drum with their stampings and
-shufflings throughout the afternoon, there remained only a single
-solitary figure when, after dark, Bull climbed up on top to air his
-choked lungs.
-
-As he sat down on the running-board the figure looked up, then moved
-closer. “It is thee, señor?”
-
-Peering, Bull made out the face. It was the sentry who had spoken to him
-at Valles’s door. As his mind associated what the “dean” had said with
-the recognition he spoke quickly. “The señor Benson? Didst thou see—”
-
-“Si, señor.” His head moved in the gloom. In the rambling *peon* fashion
-he ran on: “‘The close mouth admits no flies,’ said Matador. ‘Keep thine
-shut and we shall make thee a captain to-morrow.’”
-
-“A captain of what, señor? Of ghosts? For I was not deceived. He that
-was sentry when they killed the German? He became a captain? Also they
-that helped to roast the Spaniard till he told where he had hidden his
-gold? And the three that killed el presidente for Huerta? Captains and
-majors and colonels were they—of the dead. Si, among the *revueltosos* it
-is become a saying, ‘Be not a captain till thou hast grown lieutenant’s
-spurs.’ Si, I knew that I should be dead before the eve of another day,
-so I fled my guard, señor, and came straight to thee.”
-
-Though he was on fire to hear, Bull knew better than to bring his crude
-thought into confusion by interruption. While the train ambled along he
-let the narrative take its own course.
-
-“‘A captain?’ said Matador!” His eloquent shoulders quivered in the
-gloom. “Better to be a live mozo at the tail of Don Miguel’s horses in
-Las Bocas.”
-
-From a second pause he ran on: “He came to the cuartel general, the
-señor Benson, while I was sentry of the second watch at the door of my
-general. He was in there, Valles, with a girl. I had seen her go in—such
-a girl! tall and straight, with eyes misty as twin nights, teeth white
-as bleached bone, hair thick and black as the pine forests that clothe
-the Sierra Madras! Santisimo, señor! such a girl as one may have when he
-has combed a country and taken first pick of its women! I could hear her
-laughing in there when the señor Benson came striding up the stairs.
-
-“I saw, when he drew near, that his face was flushed, but there was no
-smell of liquor upon him. ’Twas the red of the great anger that burned
-in his veins, kept his head shaking like that of a tormented bull. When
-I barred the way he looked at me with eyes that snapped like living
-sparks, shoved me aside into the corner with one sweep of his arm,
-before I could stop him had opened the door and walked in—walked in,
-señor, through the anteroom into the private office where Valles was at
-play with the girl!
-
-“El Matador himself had warned me, ‘Let no man pass!’ But when I had
-picked myself out of the corner and followed in, there he stood in front
-of Valles, who had dropped the girl and leaped to his feet. Surprise and
-fear showed on his face—the fear of bullet, knife, and poison that dogs
-him everywhere. But it changed at once to a grin—the terrible grin his
-people fear. His glance at me said, ‘Stay!’ and as I stood, waiting in
-fear and trembling, he spoke with a voice that cut like a knife.
-
-“‘It is my amigo, the señor Benson.’
-
-“Señor, I have seen his generals tremble when he spoke like that. Even
-el Matador, tiger that he is, would slink before him like a whipped cat.
-For all the pesos in all the world I would not have taken his place. Yet
-that great Englishman stood before him solid and square as a stone;
-answered with a voice of a hacendado in speech with a *peon*.
-
-“‘I came to tell you, Valles’—just like that he spoke, señor, without
-even a ‘my general’—‘I came to tell you that I do not take my answers
-from secretaries. The offer I made you this morning was fair and square
-and good business for both of us. It deserved more than a threat of
-‘requisitions.’ You’ll never get my horses that way—if I have to cut
-their throats. If you want them, say so—yes or no.’
-
-“He got it, the ‘no,’ quick and hard. Then the great anger that was in
-him burst forth like a river in flood. Like bear and tiger they
-quarreled, the señor threatening Valles with the power and vengeance of
-his government, Valles snarling defiance, their passions feeding each
-other as brands burn together in a fire.
-
-“One other thing, and you will have a picture of it, señor—the two at
-their furious talk, the girl against the wall behind Valles, one hand
-held out, fear in her great eyes, and a fourth; for as they wrangled
-there came a stir behind me. So quietly that I, whom he touched in
-passing, did not hear, el Matador came into the room. One second he
-stood, watching them from narrow eyes, then, slowly and quietly as a
-snake slipping through grass, he drew up behind the señor. I have shot
-men in this war. At home in Las Bocas I have drawn the knife in passion.
-But the cold glittering of his eyes, slow snake crawl, chilled the blood
-of me.
-
-“He had gained knifing distance when the señor roared in disgust. ‘Bah!
-Why do I waste words on a *peon*? My general, is it? I have had such
-generals whipped on my place! General? A bandit *peon* who steals horses
-in place of the chickens with which he began his thieveries!’
-
-“‘Bandit *peon*? Stealer of chickens?’ This, señor, to Valles that had
-killed a hundred men with his own hand before the wars ever began? The
-yellow eyes of him seemed to leap out of his face. At the sight of him,
-frothing like a mad tiger in lust to kill, the girl screamed, hiding her
-face! At his belt hung pearl-jeweled pistols, the best of their kind.
-But with the instinct of his old trade the hand of the butcher flew to
-his knife.
-
-“They say that the señor tried to kill him. It is a lie! Even when the
-knife flashed in his eyes he still stood at his distance, shaking his
-big fist, growling his threats, angry but unafraid; so big, strong,
-masterful, that Valles, even in his fury, hesitated. But not el Matador!
-Looking back as she ran out of the room, the girl saw as I saw; screamed
-aloud as the knife passed, once! twice! with a hiss and ’heigh!
-splitting the backbone, piercing the heart.”
-
-With that strong sense of the dramatic which makes the *peon* a born
-story-teller he stopped. For a moment the flash of a match lifted the
-brown, hard face from the gloom under a tattered *sombrero*, lighting
-the faded red of his blanket serape. Then they faded again into a dim,
-huddled figure that swayed with the rack and swing of the cars.
-
-Bull had unconsciously suspended his breath. Now it expired in a sigh.
-“His disposal. Know you aught of that?”
-
-The shrug quivered again in the darkness. “There is little more that I
-saw. Across the body el Matador looked at me, and I chilled with the
-sure knowledge that I should never see my niñas again. He even stepped,
-then Valles spoke.
-
-“‘This is a good hombre. He will help thee with—that!’ He followed the
-girl into the next room.
-
-“Between us, el Matador and I, we rolled the señor in serapes, binding
-them with cords so that the face should not be seen by them that carried
-him out to the secret place; and it was then that he spoke of my
-captaincy.
-
-“‘Go now to thy quarters, señor.’ He clapped me on both shoulders. ‘And
-dream of the stars the morning sun will see flashing here.’
-
-“But lest I sleep too well, señor, I came from the cuartel here.”
-
-For a full minute, while Bull chewed the bitter cud of remorse, the cars
-racked on through the night. Then he spoke. “There is one in El Oro, the
-consul Ingles, that would have given many pesos—not the currency of
-Valles, but real pesos of silver and gold—for thee to set thy name to
-this!”
-
-“Si!” His cigarette glowed in the midst of a shrug. “Of what use pesos,
-even silver and gold, when the sight is darkened and the mouth shut?
-When one may no longer see the niñas at play, watch the dancing of
-girls? When the taste of good food is gone from the mouth, the feel of
-warm liquor from the throat? He that betrays Valles will have no more
-use of these.”
-
-“But in El Paso,” Bull urged, “one would be beyond the reach of his
-hand. There, also, is a consul Ingles.”
-
-“One’s pais? The rise and set of sun across the desert beyond Las Bocas;
-the chatter of the women at their washing by the stream; the soft
-laughter of girls; one’s children watching at dusk for the return—these
-are not to be bought with pesos. One’s pais is one’s pais. To it one
-always returns.”
-
-“Si,” Bull acknowledged the call, the most powerful in the feeling of a
-Mexican. “But from El Paso one could go by the ferrocarril Americano. In
-one day he could cross from El Paso to Nogales, thence south to Las
-Bocas and live in plenty beyond the reach of Valles. And one’s woman and
-niñas—would smile the sweeter at the sight of a bulging pocket.”
-
-The cigarette glowed again, this time without the shrug. “There is
-something in that. Si, señor, I will do it!—go to the consul Ingles in
-El Paso.”
-
-Just then the Chinaman called for Bull to come down to supper. He was
-not hungry, but he had food handed up for the man, who, after eating it,
-rolled up in his serape and went to sleep. Then, while he snored and the
-train racked slowly along the chain of fires, each a station that lay
-like red beads on the desert’s dark breast, Bull lay suffering agonies
-of shame and remorse that grew more vivid as the miles lessened between
-him and home.
-
-It was long after midnight before he fell into troubled sleep. When he
-woke, at gray dawn, the revolutionist was gone.
-
-“Homesick and scared out!” Bull shrugged—and what did it matter? That
-which was done was done!
-
-Nor was he the only deserter. All through the night the train had
-dribbled away its evil freight in trickles that would spread through the
-land till it was inundated with a flood of carnage, robbery, rape. Of
-the clustering brown swarm on the roof there remained only a few dozens
-scattered in heavy sleep throughout the train’s length.
-
-Across the brightening east the mountains now laid a familiar pattern.
-Beyond—the *patio* and compound of Los Arboles were lying still and gray
-under the dawn. Bull saw, with the distinctness of vision, the sheet
-across Lee’s doorway quiver under the breath of dawn. Then it faded,
-gave place to the Mills *rancho*, equally still, equally silent; its
-warm gold walls pale gray, the clustering bougainvilleas dark as clotted
-blood.
-
-That feeling analogous to the chill of death which envelops a sleeping
-house held him in thrall. While he gazed, there appeared on the veranda
-the familiar vision. But he shut it out, tightly closing the eyes of his
-mind. He turned his face to a dark dot, walls of the burned station,
-that appeared to be moving toward him across the desert’s grays.
-Climbing down over the end, he passed through the Chinaman’s kitchen
-into the car.
-
-It was still dusk in there, but he could hear the deep breathing of
-correspondents, sleeping heavily after the exhaustion of the hot night.
-Quietly he gathered his belongings, had shoved open the door
-sufficiently to pass out, when a whisper came from behind:
-
-“Adios, Diogenes!”
-
-Turning, he saw the correspondent leaning out of his bunk.
-
-“Don’t take that little slip too seriously, old man,” he whispered as
-they shook hands. “Try again. If it wasn’t for this”—he tapped his
-knee—“I’d have helped you to get out your girl. But you’ll make it all
-right. Only don’t dally. There’s going to be hell to pay.”
-
-The engine was whistling for the station. Though it did not stop, Bull
-jumped and, if a bit shaken, landed unhurt. He was watching the train
-recede, his hand still tingling, heart warmed by the strong pressure of
-his friend’s hand, when his name was called.
-
-“It is you, señor Perrin?”
-
-Drowsy and heavy-eyed from lost sleep, the Mexican agent stood in the
-doorway of his box-car station. Anxiety and fear shadowed his face.
-
-“Wicked times, señor. Up and down the line they are robbing and
-murdering, Valles’s defeated soldados. Many gringos have been slain.
-Early in the night a company of fifty dropped off here and are gone, mad
-with hate, to loot the gringo haciendas.”
-
-Appalled, Bull stared at the distant mountains.
-
-
-XXXIV: ---------------------?
-=============================
-
-Left alone on the trail, Gordon suffered his own agonies—the poignant
-anguishes of youth unmitigated by the fatalism or philosophy of
-experience. Time and again his spirit rose in furious rebellion against
-the frightful injustice of fate. Eyes starting with the strain, sweat
-pouring from his brow, he rolled in successive paroxysms, vainly
-striving to burst his bonds—only to subside each time into a coma of
-utter despair. Then, as the very violence of his exertions cleared the
-blood from his brain, he did that which an older head would have done at
-first—lay still and began to think.
-
-How to get loose! There must be some way! He had once seen a prisoner in
-a “movie” burn off his bonds with a fire of hay started by the coals
-from his pipe. But if it were possible—outside of a “movie”—where were
-the hay and pipe? An attempt to cut the *riata* by abrasion on a stone
-behind him produced only a sore on his wrists. Yet there must be some
-way! If he could only loosen them by flexing and reflexing his muscles!
-He stopped thinking, at this point, and lay staring downhill.
-
-His struggles had carried him to within a few feet of the dead
-revolutionist. Before leaving, his followers had looted the body of its
-guns, bandolier of cartridges, but had left the belt. Under the body
-Gordon now caught a glimpse of his knife.
-
-To roll downhill was simple. With his butting shoulders, it was no trick
-to move the body till the knife came up into position where he could
-draw it with his teeth. But thereafter—a knife in the teeth could not be
-used to free hands bound behind one’s back!
-
-He looked about him. The problem was simple. If the knife could be held
-firmly so that he could turn and rub the wrist-cords against the edge.
-Presently his eye lit on the stump of a *palo verde* that had been
-bruised and split off by the slip of some passing beast. Working his way
-over to it, he bent and carefully placed the horn handle in the split,
-edge up, point resting at an angle of forty-five on the ground. Then,
-shuffling around, he felt delicately till the razor edge came squarely
-between his wrists. Very lightly, in mortal dread of a miscarriage, he
-sawed, sawed, sawed until his hands suddenly split apart. One slash at
-his ankles and he was upon his feet.
-
-His first thought was to run, wildly, madly, after Lee. Then his usual
-good judgment resumed command. The revolutionists were mounted and had
-an hour’s start! He must have a horse! And with the thought there rose a
-mental picture of the *arriero* they had seen at the *fonda*.
-
-A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from
-the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee
-had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to
-help.
-
-He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now
-the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he
-came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose
-out of the cañon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the
-*arriero’s* sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling
-up out on the level.
-
-The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top
-speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the *arriero* only one
-thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his
-rifle across the animal’s back showed how he came to be still riding the
-trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and “requisitions.”
-As he had seen Lee pass the *fonda* with Gordon, one word,
-“revolutionists,” fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got
-only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his
-clucks of commiseration.
-
-“Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied
-remedies to my own niñas when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will
-cry her eyes out over this!”
-
-Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the
-hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule
-crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of
-serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his
-questions with frightful oaths.
-
-“How many were they, señor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That
-leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all
-with one flick of my knife! Take thou this.”
-
-It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own
-riding-mule, he ran on:
-
-“You shall ride her, señor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats
-of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding.
-But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse’s two. An
-hour’s start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in
-five, or less if they camp at dark.”
-
-He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol
-cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back
-down the ravine to the lush grass by the *fonda*, where old Antonio
-would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle
-across his arm, saddle *machete* and knife close to his hand, black eyes
-glittering under his *sombrero*, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready
-for the start.
-
-Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did
-Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made
-up in utility. Justifying its owner’s boast, it navigated steeps, slid
-down into cañons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the
-opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking
-pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free
-wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds,
-now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again
-hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would
-easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained
-steadily upon the first.
-
-Fast as the little beasts traveled, however, their pace appeared like an
-insect’s crawl when measured by Gordon’s fears. Action, at first,
-brought relief. Later he fell again a prey to anguish. The threat of the
-revolutionists filled him with horror through which, as in a dreadful
-nightmare, he saw Lee struggling frantically. Of Ramon he never even
-thought. It was always the men. Yet he managed to hold himself in hand;
-refrained from lashing the mule into the furious pace that would, while
-killing it, have still lagged far behind his fears.
-
-And he had always at his side the *arriero*, with his repeated, “Do not
-trouble, señor; they will keep traveling till dark!” to cheer him.
-
-The latter’s sharp glance it was that picked out the sign where the
-revolutionists had swung on to the San Carlos trail. His hawk eyes
-found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the
-opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn
-veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists’
-fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly,
-it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them,
-after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently
-shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light
-of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside
-Ramon.
-
-“One to me, little one,” Ilarian’s bellow just then rang out. “Be not
-impatient. Soon we shall take a little pasear together.”
-
-At the sight of Ramon, the *arriero’s* brows had gone up under the roots
-of his hair, for, had he wished it, Gordon’s Spanish would not have
-permitted a full explanation. Now he touched Gordon, pointing. Nodding,
-he nipped off a few leaves, then leveled the long Colt, aiming at the
-nearest man. A glance to his right showed him the *arriero* slowly
-shoving his rifle-barrel through the leaves. Then, turning again to his
-aim, he was just in time to see Lee slash Ramon’s bonds.
-
-The next instant the latter sprang for the rifles. Lee was up and
-standing almost in line with the man he had covered. He dared not shoot,
-and in the next five seconds, before they could readjust themselves to
-the rapid change, the situation had flashed into its final stage—Ramon
-had fallen with one revolutionist; the others were rushing at Lee across
-the firelit space.
-
-By that time Gordon had risen. As, standing, he fired from the edge of
-the wood a second man fell forward upon his face. The *arriero’s* rifle
-cracked sharply, and there remained only Ilarian. Swinging with Lee,
-still in his arms, he faced Gordon charging across the firelit space.
-
-Usually Gordon could be depended upon to keep his head. But Lee’s bitter
-cry, the sight of her helplessness, combined with the awful strain of
-the afternoon, produced in him a berserker rage. Teeth bared in a snarl,
-his gun completely forgotten, he seized Ilarian with his naked hands
-just as he dropped Lee; threw him with such violence that his feet rose
-in the air and he struck shoulders first on the ground. Then, without
-even a second glance, he lifted and gathered Lee in his arms.
-
-Fortunately, the *arriero* not only kept his wits, but was working them
-overtime. As, rolling over, Ilarian pulled and pointed his gun the
-*arriero’s* second bullet plumped between his shoulders.
-
-It is doubtful whether Gordon heard the shot. His face in Lee’s hair,
-hers hidden in his breast, they remained without looking around even
-when the *arriero* spoke.
-
-“Warm work, señor!”
-
-Receiving no answer, he grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose.
-“They are all that way—at first,” he confided in the stars. “But wait
-till the priest ties them so that neither can wriggle without the other.
-Wait!”
-
-A cough also passing unnoticed, he walked over and knelt beside Ramon.
-With a heavy shake of the head, he passed to the revolutionists. Three
-were dead, but, though unconscious, Ilarian still breathed stertorously.
-
-“The worse for thee, amigo,” the *arriero* addressed him. “The old señor
-Icarza will pay well to do thy killing with his own hands. By sunrise,
-mañana, I should have thee to him, and then”—he gave a little sinister
-nod at the dead—“and then thou wilt be envying these.”
-
-A glance at the lovers having shown them to be, to all intents and
-purposes, still alone under the stars, he went off, shaking his head, to
-bring up the mules. “Santa Maria Marisima! to think that I, also, was
-once so foolish!”
-
-On his return he gathered up the arms, belts, knives, bandoliers of
-cartridges, guns—it has to be written, also stripping the khaki coats
-and riding-boots from the dead. “They will serve thee no more after the
-old señor finishes,” he addressed the unconscious Ilarian, as he tore
-off his.
-
-While he was packing his loot in an orderly and methodical manner on the
-mules a murmur of talk rose behind him. But as it was couched in English
-he was saved from further reflections.
-
-“Oh—*dear!*” Lee’s exclamations, partially smothered in a rough and
-dirty shirt, still conveyed a curious mixture of confidence and fear,
-regret, relief, sorrow, and happiness, hope and doubt. “Oh—*dear!* I
-used to be so independent and fearless. Now—I feel so weak.”
-
-“Time you did.” A hug mitigated the severity of the comment. “After this
-perhaps you will let me do a little of your thinking?”
-
-“For a while.” The shirt choked a little, perverse laugh. “Till I get
-over it.”
-
-“Very well, we are going on, right now, to be married in San Carlos.”
-
-“Oh, but—”
-
-“No ‘buts.’ We’ll take no more chances.”
-
-She hesitated and—gave in. “Oh, isn’t it nice to have some one decide
-for you?”
-
-Had the *arriero* been consulted he could have told a tale. But Gordon
-quite believed it. He was raising her face to his when her eyes
-distended with a sudden sorrow.
-
-“Oh, poor Ramon! Whatever are we thinking of?”
-
-Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the *arriero* had
-finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent
-her back into Gordon’s arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the
-*arriero* took affairs into his own capable hands.
-
-“I shall take him home to the old señor, with this wicked one, and tell
-him that he died in defense of thee.”
-
-With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better.
-“They will never—know,” she sobbed, more quietly. “And—at the end—he was
-sorry.”
-
-
-XXXV: WHY?
-==========
-
-While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the
-chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky
-that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills.
-
-“The bandits moved toward the señor Lovell’s.” He answered. “Praise the
-saints! the señoritas are both in El Paso.”
-
-“Then they’ll go straight on to Mary’s!” The last vestige of color
-drained from Bull’s face.
-
-Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle
-of foul humanity dribbling down upon the *rancho*. He saw Mary Mills on
-the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and
-trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating
-the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty
-dribble swept around her and the child.
-
-He turned to the agent. “My horse? Did they get him?”
-
-“No, señor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral.” He
-pointed eastward. “Come!”
-
-Half an hour later the *mozo* shoved a shock head out of the chaparral
-in answer to the agent’s whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was
-on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare
-of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed
-through his mind.
-
-In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and
-Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden
-agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop.
-But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he
-would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end.
-At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that
-afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a
-mountain ahead.
-
-He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson
-to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line
-with the widow’s *rancho* his fears crystallized around its slender
-column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched
-till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in
-bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always
-timed Bull’s arrival at the *rancho* with the lowering of the sun. As he
-urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow
-lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the
-ominous cloud had died on the mountain’s high shoulder; but, more
-ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though
-prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the
-place.
-
-The externals were the same—crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny
-pastures. At this hour the widow’s cattle were usually to be seen
-forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now—in all the
-wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life,
-lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills.
-
-The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the
-evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with
-purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that
-stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that
-shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse,
-Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle
-and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then
-a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer.
-
-A wild rush of hope swept his being—to die the next moment when,
-rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio’s woman. On her knees, hands raised
-in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see
-or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder.
-
-She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked
-beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull’s face. Though
-she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that
-follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only
-the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half
-vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections
-of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at
-him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a
-passion of tears.
-
-At any other time Bull’s dominant racial contempt would have caused him
-to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his
-sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion.
-
-“Aie!... Aie!” Soon she began to speak. “Aie! the poor señora ... and
-the niña ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie!
-Aie! where were they?”
-
-A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited
-with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man
-on the train, to tell the tale in her own way.
-
-“They came in from all sides, señor.” Her hands swept the round of the
-hills. “Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds,
-escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The señora
-was at breakfast with the niña in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came
-running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White
-as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear.
-But she shook it off, señor, went forward to meet them with smiles and
-greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while
-she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to
-them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of
-pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its
-paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating
-them off with her smiles.
-
-“‘Enter, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.’
-Thus she spoke them.
-
-“Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of
-beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it
-reeked with their evil presence.
-
-“At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the
-sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in
-place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so
-their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however,
-soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad
-talk, they proceeded to worse—entered her bedroom and the child’s, broke
-open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing.
-
-“For that she did not care—not for anything, could she but keep the
-child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her
-with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon
-them.
-
-“‘Get Betty away!’ she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to
-that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard.
-
-“Still she had hope—that, being fed and flattered and pleased with their
-plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and went
-among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and pinches, she
-still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with smiling
-reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from her hand,
-and then—and then—how shall one tell it?
-
-“They demanded that the señorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At
-first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her
-‘Linda’ and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At
-last one beast pulled her on to his knee.
-
-“To me, in the kitchen, came the child’s scream and the señora’s bitter
-cry. ‘For the sake of your mothers, señores!’ followed by the crash of
-furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor.
-
-“At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at
-the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One!
-Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went
-down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the
-ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I
-gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward
-upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams
-of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of
-God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?”
-
-Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she
-cowered at Bull’s feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame.
-
-“Go on!” He stooped and shook her violently. “Go on!”
-
-She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. “I was wrong, señor.
-One mercy was granted—death! They murdered them ... murdered them!
-Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them—the innocent
-woman, sweet child!”
-
-“Yet you—escaped?”
-
-“Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was
-almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then,
-they were gone—gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after
-they have slain the white heifer of the plains.”
-
-Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his
-arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb,
-blind struggle filled his mind.
-
-The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in
-a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this
-horror? “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to
-the fourth generation,” says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills’s
-blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and
-farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement?
-And she—who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout
-her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul?
-Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration?
-
-Not in these clear terms did Bull’s thought run. Blind anguish kept him
-straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he
-felt—felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any
-doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it.
-
-While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his
-consciousness a sound that rose above the woman’s sobbing—the dry murmur
-of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. They
-were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone forever
-beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! Surely
-they were gone! Yet—the corruption of the tomb, mold of the grave, would
-never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames they had passed
-into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains that he was,
-born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took comfort in the
-thought.
-
-Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in
-upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw
-through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills’s
-face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a
-timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then—with deep
-thankfulness he realized it—now she would never know! never know how far
-he had fallen below his resolves.
-
-Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did
-enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering,
-was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own
-sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they
-were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies,
-he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary
-way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his
-breast the thought—now she would never know!
-
-From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, “Why?” He
-had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is
-merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this
-terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in
-their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him.
-His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds
-than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had
-utterly failed in its duties to its own—the government that, with the
-purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and
-loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric
-people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies.
-
-Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward.
-Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by
-diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern
-nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged—across the
-Rio Grande.
-
-“You done it!” His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the
-force of his indictment. “Yes, *you* done it!”
-
-The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his
-attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still
-forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he
-knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to
-supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from
-sharing.
-
-When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the
-sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains—and
-revenge.
-
-
-XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—”
-==============================
-
-Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night
-that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam
-of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined
-days before obscured by gathering dangers.
-
-Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his
-arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in
-their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos
-nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the
-railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it
-had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed
-like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a
-picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise
-counsel of Lee’s good friends, the *jefe* and priest, Gordon had
-prevailed.
-
-“These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own,” the
-priest had advised. “Los Arboles needs a man’s hardness.”
-
-To which the *jefe* had added his little joke, “Managing thee, niña,
-will not be his lightest work.”
-
-No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands,
-taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican
-law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the
-wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would
-have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church
-are on Cupid’s side—well, there is no country on earth where his
-business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that
-shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and
-Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon,
-according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures.
-
-Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl’s
-expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon’s notice.
-Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder.
-
-“I was thinking of the girl I left down there.” She expressed the
-feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they
-have left their girlhood. “She meant well, but—was *so* foolish. I was
-just wondering if—if—”
-
-“Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton.” He helped her out. “If
-she isn’t the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of
-heaven”—he paused, grinning—“and hell—”
-
-“You didn’t make *me* suffer, of course!” She flashed up in quite the
-old manner. “The way you carried on with that *dreadful* girl. But there
-goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning.
-Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to.
-Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose
-her temper and—What are you laughing at? Don’t you *want* me to reform?”
-
-“There! there!” Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second
-laugh. “If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I’d—I’d march
-you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the service
-backward.” Quite illogically he went on: “I, too, had a serious hour
-with myself. I made up my mind—”
-
-He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. “Not
-to change? Don’t dare to say it!”
-
-Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change
-is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion.
-
-“You won’t, will you?”
-
-He assured her, of course, that he wouldn’t—and believed it, no doubt.
-So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to
-remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they
-turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went
-with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid
-underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and
-valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time,
-midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the
-mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on
-a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter.
-
-In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by
-sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining
-along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in
-many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It
-looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon’s beast dropped
-hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still
-longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes
-Pedro’s *jacal* in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of
-ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the *camisa* and
-*calzones* of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old
-fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a
-welcoming grin.
-
-“He’s really part of the scenery”—Lee communed aloud with
-herself—“almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay.
-But, no!” She shook her head. “I don’t want any human being here but
-ourselves. Oh, I know! We’ll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to
-Sliver and Jake.”
-
-Neither would she—after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any
-commerce with the *jacal*. “It isn’t that it’s dirty. Old Pedro is as
-clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his
-housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We’ll camp by the stream at the
-far end of the valley.”
-
-She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated
-a savory stew of *frijoles* which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it
-to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon
-commandeered an old shot-gun.
-
-“What for?” Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his
-eye proved him at one with her in spirit. “To kill the meat for our
-first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of
-any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in
-this neck of the woods.”
-
-“That will be fine!” Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not
-clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. “The wood at the
-end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They’re just lovely broiled
-over hot coals.”
-
-“Broiled over hot coals?” he teased her. “Wild doves, the symbol of
-love? What desecration!”
-
-“I don’t care,” she pouted. “One has to eat—and they’re awfully good.”
-
-Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down
-a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went
-after wild pigeon without compunction.
-
-After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath.
-
-It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak
-had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to
-gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches.
-First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance
-around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a
-natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with
-a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim.
-
-“Your turn, Dirty Man,” she rallied him. “Go and take your bath.”
-
-When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow
-wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and
-served the *frijoles* on golden husks of corn from Pedro’s garden.
-Nature supplied the other utensils—fingers for forks, their sharp young
-teeth for knives, bits of *tortilla* to scoop up the stew. Both in its
-preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first
-meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a
-dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all
-sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to
-help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down.
-
-“Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is *my* work. You can
-watch and smoke.”
-
-Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a
-cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation.
-
-“I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven’t tried.” The
-confession was nullified by a little sigh. “But it always makes me sick.
-You don’t know how I envy Maria and Teresa!” Lighting it, she took a
-couple of small puffs, then passed it on. “I always tried to get Bull
-and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own
-quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father’s den
-and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he
-went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into
-his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so
-tobaccery and strong and—*manny*. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort
-and protection.”
-
-Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the
-attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when,
-rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few
-utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a
-squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of
-the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really
-clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or
-relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most
-powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so
-entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his
-eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing
-her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he
-rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands.
-
-She came on a little run and thereafter—it was as she had wished it in
-her girl’s dreams—as far as dawn and dark from the conventional
-marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed—the law older than
-theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church.
-In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders,
-in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink
-cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening
-song of the insects, its sanctions were recited.
-
-In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all
-things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a
-cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory,
-supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature
-to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of
-pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the *blasé* modern
-viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his
-roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of
-young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may
-never know; and—your real philosopher will admit it—most divinely in
-accord with the scheme of things.
-
-Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler,
-had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat,
-her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson
-lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars
-wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening
-vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from
-the rest of the world.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other!
-“In the midst of one we are in the other,” and the friendly night that
-wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar
-of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles
-whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight,
-incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon
-dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It
-also lit the march of Gonzales’s bandits across the desert.
-
-Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the
-stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary
-splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face
-and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the
-preparation of their breakfast.
-
-In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on,
-of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their
-second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the
-gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies.
-Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee’s
-knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond
-the rim.
-
-“Look!”
-
-Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out:
-“It’s the Millses’ beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses!
-Quick!”
-
-
-XXXVII: THE THREE—AGAIN
-=======================
-
-Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering
-knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He
-returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she
-looked up at his touch.
-
-“You heard them talking before—before—”
-
-“Si, señor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them
-speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell
-them at the border.”
-
-Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the
-ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a
-voice called out, “Ole, señor!”
-
-Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes,
-weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved
-mistress—to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame.
-From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father
-of the woman.
-
-“I had thought thee one of those wicked ones.” The old fellow slapped
-the butt of an old musket. “Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but
-by the mercy of God I waited. Si, señor, I saw them go. After I sent up
-the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always
-the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted
-them when they passed; a full score, señor, and more, on their way by
-the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the niña, señor? They
-did not harm—”
-
-He stopped, halted by Bull’s look, then cried aloud while the tears
-coursed down his wrinkled face. “The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and
-I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of
-the best! I would go after them, señor, those wicked ones; but of what
-use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The
-biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take
-thou my horse.”
-
-Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the
-smoldering beacon on the mountain’s shoulder before daylight failed.
-Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued
-to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson
-wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull
-felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint
-stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the
-fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to
-intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it
-that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull
-sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary
-systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That
-pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it,
-this peace that quieted his troubled spirit.
-
-He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt
-and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in
-his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief.
-He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a
-clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the
-sage.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had
-been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough
-to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained
-the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of
-the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee’s note the preceding evening,
-Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment’s thought he voted
-down Sliver’s proposal to ride down for Gordon.
-
-“He’d come in handy. Kin shoot some an’ his nerve’s all right. But you
-jes’ kedn’t shut her out. Better to leave them where she’s safe.”
-
-“That’s right,” Sliver had added. “An’ it ’u’d shore be a shame to break
-up their honeymoon.”
-
-Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake
-and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on
-Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman’s
-yell issued simultaneously from their throats.
-
-“Why, you dolgorned old son of a—” Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he
-saw Bull’s face. “Why, hombre! What—”
-
-Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark
-valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in
-those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that
-which is denied to speech—the soul agony of a strong man. Given that
-blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest.
-
-“Murdered!... Mother and child!... Burned ... with the house!”
-
-To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in
-readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the
-news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the
-darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining
-a fray in his *riata*. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city
-person would have been greatly shocked.
-
-“The poor damn kid!”
-
-“Hell, ain’t it?” Jake’s tone was quite indifferent.
-
-But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking
-lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold,
-snake sparkle in Jake’s bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient.
-
-“They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail.” After a long
-silence he answered Jake’s question concerning the raiders. “Must be
-nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an’—”
-
-“They ain’t there.” Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. “They’re—”
-He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs.
-Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon.
-
-Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had
-weighed down the girl’s spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot—for
-the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him,
-hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look.
-
-“Why—what—” Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, their
-inaction, told all before he spoke. “Gone!—both!—burned with the house!”
-Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to Gordon.
-Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about again and
-ran to Bull.
-
-“Oh, you poor, *poor* man!”
-
-Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee
-while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull
-gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake
-led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to
-hear when she began to sob out a broken confession.
-
-“Oh, I feel—so wicked. While all this—was happening—I—I was—getting
-married!”
-
-“Married?”
-
-“Yes—to Gordon.” She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of all
-that had happened since his departure—her abduction, Ramon’s death,
-Gordon’s ultimatum. “He begged so hard—and the padre and the jefe
-said—that I ought—and I wanted to, myself—and we were so happy until—we
-saw the smoke. And now I—I feel like a criminal.”
-
-“Then you needn’t.” He patted her shoulder. “The jefe was right. Never
-again will you have more need of a man’s strength.”
-
-“But? At this time? While—”
-
-“How were you to know? An’ remember how hard *she* worked and wished to
-bring this very thing about. ’Twould have filled her with joy to know
-that it had come to pass. ’Deed, Missy, she does know an’ is glad at
-this very moment.” With that mixture of rude faith and humility that
-made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: “Sure she knows an’
-some day she’ll tell you so herself. ’Twon’t be for me to hear it. My
-kind don’t go where she is. But you will, an’, mark me, the first thing
-she’ll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage.”
-
-“Oh, if I thought she would!”
-
-“Be certain of it, child.” The last lights had now gone out on the
-highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited
-many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed.
-
-While he talked Lee’s sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished.
-“That makes me feel better. And *you*? You, too, think I did right?”
-
-She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. “For what d’you
-s’pose I brought him here?”
-
-“Not to marry *me*?” She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment,
-her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl
-who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from
-the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. “Oh, if I’d
-only known it!” She added, with loving illogic, “I’m *so* glad that I
-didn’t.”
-
-“That’s fine.” He patted her head. “It will be easier, now, if you have
-to live for a while in the States.”
-
-“*The States?*” she repeated.
-
-In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson’s death—she had enough to
-bear—he described the scattering of Valles’s army, concluding, “They’re
-wild against Americans.” He nodded at the fire. “The men that did this
-are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there.”
-
-“My poor people!” she broke out, in sudden distress. “Gordon! Come
-here!” When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried
-it again: “Our poor, poor people! They are on their way—the raiders! To
-Arboles! We must go—at once!”
-
-“Too late!” Bull spoke heavily. “Even an aeroplane couldn’t get us there
-in time.” After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others
-recent events, he went on: “I came back to bring you and Mary and the
-child out. For them it’s too late, but you must go at once—you an’ your
-husband an’ Sliver an’ Jake.”
-
-“And you?” Lee questioned.
-
-“I’m going on.” The statement in its simplicity carried more
-significance than the wildest vow of revenge.
-
-“Alone?” Lee again demanded. “And you think we’d go slinking home to the
-States and leave you to face that band yourself?”
-
-“It’s my quarrel, my work.” His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the
-darkness. “You are young and have your husband. Your future is all
-ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With
-Sliver an’ Jake to guard you—”
-
-But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver’s voice rose in the
-darkness. “An’ there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to look after
-Lady-girl. But I ain’t so much of a fool that I don’t know the store she
-sets by you, Bull, that’s been father an’ mother to her, now, for nigh
-on a year. So it don’t go that-a-way. It’s me for Arboles while you-all
-hit with them for the States.”
-
-“Good enough!” Jake’s acid tones trembled through the gloom. “With a
-small amendment. You’re that young an’ foolish, Sliver, it ’u’d be a
-shame to cut you off—worse ’n the green grass that goes to the oven. So
-it stan’s like this—you-all go back; I go on.”
-
-“No, you don’t.” Gordon’s quiet voice interrupted. “At any other time
-I’d feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I
-could never look my wife”—he felt her hand steal up into his—“I could
-never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get
-out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border—”
-
-“They won’t—till we all go,” Lee broke in. “It’s easy to see that you’ve
-all made up your minds to stay—and you’ll need me to hold the horses.
-We’d better be getting on.”
-
-“But, Missy—” Bull began.
-
-But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse’s hoofs returned
-unmistakable answer.
-
-
-XXXVIII: FIRE
-=============
-
-Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee’s right, but when the trail
-permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded
-his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the
-mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of
-creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail,
-the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above
-Antonio’s *fonda* when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an
-exclamation.
-
-Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow
-which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and
-swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them
-to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon
-it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the
-flames roaring through the Arboles *patio*, bursting from doors and
-windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows
-of adobes.
-
-“My poor people!” Lee sat her horse and gazed.
-
-The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality
-strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up
-in flames—her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects
-and *hacienda* stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of
-old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately
-connected with her father’s memory. Surely a great loss! but if it
-flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming
-indignation—not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being
-destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice,
-ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand
-such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with
-its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver’s voice broke in the darkness
-behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock.
-
-“Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain’t burn them yard-thick walls.”
-
-“An’ we left word for the *ancianos* to drive the stock into the
-mountains,” Jake added. “Must ha’ b’en cl’ar away long before they got
-there.”
-
-“It isn’t that.” She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper.
-“My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they
-escaped.” As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added:
-“There’s only one thing left. We must—”
-
-Bull’s heavy voice completed it for her,—“catch ’em before daylight.”
-
-While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose
-above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march
-the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one
-thing—they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock of
-*aguardiente*! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep.
-And then—
-
-His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the
-change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black
-bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the
-yellow walls of the *fonda*. It also restored a little color into the
-bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children,
-herded together like sheep around its blaze.
-
-When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy,
-apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their
-babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a *peon* who
-had run in from Lovell’s *rancho*; second, that the *ancianos* had
-driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle
-among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust
-forward to tell his tale.
-
-He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with
-that *peon* indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of
-raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep.
-Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic
-stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them
-he recognized a *peon* who had run away to the wars after being whipped
-for some grossness by the señor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard
-them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast
-over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the
-renegade’s expressions of reassurance.
-
-“Si, señores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los
-Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded
-stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for
-safe-keeping, ’twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret
-pasture in the great Bowl.”
-
-Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed
-the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a
-vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the
-precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be
-caught in the same way? Jake’s remark expressed their joint conclusion.
-
-“It ’u’d be a *cinch*!”
-
-“Horses all tired out now, too,” Sliver added. “If anythin’ went wrong,
-we’d have no getaway. Not that I’d care, but we kain’t take no chances
-with Lady-girl.”
-
-Bull’s word decided. He made his dispositions, sent the youth to sleep
-out on the plains and bring early warning of the raiders’ movements;
-posted other sentries at intervals. Finally, he saw first to the horses,
-that they were watered and fed and groomed; then to the serving of a
-meal.
-
-He ate, but even his steady, methodical munching bespoke purpose, the
-conserving of strength for his ends. As he sat, after the meal, gazing
-into the fire, even Lee failed to discern much difference from his usual
-self. But after the others, refugees and all, lay wrapped in their
-serapes, dim, muffled figures under the red light of half a dozen fires,
-he still sat, a somber figure in black outline against the glow.
-
-After Lee had cried herself to sleep he sat on. At midnight her
-awakening eyes showed him still there. When she awoke again he was
-gone—on the round of sentries. He returned before she fell asleep again
-and sat on, staring into the fire, an ominous figure fraught with
-danger.
-
-
-XXXIX: “VENGEANCE IS MINE”
-==========================
-
-From the “hog’s back” where Sliver had accidentally discovered Felicia
-and the *fonda*, Lee, Gordon, and the Three watched a yellow dust cloud
-rolling slowly across the plains. The occasional silver flash that
-stabbed it through as the sun struck a saber or bayonet told that it
-enveloped the raiders. Three hours ago Sliver had come galloping in from
-a reconnaissance with the news of their advance. Instantly the refugees
-had fled like frightened quail into the secret places of the hills.
-After burying various bottles that contained the liquid abominations
-wherewith he burned out the stomachs of his customers, Antonio had
-followed. So for two hours the ravine had been untenanted.
-
-Even after the watchers sighted the dust, an hour passed before it
-disappeared in the mouth of the ravine; for, as their few horses were
-loaded down with loot, the raiders moved slowly. Another half-hour
-dragged by before they appeared, filing like ragged ants up the path
-along the silver stream. Sighting the *fonda*, they stopped, hastily
-took cover behind some bushes, and held a hurried consultation. When the
-file split and began to work its way through the chaparral on each side
-of the ravine Jake interpreted the manœuver.
-
-“Nobody home, amigos. Fooled this time.”
-
-A hoarse yell presently confirmed his diagnosis. Its note changed almost
-immediately to rage and disappointment, and presently a thin coil of
-smoke issued from the doorway, followed by a bright flash of flame as
-the fire licked up the dry thatch of the *ramada*. Like infuriated ants
-the raiders ran next to fire the stables. They were within easy
-rifle-shot and Sliver was drawing an experimental bead when Jake knocked
-up his rifle.
-
-“One shot,” he replied, to Sliver’s grumble, “an’ they’ll go like a
-flock of quail into the chaparral.”
-
-Happening to glance at Bull just then, he nudged Sliver to look.
-
-On his knees, peering through a bush, the man looked for all the world
-like some great animal, bear or black tiger, crouching for its prey.
-Under dark brows, his coal eyes burned. Like some huge dog held in
-leash, slow shivers coursed through his frame. Always the two had
-recognized in him depths of feeling beyond them. The slow shake of the
-head that passed between them expressed consciousness of a hurt beyond
-their plumbing. They looked quickly away as Bull turned toward them.
-
-“Time to be moving. They’ll be coming presently.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-An hour later saw them all placed—Gordon in the chaparral at the top of
-the trail; Bull, Sliver, and Jake at intervals of quarter of a mile down
-the zigzag trail.
-
-“No shooting as they go down,” Bull cautioned them. “Coming back,
-they’ll be among the horses without a chance to turn.”
-
-The arrangement, while wise, was not altogether to Sliver’s taste; he
-grumbled to Jake as they moved on down to their places: “Fat chance for
-us. He’ll pick half of ’em off going up between him and Gordon, then
-turn and plug the others. Any maverick that gets by to us will be that
-riddled a bullet ’ull slip through him without t’eching.”
-
-“Ain’t it coming to him?” Jake scornfully questioned. “He’s welcome to
-my share—if it’s any comfort. But listen, hombre—let me tell you that
-the killing of every *revueltoso* in Mexico ain’t a-going to cure his
-hurt.”
-
-Leaving Sliver at his post, Jake moved on down, and after he also
-disappeared in the chaparral silence spread a warm spell over valley and
-mountain; golden, sunlit silence that was emphasized rather than broken
-by the wild screech of a hawk.
-
-From above Gordon looked right down into the amber heart of the Bowl.
-Almost beneath him, the *jacal* rose like a doll’s house out of the
-vermilion splash of Pedro’s ripe peppers. From it the green veining of
-the stream ran through the tawny pastures that were spotted with black
-dots, the feeding horses. Far down, just where the stream slipped out of
-the Bowl, he could see the giant oak that marked their camp; and though
-even his strong young eyes were unequal to the distance, imagination
-supplied the ashes of their fire, the bed of leaves under the spreading
-branches.
-
-Instantly he began reliving, tenderly reliving that happy day so
-absorbed that he forgot for the moment the tragedy that had brought it
-to a close. He did not notice a slight rustle in the chaparral nor catch
-the gleam of peering eyes. Were it a raider, he had proved an easy prey.
-But the eyes were soft; the hand that presently stole out of a bush and
-shook his foot was small and white. Whirling, he came face to face with
-Lee.
-
-“What are you doing here?”
-
-She placed her finger to her lip. “Hush! they are coming! I just
-couldn’t stand it, up there in the chaparral all alone. So I tied the
-horses and—here I am.”
-
-There was nothing that could be done—except to look stern. Reaching, he
-pulled her down beside him, shook her a little, then spoiled the effect
-by a kiss. Then, lying flat on their stomachs, they kept a joint watch
-till the scrape of a hoof, rumble of voices, broke on the trail.
-
-Peeping cautiously, they saw a motley procession file on to the plateau.
-Like the soldiers of Las Bocas, their clothing ran the gamut of the
-service uniforms of Porfirio Diaz’s army; the silver and gray of
-*rurales*, red and blue of the infantry, variations from these of
-cavalry and artillery, fatigue linen mixed in varying quantities with
-*charro* and *peon* costumes. Accentuating this motley, their loose
-gross mouths, blunt animal noses, lewd eyes in the midst of faces
-swollen by last night’s debauch, fully justified Gordon’s judgment:
-
-“Gosh! what a gallows crew!”
-
-Weary and footsore after two days of heavy marching, neither their
-appearance nor their spirits were improved by the fact that half of them
-limped. Their voices had been raised in strident altercation. One
-fellow’s angry complaint carried across to Gordon and Lee.
-
-“The two gringo señoritas at the Lovell *rancho*, where were they?—fled to
-El Paso. At the second we got what?—one woman, a child, and three
-horses—and lost three men. At Los Arboles there were to be women, a
-score at least, young and pretty; also a gringo girl with golden hair
-and a skin of milk? And horses by the hundred, blooded beasts of fine
-breeding? What got we?—an empty house! Thou art a pretty leader,
-Filomena.”
-
-“Si!” came a second growl. “And the *fonda*? ‘Courage, señores,’ he says
-but two hours ago. ‘In the barranca we shall find a *fonda* with liquors
-and a girl, none prettier in all Chihuahua.’ And—”
-
-“Again an empty house!”
-
-By one and another it was kept up. “We limp like lame cats,” the first
-man spoke again. “If this business go like the first and there be no
-horses—I know of one throat that will be cut.”
-
-“And I of another!” The guide, an ugly, squat *peon*, turned on him with
-a snarl. “Was it I that sent up the warning smoke? No? Then fasten your
-tongue with your teeth. If you want women, they are to be had at San
-Carlos, a few hours away, a fine town untouched by war.”
-
-“Si, more marching,” the first grumbler was beginning, when the other
-cut him off. He had advanced to the edge of the plateau and stood
-pointing down into the Bowl.
-
-“And horses, say you? There they are—scores! Si, hundreds! enough to
-make us all rich when sold at the border.”
-
-Success! the shibboleth of the modern world! Even among these scoundrels
-it wrought the customary effect; turned malcontents into enthusiastic
-friends. “Bueno!” He who had issued the sinister hint of cut throats was
-the first to clap the guide on the back. “Bueno, amigo! thou art a
-leader indeed. ’Twas no fault of thine that the white-skinned girl
-escaped. I will slit the gizzard of the next that says it.”
-
-On his part the guide swelled and ruffled in the flattering sunlight. “I
-told ye. ‘Leave it to Filomena,’ said I. ‘Leave it to him to show ye fat
-booty.’ Behold!”
-
-Also he assumed the airs and authority of real leadership. “The horses
-we shall need to rope fresh mounts. Hide the stuff in the bushes till we
-return. ’Twill be only for a couple of hours.”
-
-Fired by the sight of the horses, the raiders fell feverishly to work
-unloading their loot, which—Gordon noted it with satisfaction—was
-largely provisions. Then, lameness and blisters forgotten, unaware of
-the cold, fierce eyes watching from the bushes, they followed the
-horsemen downhill, yelling and hooting, raising the echoes with snatches
-of ribald song.
-
-A thin wisp of smoke above the *jacal* followed by an explosive flash as
-the dry thatch took fire announced their arrival at the bottom. From
-above Gordon and Lee saw them move down the valley in a long line that
-presently came sweeping back in a half-circle with the horses in its
-belly.
-
-There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts
-were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid
-vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then
-the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single
-file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider
-sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers
-looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and
-around the trail’s yellow convolutions.
-
-After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose
-to Jake’s post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in
-the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked
-more like “The Python” he appeared in *peon* eyes. And he had the
-serpent’s patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle
-trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull’s
-shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward
-grumblings as the file rose to him.
-
-“If ’twasn’t for orders,” he mentally harangued the first raider that
-passed, “your black soul ’u’d be a-busting now on its way to hell!”
-
-High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes
-transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But
-his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic
-vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine
-across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift
-of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow
-winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a
-vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray’s “Elegy.” In place
-of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which
-man’s imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight
-and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for
-that peaceful contrast, he felt—felt with savage joy—Death, the grim
-angel, hovering above.
-
-With her girl’s strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the
-wriggling black line rose up to Bull’s station she leaned forward and
-broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon’s sighting. Yet,
-in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a
-black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon
-drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands.
-
-And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line
-of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain—the beast mouths,
-blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in
-the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish
-spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was
-the face of Death itself—the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near.
-
-In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic
-emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles
-too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the
-bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a
-flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when
-nothing better offered.
-
-About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed
-below. Instantly Bull’s rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its
-sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But
-the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that
-the last two raiders were still below Jake’s station.
-
-He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let
-three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the
-action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the
-world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a
-haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for
-the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a
-fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the
-edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a
-mad stampede.
-
-A hoarse yell marked the first raider’s realization of his danger. With
-spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a
-hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and
-beast sideways over the cliff.
-
-Springing up as the mare whirled, Gordon saw laid out directly beneath
-the course of the stampede down and around the stony staircases. At
-first it stood out clearly as in those cinema pictures of galloping men
-taken from a height. Following the first man’s cry came the wild yells
-of the second and third. One! two! three! he saw them squeezed out over
-the cliff; saw them strike the next level and bound off and over on a
-longer leap; saw them turn, slowly in midair till the horses showed like
-fat slugs above the men; saw the final crash and disappearance in the
-chaparral below. But when his glance came back the crystal clearness was
-gone, obscured by yellow dust cloud from the bowels of which men and
-horses were ejected sideways as the stampede whirled on down.
-
-Of the thirty raiders, but one had a chance—he who brought up the rear.
-But as he turned to run he came face to face with Jake, who had sprung
-up to see. Instantly Jake raised his gun, but there came a roar and
-rattle of stones and hoofs. Before he could fire the dust cloud
-swallowed the man. Three minutes later it rolled down the last night to
-the pastures.
-
-Over the Bowl silence fell again, golden, sunlit silence broken only by
-the screech of the hovering hawk. As before, the wind whispered in the
-sage, the clouds marched slowly across the blue fields above, the bees
-went busily upon their ways; but in the mean time—when the dust settled
-there remained, of the two hundred horses and thirty men, only the few
-animals that spread out fanwise as they galloped across the level
-bottoms.
-
-With the swiftness, sureness of a lightning stroke in the night it had
-come, the doom—so swiftly that Lee and Gordon above, Jake and Sliver
-below, could only stand and stare, doubting their eyes. And Bull—
-
-The instant the mare turned his mind leaped to the inevitable
-conclusion. With a roar, bellow of rage, inchoate, wild as the snarl of
-a balked tiger, he threw his hands on high, rifle waving like a reed in
-one great fist. Crash! lock, stock, and barrel, it flew in a thousand
-pieces as he brought it down on a rock! From the bank he leaped down to
-the trail, in his hot mind some mad idea of stopping the rush. But
-already the stampede had passed. He ran a few yards, as though to
-overtake and pull it back. But it swept on and down beyond his speed.
-Stopping, then, arms raised skyward, fists clenched, teeth bared, eyes
-glaring in the midst of his swollen, purple face, he stood, a towering
-figure of furious despair.
-
-Into those few minutes were compressed all the agonies he had endured in
-the last few weeks—his trial, temptations, failure, bitter
-disappointment, tragic grief, crowned by this, the robbing of his just
-revenge. Swelling with a sense of vast injustice, the injustice that
-created the world on a scheme of struggle and pain, he turned maniacal
-eyes to the sky; stood shaking his bunched fists while a terrible
-blasphemy rose to his lips. But it never issued. For in the moment that
-it seemed his reason must crack there came slipping into his hot mind,
-like a cooling breath, the old vision—of Mary and Betty as on that last
-night.
-
-In the sunlight that wrapped the valley, just as in the vast world
-loneliness under the quiet stars, he sensed her presence. His arms
-dropped, the mad light died. Bowing his dark face in his hands, he shook
-again with the throes of silent grief—but only for a short space.
-Presently he looked up, the old humility restored, its expression on his
-lips.
-
-“’Twasn’t for me. I wasn’t fit. ’Twas taken out of my hands.”
-
-Quiet now, he watched the horses careering over the bottoms. When at
-last Sliver joined him he gave quiet orders: “Go down, you an’ Jake, an’
-collect up their guns—an’ ammunition. Bring up fresh horses for all of
-us an’ a couple for the packs. We’ll have to light out for the border at
-once.”
-
-
-XL: SLIVER “MAKES GOOD”
-=======================
-
-By the time Sliver and Jake returned the sun hung like a red-hot ball in
-the smoke of the horizon. Even if the horses had not been tired, it was
-too late to start that night. Accordingly, after loading the raiders’
-provisions, they rode on down into the ravine and used the glowing
-embers of the *fonda* for their camp-fire.
-
-To them, sitting there, by ones and twos and threes the refugees came
-straggling in to gather for the night around their own fires. Going from
-one to another, Lee and Gordon dealt comfort and advice. They were to
-reap the standing corn and sow again for their own use in the secret
-places of the mountains. The *hacienda* cattle they could herd in the
-cañons of the lower hills. Thus, with plenty of milk for butter and
-cheese, corn, and beans, their own chickens, goats, and pigs, they would
-be able to live in rude comfort till the coming of peace permitted Lee’s
-return.
-
-“The knowledge that they will not suffer makes it easier to bear.”
-
-Lee spoke, looking back at the brown faces enlivened by the ruddy glare
-of the fires. But when, next morning, they crowded around her, old men,
-women, young girls, and little children, mixing prayers, blessings, and
-lamentations with their good-bys, she was less philosophical. She was
-still weeping when she looked back at those that had followed her as far
-as the mouth of the ravine.
-
-“Oh, if our government could only see them! Surely they would help.”
-
-Gordon looked for another outburst when, later, they sighted ruined
-Arboles from the very spot he and Mary Mills had overlooked it. How well
-he remembered it! The walls and courts, *patio*, rainbow adobes, a small
-city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun;
-the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy
-of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far
-horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into
-the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by
-laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. Now, roofless, windowless, its
-blackened walls upreared in the midst of a wide, blurred smudge. Yet
-though the contrast brought stinging tears to her eyes, Lee took it
-calmly.
-
-“What does it matter? It can be rebuilt. But there are other things”—her
-voice lowered and trailed away—“that can never be replaced.”
-
-They were both sad and sick at heart. Yet youth may not permanently be
-cast down. When, riding on, they left the smoke-blacked ruin behind them
-and passed from the dreary waste of burned pasture into golden plains
-she began restoration. A native carpenter could replace every loved
-beam; rebuild the massive old furniture just as it was. The *peones*
-would lime-wash the exterior in its usual rainbow color! Also,
-restoration would give opportunity for remodeling and improvement.
-
-As she ran on Gordon sensed another motive; perceived that she was
-striving to draw Bull out of his sorrow. Not a plan that did not include
-him! A great fireplace, for use during the rains, was to have a
-comfortable settle at one side, on which the Three could lounge and
-smoke while basking in the blaze. Each was to have his own room. Thus
-and so! Nor was her prattle without effect. Always sensitive where she
-was concerned, Bull divined her motive, and, albeit with an effort great
-as a physical strain, he responded, listened, and nodded acquiescence,
-occasionally forced a smile.
-
-Only Sliver was fooled. “Say,” he remarked to Jake, who rode with him in
-the rear, “did you allow she’d have taken it so light?”
-
-But Jake, the keen, discerning critic, quickly opened his eyes. “Take
-it light, you ——! ——! ——! ——!” The epithets, if printed, would
-scorch a hole in the page. “Kain’t you see she’s grieving her little
-heart out? She’s doing it all for Bull.”
-
-At any other time one of those epithets would probably have produced a
-retort that would have tumbled Jake out of his saddle. But,
-conscience-stricken, Sliver accepted all. With humility that was almost
-pathetic, he actually put into words feeling that was, for him, quite
-subtle. “’Tain’t that I’d set in jedgment on Lady-girl, on’y—I reckon
-it’s so with all of us—I jes’ kain’t bear to see her say or do anything
-that don’t jes’ fit.”
-
-After a pause he went on: “About these plans o’ her’n? If there warn’t
-no revolution, an’ we ked stay along here without a break, an’ they’d
-destroy all the licker in the world an’ forgit the art of making it, I
-don’t know but that we might live up to ’em. But I’m telling you,
-hombre, it’s been awful wearing an’ I jes’ know what a spell in El Paso
-’ull do for me—I’ll be that swinish I’ll never dare to come near her
-ag’in.”
-
-When Jake had admitted like feelings Sliver continued: “Sure, under them
-conditions, licker an’ its makers being, so to say, put on the hog-train
-an’ run off the aidge of the earth, I’d hev’ one chanst to make good.
-But as ’tis, an’ seeing that she’s now settled with a fine young husband
-an’ kin get along very nicely, I’m sorter allowing that El Paso ’ull let
-me out.” While his eyes blinked guiltily and his lips quivered with
-anticipatory thirst, he concluded, “Sure I’m that dry ’twon’t take much
-temptation for me to tell my troubles to a barkeep an’ have him drown
-’em in drink.”
-
-“Nor me,” Jake seconded. “Besides, my fingers is jes’ itching to get
-into a game.”
-
-“Drink, cards, flat broke—back to rustling.” Sliver laid down the law of
-their being. “With me it runs like, the A-B-C.”
-
-“I drink, you drink, he drinks, we drink,” Jake chanted it *sotto voce*.
-“If folks wasn’t so onreasonable a feller might make an honest living.
-But the best tinhorn that ever turned a card from the bottom is bound to
-make a slip, an’ when he does—whoosh! if he’s lucky enough to make his
-getaway, rustling’s all that’s left.”
-
-“Bull?” Sliver nodded at the broad back ahead. “D’you allow he’s a-going
-to stay put?”
-
-Jake’s shake of the head mixed doubt with concern. “If we meet up with
-any Mex—we’ll never get him away. He’ll run amuck among ’em.”
-
-Sliver’s reckless eye lit with a fighting gleam. “An’ the country’s jes’
-lousy with *revueltosos*? Hombre, it’s a cinch! Not that I’d want it,” he
-hypocritically added, “Lady-girl being along. But if we do chance on a
-few—hum! what’s the exchange, jes’ now, in Valles’s money? Seven to one,
-heigh? Well, we’ve three rifles apiece, counting the extras on the
-pack-horses. One man with three rifles is as good as two men. Twice four
-of us makes eight. At current exchange, one gringo for seven Mex, we
-orter account for fifty-six.”
-
-“There or thereabouts,” Jake agreed. “But, as you say, Missy being
-along, it’s up to us to dodge ’em.”
-
-“Five days?” Sliver hopefully repeated. “We’d jes’ as well look out for
-trouble.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-Not till the morning of the third day did the “trouble” loom up over the
-horizon.
-
-To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would
-strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso.
-Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a
-few *peon* herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But
-while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them
-away from water, the first necessity of desert travel.
-
-From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse
-grass country dotted with *sahuaros*; thereafter into sage desert
-sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same;
-a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation,
-its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only
-by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs.
-Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost
-due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the
-railroad.
-
-Dusk was falling when they—more correctly, the horses—found a small
-*arroyo*. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they
-might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They
-did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too,
-they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between
-them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for
-danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without
-fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the
-“trouble” showed up in form of a line of *sombreros* behind the peak of
-a limestone ridge—unfortunately, to the eastward.
-
-Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the
-pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as
-they rode, Gordon saw the line of *sombreros* rise in correspondence as
-the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the
-ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief
-against the sky-line.
-
-“They’ve seen us!”
-
-As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their
-galloping hoofs. “Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!”
-
-A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets
-chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew
-overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main
-wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards
-away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the
-ridge.
-
-Differing speed had strung the pursuers out in a scattering column, and
-Sliver grinned his delight at the arrangement. “Like bowling at the
-county fair. Miss one, you’ve still a chance at the next behind. Set ’em
-up again!” he yelled as, following their volley, two men and a horse
-plunged forward on the ground.
-
-“A bit lower, Son,” Bull quietly admonished Gordon. “Aim at the jine of
-man an’ horse. That gives you a seven-foot target.”
-
-“One cigar, one baby down!”
-
-Sliver’s second yell marked the fall of two more horses and another
-man—shot by Bull out of his saddle. Aiming and firing with the deadly
-accuracy bred by years of just such fighting against more sagacious
-foes, they dropped the leaders as fast as they came on; in three minutes
-had drawn a dead-line of men and horses across their front. And that
-deadly practice told. Brave enough, after their lights, the raiders were
-not accustomed to such shooting. In the revolutionary wars their own
-practice, like that of their opponents, was to spring up out of a
-trench, yell “*Viva Mexico!*” fire in the enemy’s direction, and drop
-back again, trusting to the god of war to find a billet for the bullet.
-Turning, they raced back for the opposite ridge, spurred on by the
-galling shooting that emptied two more saddles.
-
-Bull’s black glance following them with longing that confirmed Jake’s
-diagnosis—he would have “run amuck among ’em” if left to himself. The
-more steadily, perhaps, for his deadly thirst to kill, he had aimed and
-fired with automatic precision. Withal, he had found time to note
-Gordon’s steady shooting.
-
-“You done fine, lad,” he commented. “If there was only ourselves, I’d be
-in favor of carrying it to ’em. But”—his glance went to Lee, who was
-holding the horses—“we’ll have to fall back. They’ve had their lesson
-an’ ain’t a-going to try any more fool charges. Now they’ll try an’
-flank us. While Sliver an’ Jake hold ’em, we’ll run back to the next
-ridge.”
-
-But Gordon, flushed with his taste of battle, rebelled. “What’s the
-matter with me staying? You fellows care for me like three hens
-scratching for an orphan chicken. I’m tired of this sheltered life.”
-
-“‘Sheltered life’?” Communing with himself, Jake glanced at the grisly
-dead-line. “‘Sheltered life,’ an’ him with two stretched out down
-there.”
-
-“Comes o’ being married,” Sliver added. “No married man has a right to
-run with batchelders.”
-
-“That’s right,” Jake approved. “It’s up to you to look after your wife.”
-
-“Well?” Gordon protested. “How can I do it better than by staying here?”
-
-“What?” Sliver looked scandalized. “Us take a chanst of her being
-widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree!
-Git out.”
-
-“Come on, Son, you’re delaying the game.” Bull had already joined Lee.
-His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug,
-Gordon obeyed.
-
-The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others
-had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. “Bet you
-they’ve split already an’ are moving around us. Now if we do the same,
-keeping well out of sight, we’ll mebbe get another crack at ’em.”
-
-And so it was. When, after a half-mile détour through limestone and sage
-chaparral, the halves of the raiders’ party showed in the open two
-rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless
-horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From
-the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back
-and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the
-nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an
-occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead.
-
-While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its
-southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like
-an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge
-behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But
-with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in
-unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely
-upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only
-roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would
-bring forth no new enemy.
-
-Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut
-the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered
-more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an
-impassable barrier, forcing a détour. Worst of all, the denser growths
-permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver,
-midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than
-two hundred yards away.
-
-“If ’twas on’y black powder they was using,” Sliver bitterly complained,
-“we’d stan’ some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their
-smoke.”
-
-“You’re onreasonable,” Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting
-from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los
-Arboles: “In order that these here bandits kin exercise the ‘sacred
-right of revolution to reg’late their own internal affairs’ your Uncle
-Samuel has kindly supplied ’em with the latest smokeless cartridge.
-Thanks to his benevolence, some one’s going to get hurt pretty soon.”
-
-He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they
-evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down
-Sliver’s horse. Hanging on to Jake’s stirrup leather, he made the next
-ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load
-abandoned.
-
-“An’ this is on’y the beginning.” Jake continued his remarks from the
-next ridge. “The railroad’s not far away, an’ as I remember the country
-hereabouts, she runs right out in the open, with nary a snitch of cover
-for over twenty miles. There’ll be nothing to stop ’em from shooting us
-down by volleys at long range. So it all boils down to this—some one’s
-got to hold ’em at the next good stand while the others make their
-getaway.”
-
-They had been carrying two rifles apiece. Now Sliver quietly
-appropriated Jake’s extra weapon. “With three rifles I orter be good for
-two hours.”
-
-“When I said ‘some one’”—Jake quietly repossessed himself of the
-weapon—“I naterally allowed his name was Jake Evers. Git! before I bust
-you over the head.”
-
-“If ’twasn’t for them”—Sliver’s hard glance went out to the
-chaparral—“there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to take time to rub your
-long hoss face in the dust.”
-
-The threat, however, produced from Jake only his wolf grin. “You damned
-fool! D’you know what’s going to happen to the man that stays behind?
-He’s a-going to be what the society columns call ‘the piece de
-resistence’ at a Mexican barbecure. There ain’t a thing in the line of
-torture that them bandits won’t do to you.”
-
-“You ked never stan’ it.” Sliver displayed great solicitude. “You’re
-getting along, Jake, an’ your nerve ain’t what it used to be.”
-
-“You’ve said it.” Jake’s cold eye warmed. He placed a friendly hand on
-Sliver’s shoulder. “You’re dead right, Son. I’m getting on. What’s more,
-I’m that dyed-in-the-wool with deviltry ’twon’t hurt anybody when I
-pinch out. But you’re young yet. You’ll—”
-
-“—hit El Paso an’ go straight to the devil. You know it darned well.
-We’ll gamble for it.” He spat on a pebble and threw it up. “Wet or dry,
-which? Wet! I win!”
-
-“Jest my luck!” Jake’s complaint was sincere as though, instead of death
-or torture, life and fortune had been the hazard. “I don’t have no
-chance at all except with cards. What did I wanter go an’ do that for,
-anyway, an’ me with a deck right here in my pocket?”
-
-“Too late!” Sliver pressed his triumph. “Now git!”
-
-But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the
-stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon
-were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it
-loomed even more inaccessible.
-
-“’Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the
-middle.”
-
-Sliver’s glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the
-ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. “Don’t tell
-Lady-girl—that is, not jes’ now. Let her think I’ll make my getaway to
-the northward. But some day, after she’s safe in El Paso, you kin tell
-her—that Sliver was on’y too damn glad to give his life for her’n.” He
-went on, dreamily: “’Course I knew it ’u’d be all off after I’d hit the
-city. But I’d sorter thought, now an’ then, that if the rangers didn’t
-get me too quick, some day I’d come back to Arboles, when her kids was
-about hip-high, an’ teach ’em to ride an’ shoot. But that was jes’ a
-dream.”
-
-Jake’s glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the
-*revueltosos*, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver’s request
-might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other
-trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he
-could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone.
-
-“Funny, ain’t it? But that’s just what I’d often thought myself. Sure
-I’ll tell her—if them devils don’t down me on the next run. They’re damn
-close now, and they’ll be up here before we’re half-way across. Against
-that limestone front we’ll make some mark, an’ with fifty of ’em
-cracking at us it ’ull be the luck of hell if they don’t down one or
-both.”
-
-Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the
-boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering
-behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks
-or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless
-scramble up the last steep two found their mark—one through Sliver’s
-knee, the other dropped Jake’s horse.
-
-Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of
-his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried
-him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a
-full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain
-traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see—not the tracks; it
-was too far away for that—a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine.
-Bull and Gordon still lay answering the *revueltosos’* fire. But Sliver
-and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in
-which the dead horse lay out of sight.
-
-“Hey!” Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. “Let ’em go!
-You’ll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I’m hurt. You
-kin take my horse; on’y lift me down first an’ prop me up among the
-rocks where I kin lie comfortable an’ pump a gun.”
-
-Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his
-rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well
-and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him,
-painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride
-with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands,
-shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring
-raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the
-memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other
-beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends;
-all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound
-the “Three Bad Men of Las Bocas” closer than brothers—all this combined
-in an emotion that revolted at desertion.
-
-“My *God*, hombre!” he broke out in protest. “I kain’t leave you here,
-wounded, to fall in the han’s of them wolves!”
-
-“You kain’t do nothing else!” Hard eyes flashing, Sliver went on:
-“Didn’t we gamble, jest now, for who was to stay? An’ didn’t I win? Now
-you’re trying to renig?” As he noted the sweat standing out on Jake’s
-brow, he went on more quietly: “Look at it sensible. What ked you-all do
-with a wounded man? You’d on’y sign Lady-girl’s death warrant. And don’t
-worry about them wolves. They ain’t a-going to light no fires on my
-belly nor burn my feet. If I don’t get done up in the scrap—the last
-bullet will be for myself.”
-
-Also he turned an adamant face to a proposal that Jake should stay too.
-“No, hombre, it’s still over a hundred miles to the border, an’ they
-need you. There’s nothing left for you but to take my horse an’ git.”
-
-It had all been said and done without strain, effort, or
-self-consciousness; was entirely the expression of his hardy, careless
-soul that had never known the vice of self-pity. But when Jake still
-stood, his long, lean face working lugubriously in his attempts to hide
-his grief, Sliver did that which, for him, was a miracle in
-divination—entered into and felt the pain of another soul.
-
-“Oh, shore, hombre!” His face lit up with sympathy. “You orter be glad.
-Ain’t it better to die clean, this-a-way, than to choke slowly at the
-end of some ranger’s rope? Go on, now, an’ catch up to ’em an’ keep ’em
-moving till night. With the least bit of luck, you’ll pull through all
-right.”
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver’s
-consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee
-was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake’s
-departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; *i.e.*, to
-inflate to the limit the current exchange of one *gringo* for seven
-*revueltosos*. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark,
-addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake
-had left at his elbow.
-
-“Gosh, but I’d like a drink!”
-
-His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. “You’re
-going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You’ve taken your last.”
-
-Pulling his Colt’s .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle.
-“Handy for the funeral.” He uttered a second grim chuckle.
-
-The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he
-lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge—so quiet that a
-lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully
-away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent
-history so much firing had invariably brought food.
-
-From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly
-rifles picked them off, the *revueltosos* had learned caution, only
-advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake
-had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, the
-*revueltosos* remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple of
-*sombreros* rose cautiously out of a clump of sage.
-
-“Stuck up on sticks.” Sliver criticized their wabbly motion.
-
-After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly
-broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into
-the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of
-sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he
-draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the
-*revueltosos* that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied
-the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses
-and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two
-more as the *revueltosos* raced back over the opposite ridge.
-
-“Six added to three I got makes nine!” Sliver grunted. “A few more an’ I
-kin afford to cash in.”
-
-He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he
-noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his
-satisfaction.
-
-“You ain’t a-going to try an’ pass through me ag’in,” he addressed the
-invisible foe. “An’ you ain’t going to leave me here. It’ll take you an
-hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with
-night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you—”
-
-The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series
-designed to keep the *revueltosos’* attention upon himself, and when,
-half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep
-face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded.
-
-“They reckon we’re all here, trying to stick it out till night,” he
-correctly interpreted the movement. “It ’ull take ’em another half-hour
-to find out.”
-
-A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the
-brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face
-of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots
-in both directions along the ridge.
-
-“Not that I’m expecting to bag any of youse,” he addressed the unseen
-enemy. “But just to slow you up a bit an’ let you know I’m here. When
-you get there”—his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that
-commanded his post on both sides—“good-by an’ *good* night.”
-
-Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to
-wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver
-stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he
-counted each minute, each second in yards—the hundreds, scores of yards
-Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day
-in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness.
-While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched
-slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge
-oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed
-neither fear nor softening in Sliver’s face when, from the spot he had
-long noted, a rifle spoke.
-
-It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks
-about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that
-time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff
-of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many
-years claimed the stakes.
-
-He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched
-arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights,
-his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out.
-
-Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low
-sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child.
-
-
-XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE”
-================================
-
-By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being,
-whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had
-withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired
-for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth
-while to inquire.
-
-“*Him?* Oh, he’s back there a-holding ’em off while we gain a spell.”
-
-Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not
-altogether relieve her anxiety. “But—how will he find us again?”
-
-Jake’s shrug was fine in its indifference. “He’ll play a lone han’,
-Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he’ll
-likely beat us to it.”
-
-“You really think so?”
-
-“He’ll be there to meet us.”
-
-Jake’s tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not
-deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of
-the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the
-knee—he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause,
-explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the *revueltosos* came out
-in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the
-ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence,
-explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter’s slow shake of the
-head, signaled then that all was over.
-
-While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the
-sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp
-black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose
-from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid
-his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all
-night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along
-the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when
-they began the fight that morning.
-
-The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range
-glasses at the dark smoke plume. “Enjine an’ five cars.”
-
-He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter’s keen sight the
-lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle
-on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay
-*rebozos* told they were mostly women, and that told all. “Nobody there
-but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that’s chasing us.”
-
-“A hundred miles to El Paso,” Jake spoke. “Three days’ horseback? Three
-hours with that old mogul?”
-
-“Golly!” The idea fastened on Gordon. “Couldn’t we?” In place of their
-present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past
-as they sped northward in the engine.
-
-“On’y women and wounded?” Jake repeated it, musingly.
-
-“Dark in half an hour?” Bull added: “They kedn’t tell us from their own.
-’Course we should lose the horses.” With his accustomed caution he read
-the reverse of the shield. “If anything went wrong—we’d be left afoot on
-the desert.”
-
-“No worse than we are,” Jake argued. “These beasts have been running
-sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to
-the mountains we’re not sure of feed nor water—an’ still a hundred miles
-from the border.”
-
-“But Sliver?” Lee protested. “We can’t leave him.”
-
-She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind
-a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and
-steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a
-good end. “The last thing he tol’ me, Missy, was not to wait. ‘’Twould
-hinder me an’ hinder you-all. I’ll make my run alone.’”
-
-“Very well.” Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that
-her boy would be safer under her own eye. “Very well, but I *do* wish he
-were here.”
-
-Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither
-spoke.
-
-While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. “It ’ull be up to
-you an’ Missy,” he told Gordon, “to take care of the engineer while Jake
-an’ me stan’ off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you
-pitch the stuff aboard.”
-
-The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its
-warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some
-were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths
-of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the
-scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a
-*revueltosos’* train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their
-knees at the *metates*, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all
-gossiping at their work. Here and there a man’s face showed in the fire
-glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his
-presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the
-railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were
-stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up
-their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man
-raised a gun, and as Bull’s rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged
-headlong from the top of the car to the ground.
-
-Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the
-mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from
-Gordon’s gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train.
-Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with
-Lee’s gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their
-stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots
-along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened
-wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward.
-
-The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman’s shovel. “Here’s
-where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions.”
-
-Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch
-the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he
-shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual
-caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable
-information with the muzzle of his gun.
-
-His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of
-the speeding engine across the cab. “He says the half of Valles’s army
-is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what’s left
-he’s making a las’ stan’ north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the
-country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to
-supply the new base!” The next item of news he delivered with a cheer.
-“Hooray! the line’s open clean to the border! He don’t know of any
-trains being run to-night! Thinks we’ll have a clear track!”
-
-Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine
-came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section
-gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown
-faces.
-
-They suggested Bull’s question, “Ask him if there’s any revueltosos on
-the way.”
-
-“At La Mancha!” Jake yelled back. “About thirty miles this side of the
-border!... Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!”
-
-The *brigada* Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of
-Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull’s dark face. His big hands
-clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained
-control of his voice.
-
-“Does he allow we kin run through there?”
-
-Jake nodded. “If we douse the headlight and race by afore they have time
-to block us.”
-
-Looking back, just then, at Gordon, now stripped to his undershirt and
-growing sootier every minute, Lee heard the answer. She did not,
-however, give it much thought. The hills and rocks that took on queer
-shapes in the dim light of a rising moon, giant *sahuaros* that went
-slipping past like huge ghosts, the occasional fires and lights,
-glimpses of strange brown faces, the rush and roar of the engine
-speeding through mysterious night, held her senses. Yet it stuck in her
-mind, came popping out when, as the engine rounded a sharp curve, the
-headlight beam struck full on a sheaf of glittering wires.
-
-“Oh!” she called out in sudden alarm. “We ought to have cut the wires!”
-
-It was a vital error. Gordon’s whistle expressed their joint dismay; but
-Jake, with his intense practicability, recovered first. “Well, what’s to
-do—stop an’ cut them?”
-
-Bull shook his head. “Too late! We’ve been running over an hour. Nothing
-left but to take a chanst.”
-
-Jake nodded. But presently he spoke again. “Chanst? If they pull up a
-rail an’ ditch us at La Mancha, I’d hardly call it a chanst with half of
-the brigada Gonzales shooting us up from all around. We’d be pickled for
-keeps.”
-
-During their “rustler days” it had always been Jake’s craft that pulled
-them out of tight places. Habit held Bull silent till, after he had
-spoken to the engineer, Jake went on: “He says the track runs two per
-cent. down into La Mancha. We kin shut off steam an’ pussy-foot it the
-last few miles. So here’s the dope. We drop you-all”—his glance took in
-the others—“a mile this side of the station, give you two hours to go
-around, then shoot ahead. If we get through, you-all strike a light an’
-we’ll stop and pick you up. If we don’t—we don’t. But you’ll be less ’n
-thirty miles from the border an’ have all night to make your getaway.”
-
-“But—”
-
-Gordon’s objection, however, was nipped by Bull. “It goes.”
-
-Lee, however, was not so easily silenced. Climbing down, she crossed the
-wabbling cab with unsteady steps and caught Jake’s arm. “Oh, don’t take
-the risk. We’ll abandon the engine. Come with us!”
-
-Looking down into her face, Jake’s bleak eyes were almost soft. He
-gently patted her hand. “Now don’t be jumping at conclusions, Missy. We
-need the enjine to go on, but I ain’t a-going to commit suicide. If the
-tracks are blocked we’ll back right off. Then I’ll take to the bushes
-an’ follow you round.”
-
-With that she had to be content. But, realizing the danger, she climbed
-up and sat beside him while the mogul rolled and racked and plunged
-forward through the night. She was still sitting there when, an hour
-later, a headlight flashed up far away.
-
-“They’ve wired ahead!” Bull yelled across the cab. “Make him stop, Jake!
-We’ll take to the bushes here.”
-
-“Oh! now you come with us!” Lee cried.
-
-But Jake’s answer wiped out her happiness. “No, Missy, I’ll pull ’em
-along for a few miles while you-all make your getaway afore I drop off.”
-
-Already the throttle was closed. Slowing under the brakes, the mogul
-glided to a stop. Leaping down, Gordon caught the provisions,
-ammunition, and rifles as Bull threw them down. Meanwhile Lee stood
-looking up at Jake with wide, distressed eyes.
-
-“Come on, dear!” Gordon called up from below.
-
-“No time to waste.” Bull touched her shoulder.
-
-Still she stood. “Oh, I hate to leave you. *Do* come!”
-
-“Oh, shore!” Jake laughed, patting her cheek. “I’ll jine you in a few
-hours—or at El Paso, if I miss you here.”
-
-Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the
-least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed
-beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her
-hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his
-cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon’s arms.
-
-Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer
-threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to
-glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips
-had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some
-reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him
-in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would
-never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames.
-
-The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before
-he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant
-waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning
-spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught
-by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer.
-
-“What are you grinning at?”
-
-The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his
-seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake.
-
-“The trouble with you, Alberto, ain’t that you Mexicans are a dirty,
-lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you’re too plumb ignorant to
-know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you
-call a face there ain’t a gleam to show you’re sensible of the honor
-you’ve jest been paid. You don’t know it, Alberto, an’ you probably
-never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten
-country ’twouldn’t come near it. If I don’t blow the top of your head
-off during the next hour—which I likely will—you’ll be able to tell it
-to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they’re
-smart they won’t believe you. But it’s the closest to fame you’ll ever
-get, so play it for all it’s worth. Now listen, Alberto”—he shook his
-finger in the engineer’s frightened face—“if you ever expect to hand it
-down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to
-business.”
-
-Delivered in English, the harangue flew high over the Mexican’s head.
-But it did Jake lots of good. Having, as it were, palliated his shameful
-emotions, he followed his own advice and turned to the business in hand.
-
-“How far is that enjine, Alberto?” He poked the question in with his
-gun.
-
-“Five miles, señor.”
-
-“Jest an enjine?”
-
-“No, señor, it rides too steadily. It draws two cars; no more or it
-could not take the grade at this speed.”
-
-“How long afore they catch us?”
-
-“Ten more miles, señor. They travel two to our one.”
-
-“All right, slow up a bit.”
-
-With hollow clank of drivers the mogul moved on at slackened speed until
-less than half a mile intervened. It was running, of course, reversed,
-and across the intervening space the headlights stared. When, obedient
-to Jake’s order, the throttle was thrown wide again the two engines ran
-like giant insects through the night, one in chase of the other,
-thundering across bridges, whizzing around curves, shooting through
-cuts, chimneys spitting smoke and flame, headlights flashing defiance
-like fiery eyes.
-
-All the while Jake timed the distance. “Cut her off a notch,” he ordered
-when the mogul began to gain. “I wanter draw ’em on as far as I kin.”
-
-But out of the dim smoke that trailed behind the pursuing engine broke,
-just then, a series of red flashes in furious staccato. The drumming
-reports were drowned in the roar and clank of the racing engines; but
-the hail of bullets that rattled and glanced from the mogul’s side was
-unmistakable.
-
-“Machine-guns!” Jake exclaimed. “Chuck her into high, Alberto!” As,
-under a full head of steam, the engine picked up and ran through the
-night like a frightened girl, he added: “Sheer accident, they hit us,
-anyway. They kain’t do it again.”
-
-Proving his words, the next burst of firing went wide. Only one bullet
-struck the cowcatcher, and, leaping like a horse from the spur, the
-mogul launched in dizzy flight down grade; had drawn two miles ahead by
-the time she took the next sharp curve.
-
-“Hold her at that,” Jake ordered.
-
-But again he had failed to reckon with the wires, which, after blocking
-their advance, now cut off retreat. Shortly thereafter came a flash of
-light as the engine shot from a cut through the first of the series of
-stations they had passed on their way up.
-
-In accordance with the inscrutable law which governs the location of
-Mexican stations, it stood a half-mile from the little adobe town that
-dragged its unclean, brown skirts across the tracks. If the inhabitants
-thereof had been content to obey telegraphed orders to build an obstacle
-and let it go at that, the mogul would probably have gone into the ditch
-without a second’s warning. But, desiring to see the smash, they had
-lighted a huge fire alongside the tracks, and under its glare the pile
-of ties, earth, and stones stood out plain as by day. Wheels grinding,
-blue sparks shooting from the sanded rails, the mogul stopped within a
-hundred yards.
-
-After he had closed the throttle and thrown on the brakes the engineer’s
-eye had gone to the cab door. Then it switched to the ugly, black muzzle
-of Jake’s gun. Releasing the brakes, he reversed and opened the
-throttle.
-
-A sputter of musketry had followed the first yell of disappointment that
-went up from the rabble of *peon* watchers. Fired from ancient pieces,
-however, the bullets fell short or rebounded like peas from the mogul’s
-sides. Picking up her stride, she outran their feeble pursuit in a
-hundred yards.
-
-It was then that the engineer’s voice rose in protest: “But, señor, we
-shall run into the other train! Mira! Mira! it is now only a mile away!”
-
-Jake’s eye measured the distance. Then, in dry soliloquy that, even if
-it had not been couched in English, would still have gone over the
-other’s head, he spoke. “Do you know what a maquina loca is, Alberto?
-You don’t? You s’prise me.” Scared out of his small wits, the poor devil
-had not even answered. “It’s the one great invention your pais has
-produced. ’Twas first used by Mr. Orozco shortly after he graduated from
-a mule’s tail to be commander-in-chief of Madero’s army. He designed it
-for the extirpation of Huertistas that got to tagging after him like
-these gents is trailing us. ’Twas very simple. He’d load up half a ton
-of dynamite on an enjine cowcatcher an’ turn her loose with the throttle
-wide open jest where she’d catch a troop-train in a blind cut. Mighty
-effective, it was, too. Some o’ them Huertistas was so elevated above
-their normal they hain’t finished raining down yet. Of course we’re shy
-on the dynamite. But a forty-ton mogul careering along at sixty miles an
-hour ain’t to be despised. Anyway, we’ll try it. At this gait we orter
-catch ’em in the cut beyond the station. Hit her up.”
-
-While talking he had not been idle. First he laid his rifle by the cab
-door, ready to jump; then slipped over his head and shoulder the
-bandoliers of cartridge-clips Gordon had left for him. Meanwhile the
-Mexican’s frightened glance swung between him and the tracks which were
-slipping faster and faster under the mogul. Beyond the station a faint
-glow, reflection from its headlight, marked the entrance of the
-*revueltosos’* train into the cut. In his mind the engineer’s horror,
-burning, mangling, scalding, fought for supremacy with his fear of
-Jake—and won. Selecting the moment that the latter’s two hands were
-engaged with the bandoliers, the engineer crossed the cab in one leap
-and plunged down and out.
-
-“You son of a gun!” Grabbing his rifle, Jake jumped after.
-
-But in the few seconds that elapsed between their leaps the mogul
-carried Jake a hundred yards. A second to a bump and each roll as he
-struck rebounded and turned over and over lost more time. A few more
-were required before he picked himself up. Then his glance went after
-the mogul, now shooting like a comet toward the cut from which the
-*revueltosos’* train had just emerged. In the glare of the headlights
-each vividly illuminating the other, like two dragons breathing fire and
-smoke, they flew at each other’s throats.
-
-Came a yell! a crash! Then darkness, hazy with steam, wiped out all but
-screams and agonized curses.
-
-“*God!*” It burst from Jake. “If Bull could on’y have been here!”
-
-Both while in the air and rolling over and over he had an impression
-that he must have jumped almost on top of the engineer. But now, looking
-around, he became aware—first, that he was standing directly opposite
-the station; second, of a dark figure in the lighted doorway; third, of
-a flash, pistol-crack, of a bullet singing by his ear; lastly of a
-baker’s dozen of other dark figures rushing at him from all around.
-
-In a pinch—how well Sliver and Bull had known it!—Jake could always be
-counted upon to do the unexpected. Behind him stretched an open, moonlit
-plain where he would be easily shot down or overtaken. Grabbing the bull
-by the horns, he rushed straight at the figure in the doorway. Into its
-dark midst went the butt of his rifle. Bang! he slammed the door, a
-heavy, three-inch affair of oak that fitted against stone jambs and
-lintels; was secured by iron swing-bars. As he dropped these in place
-the panels quivered under the impact of many shoulders. Leaving the man
-he had overthrown writhing and holding his middle, Jake crossed quickly
-to the window.
-
-In readiness for just such contingencies, its iron grill had been set
-out six inches to permit a raking fire along the wall, and shooting at
-ten feet into the convulsive movement at the door Jake’s first shot
-dropped a man. As the others dodged around the corner a yell told of
-another wounded.
-
-A smaller window commanded that side, and, crossing over, Jake raked the
-fugitives in their flight with a galling fire till the last dim figure
-disappeared in the brush. Then, after he had noted with satisfaction
-that the window rose high above the ground, he turned to his captive,
-who still lay groaning on the floor.
-
-“Git up!”
-
-Steel eyes and ugly pistol muzzle enforced the order.
-
-The man, a fat Mexican with a yellow, bilious face and small, beady
-eyes, arose. “If you will only let me live, señor—”
-
-“Shut up!” Jake cut him off. “You’re the station agent?”
-
-“Si, señor!”
-
-“What’s in those boxes?”
-
-“Powder, señor, giant powder that was brought in by revueltosos from a
-gringo mine. It is to be shipped on the train to-morrow to Valles, who
-will have it made into bombs for use in his trenches.”
-
-“Thought so.” Jake grinned at the pile of boxes. “’Tain’t no trick to
-tell gringo dynamite. The markings fairly scream, ‘Made in America!’ So
-Valles is going to make bombs of it? Well, well!”
-
-“Señor, you will—”
-
-“Now, Alberto, cut that out.” Having thus transferred the cognomen from
-the engineer to his present captive, Jake went on. “That precious
-existence o’ yourn depends altogether upon your paisanos outside. The
-longer I hold ’em off the longer you live. Get it? Bueno! Now trot over
-to the window. The second you see any one—yelp! If you don’t—” He tapped
-his gun significantly.
-
-The agent thus placed, he looked around the room, The blackened stone of
-the walls told that it had already been burned in one or other of the
-revolutions. He grinned again, noting that the original roof had been
-replaced with laminated iron. “Kain’t roast us out, anyway, Alberto.”
-
-On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a
-small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a
-few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall.
-Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent
-watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid
-block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window.
-
-Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight.
-Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of
-dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry,
-command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst,
-then dropped it again.
-
-“’Tain’t square, shooting wounded.” But there was no pity in his eyes.
-His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: “I’d like to know jest
-how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who’s
-here!”
-
-It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick
-eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred
-yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the
-chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer.
-
-“Afraid I’ve spoiled another of your colleagues.” He turned to the
-agent. “They ain’t very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It’s
-a cinch they’re not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an’
-I simply kain’t waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep
-watch, Alberto.”
-
-Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and
-laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after
-game Jake’s brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and
-tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He
-could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing
-with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a
-frontier bunk-house.
-
-In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face
-loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held
-him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff
-of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he
-watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the
-gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having
-compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung
-poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak.
-
-Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and
-looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A
-stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing
-in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled
-in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak
-now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded.
-
-Lee’s face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her
-arms around his neck, when he murmured, “On’y thirty miles to the
-border, a clean getaway.”
-
-Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range
-that marked Sliver’s last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face
-turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small
-nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness
-settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a
-sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the
-shutters, he returned to the table—not any too soon; for as he sat down
-and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range,
-the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters.
-
-Through all, as a rat in a corner might watch a cat, the agent had
-watched him with deadly fascination. From the north window where he
-stood it was but a step to the door. Apparently Jake did not notice him
-take it, for he did not look up—even when the agent’s hand touched the
-upper bar.
-
-“If I was you, Alberto, I’d come away from there.”
-
-The agent froze. But Jake had spoken in English. The hand went again to
-the bar, was slowly lifting it when, following a second splintering
-crash, he fell forward on his face with a hollow cough.
-
-“Through the lungs, I reckon.” Jake looked down at the gross body,
-writhing in its death agony. “I told you to keep away, Alberto.”
-
-The man’s last convulsive clutch had swung the upper bar clear of its
-sockets, but Jake did not move. The lower bar still held and, standing
-up, he watched the oaken panels quiver and split under heavy blows. With
-rhythmic regularity came the crash of volleys fired point-blank into the
-shutters. Bullets, too, were spitting through the side window—to strike
-and flatten on the opposite wall. Over all, above the crash of
-rifle-fire, thud of the beam they were using on the door, rose the roar
-and howl of a blood-mad *peon* rabble.
-
-“The hull town has come to the funeral,” Jake muttered. “Well, they’ll
-see some wake.”
-
-As the door crashed in he stooped and blew out the light. Darkness fell
-through the room—darkness that pulsed with convulsive movement. Over the
-body of the agent the leaders tripped and fell. Upon them others piled
-in a heap, yet under the pressure of the howling crowd outside still
-others streamed in. Above the oaths, curses, mad howls, rose yells for
-some one to bring a light.
-
-Presently it came, a piece of engine waste soaked in alcohol at the end
-of a stick; and when it did, the rolling eyeballs, furious faces,
-vicious mouths, stood out for a second, writhing in murderous lust, then
-set in sudden horror.
-
-For the bluish flare fell full on a grim figure, tall, lean, topped with
-a hard face, steel-point eyes. The muzzle of Jake’s gun touched the top
-layer of powder. Cold, weird, satanic, he must have loomed in their
-vision as the Evil One in whose existence they all believed. Paralyzed
-by the impending doom, some stood staring. Others, screaming hoarsely,
-fought in vain to beat back through the crowd. Till the last moment,
-yes, till one hardier scoundrel raised a gun, Jake held them in torture,
-then—
-
-Both shots were wiped out by the tremendous explosion whose thunder and
-red sky-flash were heard and seen by Bull fifteen miles away.
-
-
-XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM!
-==========================
-
-After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the
-sage-brush while the *revueltoso* engine approached. With a roar it came
-at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead.
-For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette
-against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and
-swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of
-smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on
-spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared
-past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of
-dust.
-
-Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while
-they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away.
-
-“We’ll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours,” he
-said. “We kain’t afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we’ll have to travel
-at night an’ hide up during the day—unless we chance on a *rancho* where
-we kin steal horses! Of course, it’s terrible on you, Missy. But if you
-kin stan’ it for a little longer—” He stopped as Lee shook, as he
-thought, with a sob.
-
-It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and
-trouble. “It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own,
-should have to turn rustler.” With a little mothering pat that somehow
-reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her
-fostering care, she added: “Don’t worry about me. If I could only make
-you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a
-rifle. I can at least carry something.”
-
-But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and
-provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding
-through sage, *palo verde*, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure
-hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they
-obstinately refused—and it was well that they did. When Bull called a
-halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and
-swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock.
-
-“Don’t dare to move,” he ordered, “till I get you something to eat.”
-
-They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt
-meat. But after “Alberto” cut off the engine Gordon had “requisitioned”
-his *tortillas* and chile stew—plenty for three. Once again Lee wished
-she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct
-still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery *tortillas* his
-head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the
-engine soot off his face.
-
-Neither did Bull escape. “There!” Bestowing a little, loving box on
-Gordon’s ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and
-washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child.
-Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction.
-
-“Well, you’re *half*-clean, anyway.”
-
-Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken
-his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew
-from Bull a grave smile. “Sleep, now, you kids,” he admonished them.
-“Two hours an’ we’ll have to be moving again.”
-
-“You, too!” Lee insisted.
-
-Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at
-once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower
-rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet.
-Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding
-their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles
-to the southward Jake was playing his last lone “hand.” He was in Bull’s
-mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with
-calcium red.
-
-“Something doing there.” Though he could have no accurate knowledge,
-Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. “Bet you Jake had a
-finger in it.”
-
-Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and
-provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she
-needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused
-in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open.
-
-Yet she made light of it. “My feet seem to belong to some one else. All
-the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!”
-
-It was the barbed thorn of a *nopal*, which hurt worse coming out than
-it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, “cat’s claws” and
-“crucifixion thorns” lay everywhere in prickly ambush. “Spanish bayonet”
-scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would
-rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open
-among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of
-the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In
-daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking.
-When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once;
-in five seconds were fast asleep.
-
-This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed
-on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to
-the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first
-pale lights.
-
-Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and
-scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee,
-pale, tired, limping, but cheerful.
-
-She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. “To
-be sure! We’ll have all day to rest.”
-
-“I didn’t mean, though, for you to walk no more.” Stooping suddenly, he
-rose with her sitting on his shoulder.
-
-“Your weight ain’t no more to me than a fly,” he replied to her protest;
-and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these
-brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a *mesa* that
-raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the
-boulders and sage.
-
-“’Tain’t safe to go on,” he said, setting her down. “You’d think, to
-look around, there wasn’t a living thing within a hundred thousand
-miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without
-being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard.
-Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding
-from the *rurales*; but there’s always some one. We’ll stop while it’s
-safe.”
-
-He was right. Already they had been seen—by a *peon* who had been driven
-by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret spring
-from *revueltoso* lovers. But the tale of their passing did not go forth
-by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of their
-burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away “Alberto,” the
-engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop of
-*revueltosos* he had guided up the line.
-
-“Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet?
-These little ones no larger than a child’s are those of the woman.”
-
-“A white girl, thou sayest?” the leader asked.
-
-“Si, señor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man’s
-riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate
-for thee.”
-
-“There should be *some* pay.” The *capitan* went on, with a vile oath.
-“Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us;
-si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs
-come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt
-that gringo. But he goes out like”—he blew out the match with which he
-was lighting his cigarette—“this! and takes a hundred more of us with
-him. Bueno!” His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. “They
-are gone, our compañeros, but we shall meet again—in hell. But these
-others, the girl and her men, shall pay.”
-
-At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of
-which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to
-the north and east as they went, they approached Bull’s limestone castle
-just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon.
-
-After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a
-rough *ramada* of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting
-in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the *revueltoso*
-line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust
-clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet
-let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so
-carefully that Lee slept on.
-
-“There ain’t many of ’em,” he whispered. “We must make ’em sick at the
-first shooting. I’m going to slip along the ridge to get that second
-man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin
-see his eyes; then bust him where he’s biggest.”
-
-Yesterday’s fighting had absorbed most of Gordon’s thrills. But now, as
-he lay looking down at the *revueltoso* coming on a little, ambling jog,
-he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and
-fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed
-different—as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon
-instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When,
-pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon
-experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after
-fair warning.
-
-But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened
-him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting
-from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired.
-
-At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the *ramada*, startled and
-wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide
-headlong to the ground. Bull’s man was also down, and as the riderless
-horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the
-sage whirled back and combined half a mile away.
-
-By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at
-a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. “That
-is the Tejon Pass—about ten miles away. The American border is on’y
-twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold ’em till
-then we’ll have all night to climb through the Pass.”
-
-They made a good gain while the *revueltosos* were recovering from that
-first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle
-around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller
-elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further.
-
-Thus began a repetition of the previous day’s fighting—with this
-disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone
-ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time
-with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the
-brush with their bullets to keep the *revueltosos* from crawling up on
-them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time
-more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the *revueltosos*
-brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired
-directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was
-complete.
-
-It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the
-circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he
-sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into
-the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up,
-then fell forward.
-
-So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set
-the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a
-huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon’s
-dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance,
-supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of
-the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly
-thereafter they entered the Pass.
-
-From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell,
-hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool,
-at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after
-they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on
-his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail
-to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So
-tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of
-crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering
-her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep.
-
-Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his
-ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he
-closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was
-accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his
-thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything,
-it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal
-perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed
-down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the
-hour.
-
-Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in
-the curve of Gordon’s arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces
-turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl’s
-color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under
-the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad,
-low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier
-mold of Gordon’s features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose,
-forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw,
-supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the
-other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in
-spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long
-limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly.
-
-In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower.
-The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of
-Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and
-earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that
-age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft
-dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past
-loves enveloped them sleeping there.
-
-“Jes’ naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get
-such a pair.”
-
-Bull’s murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world
-to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of
-health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to
-degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the
-world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a
-thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature’s intent so
-completely fulfilled.
-
-To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and
-to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at
-Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the *portales* many a
-time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the
-Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that
-tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself
-and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under
-Bull’s eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter
-raised the echoes in the *patio*. Now they were young men and women! He
-saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine
-young fellows come in to woo and win Lee’s girls.
-
-With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under
-forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by
-the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship
-into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships
-thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of
-iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee’s children, always strong,
-always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In
-legislature, church, halls of state, they took place—at first a few
-white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race
-drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors,
-legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its
-neighbor across the Rio Grande.
-
-It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately
-consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in
-the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull’s
-gaze came back to them.
-
-Surely they were “fit,” the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long
-process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained
-children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste
-the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought
-about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and
-complete. “Fit,” morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the
-term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more
-ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the “fit” of ten
-thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on
-their lives.
-
-It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it—and died; as Jake had
-sworn to it—and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation,
-heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the
-cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of
-heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only
-enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon’s, he had to empty
-his own.
-
-“Won’t need it, anyway.”
-
-Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last
-evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley,
-then on up here, he had searched for just such a place.
-
-“No, I won’t need it.”
-
-Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into
-Lee’s face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He
-knew it for the last time—just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like
-Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had
-repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial
-with a heavy shake of the head.
-
-“Twould on’y break them up an’ do me no good.”
-
-Very gently he woke up Gordon. “Don’t wake her till I’m through telling.
-It will soon be daylight. With it they’ll be on top of us again. The
-border’s over there—on’y a few miles.” With heavy steadiness he went on
-with the last fine lie: “I’m keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an’
-I’ll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don’t you wait for
-me. She’s well rested now; so keep going and going till you’ve crossed.”
-
-Reaching up, Gordon took Bull’s hand in a strong grip. “I suppose
-there’s no use asking you to let me stay?”
-
-“No.” Bull shook his head. “An’ if I would—she wouldn’t! Now wake her
-up.”
-
-Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while
-making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered
-their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet
-when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing
-there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back.
-
-“Oh, won’t you come?” she pleaded.
-
-“Sure, come on!” Gordon seconded her plea. “We can fight and run like
-yesterday.”
-
-“Yes, *do*?” Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him,
-shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread
-earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. “Oh, *won’t*
-you come? I’m *so* afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I’m
-dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them—will happen to
-you. And if it did—oh, what should I do? What *shall* I do?”
-
-Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a
-year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in
-holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, “had walked in an’
-come out again, sober, like a man,” he might have given in; gone on in
-her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the
-desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake.
-
-She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through
-events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne
-herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to
-restrain her tears. “There! there!” Gathering her to him, Bull patted
-her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. “There! there!
-In a few hours we’ll be over the border, and ’twon’t be long afore we’ll
-be back at Arboles, you an’ Gordon an’ me an’ Sliver an’ Jake.” He said
-more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life.
-Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of
-the pain it covered, he concluded: “So don’t bother about me. There’s
-less risk here than in any of the stan’s we made in the last three days.
-I’ve got ’em all down below me an’ there’s on’y this trail. If they try
-to come on, it ’ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I’ll hold ’em
-jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run
-along.”
-
-“You’re sure?”
-
-“Sure!” He had to swallow his heart to say it.
-
-“Remember,” she called back, moving away, “I’ll be on pins and needles
-till you come.”
-
-Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer.
-“I won’t be here long.”
-
-Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in
-hand, he turned his face to the foe.
-
-
-XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN
-====================================
-
-As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and
-fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau.
-From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high
-walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a
-lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched
-down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they
-could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting
-men.
-
-After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever,
-Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the
-largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from
-below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and
-looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to
-form in the pale dawn.
-
-Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so
-fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity
-or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who
-shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first
-pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their
-great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of
-rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in
-the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the
-emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a
-man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was
-strong upon him.
-
-In such moments a man’s whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema
-drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull’s reflections began with
-his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden
-pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground,
-coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the
-wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados.
-
-Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute
-white fear on the opposite side of Carleton’s death-bed. He saw her,
-after the funeral, coming toward him through the *patio* gateway,
-swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis
-Lovell’s rich, dark beauty.
-
-Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her
-diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded
-some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered.
-All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of
-match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his
-thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one
-scene.
-
-Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he
-started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure
-her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read
-their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her
-face buried itself in his breast.
-
-Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still
-in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then,
-as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills *rancho*, memory leaped
-the gap in time and distance—he was sitting in the widow’s kitchen,
-Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee’s birthday
-cake.
-
-From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last
-tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her
-pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the
-bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he
-was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm
-in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into
-dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always
-in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through
-the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that
-his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her
-ownership.
-
-“I shall expect you soon?”
-
-He heard, too, his own answer, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”
-
-Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty’s shoulder, and—the
-bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty windows that
-stared with fiery eyes from seared walls.
-
-In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dénouement came almost
-with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony.
-
-While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and
-strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the
-rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple
-shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow
-interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam
-of the sun.
-
-It announced the *revueltosos* of the *brigada* Gonzales! Her murderers!
-Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew
-into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac
-glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a
-club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he
-peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now
-wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was
-again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the
-*revueltosos* in the *fonda* cañon. Big, black, burly, he looked more
-like a bear than a man.
-
-If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the
-long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that
-sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his
-care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives
-to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his
-revolver, a heavy Colt’s .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised
-them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and
-climbed to the crest of the opposite bank.
-
-Lying there, he looked down on the *revueltosos* who had begun to climb
-up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was
-impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high
-and fired.
-
-The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the
-*revueltosos* tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared
-with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the
-“fight and run” of yesterday’s warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they
-moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from
-which to return his fire.
-
-Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at
-intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust
-about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long
-silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up.
-
-Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts,
-each recording a stage in Lee’s advance toward safety. As clearly as
-though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but
-moving steadily on with Gordon’s help. And his imaginings ran with the
-facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back,
-down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the
-plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that
-marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently
-grew into a United States cavalry patrol.
-
-Suspecting an ambush, the *revueltosos* came forward slowly. Quarter of
-an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the
-opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long
-silence, three appeared in the open.
-
-“They have gone! Bring up the horses!”
-
-The leader’s call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they
-waited, he heard their conversation:
-
-“If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men,
-we had caught them last night.”
-
-“Si,” came the answer. “But he wanted the girl for himself.”
-
-“The swine!” The epithet was set in vile oaths. “But he is cured forever
-of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The
-bullet took him squarely between the eyes.”
-
-There was more of it—their present hope to run the *gringos* down with
-horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition
-they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black
-eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs,
-hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of
-the horses.
-
-A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and
-sliding, most of the time on their beasts’ haunches, down into the rock
-pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously.
-Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage:
-
-“They are surely gone. Vamos!”
-
-A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room
-for all in the “bore.” He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing
-of the first beast he waited, then—with a sudden pry of the rifle-barrel
-he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast as he could
-pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed rifle
-waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth bared,
-leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the midst of
-the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among them
-almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound from
-the opposite hill.
-
-For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of
-which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the
-dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat
-time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the
-primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that
-evil chaff, dropping them as they came on.
-
-And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds,
-they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his
-fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and *machetes*. Till
-only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up
-the hill Bull made no effort to follow.
-
-Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the
-dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with
-the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled
-and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand
-and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two *revueltosos*
-staring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his
-rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white
-cloud overhead.
-
-With such intensity did he stare, the second *revueltoso* also looked
-up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the
-faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw;
-clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills’s voice:
-
-“I shall expect you soon?”
-
-The *revueltoso* was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his
-answer rang out, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”
-
-The rifle cracked and “Bull” Perrin, the last of the “Three Bad Men of
-Las Bocas,” collapsed in a heap.
-
-.. vspace:: 2
-
-.. class:: center small
-
- THE END.
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. class:: center
-
- | :lg:`ZANE GREY’S NOVELS`
- |
- | May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list.
-
-.. vspace:: 1
-
-THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS
-
- A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of
- frontier warfare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she is
- captured by bandits. A surprising climax brings the story to a
- delightful close.
-
-THE RAINBOW TRAIL
-
- The story of a young clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the great
- western uplands—until at last love and faith awake.
-
-DESERT GOLD
-
- The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and ends
- with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had willed to the
- girl who is the story’s heroine.
-
-RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE
-
- A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago when Mormon
- authority ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is the theme of
- the story.
-
-THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN
-
- This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo Jones,
- known as the preserver of the American bison, across the Arizona
- desert and of a hunt in “that wonderful country of deep cañons and
- giant pines.”
-
-THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT
-
- A lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love a
- young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands that the
- girl shall become the second wife of one of the Mormons— Well, that’s
- the problem of this great story.
-
-THE SHORT STOP
-
- The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win fame
- and fortune as a professional ball player. His hard knocks at the
- start are followed by such success as clean sportsmanship, courage and
- honesty ought to win.
-
-BETTY ZANE
-
- This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beautiful
- young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest pioneers.
-
-THE LONE STAR RANGER
-
- After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an outlaw
- along the Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of the river, he
- finds a young girl held prisoner, and in attempting to rescue her,
- brings down upon himself the wrath of her captors and henceforth is
- hunted on one side by honest men, on the other by outlaws.
-
-THE BORDER LEGION
-
- Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a lawless
- Western mining camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing that she
- loved him—she followed him out. On her way, she is captured by a
- bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots Kells, the leader—and
- nurses him to health again. Here enters another romance—when Joan,
- disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A
- gold strike, a thrilling robbery—gambling and gun play carry you along
- breathlessly.
-
-THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey
-
- The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” as told by
- his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in Iowa and his
- first encounter with an Indian. We see “Bill” as a pony express rider,
- then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the Scouts, and later engaged in the
- most dangerous Indian campaigns. There is also a very interesting
- account of the travels of “The Wild West” Show. No character in public
- life makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than
- “Buffalo Bill,” whose daring and bravery made him famous.
-
-.. class:: center
-
- Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York
-
-.. clearpage::
-
-.. class:: center
-
- | NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY
- | :lg:`WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE`
- |
- | HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED.
- |
- | May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap’s list.
-
-.. vspace:: 1
-
-MAVERICKS.
-
- A tale of the western frontier, where the “rustler,” whose
- depredations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the
- range, abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told.
-
-A TEXAS RANGER.
-
- How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried law
- into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a series of
- thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, and then passed
- through deadly peril to ultimate happiness.
-
-WYOMING.
-
- In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured the
- breezy charm of “cattleland,” and brings out the turbid life of the
- frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor.
-
-RIDGWAY OF MONTANA.
-
- The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where politics and
- mining industries are the religion of the country. The political
- contest, the love scene, and the fine character drawing give this
- story great strength and charm.
-
-BUCKY O’CONNOR.
-
- Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, replete with
- the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash and
- absorbing fascination of style and plot.
-
-CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT.
-
- A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a
- bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is a
- most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination that is
- fittingly characteristic of the great free West.
-
-BRAND BLOTTERS.
-
- A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid life of
- the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with a charming
- love interest running through its 320 pages.
-
-.. class:: center
-
- Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York
-
-.. vspace:: 6
-
-.. pgfooter::
diff --git a/old/40600-rst/images/cover.jpg b/old/40600-rst/images/cover.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 40e3e2c..0000000 --- a/old/40600-rst/images/cover.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/40600-rst/images/illus-fpc.jpg b/old/40600-rst/images/illus-fpc.jpg Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 6b34edf..0000000 --- a/old/40600-rst/images/illus-fpc.jpg +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/40600.txt b/old/40600.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f4a384a..0000000 --- a/old/40600.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13701 +0,0 @@ - OVER THE BORDER - - - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost -no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license. - - -Title: Over the Border - -Author: Herman Whitaker - -Release Date: August 27, 2012 [EBook #40600] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: US-ASCII - - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net. - - - - - - OVER THE BORDER - - - A NOVEL - - BY - - - HERMAN WHITAKER - - - AUTHOR OF "THE SETTLER," "THE PLANTER," "THE PROBATIONER," Etc. - - - NEW YORK - GROSSET & DUNLAP - PUBLISHERS - - Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers - - - - - Books by HERMAN WHITAKER - - - OVER THE BORDER - THE PROBATIONER - THE SETTLER - THE PLANTER - THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA - CROSS TRAILS - - - HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK - Established 1817 - - - Over The Border - Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers - - - Printed in the United States of America - Published May, 1917 - - - - - TO - Jack London - IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP - - - - -[Illustration: GORDON SEIZED ILARIAN WITH HIS NAKED HANDS] - - - - -Contents - - - I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - II: OVER THE BORDER - III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - V: THE "HACIENDA OF THE TREES" - VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - VIII: "THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS" - IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - X: WANTED--A HUSBAND - XI: GORDON'S DEBUT - XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT--IN SEVERAL WAYS - XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE--AND IS "DOGGED," IN TURN, BY LEE - XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT-- - XVII: --BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY - XIX: A KISS--ITS CONSEQUENCES - XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - XXVIII: A "REQUISITION" - XXIX: TEMPTATION - XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - XXXI: "BRAINS WIN" - XXXII: TRAVAIL - XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - XXXIV: ---------------------? - XXXV: WHY? - XXXVI: "IN THE MIDST OF LIFE--" - XXXVII: THE THREE--AGAIN - XXXVIII: FIRE - XXXIX: "VENGEANCE IS MINE" - XL: SLIVER "MAKES GOOD" - XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE "EXCHANGE" - XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - - - -I: THE THREE BAD MEN OF LAS BOCAS - - -The Three had chosen their lair wisely. - -In the picturesque Spanish phrase, it "situated itself" midway of the -desert, the great Mexican desert that is more varied in its heated -monotony than a land of woods and fields and streams. Here it runs to -sparse grass land under upland _pinon_; there spreads over wide, clean -sands that reflect like burnished brass the intolerable glare of the -sun. Now it marches for leagues with the yuccas that fling crazed arms -and shrunken limbs like posturing dwarfs; again it is dotted with lonely -_mesas_, monolithic masses that raise orange and vermilion facades out -of a violet mirage. A magic land it is, made out of shattered rainbows, -girded with crimson-and-gold mountains that wear around their high -foreheads cooling bandages of snow; a land of deathless calms, cyclonic -storms, torrential rains, peopled only by the vultures that wheel -against the sky and the little golden dust-whorls which dance together -over its heated face. A country where dwells the very spirit of romance; -of which anything might be predicted and come to pass; therefore, as -before said, the very place for a lair. - -Secondly, the Three had shown a nice discrimination in the selection of -a site. Its capacities in the way of offense and defense would have -earned the instant commendation of a medieval baron, Mexican bandit, -revolutionist, or "movie" director in search of an ideal robber's roost. -Years ago a Yankee "prospector" with more faith than sense and money -enough to have left prospecting severely alone, had kept a raft of -_peones_ busy for the better part of two years ripping the heart out of -a mountain-top in a feverish search for fabulous gold. Rumors that still -linger in Sonora _jacales_ tell that the _gringo_ worked under the -direction of the spirits--or a spiritualist, which may or may not be -quite the same. The results--to wit, a huge gap in the mountain and an -abandoned adobe powder house, now serving as a residence for the Three -Bad Men--seem to favor the rumor. Spirits were never good miners. But -that is neither here nor there, the Three concerning themselves only -with the natural fortifications they thus inherited. - -The adobe stood well back in a semicircular gap, protected on three -sides by the curving walls of the excavation. Behind them, the mountain -dropped almost a thousand feet sheer, and the level bench in front of -the house could only be gained by a narrow path that fell like a yellow -snake down the steep slopes into thick chaparral. From its edge one -overlooked the vast reaches of the central Sonora desert, an ashen sea -of sage and mimosa shored in by far mountains that loomed dusky purple -or stood out stark yellow as they happened to lie to the sun. Since the -Yankee went back on his "controls," or they on him, a _sahuaro_ cactus -had raised its fluted barrel within the excavation, captaining a squad -of dwarf yuccas that poked grotesque arms in pathetic entreaty out of -the rubble. To these natural improvements the Three had added a -_ramada_, broad porch of poles and cornstalks, in the shade of which -they took their ease one hot nooning, two playing _pedro_ at a rough -wooden table while the third dozed and nodded with stool tilted back -against the adobe wall. - -It did not require more than a cursory glance to know the Three for -members of that sad colony which is doomed by its past to remain on the -wrong side of the Mexican border. Beginning with Sliver Smith, the -sleeper; his drowsy lids hid blue eyes that were hard as chips of agate -and exactly fitted his reckless face. Just now sleep had softened its -lines and brought a certain underlying good-nature. But for the mouth -and deep creases down each side of the nose, which bespoke passions -violent and unrestrained, one would have put him down now for that which -he had been--a cowman from the New Mexican ranges. - -The other two, however, really looked the "bad man." "Bull" Perrin, the -biggest and eldest, might have been especially cast by nature for the -part. Big, burly, black-visaged, and heavy-jowled, excessive drinking -had dyed his face out of all relation to the creamy skin the gods had -given him. The hot brown eyes under straight bushy brows bespoke a -cyclonic temper. But though Bull conveyed the impression of an "ugly -customer" at first sight, a physiognomist would have picked Jake Evers, -his partner, as a far more dangerous man. The cold, bleak sparks of eyes -in his lean, lantern-jawed face scintillated with cunning. But for a -certain humor that lurked about the corners of his mouth, his face would -have been utterly repulsive. - -Yet after granting their "badness," there was about them no taint of the -mean, rat-like wickedness of the city criminal. Their composite was of -strong impulses, misdirected forces gone to waste, of men cast by birth -in a wrong age. In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their -strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in -the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned -toad in the sand at Bull's feet, as much as the lizard that coursed -swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper's head; as much as the -_sahuaro_ and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold -glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that--horses and cattle not -being in question--they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter -of its best traditions. - -Looking at Bull and Jake as they sat at play, the former might be -likened to a grizzly; the latter to a tiger, alert, stealthy, cunning, -ferocious; qualities which sprang into evidence with startling -suddenness when a shrill burst of woman's scolding presently disrupted -the heated silence. - -Apparently the noise issued from a white cloud that hid the doorway; but -as this settled and cleared away, a buxom slattern of a Mexican girl -stood revealed. While flicking out the last dust of flour from an empty -sack she bitterly reviled the Three. Though delivered in Spanish, the -substance of her complaint was international and goes easily into -English. - -"Flojos! Lazy ones! how shall one cook without flour? The coffee, too, -is gone--and the sugar. Of lard or grease there is not a smear for the -pan. You must go forth, to-day." - -This was merely the text. While she enlarged thereon with copious -illustrations to prove their worthlessness as providers, the two men at -the table proceeded quietly with their play. It was the third that -finally interrupted the harangue with the irascibility of one aroused -from pleasant sleep. - -"Shut up, Dove!" - -In its literal sense the word stands for the most innocent of birds. But -she chose to take the opposite meaning of the sarcastic Spanish. - -"Si, senor! I am that or I should not be here now, cooking for three -beasts." After a comparison between them and the lower animals that -greatly favored the latter, she ran on with increasing heat: - -"'Dove,' indeed? Then where is my price? Where are they, the fine -clothes, the silks and satins and linen, the jewelry and laces you were -to gain for me? Was it by this I was bought?" She held out her dirty -black skirt. "I, that might be now sitting in the cantina of Ignacio -Flores at Las Bocas, selling aguardiente and anisette to his custom? Si, -senores, _where are they_, the velvets, ribands, and neck chains? I--" - -It was at this point that Jake displayed his quality. Swinging swiftly -around, he threw his knife, so hard and quickly that it stuck quivering -in the door lintel close to the girl's throat before she had time to -close her mouth. - -"Here! don't be so careless." Bull's bushy brows drew down over his -burning eyes in quick reproof. But his next remark proved that the -interference was not based on altruism. "If you croak her, who's to do -the cooking? Any corn left, Rosa?" - -Whereas Sliver's rude interruption had merely stimulated her tongue; -whereas, also, she had stuck out that member at Jake the instant she -made sure the knife had missed, she now caught her breath with a little, -frightened gulp. "Si, senor." - -"Then make some tortillas and serve them along with the jerky," he -called after her. "And bring us out a drink." - -At this Sliver, who had resumed his doze, sat up again. His lugubrious -exclamation, "Oh, _hell_!" caused the others to look up a moment later. -With an empty demijohn held upside down Rosa stood in the doorway. She -did not speak. But her tragic pose, vindictive nod, said quite plainly, -"Now will you go?" - -Neither did they speak. The situation was beyond revilings. Slowly Jake -picked up and pocketed the cards. Sliver rose to his feet. In single -file they marched down the path to find their horses. Indeed, they had -caught the animals, saddled up at the stable on the flat below and were -riding away through the chaparral before they recovered sufficiently to -attempt to fix the blame for the shortage. - -Sliver--who, by the way, had gained his nickname under the law of -opposites because he was short and stout--remembered that he had warned -them several times "notter hit it so hard." But his testimony lost force -by reason of certain "lone drinks" in the absorption of which he had, by -the others, been caught. Jake, on the other hand, had pleaded for more -liquor and less flour the last time they stocked up at Las Bocas. By -frank confession, moreover, he reduced the force of Sliver's charge that -he would never be satisfied with less liquor than "he ked swim in." - -"That's right. I never really seen at one time more whisky than I felt I -c'd drink." - -From this he went on with invectives against the wave of reform which, -by its sudden flooding of the "Territ'ries"--as he still called the -States of Arizona and New Mexico--might be held indirectly responsible -for his present thirst. "For a cowman, like Sliver here, it don't matter -so much, him being used to dry spells out on the range. But for a man -that's dealt faro in a s'loon for a spell of years with two fingers of -bourbon allus under his nose, it comes some bitter. Them was the golden -days. What a man made in beef cattle or gold was his'n to plank down on -a bar or place on a card. Till them pinch-faces from the Middle West -descended like locusts upon the lan', drought was unknown save by a few -fool prospectors that got themselves lost in the desert. Locusts? I -wrong 'em! A locust does live up to its natural instincts. Locusts is a -blessing compared to pinch-faces. Why--" But certain lengthy reflections -that established the place of the "Middle-Wester" beneath even the lowly -bedbug in the scale of creation, must give place to his conclusion. "Si, -senores! 'twas them druv' me to rustling. But for them I'd still be -living honest, dealing straight faro to all comers with on'y an -occasional turn from the bottom of the box for the good of the house." - -"Pity for you!" - -Bull's pithy comment was enlarged upon by Sliver. - -"An' you-all needn't to be howling so loud, either, about them dry -spells on the ranges. We allus had it in the bunk-houses an' 'twas a -poor cook that couldn't hide a keg in the chuck-wagon. As for your -faro--'twas to play the odd card you wolves dealt from the bottom that I -med my first rustle. But for you I'd be taking my copa right now out of -the cook's keg instead of dying of thirst in this lousy desert." - -There was real heat in the accusation, but the ex-gambler's lean, -leathery face merely split in a dry grin. - -"If your mother bred you a fool, don't blame me. The flea bit the dog, -the dog bit me; I kicked the dog an' killed the flea. Take a drink of -water, Sliver; it all works out in the end. You next, Bull. Which was -it--water, wine, or weemen?" - -"None of 'em." The big rustler shook his head. "Early piety did for me. -Prayers morning, noon, an' night; grace before meals; two long sermons -on Sundays, an' two hours, Sabbath-school, and what would you expect? I -was so well brought up I jest had to go wrong. But if we don't jog along -we won't make Las Bocas to-night." - -As Bull spurred on ahead, Sliver looked at Jake. "Say, he ain't exactly -what you-all 'd call frank in his conversings. If there's a thing he -don't know about us--well, 'tain't our fault. But him? When you come to -think of it did you ever hear him say how he kem to take up rustling?" - -The gambler shook his head. "In a gen'ral way--so gen'ral that I -couldn't tell jest how I got it--I've sorter gathered that he once -croaked a man. But whether 'twas before or after he took up the profesh -I couldn't say. In the natural order of things, a rustler's bound, -sooner or later, to down some prying fool. There's so many that try to -mix in his business. But if it was before, Bull done it--I'll bet you -the gent had it coming." - - - - -II: OVER THE BORDER - - -That night the Three put up at the _cantina_ in the little adobe town of -Las Bocas, where, by reason of occasional largesses to the leader of the -revolutionary faction that happened to be on top, a welcome was always -certain. Just now it was more particularly so because the present -_jefe-politico_, a Carranzista, varied his political activities by -acting as "fence" in the disposal of their plunder. - -In accordance with his advice, the following afternoon found them -approaching the American border at a point far west of their usual -sphere of operations. While they journeyed the sun slid down its western -slant till it hung like a smoky lamp in the far dust of the desert. -Behind them the sea of sage still ran off to distant mountains, but the -sunset glow washed its dust away, draping the land in a royal robe. -Ahead the grade was rising imperceptibly but steadily to a sparse grass -country where the sage, _palo verde_, and yucca gave place to huge -_sahuaros_ that strewed the plain with their fluted barrels like the -jade columns of some vast ruin. Among them roamed the flocks and herds -of a pink-walled _hacienda_ that nestled in a grove of lordly -cottonwoods. As they rode past, the Three noted with appraising glances -the sleek hides of a fine bunch of steers. - -"Dress a thousand pounds of beef apiece," Jake opined. - -"Worth eighty pesos, gold, on the hoof, in El Paso," Sliver yearningly -added. - -But their interest went no further--for reasons that appeared when, at -sundown, they rode past the concrete pillar that marked the -international boundary. Rustler that he was, drunkard and gambler, -utterly worthless if the reports current on the New Mexican ranges were -to be believed, Sliver's eye nevertheless lit up at the sight of it; the -glow on his hard face was not all sunset reflection. - -"The good old U.S.," he commented. "_Some_ country!" - -"He wasn't talking that way las' time we crossed." Jake winked at Bull. - -"Guess not. He was cussing Cristobel Columbo for ever having discovered -it." - -"That's right," Sliver admitted. "But I was what you-all might call in a -bit of a hurry with a squad of rangers streaking at my heels. Other -things being ekal--" - -"Which they ain't," Jake interrupted. "Mexico's good enough for me. -Mexico an' revolution! For I tell you right now that if Porfirio Diaz -was still boss, his rurales would have taken right holt where the -rangers left off. Instead of dangling from a pine on the American side, -we'd hev' finished with a fusillado on this. But with the government -switching every five minutes between Orozco, Villa, Huerta, Carranza, -an' the jefe-politicos an' governors slaughtering each other -between-whiles, it's nobody's business to look after us. We make our -little sneaks across the border an' return in peace an' quiet. So 'Viva -la revolucion!' That reminds me--where're you heading, Bull?" - -"Livingstone _rancho_ on the Little Stoney." - -"Say, but that's horses! Don't they run 'em into the corrals at night?" - -The big rustler nodded. "All the easier to find, an' after you once get -them moving it don't take three days to run 'em over the line. Besides, -Don Manuel tol' me at Las Bocas yesterday that the Carranzistas are -needing heavy horses for their artillery over on the Coast. He'll pay -fifty pesos apiece an' take his chance on a five-thousand-per-cent -profit after the old gentleman grabs the presidential chair." He -emphatically concluded, "_Horses_, you bet!" - -"Some risky, cutting 'em out?" Sliver, too, looked dubious. - -"Not as much as you think. Did you never have some flea-bitten son of a -gun rub down the bars while you slept plumb up against the corral an' -wake next morning to find nary a head in sight? A horse don't like a -corral any more'n a man loves prison. The bars once down, you kin trust -'em to soft-foot it out to the open. Why"--his grin at the remembrance -set a flash of good-nature in his hard face--"why, I've seen an old nag -look back at a colt that kicked the bars passing out just like he was -saying, 'You damn young fool! now you've upset the soup!' Leave it to -me. I'll work 'em out on foot while you sit tight an' hold my horse. -Moon's going to be jest about right, too. She'll be taking her first -peep about the time we get 'em out in the clear. It'll be a pipe, then, -to saddle up fresh beasts an' shoot 'em over the border." - - -The _rancho_ for which they were heading lay still two hours away, and -while they rode the _sahuaro_ pillars gave place in turn to _pinon_ and -juniper thinly strewn over rolling grassland. Before night settled down, -the wandering cattle-trails they had followed drew into the twin ruts of -a wagon-road. Their going was timed by the moon. But it stole out from -behind a low hill a trifle ahead of schedule. By its first dim radiance -they made out the dark mass of the _rancho_ buildings, house, corrals, -stables, in a swale between two hills. It was, however, dark enough for -their purpose, and, leaving his horse with the others, Bull went forward -on foot. - -It was nervous work, sitting there watching the buildings take form -under the waxing moon. Their strained senses took every sound, smell, -and sight; a dog's bark, click of horns as a steer scratched his -forehead on the top rail of a corral, the impatient pawing of a horse, -the warm cattle odor that floated on the night breeze. Dim, uncertain -shapes seemed to form and fade in the nearer gloom. They were nervous as -cats by the time a gun suddenly flashed under the dark porch of the -house. - -The croupy cough of a child plus the nervous fears of its mother did it. -Not that the woman saw Bull when she drew the curtain and peeped out. -But these days, with a new revolution breaking, as Jake put it, "every -five minutes" over the border, the American ranchers along the -international line slept always with an eye open for possible raids. So -far as Bull was concerned, her whisper was just as fatal as though she -had seen him. - -"Pa! get up! I'm sure there's some one out there!" - -Perhaps the rancher did see. Educated in objects moving through dusk, -his plainsman's eye may have noticed movement. Or perhaps he shot on -chance. In either case he was quickly informed by the roar and clatter -of hoofs that followed, for though Bull did not expect, now, to get away -with a single head, pursuit would be blinded and divided by stampeding -the beasts. Dropping the bars while the gun continued to flash its -staccato warnings, he started the animals out, leaped on the back of -one; as soon as it cleared the huddle, went shooting down the trail, -guiding the animal with the swing of his body. - -Unfortunately, the whim that governs a stampede moved the other beasts -to follow. So when the rancher and his men--in shirts and trousers, but -not one without a gun--pulled their mounts out of the stables, their -pursuit was guided by the distant thunder of hoofs. Neither did Bull's -quick change to his own beast divert the stampede. When the Three -galloped on, the scared animals still followed like dogs at their heels. - -"First time my prey ever chased me!" Jake laughed harshly, looking back -at the band. "If old man Livingstone don't follow too close we'll get -'em yet!" - -Bull shook his head. "Not with the moon sailing up to her full an' the -critters leaving a trail broad as a pike road. Listen to that!" - -A sharp report punctuated the thud and clatter of the stampede; the -first shot of a fusillade that grew hotter and hotter as the horses -trailed off right and left, leaving the rustlers more exposed. As yet -they were running in the shadow of a long hill where the light was poor. -But half a mile ahead lay an open plain unbroken by cover. - -"They'll shoot the lights outen us there!" Sliver prophesied. "Better -make a stan' while we can." - -"They _are_ getting sassy," Jake agreed, as a bullet whizzed under his -chin. "We'll have to teach 'em this ain't no turkey-shoot." - -The deciding word came, as usual, from Bull. "They'd surround an' hold -us for the posse. You ride on while I check 'em. If they try to round me -it'll be up to you to take 'em from the rear. Get behind so's they don't -see me turn." - -In the faint light his sudden whirl behind a bush went unnoticed. He had -already unshipped his rifle from the saddle slings, and through the -upper branches he took careful aim. A hundred yards away Livingstone was -coming at full gallop, about the same distance ahead of his men. Bull -waited till he could see the old fellow's hair, silver in the moonlight, -framing his angry red face. Once the sights lined up level between the -eyes. But muttering, "I ked sure spoil your beauty, but--I won't," Bull -lowered them to the horse's chest and fired. - -With the report the beast plunged forward, head and neck doubled under, -throwing his rider out in the clear. Though badly shaken, the old man -was up the next instant, and as he ran for cover his sudden change of -expression from anger to flustered surprise drew from Bull a grin. - -"Teach you not to get so fresh." - -At the crack of the rifle the others had also darted for cover, and as -their guns began to spit and flash from the chaparral along the -hillside, Bull laughed outright. "Not a rifle among 'em. Easy going! -Hasta luego, senores! Some other time!" - -One or two bolder spirits emerged from the chaparral as Bull rode out in -the open. But they scuttled back like rabbits as he swung in the saddle -with leveled rifle. Though they followed till the boundary pillar stood -out, two hours later, a shining silver shaft under the brilliant moon, -they preserved always a safe distance, and Bull denied Sliver's -suggestion to "chuck a volley" into the dim mass. - -"Kain't you leave your Uncle Samuel sleep? He ain't a-going to be moved -off his 'watchful waiting' by the loss of no horse, but if we go to -killing folks, he's sure going to take time to catch our goat b'twixt -revolutions." - -"To-morrow morning," Jake commented, grinning, "the morning papers will -be running scareheads an inch high about the 'Latest Border Outrage!' -Meanwhile we'll be jogging home--" - -"--without the horses," Bull dryly finished. - -"An' Rosa, back at the roost," Sliver added, "howling for coffee an' -flour an' grease." - -Which reminded Jake of their former argument: "I told you we orter ha' -bought more whisky. Nothing left but to ride back to Las Bocas an' hit -Don Miguel for credit." - - - - -III: EVEN A RUSTLER HAS HIS TROUBLES - - -Las Bocas was slowly stewing in its native filth when the Three sighted -it again at noon next day. - -In all the world nothing reflects its environment more faithfully than a -Mexican town. Southward, the great cities of Mexico and Guadalajara -testify with their stately cathedrals, ornate public buildings, -theaters, parks, and plazas, the flowering _patios_ of lovely and -luxurious homes, first to the richness of the central Mexican plateau, -secondly to the fact that in normal times all the wealth of the republic -drains to them. Oppositely, the northern towns with their squalid adobe -streets, overrun with a plague of dirty children, dogs, vultures, pigs; -desiccated by fierce heat, drowned by torrential rains; these in their -place and turn are eminently characteristic of the arid desert. Save -that it was a little smaller, a little dirtier, perhaps a little richer -in the variety of its stenches, Las Bocas might serve as the type of all -Mexican frontier towns. - -As the wind blew their way, the Three smelled it from afar. But usage -breeds indifference even to evil odors. If not actually homesome, the -fetor bespoke a possible drink. - -A quarter mile before entering the town they crossed the _arroyo_ that -gave it drink. Its waters also furnished an open-air laundry for two -brown girls who knelt by its edge, pounding their soiled linen on flat -boulders. These days of rampant revolution, a good girl had needs be -careful, and at sight of the Three, dusty, unkempt, bearded, and gaunt -from tire and travel, _gringos_ at that, the two leaped up and fled -toward the town. - -Grinning at their fright, Bull and Sliver would have ridden on, but -Jake, who never missed a trick, reined in his beast and began to examine -the laundry with the eye of a connoisseur. Though the remainder of her -be clad in rags, the humblest _peona_ will have her lace petticoat, and -the dozen or so pieces that were already spread out to dry on the -neighboring bushes were really very fine. - -"D'you allow to turn lady's maid?" Sliver spoke, as Jake bent to stuff -the lingerie into his saddle-bags. - -"Not till Rosa's had the refusal of it. This orter keep her satisfied -for at least a month." - -Grinning, the pair of rascals spurred their jaded beasts and overtook -Bull as he entered a narrow gut of a street that followed the -meanderings of the original cow-path to the _jefe's_ house, a plastered -adobe, limewashed in purple and gold, that faced the inevitable military -barracks across a sorry attempt at a plaza. - -If the small traders and artisans who constituted the bulk of the -population had been addicted to such flights of imagination, they might -have pictured the _jefatura's_ yawning gates as a huge gullet through -which, in normal times, their substance drained in taxes, fines, and -imposts to Mexico City, the nation's stomach, there to be consumed by a -hungry tribe of official hookworms. Now, of course, it was being -deflected into the private pocket of the dominant revolutionary chief. -Lacking the imagination, they cursed beneath their breath and waited -patiently till the next revolution should bring a new tyrant to avenge -them on the present oppressor. - -The latest incumbent was at lunch under the peppertree in the _patio_ -when the Three dismounted at the gates. Fat and sleek and brown, his -generally gross appearance was accentuated by pouched beady eyes, waxed -mustache, unhealthy, erupted skin. As he sat there, shoveling in -_frijoles_ and _chile_, even a _peon's_ slack imaginings could have -easily established a resemblance--if not between him and a hookworm, at -least, to some greedy parasite. The irritability, blind individualism, -offensive conceit, treachery, too common to Mexicans, lay hidden under -the usual veneer of Spanish courtesy. The embraces, backpattings, -effusive greetings with which he welcomed the Three would have graced -the reception of a favorite son. - -"Enter, amigos!" His welcome buzzed through the _patio_. "Sit down and -eat. Afterward we shall look over the horses. You have bestowed -them--where?" - -But when he learned of their failure, the scorpion showed through the -glaze of courtesy like a fly in amber. "_Carambar-r-r-aa_, senores!" His -read wagged in a nasty way. "I had counted on the horses--to save your -alive. On my desk lies a requisition from your gringo border police, -demanding your bodies. Que desgracia!" The spite that scintillated in -his beads of eyes gave his words sinister significance. "One would -dislike to do it, if 'twere only through hate of your Government. But -one has to account to his chiefs. Already they have inquired for you, -and always I made answer, 'These are good hombres, useful to our cause.' -But deeds count more than words. Horses for their artilleria would have -proved your worth. But now--" a second nasty wag told that their failure -left them as other _gringos_, to be despised, hated, persecuted. Having -given the impression time to sink in, he suggested, "But there must be -others? You will try again?" - -"No use." Bull's gloom emphasized the denial. "This is the second time -in a month that we've been chased across the border. They're looking for -us all along the line." - -"Si? Then must you go elsewhere. What of"--pausing, he looked cautiously -around--"what of this side? In central Chihuahua there are many -horse-ranchos, gringo ranches with fine blooded stock." - -"But--" - -The _jefe's_ shrug anticipated the objection. "Si, si! 'tis Mexico. That -is what I have always told my chief--'these hombres bother only the -gringo pigs.'" With a covert grin at the safe insult, he continued, "But -a gringo is a gringo, whether here or in your United States. If they be -despoiled, we shall not shed many tears. There will be a complaint, of -course, to and from your Government, and much writing between -departments. In the mean time we have the horses. So--" - -"But that's Valles's country, isn't it?" Jake put in. "He's a bad hombre -to fool with!" - -The _jefe_ turned on him his evil grin. "What if the gringo ranchers had -caught you last night? Hanging, amigo, is a dog's death. I would prefer -the fusilado of Valles's men." - -"What if he kicks to your people? Puts in a claim for our heads? You're -working together, ain't you?" - -Once again the _jefe_ looked around. "Listen, amigos! Between friends -one may show the truth. Already there is a cloud, a little cloud, no -bigger than a child's hand arisen between us and Valles. If the horses -are taken from a gringo _rancho_ in Valles's country, my chiefs will be -the better pleased. What they have Valles cannot get in the days when -the cloud grows big and black and bursts." - -Sliver, who understood more Spanish than he could speak, here nudged -Bull. "Ask him if he'll grub-stake the deal." - -"Ask nothing!" Bull's hot eyes shot brown fire. "You heard him rubbing -it into us, didn't you? If it wasn't that we need him I'd wring the -little brown adder's neck." He went on, suavely, in Spanish, "My amigo -questions me of the price. It will be the same--fifty pesos apiece, -senor?" - -Nodding, the _jefe_ glanced impatiently back at his lunch. He appeared -to have forgotten his invitation. Pleading an engagement, he bowed them -out through the gates, then returned to his gorging while, hungrier, and -even still thirstier, the Three rode down the street. - -Usually they were not averse to an exchange of glances, or a -flirtation--if the _hombre_ was not in sight--with the brown girls who -watched them from their doorways. But now their glances sought only the -_cantinas_, whose open bars displayed a tempting array of bottles. While -they looked their progress grew constantly slower, finally stopped in -front of one whose owner was taking his _siesta_ stretched out on the -bar. - -Jake looked from the sleeper to his companions, then at the bottles of -anisette and _tequila_ on the rough wooden shelves. "If he was drunk it -'u'd be easy--" As the Mexican disposed of the doubt, just then, by -opening one excessively sober eye, Jake desperately concluded, "Say, -kain't we raise the price among us?" - -Bull tapped his empty pockets. - -Sliver mourned, "All I've got is a Confederate five some one slipped me -during my last toot in El Paso. I've carried it sence for a lucky -piece." - -"An' lucky it is!" Jake extended an eager hand. "After this -revolutionary currency that's run off by the million on a newspaper -press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got -Jeff Davis's picter on it? This fellow don't know him from Abe Lincoln. -All gringo bills look alike to him. He'll never know the diff." - -Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the -bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two _pesos_ and some -_centavos_, along with three stiff _copas_. Deceived by the size of the -roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the _tienda_ behind the bar -coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa's desire, and other -necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of _tequila_, it made a goodly -pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson -in finance--to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating -the _tequila_ from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and -shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some _centavos_ aforesaid -represented the value of either. - -From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the _tequila_; -then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck -of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver -happened to catch the merchant's eye. - -He grinned, answering Sliver's wink. "Si, senores, this time you shall -drink with me." - -That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting -out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began -to throw two kings and an ace in the "three-card trick." So deftly he -did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a -dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed -the Mexican's interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the -flying cards. - -"Looks easy, don't it?" Bull suggested. "Here, Sliver, give this hombre -a chance." - -Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on -to try again. He could do it! He'd bet his _sombrero_, his horse, his -store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no -other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on -the counter, against their bottles of _tequila_--and lost! In the course -of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings, -there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original -thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, a bolt of lace and linen for -Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged -them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost -his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable -interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three -packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way. - -As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine. -Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, the -_comerciante_ would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so -his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser--perhaps because -she has usually no hand in the game--and as the Three rode off she let -loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner. - -"It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art -lost in a siesta!" she assailed him. "After them, lazy one, and recover -our goods!" - -By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was -quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two -girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street -and added their outcries to the woman's clamor. And now the Three were -surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme -had been making sheep's eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the -saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor. - -"They stole thy--" Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural -indignation increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up -the street and overtook the Three. - -Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish -punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his -discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull's -bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the -man's angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was -up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake's bleak -eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull's rifle was -aimed from the hip. - -To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If -one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a -company can--or a regiment. The man's shrill whistle was really far more -dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the -next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally -brought from the _carcel_ a squad on the run. - -By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with -rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human -kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was -gone. Jake's long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver's reckless -face had frozen in stone. Bull's head and huge shoulders rose above his -breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as -trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers -brought an officer and company from the barracks. - -Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican -comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery -set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of -Porfirio Diaz's famed _rurales_, the blue and red stripes or fatigue -linen of the Federal Army, even the _charro_ suits of Orozco's -Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men -were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown -faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy -would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the -officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled -rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this -fundamental truth--whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not -worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull. - -"Did I not see you, senor, at the jefatura just now?" - -With Bull's nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on the -_comerciante_ and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint. -"They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in -carcel." - -Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the -merchant's back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. "How know -ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed -while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be -friends of the jefe and no stealers of women's fripperies." - -Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away. - -Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way--to the -_cantina_ where they usually put up. - -"All we've gotter do now," Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the -street, "is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an' Rosa'll -be fixed for a month." - -But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten, -followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural -"thirsts" turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course -they spent first the thirty-two _pesos_ and some _centavos_, drank up -their own _tequila_, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more -liquor for the rabble of _peones_ and brown girls that flocked to the -_cantina_ like buzzards to carrion. - -The "drunk" went through the customary stages from boisterous -conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times -Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at -each other's throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse, -because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the -other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad -shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary -throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past -tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep. - -As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was -nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a -likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside; -unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their -natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at -that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, _sans_ -groceries, _sans tequila_, _sans_ money, but plus three splitting -headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor. - -"Tough on Rosa," Jake said, with a rueful grin. - -"If she's still there," Sliver doubted. "An' I'll bet a peppercorn to a -toothpick she ain't." - -"Chihuahua, now, or starve," Bull succinctly summed the situation. He -added, grinning, "Anyway, we'll travel light." - - - - -IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS - - -Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the -first and greatest of the Chihuahua _haciendas_. - -Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of -the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled -on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train, -then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles -away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested -in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs -were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first -revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern -overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers, -artisans, _peones_, drew by his grace the very breath of life. - -"Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that." - -Jake's glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining -distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped _mesas_ uplifted -their chrome and vermilion facades from the dead flat. Very far away, -one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a -mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of -the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn -over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched -windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; -burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little -winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of -distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary -reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so -very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the -blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post. - -"Vultures," Sliver pointed. "Must be something dead over there." - -"Or dying?" Bull questioned. "Otherwise the birds 'u'd settle. These -days it's as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way." - -And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of -encircling cactus into an open space around a giant _sahuaro_. Head -fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, -limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full -stretch of his arms around the _sahuaro's_ barrel. During the sixty -hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till -it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to -the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot -sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus. -Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow -roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the -approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling -the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings. - -"He's white! a gringo!" Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords. - -"The poor devil!" Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, -limp body on his outspread coat. - -While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on -the man's swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the -wrists and cut away the cords. - -If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered -through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have -noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would -probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too -weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the -point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself. - -He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from -the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His -house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings -up there. If he could only get to it, he'd be all right. - -And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and -cradled like a child in the rustler's great arms, he scarcely felt the -journey. Viewed as he hung on the _sahuaro_, dirty, bruised, shrunken by -fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, -washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky -and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical -American miner of middle age--short gray beard, hawk profile, high -cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked -for themselves--for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too -late to go on--he had recovered his voice and told them all. - -"It was the 'Colorados' that tied me up. I knew them by the 'red hearts' -on the breasts of their charro jackets." - -Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the -terror associated with the name. Originally the "Colorados" had been -Orozco's soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution -against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern -Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by -the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter -power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids. - -"But I was lucky to get off with that," he said, after describing the -beating that had preceded the tying-up. "They cut the soles off the feet -of two of my _peones_, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky -chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death -where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn't been -that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I'd -have got the same. They left me to raid some _rancho_, but swore they'd -come back." - -Riding in, they had passed the dead _peones_, and, bad man that he was, -Jake shuddered at the memory. "But why do you stay here, with that kind -of people running loose?" - -"Why do I stay?" The miner repeated the question, with heat. "The -American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man -stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties -that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had -been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, -and I'd worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to -come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose. - -"At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our -rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out--we that had invested -a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million -dollars' worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it -all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned! - -"Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But -most of the others had. We'd thought, of course, that the mistreatment -of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans -till the thing had been done again and again. Since then--know what that -Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our -Government?" - -"'Your Government!' he sneered. 'We have killed your men, we have -ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me -what else we can do to make your Government fight?'" - -He concluded, with bitter sadness, "I was brought up to love and revere -the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it -floated. But, men! I've seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled -by filthy _peones_, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of -Americans who believed in its power to save." - -In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered -principally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the -central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the -Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief. - -"It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light," Jake agreed. "He don't -seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to -Mexico City." - -Bull's big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of -tobacco smoke. "Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put -the Apaches outer the scalping business an' got through spanking Johnny -Reb." - -Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. "Jest wait! D'you-all -know what's going to happen one o' these days? That same Uncle Sam, he's -mighty patient an' he's been handed a heap o' bad counsel; but one of -these days he's a-going to get mad. When he does--listen! he's a-going -to walk down to the Mexican line an' take a look at it with his nose all -crinkled up like he smelled something bad. 'Things ain't quite right -here!' he'll say, ca'm an' deliberate, that-a-way. Then he'll stoop an' -pick up that line, an' when he sots it down again--it 'ull be south of -Panama. Jest you-all wait an' see!" - -"'Wait? Wait?'" the miner sarcastically repeated. "Seems as though I'd -heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me--one thing I know. -Unless your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there'll be -darned few of us gringos left to see." - -"Why not watch from the other side?" - -"Watch hell!" The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that, -despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and -indignation over his fellows' wrongs, that despite all the indomitable -American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquest -of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California -to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from -disintegration, the fine old spirit of '76, still burned under all. -"Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed -protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we're going to stay! -To-morrow I'll get together my _peones_ and go right to it again; -only"--he observed a significant pause--"the next time the Colorados -come there'll be a machine-gun trained on 'em from up here on the bench. -All I ask is that the Lord sends me the same bunch again." - -In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about, -the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the -gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a -solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he -passed out of their lives--in person, but not in other ways. His was one -of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life -and, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing -had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull, -at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the -sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the -pommel as they rode along. - -"I was thinking of what that fellow said las' night," he replied to -Jake's questioning look. "To think, after that, we're out to rob our own -countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser." - -"That's so." Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed -alacrity. "Damned if I seen it that way afore." - -But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a -sudden injection of rustler's sense. "Aw, come off! You fellows may be -out for Mexicans, but I'm for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the -other side of the line, an' what's wrong with robbing them on this? I -kain't see the diff. Business is business; we've gotter eat." - -"That's right, too." Sliver caught the sense of it. "We've sure gotter -eat." - -But Bull's face grew blacker. The Colorado's boast, "We've raped your -women, exterminated your brats," had aroused in him instincts older than -the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling -hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind -at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the -entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal -women. - -He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become -a prey of _peon_ bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his -black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered -with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in -the defense of a common cause. And yet-- - -Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their -evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan. - - -About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican -Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As -they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into -the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east -to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and -ruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes. - -Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of -twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated -carcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of -their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond -their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, and -crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the -_Nacional_ railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of -the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown. -Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge -wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the -evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it -to save the station. - -While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle -sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen, -whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling like -a dusty brown blanket over the desert. - -As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in -surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some -thousand _peon_ soldiers, part of Valles's army on its way south to -pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction. -Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were -loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of -box-cars. - -In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with -tight _charro_ suits and _peon_ cottons, they were exceedingly -picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at -least fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges. - -Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their -brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on -earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the _frijoles_ and -_chile_ simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled, -smoked, or slept. - -Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs -dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal -drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets, -violets, blues, yellows of the women's dresses and serapes, wreathed in -the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and -passed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor -to their roar and rattle. - -As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was -set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: "Come on, fellows! We're -going to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!" - -It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men, -she who was largely responsible for their "rustlings," investing it, as -she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through -hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede, -the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its -essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned -from it in disgust. - -If the train had stopped--perhaps their lives would have been deflected -into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the -trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it -vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in -the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they -were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be -had all over Mexico for "a cigarette and a smile." - -While eating they extracted from their host, a simple _peon_, all the -information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid "requisitions" -payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press, -the _gringos hacendados_ had driven their animals into the mountain -pastures three-quarters of a day's ride east of the tracks. But omitting -the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grass -ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the -raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in -the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon. - -Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the -difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican -scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about -the same part in their operations as a "jimmy" in those of a burglar, -Bull exclaimed his admiration, "_Some horses!_" - -"But--" Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a -fast trot down the valley, "we're out of luck." - -"Oh, I don't know." Bull handed him the glasses. "See what you make of -'em." - -"_Colorados!_" Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on -the blue _charro_ jacket. "It's the same outfit that tied up the miner, -too. Remember how he described the leader? 'About twice as tall as a -common Mexican'? That fellow's six-foot-two if he's an inch." - -"The gall of him," Sliver snorted. "What do you think o' that? After -_our_ horses! Well, they 'ain't got 'em yet. We'll jest ride along -behind the hill here an'--" - -But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted. -"No, you bet he hain't. I've a hunch that the gent coming over the hill, -there, is the man that owns 'em." - -As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause, -he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. "He's -sure got his nerve." - -"Mebbe he don't know they're Colorados." - -Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders' backs were turned, the daring -rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the -marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them -opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired. - -"Here comes his army!" Jake croaked. - -"Only a lad." - -Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, white -with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the -galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down -the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from -their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his -tracks. At the same moment the lad's hat, a soft slouch, blew off, -loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill -scream would still have proclaimed the rider's sex. - -"Hell!" Bull's astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. "It's a -woman! a white girl--dressed in man's riding-togs!" - - - - -V: THE "HACIENDA OF THE TREES" - - -Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart, -two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be -deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance, -yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two -drops that join running in down a window-pane. - -Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres, -and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would -appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun. -Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation -whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet--but let it suffice, for -the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the -_hacienda_ Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the -crest of a grassy knoll that overlooked the buildings. - -A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait. -Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect -shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume; -riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man's cambric shirt -with a negligee collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small -and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly _retrousse_. Her eyes, -large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly -contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was -wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response -to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that -curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling. - -"Oh, dad, isn't it beautiful!" - -The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit -billows; but her eyes were on the _hacienda_--_Hacienda de los Arboles_, -named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it -pleasant shade. - -Built in a great square, its massive walls, a yard thick and twice the -height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, -storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to -the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, -with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the -old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the -meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cluster of -giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading -with checkered leafage the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing -fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, -crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as -ever a man looked upon and called his home. - -Carleton smiled as she added, "I'd hate to have been brought up in El -Paso or any other prosy American city." - -He might have replied that there were American cities she might find -less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as -she did. - -His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of -accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his -satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his -creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or -three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with -Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, -he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a "land-poor" Spanish owner. - -To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid -almost four centuries ago by one of Cortes's _conquistadores_ might have -meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From -a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a -story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its -massive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during -her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very -being. - -They seldom overlooked the _hacienda_, as now, without making some -observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old -Dons, their _senoras_, _senoritas_, savage brown retainers, in the midst -of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it -were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to -think of himself as belonging to the family. - -"Great old fellows they were!" Though he spoke musingly, now, without -connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back. -"Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land titles the other -day, and the records read in princely fashion. 'Between the rivers such -and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,' that was a -favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like -cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few -square leagues." - -"And here comes one of them." Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who -had just topped the opposite rise. "Doesn't he look it?" - -Surely he did. The _charro_ suit of soft tanned deerskin with its -_bolero_ jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the -lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes -that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced _sombrero_; the fine horse and -Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted _machete_ -in its saddle sheath under the rider's leg, even the rope _riata_ coiled -around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in -that pageant of the past. - -"It is Ramon Icarza," Carleton nodded. "He hasn't been here for a long -time." This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up. - -"Attending to the herds and the horses, senor. As with you, the most of -our _peones_ have run away to the wars. We have left only a few -_ancianos_ too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the -aid of the women we manage. That last requisition for the"--his shrug -was eloquent in its disdain--"_cause_. You paid it?" - -"Had to--or be confiscated." With a grin comical in its mixture of -amusement and anger, Carleton went on, "I raked up five thousand pesos -of Valles's money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he -said? 'I don't want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute. -You must pay me in gold.'" - -Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his -race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. "The devil take him! -Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us, -he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!" His hands and eyebrows -testified to Valles's scandalous treatment of the merchants. "First he -demands a contribution to the _cause_. Those who refuse are foolish, for -first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the -poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the -money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left. -In the old days we used to curse the locusts, senor; but they, at least, -left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago, -that you and the senorita here and my venerable father would be reduced -to become herders of cattle?" - -"Oh, but it's lots of fun!" Lee's happy laugh bespoke sincerity. "I love -it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And -that reminds me that we're almost due there for lunch." - -"You'll stay, of course, Ramon?" Pointing to a couple of mares with -foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton -added, "There's still another over in the next valley. If you will take -these along, I'll get her." - -Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the -_hacienda_, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless -boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched -the girl's maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly -knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she -exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty. - -"Oh, aren't they pretty!" - -Ramon agreed--as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila -monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors--that -is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by -the hundred miles--their childhood had compassed more than the usual -number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him -slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of -many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of -course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last -iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself -and clothes. Having passed favorably on the material, fit, and -trimmings, she reached for his _sombrero_. - -"You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let -me look at it. What a beauty!" - -While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined -it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow -intensified in Ramon's big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the -gold of his skin. His mouth--too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon -standards--drew into a tender smile. - -According to the canons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black -or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, -with singular disregard, for writer's law, Nature continued to weave for -Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee's hair, rose blush -of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the -sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which -Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as -powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande. - -On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again, -Nature utterly ignored "best seller" conventions. Brought up among -Mexicans, counting Ramon's sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial -prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal -health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After -sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on. - -"How does it look?" - -As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there -was no mistaking the "dare." Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico, -Ramon caught the implication. - -"Pretty enough to--kiss!" - -With the word he reached swiftly for her neck, but caught only empty -air. Ducking with a touch of the spur, she shot from under his hand. - -The next second he was after her. Along the shallow valley for a -half-mile she led, then, whirling just as he rode alongside, she shot -back along the ridge. At the end he overtook her, and, anticipating her -whirl, caught her bridle rein. Leaning back, however, flat on her -beast's back, laughing and panting, she was still out of his reach; and -when he began to travel, hand over hand, along the bridle, she leaped -down on the opposite side and dodged behind a lone _sahuaro_. - -Sure of her now, he followed. But, dodging like a hare around the -_sahuaro_, she came racing back for the horses; might possibly have -gained them and made good her escape, if, glancing back over her -shoulder, she had not seen Ramon stumble, stop, then clasp his right -ankle. - -"Oh, is it sprained?" she cried, running back. Then, as, reaching -suddenly, he caught her, she burst out, "Cheat! oh, you miserable -cheat!" - -That all is fair in love and war, however, goes in all languages, and -while she punctuated the struggle with customary objections whereby -young maids enhance the value of a kiss, there was no anger in her -protests. Wrestling her back and down, he got, at last, the laughing -face upturned in the hollow of his arm; had almost reached her lips, -when, with force that sent Lee to the ground, he was seized and thrown -violently against the horse. - -In the excitement of the chase they had completely forgotten Carleton, -who had viewed its beginnings from the opposite ridge. By self-adoption -he had almost, as before said, identified himself with the Spanish -strain that had flowed for centuries through the _patios_ and compound -of Los Arboles. He had even come to think in Spanish; in custom and -manner was almost Mexican. But in moments of anger habit gives place to -instinct. The instinct that first formed and later preserved the tribe, -pride of race, overpowered friendship. In one second the young Mexican, -whom he had regarded for years almost as a son, was transmuted into the -despised "greaser" of the border. - -"You--you--" Choking with anger, eyes bits of blue flame, he strode at -Ramon, fist bunched to strike. - -But the blow did not fall, for, scrambling up again, Lee seized his arm -from behind. "Oh, dad! dad!" Despite his struggles, she clung like a -cat, defeating his efforts to shake her off. "Oh, dad! It was only a bit -of fun! all my fault! I put on his hat! Please don't!" - -If the young fellow had flinched, perhaps Carleton would have struck. -But, head erect, he quietly waited, and presently Carleton ceased -struggling. - -"All right! I'll let him go--this time. But, remember"--bringing his -clenched fist in a heat of passion into the palm of the other hand, he -glared at the young man--"remember! when this girl is kissed--it will be -by a man of her own breed. Get off my land!" After helping Lee to mount, -he vaulted into his own saddle and rode away, driving the mares and -foals before them. - -In accordance with before-mentioned precedents, Ramon ought to have -folded his arms and hissed a threat through gritted teeth. Instead, he -stood very quietly, his face less angry than sad, watching them go. His -little nod, in its firmness, would have become any young American; went -very well with his thought. - -"We shall see." - -Mounting, he rode away to the northward, and not till he had covered -many miles did he rein in his beast, so suddenly that it fell back on -its haunches. His dark face expressed vexation mixed with alarm. -"Maldito! I forgot to warn them that Colorados had been seen east of the -railroad. I must go back." - -On their part, Lee and her father rode on toward the _hacienda_. Though -he glanced at her from time to time, it was always furtively, for with a -man's dislike of scenes he made no reference to that which had just -passed. Nevertheless, it filled his mind. Man-like, he had watched her -develop into womanhood with scarcely a thought for her future. If he had -given the subject any consideration he would probably have concluded -that, sooner or later, she would choose a suitable mate from the -hundreds of American miners, railroad men, ranchers, and engineers that -had swarmed in the state of Chihuahua before the revolution. - -But with the clear vision of after sight he now saw that he had -unconsciously depended on the race pride which had just manifested -itself in himself to prevent her from contracting a mesalliance. Now, -with consternation, he faced the truth that racial pride is masculine; -contrary to both the feminine instinct and nature's scheme of things. - -"I was a fool!" he berated himself. "A damned fool! She will have to go -north--live in the States for a while." - -These and similar thoughts were whirling through his mind when they came -on a band of his horses at pasture under charge of an _anciano_, a -withered old _peon_, whose age and infirmities had estopped him from -joining the exodus to the wars. After cautioning the old fellow not to -allow the animals to stray too far, Carleton plunged again into deep -meditation. - -Had he not been thus preoccupied he would probably have long ago -discovered the five horsemen who were following at a distance, using the -natural cover afforded by the rolling land; for he always rode with a -powerful binocular in his holster, and often swept with it the prospect. -Several times the glass would have shown him a row of heads behind the -next ridge in rear. As it was, he had ridden to the crest of the rise -from which they had looked down on the _hacienda_ before habit asserted -itself. He had no sooner leveled the glasses than an exclamation burst -from his lips. "My God!" - -"What is it, dad?" Lee swung in her saddle, looking back at him. - -"Raiders! They are attacking Francisco! He has nothing but his staff! -He's fighting them like an old lion! My God, they're chopping him with -their machetes." It came out of him in staccato phrases. "Race in and -send out Juan, Lerdo, and Prudencia with rifles! Stay there! Don't dare -to follow!" - -Digging in his spurs, he galloped away. For a moment the girl hesitated. -Her eyes went to the _hacienda_, still half a mile away, then back to -her father racing madly down the slope. There was no time to go for -help! Loosening the pistol in her holster, she drove in her spurs and -galloped after. - -From Carleton's first appearance till the girl screamed all had passed -so quickly that the Three could only sit and gape. From their original -intent to rob Carleton it was a far cry to the reconstructed impulse to -succor and save him, and it speaks well for them that they accomplished -the revolution as soon as they did. - -The scream had not passed unnoticed by the Colorados. The leader, who -had turned to ride on, swung his beast, looked, then, as the girl -dropped from the saddle to her knees beside the wounded man, drove in -his spurs and galloped toward her. Heedless of her own danger, Lee was -trying to stanch with her handkerchief the bloodflow from Carleton's -chest, so lost in her agonized grief that she did not look up till the -Colorado leaped down and seized her. - -In this world there are savages who would have respected, for the time -at least, her white grief. But this was the man who had tortured the -miner and his _peones_; driven the latter naked through spiky cactus -after he had cut the soles off their feet. She sprang up when he seized -her, and as she fought bitterly, beating away his black, evil face with -her little fists, his strident laughter mingled with her wild sobbing -and carried to Bull behind the ridge. - -For three days this man's boast had rung in his brain: "We've killed -your men, outraged your women!" But though anger blazed within him, his -tone was icy cold. "Look after the others. I'll 'tend to him!" - -He had already pulled his rifle from the sling under his leg. Raising it -now, he lined the sights, the same sights that had directed a ball -through the brain of Livingstone's horse. While Lee writhed and twisted -in the Colorado's arms, he dared not shoot. He waited until, at the -double crack of his companions' rifles, two of the other Colorados -pitched headlong from their saddles. Then, as their leader paused to -look and, with a swift wrench, Lee tore loose and let daylight between -them, the rifle spoke, sent its bullet whistling through his brain. - -"Keep after them!" Bull called back as he rode on over the ridge. - -But already Jake and Sliver's rifles were barking like hungry dogs. -Trained to a hair in guerrilla warfare, the remaining Colorados had -spurred their beasts behind the horse herd. At the first shot the band -had stampeded, and now, urged on by the yells of the fugitives, who rode -crouched on their horses' necks, the scared animals coursed swiftly down -the valley. - -"The gall of them! _Our_ horses!" Repeating his former observation, -Sliver would have ridden after. - -But Jake caught his bridle. His bleak eyes were scintillating like -sunlit icicles. His lean, avid face quivered with subdued ferocity. -"Don't be a damn fool! They're only using 'em for cover! We'll shoot -along this side of the ridge an' catch 'em at the end of the valley!" - -Meanwhile Bull rode on down the slope. After a surprised stare that -showed her rescuers to be Americans, Lee had knelt again beside her -father. As before said, Bull was no beauty. His black beard, bushy -brows, hot red eyes, drink-blotched face, were of themselves sufficient -to frighten a woman. Yet when she looked up sympathy illumined his -countenance till it shone in her distressed sight as a clear lamp -radiating human feeling. Without fear or doubt she turned to him for -help. - -"It's my father! I'm afraid--Can't you do something?" - -So far Carleton had lain with his eyes closed. Now he opened them and -spoke in detached whispers as Bull knelt by his side. "You're--American. -I told her not to follow. Don't bother--with me. I'm shot--through lungs -and stomach--bleeding inside. Get Lee--back to the house." - -"Plenty of time," Bull soothed him. As a crackle of rifle-fire turned -loose in the distance, followed by sudden silence, he added, "That 'ull -be the last o' the Colorados. I'll fix you a bit, an' when my fellows -come back we'll jest pack you home." - -With a plainsman's skill in crude surgery, he tore up Carleton's shirt -to make a pad and bandage which he twisted with a stick till the -blood-flow stopped. This was no more accomplished before Jake and Sliver -rode up, driving the horses ahead. - -"They won't cut no more soles offen people's feet," Jake answered Bull's -questioning look. - -"Fine and dandy." Bull nodded. "You, Jake, rope a fresh horse outer the -band an' ride like hell to the railroad an' wire El Paso for a doctor." - -"No!" Lee eagerly suggested. "Wire the American Club at Chihuahua. These -dreadful days all gringos help one another." - -Freshly horsed, five minutes thereafter, Jake galloped away--but not -before, cold, crafty, laconic, dissolute gambler as he was, he had left -a comforting word in the girl's ear. "Don't you be skeered, Miss. I'll -bring out a doctor, if I have to ride inter El Paso an' raid a -hospital." - -As he went out of sight over the next roll Sliver, with the girl's aid, -lifted the wounded man up to Bull in the saddle. So for the second time -within three days did the giant rustler bear like a child in his arms a -_gringo_ victim of the Mexican revolution. To the leaven that had been -working within him was now added the most powerful influence that can be -brought to bear on a man--a woman's heartbroken sobbing. - - - - -VI: BULL TURNS NURSE - - -Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old -Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on -herself. But now she burst out crying. - -"The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down, -and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have -tried to pursue them alone." - -"He was old--an' died a man's death," Bull offered her rough comfort. -"You couldn't wish him a better ending." - -It was man's reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman's feelings, yet -it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull -suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room. - -By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off -his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into -unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. "Don't you allow I'd better -leave 'em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an'--" He -stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull's stare. - -"You're dead right! Don't trouble to say it. I'd steal the horses offen -a hearse." - -Bull's glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly, -he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: "Wait till he's well -enough to fight for his own. Till then--we leave him alone." - -Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the _patio_ -gateway. Within, arched _portales_ ran around three sides, supporting -the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful -creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only -vigorous pruning kept it from burying the _portales_ beneath. In the -center rose a great _arbol de fuego_, "tree of fire," contrasting its -flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas. - -They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women, -house servants, and _peonas_; for of the scores of men who had worked -for Carleton before the wars there were left only three withered -_ancianos_ to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that -caught the fresh breeze from the mountains. - -Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the -surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even -from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry -desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied -the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch. - -Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating -marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made -shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache. - -"You she'd have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a -flip-flop onto him. Druv' the pommel clean through his chest, it did. -Yet he was up an' around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less 'n -five weeks." - -Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her -father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was -announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had -achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from -a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to -bury its dead. - -The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull -picked him for a "colonist." Just how, he himself could not have said. -His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to -overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been -cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows, -impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under -the _portales_ while he ate. - -"Say! but he's whitish. Looks like he'd done time." - -"He has," Jake nodded. "I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in -Valles's army that had got himself shot through both arms an' was being -taken back to the base hospital with about a hun'red others. When I -landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out -of a box-car door, watching 'em bury his _companeros_ that had died on -the way. - -"'Gotter do it quick,' he says. 'They don't keep worth a darn in this -clime.' - -"He'd met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an' 'twas him that sent the doctor -an' tol' me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he'd -belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies. -They'd insure some _peon_ that was about ready to croak, paying the -premiums themselves an' c'llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If -he lingered 'twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite -proved, most of 'em being too far gone to testify when they was -resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an' as the -Mexicans ain't so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was -sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he'd been Mexican they'd -have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good -greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He'd actually -served twelve years--think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican -jail before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their -hospital-trains." - -"Twelve years!" Sliver echoed it. "An' just for croaking a few Mex? He -orter ha' practised in New Mexico. They'd have give him a medal up -there." - -After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came -down. While eating he made his report. "If I could do any good I'd stay. -But he will surely die to-night. It's going to be mighty hard on that -poor girl. Like most of us"--his glance took in all Three--"Carleton -didn't come down here for his health. It's bad form in Mexico to inquire -about a man's past. Nevertheless, it's pretty well known that he killed -the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four -years old. She's never been away since, and has no kin that she knows -of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl." - -His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted -his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. "I've left an -opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don't be -deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark." - - -It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the -room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair -to the door, which opened out on the _corredor_, to secure the free air -his rustler's lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the -moon's pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its -maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains -loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid -chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet -and clear gold. - -_Gringo_ as he was, his people had lived under Carleton's hand fuller, -freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican -overlords, and, day or night, the _patio_ had never lacked a dozen brown -_peonas_ on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under the _arbol -de fuego_ in the center of the _patio_ below three old crones had -erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of -gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note -which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still -night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched -between prayers. - -"Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that -means?" - -"Si; they were devils come for a soul." - -"'Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The senor was a -good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard." - -"The senorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that -she also will be cast into hell?" - -"Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty -centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her -soul's sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor senor--" her pause -doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their -prayers for his saving. - -The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of -distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars, -combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle -of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate -the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed -heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed. - -In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw -Carleton's face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both -were there. - -"Where is--Lee? Sleeping? Don't wake her. Listen! She--must not--stay -here. Tell William Benson--he's rough and a bully--but honest and good. -Tell him to get a permit--from the revolutionists--to drive my cattle -and horses--across to the States. They will bring enough--to keep Lee -for many--a year. Be sure--" - -The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a -stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the -moonlit plains. - -For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made -toward the door that led to the girl's room. But as her tired face rose -before him he stopped and shook his head. "Let her finish her sleep." -Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly -called the old women. - - - - -VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED - - -"Well, I reckon this about lets us out." - -The Three sat under the _portales_, heavily smoking. Bull puffed -meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed -absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had -trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all -necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands -were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental -concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the "this" alluded to -Carleton's funeral, which had taken place the preceding day. - -It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor, -happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better -class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till -still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The -Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered _hacendado_, attended, with -Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American -rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds of -_gringos_, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come -in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton's _peones_, and the Three, -had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little -adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus -consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways -and means. - -"Yes, I s'pose we'll have to move on." If not actually dismal, Sliver's -indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction. - -Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had -just then stepped out of her room across the _patio_. Phyllis, the -younger, was to stay for a week, while Phoebe, the elder, returned home -with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee -walked with her guests the length of the _patio_ she took with her the -sympathetic glances of the Three. - -Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of -her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, -the sight of Carleton's riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown -in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her -agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now -complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she -made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. -Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely -accidental, a natural trimming of her dress. - -Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American -born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, -dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee's fairness. If -their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely -accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of -association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in -sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a -smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a -cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept -through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross -and passion. - -"Adios, you fellows!" Lovell's friendly voice came floating back from -the gate. "Come and see us at San Miguel." - -It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of -suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man's hand was -against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and -trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver's muttered -exclamation: "Lordy! I'd like to! but--" - -"--it's no place for us." Bull nodded toward Lee. "It 'u'd be easier if -she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an' a new revolution -breaking every other day!" - -"Pretty fierce," Jake coincided. "But if 'twas left to that young Mex at -the funeral yesterday--Ramon Icarza, wasn't that what they called him? -If 'twas left to him she'd soon be--" - -"--damned an' done for!" Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: -"Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex -that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. -Hell! if I thought she'd look twice his way, I'd croak him afore we -left." - -"It wouldn't be unnatural, she being raised here an' not knowing much -else." Bull's gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. "I'll bet -you that's what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an' -get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so's I could tell him -afore we left." - -"Tol' her yet?" Sliver asked. - -Bull nodded. "Las' night. Said she hadn't given any thought, yet, to the -future." - -The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to -go down the opposite _portales_. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her -arm from the other girl's waist, and came walking on alone. - -They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well -formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They -felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness. - -"Oh, shore!" with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her -attempts to thank them for their kindness. "We hain't done nothing worth -while." - -"Sliver's right." Jake's bleak eyes had grown almost soft. "You don't -owe us anything. All that's bothering us is--" - -"--that we kain't jest see how you're going to manage," Bull finished. -"Your father's idea--" He stopped. - -Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. "It -isn't practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across -the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would--" Her -sweeping hand took in the sunlit _patio_, the brown _criadas_ -soft-footing it along the _corredor_; the compound ablaze with barbaric -color; the _peonas_ gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that -medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. "And if he -would--I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to -this. I'm part of it, and it of me," she concluded, with a firm little -nod. "I shall carry on my father's work." - -The Three looked at one another. Bull's troubled look, Jake's dubious -brows, Sliver's cough, all expressed their common doubt. "Can you do it, -Miss, alone?" - -"I sha'n't be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here -to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you--" she paused, -looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. "Of course, -that's absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know -some one?" - -The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of -each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in -a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the -American border tightly closed; the _fusilado_ against a 'dobe wall that -would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that -dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, -to do them justice, the girl's helpless situation affected them most. If -they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new -path. - -Jake spoke first. "To tell the truth, Miss, we ain't exactly what you'd -call rushed with business." - -"Like all of us--upset by the revolutions." She jumped to the natural -conclusion, "Were you--mining?" - -A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before -all Three. Not without truth was Bull's statement, "We ain't worked it -much, of late." - -"Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?" - -A sudden memory of Rosa's desertion permitted Sliver to say, "The las' -we had left jest t'other day." - -Her pretty face brightened. "Then you mean to say that you are free for -the present?" - -That was exactly what they had! - -She went on, slowly: "I'll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and -sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven't been permitted -to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don't know, -even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I -can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten--" - -"Don't you be bothering about that, Miss," Bull broke in. "We'll stay, -an' when it comes that you don't need us any longer--" - -"--we ain't a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages," Sliver -concluded. "To tell you the truth, Miss, I'd be willing to work for my -board jest to feel at loose on a range ag'in." - -His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort, -it still added warmth to her words. "Then--now you are _my_ men." - -The accent on the "my" unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her -bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own -and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an -alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the -fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies -in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely -enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke -loose on the devoted heads of the Three. - -"_My_ men!" It sealed their adoption. - -"Phyllis, come here!" She was eying them with that microscopic feminine -scrutiny that detects the minutest personal defect. Her gesture of -despair when the other girl came up was so lovingly insulting it could -not have been outdone by the best of mothers. "They are going to work -for me, so we'll have to care for them. Do you suppose we can _ever_ get -them to rights?" - -Phyllis wasn't quite sure, but as her interest while real was more -casual, she held out hope. "They'll look better, dear, after they're -washed and mended." - -That was too mild for Lee. Nothing but revolution, drastic and complete, -would satiate that hungry instinct. "No, they'll have to have new -things. The store is run down badly, but it will supply their present -needs." - -With something of the air of convicts arraigned before a stern judge the -Three listened to certain other frank comments upon their appearance. As -laid down, their reconstruction included shaves for Sliver and Jake, a -beard-trim for Bull, hair-cuts for all three. To this they meekly -agreed; took their new things with sheepish thanks when they were -brought from the store; endured all with resignation, if not -cheerfulness, up to the moment that she tried to quarter them in the -house. Then the last shreds of masculine independence asserted -themselves. They made a stand. - -"If it's all the same, Miss," Jake pleaded, "we'd sooner bunk down in -one of those empty adobes." - -Sliver supported the rebellion. "You see, Miss, we're that rough an' not -used to ladies' society--" - -"An' we smoke something dreadful," Bull added his bit. "You really -couldn't stan'--" - -"Oh, I wouldn't mind it a bit. I love tobacco smoke. It's half of -Mexico." - -Deprived of their last weapon, the Three could only stand and fidget -till Phyllis came to the rescue. Her interest, as aforesaid, being -founded merely on the general principles of loyalty to her sex, she -could afford to be generous. - -"They'll want to play cards and generally carry on," she whispered. "Men -always do. Let them sleep in the adobe and take their meals with you at -the house." - -A compromise thus effected, Lee marched the Three to their new abode. -But this was not the end. Just as they were about to settle therein she -turned loose upon them a veritable hornets' nest of brown _criadas_. All -afternoon they found themselves encircled, as it were, by clouds of -flying skirts, and when the flutter subsided the adobe stood scrubbed -and dusted and furnished with _catres_, bed-clothing, wash-stands, -chairs, and a table for the "cards and general carrying on." When the -invasion, brown and white, finally withdrew, and the suggested changes -in apparel and personal appearance were duly consummated, they were left -gazing with something of awe and a great deal of wonder at their -reconstructed selves. - -"You look almost human," Jake gave his opinion of Bull. "A touch with a -powder-puff an' I allow you might mash one o' them criadas." - -Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate. -"It's dreadfully clean in here," he remarked, coming back. "But I reckon -we'll sorter get used to it. Now if we on'y had a bottle o' aguardiente -to hold a bit of a house-warming, it 'u'd--" - -Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. "Look here! We've got the care -of a young girl on our han's. There's going to be no boozing--at least -on the premises. When you feel you kain't stan' it any longer, light out -somewheres an' get it over." - -"That's right," Jake lent support to the moralities. "Though it sorter -looks to me like she'd adopted us." - -As a matter of fact, the girls' talk, walking back to the house, quite -favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had -obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at -Phyllis's remark, "Aren't they big and crude and funny?" - -"Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I've had them a -month." - -"Won't it be a little difficult? They're grown up; can't be treated like -babies." - -"Not a bit." Lee laughed softly again. "If one of them misbehaves, I -shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct -Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they'd see -through it at once. Being men, they'll feel quite perked up." - -Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their -merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the -disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own -likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case, -as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a -crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again. - - - - -VIII: "THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS" - - -It was not done with malice aforethought, for Sliver had not quite -reached the point where "he couldn't stan' it any longer." It just -happened. Heavy drinkers may be divided into three classes--to wit, the -sporadic, who break out in occasional wild debauches; the "steadies," -who sop, sop, sop all the time; and a third class which combines the -traits of the other two. Of the Three, Bull represented the first, Jake -the second, Sliver the last and worst. - -If Sliver had not ridden his horse along the crest of a certain hog's -back on the chance that the cattle he was hunting might be in the ravine -below, it might never have come to pass. If Napoleon Bonaparte, for -matter of that, hadn't developed indigestion at Waterloo; if Christopher -Columbus had followed the Church instead of the sea; if Julius Caesar -had been born a girl; if all the cats on all the famous fences of -history had happened to jump the other way--this world would be quite -different. So let it suffice that Sliver rode along the hog's back. - -At its end the ridge ran out on a wide bench from which Sliver looked -over the foot-hills, rolling tumultuously under a black blanket of -chaparral out to the tawny valleys of the _hacienda_ pastures. Below, he -could see a path that ran with a silver stream at the bottom of the -ravine. Its deep rut, no wider than the swing of a mule, marked it for -one of those ancient highways whose place had been usurped by the Diaz -railways. In its heyday the canon had rung with the tinklings of the -mule-trains that transported _aguardiente_, maize, tobacco, serapes, and -cloths between Mexico City and Santa Fe. But of that great traffic there -now remained barely enough to support the little _fonda_ that lay with -its mule _patio_ almost at Sliver's feet. - -Though no one was in sight, he set down certain moving black dots as -chickens, goats, or pigs. Thus assured of tenancy, and thinking that he -might pick up some news of his strays, he rode on down a trail that -zigzagged through the chaparral. - -Looking down from above, Sliver had noted the resemblance of the place -to the lair back on the miner's bench in Sonora. The _ramada_ of grass -and cornstalks might have been the same. Only that she was younger and -prettier, the Mexican girl who knelt before a _metate_ grinding -_tortilla_ paste could have passed for Rosa herself. Though Mexican -Indian, some vagrant Spanish strain had pushed up her brow, reduced her -cheek-bones, shortened her waist, and lengthened her limbs. Masses of -black hair framed her oval face. Her eyes were velvet pools; the nose -small and well shaped. Her bare arms tapered from fine shoulders to -small wrists, and if she followed Juno rather than Psyche in her -luxurious molding she was pliant as a willow, carried her shapely -poundage with an effect of slimness. - -If Sliver noted these desirable personal assets, his interest therein -disappeared after he had spied the sign, "Fonda," over the door. True, -the month which had now elapsed since they entered Lee's service had -not, however, been entirely "dry." At the close of each day's work the -Three took their _copa_ with the _ancianos_ at the _hacienda_ store in -the Mexican fashion. But the application of liquor in such medicinal -doses to a thirst like Sliver's was equivalent to the squirting of -gasolene upon a fire. Now, as he gazed at the sign, spirituous desires -flamed within him. It was with difficulty that his dry lips formed his -question to the girl. - -Was there a _copita_ of _aguardiente_ to be had? - -Nodding, she rose, and as she let down a small wooden door in the wall -Sliver's glance licked the rows of bottles within. - -_Tequila_, anisette, _aguardiente_, _mescal_, every variety of liquid -fire with which the Mexican _peon_ burns out his stomach, stood there in -deadly array. Beginning at one end, Sliver worked his way, during the -next two hours, along the row, and had just started back again when, -with some surprise, he noted a most curious phenomenon--to wit, the gray -hair and deep wrinkles the girl had suddenly acquired. Quite unaware -that she had resigned his thirst to her father, and was even then -vigorously rubbing _tortilla_ paste behind his back, he solemnly studied -this startling metamorphosis. Drunk as he was, his cowman's instinct had -kept him warned of the sun's declension. Sure, now, that he had had -enough, he paid his score, gravely addressing his host, meanwhile, -concerning his changed appearance. - -"You she'dn't do it. It's--hard on the nerves. Keep it up an'--you'll -drive your custom away." - -Having climbed into the saddle, he remained there because of that -merciful provision of nature by which a man may ride long after he has -lost the power to walk. Realizing his condition, he left the business of -going home to his horse. While it carried him down the canon and out -across the plains he concentrated his remaining energies on "The -Cowboy's Lament," howling its one hundred and one verses at the top of -his voice, sending warning of his coming a full mile ahead. - - -In the mean time Bull with Lee, Jake "on his lonely," had pursued the -search for the strays in other directions. It chanced that luck rode -with the former. Returning home at sundown, Jake saw them driving the -cattle along a shallow valley. - -During the month which had elapsed since her father's death Lee had -taken the only real panacea for grief--hard work. In addition to the -management of the house _criadas_, she exercised a feudal overlordship -over the _hacienda peones_. Besides hiring and letting, leasing of lands -on charges, she acted as judge in their squabbles, adviser in their -small affairs, comforter in trouble. In addition, her womanhood brought -extra duties. She had to godmother the babes, attend christenings, -doctor the sick, lend her patronage to the _bailes_ and _fiestas_. - -Most of these duties she discharged in the mornings. Afternoons she -donned her man's riding-togs and rode out with the Three, rounding up -strays, new-born calves, and foals. At nights her fair head might be -seen under a golden aureole lent by the lamp, while she mended or made -for them and herself. If it lacked the stimulation and color of city -life, it was, at least, a healthy and honest existence. Already it had -restored her shocked nerves, given back her roses. She had never been -prettier than when, reining in, she looked back at Jake as he came up! - -"We found them! _we_ found them!" Her pride in the fact provoked Jake's -smile. "They were up in the Canon del Norte. Whatever in the world is -that?" - -It might have been anything from the last puff of a worn-out calliope to -the yelp of a sick coyote, for at its best Sliver's voice rarely came -within a quarter of a mile of a specified tune, and an hour's steady -tearing into "The Cowboy's Lament" had not improved its tone. As the -raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling -little laugh. - -"Mr. Sliver isn't hardly what you could call a singer. Is he--often -taken like that?" - -They could have answered quite easily, Sliver's vocal efforts being ever -timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank -disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs -and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to -the Canon del Norte. - -"Piously drunk!" Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond -earshot. "Wonder where he got it!" - -"Search me," Bull shrugged. "The question is how to stop him. You know -what to expect if he's loose an' drunk among all them _peonas_. You ride -on an' head him off. Don't stan' any nonsense. Bat him over the can if -nec'ssary." - -The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither -was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped -Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged -and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the -compound, had him lashed to his _catre_ in their adobe before Lee and -Bull arrived. - -So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull -replied to Lee's inquiry concerning Sliver's absence that he "wasn't -feeling well." - -She jumped up at once. "Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he -can eat!" - -A vivid mental picture of the "poor fellow," gagged and lashed to his -_catre_, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself -for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating -his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it. - -"I wouldn't--really, Miss." - -She stopped, half-way along the _portales_. He had spoken so earnestly. -"Why not? Is it--catching?" - -Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further -complications. Jake shook his head. "No, it's just chills an' fever, a -sorter constitutional ague he's taken with at this time o' the year. -But--well, Miss, it's this way, Sliver's that bashful, though you -mightn't think it to look at him, he'd die of shame if a young lady was -to see him in his bunk." - -She hesitated, then came back. "But--he ought to be looked after." - -"He has been." Jake clinched the victory. "A copa's the finest thing in -the world for chills. He's had a couple an' was sleeping like a babe -when we came in." - -She gave in with a sigh. "Then we won't wake him. But you must take him -a tray when you go out." - -But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it -broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain -have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded -portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee "shooed" him like -a sick chicken into a corner of the _patio_, there to be coddled and -doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every -mother's daughter of whom had her own infallible "_remedio_." His real -contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his -companions at meals. - -"Invalid looks a bit better," Jake would opine. - -"A week's careful nursing orter bring him around," Bull would add. Then -while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned -his poor, burned-out stomach. - -That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they -got him alone in the adobe. "I s'pose neither of you saints would ha' -stopped even to smell of it," he sarcastically inquired, after -confessing how and where he obtained the liquor. - -"'Tain't that," Bull admonished him. "I'm pretty near due for a bust -myself. But when it hits, you bet I'll go somewheres so's the sight of -my hoggishness ain't a-going to offend our girl. No, 'tain't that you -acquired a bun we're kicking at, but that you toted it back here." - -"You bet y'u," Jake added. "Next time you're took that-a-way, have 'em -hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an' don't budge till -you're through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you -forgot to drink?" - -"Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!" Sliver groaned. "My liver's burned right -out!" - -"Bueno!" Jake nodded his satisfaction. "Then if you've finished I'm free -to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. -That's where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you've gotter do -is to find a bottle, but mine's simply gotter have cards in it. I don't -get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining -business of our'n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow." - -"All right, get it over," Bull agreed, after a moment's rumination. -"Tell her at breakfast. She'll fix you up with the fare." - -"'Tell her at breakfast'?" Jake looked his scorn. "An' have her running -an' fixing me out with socks an' shirts an' things like I was going off -on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable -and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an' through, I -simply kain't fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest -give me all you've got. With any kind of luck it'll turn you big -interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so's to catch an -early train." - -So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But -thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed. - -When Jake arrived in El Paso--But the less said about his sojourn there -the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some -cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at -the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, -a week later, coming through the _patio_ gateway. - -"Oh, you poor man!" she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. -"They must have worked you all night." - -"Which they did work me overtime," he confessed to Bull, in the adobe -that evening. "Five days an' most of the nights I sat inter one game. -Look at this!" - -The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of -American dollars. "When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled -a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten -Miss Lee's hand. He was a-- - -"What are you crinkling your nose at?" he hotly demanded of Bull. "This -ain't no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying -horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of 'em came from this very -ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better -right to their money than the little girl?" - -"'Tain't that." Bull shook his head. "I was on'y thinking that I'd -liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don't look like she'd take -easily to charity." - -"_That so?_" Jake regarded him cynically. "Now kain't you jest hear me -a-saying, 'Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?' -But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple -of thousand in horses?" - -"No; but she will." - -And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three, -made his proposition, Lee shook her head. "It's only a question of time -before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be -your two thousand dollars?" - -"In the same box with yours--stowed safely away where we can't spend or -lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims," Jake argued. "The -risk we're willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that -account." - -At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by -devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error, -turning evil to good, if only for once. - - - - -IX: A PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -"Lady-girl's a-going to have a birthday." - -The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house. -So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer -that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease -on their _catres_. But the title "Lady-girl," Sliver's especial name for -Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him. - -"That so?" Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. "How'd you know?" - -"She asked me to write a piece, t'other day, in her birthday-album, an' -looking through it I kem on her day." - -"She asked me, too," Jake admitted. "What did you write?" - -"'Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an' so air you.'" - -"A real nice piece, too," Jake commented upon this classic. "I like it -better 'n mine." Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet, -he gave his own: - -Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. "I ked on'y -think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister's album when I was -a kid. 'Tain't near as good as yourn. - - "My pen is dull, my ink is pale; - My love for you will never fail." - -"I think it's pretty fine," the others commended the effort. - -After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, "How -old is she, Sliver?" - -"Rising twenty, be the date." - -"Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the 'casion--if -it's on'y to keep her from feeling lonesome." - -"Little bit close on the funeral," Jake tentatively suggested. "Jest -about three months, ain't it?" - -"Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an' -have 'em drop in that day." - -"We might shoot things up a bit, too," Sliver began, but Jake cut him -off with utter scorn. - -"This ain't no cowman's jamboree. Girls don't like any shooting except -what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles 'u'd be -my idee." - -"'Cake'?" Sliver now returned the scorn. "Kain't you see these Mexican -dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an' -curran's an' cit-tron peel, an' with spice fixin's to it? An enchilada -stuffed with store prunes 'u'd be the best they ked do." - -"Oh, I don't know." Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled -waters. "What about Mrs. Mills?" - -He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her -young daughter and a few _peones_, had kept their _rancho_ going since -her husband's death. "If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I'll bet -you she'd fix up a cake, if 'twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for -candles, candles an' beer-factories are the main products of Mexico." - -Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward -consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull -delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the -following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe's _fiance_, a young mining -engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend, -a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded -to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on. - -"It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza," Phyllis warmly -declared. "She and Lee have always been such good friends." - -Accordingly, a _mozo_ delivered an invitation at the _Hacienda del Sol_ -about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow's _rancho_. - -The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated -former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating -supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he -developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered -on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her -small daughter. - -Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her -flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything, -the girl's childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled -happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless -directness that sometimes proved embarrassing. - -Had he a father, mother, sister? Where did they live? What was his -business? Married? Why not? And when he returned the usual answer that -no one would have him she brought him to sudden and utter confusion. - -"Oh, I'm so glad! Mother would take you, I'm sure. I'd just love to have -you for my father. Will you please marry her, then she will never be -anxious or fearful again?" - -Her mother's merry laugh helped to cool Bull's blushes. "Don't be -specially insulted. She says that to every one." Then, brave little soul -though she was, she lifted a corner of the curtain that veiled an -ever-present fear. "It's true that I get sometimes terribly anxious. -Mexicans are lovely people when they're kept in their place. But since -Diaz was overthrown they're like a school of naughty children, let loose -without morality, discipline, or guidance to protect them from -themselves. Sometimes I think we ought to leave, but if we did the place -would be sacked and burned before we reached the railroad. So I'd rather -take the risk than be a pauper in the United States. But there, I'm -ungrateful talking this way instead of thanking Providence we've got -along so well." - -"That's the way to look at it, ma'am," Bull encouraged her. While a -wicked flash shot from under his black brows he added, "If any one -bothers you jest send for us." - -"Oo-oh, but you looked fierce then!" the child gave a delighted shudder. -"Do it again." Though a humorous twinkle sterilized the rehearsal, she -consoled herself with the reflection: "'Tisn't the same. But I'll bet -you're muy malo when you fight." - -"It's a good thing if he is." From the sink, where she was washing -currants, her mother surveyed with approval Bull's imposing bulk. "It -was a great relief when we heard that you and your friends were staying -with Lee." - -Later, when Bull's shyness had somewhat abated, she spoke more -intimately. From Ramon himself she had learned of his expulsion from Los -Arboles. "Ramon is a nice boy, yet no one could blame Mr. Carleton," she -said. "Yet what is Lee to do? Before the revolution she could have taken -her pick from scores of young Americans, but now they're all gone." -Laughing, she finished with a remark which was destined, later, to -produce unexpected results. "I guess we'll have to import her a -husband." - -Bull's heavy rumble echoed her laugh. It broke out again when Betty -cried out: "While you're at it get one for me. I simply won't marry a -greaser." - -Because of the unusual proceedings she was allowed to sit up. Caught -yawning while the cake was baking, she fled to Bull's knee, from which -strategic position she defeated her mother's best efforts to coax her to -bed. Whereafter she promptly celebrated her victory by falling asleep. -Curled against him in trustful comfort, she slept with her fair head -pillowed on his mighty chest till, the cake finished, he carried her to -bed. A _catre_ had been moved out for him under the _portales_. But -after silence and sleep descended on the house he sat for a long time on -its edge, softly musing, the warmth of the child's body enwrapping his -heart. Even Jake, whose sharp eyes had detected many an alien expression -on that scarred visage of late, would have wondered at its tenderness. - -Betty was still asleep when he mounted to leave next morning, but at the -beat of hoofs she came running, bare feet and legs flying under her -nightdress. Stooping, he swung her to the saddle before him. The -pressure of her warm arms around his neck, soft lips on his cheek, put a -thrill of earnestness into his farewell. - -"Remember, ma'am, we'll come whenever you call." - -A quarter-mile away he drew rein and looked back. Though smaller than -Los Arboles, the _rancho_ buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of -the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea -vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against -the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed -in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed -the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a -dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes. - -Shaking his big head, he spoke aloud. "'Tain't safe for them here, -'tain't safe!" - -So vivid was that dread feeling, presage of evil, the sweat broke on his -brow. Into his mind shot a vivid picture of the miner hanging limply -from the _sahuaro_, face turned up to the torrid sun. Around it, as in a -whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders -of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern -horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive -indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the -long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon -it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again -and rode on. - - -It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets -and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. These tendencies are due to -the fact that a woman lives principally in the past and present, a man -in the future; while she observes past occasions, he creates new ones. -Whether she be looking forward with youthful joy, or looking back with -increasing regret, a woman specializes upon her birthdays. But, -accustomed to her father's bad memory, Lee had not expected any one to -remember; was accordingly astonished and pleased when, coming to -breakfast that morning, she found the table decorated with trailing -vines and a bouquet of wild flowers at her plate that had been picked by -Sliver. - -"Why--" she gave a little gasp. Then her shining glance accused the -Three, whose sheepish grins loudly proclaimed their guilt. "How _did_ -you know? What's this?" - -While she was unwrapping the tissue-paper in which Mrs. Mills had -wrapped the cake the Three looked on with eager expectance, and were -treated to a second bath of sunshine. "A _real_ cake! Where _did_ you -get it?" - -In a country where cakes, if not actually hanging on every tree, may be -either home-grown or plucked from the counter of any pastry cook, her -joy might have seemed exaggerated. But in that alien desert, stripped of -its substance to the bare hot bones by repeated revolutions, the -conjunction of a sure-enough cake with a girl's birthday verged on the -miraculous. Nor was Lee's pleasure lessened after she heard at what -pains it had been produced. - -It was, of course, merely the first of the day's surprises, some of -which were purely accidental, as when William Benson rode in at noon. As -a matter of fact, his visit pertained to a defensive alliance against -raiders, but, being warned in time, he straightway credited his visit to -the birthday. A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered -and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit -of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old -friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the _patio_ when the -second irruption of the Lovells and their _fiances_--for Phyllis had -conquered the smelter man in record time--occurred midway of the -afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the _portales_ -before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under -the arched gateway into Lee's arms. - -"But you surely did not come alone?" Though that was exactly what she -might have done herself, Lee looked at her in horror. - -"Ah no, querida! Ramon escorted me, and will return to-morrow!" - -"You don't mean to say that he has--" Lee stopped, for she had caught, -just then, a glimpse of him riding away. - -"Your father--you remember--he thought--" - -Isabel stopped in her embarrassed explanations for, like a scared white -bird, Lee was flying through the gateway. Grabbing Isabel's horse from -the _anciano_ who was just about to lead it around to the compound, she -leaped into the saddle and went flying down the trail. - -Turning at the sound of hoofs, Ramon waited for her. It was the first -time they had met since the funeral, and though embarrassment would have -been quite natural, Lee's frank greeting put him at once at his ease. - -"You were going away--on my saint's day?" - -"It was out of respect for--" - -She cut off his apology. "Yes, yes, but father was angry and unjust that -day. He would have acknowledged it himself, had he lived. You must come -back, at once, with me." - -Not knowing the cause of her sudden flight, Bull had followed to the -gateway. As he stood there watching the two returning, Benson's voice -broke at his shoulder. - -"That's the hell of raising a girl in this country. I spoke often to -Carleton about it, but he was a lonely man and couldn't bear to have her -away. I suppose that he felt she was perfectly safe with him." - -Knowing him for Lee's sincere friend, Bull did not scruple to hand on -the information he had gained from Mrs. Mills. Benson received it with a -low, shocked whistle. - -"And the poor man had to meet death with that on his mind? She hasn't -seen Ramon since the funeral, you say? That speaks well for him. He -tried to go, just now, too. He's not half bad. But when it's a question -of marrying Lee, no Mexican need apply. But come on back in. She'll pick -out in a second that we're talking about them." - -During the lively chatter that whiled away the afternoon; at supper when -the cake appeared in a glory of radiant candles; while the young folks -laughed and chatted thereafter under the lighted _portales_, the two -stealthily watched Lee and Ramon. Sliver and Jake having retired early, -Bull and Benson engaged in an interminable game of poker which left them -free to discuss the proposed defensive alliance without neglecting their -watch. - -Before night fell the girls had distributed candles here and there among -the foliage which now transmuted their waxen gleam into a greenish -incandescence. Behind the creeper that fell in a cascade from the roof, -the lamplit _portales_ gleamed in half-circles of gold. The massed -cluster of a bougainvillea dripped clotted blood down the facade of the -gate arch. As the girls moved under the golden arches opposite, their -white dresses might easily have been the fluttering wings of giant -tropical moths, and, noting it, Benson paused in filling his hand. - -"It's like a beautiful stage setting." - -Bull's nod took in the bright faces, soft laughter, happy chatter. With -a slow, indulgent smile he musingly watched the secret glances between -the two pairs of lovers; artless subterfuges by which the girls achieved -small personal contacts. - -"Don't take much to make 'em happy, does it? A little laughter an' a -little song; plenty of chatter an' some pretty clothes; a baby to love -and a man to boss; 'tain't much, but Lordy, how many of 'em don't get -it. If men 'u'd on'y keep on admiring in their wives the things they -liked in their sweethearts, the divorce courts 'u'd go out of business. -If I had a daughter, I'd marry her to a boot-black that understood the -nature of women ahead of a merchant prince; for a man that says to his -wife at breakfast, 'Why, how pretty you look this morning!' is a-going -to get a reward that can't be bought with a million." - -Just then Phoebe Lovell's clear voice floated across the _patio_. "What -a lovely night! Let's go for a walk." - -"All right. Wait till I get a shawl." - -As the others moved off, Lee ran back into her room. They had passed -through the gateway when she came out again, except Ramon, who took the -shawl and threw it over her shoulders. For a few moments they stood -talking under the lamplit _portal_, and, though the conversation was -quite ordinary, the glow in his big dark eyes was sufficiently -revealing. As Lee's back was turned toward them, her face told nothing. -But just before they moved off she reached up and straightened the lapel -of Ramon's coat. - -Bull frowned. "D'you really think she's in love?" - -Benson shrugged. "When a girl fusses with a young man's clothes she -doesn't hate him." - -Bull broke a second frowning pause. "You've knowed her almost all her -life. Kedn't you put in a word?" - -The Englishman made a wry face. "I did, about six months ago, when I -first noticed this thing starting. But never again!" He laughed, a -little self-consciously. "I never had any one sauce me so in all my -life. Told me that it was none of my damn business; to go home and boss -my poor wife. Said that she preferred Mexicans to English, anyway. -Phe-e-ew! I never think of it, even now, without aching to spank her. -No, counsel wouldn't help her." - -"But she simply kain't be allowed to go ahead an' marry him." Bull's -coal eyes flashed with the old wicked gleam. "Before that I'd--lay for -him an' shoot him." - -Benson regarded him dryly. "Your plan has the advantage of finality, -but--it would lead to reprisals. Old Icarza stands well with Valles. If -anything happened to his beloved son we'd be wiped out so completely -there'd be no one left to mourn us. But why worry? We don't know for -sure whether she even loves him. Give me two cards. I raise you three -blues." - -For two hours thereafter the two played and talked, arranging a code of -smoke signals by day, beacons by night, to warn the _haciendas_. But -under it Bull's thought still revolved around Lee and her problem. The -party had returned from the walk, and Lee was shooing all her guests off -to bed before his brow cleared and he uttered a low chuckle. - -"What's the matter?" Benson looked up in surprise. - -"Oh, jest something I was thinking of. I raise you two reds." - -Not until Jake woke up when Bull entered the bunkhouse did his secret -thought find expression. "Sure I noticed it," he answered Jake's remark -concerning Lee's "likin' for that Mexican." "But leave it to me." - -"What d'you allow to do?" - -This time Bull laughed outright. "Mrs. Mills was saying, t'other day, -that we'd have to import a rival. 'Tain't sech a bad idea." - -"What d'you reckon to do--put an ad in the paper 'Wanted, a husband'?" - -"Never you mind," Bull quietly replied to the cynical comment. "I'm -going, to-morrow, up to El Paso." - - - - -X: WANTED--A HUSBAND - - -Departures are usually cheerless affairs, but the morning sun loosed a -flood of gold into the _patio_ where the party was in process of -dissolution. William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they -went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone. - -It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the -sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an -indulgent grin two small brown _criadas_, darting with needle and thread -and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the -transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the -beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love--set his big rough heart aglow. -The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. The young -men, with natural respect for quiet power, admired his kindliness and -strength. Their farewells and invitations were hearty and sincere. - -"You've promised and promised and never come yet--that is, for a real -visit," Phoebe and Phyllis rebuked him. - -The young men earnestly charged him, "We look to you to take care of our -girls till we're in shape to look after them ourselves." - -Not till the Icarzas bid him good-by did that kindly glow fade. Even -when Isabel slid a small soft hand into his huge paw and turned on him -the full power of her big Spanish eyes while uttering lovely felicities, -he remained non-committal. He frowned hearing Lee accept an invitation -for a visit in the near future. But when she came in, after they left, -the hostile look had faded. - -"Oh, didn't we have a lovely time?" She patted his arm. "And it was all -due to you." - -"And now I'll take my pay. I want to go up to El Paso." - -"Oh, I'm so glad!" Darting into her room, she came running back with a -fat roll of bills. "I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr. -Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in -El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece." - -Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the -last thing in the world that Bull's heart desired. But she looked so -pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled -through the _patio_. - -"Now that's real nice of you. But back up at the mine we've all got -store clothes to burn. One o' these days, when the work ain't so -pressing, Sliver kin ride over an' get 'em. Fifty'll be all I'll need." - -"Oh _dear_!" she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. "I did want -to do something; you've all been so kind." - -But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his -comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then -bossed the job while her _criadas_ brushed and curried and sponged him. -After tying one of her father's cravats around his neck she turned him -round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed -him with a gentle pat. - -On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, "be how an' -when," but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger -at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform -to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the -mixture of _peones_, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican -_comerciantes_ that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep -he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under -the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent. - -"'Morning, friend," he greeted Bull, cordially. "My name is Naylor. -Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you'll tip this water-bottle -for me, I'll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer -of dust and cinders." - -The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years -to establish in civilization's cultured circles. Before it was over, -Bull had learned that his companion was "on a little _pasear_ between -revolutionary battles," and had given, in return, some inkling of his -own affairs. The young fellow's lithe, spare figure, clean face, -fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled -along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he -eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last, -the other's attention. - -"Hey!" he demanded. "Is my nose out of plumb, or what?" - -Bull warded off offense with the truth. "I happened to be looking for a -man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?" - -"That depends." The correspondent answered, breezily, but with caution. -"Without being what you could call wedded to this sandy, thirsty, -cutthroat business of Mexican revolutions, I like it better than -anything else in sight. But what's your lay? Ranching?" He repeated it -after Bull. "In central Chihuahua? Forget it, friend." - -Bull eyed him wistfully. He fitted so closely to specifications. -Finally, in desperation, he opened his simple heart; was explaining his -quest when the young fellow burst out laughing. - -"I beg your pardon." He raised a protesting hand against Bull's black -glower, then went on with sympathetic seriousness: "But you'll have to -admit that one doesn't see a man of your build every day in this -matrimonial business. So there's a damsel in distress, hey? That alters -the case. If it wasn't for a little girl up in San Francisco that I -expect to marry some day when I become very rich and famous, I'd try and -help you out, for I know just how you feel. It would be a damned shame -to have her throw herself away on a Mexican. But you've laid yourself -out some job. Not that you won't be able to find men, good-looking chaps -at that. But to get the right one calls for some picking and choosing. -But I tell you what I will do--I shall be up for a week and I'd love to -give you a hand." - -"Sure you kedn't tackle it yourself?" - -The young fellow denied the wistful appeal. "Hombre! a million wouldn't -release my girl's mortgage." - -With a regretful sigh Bull struck hands on the compact. While they were -talking the train had ambled through the brown adobe skirts of Juarez, -the squalid Mexican town across the Rio Grande, whence they were -presently shot by automobile over the international bridge into the -spacious bosom of El Paso's largest hotel. Bull had calculated to go -out, at once, on his search, but while they sat at breakfast there -descended upon them a host of reporters and correspondents, ravenous for -news and aching to dispense hospitality. - -"Might as well put it off till to-morrow, Diogenes." His friend had -already named Bull after the person who had such a deuce of a time -hunting an honest man among the grafters and ward heelers of ancient -Greece. "We'll devote to-day to the irrigation of our desiccated -systems, then go to it manana like hungry dogs. But safety first! Take a -ten out of your wad and give the rest to the clerk." - -Instead of one day, however, three passed during which Bull's huge bulk -upreared alongside a hundred bars. In all that time he never went to -bed, for, intensified by long abstinence, the outbreak proved unusually -virulent. Generally the conclusion of his debauches found him broke. -But, thanks to the correspondent's prevision, he awoke on the fourth -morning, in bed at the hotel, with the bulk of his money still in the -office safe. While he was draining the water-jug according to -time-honored precedents, his friend appeared in the doorway of the -adjoining room. His own head was swathed in a wet towel that almost hid -his rueful grin. - -"One never knows what one is starting. You certainly went the limit, -Diogenes. Are you quite sure you're through?" - -Bull nodded and put down the jug with a satisfied sigh. "It's a bit of a -strain, this fathering an' mothering a lone girl, a feller's gotter keep -so straight." He added, apologetically, "I was jest plumb ripe for a -bust, but I reckon this orter hold me for another three months." - -"Very well, then, let's get down to work. At intervals, while I could -still see, I kept one eye open for possibles. But it's like looking for -gold or diamonds; the supply doesn't touch the demand. The few prospects -all proved to have attachments in the shape of sweetheart or wife. Good -ones, I suppose, are so rare that the girls grab them at sight like -marked-down waists on a bargain-counter." - -After two days of vain search through the plazas and parks, hotel -lobbies, streets, and bars of El Paso, Bull was almost driven to the -same conclusion. Short men, tall men, thin men, broad men; some that -were ugly, others handsome; well and ill clad from all walks of -life--passed under his observation. The few he trailed were either -engulfed within the sacred precincts of some bank or met at the doors of -suburban bungalows and there warmly kissed by young and pretty wives. -Without fulfilling the specifications called for in the potential -husband, it would have been difficult enough to have enlisted an -ordinary ranch hand for service across the line. At the close of the -second day Bull reported as much to the correspondent when they met in -the hotel lobby. - -"Guess I'll have to give it up." - -"Now if _that_ was only free." The other bowed, just then, to a young -man who had just walked in from the street. "Look at him! Five-eleven in -his socks, hazel eyes, brown hair, good strong jaw, flat shoulders and -flanks, deep chest; walks the earth like he owned it. Some dresser, too. -That mixed plaid cost a hundred at his New York tailor's." - -"Some banker's son, I'll bet you," Bull grumbled. - -"That or better. I had a little chat with him this morning. A 'varsity -man by his accent and manner. Seemed to know the Mexican situation down -to the ground from the Wall Street end, so papa's probably a broker. -Holy snakes! Look at that! Neat work! Neat work!" - -Walking up to the counter, the young man had held out his -hand--evidently for the key of his room--while his indifferent gaze -traveled around the lobby. The clerk, who departed in no wise from the -casual specifications of his supercilious breed, glanced at the hand -contemptuously. Turning, the young man spoke. Then as, without glancing -up, the clerk answered, he snatched, hauled that superior person across -the counter, and slammed him down hard on the floor. Next, as they came -on, he felled one large door porter and three oversized bell-boys who -had answered the clerk's yell. This done, he waited, expectantly, -quietly surveying the wreck, the hazel eye admired by Naylor transmuted -into hard steel flecked with dots of brown light. - -Jaw, eyes, pose, all said, "Next!" But the "wreck" was complete. The -oversized bell-boys ran off to answer imaginary calls. An automobile -party at the door called for the porter's attention. Deserted, the clerk -swiftly retreated behind his counter, behind which, from a safe -distance, he issued defiant mutterings. With a slight nod that expressed -comprehension and satisfaction, Hazel-Eyes sauntered across the lobby -out into the street. - -All had passed in the time required for the correspondent to reach the -desk. He was back again in five seconds. "He's broke--owes two weeks' -room rent. Clerk told him to get out; hence the scrap. Diogenes, we're -in luck! Venus and Cupid are in the ascendant. He's our meat." - -Grabbing Bull's arm, he hustled him outside, where they spied the quarry -turning up a cross-street that led to the plaza. When he finally settled -down on an empty bench, the correspondent nudged Bull in the ribs. - -"Look at them!" He indicated the hundreds of men idling on the benches -or sprawled out on the turf. "Last refuge of the broke, home of the -out-of-works. That settles it. Bet you he hasn't the price of a meal. -But, say! he's plucky. The beggar is actually smiling." - -From the way in which the young fellow's glance wandered around the -assembled out-of-works, it was easy to see that he rather enjoyed the -novel situation. When Bull had noted and commented on the fact, the -correspondent went on: - -"Now, Diogenes, we must proceed with due regard for the traditions. When -grand dukes, princes, and caliphs in disguise befriend some worthy -person, they invariably begin by testing his honesty--see _Arabian -Nights_ and other authorities. Split a couple of tens off your wad and -drop them as you stroll past him. I'll stay here and watch lest he be -found wanting." - -Bull managed it, too, quite cleverly, scraping the bills out of his -pocket along with his tobacco-pouch. Watching closely, the correspondent -saw the young fellow look, pick them up, then run and tap Bull's -shoulder. Leaning back, he shook with silent laughter. - -"And they say romance is dead," his thought ran. "_Dead!_ while this -big, black giant stalks around like a knight of old seeking a perfect -husband for a girl he's known only a few weeks. Diogenes, my friend, Don -Quixote had nothing on you. Of all the lovely, fine pieces of idiocy -that ever helped to raise us out of the muck of commercialism, this is -the very finest. And wouldn't it be queer if it worked? It's almost too -good to be true, and yet--a girl that can move a man to do things like -that must be remarkably worth while. Quien sabe? Perhaps it will end -like all true romances, with a happy marriage." - -Till the two settled down side by side on a bench, the correspondent -watched. Then with a satisfied nod he rose and walked out of Bull's life -in the same casual way he had entered it; to return once more, however, -at a critical juncture, many months later. - -Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with -diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual -observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor -conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated -astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was -remarkably well done. - -"_No-o-o!_" he protested. - -"Sure!" the other nodded. "I was turned out of my hotel only half an -hour ago." - -Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended -doubt. "Broke, mebbe, but you don't belong with these. What was it? -Wine, weemen, or cyards?" - -The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. "A woman, yes, but not in -the usual way. What would you think if I told you--But, pshaw! what's -the use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work -fairy-tale. Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I'm -here, busted and broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars' -worth of gilt-edged securities and real estate." - -"A hundred thousand!" Bull's financial acquaintance having rarely risen -above the sixty-a-month class, he could not repress his surprise. - -"There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I -refused a hundred thousand--with a girl attached." - -Bull's face fell. "I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an' you refused -beca'se you'd already picked one for yourself." - -The young man nodded. "Correct except in one or two particulars. I -disliked the girl so much that her money couldn't tempt me. As for the -one I'll marry, I haven't picked her yet. But I mean to when I'm taken -that way." - -Bull's face lit up with hope again as, with naive frankness, the young -fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a -marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only -daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all -that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there -was the hitch! - -"For a fellow doesn't want to marry his sister," he explained. "I know -her so well she hasn't a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will -be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing -forever after. But the Relieving Officer"--he broke off, laughing at -Bull's puzzled look--"that's my name for my father. He was always coming -through when I got in debt at college, hence the title. He's a good old -scout, but obstinate as--as--" - -"--yourself?" Bull suggested. - -"Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits -the immovable obstacle--something busts. That was me. Without even the -last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama, -I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn't have me suffer. He -supposed I'd presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just -for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So -here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the -result--pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future." - -"Oh, shore!" The caliph--that is, Bull--was proceeding very cautiously. -"You'll get a job in some bank." - -"Don't believe it. You see, I'd just come home from Princeton and had no -commercial training. Anyway, I'd rather work in the open, ranching, or -something like that. If I had a little capital, I'd buy in. As I -haven't, I'm open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I've got no -experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I'm afraid -it's pick and shovel." - -The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was -spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull -proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job--in fact, it was on -the same _hacienda_ where he worked himself! Of course it had the -disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing -was certain but death and "requisitions"! And there was always the -chance of a scrap! He, Bull, wouldn't advise any one to try it that had -too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one -might be launched into "Kingdom Come." But for a man who liked action -and would take a fighting chance--so forth and so on. - -A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred -inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so--Bull -did not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic -outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken. -He had finished telling of Carleton's death at the hands of the -Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his -_companeros_ had assumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow -thrust out his hand. - -"Say, that's fine, old man! I'd be proud to have you take me in. My name -is Nevil--Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?" - -"Whenever the train goes, an' that's be guess an' be God. It's billed to -pull out from Juarez this evening, but we'll be lucky if it leaves -before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an' start almost on -time. So we'll go aboard to-night." - -"What about clothes?" The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay -at his fashionable tweeds. "I can't punch cows in these." - -"Hardly," Bull grinned. "You'd come out from your first bunch of pear -chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an' we'll see about -an outfit." - -It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon -changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army -shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman's hat, -his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better -advantage. Bull's expression, looking him over, would have fitted a -match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her debut. His -comment, "You'll do," would have surprised the recipient could he have -divined all of its implications. - -Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon -stopped him. "Here, you can't do that!" - -"But you're broke." - -"I still have these." He held out the tweeds. "How much boot do I get, -Father Abraham?" - -Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he -stood for his tradition. "Only vot iss on your feet. These ain'd much -good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade." - -"You'll chuck in that pair of chaps?" - -With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own -generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were -stowing away the _chaparros_ and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out -a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner -read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very -cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents. - -Gordon burst into a merry laugh. "Father Abraham isn't on to real -clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York." - - - - -XI: GORDON'S DEBUT - - -Starting "be guess an' be God," the train left Juarez at five the next -morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull -had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by -the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first -"shoo-fly" around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over -the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could -never be obtained through a Pullman window. - -It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern -experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, -tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly -revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in -purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun -rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its -nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also -revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with -grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, -startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land. - -"Destruction's the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys," Bull -answered Gordon's question. "You orter see them at it. They run the loop -of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, -then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, -spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith's hammer. After cutting down -the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an' yank a mile of it away -at a time. As wreckers, they can't be beat, for in four years they've -completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property -that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty -years to build." - -"Are they still at it?" - -The sudden illumination of the young man's face so palpably expressed -hope that Bull had to grin. "Yes, farther south, where Valles is -fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it -pretty close. Still"--his nod went beyond the distant mountains--"it's -pretty much all bandit out there. Now an' then they attack the trains. -There's allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap." - -"That isn't so bad." - -Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to -the scenery. - -In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first -took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash -in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts -violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible -ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as -its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear -in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and -had his being. - -The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow -sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the -revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when -the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of -his hair. - -It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like -the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the -feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal -expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled -away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by -deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him -always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the -hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican -_haciendas_ did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the -scenery as such. - -"I'm glad we're up here." From the engine, puffing away at the head of a -dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far -to their rear. "I wouldn't exchange this for a Pullman." - -"Well, don't imagine that you're traveling second-class," Bull grinned. -"I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it's worth it. You'd -suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some _peon_ -spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it -an' grin. Sure!" He answered the young fellow's look of disgust. "That -is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you're German or -English, or b'long to any other nationality that looks after its people, -you might resent it an' get away. But, thanks to our Government's -policy, it's open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a -few, too, every so long." - -"Would _you_ stand for that?" - -Bull shrugged. "Kain't say, till I've been tried. But it's good advice, -nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don't like it, you'd better be -toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home. - -"Here, here!" he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on -a telegraph-pole. "Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t'other -day for plugging insulators. Besides, it's waste. Every bullet is worth -a life--mebbe your own." - -"Maybe his own!" Again Gordon felt the prickling hair--in fact, as they -rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that -failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a -few miserable _peonas_, ragged and half-starved, begging for _centavos_. -There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of -a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty -brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied -the details. - -Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of -war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! -That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets -from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish _hacendado_ -whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and -torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the -full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape. - -Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. -Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, -the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit -tortures! - -He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before -he was aware of it the sun's great red orb sank behind a huge black -mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a -while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark -pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them -rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the -running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a -luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at -the station at midnight. - -"We'd better go right on," Bull said. "We'd get no sleep here for the -fleas, an' desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we'll be into -the grass country an' kin take a nap while the animals graze." - -With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved -off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over -its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours' more travel -brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and -Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, -just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in -chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. _Riata_ swinging in -rhythm with her beast's stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, -took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully -as any _vaquero_. - -"Pretty neat!" Gordon exclaimed. "That boy can ride!" - -"You bet you!" Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, "Sliver -himself, that was born with a rope in his han', don't throw a better -loop than Miss Lee." - -"_What?_" As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a -clear cowman's yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon -exclaimed, "Why, it--it _is_ a girl! In this country do they usually -wear--" - -"No more 'n they do in the Eastern States," Bull dryly filled in the -hiatus. "On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican -Catholic--they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p'ints. Ever -sence the revolution, Miss Lee's been doing vaquero's work, an' what -kind of a job d'you reckon she'd make of it going 'round in skirts? If -you don't mind, I'll ride on an' help her with that critter." - -The light that had flashed over the girl's face at the sight of Bull -spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and -sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an -impulsive feeling. - -"Oh, I'm _so_ glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully." - -"_Home!_" And she was happy because he, "Bull" Perrin, the notorious -rustler, had returned _home_! Earth held no terror that could have sent -that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he -controlled his voice. - -"Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?" - -"Indeed, no!" She laughed, merrily. "They're like two old hens 'tending -an orphan chick. But--well, you know a girl, even as independent as I, -must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone." - -A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant's eyes. His -sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch. -Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be -forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of -sin. The shadow marked a resolution. - -He spoke very gently. "I hope that you'll allus feel that way." Then, -with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: "But what are -you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for -this." - -She laughed saucily up in his face. "Then it is due to me. I gave them -the slip. Who is--" She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up. - -Bull briefly sketched his history. "Young chap I found dead broke in El -Paso. He's the right sort." Perhaps because he divined the probable -effect on her feminine psychology, he added: "He's from the -East--college man--wealthy family--turned out because he refused to -marry a fortune. I tol' him you'd likely hire him." - -"I would in ordinary times." She looked at Gordon, who had now reined -in. "But I cannot pay regular wages just now." - -"He's willing to wait, like us," Bull began. "He's--" - -"--out for experience," Gordon put in. "To tell the truth, Miss -Carleton, I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you'll find me worth my -board." - -He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet -reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which -she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke -out with a comical little laugh. "If it wasn't so nice, it would be -ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking -for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is -the matter with you?" - -She may have read the answer in Gordon's eyes and resented the indignity -it offered her independence. Or the feeling underneath her sudden -stiffening may have rooted deeper. Be a young man ever so comely, a girl -ever so pretty, there will flash between them on first meeting the -subtle challenge of sex; instinctive defiance based through love's -history to the far time when every girl ran like a deer from a possible -lover and only gave in after he had proved his manhood by carrying her -off. It passed in a flash, for, noticing her stiffen, Gordon reduced his -gaze to respectful attention. - -Subtle as it was, Bull had still noticed the by-play. "Looks like she'd -taken a down on him." - -But even as the doubt formed in his mind it was removed by her laughing -comment: "I suppose I'll have to stand for it. But you must be starving. -Let us get on to the house." - -As they rode along, moreover, Bull noted certain swift, stealthy glances -with which she took complete census of Gordon's clean profile, strong -jaw, deep chest, flat flanks; signs of a secret and healthy curiosity. - -"She's a-setting up an' taking notice." He winked, as it were, at -himself. "I reckon, Bull, you kin leave the rest to natur'." - - - - -XII: THE RECRUIT IS TRIED OUT--IN SEVERAL WAYS - - -"Well, what do you-all think of him?" - -Bull's question emerged from the thick tobacco reek which invariably -mitigated the severity of their evening deliberations. - -It pertained, of course, to the new recruit, concerning whose merits or -demerits Jake and Sliver had reserved judgment during this, his first -week. When they had come from supper straight to the bunk-house, Gordon -had taken his pipe and gone for a stroll around the compound, which was -never more interesting than when clothed in the mystery of a hot brown -dusk. The lights and fires, like golden or scarlet blossoms; the soft -brown faces glimpsed in cavernous interiors by the rich glow of a -_brasero_; the women's subdued chatter; laughter wild and musical as the -cooing of wood-pigeons--all had for him perpetual fascination; and while -he sauntered here and there, looking, listening, the Three held session -on his case. - -"What do we think of him?" Jake slowly repeated the question. "It's a -bit soon to jedge, but if he's half as good as he looks, he orter do." - -Sliver, however, was more critical. "Too darned nice-looking fer me. I -hain't got much use for these pretty boys." - -"_Pretty_ yourself!" Bull swelled like a huge toad with indignation. "He -ain't no pretty boy! You-all orter ha' seen him clan up that hotel lobby -in El Paso." - -"A _ho_-tel clerk, an' some bell-hops!" Sliver sneered. "Why, a good -cowman 'u'd jest about as soon think of hitting a lady. 'Fore I allow -him even a look-in with Lady-girl, he's gotter show me. If you-all ain't -afraid he'll spoil, jest send him an' me out together to-morrow." - -"All right, senor, he's your meat." Bull's grin, provoked by a sudden -memory of the thwack with which the hotel clerk had hit the lobby floor, -was veiled by tobacco reek that reigned beyond the lamp's golden -glimmer. "Only, don't chew him. Kain't afford to have his scenery -damaged." - -"Nary a chew," Sliver agreed. "Twon't be necessary. I'll take him in two -swallows." - -In this wise was Gordon apprenticed to Sliver for the period of one day, -to learn, in course thereof, such lessons in cow and other kinds of -punching as it might bring forth. When they two rode out, armed -cap-a-pie as it were, with rifles, saddle _machetes_, and a brace of -Colt automatics, in addition to the usual cowman's fixings, it is -doubtful whether North America held a happier young man than he. Out of -the thousand and one lovers who had awakened to the knowledge that this -was their wedding-day, some might have been equally happy. But none more -so, for Gordon was also espoused--to Adventure, the sweetest bride of -real men. It may be safely stated that no bride ever surveyed her -trousseau with more satisfaction than Gordon displayed in his "chaps," -spurs, guns, and _riata_. - -This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He -wasn't in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the -point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted -himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction -that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting, -park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman's lope. In fact, so -quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the -course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with -thoughts of Lee. - -"'Twon't do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her," he told -himself. "He's gotter show me, an' if he don't--out he goes." - -Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse, -on Gordon's part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with -brutal roughness. - -"Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride -the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you'll -have to try an' look like a man." - -Gordon stared. It wasn't so much the words as the accent that -established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes -were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown -specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden -disappointment when he rode on. - -"_Santa Maria Marrissima Me!_" He swore to himself in sudden alarm. "Is -he a-going to swallow it?" But the next moment brought relief. Gordon -was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine. - -With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the -wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. "Calculated it would -get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He's putting it up to me!" - -Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel, -there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he -began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of -riding. "Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank--" - -The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him -out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped -down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy -chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear. - -A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in -two words, "Poor McNab!" Sliver was almost as terse in describing his -defeat to Bull and Jake that evening. - -"Gentlemen, hush! He leaned over as I took my holt, grabbed me round the -waist from behind, straightened, an' away I flew over his shoulder an' -kem down spread-eagled all over the grass, plumb knocked out." - -Returning to the combat: When Sliver gathered his shocked wits together -and sat up, Gordon stood looking down upon him, hands on his hips, -quiet, determined, yet with an inquisitive twinkle in his eye. - -Sliver answered the twinkle. "Say, that was sure a lallapaloo. I've -wrestled with bears an' once choked a cougar till he was gol-darned -anxious to quit. But I draw the line at earthquakes. If you-all 'll -please to tell how you done it, I'll shake han's an' call it squar'." - -"Done!" Gordon broke out in a merry laugh. "And I'll promise, on my -part, never to ride like that again." - -"For which I'll be greatly obliged; that hippity-haw, side-racking gait -does sure get on my nerves." - -Striking hands upon it, they mounted and rode on. - -They were heading for a mountain valley, enormous green bowl hemmed in -on all sides, that could only be reached by a single rough trail. -Watered by a running stream and knee-deep in lush grass, the difficulty -of approach and sequestration rendered it almost raider-proof. But as it -afforded pasture for barely a third of Lee's stock, it was their habit -to send the animals out in relays to remain under charge of an _anciano_ -for a week at a time. - -As they rode along, Sliver's secret satisfaction revealed itself in many -a stealthy glance. At first they expressed that feeling alone, but -presently there entered into them a leaven of doubt. Their way now led -along the foot of the hog's back from the crest of which Sliver had -obtained his first view of the _fonda_ on the other side, the discovery -of which caused his first lapse from grace. The slight doubt was -explained by the thought that accompanied his glance upward at the -ridge. - -"He's a fine upstan'ing lad an' kin take his own part. But that ain't -all. Supposing he drinks? We-all jest kedn't stan' for any young soak -around Lady-girl." - -In view of his own shortcomings, his grave shake of the head was rather -comical. Nevertheless, it was quite sincere; likewise his emendation: -"'Course we wouldn't have him no canting prig. He orter be able to take -his two fingers like a gentleman, then leave it alone." - -Reining in suddenly, he asked, "D'you ever take a drink?" - -Gordon looked surprised. "Why, yes, on occasion. But you don't mean to -say--" - -"Come on!" Sliver's manner was quite that of the "mysterious stranger" -of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to -befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, "It's a -fine chance to try him out," cloaked certain strong spirituous desires. - -Quarter of an hour's heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks -brought them out in the _fonda_ dooryard. From above Gordon had noted -its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His -eyes now went, first to the two _ancianos_, a wrinkled old man and -woman, who dozed in the shade of the _ramada_; then to the girl who -knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. -Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a -mule-train going up the canon added the last touch, vividly raised in -his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker -colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of -their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With -unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window, -and set out a bottle of _tequila_. - -Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have -been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide -and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When -their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he -missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words. - -"She wants to know who you are an' all about you," he translated her -rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played -as large a part as her tongue. "She says her father an' mother are about -ready to cash in. If you'll stay here an' be her man, you'll stan' right -in line for the _fonda_." - -It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. "Cash in?--the _fonda_? Say! -You're fooling?" - -Sliver raised his right hand. "Take my oath!" - -"Then _she's_ fooling." - -"Nary!" Sliver grinned. "She's serious as a New England housewife in -chase of a bedbug." - -Now Gordon's merry laugh rang out. "Is this leap year, or does this sort -of thing go all the time down here? Her proposal calls for a priest, I -suppose, and a marriage license?" - -"Nary." Sliver grinned again. "Ladies of her class get along very nicely -without them artificial aids to marriage. All she wants is for you to -settle down here with her to housekeeping." - -"Why--but--" He still half believed that Sliver was joking; but, looking -at the girl, he saw for himself the smoldering flame in her dusky eyes. -This time his laugh was a little confused. "Please tell her that I'm -dreadfully sorry, that I appreciate the high compliment, and if it -wasn't for the fact that I don't expect to stay long in this country I -would give her nice offer my most distinguished consideration." - -Any further doubts that he might have entertained would have been -effectually dispersed by her dark disappointment when Sliver translated. -A touch of pity mingled with his amusement; moved him to add, "I hope -that you put it nicely." - -"Sure," Sliver breezily answered. "I told her that you said for her to -go to hell." - -"Oh, well"--Gordon recovered his breath again--"at least that puts the -whole business beyond further doubt." - -"Don't you believe it." Sliver gave a third and last grin. "She says -that you-all kin always find her here if you happen to change your -mind." - -"Now that's very nice." Really pleased under his amusement, Gordon -brought the little comedy to a graceful end. Unsnapping the leather -watch-fob that bore his initials worked in gold, he laid it in the -girl's hand. "A fellow doesn't get a proposal of marriage every day. -Tell her for a little remembrance." - -"And now for another drink." - -But as Sliver reached for the bottle Gordon seized his arm, and any -doubts as to his sobriety were removed then and there from the cowman's -mind. "You've had two already, and I'm not going to stand by and see you -burn your stomach out. Come on, gol darn you! or I'll hand you one." - -His smiling good humor removed the offense. Nevertheless, the curious -brown specks were floating again in the blue of his eye. - -Sliver knew the threat was real. "Just this one?" - -"Well, if you'll down it quick and come on." - -With feelings that had hovered between gratification at Gordon's -sobriety and regret for his own, Sliver drank, bade the girl "Adios," -and mounted again. Standing in the doorway, her glance followed them, -enwrapping Gordon's upright figure with its dark caress. Just as they -crossed the stream at the foot of the path, her face lit with sudden -remembrance. Turning at her call they saw her coming at a breathless -run. - -"Kain't bear the parting," Sliver interpreted the action. - -But his grin faded as he listened to her voluble talk. "She says that -four strange Mexicans stayed here last night. They didn't belong to this -country, an' they questioned her closely about the different haciendas. -They were 'specially curious about our horses. Us being gringos an' her -Mex, they naturally concluded she'd be ag'in us, and they would have -been right but for the fancy she's taken to you. So they opened right -up; asked all about the mountain pastures an' whether we kep' a close -guard. She says they was heading for there. While I go after 'em, you -ride like the mill tails o' hell an' bring out Bull an' Jake." - -That crude but strong expression accurately described Gordon's progress -homeward. While his beast scrambled like a cat up one side of the -ravine, slid like a four-footed avalanche down the other, and streaked -like a shooting star up and down the long earth rolls, he learned more -of horsemanship than during all his previous years. Lee, who saw him -coming from the upper gallery above the _patio_, nodded her approval. -Such haste, of course, had but one interpretation--raiders; and by the -time Gordon dashed into the compound she was already mounted and a fresh -beast waiting for him. - -"They are up in the Canon del Norte," she answered his inquiry for Bull -and Jake. "Come on!" - -"You are surely not thinking of--" - -Before he could finish, however, she shot under the gate arch; was off -at a speed that kept him galloping his hardest to keep her in sight. Not -until she slowed down on the rough trail that led into the canon, within -sight of Bull and Jake, who had just roped a foal for branding, did he -catch her. But it was just as well, for that which he would have said -came with more authority from the lips of Bull. - -"All right, Missy. There's on'y four, so you don't need to be skeered. -You kin go right back home with Gordon an' leave us to take keer of -them." - -"Indeed I won't!" she exclaimed, hotly. "I'm going, too! I am! I am!" -She cut off his remonstrance. "I am! I am! _I am!_" - -It was the first time their wills had clashed. Bull glanced at Jake, who -shook his head--not that he required support or intended to waste time -in fruitless argument. "You mean that?" His glance, grave with stern -disapproval, came back to Lee. - -It hurt her. But though her lips quivered, she answered, doggedly: "I -do! I _won't_ go back." - -"Very well. We've no time to waste. Ride on while I cut this foal -loose." But as she obeyed, with one flick of the wrist he roped her -above the elbows from behind. Then, in spite of angry protests that -ended in tears, he cinched her little feet from stirrup to stirrup. - -"Now take her home." Handing the lead rope to Gordon, he leaped into the -saddle and galloped after Jake. - -Till they disappeared, Lee looked after, wavering between anger and -tears. Tears won. Bowing her fair head, she wept unreservedly for fully -a minute. Realizing then that she was gaining nothing but swollen eyes -and a red nose, she stopped crying and turned to Gordon with a little -laugh. - -"Isn't this ridiculous? Please untie me." - -But now she found herself gazing into the sullen face of a young man -who, through her, had been cut out of a real fight. He shook his head. - -"You _won't_?" - -"No." - -"Why?" - -"You'd go after them." - -They looked at each other. Her eyes were now gleaming brightly above two -red spots; but he met their gaze with stubborn obstinacy. - -"You mean to say that you are going to take me home tied up like a veal -calf?" - -He nodded. - -Biting her lips, she looked at him again. "Do you realize, sir, that you -never set eyes on me till a week ago?" - -"Sure!" - -"Also that you are my hired man?" - -He nodded again. - -"Very well, you're fired! Now untie this rope, then get off my land!" - -But even this was turned against her. "I don't have to. I'm no longer -your servant. I'll get off your land, yes--after I've delivered you at -your home." - -If looks could kill, to use that hackneyed but still expressive term, he -would have died there and then. But they don't, and, masking his own -disappointment with a hypocritically cheerful whistle, he turned his -beast and rode down the canon, towing her behind. - -It was dreadfully humiliating, and, being a girl, she cried some -more--this time for sheer anger. But soon her tears dried and she fell -into deep musing. Soon a small smile restored its softness to her mouth. -Her voice, seductively pleasant, mingled with the tramp of hoofs. "Won't -you _please_ untie me? The rope is hurting my arms." - -He stopped, pulled her horse up alongside, and as he began to fumble -with the ropes she turned her head so that he could not see her smile. -It was transmuted into a flash of fury when, finding the rope a little -loose, he drew it tighter. - -"I thought you were a gentleman!" she shot it viciously at his back as -he rode on. "Gentlemen don't tie up ladies!" - -"Ladies don't fire men for obeying orders. You needn't think I'm -enjoying this. Just because you shoved in where you were not wanted, I -have to go back." - -She did not like that, either. What girl would? Once more she bit her -lip, yet, for all her anger, a touch of respect mingled with her -resentment. Concerned principally with his own disappointment, he rode -on without looking back and so missed the little persistent wriggles by -which she gradually freed one hand. Soon she was able, by leaning -forward, to reach and draw her saddle _machete_. Indeed, she worked with -such caution that he got his first warning when, with one slash, she cut -the rope between them. By the time he had swung his beast around she was -going like the wind back up the canon. - -Her mocking laughter came floating back. - - - - -XIII: AMERICAN RUSTLERS _VS._ MEXICAN RAIDERS - - -Shoving rapidly into the mountains, Sliver ascended with the trail in a -couple of hours through upland growth of _pinon_ and juniper to the -height of land, a pass riven by earthquake or subsidence between twin -jagged peaks, from where he overlooked the valley pasture. - -Like a great jade bowl, bisected by the silver line of a stream, its -wide green circle, miles in diameter, lay within a broad ring of purple -chaparral. Over its surface black dots were scurrying toward the corrals -at the northern end, and under Sliver's glass these resolved into horses -that were being rounded up by four Mexicans; for he could see their -peaked _sombreros_, tight _charro_ suits, even at that distance. Turning -the glass on the _jacal_, a rude hut of poles and grass thatch near the -corrals, he looked for Pedro, the _anciano_. - -"Poor old chap! they've sure got his goat." While clucking his -commiseration, however, he shifted the glass to a patch of white on a -near-by tree, and it immediately resolved into the old fellow's blouse -and _calzones_. "No, they've just tied him up. Then these ain't no -Colorados. It's Felicia's gang, all right, all right." He added, -chuckling, "Four nice little raiders in a pretty trap, along comes Jake -and Bull, then there was none." - -And trapped they were. Except where the stream slipped out over a -precipice between two narrow walls, the mountains rose sheer around the -Bowl, unscalable save where the trail rose by precarious zigzags to -where Sliver held the pass a thousand feet above. At few places was it -possible for two horsemen to ride abreast. At that point there was -barely room for one; if necessary, he could have held it, alone, against -a score. But it was not. Watching closely, he saw the raiders first -drive the horses into the corrals, then settle down for a _siesta_ in -the shade of the _jacal_. - -"Going to bring 'em up at sundown," he muttered, "in time to make the -first run by night." - -So certain he was of it that he did not scruple to take a sleep himself; -cat-napped, with occasional squints down into the valley up to the -moment that he was awakened by the hoof-beats of Jake and Bull's beasts. -The glass then showed the raiders working the horses out of the corrals. -As the herd thinned out to single file at the trail, one man took the -lead; a second and third fell in at even distances; the last brought up -the rear. - -"They know their business," Bull commented on the manoeuver. "It's -easier to keep 'em moving." He grimly added: "And easier for us. The -line will string out for a quarter-mile, so I'll go down that distance -an' hide in the chaparral. Let the last man pass me before you hold up -the first. Then, while one of you keeps him covered, t'other can take -away his tools. I'll keep 'em moving on up till you've got the other -three." - -While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By -that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and, -peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow -black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear, -above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another. -Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see -the leader's face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral -Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. Somewhere, -though he could not place it, he had seen the man before! He was still -puzzling over it when Jake's command rang out in Spanish: - -"Hands up!" - -The leader looked and complied, persuaded by the black muzzles, wicked -eyes, that looked down from the rock above. The second and third men did -try to turn, but were blocked by the file of animals. An attempt to pass -would have sent them down, bounding from level to level to the floor of -the valley below. The fourth man swung his beast around only to find -himself looking into Bull's rifle. So while Jake covered the operation -from above and Bull from below, Sliver disarmed and bound the raiders. - -After the captives were arranged in line under a _copal_ tree upon a -little plateau, where the trail began to fall downhill on the other -side, Bull stood frowning down from his height on the man whose face had -aroused that haunting memory. "I've a hunch that I've seen this chap -afore." - -He would have been more certain of it had he noticed the fellow's look -of recognition and fear only a moment before. But now his ugly -countenance was veiled in that ox-like stolidity which a Mexican _peon_ -can so easily assume. He shook his head in dull negation to all of -Bull's questions. He did not come from any of the neighboring -_haciendas_! They had never met before! His _pais_ was far--it might -have been anywhere in a thousand-mile circle implied by the wave of his -hand. - -"Yet I could swear to him." Bull looked musingly at Sliver. -"Pock-marked, too. Where have I seen him afore?" - -Sliver shook his head. "Can't prove it be me. All _peones_ look like so -many peas in a pod; some mebbe a bit uglier than others; an' pock-marks -ain't no distinction with two-thirds of 'em pitted like a -nutmeg-grater." - -"That ain't the question before the house, neither," Jake put in. "All -I'm bothering about is whether to hang or shoot 'em. Hanging is what I -was brought up to, but shooting's more fashionable down here. I'd allow -they'd likely prefer it." - -"Shooting's too good for 'em." In a spasm of virtuous indignation, -Sliver shook his fist at the captives. "Hanging's slower an' hurts a -heap, an' if it gets about that the gent that meddles with our stock is -in for a slow, choking they ain't a-going to be near so careless." - -"There's something in that," Jake conceded. "An' this copal's got nice -stout limbs. We kin use their own riatas, an' that'll be what the -Tombstone editor used to call 'poetic justice.' Hanging goes." - -Bull was still staring at the raider, but, taking his consent for -granted, they proceeded to fit the _riatas_ around the prisoners' necks. -Jake had, indeed, thrown the slack of the last over a bough when there -came a rattle of stones and scrape of hoofs on the trail below. Grabbing -his rifle, he slid with Bull and Sliver, each behind a tree. One second -thereafter their guns were trained on the spot where the trail debouched -on the plateau. - - -Meanwhile, with Gordon in pursuit, Lee had led the race into the hills. -Her blood mare was the fleetest animal she owned and, had she chosen, -Gordon would have soon dropped out of sight. But she contented herself -with just holding a lead. - -Unaware of this, Gordon made repeated attempts to catch her with sudden -bursts of speed. Perfectly aware of it, on her part, she would wait till -his horse's head almost touched her leg, then shoot ahead with a little -laugh. Her face, looking back at him, was hard as her laugh--eyes bright -and shining, nose contemptuously tilted, mouth one scarlet line. - -To be defied, drawn on, mocked, and teased with low, derisive laughter -is not a situation that any man loves. But if thoroughly angry, mad -clear to the bone, Gordon's face revealed only dogged hope. For Chance -was riding with him. If Lee's beast slipped or tired. If she were a -second late with the spur. One of the three was fairly certain, and the -belief set a gleam in his eyes that caused her a quiver of apprehension. - -"Oh, he's mad enough to beat me!" she told it to herself. "I wonder if -he would." - -Nevertheless, every time she looked back at that dogged face she felt a -sense of security. With raiders at large, it was just as well to have -him around! The thought was in her mind when, with him only a few feet -behind, she shot over the edge of the last steep out upon the plateau. - -"Oh, my _goodness_!" It burst from her in sudden fright. - -The Three, of course, were out of sight. The natural droop of the -_copal's_ outer branches hid the halters, and she saw only the four -raiders, unevenly grouped, and three rifle-barrels aimed from behind the -tree. As she reined her beast back on its haunches Gordon swung his -animal sideways between her and the raiders, and, quite shamelessly, she -accepted the protection. - -"Beat it quick!" - -Already he had pulled his gun, and but for the fact that Bull just then -stepped out in the open the question of hanging or shooting would have -been decided for at least one of the thieves. As it was, his readiness -served one purpose--reduced the heat in Bull's eyes. - -"Put up your gun, Son, the job's done." Pointing at Lee, he sternly -inquired, "But what's _she_ doing here?" - -Now fright, plus Gordon's chivalrous behavior, had driven the last -vestige of anger out of Lee. She spoke before he could answer. "Don't -blame him. He did his best to take me in." - -"Then who shall I blame?" - -"Me!" The coals of her anger sent forth a last flash that was -immediately quenched by her mischievous smile. "Or blame yourself for -leaving me the machete. I wiggled and wiggled till one hand was free, -then cut the rope." - -Combined with the smile, her little illustrative wriggle completed his -rout. He turned to hide a grin, but was betrayed by his shaking -shoulders. Noting it, she flashed with feminine quickness from defendant -to accuser. She pointed at the halters. - -"_What are you going to do?_" - -Sliver and Jake had now come out. The former answered, "We was jest -about to bump 'em off, Miss." - -"What? _Hang_ them?" - -"Now look a-here, Lady-girl!" Sliver burst forth in indignant -remonstrance. "Didn't we catch 'em red-handed? An' d'you allow we're -a-going to let 'em loose to try again?" - -"But _hang_ them? Just for stealing? Of course, if they were Colorados, -but--" She stopped, clasping her hands in sudden fear. "Oh! they killed -him--poor Pedro?" - -"Nary; jes' tied him up," Sliver quickly reassured her. "I seen him -wiggling through the glass, an' the big thief, there, says they didn't -harm him." - -Sighing with sudden relief, she returned to the charge. "Then if they -spared _him_, why are you going to kill _them_?" - -"Look a-here, Missy," Bull now intervened. "'Twas agreed between Benson -an' all the hacendados to make an example of captured raiders. If you -once start letting 'em off, there won't be a head of stock left in all -this country at the end of a year. That was why I wanted you to go back, -an'--" - -"I'm glad that I didn't." - -Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian -stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in -their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not -preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is -universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the -pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish. - -They were poor _hombres_ with families back in their _pais_ reduced to -the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they -would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted -to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For -themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there -would be an end! But their women? And the little _ninas_? These would be -left in continual suffering! - -Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep -instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she -began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women. -Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been -duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and -so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing -into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing. -Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and -reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they -related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces, -leaving them soft and human. - -Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk _jacales_ with their -brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands -for their men's return; their small, nude children playing in the hot -dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great _vaquero_, -roping chickens and cats with a string _riata_, then dragging them, -captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by -the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It -was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow. - -"This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They -were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us -might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would -you feel?" - -"_Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!_" -She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the -prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at -Sliver, who looked away. - -A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and -beyond the pleasant span of to-day's existence the old rustler life of -yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was -now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely. -But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of -each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las -Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they -looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish -grins. - -"Under the same circumstances," Bull answered, slowly and truthfully, -"_we-all 'u'd expect to hang_. But if you feel different"--his glance -interrogated Sliver and Jake--"it goes as you say. On'y, if you let 'em -go, we'll have to run 'em out of the country in fairness to the other -haciendas." - -"Of course." Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. "We'll take them home -now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out." - -This settled, and while Sliver rode on down into the valley to free the -_anciano_, Bull and Jake cinched the thieves securely in their saddles. -Then, driving them and the horses ahead, with Lee and Gordon following, -they started down the trail. - -Now the spectacle of four men trussed for hanging is not to be seen -every day--let us say, on the streets of New York--and though Gordon had -looked on with breathless interest, he could hardly believe that the -business would have been carried to a conclusion. - -"Do you really think they would?" - -Lee looked at him in surprise. "Of course! You know Valles has issued -orders for hacendados to shoot raiders on sight; that is"--she added it -with a little sigh--"all but his own." - -Her tone was so casual, he felt convicted of vast and unlimited -greenness. But where, according to the lights under which he had been -raised, he ought to have suffered a severe revulsion, he actually -experienced a thrill. This juxtaposition of life and death, the violence -and quickness with which events rang their changes, somehow stripped -away the veils from the riddle of existence, reduced its complex terms -to their basic factors. Here in the mountains, desert, plains, they were -very simple--to eat well, sleep well, fight well, and die well, even as -these thieves, comprised the whole duty of man. The thrill recorded his -acceptance of the terms. - -While they were riding down and down the sun lowered its great crimson -orb till it hung, transfixed, on a distant peak. The mountain steeps -above, spurs, and ridges beneath, were washed in its dying crimson. Deep -purple filled the hollows; faint violet clothed the distant plains. Over -all a cloud-flecked sky spread its parti-colored glories. Mountain and -plain, canon and deep ravine, it was a scene infinitely wild, infinitely -beautiful, and as he looked over it all Gordon took his breath in a deep -sigh. - -"This is life! I hate to leave it." - -"Leave it?" If Lee's surprise was assumed, it was exceedingly well done. -She went on, with a low laugh: "Oh, I see! Papa wins out. The prodigal -will return to marry the beautiful heiress and live happy ever -afterward." - -"Who told you? Oh, Bull, of course. Now that comes of owning a blabbing -tongue. Confound him! Well, since you want to know, I won't. In my -present mood, New York is the last place in the world I want to see." - -"Then you have tired of us--_so_ soon?" - -"Or you of me? You forget--_I'm_ fired." - -She noted the subtle accent, and equally subtle was her reply. "Why, -yes, so you _were_." - -Then, looking at each other, they both laughed. - - - - -XIV: NEMESIS DOGS THE THREE--AND IS "DOGGED," IN TURN, BY LEE - - -Midnight saw the prisoners safely bestowed in a 'dobe that had served -the old Spaniard, Carleton's predecessor, for a jail. During the -remainder of the night the Three stood guard in turn and Gordon, who -relieved Sliver at daybreak, was still at the door when Lee came out of -her bedroom on the upper gallery. - -Goodness knows she was pretty enough in her man's riding-togs, but now a -flowing kimono added the softness and mystery a man loves best in a -woman. As she moved forward to the rail and stretched, looking off and -away to the mountains, the loose sleeves fell away and Gordon obtained a -distracting glimpse of polished arms, small white teeth, in a round red -mouth, all set in the blazing gold of her hair. Seeing him, she cut off -the yawn and smiled. - -"You must be dreadfully hungry." Her clear call floated across the -compound. "Come to breakfast. I'll send Miguel to keep watch." - -She was already seated at the table under the _portales_ when he came -in, and as he took his seat Maria, the smaller of the two house -_criadas_, reported the Three as being still lost in sleep. - -"The poor fellows!" Lee commented, distressfully. "They must be dead. -Don't awaken them." - -Thus, after the crowding events of the previous day, which included a -fist fight, proposal of marriage from one girl, wild chase after -another, a bandit raid and lynching-party, all rendered more impressive -by the dark ride through warm, mysterious night, Gordon now sat -_tete-a-tete_ with his pretty employer. - -The _patio_, with its arched _corredors_, cool as a grotto under -flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the -_arbol de fuego_; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a _criada_ down -on her knees rubbing _tortilla_ paste on a stone _metate_; the soft -stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these -helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee's -small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and -gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came -still others. - -Two brown girls, who stood twisting their skirts in the gateway, moved -forward at Lee's word. - -"They wish to take my advice about following their lovers to the wars," -she summed for him their Spanish. "I explained the risks of hunting them -among twenty thousand revolutionists, and advised them to wait till they -came home. But they say that is too indefinite. They may be killed, and -there is no one to marry them here but the _ancianos_, and they already -have wives. So they are going--to join the rag and bobtail in the wake -of the revolution." - -After the next client, a wrinkled old woman, had followed the girls out, -Lee burst out in merry laughter. "She was telling me of a miracle that -occurred at the funeral of her brother, who worked for William Benson. -It appears that he had only his dirty cotton calzones to be buried in, -so his wife begged a worn white suit from Mr. Benson. The poor old -fellow had been reduced by sickness to a rack of bones, and you could -have rolled him in it like a blanket. And here came the miracle! The -weather, you know, was exceedingly hot last week, and instead of burying -him at once they waited till some relatives from a distance had arrived. -And when the coffin was opened for them to take a last look--lo! the -miracle! - -"'For Saint Joseph,' she said, just now, 'had wrought a most wonderful -thing, senorita. Whereas Refugio had lain in the senor's clothes like a -nut in a withered shell, he was now so large and handsome they fitted -him like his skin!'" - -He laughed so heartily she was drawn on to tell him more, and pleased -herself thereby as much as him. For to be really happy, a girl must have -exercise for her tongue, and with all their genuine devotion the Three -offered but a limited field for conversation. Naturally laconic, their -communications touched principally upon flocks and herds; and holding, -as they did, the traditional frontier viewpoint concerning Mexicans--to -wit, that they ranked in the scale of creation below the Gila -monster--they shared neither her affection for, nor understanding of, -her brown retainers. - -But Gordon, with his quick and reciprocal feeling, made an ideal -listener. From the "miracle" she ran on with anecdotes and happenings, -some quaint, others amusing, several tragic, that revealed with a -vividness beyond the power of description the mixture of love and -treachery, simplicity and savagery, ignorance and idealism, religious -faith and gross superstition, that go into the making of a Mexican. -While she talked and he listened, there was established a community of -feeling which was destined to produce immediate results. - -"What is it, Maria?" Pausing, she looked up at the _criada_ who had just -carried the prisoners their breakfast. - -"They wish to speak to me," she translated the girl's answer, "alone. -They say it is very important." - -"Better let me go with you." Gordon rose. "I can wait outside." - -"Surely." She accepted, at once, his offer, and when, moreover, he -followed in after Miguel opened the prison door, she offered no -objection. - -Neither did the raiders--for reasons that quickly developed. "It matters -not, senorita." The man whose face had caused Bull such disturbance -shrugged his indifference when Lee explained that Gordon spoke no -Spanish. "'Tis of the others, your servants, I would speak." - -While crossing the compound she had puckered her smooth brow over the -mystery--without gaining any inkling to break the force of the -communication. While the fellow ran on, hands and shoulders helping out -his torrential Spanish, Gordon saw her expression pass through surprise, -incredulity, doubt, finally settle in deep concern, when, with emphasis -that carried conviction, the other three testified to the truth of their -fellow's words. - -"I-- Oh, do you know what they say?" Distressed, she turned to Gordon -with blind instinct for help. "I really don't know whether I ought to -tell you. It so dreadfully, pitifully concerns our poor friends. You -have been here such a short time, yet--I feel that you can be trusted. -They say--" - -But the tale, as elaborated and filled in by Gordon's cross-examination, -is best summed. Not for nothing had been Bull's "hunch." The haunting -face fitted the _charro_ who had held their horses that day at the -_jefe-politico's_ gate in Las Bocas. When the Three failed to return -with Carleton's horses, that astute person--the "wicked one" of -yesterday's talk--had sent out others. In return for the _senorita's_ -great kindness in saving their lives--but principally, if the truth be -known, because they feared to be sent out under convoy of Sliver and -Jake--they wished to make grateful return by warning her against these -evil ones; these wolves in sheep's clothing that had slunk into her -fold! Followed a recital of their border raids that lost nothing by -reason of the details being filled in from imagination! They were -terrible _hombres_! _Muy malo_! greatly desired by the _gringo_ police -for dreadful crimes! - -"Don't you suppose they are lying?" Gordon suggested. - -She shook her head. "Their story is too literal. When a _peon_ lies, he -goes the limit. Some terrible tale of atrocious murder and torture would -be the least; something beyond mere banditry, which is scarcely a crime -in their eyes. Then it is corroborated by a lot of little things. You -know they were riding my horses yesterday and were differently dressed, -yet this man described their horses and clothing as he saw them in Las -Bocas, just as they were the first day they came here. And do you -remember how they looked at one another yesterday when I said that any -of us might have done the same thing?" - -Gordon nodded. "They did look queer, and do you recall Bull's answer? -'Under the same circumstances, we-all 'u'd expect to hang.' He spoke so -slowly, looking at the others, and they both nodded." - -"Then see how they came here--started up, as it were, out of the ground. -In Mexico one doesn't ask strangers embarrassing questions. It would be -like throwing stones at random in a city of glass. But if they stay with -you, one generally learns something of their past. But theirs is wrapped -in mystery. I know no more of them than on the day they came. It is -probably true." - -Her tone was quiet, indeed so casual in its acceptance of the fact that -Gordon wondered. In El Paso he had been greatly impressed by the -knight-errantry of the Three in espousing the cause of a lonely girl. -During the last week he had seen for himself their simplicity of heart, -rough kindliness, genuine devotion; and now this land of surprises had -confounded him again with its juggler's changes of good and evil. These -kindly fellows were, after all, cattle-rustlers, but one remove from -bandits. - -To him it was a most astonishing situation. In New York, where folks -were sharply divided into the sheep and the goats, it would have been -easily solved; one would have merely rung for the police. But here, -where everything seemed to go by contraries, anything might happen. -Accordingly, he looked at her and waited. - -But she did not answer his unspoken question. She was looking at him, -yes, with wide, distressed eyes. But he felt, without understanding, -that she was looking across that queer situation. He had a sudden, vivid -suspicion that he was on trial in her mind instead of the Three. He was -certain of it when she spoke. - -"What would _you_ do?" - -Ten days ago he would undoubtedly have viewed the case under his -previous lights and have pronounced it one for the police. Now he -answered from the larger charity that belonged to the land: "You -remember what you said yesterday and repeated a moment ago--under the -same circumstances we might have done the same thing? It isn't what they -_were_; it's what they _are_ that counts." - -"Oh, I _knew_ you would say it!" She impulsively thrust out her hand, -and as the small, firm fingers locked with his in a strong grip, he knew -that not only had he emerged victorious, but also that his answer had -established between them a real bond. Eyes shining, she ran on: "They -saved my life, helped to nurse my father, have been so kind and good and -dear! If they had been the vilest criminals it would make no difference -to me. They are my people, my _men_!" - -"Of course they are!" Gordon cordially agreed. "Now what about these -fellows? What will you tell them?" - -Doubt clouded her shining enthusiasm. "I don't quite know. What do you -think would be best?" - -"The truth. If what they say is true, and we believe it is, they can't -be bluffed. But it won't do to have them believe you knew nothing of -this. I'd hint that though you were not acquainted with the details, you -were perfectly aware of your servants' past, but that they are now -leading honorable lives. Clinch it by adding that you hope they will do -half as well with their chance." - -"Fine!" Her face lit up again, and when, having put it all into Spanish -for the thieves, they went outside, she thanked him for the counsel. "I -knew you could help me. Now just one more thing--this is all between you -and me. No one else must ever know--especially them." - -"We'll forget it ourselves." - -Once more her small cool fingers locked with his, and, smiling brightly, -she went back to the house, leaving him to resume his guard till the -prisoners were taken away by Sliver and Jake. - -After they were gone there entered into Gordon's mind a small doubt. -Supposing the raiders talked? Spread their report of the Three through -the desert country? It remained, that little doubt, like a thorn in the -side till it was drawn by Sliver and Jake when they returned the -following night. - -"We'd calc'lated to hand 'em over to the vaqueros at Hacienda El Reposo, -an' have them chase 'em beyond their bounds," Jake explained. "But at -the railroad we ran into a Valles colonel that was drumming up recruits. -He grabbed 'em offen our hands that quick they hadn't time to kick." - -"By now," Sliver added, "they're three hundred miles south on their way -to death an' glory." - -"But the little girl mustn't know that," Bull's heavy bass rose in -caution. "She was that sot on returning 'em to their women and children, -it 'u'd half break her heart." - -"Not a whisper," the two agreed, but Sliver added, with a chuckle, "Alle -same, they'll stay put an' trouble her no more." - -Inwardly Gordon echoed it, "They'll trouble _you_ no more." - -While the others were away Bull had also been doing some thinking, and -after Gordon went out for his evening stroll through the compound he -laid the results before them. "Say, I've placed that chap." - -"Which chap?" - -"Fellow with the pock-marks. D'you remember the mozo that held our -horses at Don Miguel's gate?" - -"No-o-o--" Jake began, but with memory thus stimulated Sliver recalled -him. - -"Julius Seize-her! you're right!" As the possibilities of the late -situation flashed upon him he gave a low whistle. "What an escape! We've -had some close calls in our time, but none to beat it. 'Twas lucky he -didn't recognize us, for he'd sure have peached, an' I wouldn't have -Lady-girl to know for a cold million." - -"Nor me," Jake added. "But it ain't likely--now." - -"Thank God for that!" Sliver exclaimed it with almost religious fervor. -With deep thankfulness Bull repeated it in his mind. - - - - -XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE - - -"Ain't that queer?" - -The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank -bench in front of their 'dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to -smoke in the house, they preferred it there--partly through a rooted -instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the -natural enemy of "Lady Nicotine," regarding her always as a formidable -rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the -compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver's remark broke -the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who -sat in the doorway of a 'dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of -three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile. - -"Ain't what queer?" Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through -the warm air. "There's so many queer things down here I'll have to ask -you to come again." - -Sliver nodded at Gordon. "Ain't it odd how he cottons to them little -Mexes? To me they're no more' n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat -up night afore last with a sick one?" - -"No-o-o-o!" Jake's surprise knew no bounds. - -"He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an' he sat -there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it 'round, too, he -did." - -"Kain't understan' it." Jake shook his head. "For my part, I'd sink the -country under water twenty minutes if I could, an' drown the hull brown -b'iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his'n -ain't going to hurt him none with Missy. If there's anything a girl -likes in a man it's to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good -daddy, I s'pose, an' without actually reasoning it out that way it's -what they're all a-wanting." - -"Don't seem to have feazed her much as yet," Sliver grumbled. "Look at -him. A fine lad, straight an' strong an' true, eddicated an' well -raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But -though he's been here two months, there's nothing doing. Sometimes I -ketch myself wishing he'd hand her a crack like he give me. It 'u'd make -her sit up an' take notice!" - -Jake approved the diagnosis. "They're real friendly--friendly as a brace -of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he's telling, -evenings, about New York, an' university doings, her eyes shine like -clear wax candles, but 'tain't fer him. She's jest a-seeing an' a-doing -an' a-being what he's telling. Sure she likes him an' him her, but, as -you say--there's nothing doing." - -Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his -disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. -"Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together." As, -rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: -"I've gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an' while -I'm that far I'll jest go on an' have a word with Mrs. Mills. She's that -clever I'll bet you she'd have 'em hitched be this if she'd been here." - -"Say!" Sliver's nod followed Bull as he walked away. "Third time this -month--once beca'se he'd heard Betty was ailing; again 'cause it was -rumored raiders had been seen around her _rancho_; now beca'se he wants -advice. D'y' know, I believe it's the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you -think of it! Old Bull an' her an' domestic bliss an'--" - -"D'you reckon it's anything to josh about?" Jake sternly interrupted. "I -uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an' sorter scorn them as -did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there -ain't a thing in the world left for him but a wife's smile across the -table an' children's hands clutching his knee." His bleak eyes, lean, -sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and -left it even colder. "After the pleasant time we've had here, that old -hell an' ruin life looks like a bad dream. I've thought, sometimes, I'd -try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull's natural goodness. But -I'm bad clean through to the bone. Why, I'm fixing even now, while I'm -talking, for a bust. My system's that dry I ked drink up a lake, an' my -fingers is itching to get into a game." - -"Me, too." Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake's mood. -"I'll soon be due for a night at the _fonda_." He added, with comical -pathos: "You bet, I'll go an' lie down to it again. But I do wish -Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p'ison. I suffer so -when I'm through." - -"Sure." Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted -to satisfaction. "One of these days I'll take a tumble an' go back to -the old life till it's cut off by the sheriff's rope. But Bull--" - - -Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his -first visit, he had looked back on the widow's _rancho_. The low sun -filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid -gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red -masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on -Bull's face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited -altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old 'dobe -wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his -musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack -till a voice broke the golden silence. - -"It will pay you, senor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the -eyes out of you with perfect ease." - -As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in -outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, -emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing -it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile -warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull's question. - -"Si, the senora is there. Ride on, senor. I shall watch here for a -little while." - -Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull's knee, the widow explained -the apparition. "That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He's very -faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times -in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used -to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on -his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, -almost shot to pieces. After I'd nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got -his pardon from Diaz on condition that he'd stay with us and behave. -That's over ten years ago. He's been with us ever since, and that old -bandit reputation of his has been our best protection." - -"That's fine, ma'am," Bull made hearty comment. "It takes a bad man to -scare a bad man. I'll feel easier for knowing this." - -The widow had already dismissed Terrubio's woman, who served as her -_criada_, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull's -supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and -constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her -skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. -Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of -the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at -last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch -him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, -though he introduced it then. - -"Two months he's been here, ma'am," he concluded his tale of woe, "an' -nary a thing doing." - -"Why, what did you expect?" Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter -and Betty joined her childish merriment. "Did you think it would happen -in the first five minutes? Now just consider--what good would she ever -have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at -first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out -at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a -lasting love. It's good that he isn't impressionable, for he'll go down -all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn't have liked Lee to fall -in love with him at once. But she isn't that easy kind. The man that -gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they -act?" - -Bull gave the diagnosis--they appeared to like each other! Were very -friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn't think of anything -else! - -The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst -out laughing. "Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men -are! That isn't much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she -him, accidental, as it were?" - -Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the -stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the -question. "Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t'other day. -It lashed out an' upset them an' for a minute they was that balled up -you kedn't tell t'other from which. Didn't seem a bit anxious to let go, -either." - -"That's favorable," the widow nodded thoughtfully. "Looking at it from a -distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It's the -life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. -They'll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up -like a wind, then--up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles -since Mr. Nevil came?" - -"A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an' Ramon -was gone afore we kem in." - -"It's a pity he hadn't been there. He'd feel the same about as we do, -and he wouldn't be human if he didn't try to cut Ramon out. Let me see." -She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. -"I know! I'm having a birthday next week. I'll make a little party and -invite Ramon and Lee. You'll see to it that Gordon brings her here?" - -"But then Bull won't be able to come," Betty's small voice piped, -indignantly. "And you told me only yesterday that you weren't going to -ask any one but him." - -Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. "So I did, dear, and I'd -rather have him. But when Lee's happiness is at stake we'll have to give -up our own pleasure. And you mustn't call him that. 'Tisn't respectful. -Say Mr. Perrin." - -"But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could--didn't you, Bull? -There, you see!" Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with -further revelations. "Mother will be thirty-sev--" when the widow -clapped her hand over the small, traitorous mouth. - -She broke into a little, conscious laugh. "I know it's silly. But was -there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won't -acknowledge to a day over thirty." - -"And you look five years younger than that, ma'am," Bull gallantly -replied. - -He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus -consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, -warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, -electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, -forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or -flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids -and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more -personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations. - -In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to -sleep in Bull's arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the -soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not -of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he -dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment: - -"'Tain't for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own -hand." - -He repeated it next morning, looking back on the _rancho_ from the last -rise. "No, Son, 'tain't for you." - -At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his -distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might -have read denial of his thought in both the child's words and the -widow's reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of -his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade -longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty's words -with a sudden squeeze. - -"Mother, I just know he's falling in love with you. Wouldn't it be nice -if he asked--" - - - - -XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT-- - - -The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow's birthday. Not that -there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, -the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua--altogether too brightly for -a white man's comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses -into the shade of the 'dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in -the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was -initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of "cat's cradle" with a -loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house. - -At the sight of the two heads bent over the "cradle," the girl's face -lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. -"Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?" - -"Is this she?" Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. "I had -just about made up my mind to adopt her myself." - -"Let me see--" Lee's smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. "She's -about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been -born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I -cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. -Oh, you needn't blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was -loud in your praises. 'Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio's sick babe all -night. What a husband for some happy senorita!'" - -"That was very nice of Maria." He laughed. "Only, I'm afraid there's -nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow -up--somehow I lose interest." - -It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected -far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines -that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself -for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. -The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then -by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the -parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe -housekeeping around the corner. - -"Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the senorita," came a voice, -gruff with masculine authority. "Only we be married." - -"But will they be married, Pancho?" piped a softer treble. - -"Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old 'Lupe -talking at the well. 'Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman -with never a duenna to her name? 'Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood -runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, -this may not end without marriage.' This is what old 'Lupe said to thy -mother." - -Rich color swept from the roots of Lee's hair down to her neck. She -hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; -then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky -sentences, she regained her composure. - -"Woman!" "Don Gor-r-r-don" was speaking again. "What is this--the -tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of -the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? 'Tis sour as swill, fit -only for swine." - -"Then it should suit thee very well," came the softer voice, with -unexpected spirit. - -"A-r-r-r-h!" It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which -Don Gor-r-r-don's father resented household rebellions. "Thou wouldst -answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!" - -Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don -Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the -house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon. - -"Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you," she teased him. "They -were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he -handed Dolores one on the mouth." - -He laughed. "The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the -proper relation of the sexes." - -This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again -and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the -saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased -surprise. - -Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value -these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician--the widow, for -instance--would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they -rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long -earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, -her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a -curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite -frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little -gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed -nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled--and -mishandled--man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the -wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private -chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded -being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends. - -He "lost interest in them after they grew up." Indeed! Why, the -freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic -beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all -the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were -nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of -her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature's -cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, -he did not know it. The "fire and tow" still lacked a "wind." - -They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell's -_rancho_ to the widow's; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. "It -is rougher," she said, "with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both -shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded -canon past a country _fonda_. There I'll show you the prettiest Mexican -girl in all Chihuahua." - -"At the _fonda_? Then I have seen her." - -Her quick look said quite plainly, "Oh, _you have_?" - -"Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should -say!" He added, laughing, "She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, -adding the _fonda_ as an extra inducement." - -Her expression now said, "Oh, she _did_?" But as she looked away, he -failed to see it, got only her words, "And you had the heart to refuse?" - -"Sad to relate." - -"And you haven't even been to see her again?" - -"No time." - -She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, -as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that -expressed--perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and -reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman -is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up -the canon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy -watch as they approached the _fonda_. - -"There's your beauty--attired like a bride for her groom." - -Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an _olla_ -of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a -handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from -under the _olla_, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy -mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and -shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe -bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty -picture overmuch for his companion's taste. - -His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, "Perhaps she hasn't -lost hope?" - -She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. -While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with -seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient -because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came -hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that -followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl -reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon's fob -dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads. - -At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under -pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl's chemisette, -she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon's -monogram in gold. - -"Ah, _ha_! senor!" - -Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under -it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was -it the widow's "wind" fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least -when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze -following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. -Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke: - -"I am yours!" - -After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling -after Gordon's up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag -staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question. - - - - -XVII: --BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK - - -When they rode in to the _rancho_ that afternoon, the "wind"--that is, -Ramon--had not yet "blown in"; so there were no complications to -interfere with the widow's first attempts at diagnosis of the "case." -She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and -Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the -pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her -across to the veranda. - -"Promising," she inwardly commented. - -A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered -temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and -white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow's -bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark: - -"Ramon is coming." - -"Yes? Isabel too?" - -An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills's belief that the indifference -was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. "No, it was quite -accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along -their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and -show me to-day." - -"Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy." - -She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. "Never -missed a dab. William Benson's a fool--though, of course, she may have -changed her mind." This she proceeded to find out. "Your new man seems -nice?" - -"He is." Followed a long description of Gordon's night vigil with the -child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, "But--" - -"But what?" - -"He's been going to see Felicia at the _fonda_. Sliver took him there, -one day, and he says that he has never been again. But--she's wearing -his watch-fob in her bosom-- Yes, yes! I know! A _peona_ will beg the -shoes off any man's feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. -But--" - -Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously -made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in _peonas_' bosoms, will -bear watching. "Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is -very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn't he -twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh--" - -She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly -subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little -smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed. - -Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. "Oh, wouldn't that be -just too lovely! Is it--settled?" - -The widow, of course, shook her head. - -"But it will be." - -"How do you know?" She was quite willing to be convinced. - -"How do I know?" The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of -powder. "Just as if it depended on _him_. Just as if any woman--who -hasn't a harelip--can't marry any man she wants." - -Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a "case," Mrs. -Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so -self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an -honest person, she owned up with a hug. - -Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom -dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to -an equally keen if less discreet examination. - -Betty's major premise agreed marvelously with Lee's and was stated with -the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the -subject from different distances and points of view. "I like you--only -not so well as Bull. You're nicer-looking, but--" A long pause -emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in -other ways. "I'm going to marry him when I grow up--that is, if mother -doesn't beat me to it!" - -"Any danger of that?" Gordon laughed. - -"You bet there is. Bull's dead in love with her, and she--of course, she -doesn't admit it, but _I know_." - -"Well, well, isn't that fine!" Gordon really meant it. "Congratulations, -I suppose, are not yet in order." - -"I should say _not_!" Betty's blue eyes widened with horror. "Don't you -_dare_! I'm not too big, yet, to be spanked"--she wriggled, -reminiscently--"and when mother's real mad she goes the limit. -Nevertheless, it's true." After a second calculating survey, she -concluded, "But if she grabs Bull, I _might_ marry you." - -"If you only will," he pleaded, "I'll be _so-o_ good! Can't we consider -ourselves engaged?" - -After a moment's thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. "No, I'm -afraid not." - -"Why?" - -"Because." - -"Because doesn't answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why." - -"Because I'd only be disappointed again." She added, with a little sigh: -"All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You'll fall -in love with Lee." - -"_I?_ With _Lee_?" His real surprise showed how little that contingency -had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of -apprehension colored his accent. "Now how do you figure that?" - -"Because you'd be a fool if you didn't." - -The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. "But--but, you -know, I am only her hired man?" - -"That wouldn't count--if she liked you." After another examination: "And -she might do worse. _Gee!_ if I were only a man!" - -"Yes?" he prompted. "If you were a man?" - -"I'd love her so hard she'd just have to give in. I'd--" - -But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her -mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. -Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with -plentiful food for thought. - -During the last two months he had seen Lee--riding the range, a pretty -lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in -her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a -girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the -sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it -with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there -something wrong with his head? - -Presently he gained an inkling--he had been wearing another's colors! -She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance -of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his -view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with -thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the -Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the -inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet--these -and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his -brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure's trail! - -He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were -really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one's joy in beautiful -things! Come to think of it--Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! -He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant -tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the -gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the -upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding -her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall -dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the -course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the -earth's fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not -belong. - -Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary -effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly -dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of -his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung -in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, -stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl! - -It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it's the -feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but -actually triumphed over, Lee's severe man's riding-clothes, took a -billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings -under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the -dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure -rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, -that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, -without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste. - -"Why, Sister!" he returned her greeting of the morning. "What killing -clothes!" - -"Right, Brother!" she answered, in kind. "That's what they're for." - -Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of -course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, -badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders' wit. But under -all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she -reacted to it--though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who -had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam -still sparkled in her eye. - -"I wonder what she's up to?" The thought formed in Mrs. Mills's mind. - -She soon found out, for just then the "wind," alias Ramon, "blew in." - -"Oh! I'm _so_ glad to see you!" - -With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the -_corredor_, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, -giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, -aunts, cousins--goodness knows! the category might have embraced every -one of his _peones_ if she had not been warned by the deepening of the -young fellow's rich color that it was about time to let go. - -"Just a bit too effusive," the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, "You -are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear." - -"Oh, I beg your pardon!" But the glint in her eye took it back and she -managed the introductions with malicious skill. "Ramon, this is Mr. -Nevil, our latest acquisition." - -"Just as if he'd been a horse," the widow inwardly commented. To prevent -further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table. - -On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two -men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, -was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever -with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His -great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced -_sombrero_; the _charro_ suit of soft leather that so finely displayed -his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle--made such a -figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage. - -Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just -as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they -settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from -Gordon's impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in -course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point -of view. - -"I do not know of myself," Ramon replied to his question concerning the -outcome, "but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, -without forming some opinions. No, senor, we shall never settle our -troubles ourselves--because, first, it isn't in us; second, we do not -try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside--but that we -should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your -throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living -on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and -nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like -careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in -order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, -senor"--he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug--"we should -fight any attempt on your part to limit our 'God-given right'--as your -political speakers would say--to cut one another's throats and run off -with one another's women as we have been doing for thousands of years. -We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have -done our best to make up the arrears." - -So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. "I think -your father must be a bit of a cynic." - -"No, senor." Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. "He merely knows us. In -your schools--I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your -big military academies--you teach that every American boy has a chance -to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of -your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so -forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men -have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with -the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to -kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without -scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your -political speakers would call 'our God-appointed place.' As there are -many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound -to result. - -"Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is -right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between -our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time -comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute -ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of -children's and women's lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no -principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your -warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to -our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that -is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces -our _peones_ live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat -and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in -their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the -least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with -your system." - -"In other words," Gordon suggested, "'you prefer the frying-pan to the -fire'?" - -For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application -of the strange proverb, he laughed. "Exactly, senor. Why trade devils?" - -"So that is how you Mexicans feel?" Gordon commented on these strange -ideas after a thoughtful pause. "Then why did you ever let the -foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested -billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective -countries, you can never turn them out." - -Ramon's nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set -back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its -ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a -detested commercialism, was not to be stayed. - -"Why did we do it? _We_ did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo -de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have -built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But -after him--Diaz, the Flood!" Flicking the ash carelessly from his -cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: "No, we cannot throw them -out--now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed -Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time--we -shall fight." - -From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let -alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee -returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In -fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she -addressed him half an hour later. - -"We are going for a little walk. You may come--if you choose." - -He didn't _choose_! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off -alongside the _charro_ suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face -displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common -to two creatures under the sun--to wit, a bull being played with the -_capa_ by a skilful _matador_ and a man under torture by a woman. - -When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here -the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with -him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had -first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of -a--well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet -under his wrath the "wind" was fanning another flame into quite a -respectable blaze. - -If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their -relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, -Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned -almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the -going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted -shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. -In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, -at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he -started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her -well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, -threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. -But never for a moment was she deceived. - -"Flirting their young heads off against each other," she summed the -situation. - -With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon's good-night at -the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee's answer; -also the stiffness of the bows between the young men. - -A certain restraint in the girl's good-night to herself caused her -inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction -not to let the sun go down on one's offense. She entered with Lee into -her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the -door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, -thereby, from a correct judgment of results. - -"On the whole honors were even," she mused while making her toilet. "I -wonder who will score to-morrow?" - -It was Lee. - -"I'm coming home later," she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. -"You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me." - -There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode -away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note -that contained--at least so she said--the recipe for a liniment Terrubio -used on their horses which he had promised to Bull. - -Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the -curtains. "That's downright cruelty," she scolded. - -"Well?" Lee shrugged. "Didn't he say, yesterday morning, that he didn't -take any interest in girls after they grew up?" - -"But he does." - -Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little -laugh, "I know it." - -Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure--that -is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on -the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. "Oh, he's going -back by the _fonda_!" - -"Ah-ha!" the widow mused. "Now we shall see." - -She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee -routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after. - - - - -XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY - - -In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike. - -A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode -into the hills Gordon's thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary -with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and -flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their -heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he "didn't -give a damn"! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the -pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air. - -The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden -impulses to go back, punch Ramon's head, and lead Lee away by one pretty -ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let -go with the admonition, "There! that will teach you to behave!" - -Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode -on--madder than ever. Also--but, as before said, his thoughts and -feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, -hours later, he saw the _fonda_ lying like a cup of gold in the ravine -below he was in a highly reckless state. - -Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been -in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, -plowman and professor alike proceed to "take a hair of the dog that bit -them" by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so -caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the -number shall never be told! - -In accordance with this natural law, Felicia's pretty face now flashed -up before Gordon's eyes. His exclamation, "Aw, take a drink and forget -it!" might, metaphorically, be applied to the _fonda's_ liquors less -than to her. - -A _peona's_ life gravitates between her grinding at the _metate_ and -laundering on the river boulders, with spells of "drawnwork" between. -Having put out her "wash" and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was -making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on -the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down -from above. - -From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around -a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the -satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl -would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat -out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, -led his horse in under the shady _ramada_, then proceeded calmly with -her toilet. - -Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the -dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and -arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! -eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that -would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start -out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape. - -The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, -golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was -exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and -flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a -girl's contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. -Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of -his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he -looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and -shoulders. - -Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the -cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled -two _copas_ of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him -in Spanish. - -"Salud y pesitos, senor!" (Health and a little money!) - -In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the -contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a _peso_ -note--even after he had filled and drunk again. - -A _peona_ refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had -he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was -not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his -years. But being absolutely ignorant of _peona_ nature, and in fine -fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and -chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs. - -When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a -_diccionario_ with "long hair" he laughed, but failed to catch the -personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had -repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But -now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped -herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats. - -To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and -burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so -delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the -"long-haired _diccionario_" was in constant use. While her father and -mother dozed under the _ramada_ he consulted it about the scenery and -natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But -when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer -objects--fingers, eyes, hair--the lesson passed the boundaries of -etymology into the domain of love. - -He was well over that border before he realized it--how far he did not -guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for "kiss," the -_diccionario_ answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action -to illustrate it. - - - - -XIX: A KISS--ITS CONSEQUENCES - - -If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the -canon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling -like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a -binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in -that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both -the girl's worried expression and Ramon's glowing ardor. For just as the -"wages of sin is death," so the wages of flirtation--especially if the -party of the second part be of Latin blood--is apt to be disaster. Lee -was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up -and pressed down, last night's consequences. - -With a girl's keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and -had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, -that would have appeared ridiculous--besides, though she would not have -admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that _dreadful_ -girl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself -for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had -ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited -chatter--Ramon's family, _hacienda_ affairs, the scenery--while she -dodged like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing -this were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? -Would she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, -herself, what her answer might have been! But she _did_ know that she -would have let him speak. - -If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride--bolstered by irritation, -for with a woman's illogic she charged her present plight to him--her -pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her -from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort -great as a physical strain. - -But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the -mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And -their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to -check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently -leaped over and swept all before it. - -A remark of hers concerning his father's age precipitated the flood. -"Si, he has many years." Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran -on: "Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he -but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on"--he paused, -then added the _tu_ of lovers--"on _thee_. If--" - -"Oh, Ramon!" she pleaded, in wild distress. "_Please_--don't!" - -But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, -but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his -love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of -spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert--all -were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his -universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, -it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have -listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now--it filled her -with dismay. - -"Oh, you poor Ramon!" She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but -when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. "Oh no! -_no!_ Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played--" - -But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the -moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. "There is no hurry. I did not -intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou -hast always known it." - -"Oh yes." Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. "Yes, but--" Then -realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the -compromise. "No, I won't answer now. Wait." - -"If there be any one else--" His brow drew down over somber, threatening -eyes. - -"Oh, there isn't!" She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she -repeated again. "There _isn't_, Ramon!" - -"Bueno!" His face cleared. "Then I am content." - -Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of -imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think. - -Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved -on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between -remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately -refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the canon, -curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. -Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the -zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate. - -Their first view of the _fonda_ showed, of course, only the roof and -walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon's horse -tied to a post of the _ramada_, then the young man himself leaning at -ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of -the "long-haired _diccionario_," which was now being consulted in the -matter of hair and eyes. - -"The senor seems to be enjoying himself." - -His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not -see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, -she watched from across the stream the girl's head go up and meet -Gordon's in a kiss. - -For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. -The chrome-yellow walls of the _fonda_, toned under the eaves by Time's -green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a -greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed -brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which -knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of -it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have -carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an -audience--in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of -a deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just -sat her beast. - -In taking the last turn, Ramon's horse dislodged a pebble, and as it -rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl's -clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon's glance of startled -inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet. - -"My God, she saw it!" - -Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change -wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had -assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. -Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole -world had gone to smithereens! - -"Competition is the life of love!" Mrs. Mills might have -added--sometimes its death. The "wind" had blown with a vengeance--from -opposite ways. Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon -shivered. Though only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and -joined Ramon in front of the _fonda_, it seemed to both a deathless age. - -After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, -and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the -girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee -stiffened and looked at Gordon. - -"I am glad that we overtook you. Senor Icarza has asked me to marry him. -You shall be first to congratulate us." - -Gordon's glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then--the -tricks fancy plays us! _Fonda_ and ravine faded into a glade in a Java -forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a -golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without -recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice. - -"I wish you all happiness!" - -The crash of Lee's glass as she threw it among the stones brought him -back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the canon. - -Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder. - -Gordon's practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He -spoke very quietly. "We'd better catch her before she breaks her neck." - - - - -XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED - - -Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden -more recklessly. - -Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in -successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast -launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on -full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks -that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed -by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the canon and out upon the -plain. - -Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on -and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught -of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from -her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she -slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon's, -to catch up. - -Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he -had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. "Little -Wicked One!" he called, coming up. "Have a care for my happiness if not -for your neck!" But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly -engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded -from his own. "Why, queridita? What--" - -"I want you to leave me now." She cut him abruptly off. - -His big eyes widened. "After raising me to heaven would you plunge me -in--" - -"Ah no, no!" She impulsively thrust out her hand. "You have earned far -more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But--" - -"Si? But--" - -She gave him a little wan smile. "When you come to understand girls -better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a -thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the -cause." - -"But--" - -"Ramon," she looked at him with sweet severity, "if I had told you on -top of the mountain what I said back there--wouldn't you have been -content?" - -"Assuredly! It was only--" - -"Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now--and stay till I either -send or come. It won't be long--I promise." - -"Bueno," he shrugged. "Though minutes will be ages!" - -Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his -beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off -to the north. - -His departure left her free to review the situation--with little -satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out--in a moment of pique -she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, -she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break -it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that. - -"You flirted with him," she berated herself. "Led him on to an avowal; -accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable -_thing_, and now you'll go through with it." - -It never occurred to her that, being so "mean and despicable" it might -be against Ramon's interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with -her girl's illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of -comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. -She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal--the chief, if -unconscious, cause of it all--was getting along; and though he was too -far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting -dejection. - -As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as--as she could have -wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a -personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests -and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely -places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would -tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden -aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening -to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly -and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her -reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his -rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds. - -"It's a damn shame!" he told himself. "Ramon seems a good sort, but--no -greaser is good enough for her!" While the bright, hard specks floated -up in his eye, he added, "And it isn't going to be." - -For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by -open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a -vagrant inclination--even if the latter were based on a sense of -injury--might not appeal to her woman's logic, he kept his distance. -Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across -which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed -their hopelessness. - -"Poor girl!" he pitied her. - -"He's feeling terribly," she told herself, with mournful satisfaction. - -Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of -Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her -heroic mood. "Our friends"--she nodded toward the distant -buildings--"are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep -it to yourself." - -He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence. - -At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the _patio_ gate, Lee did -cheer up a little--partly because of a natural instinct to hide her -hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always -gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both -the droop of her shoulders and Gordon's air of gloom. - -He was not to be deceived. "Been fighting. Wonder what it's all about." - -He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow's recipe for -"liniment," after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the -stable. It ran: - - "Dear Friend,--Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the - _fonda_ the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. - It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon." In her - ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: "But there - is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep - him away from the _fonda_, I am sure things will turn out all - right." - -Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own -pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was -something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the -signature "Your friend, Mary Mills." Gordon had almost finished caring -for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after -carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, -he fished for further information. - -"Any one else there?" he inquired, nonchalantly. - -"Young Mexican," Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive -curtness. - -"Ramon Icarza, I reckon." Bull went innocently on: "He an' Miss Lee were -almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of -him--" - -"No reason why she shouldn't." - -Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee's horse to hide a -chuckle. "Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary--" he paused, reddening, -for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated -it with lingering delight. "Mary--was right. We've sure stirred 'em up. -On'y we'll have to 'tend to Felicia at once." - -His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia's solution with the -characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper -that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake -and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light. - -"You-all never orter ha' taken him there," he charged Sliver. "Here we -go an' import this young fellow at no end of trouble an' expense, then -you herd him right into the arms of another girl." - -"Aw! she don't count." Sliver excused himself. "She's Mex an' wild -girl." He sagely added: "You see, I was that anxious to make sure he -didn't drink. We kain't have no young soaks 'round Lady-girl." - -His solicitude drew Jake's satirical grin. "You wasn't looking for a -drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an' wild--you damn fool, -don't you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He's -be'n there once an' he'll go again." - -"If he ain't stopped," Bull qualified. - -"If he ain't stopped," Jake nodded. "An' it's up to you to do it." - -"But how?" Sliver's broad, round face struggled like a full moon in -clouds of helplessness. "How in the 'tarnal kin _I_ stop him?" - -"By 'quiring vested rights in the premises," Jake nodded sagely. "If you -marry her he kain't come 'round." - -"_Marry_ her? _Me?_ Marry a _Mex_?" Sliver almost yelled it. - -"That's what." While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf -grin, Jake went on: "Anyhow, what's your idee in shying an' rearing -this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss 'n a colt at flying paper? Why, -other men rush for it like 'twas--" - -"Sticky fly-paper," Sliver ungallantly supplied. "An' once they're -in--_good night_!" - -But Jake ignored the interruption. "You-all orter take shame to -yourself. Marriage is nature's most holy an' necessary ordinance. Don't -all the preachers tell it? An' what would become of the census without -it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an' -thanking your stars that a girl can be found that's damn fool enough to -take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an' howling like a hungry -coyote." - -While Jake thus orated, Sliver's expression of obstinacy was leavened by -fleeting hope. "If you b'lieve all that--what's the matter with you -marrying her yourself?" - -Jake's thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. "I've no calling -for it. You see I'm that soft by nat'er any woman could crush my tender -feelings. But one glance at your brutal count'nance would tell even a -blind man that your wife would be kep' in her place. Besides--was it me -that took Gordon up there?" - -"Quit your fooling," Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of -the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his -cherished plan, he faced Sliver. "Yes or no--will you do it?" - -"No, I'm da--" - -"You won't?" Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl, -knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of -corn fodder on which he was sitting. "You upset the beans we put to -b'ile an' refuse to pick 'em up?" - -Almost as quickly Sliver's knife took the lantern gleam, and as they -circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months -dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against -man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before -they could close, Bull's bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great -hands sent them staggering back. - -"Cut it out! We can't stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee." -Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the -law. "You an' us have ridden an' fit together for many a year. So far -you've never failed us an' I don't believe you will. We brought this -young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an' you've -sp'iled our game by throwing him in Felicia's way. Now it's up to you. -If you make good--we go on. If you don't--there's the trail." - -He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked -only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife, -though, Sliver glared at Jake. - -"I'll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the -range." Addressing Bull, he went on: "Of course if it's to help -Lady-girl, you bet I'll go the limit. But what d'you-all expect? That -I'm a-going to cinch her with a priest an' license?" - -"That'd be more loving-like; she'd appreciate it, too." - -"Shut up, Jake! We don't care so long as you acquire enough title to -shoo Gordon off. Here's fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio 'u'd -sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of -course you'll have to live out there for a whiles--mebbe till this Ramon -business is knocked out of Miss Lee's head." - -"What! An' cut out the range?" Sliver exclaimed in horror. "Me hang -around there a-selling aguardiente to _peones_?" - -"What's left after you get through," Jake began, but was cut off again. - -"No, we can arrange the work so there'll be plenty for you within easy -riding." - -"So's you won't be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn't -stan' for that." - -Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver's answer transcends print. -He wound up with the complaint: "All right, I'll go, but I see my -finish. I'll die on Felicia's grub." - -"Couldn't be any worse than Rosa's," Jake comforted. "You managed to -live on that." - - -With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next -morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his -kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these -preliminaries, Sliver's mien was rather that of chief mourner at a -funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left -him he even advanced a belated plea. - -"Don't you allow we ked get some one else?" - -"With all the men in the country off at the wars?" Bull shook his head. -"Besides, no _peon_ could hold her down. She needs a strong hand." - -"It's either you or Gordon," Jake added. "You'll have to sacrifice." - -Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind -the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee. -"'Tain't going to be so dreadful easy," Bull frowned thoughtfully, "she -being a girl and prejudiced. She'd hardly cotton to sech primitive -nupt'als as Sliver is likely to consummate." - -"I she'd think not!" Jake looked his horror and scorn. "You'll make a -mess of it. Better leave it to me." - -Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on -the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact -at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret -love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won, -ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for -feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved -how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the -former's service. - -"No, Missy, you ain't a-going to lose him," Bull answered, on his part, -Lee's troubled question. "He'll take care of things over that way." - -"Well--" Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, "I hope he'll be--happy." -Then becoming conscious of Gordon's gaze, she dropped her glance to her -plate. But not before he had read its meaning. - -"Why hadn't this happened a week ago!" - - - - -XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE - - -Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on -wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor? - -Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and -misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee's flesh -during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy. - -Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman's life is her feelings, and -if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a -certain mournful satisfaction--akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the -ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent -springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion -and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally -masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon -perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him -in a quiet, sisterly manner. - -A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between -desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of -which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has -to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine -precedent, returning for Lee's sisterly solicitude more than the average -brotherly brusqueness. - -Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings -of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable. -Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with -neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place -her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon. -What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it. - -Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a _mozo_ -rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon. - -Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, "May I -come?" and though she returned a single line, "I'm coming to see Isabel -next week," the flower had done its work. - -The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination -and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her -eyes that, without understanding, Gordon's sulks gave place to pity. -Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a _mozo_ with a note to the -widow. - -Straight to the point the epistle ran: - - Dear Ma'am,--The young man, he's a-moping like a moulting - chicken an' Miss Lee's that peaked and pale and down-hearted - you'd hardly know her. T'other day a _mozo_ brought her some - sort of a package from Ramon, and ever since she's looked - wild-eyed and scared as a canary in fear of a cat. There's - something queer going on. It wouldn't take you more'n a minute - to find it out, and you owe us about a dozen visits, anyway. - Couldn't you take a day off and come? - -She came, of course, the good, kind soul, with Betty, under guard of -Terrubio and the bandit reputation which gained so much from his weird -eyes. The gods and goddesses willed it that they fell in with Gordon -returning to the _hacienda_ at the close of his day's work, and the -widow seized the opportunity like a skilful general. After permitting -Betty and Terrubio to ride on beyond earshot over the slopes that were -dyed a glowing apricot by the low sun, she opened on Gordon. - -"Now tell me all about it, young man." - -He looked at her, surprised, then laughed. "You mean all that I would -have said if I hadn't been ordered home that morning? All right. Of -course I don't have to tell you that I love you madly, and if it wasn't -for the fact that Bull would wring my neck, I should propose at once. -Really--" - -"Nice boy!" She laughed merrily. "To comfort your poor mother. It was -simply disgraceful the way you flirted with me, almost compromised me -with my own offspring. 'I was just ashamed of your dreadful behavior, -mama,' Betty told me, afterward, 'trying to take poor Lee's beau from -her.' Nevertheless, I found it very encouraging." - -"My mother?" He achieved an excellent example of that species of -cachinnation known as the "horse laugh." Then, with sincerity of accent -and feeling that caused her a little blush, he ran on: "My mother, -madam, is more than twenty-eight. Yes, I said twenty-eight. Add to that -eyes as clear and young as--" - -"Make it Lee's." - -"As Betty's. A fine, soft skin, pretty nose, figure--um! just right. -Why--" - -"Yes! yes!" She held up her hand, laughing. "But we mustn't waste time. -You know I'm on your side. Tell me--what happened?" - -"That's easy--she's engaged herself to Ramon." - -"What?" Her shriek of horror and surprise caused Betty and Terrubio to -look back. Her next question showed the keenness of her intuition. "Why, -whatever did _you_ do to her?" - -He told--of his anger, jealousy, pique, attempt to soothe his ruffled -vanity by flirting with Felicia. He told all with candor and humorous -insight into his own feelings that robbed the narrative of conceit. He -told even of the kiss and that Lee had seen it. "Though I don't see how -that could have anything to do with her engagement, for she announced it -the next second." - -"She sent him off within the next hour--with only a kiss of her -hand--hasn't seen him since--nor communicated with him till the other -day--has looked like a frightened bird ever since." She told off the -items with amused contempt. "How stupid men are! Why, it is plain as -day. He asked her to marry him, yes, on the way. How could she escape -after the way she had flirted? But she had either refused or held him -off. But when she saw you kiss--" - -"My God!" It burst on him. "What a fool I am! Why did I--" - -"Don't blame, yourself. She was more in fault. The question is--not what -is done, but what to do." - -"I had thought, at first, of quitting this to join Valles. It would be -lots of fun and I was so darned mad--" - -"And leave _her_ to _him_?" She looked a little scornful. "Why--" - -But he cut in. "You bet I won't! He'll never marry her--if I have to -carry her off." - -"And I'd help you do it," she warmly declared. "At present Ramon is all -right, and if you could put up, like preserves, so he'd keep, it -wouldn't be so bad. Yes, he's all right--but, so are the young of any -kind, a lamb or kid, little frog, tiny snake, and there's nothing cuter -in the whole world than a baby pig. But after it grows up--good Lord -deliver us! - -"And it's the same with Mexicans. They are the prettiest babies; nice -young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too -handsome to live just now. But after a while he'll grow stout and lazy -from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks -like a scorched hide. Right now he's so romantic he'd twang a guitar all -night under Lee's window. After a while she wouldn't be able to sleep -for his snores. Now he'd fly at her bidding. Later, she'd fly at his. -She would live behind bars while she was young; go without love in her -middle age, be tyrannized and bulldozed all the time." - -"But do you think she would _really_ do it?" - -"Indeed, yes! She's highly idealistic, and was trained by her father in -the old ideas. Now that she has given her word, it will take wild horses -to pull her from it--or wild men." - -After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above -the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: "Now -listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he's sensitive as -a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she's -promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance -so much as strays in any one else's direction, he'll be ready to kill. -It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will -either break the engagement or give her cause. In other words, you must -force him to play your hand." - -She continued, with a little deprecatory laugh: "I know it's a low-down -trick, but it may stave off something worse. Before he would let Lee -marry Ramon, I feel sure Mr. Perrin would kill him." - -A mischievous grin broke up Gordon's grimness. "So we are not altogether -disinterested. We could never stand to see Bull get in bad." - -She laughed softly, happily, looking away, and lapsed into silence which -endured while they rode up and over the last slope that laid the -_hacienda_ at their feet. - -Its walls and courts, _patio_, painted adobes, lay, a small city of gold -magnificently blazoned by the rich red brush of the setting sun. The -glossy crests of the shading cottonwoods flamed a deep apricot under a -sky that spread its glories of saffron, and cinnabar purple, and umber, -down over the horizon. All about them the pastures laid an undulating -carpet, violet in the hollows, crimson on the hills. From the stubby -chimneys soft smoke pennons trailed away till lost in the smoldering -dusk of the east. Up through the clear air came a soft cooing of woman -voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. - -The widow lowered her voice in harmony with the peace of it all. "It is -a great prize." - -He nodded. "It's beautiful, but--I'd love her as much in rags." - -Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from -teasing. "Yet--a week ago you hardly gave her a thought." - -He looked at her in naive wonder. "Isn't it queer--how sudden it gets -you?" - -She nodded. "That's the beauty of it." - - - - -XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED - - -As, in the seclusion of Lee's bedroom that night, she and the widow sat -side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making -their night toilets, a "movie-man" would have given his head to -reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair, -filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these -may be left where they belong--behind the secure guard of Lee's oaken -door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation. - -"So we've engaged ourself, have we?" As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went -straight to the bat. - -"Why--" Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked -her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. "Mary Mills! -_whoever_ told you?" - -"This and these would be enough." The widow touched the girl's pale -cheeks and shadowed eyes. "But I caught your young man, coming in, and -made him confess. So we got mad--because he kissed another girl, and -took it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little -fool!" - -Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the -filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. "If it had been Phyllis -or Phoebe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn't have cared. But--a -peona." - -"Well, what of it?" Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the -widow went confidently forward. "She's mighty pretty." - -"But a _peona_! And you know _her_." - -"Yes, and I know _him_--better than you do. Now look here, my dear--" -Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had -profited by her married experience. "A man is a _man_ and there's no -sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she -excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a -man--while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see -beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to -stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I'd have allowed -you real reason. After thirty a man's kisses mean something. But at -Gordon's age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity -rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty -girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his -self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are -mostly to blame. Why--" - -Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal -applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. "_You_ -didn't flirt with _him_, of course." - -"Goodness, child! don't bite me! I couldn't see the poor boy crushed -into the face of the earth. Now listen." After detailing Gordon's -confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to -solace in Felicia's smiles, she concluded, "But you--after driving him -to desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life." - -"And you think that was the way of it? That he didn't really _mean_ -anything?" - -"Didn't he tell me so himself?" - -"Well--" she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly -collapsed on the other's warm shoulder. "Oh, I'm so glad! I--I _hate_ -him!" - -The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. "Of -course you do." She gently fondled the fair head. "How much?" - -The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. "I hate him so much -I--I could just _kill_ any other girl that tried to take him!" With a -wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder. - -"Well, they'll try, all right." - -The head rose again, startled eyes, big and brown, staring from the -glass. "Do you--really think so?" - -"What do you expect--a nice boy like that to mope and pine for the rest -of his life with ten million girls of marriageable age running loose in -the United States? What brought him here, anyway--bolting to escape one -girl's noose. Take my advice and rope him quick." - -"But I'm promised, now, to Ramon." - -"Call it off." - -"Oh no." Sitting up straight, she shook her head. "I cannot ruin his -life." - -"Hum!" The widow coughed. "You cannot ruin his life? So you intend to -bless it by devoting to his service affections that belong to another? -Also to cut him off from the greatest thing in the world--the real love -of some other woman? Ruin his life, indeed? Lee, I always credited you -with a little sense." - -"There is something in that." She snatched at the hope. "The best thing -is to tell him I don't love him and leave it to him to decide." - -"And he'll do it, have no fear!" The widow tossed her head. "Ramon's -nice, but he cannot rise above his race, and you know very well there's -neither reason nor justice nor the instinct of fairness in it. Fancy a -Mexican giving up a girl because she loves another! He'd resent even the -suggestion, take his revenge after marriage." - -The gleam of hope had died. She sighed. "I can try." - -"Oh, you little fool!" In her irritation the widow bestowed a smart slap -on the girl's shoulder. But she spoiled the moral effect the next second -by gathering her in her arms. "Don't you know that up in the States -girls take on a new beau every Saturday night and break the engagement -the following Sunday?" - -But the precedent produced only a second envious sigh. "I wish _I_ could -do it. I guess I wasn't brought up right." - -"'Tisn't training; it's heredity. You're your father over again; will go -your own way. I wash my hands of you." - - -That charitable process known as "washing one's hands of anybody" was, -however, the last thing Mrs. Mills was capable of. The assertion simply -marked a change of plan which, rising early next morning, she -inaugurated when she caught Bull on his way to the stables. - -Though he had sat next to her during the long pleasant evening that -followed supper last night, the others' presence had debarred private -communications. Content to hear her voice running with Lee's in happy -chatter--so content, indeed, that he forgot for the time being the -impending trouble--Bull had smoked furiously in the dusk till they -retired to bed. - -He listened, now, in silence while the widow told of Lee's engagement. -But the sudden lowering of his black brows was far more dangerous than -any threat. She laid her hand on his arm in sudden alarm. - -"Easy, my friend. Don't be too quick. She isn't married yet, and won't -be--if you leave it to me." - -More powerful than the plea was her gentle pressure. Apart from certain -accidental contacts, before mentioned, which had caused him such -pleasurable embarrassment, it was the first time she had actually -touched him. Big, burly, black giant that he was, he still trembled like -a school-girl; trembled so violently that she felt it and dropped both -her hand and her eyes. Transferring the embarrassment to herself, that -helped him mightily. He was the first to break a confused but happy -silence. - -"What do you want me to do?" - -"Nothing, just now, except to let Gordon ride with me a piece of the way -home." - -It was impossible to overlook his sudden disappointment. With -characteristic frankness she did not wait for him to tell it. "I'd -rather have you; there are so many things I want to consult you about. -Dear me!" Her little vexed face was very comforting; it expressed such -sincere feeling. "These young folks certainly do make one a lot of -trouble. Betty wanted you _so_ badly at my party--and so did I; but we -just had to ask Gordon to help Lee out. But I'm going to settle this -business right quick. And when it is all over--you will come and make us -a real visit, won't you?" - -Wouldn't he? His nod and effulgent grin expressed happiness in the -prospect beyond the powers of his slow tongue. Satisfied, she proceeded. - -"So let me have him this once. Lee is going to ride a few miles with us, -and before she comes back--" - -But the matter of her communication is covered by her talk with Gordon, -whom she caught coming out of the bunk-house five minutes later. - -"I argued with her half the night," she told him, walking along at his -side. "Goodness me, young man, you don't know what you are up against! -Such obstinacy! Lucky for you that it is balanced by a sweet temper and -strong sense of justice. All I gained was her promise to beg off from -Ramon. She plans to go over and see him some time this week, and if she -does--well, with Isabel loving her to death, the old man tendering sage -advice, and Ramon passionately pleading his cause, they'll have her to -the priest and married before she has time to think. She mustn't go." - -"But if she is so obstinate--" Gordon began. - -"I'll take care of that. I shall call on Ramon on the way home and -explain the true state of his lady's heart. Of course he'll raise Cain -and probably damn me for a black-hearted liar, but I can stand it. The -point is--he will come right over here. In the mean time you must get -busy. A declaration in hand is worth two suspected, and though I've -hinted very strongly that you are not altogether indifferent to her -sweet self, it will make Ramon's task ten times harder if she hears it -from your lips. Now listen!" - -The rest was plot, dark and devious. Lee had promised to ride with her a -few miles on the homeward journey, and Bull would detail him, Gordon, -for her escort. Coming back, he would have all the time in the world. - - - - -XXIII: IN WHICH THE WIDOW GOES AND SLIVER COMES - - -As thus arranged, the program was carried out after breakfast. Very -artfully Bull waited till the party was almost out of sight before he -sent Gordon galloping after. Even then the plot was endangered when, -turning at the sound of hoof-beats, Lee saw him coming. Her face clearly -expressed her determination to send him back, but in the nick of time -the widow spoke. - -"Oh, let him come! The poor fellow is suffering enough." - -Lee's nod and faint smile, riding on, revealed a queer mixture of -happiness and apprehension, which was wiped out by amused astonishment -when, just as Gordon came up, a lone figure hove in sight, coming from -the opposite direction. - -"Why--it's Sliver!" - -And Sliver it was--though difficult to recognize by reason of a complex -embroidery of scratches, bumps, and bruises. His own broad grin broke -through, however, when Lee inquired after his wife. - -"She was fine an' dandy when I seen her last, which, was in the shank of -the evening two nights ago." Lovingly fingering a huge bump that -occupied a central position in his altered scenery, he went into the -intimate details of his matrimonial venture. "Till then it had all been -lovely. She'd sorter cut up a bit, at first, me an her padre having -fixed up the match without any of her 'sistance. But after I'd given her -a fair larruping with a saddle strap, jest to show who wore the pants, -as the saying goes, she come right into camp; snuggled in like a kitten. -Sure, she behaved real domestic till Fernando, that hawk-nosed arriero -from San Ramon, blew in with his mules two nights gone. I orter 'a' -suspicioned him, he was that free in handing out drinks. But I -didn't--leastways not till Felicia laid me out with one whack of a -cordwood stick from behind. The rest I got from the mirror an' the padre -when I woke next morning and found him doctoring my map. She an' -Fernando had gone off together." - -"She's gone!" Lee gave a little hysterical laugh. "For good?" - -"An' then some--they're off to the wars." Gently massaging the bump, -Sliver added: "She'll stay there if she's wise. It'll be a 'tarnation -sight less risky than coming back. She was for cutting my throat, but -neither the padre nor Fernando would stan' for that, they being afraid -of 'The Black Devil' an' 'The Python,' which they call Bull an' Jake. -'For I knew, senor, that they would follow us to the ends of the earth -if any harm came to thee,' the old fellow tol'. But they made her free -of my map, an', as you see, she done a good job." - -"Oh, I'm so sorry! I must go back and care for your face." - -With Lee's exclamation the props trembled beneath the widow's plot, but -Sliver restored their stability. "It's cheap at the price. Many's the -man up home that gets as bad or worse an' is stuck, to boot, for -lawyer's fees an' al'mony. Don't you bother 'bout me, Lady-girl. All I -need is a bit of salve, an' Maria kin get me that." - -As Sliver rode on, the widow looked at Lee, who returned her meaning -glance. Neither looked at Gordon, who discreetly watched Betty. But the -thought was the same in the minds of all three. "Thank goodness, she's -gone." - -For a while Lee hesitated and debated whether, after all, she ought not -to go back, and she reined in, startled, when a long howl presently -drifted over the rise behind which Sliver had disappeared. A coyote, in -its death agony, might have equaled the sound. But as, presently, the -tortured notes resolved into the opening bars of "The Cowboy's Lament," -she giggled and rode on for another five miles. Sliver was happy! - -While Lee was kissing Betty good-by the widow managed to pass a whisper -to Gordon. "Now don't let her escape! And remember--look out for Ramon -to-morrow." - -He nodded and, looking back from behind the crest of the next rise, she -saw for herself how well he obeyed. Lee had made to get off at a gallop, -but had reined in when he spoke, and now they were riding side by side, -deep in earnest conversation. - -Nodding, the widow rode on, but stopped again for a last look while she -could still see over the rise. She was practically invisible when Lee -looked back, protesting, as Gordon grabbed her bridle and pulled her -beast alongside. Her pointing finger said, quite plainly: - -"They will see!" - -The widow gasped, for with one swift reach he snatched Lee out of the -saddle and set her before him. - - - - -XXIV: UNDERSTANDING - - -Had she heard the conversation which preceded that bold action, Mrs. -Mills would have been still more impressed. Determination is the natural -foe of diplomacy. Warned by one single, furtive glance that Lee intended -to make off, Gordon plunged at one smash through her fence of reserve. - -"Do you intend to keep that engagement?" - -Coming from a young man whom one hated so vindictively that one could -"just kill any other girl that tried to take him," the question was well -calculated to arrest attention. Neither was its force lessened by the -fact that it was _his_, not _hers_--perish the thought!--outrageous -conduct which had caused said engagement! - -The audacity of it caused her first to gasp, then draw rein and stare at -him in utter surprise; finally to ride slowly on while preparing an -answer that should not only wither him, there, in the saddle, but also -hide the tumult of fright and pleasure in her own breast. - -Her glance said, "You certainly have got your gall with you!" But her -answer was much more dignified, "By what right do you ask?" - -"The right of a man who loves you." - -It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her -affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient -court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so -conceded by one girl's fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had -been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural -cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and -men, she proceeded to deny it. - -"Yes?" she raised cool brows. "Judging by what I saw in the canon--it -must be recent." - -She looked for him to wither, but--the fellow refused! He did not even -flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness; -sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn't -help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light -subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness. - -"I thought so myself--but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful, -picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you, -but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn't till you shot -that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke--awoke to the fact that -all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life -and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear." - -This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he -built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played -with the coils of her _riata_. As an oratorical effort, it could not -compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon's rhythmical -Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant -feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any -honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by -its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he -finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel. - -"When--when did you find this out?" - -She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little -hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her -hunger for more. - -Be certain she got it--in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of -poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had -ridden over to the widow's together that the sunlight proceeded from her -hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of -the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation. - -There was also some mention of the hair in connection with a certain -Java forest, with passing reference to the Chinese Wall and a voyage he -had intended to make up the great Asian rivers. Not having personal -experience in their navigation, said references were rather vague, but -her imagination abundantly supplied the requisite flora and fauna from -magazine articles and pictures. Porcelain towers, orchids, giant palms; -deep jungle temples; the crowded boat life of the Yangtse-Kiang, junks -and sampans with their cargoes of saffron-faced, slant-eyed Celestials, -men, women, and children--especially children--her imagination improved -on the lovely dreams she had so cruelly disrupted. He concluded with -that: - -"And you smashed it--all to smithereens." - -For a while she rode in silence. Apprehension and fright had given place -to sorrow that contended tumultuously with delight for possession of her -soul. "I'm sorry," she spoke at last. "_So_ sorry, but--you provoked -it." - -"Why! How?" - -He was reminded, of course, that he "lost interest in girls after they -grew up." She added, a little vindictively, "And _you_ didn't flirt with -Mrs. Mills?" - -"Only in self-defense. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, -isn't it?" - -But she denied this bit of ancient wisdom. "No, it isn't! And--and you -_kissed_ that dreadful girl! I--oh, I could have _killed_ you!" - -"Why?" - -She was looking at him now, and the compound of bright anger, pleading -and defiance, regret, love, hope, and despair that alternately flashed -and swam in the wet eyes gave sufficient answer. It was then he plucked -her from the saddle; crushed her to him with force that squeezed out, -for the moment, the anger, regret, despair, left only love and hope. - -Ensued the usual delirious moment when poor mortals conquer time and -eternity, set at naught the black riddle of existence. Her face buried -in his shoulder, his in her hair, they clung to each other while his -horse moved slowly forward and hers went careering on over the next -earth roll. - -Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were -coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; -feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of -them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue -loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one -another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that "cause"; -committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither -and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment -over these sunlit plains. - -Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only -of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to -themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in -an illumined dream. - -It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face, -he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly -recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand -over his mouth. - -"You mustn't." - -"Why?" - -"You forget--I am still engaged." - -"Why--so you are!" Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted -when he saw she was in earnest. "You surely don't intend--" - -"No, indeed!" She read his thought. "I had believed, at first, that I -ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon -while--" - -"Say it." - -"While I loved _you_." - -For a girl who had just restated her engagement to another man, she -behaved most disgracefully during a long silence that was broken only by -the measured tread of the horse. Snuggling in closer, she re-entered -that illumined dream, and made no attempt to check the kisses he -showered on the soft palm of the restraining hand. It was, no doubt, -some realization of her misbehavior that caused her to sit up, -presently, and pull it away. - -"This won't do. For the present we'll have to behave like ordinary -persons." - -"But your horse is gone," he protested when she gently put away his arm. -"You can't walk." - -"No, but I can ride behind you in the Mexican fashion. Stop, while I -change." - -He would have preferred it as it was, but when, after mounting behind -him, she slid her arm about his waist, he had to concede the Mexican -habit its own delights. It was surely nice of her to allow him to cover -her hand. - -"The young people," she explained, "are not allowed to do this--only -husbands and wives." - -"Poor young people!" he pitied. "But, on the whole, quite right. It -would never do to have them cavorting over the country like this; too -much of a strain on the conventions. Indeed, I think we ought to conform -ourselves at once." - -"How?" Just as if she hadn't known what he meant. - -"Let's ride into San Carlos, get a license from the jefe and be married -at once?" - -The bold proposal drew only a soft laugh. "To think that, up to a week -ago, he didn't even see me--except as part of the scenery. No, amigo, -till to-morrow we are to be ordinary persons. Then I shall go and tell -Ramon." - -"And if he refuses?" - -"I shall break it myself." - -It was in his mind to say that she could not go alone. But he remembered -that Ramon would probably arrive at Los Arboles before she started. He -turned again to the delightful present. - -"And after that?" - -A little pressure at his waist made answer. - -Reaching behind, he drew her other arm forward till her hands clasped in -front, then squeezed his own elbows down tight over hers. Thus, -oblivious once more of the toiling billions, revolutionists beyond the -mountain's loom, they rode forward again in that illumined dream, two -foolish, happy souls at loose in the spheres. - - - - -XXV: LOVE AND BUSINESS - - -In those days of raids and "requisitions," the customary oversight of -the herds on the Chihuahua _haciendas_ had grown of necessity into a -system of patrols. At Los Arboles not a day passed without Gordon and -the Three describing a circle around the _hacienda_. - -Riding south after the others left, Bull had covered only a few miles -before he spied a lone horseman topping a distant ridge. As the rider -drew near the first indefinite outlines resolved into the square, hard -figure of William Benson. Scarcely a week had passed without a visit -from the Englishman. From the first he had accorded Bull the respect due -to his quiet strength. Later, this had developed into a real liking -which showed in the smile that wiped out, for the moment, his native -harshness. - -"Heard the news? The Carranzistas have given Valles a lovely trimming. -He didn't stop running till he reached El Oro." - -Bull's black brows rose. "We'd allus allowed Valles could whip twice his -weight in Carranzistas. So long as they keep on killing one another off, -we sh'd worry." - -Nodding, Benson went on. "Valles lost heavily in horses, and is looking -for fresh mounts. One of his colonels came to my place yesterday and -offered me a thousand pesos apiece for all I have." - -"_Gold?_" - -Benson's big mouth split in a sardonic grin. "Valles money, amigo, -beautifully printed on butcher paper. He must have used up all the -newspaper stocks in northern Mexico." - -"And you sold?" - -"I'd cut their throats first. It may come to that, but just now I see a -way--if not to pull even, at least to avoid complete loss. Between us we -can pretty nearly equip Valles with fresh mounts. The beggar has -gold--hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in the El Paso banks, and -my idea is for us, you representing Lee, to go down to El Oro and offer -him all that we have for a low price in gold on condition that he permit -us to drive our other stock across the line. If he accepts, we then go -out of business till order is restored." - -"Fine idea!" Bull added. "Could you let Mrs. Mills in on it? She was -telling last night she didn't know where to turn for living expenses." - -Benson heartily agreed. "Only too glad!" - -"And when do you start?" - -"To-morrow night. There's a freight going down." - -"All right. Pity you hadn't come earlier. Mrs. Mills left only a couple -of hours ago. But I'll ride over this afternoon, get her written -authority, then meet you at the railroad." - -Riding back to Los Arboles, they perfected their plans. They were, -indeed, in sight of the buildings before Benson switched the -conversation to Lee. Her oldest and stanchest friend, it was his right -to know, and Bull told all, from his plotting with the widow down to the -disastrous ending in the sudden engagement. - -"The little spitfire!" Benson grinned. "Hello! What's that?" - -It was Lee's horse galloping down a distant slope toward the _hacienda_. -In that wild country a riderless beast generally bespoke tragedy. -Without a word they galloped off in the direction from which the beast -had come; rode at top speed until Benson, who had gained a lead, -suddenly reined in. - -A bunch of chaparral intervened, at first, between Bull and the object -at which the other was pointing. Then, rising in his stirrups, he saw -Lee and Gordon on the one horse; at least in Bull's sight it was a -horse. In that of the lovers, horses, plains, _haciendas_, and other -commonplaces of ordinary existence had vanished, leaving them -unconscious of time and space, proceeding magically through the -aforesaid illumined dream. - -Perhaps some touch of their feeling wirelessed across the intervening -space, for Benson's harshness melted, delight burst like sunlight -through Bull's truculence. - -"That's too good to spoil," Benson whispered. "Let them go by." - -They had passed over the next ridge before Bull spoke. "I tol' you Mrs. -Mills could do it. She's a right smart woman." - -"A fine woman!" Benson echoed. "I don't know what you are thinking -about. Now if I were single----" He burst out laughing at Bull's blush. -Instantly it was drowned in brighter scarlet. But this faded as Bull -noted the kindly twinkle in the other's eye. He shook his head in -deprecation. - -"What c'd a nice woman do with a bear like me?" - -"That's her business. I'm not denying that it would some job." Benson -critically surveyed Bull's great bulk. "But if there's anything in the -world a woman loves it is making a man over, like an old dress. After -she finishes, she generally realizes that she's spoiled the material and -wishes him back as he was. But in the mean time she has had her fun. -I'll bet Mary Mills is just itching to try her hand on you." - -"Do you really mean that?" Bull looked up with sudden hope--that quickly -died. He shook his big head. "She deserves something better. I'd only -spoil her life." - -Nevertheless, he relapsed into deep thought, returning only -monosyllables to Benson's talk. The little seed thus planted rooted deep -in his silence. - - -Strange is first love with its intense desire for purity! Cleanliness is -next to Godliness, and Godliness is Love. Thus Cleanliness must be next -of kin to Love. - -If this be doubted, observe a ten-year-old boy, self-convicted of -water-marks on his neck and soil in his ears enough to grow potatoes. -See him scrub himself with profuse use of soap till his countenance -shines so that it might serve as a mirror for the small charmer who has -ensnared his budding affections with her bright curls. Watch him, later, -a man grown, solicitous about his daily tub, careful of his raiment, -choice in cravats! Later his wife shall drive him with revilings to his -bath! Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling -shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt. - -Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering -in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them -earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is -when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. So Lee, who was perhaps even -a bit more boyish than the average, came to lunch in a soft white dress -with a flower at her throat, powdered and delicately perfumed, bright -hair framing happy eyes, every soft line and fold proclaiming her -womanhood. Like an emanation, soft and effulgent as moonlit mist, the -fullness of her content proceeded from her, wrapped her in a bright -atmosphere in the midst of which she softly brooded. Not that she was -silent. She laughed and talked; seriously discussed Benson's schemes. -But that was all of the surface. Behind the chatter she lived in the -enchantment of her dream. - -It was too marked to pass unnoticed. But if Bull and Benson saw the -clinging of glances, sensed the pulsing feeling, they observed with the -friendly indulgence of experience the young man's honest devotion, the -girl's shy happiness. During the long hour they sat talking after lunch, -no silly jest marred its beauty. Except for a greater kindliness of -manner, with delicacy quite foreign to his harsh exterior, Benson gave -no hint of his understanding up to the moment he rode away. - -Then for a brief moment Bull was taken into the dream. While Gordon went -for his horse, Lee packed his saddlebags with clean things for the -journey, and was giving him the usual last critical inspection. As he -stood smiling down on her, hugely pleased, her eyes rose from the tie -she was arranging to his; and as she read their sympathy and -intelligence, she clasped his neck and hid her face against his broad -breast. - -Until the beat of hoofs at the _patio_ gate announced Gordon's return, -he held her to him with one arm while the other hand gently patted her -shoulder. Neither spoke. Words would have told less. When she withdrew -and walked with him to the gate, she was soothed and comforted as any -girl that ever made a confidante of her mother. - -When she ran back after the quirt he had purposely left on the table, he -had time to pass a word to Gordon. "Remember, she don't leave this house -to go _anywhere_ alone!" - -Gordon nodded, and, satisfied, he rode away with Lee's last charge -floating after him, "Come home soon!" - -The words were still ringing in his ears, he still felt the firm, cool -clasp on his neck, when he drew rein at the first rise and looked back -at the _hacienda_. From one corner, where an _anciano_ had burned some -rubbish, rose a lazy pennon of smoke, but the brown girls, women, and -children who usually filled the compound with restless life were in full -enjoyment of the noon _siesta_. Within its bright walls, the place dozed -in the pleasant shade of its towering cottonwoods. - -Somehow the stillness recalled to Bull's mind the Spaniard's house he -had shown Gordon from the railroad--sacked, burned, its vacant windows -staring like empty eyes over the desert. His face clouded. He moved -uneasily in his saddle, but presently the golden peace that incited the -memory worked its own remedy. Jake and Sliver and Gordon were there, and -the place was still far beyond the surge and swirl of the revolution. - -"And I'll be home again in less than a week," he encouraged himself. - -Home! It recalled again Lee's words. He felt her clasp, thrilled at the -memory. He, "Bull" Perrin, the rustler! Around his neck that had been in -constant hazard of the halter for a dozen years, this fine, clean girl -had thrown her arms. His tender musing over the wonder would have -excited the scorn of a city man, _blase_ and stale from the constant -presence and attentions of pretty women. But it was sincere. While he -rode on over the hills and plains, the thought warmed his heart, -quickened the seed planted therein by Benson, freed his soul from the -bonds of his great humility. - -"Of course it's damn foolish for you even to think of it," he chid -himself. Nevertheless, he did, slowly, heavily, taking stock with minute -exactness of his own demerits. How great they were none knew better. The -rustling, of course, he had abandoned along with certain gross habits of -life. But the liquor? These periodical debauches? Was he strong enough -to conquer them? - -"If I c'd only ride into a town an' either leave it alone or take a -man's fair allowance," he mused. "But kin I? Mebbe with a fine little -woman like that to help me." But the next instant he shook his head. -"An' have her take the chance? No, no, hombre, you're crazy. You put all -that behind you by your own act years ago." - -Yet this conclusion did not end the argument. When, at sundown, he drew -rein at the accustomed spot and looked down on the _rancho_ buildings -now dyed a flaming apricot he took his breath deeply. With its -bougainvillea draping walls and porches in rich purple clusters, its -pretty _patio_ and outside kitchen garden, it was just such a home as -would fit the dreams of a common man. Instantly his mind filled in the -picture, the man and woman sitting after supper on the veranda, he with -his pipe and paper, a child on his knee, she with her sewing. A thousand -intimacies were supplied by his lonely, hungry soul, and when the -picture stood complete he burst out with a great resolve. - -"By God, I'll do it! You're a-going to walk like a man into town an' -come out without teching a drop!" - -From where he was sitting he usually could see--either Betty at play on -the veranda, her mother moving in and out, or Terrubio moving around the -stables. To-night silence wrapped the place. From the west, as on the -south where he sat, the land fell rapidly toward the _rancho_, and as he -rode forward, puzzled, the silence was explained. Over the western ridge -the widow, Terrubio, and Betty came riding, and reached the house just -as he rode up. - -"Though we brought bad news to his son," she explained the delay, "the -old Icarza would not permit us to leave till we had broken his bread. -How did Ramon take it? Just as I said he would--out came the Mex in in -all of its nasty selfishness, blind conceit. She was promised to him and -he would hold her to it! He'd kill any one who interfered. Goodness! you -never _saw_ such fireworks! He showed no trace of the real pride that -would have kept one of our boys from showing his hurt; and still less -consideration for Lee. It was"--she gave a little sniff of -disgust--"just sickening. I was almost sorry she couldn't have been -there, for it would have effectually cured her remorse. But she'll get -it to-morrow, for he's going over to plead his own cause." - -Unease swept Bull's dark visage. After a brief statement of his mission -he voiced his apprehension. "But if he's coming to-morrow, I don't know -but I orter go back." - -"Nonsense!" Mrs. Mills pooh-poohed the idea. "It's all fireworks--and -there's Sliver and Gordon and Jake." - -To which Betty added a direct command. "You are just going to stay here. -We haven't seen you for ever so long, and mama is just dying to tell you -her troubles." - -"Tea and trouble," the widow laughed. "A genuine woman's party." - -When he lifted and placed her with one swing on the veranda she allowed -one hand to remain on his shoulder, and he was not so ignorant of woman -nature as not to recognize the liking behind the action. While she -bustled around, adding dainties to the meal Terrubio's woman had ready, -he watched her with an expression that she, on her part, could not fail -to interpret. And whereas, on previous visits, she had managed all kinds -of accidental contacts, watched with mischievous delight for the effect, -she was now filled with pleasurable confusion that manifested itself in -an almost girlish shyness. - -When, afterward, they moved out upon the veranda, Bull's dream of an -hour ago was almost fulfilled. For Betty snuggled as usual in his arms, -while the widow busied herself with a bit of sewing--a fine excuse that -lent itself to the lowering of eyes, permitted stealthy glances. - -While they were at supper, the sun had slid down to the western horizon. -Pools of deep indigo now filled the hollows. Above them the plains ran, -a deep violet sea broken with apricot foam where the crests of the great -earth waves rolled high, ran off and away around the bases of gold and -crimson mountains. - -It was unearthly in its beauty, and while they could not have put their -feeling in words, it filled both with that sense of vastness before -which man in his littleness quails. Often the widow paused in her -sewing, and as Bull saw that infinite loneliness reflected in her face, -the big, simple soul of him melted with love and pity. Till the lights -faded and she no longer needed its excuse, she alternately sewed and -gazed; then when warm gloaming settled over all, wiped out the -loneliness with its friendly gloom, she recovered her voice. - -"Oh, I had almost forgotten." - -It was that which she had seen in the morning--to wit, Gordon snatching -Lee out of her saddle. - -"And oh, isn't it nice to think that she'll be settled, at last, with -that fine boy!" - -Happy in the conclusion, she began to sketch a picture of them settled -happily at Los Arboles. Her voice, as she ran on, took a little quiver -that powerfully expressed her own loneliness, inspired in Bull an -intense desire to seize and squeeze it out. Instead his arms tightened -around the child. - -"Not one marriage in a hundred turns out what it might be. But with the -exception, when respect, friendliness, affection, and a sense of duty -are reinforced by love--well, it's the nearest to heaven that poor -humans ever gain." She added, with a sigh: "Excepting that it gave me -this child, my own wasn't all that it might have been. She's been a joy -and comfort, but--in a few years more she'll be marrying, herself. Then -I'll be again alone." - -"Why did _you_ never marry?" Betty's small, soft voice stole out on the -darkness from the depths of Bull's embrace. - -The stock excuses rose to his lips--but did not pass, for through the -friendly gloaming he was aware of a rustle. His face turned toward it. - -"I never felt myself fit." - -"Why, that's just nonsense!" Betty indignantly declared. "Any woman that -wasn't a downright fool would be glad to have you. I know one that would -give her best shoes--" - -"Betty!" - -But the small rebel ran on, "Well, she would--even if I can't tell you -her name." - -Once more Bull faced a stir in the darkness. "I've led a hard, rough, -bad life. No decent woman would ever want me." - -Now he saw the dim whiteness of her face turning to him. Her quiet voice -took up the argument. "It's a thin, pinched nature that's always good. A -big, strong one is liable to be led astray by its own force before -wisdom comes to teach and chasten. In the long run I don't know but that -it gains by it in charity and loving-kindness. Wickedness of the flesh -doesn't count so much as wickedness of the heart; the inward vileness -that rots and corrupts; and I've seen as much of that in the churches as -among downright sinners." She concluded with the very words that Gordon -had used with Lee. "It isn't what you _were_, but what you _are_ that -counts." - -From a second warm silence issued Bull's vibrant rumble. "You think a -man that has lived hard has a right to speak, to a good woman--providing -he's put it all behind him?" - -Low, but confident and firm, her answer thrilled through the gloaming. -"I do, and--she'd _love_ to help him." - -Almost without his volition, Bull's huge paw stole out. He half hoped -she wouldn't see it. He had begun to withdraw it when, like a dim white -dove, her hand came fluttering and nested in his. - -Every life has its golden hour. That was Bull's, and, like a pearl -shining in the mire, it stood out from the blackness of his past life. -Though neither spoke, the peace and quiet, surety of perfect -understanding, settled upon them. When, presently, Betty resumed her -chatter, they listened or joined in. After she fell asleep they relapsed -again into happy silence; just sat like a shy boy and girl, hand in -hand, till she rose and carried the child off to her bed. - -To meet her, next morning, was to Bull something of an ordeal, but her -quiet smile restored at once the perfect understanding. Her sense of -proprietorship showed in the way she fussed over his coffee and eggs, -berated him for his lack of appetite. Her final inspection before he -left could not have been outdone in severity by Lee herself. But nothing -was said. She knew that he would speak in his own good time. - -Except that her hand clung a little in parting, it differed little from -their usual. "I shall look for you when you return." Her call after him -reiterated ownership. - -His answer confirmed it. "I shall come here, ma'am, straight from the -station." - -Indeed, the real parting came when, reining in at fifty yards, he looked -back over his shoulder. With both hands on Betty's shoulders, slightly -dejected, yet with her honest, level gaze sending out trust and hope, -she stood watching him go, as the race of wives and mothers have stood -throughout the generations. And just as, throughout time, the sight of a -woman's trust and child's faith have urged real men on to big deeds, so -the sight of them set the ex-rustler's heart swelling within him. As, -with a last wave of the hand, he turned again and rode on, the spirit -within him equaled in love and reverence that of an ancient -knight-errant starting out in pursuit of the Holy Grail. - - - - -XXVI: A SETTLEMENT - - -About the time Bull started, Lee and Gordon rose from the -breakfast-table under the Los Arboles _portales_. - -Perhaps with sympathetic intuition, for they exchanged an amiable grin, -Sliver and Jake had already passed out. It is true that Maria and -Teresa, the small brown _criadas_, were peeping from the crypt-like -depths of their kitchen. But even had she been aware of their vast -interest, Lee would not have withdrawn the hand which, as they rose, had -somehow tangled with Gordon's. Reflected and thrown up from the yellow -wall, the strong morning lights bathed the flesh of her arms, face, and -neck with suffused amber, wove a soft glow in the mesh of her hair. So -different from her usual boyish activity, her gentle quiet, combined -with the warm air, suffused lights, to create a dreamy spell. Goodness -knows how long they would have stood if Maria had not come out to clear -the table. - -Then Lee spoke. "Such sloth! This will never do if I am to go to El Sol -and return to-day. While I dress will you please get my horse?" - -When Gordon reached the stable Sliver had already gone, but Jake had -lingered to say a word. It was very much to the point. "Say! Bull tipped -me off as how the young greaser was likely to show up an' raise some -hell to-day. Don't you allow I'd better hang around?" - -He nodded, however, when Gordon explained the situation. "Missy don't -know he's coming, hey?--thinks she's going over there. Then they'll meet -on the way. Mebbe I'd better tag along." - -But to this Gordon's pride would not consent. "Don't you think I can -take care of her?" - -"No one better," Jake hastened to appease. "But, say! If he doesn't show -up, don't you let her go on over there--not if you have to rope an' drag -her home." - -"Like we did before?" He smiled at the memory. "This time I'll not leave -her the saddle machete." - -"Little bit too smart for you that time," Jake grinned in sympathy. -"Take care she don't spring a new one. She ain't so very slow." - -Nevertheless, in the face of his apparent acquiescence, while apparently -heading out on his usual beat, he whirled behind the first ridge and, -proceeding at a fast lope, had covered five miles of the way to El Sol, -the Icarzas' _hacienda_, by the time Lee came out. Slowing down, then, -he rode more leisurely, had covered another mile when, over the crest of -a ridge, he sighted Ramon coming at a gallop down the opposite slope. A -clump of mesquite and _palo verde_ afforded convenient cover. Forcing -his beast in, Jake stooped low and watched Ramon go by, so close that -his stirrup whipped the bushes. - -It had never been Jake's habit to notice Mexicans. But now he noted with -surprise the change in the young man's face. The lines deeply plowed -down the nose under the cheeks, the hardening of the red, womanish lips, -the vindictive black sparkle that had contracted his great dusky eyes -into burning black dots, added ten years to his age. - -"The Mex is souring in him," Jake inwardly commented. "That guinea's -liable to try an' hurt some one. Glad I came." - -Allowing Ramon to pass on, Jake then rode after, and so, progressing -from ridge to ridge, keeping always the height of land between them, was -less than fifty yards behind when, peeping over the crest, he saw Lee -and Gordon coming up the slope. - -Another bunch of chaparral afforded cover, and after tying his horse in -it, Jake crawled up to the ridge and looked over. - - -It was not without argument that Gordon had obtained Lee's consent to -accompany her. When she found him standing with two horses at the gate, -her brows rose in a troubled arch. - -He understood that she hesitated to accuse him of bad taste, and quoted -Bull's last orders to remove the impression. "He said that you were -never to ride alone." - -The responsibility being thus shifted, she felt able to speak. "It is -rather-- Really, I don't see how I can do anything else." - -"Why go at all? Why not write?" - -She shook her head. "I've known him since childhood--and have treated -him badly. I owe him an apology and it will have to come from my own -lips." - -It was reasonable enough from her point of view, but not from his. If -Ramon were an American he would have said, "Go, ahead; take your -medicine!" Being Mexican, discretion bade him remain. - -"At least let me ride with you part of the way. I will turn before you -reach El Sol." - -"Oh, that will be all right," she had conceded at once. - -He had felt certain, of course, that they would meet Ramon. But the -usual witcheries, sweep of the tawny earth-waves under the bright sun, -satisfying thud of hoofs on the trail, creak and smell of hot leather, -had combined to blind him to all but her presence. Now, before he could -turn, Ramon reined in before them. - -Like Jake, they noticed at once the sardonic furrows, set mouth, frown -above the glittering eyes. With his youth had vanished that veneer of -refinement which conceals natural Mexican grossness. Like veins in a -stratum revealed by a landslide, selfishness, conceit, violence, -revenge, lay exposed. With the natural instinct of good breeding, Gordon -had half turned to withdraw. But even if one glance at the passion-torn -face had not checked the impulse, it would have been killed when Lee -backed toward him. Shocked and a little afraid, she gazed at Ramon -before she spoke. - -"Are you ill? You look so--" - -"So it was true, what the senora told me yesterday!" He spoke in low, -strained tones. "It was true, though I did not believe; refused to -believe. But now I see. It is true that you used me as bait for your -fishing." - -"Ramon!" She raised her hand, but he switched suddenly from denunciation -to appeal. - -"No! it is not true! It cannot be! She lied! I will not believe it even -though you tell me yourself!" - -From this he ran on with an appeal, hysterical and disconnected, which -reflected as in a clear glass the nature of his love. In it was no -appreciation of the feminine personality with its delicacies of feeling, -refinements, inconsistencies, helplessness, all the illogicalities that -render it charming, as much or more than its faith and love. In terms of -blind egotism, it expressed only his passion and jealousy, fatuous -conceit. As in a clear glass, under a powerful light, he revealed -himself so that even a woman blinded by love could not have failed to -see. In the middle of it Gordon heard Lee take a long breath, and knew -it for thankfulness. Yet her relief did not kill her poignant regret for -the part she had played. - -She spoke softly, pityingly, when he stopped. "Ramon, I'm sorry. It was -wicked of me to draw you on. But to marry you would be far worse. What -can I do to make up?" - -He told, with anger and offense. She had promised to be his wife! It was -a betrothal! as binding in Mexican eyes as marriage! He had announced it -to his father, mother, sister, friends! His conceit cropped out again as -he pictured himself, jilted, in their eyes. Angered by his own -imaginings, he was growing abusive when she cut him quietly off. - -"I was on my way when we met, to own and ask pardon for my fault. I had -counted on our old friendship and your generosity to make it less -difficult. But I see, now, my error. There is nothing left but to bid -you good-by." - -Now came the ultimate revelation, that passion of furious jealousy which -drives the Mexican _peon_ to cut off the hands, slash the face and -breast, of his love. His eyes narrowed to shifting, insane sparks. Hand -raised, as though to strike, he spurred his beast forward. - -"You--you--" - -He got no further, for one hard dig of the spur shot Gordon's horse in -between. From English to Spanish the argument had run, but from Lee's -answers Gordon had gathered enough. Though slower, his beast was heavier -than Ramon's, and while forcing horse and rider sideways with a steady -pressure he issued his orders: - -"That's about enough for you! Get!" - -Ramon's hand flew to his saddle _machete_, but he did not draw, for -Gordon's had gone to his gun. Leg pressed against leg, they manoeuvered -their plunging beasts; without drawing a weapon fought the old fight of -the brown man and the white; the struggle which began when Cortes -imposed his will on the Aztec emperors; was continued by the Puritan -forefathers against the American Indian; which has been fought to the -same conclusion all over the world. And from the two faces--Gordon's -cold, hard-eyed, Ramon's distorted with black fury--the cause of that -inevitable ending might have been read. - -So close they were Gordon could see the palpitation of light from the -insane waverings of the other's eyeballs steady under a doubt. He felt -rather than saw the Mexican's sudden swift reach for his knife. Even -more swiftly he snatched, and with a sudden wrench of the other's wrist -sent the knife flying and bore him back flat in the saddle. For a moment -he held him, then with a powerful shove his horse sent Ramon's beast -stumbling sideways and broke the grip. Wheeling in a circle, Ramon faced -them again. - -So far Lee had looked on distressed. Now she spurred forward and caught -Gordon's arm. "Let him go!--please!" Her anger gone now, sorrow -quivering in her voice, she added, "You will, won't you, Ramon?" - -His fury, passion, wild jealousy had settled in dark calm. "Yes, I am -going _now_. But the next time--." He wheeled and galloped off. - -Till the tip of his _sombrero_ vanished behind the ridge Lee watched him -go, distress and relief mingling in a wintry smile. - -"Don't give him too much of your pity," Gordon consoled. "One -disappointment doesn't make much of a dent in such egotism as that. -After a while he'll find some pretty senorita to take him at his own -valuation." - -"I hope so." Her smile brightened. "Though I still feel guilty. But if -he hadn't behaved so ridiculously I should feel much worse." - -Gordon nodded toward the ridge. "You heard his threat. Do you suppose -he'll---" - -"Oh no!" Her hair flew in a cloud under her vigorous shake. "After he's -had time to cool off he'll forget and forgive. But just to think"--her -glance displayed an even mixture of mischief and reproach--"just to -think that all this trouble was caused by you kissing that horrid girl!" - -"Why--" he gasped, under the sudden attack. "Well, I'll be-- Say! Who -drove me to it with her disgraceful flirting?" - -"Did it make you feel _awfully_ bad?" - -"Did it?" The thought of his miserable unhappiness was still powerful -enough to cloud his face, and she noted it with a little quiver of -satisfaction. "Let's forget it." Snatching her hand, he worked his horse -in against hers and tried to draw her to him. "There's a momentous -question I wish to consult you about; one you refused to consider -yesterday. Will you--" - -But she pulled away. "Not yet. First there's something I want settled. -Was it really pique that--made you kiss her?" - -He wanted to laugh, but refrained, for under her smile he felt her -earnestness. "Nothing else." - -"You're sure?" - -"Sure!" - -"Cross your heart to die?" - -He performed that solemn and ancient function, and if she still -entertained a doubt she stuffed it away down in consciousness. - -"Very well." With a little sigh of content she let her head fall back on -his shoulder and a whisper escape from her upturned lips, "Now--you -may." - - -From his covert on the ridge Jake had observed the meeting, talk, -struggle, Ramon's retreat, also something which was hidden from the -lovers in the valley below--the fact that, after crossing the ridge, -Ramon had dismounted, pulled his rifle from the saddle slings, and -crawled back on hands and knees to the edge of Jake's covert. By that -time the little tilt concerning Felicia was over, and as Lee's head went -to Gordon's shoulder Ramon raised the rifle. - -A shot at that short distance would have pierced them both, but as -Ramon's eye dropped to the sights a sharp order issued from the covert, -"Throw up your hands! damn quick!" - -A quick, startled glance showed Ramon the lean, grim face through a -break in the chaparral. Not for nothing had the _peones_ named Jake "The -Python." In moments such as this his lean personality, deadly eye, -conveyed that very impression--of a snake coiled to strike. As Ramon's -hands went up, he stepped out and, crouching behind the ridge, took the -other's rifle and drove him downhill to his horse. - -Having extracted the cartridge both from the rifle and from the revolver -in Ramon's holster, he threw the weapon at his feet. "I reckon I orter -plug you, an' I would for two cents. It'd be set down to raiders, which -fixes it very nice. Sure, I reckon I orter do it, but if you've got a -few thinks to the contrary spit 'em out." - -It was no idle threat. The vicious gleam of the cold gray eye told that. -But in place of fear Ramon's face showed almost relief. "Very good, -senor. There is nothing you could do that would suit me better." - -The cold eye flickered. "Hell! you're too anxious. I couldn't make up my -mind to do it that quick--an' there's a few things I wanter find out. -For one, what's your idee in wanting to drill them young folks?" - -Ramon told--this time without the fireworks. - -Jake summed it briefly. "Promised you, then threw you down. That's hard -luck. But there's one thing you Mexes can never get into your hot -heads--the right of our little American queens to change their pretty -minds as often as they damn please without any gent's consent. You was -damn lucky that she ever give you a smile. If I conclude to change my -mind on plugging you, have it writ up large in your family tree that -oncet an American girl let herself be engaged to you for nearly five -minutes. Now supposing I refrain from my desire to make you into a -corpse, d'you reckon you could keep a promise and not make any attempt -on their lives?" - -While he was talking Ramon's face had stiffened in defiance. He shook -his head. But instead of anger, a small gleam of admiration lit Jake's -hard eyes. Raising his gun, he aimed full at the other's breast. - -"You have just two minutes to make up your mind." - -"One minute!" - -For a time it seemed as though he would have to shoot. But just before -the time expired, Ramon spoke. "For myself, I do not care. But I have an -old father and mother, whom my death would surely kill. I promise." - -"All right." Jake dropped the rifle in the hollow of his arm. "I allow -that I'm foolish for trusting a Mex, but the little Missy allus liked -you. On her account we'll take one chance. Here's your cartridge--only -don't load till you're off this range. An' remember"--a cold flash -emphasized the order--"after this our boundary is your dead-line. Cross -it again--you'll be shot like a panther, coyote, or other varmint." - -Returning to his horse, he watched the other mount and ride away. A -glance in the opposite direction showed him Lee and Gordon, going hand -in hand up the opposite slope. Till they had gained across to the next -valley he remained where he was. Then, riding in their rear, with a -sharp eye always behind, keeping the width of a valley between them, he -followed home. - - - - -XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE - - -Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped -and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he -had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the -Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him -across the tracks. - -"There's a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been -streaking through all day carrying Valles's reserves from Chihuahua. Don -Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If -we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along." - -"Half an hour?" Bull snorted. "That means half the night an' then some. -We'll have time for supper an' a sleep." - -But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the -crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the -train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail -of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on -top. - -"Must be yesterday's train a bit overdue," Bull defended his theory, as -the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. "The comandante'll be in the -passenger-coach ahead. We'd better to mosey along an' brace him." - -But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs -dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop. - -"Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it -pan out?" - -It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull's friend and Cupid's aide. As his -car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the -titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest -subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign -in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the -dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their -dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a -composite welcoming grin. - -"Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings." The correspondent breezily -ran off the names. "There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles's chief of -staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government -clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us, -but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room. -Come right up." - -A partition divided the car into kitchen and living-quarters. Bunks rose -in a tier of four at the end of the latter. Four more could be slept on -long lockers at each side of the table which was being set for supper by -the Chinese cook. From the oldest to the youngest, the correspondents -were on edge for the approaching battle. At supper their talk ran on its -possibilities. - -"If Valles is beaten again," Weekes, the gray-haired dean, summed the -conversation, "our government will throw another of its silly flip-flops -and turn him down. And then--" - -"--this corresponding job won't make good insurance." - -"And then--" the dean began again. - -"We'll hit for El Paso before Santos-Coy grabs us again." - -"And then"--the dean triumphed over interruptions--"God pity the poor -gringos in northern Mexico." - -Bull's friend nodded. "Valles's army will scatter into bands that will -rake the country with fine-tooth combs for the least bit of plunder. You -had better get your girl and her fellow, Diogenes, and come out with -us." - -Later, when they had all climbed up on the roof and sat watching the -oil-smoke from the laboring locomotive whirl and twist, then float away -and lay its great sable plumes against the rich reds and golds of the -evening sky, they gave expert opinion on Benson's mission. - -"If Valles wins, so do you," the dean opined. "He needs horses worse -than money, and, as you say, has slathers of it in the El Paso banks. -But if he loses--hit for the border at once. I saw him the other day -after the first defeat, and hell couldn't produce his equal. He was -crazy; a maniac; a tiger gone stark, staring, frothing mad. - -"And lose he will. How do I know?" He answered a challenge. "It's a mere -problem of mathematics, the first equation of which was worked out in -the battle the other day. Given two men of equal military ability, the -one with a trained mind is bound to win. The other fellow, as you know, -is a college man--a college man against a bandit." He turned to Bull and -Benson. "It's a cinch that he'll win. If I were you, gentlemen, I'd wait -the event." - -Benson shook his head. "If we see Valles now and strike a bargain, we -can get our cattle across the border before he's all in." - -"Good enough reasoning," the dean admitted. "But--ever since the first -defeat he's been in one of his towering rages. Even his own generals -hardly dare go near him." - -Benson shrugged; with British obstinacy he clung to his point. "It won't -be the first time I've seen him in his rages. He may be dangerous--to -Americans, but John Bull looks after his people and even Valles is -careful of how he flies in the old fellow's face. I shall go to see him -at once, and if he refuses--well"--his voice grew harsh and -menacing--"he'll hear the truth about himself." - -Not knowing him, the correspondents received it in silence. While they -smoked Benson went on in his hard, rough voice. "I tell you, amigos, -that your people have made a sad mess of this whole Mexican business. -For three years, now, you have been trying to apply the principles of -your Declaration of Independence to a race which won't have evolved to a -point where it has the faintest understanding of them for a thousand -years to come. You stand on your Monroe doctrine, but refuse to take up -its obligations and give alien nationals the protection you will not -allow their own government to extend. While your statesmen prattle about -the sacred right of revolution and Mexico's ability to settle her own -affairs, the country is overrun with bandits and mobs of pelados who are -killing off the decent people and destroying billions in property they -never created. - -"Bah!" he snorted his disgust. "Don't talk to me of republics. Do you -suppose that either England or Germany would have stood for the anarchy -which rules here? For centuries John Bull has been ruling brown peoples -and he knows his job. 'Be good and you'll be happy!' he tells them. If -they're not--they get it, hot and heavy, on the spot where it will do -most good. The brown man is all right in his place--which isn't on top -of the white man--but your government, so far, has failed to perceive -it." - -He went on from a pause: "Republics are incapacitated by nature in any -case for the job. They are too divided in their counsels--swayed to-day -by capital that will accept any dishonor rather than jeopardize its -revenues; to-morrow by sentimentalists who hold up hands of horror at -the very thought of war; governed most of the time by a ridiculous -yellow press. Individually, you Yanks are good people, but taken -collectively, as represented by your government and papers, you are -hypocritical, weak, hysterical, sentimental, without dignity or force. -You are grown fat with wealth, soft with luxury, too lazy and -indifferent to undertake your responsibilities abroad, and if you were -not, you lack the first essentials--centralized federal authority and -military strength to enforce your will. If you do anything here it will -be accidental--such as when the blowing up of the _Maine_ aroused one of -your periodical brainstorms, stung you into action. But in the mean time -the destruction of Mexico will be complete. There will be nothing left -of the civilization built up at such enormous pains by Diaz and which it -was your duty to maintain." - -Silence followed, the uncomfortable silence that attends the digestion -of unpalatable truth. While they talked, the cars had resolved into dim -masses that swayed and swung through hot dusk that was splashed, here -and there, with the red glow of charcoal cooking fires. On those -immediately ahead and behind, dim sombreroed figures still loomed in -half-gloom. The flash of a match occasionally set a dark face out in -startling relief. The tinkle of a guitar accompanying a high, nasal -_peon_ chant, mingled with the roar and rattle of wheels. For some time -its whine rose under the stars before the voice of the dean broke the -silence. - -"What you say is true--most of it. We have been tried in the balance and -found wanting. We've neglected our duty to the Mexicans and our own -people--that's the hell of it! But nations, like individuals, learn -their lessons through painful mistakes. We've had bad leadership and -worse counsels--so much of it that it would almost seem that we were -irrevocably stamped as incapable. But it's only a phase. Under it all -the heart of the people still beats sound and true. Sooner or later its -voice will be heard. And when it is--the bleating of the sentimentalists -will be drowned in the tramp of marching men." - -"You bet you!" It rolled out in chorus. - -"In the mean time," a voice added, "what's the matter with a little -drink?" - -Instantly the recumbent figures rose in a shadowy mass, and as its units -made their way down over the edge of the swaying car, the correspondent -jogged Bull's elbow. "Come along, Diogenes!" - -But though a flame, sudden and fierce, had leaped within him; though he -trembled under the intensity of his desire, he shook his head. "Thanks, -I'm not drinking." - -"Why--Diogenes? Whatever is the matter? If parental responsibilities do -this, damned if I know whether I'll ever dare to hook up--providing my -San Francisco girl ever consents. Is this straight?" - -"Straight." - -Warned, perhaps, by a certain earnestness, the other answered: "All -right, old man--only--if you change your mind, come on down." - -Bull made no answer, could not, for as he lay there, huge bulk stretched -out on the running-board, face turned up to the stars, every ounce of -his energy, even the bit that would have been used up in speech, was -consumed in the fight against the furious desire that brought the sweat -starting on his brow, shook him like a leaf. Out of the rack and bang of -the swinging cars, click and roar of the wheels, his ear presently -picked the clink of glasses. Out through the lamp-lit doorway floated -Benson's rough voice. - -"Well, here's to Uncle Sam! wishing him better counselors and quicker -understanding!" - -Bull heard no more, for he had rolled over, buried his face in his arms -to hide from his snuffing nostrils whiffs of spirits. Once he half rose, -looking toward the ladder. But, strengthening his resolution, there rose -in his mind just then a picture of Betty and her mother as he had seen -them at parting--her hands on the child's shoulders, stooped in slight -dejection, yet radiating faith and trust. - -Lying down again, he lay, hands clasped under his head, gazing up at the -fire of stars, while his mind traveled back to the _rancho_, lived over -and over again the slow, sweet hours of last night. Below, an undertone -to the roar of the speeding train, he now caught the hum of talk. But he -took no heed--even when it ceased. He dreamed on till a hand shook his -foot. - -"Aren't you coming down to bed?" - -"No; I reckon I'll lay out here. It's cooler." He did not acknowledge to -himself his fear of sniffing the spirituous odors. - -"All right, only don't roll off." The correspondent paused on his way -back to the ladder. "Say! did your friend mean what he said? Or was it -just talk?" - -When Bull answered with a sketch of Benson's violent temper, illustrated -by a few instances, the correspondent shook his head. "Well, don't let -him see Valles alone." Going down the ladder, he called back, "If you -should change your mind about the drink, you'll find the jug on the -table." - -Instantly it materialized in Bull's vision, a round stone jug and -glasses, as solid and real as though it stood within the reach of his -hand. Nor could he shut out the vision, as he had the odor, by burying -his face. With the cars swinging and swaying through the night, shut -out, it stood forth clearer than ever. He saw himself snatching out the -cork; felt the burning liquid coursing down his throat. - -"My God! why did I come? I'll never be able to stan' it!" - -The thought of the temptation, ever present, growing more powerful -through the coming days, gaining in strength while he grew weaker, -brought out of him a cry of dismay: "I'll never be able to stan' it!" -Then, very quickly, "I'll have to! If I don't--then I'm no fit man for -her!" - -The thought brought her face again in all its sweet wholesomeness. -Through the warm dusk, as it were beside him, he saw her hand fluttering -like a homing dove into his. He felt it lifting, raising him above his -temptation. The memory of its soft pressures strengthened and comforted. -Presently his fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the -running-board. Exhausted, he fell asleep. - - - - -XXVIII: A "REQUISITION" - - -Slipping in over the patio wall, a golden sunbeam struck behind where -Gordon sat writing and flooded the _portales_ with topaz lights. From -the kitchen came the soft spat, spat of _tortillas_ in the course of -shapement between Teresa's palms, competing splash and flop of Maria's -cloth as she washed off the brown-tiled floor. No other sound disturbed -the morning freshness, for Gordon had risen early to get off a letter -with Lovell, who had dropped in last night on his way to El Paso to -attend Phoebe's wedding. - -So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung -across Lee's bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The -rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of -white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair's bright tousle, -round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily -dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono -and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back. -Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon's first -notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes. - -With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could -feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore -it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom -she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the _ancianos_, he -was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of the -_hacienda_ when she cut him off. - -"Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had -guessed right I might have given you a--" - -He took it--in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. "To my -father and mother," he replied to her question. "I thought it was about -time I dropped them a line--haven't written home since I came down." - -"What?" She uttered a small shocked scream. "You've let them suffer all -this time in suspense and alarm?" - -He looked up in innocent surprise. "Why should _they_ suffer? I didn't." - -_He hadn't?_ Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against -such utter lack of imagination--but dropped again quickly, owing to a -second base treachery on the part of the sleeves. - -"Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. _You_ -didn't suffer? _Oooooh!_" She pulled his ear till he yelled. "If you -ever dare to treat me like that!" - -"That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together." - -After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she -asked: "But why this sudden plunge into correspondence--after such long -abstinence?" - -"To inform them," he replied, with great dignity, "of a certain -momentous change impending in my condition." - -"Oh, you are telling them about--_me_? May I see what you have written?" - -She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that -his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes -passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against -his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it -had evolved into a bear hug. - -"Oh, what a liar they will think you!" - -"To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the -silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing's believing." - -Of course she declared it "wasn't a bit like her" and the rest of it. -Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee, -picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for -the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally -and _in toto_ denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor -panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent. - -"Only you are so blind. They'll hate me when they see it." - -"Trust dad for that!" he laughed. "He still has a soft spot for a pretty -damsel. When he sees this--well, he'll go straight out and buy a fatted -calf." - -"But your mother and sister? They'll never forgive me for taking you -from that other girl." - -"Wrong again! They weren't a bit anxious about it. It was all my -father--with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They'll love you -as much as I--no, that's impossible! But they'll love you, all right." - -A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. "That other girl? You -never told me about her. Did you ever--kiss her?" - -"Lots of times." Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. "At -parties, when I was a kid--and when we played 'post-office' and sich." - -"Never since you grew up?" - -"Never." - -"Oh, well," she sighed, "I suppose I'll have to forgive you since you -were so very small, and it's such a long time ago I'll really have -to--make up." - -Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she -had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. "And now--what -about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they -receive it?" - -Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. "Such -impatience! Aren't you happy?" - -"Happy?" His voice rang with sincerity. "Happier than I ever thought -possible, but--" - -"But--?" - -"I want to be happier still." - -He meant and thought it. But she with her woman's intuition knew this, -their love time, for what it was--the flowerage of their lives. Later -would come the ripe fruit--content mixed with the joys and sorrows that -form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed -forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she -would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was -not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it. - -"After--after Bull comes home." - -In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the -shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped -in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time -before he spoke. - -"If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made -it a double marriage. Why, what's the matter?" - -She had sat up with a little shiver. "Oh no! I could never be happy in -one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!" Coiling up again, she -allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. "I never saw him, he who -was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon -behind a cloud, but he felt--like you. In my visions he always took me -into the wilds--the hills, woods, canons, and it is there we must go. - -"It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and -gone down the length of the Sierra Madres--at first alone, later -traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then -down on the other side through giant canons. We should have seen only -the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that -impossible. But this we can do--go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, -who are both old friends of my father's, to be married, then ride -straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by -ourselves till--till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you -look after the horses, and we can play that we are simple _peones_ and -be--oh, _so_ happy!" - -Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good -as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. "How perfectly lovely! Why -didn't I think of that myself?" - -"You would have, in time. Oh!" She sprang from his knee at a stir and -tinkle of water. "Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress." - -"You'll go out with me to-day?" he called after her. - -"No." She bent down over the rail to answer. "I promised Jake to go with -him to Canon del Norte to look at the colts." - -"Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?" he -protested. "'Tisn't fair." - -But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out -from behind the sheet. - - -From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now -described about the _hacienda_, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise -from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had -become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with -Sliver or Jake--and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests -of great earth waves--then to sit and muse while the declining sun -washed the wide world with its resplendence. - -As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted -adobes, _patio_, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, -the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the -burning hills. But--in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and -wild--there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry. - -"Beast! she is but a child!" - -Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses -standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a -flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the -adobes. - -"Raiders!" he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, -"_Revueltosos!_" - -A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a -fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its -panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear -which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. -Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back -compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway -of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth. - -From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon's sight, -blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the -half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw -a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a _revueltoso_. The elder -sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this -helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing. - -"Senor! Senor! Pity of Mary!" - -At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon's spine. Blind, -breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and -tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man's arms, and threw him -violently against the wall. - -So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the -fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming -imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired, -aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a -finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then, -stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll -over. - -Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely -surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he -stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the -mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them. - -The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a -heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed -to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick, -it withstood a violent hammering. - -The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit -under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse. -But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand, -the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood -very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the -burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning. - -"They say to bring fire and burn down the door." Her quick motion -simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame. -Whispering: "Tira! senor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!" she pointed at the -window. - -It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside, -and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the _revueltosos_ were hugging -the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the -bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at -random, there followed a quick scurry of feet. - -Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in -swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they -could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back -before--zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in -through the window and plump in the back wall. - -Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above -the woman's shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against -him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window, -they waited--in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So -still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman's excited breathing and -an occasional sob under the bed. - -"Tempting me to look out," he read the silence. - -But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet -and the voice of Maria, the little _criada_, called through the bars: - -"It ess good now, senor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with -those evil ones." - -The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned, -first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them, -"Don" Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back -gate Sliver and two _ancianos_ now stood with leveled rifles. Two more -poked deadly snouts over the low _patio_ wall, Lee and Jake behind them. -And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets -out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, _machetes_, a -hysterical, dangerous mob. - -In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed -at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind -him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the -ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they -showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them -villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they -rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with -evil jokes. - -"Drive back those women!" Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. "Then -bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over -here." - -Nodding in reply to Gordon's gesture, the leader followed him across the -compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly -cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome -Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the -ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such -reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature's -mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales -and addressed Jake with an authoritative air: - -"Now, senor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of -General Valles?" - -"Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles -attacked my people!" - -It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man's riding-clothes, and -the man's surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy. -Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his -first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair. - -"I did not know"--his bold glance wandered over her costume--"you will -pardon me, senorita?" - -Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time -that revolutionists had come with "requisitions" to Los Arboles. She -answered from experience. - -"You have a commission from General Valles?" - -He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language -that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to -contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, _el -capitan_ Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or -other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with -his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles's own -illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal. - -Lee handed it back. "This seems to be in legal form. That being the -case"--she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake -an appreciative nod "perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my -people!" - -"I know of no attack except"--the straight brows knit over a black flash -at Gordon--"when this man killed one of my men." - -Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: -"He shot in self-defense--to save one of my girls." - -"Santa Maria!" His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. "What -foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled -a dove. You Americanos take these _peonas_ too seriously, fill them with -ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a -soldado for a sweetheart." - -Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined -just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on -Gordon's part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool -calculation by Jake as to the possibility of "getting away with it" -should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still -holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering -if he could send one bullet through all four heads. - -If the thoughts of the _peonas_--now gathered in a murmuring, -gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling -like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall--a composite of their -thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and -torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of -mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought -and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine -nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee's voice: - -"_You_ say that? _You_, a follower of a man who was once himself a -_peon_, who boasts that his is the _peones'_ cause? _You_, his -representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor -creatures? If you _do_ represent him, then God help us, for we have -little but violence to expect from your cause." - -It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the -strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but -little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused -even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the _peon_ in all his -ways, to mutter: "You bet! they hain't got nothing coming from him!" But -in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by -training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only -surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of -her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, -with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the -shibboleths of his "Cause." Surely they were fighting for the _peon_; to -obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the -_hacendados_. - -"If my hombre did as you say," he concluded, "he earned his death. My -general would be the first to applaud it." With a gesture that dismissed -the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: "So let us -say no more of that. My wish is to serve _you_!" - -Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied -them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry -blood flooding Gordon's face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing -his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture. - -"Leave him to me," she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in -the eye, she gave him his answer. "You wish to serve me? Very well, -senor, you may do so very easily--by removing yourself and your men off -my place." - -For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise. -In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. "Si, senorita--after -you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new -levy for equipment and supplies. Also"--another black flash went to -Gordon--"it will be my duty to take this man to my general." - -"Perhaps I had better go," Gordon whispered. "It may save you--" - -Lee cut him off without looking around. "And shoot him the moment you -get him outside the gates?" She quoted the Mexican law of "The escape." -"No, senor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him -with my own hands at your general's call." She added, after a -significant pause, "Along with the evidence of your own neglect in -permitting your men to attack my people." - -For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of -effect--especially upon meddlesome consuls--it was the fashion in the -revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one -could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He -blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed -through his vicious look. - -"Very well, senorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the -horses. These I must have at once." - -"Well, think you've got 'em, an' let it go at that!" - -While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her -meditation flashed a sharp question: "Were you at the hacienda of the -senor Benson last week?" - -The man's dark brows rose. "No, senorita. If there was a requisition -served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez." - -"When did you leave the cuartel general?" - -"Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other -side of the railroad. But what difference does it make--" - -"A great deal." She gave a little nod. "Since you left headquarters the -senor Benson, with my manager, the senor Perrin, has gone with an offer -of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter -may also be left with him." - -"Which lets you out!" Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the -background, now burst out. "Now git! That's what I said--an' take your -dead hombre along." - -From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the -man's glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the -peonas who were now crowding the _patio_ gates. Everywhere his glance -fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of -glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning -fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his -glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent -behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a -shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the _peonas_ -opened. - -While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the -_patio_ wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and -Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his -_ancianos_ still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret -mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it. - -As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they -passed out under the _patio_ arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically, -then followed his men. - -"Saddle a fresh horse an' go after them," Jake ordered, when Sliver came -up. "Don't let 'em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we'll -have to keep one man circling the hills while the _ancianos_ keep watch -an' watch at the gates." - -With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men -ride away. "I am sorry to have brought this on you," he said, in low -tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added, -"Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him." - -A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. -Jake was shooing the _peonas_ back to their quarters with much language -and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick -movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and -planted a swift kiss on his cheek. - -"I don't want to be widowed--before I'm married." - -At midnight Sliver brought in his report. "They've gone on to El Sol. -After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into 'em when they -stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood -quiet an' the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. -The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn't hear of it. - -"'The damned gringos shoot straight,' I heard one of 'em say. 'Already -have they killed one of us, an' now they be ready. Also the horses are -tired an' we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.' Then, after -some jawing, they moved on." - -"An' they won't come back," Jake commented on the report. "Not so long -as they kin find something that looks easier." - -Which was only half of the truth! - - - - -XXIX: TEMPTATION - - -Bull's eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted -pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering -mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half -conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence, -the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth. - -Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town -enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in -the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand -_revueltosos_, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in -their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the -scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth -within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung -straight as strings in the crystal air. - -"'Morning, Diogenes!" The correspondent's cheerful face poked up from -under the edge of the car. "Some picturesque, heigh? Who'd think, to -look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the -destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But -that's your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a -quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night -for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A -night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to -the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit -each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a -cheerful, 'Adios, senor, it is time to begin fighting!' they return to -their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the -midst of their dirt and disorder." He added, thoughtfully, "I never see -them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children -shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the -powerful weapons we placed in their hands." - -"Picturesque? Yes," he went on, from a pause. "But it's mighty hard on -the common people. Look at that!" - -He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was -clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car. - -"She's picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!" -Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: "If our wise men -in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are -doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! _The seed corn and -the brood mares!_ You know what that means--famine! If I were a poet I'd -take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles's -war horses--I'd take her for the symbol of Mexico--Mexico bleeding and -bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed. - -"It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it's -true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast -returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring -perpetually upon one another. Already--oh!" He descended to a homely but -vital conclusion. "They make me sick. God send us a _man_! A man with -sympathy and insight; understanding of this people's failings and -necessities. God send us another Lincoln!" - -"You bet it's hell!" In spite of the profanity Bull's laconic comment -was reverent in its essence as the most profound "Amen!" - -With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful -self. "I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast." - -Stepping from the ladder, Bull's glance went, in spite of himself, to -the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone -jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his -back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look -when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his -sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and -when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town, -it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind. - -From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in -dirty streams of khaki and _peon mantas_ splashed with the flash of -brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot -of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured -into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt -and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with -a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its -evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson's remark as -they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified: - -"If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this -would be a safer, cleaner land." - -Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet -odor of carrion hung thick in the air. - -"More Mexican efficiency," the dean shrugged. "After the last scrap out -here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They'd pile -twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the -soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of -hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way--it's -hard on a white man, though the Mexicans don't seem to mind. Appeals to -the natural vulture in them, I suppose." - -While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the -crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under -guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten -years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one -thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the -extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell--to be -picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and -hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd. - -"Ole, Enrico!" As they came opposite, Bull's friend hailed the officer -in command. - -After walking a few feet with him, he came back. "They're Spanish -storekeepers on the way to 'the place designated,' which is a -revolutionary euphemism for being shot. 'The place' is the cemetery -where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican -refinement, eh, making a man's legs carry him to his own funeral? Their -crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in -contributing to the 'Cause,' been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps -have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters' beds. -Even in this country"--he spoke with bitter irony--"there are still men -to be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are -Spanish. God knows, it's enough. Valles never forgets that he is a -_peon_. After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children's -children the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec -forebears. It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some -justification for it--if it were only a cause and effect. But"--his -pitying glance followed the stumbling boy--"it is rotten hard to watch." - -It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while -running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing -glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As -the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of -Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an -interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a _revueltoso_ -would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest -from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at -the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter, -quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand. - -"That isn't quite so bad." The correspondent nodded at one struggling -desperately with her captor. "She'll soon give in and dry her tears. In -one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within -twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with -Valles's soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by -a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it -doesn't matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the -others--daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many -of them educated in Europe--well, during the sack of Durango forty girls -of the upper classes committed suicide." - -After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and -turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old -Spanish mansion, with a great _patio_ and interior garden, its high -walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The -glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which -flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun -blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by -contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet -demesne. - -As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in -earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest. - -"More victims of the 'Cause.'" After he had greeted them, the consul, a -bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. "Valles has robbed churches, -seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with--this. Last -spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to -which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and -came here to-day to ask the priest--who is himself a refugee whom I -saved from a mob that was stoning him to death outside--to ask -permission for themselves and others to end their desecration by -suicide. One would think that such experiences would kill in any human -being the belief in a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good -stuff. Sticks right to his guns." - -Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came -just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the -burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: "The life He gave -none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is -not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight. -It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness; -puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was -necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked -ones to their proper end? It may be"--he paused, shaking his old head, -tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks--"but it is not for us to -attempt answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have -wished that He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones -of the mob. But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait -till His brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision." - -Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the -children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of -mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty -four or five, raised her pale, olive face. "And may we love them, our -babes, when they come?" - -The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the -wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. "God is love, Sisters. He -would not wish otherwise." - -In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were -wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked -slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house. - -Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost -pain. And yet--even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the -garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on -a small side-table. On their way they had passed _cantina_ after -cantina, all thronged with half-drunken _revueltosos_, all exhaling a -thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the -drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul's invitation, he walked out -on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in -time to hear the consul's conclusion on Benson's business. - -"As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was -never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn't help -any for me to go with you, for I've been fighting him on other accounts -all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that -will secure your admittance." - -On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the _cantinas_. With -invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful -was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals; -seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd -that blocked always the gates of Valles's headquarters--simple _peones_ -who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of -obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a _peon_ like themselves who had -abased the great _hacendados_, their taskmasters, confiscated their -lands, beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though -he shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw -them; had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming -and going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a -secretary, seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to -what was going on. - -"That's 'Matador' Fero, Valles's killer." Benson nudged him as a man -looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a -suspicious stare. "He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon, -in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power -rifle. Looks it, doesn't he?" - -He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black, -piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his -colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom -they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there -closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged -before the desk, and also the _revueltoso_ officers who lounged on the -window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice. - -Fierce beast that the "Matador" was, Bull's keen knowledge of men, -developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less -dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive -upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his -thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest, -sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither, -told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the -bandit _peon_, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they -entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand -nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling, -it would rise and fall with a bang. - -"You may tell your papers, senores, the reverse of the other day was -sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow--you have seen my -reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?--to-morrow -I shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot -wind. And you can tell them"--he observed a sinister pause--"you may -tell them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is -now giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American -lives and property in the country I control, but if your government -allies itself with my enemies--" His big fist struck the table with -force that emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes. - -Yet, pulsing with vindictive anger, the exhibition paled by contrast -with his furious attack on one of his own officers who came in as the -correspondents filed out. The fact that he had been wounded and had gone -on, alone, when his command refused to face a galling fire, made no -difference. Beast mouth stretched to a gorilla grin, every line of his -face writhing in an awful smile, Valles scored him with coarse insult -and seething invective while his hand toyed thirstily with the hilt of -his knife. - -Flushing and paling, the man stood with hanging head till an order -issued from the last furious burst. "Go, now, and shoot every tenth man -in your command. I will teach them that I am more to be feared than the -damned Carranzistas!" - -In the midst of it Bull nudged Benson. "Don't you allow we better leave -him cool for a while?" - -But the Englishman's obstinate jaw set hard. "I'm not afraid of him. -Besides"--the secretary stood again in the doorway--"it is too late." - -A curt nod marked Valles's recognition of Benson as they followed in. -Then, as his tigerish eyes took in Bull, they lit with quick -appreciation of his bulk, then went off again on their suspicious -questing. While Benson talked, he beat again a soft tattoo with the heel -of his hand; then, rising, he walked off into another room. - -The secretary followed, and through the closed door they caught the -harsh, throaty monotone. When it ceased the secretary came out. - -"My general says that all of your property is subject to requisition to -be paid for in legal currency issued by him as the chief of the -republican armies." - -"And he thinks we'll stand for that?" His eyes flashing under bent -brows, harsh face burning with anger, Benson stepped toward the door. -"I'll--" - -But as he moved the "Matador" stepped in between. Half a dozen lounging -officers, too, came hurrying from the balconies. - -"It would do no good, senor." The secretary's shoulders rose in a shrug. -"Wait a more favorable time." - -Benson stared down upon him, big fists clenched, face purple with -furious passion. Thinking he was about to strike, Bull put out his hand. -But, turning suddenly, Benson strode out of the room, throwing his -defiance back over his shoulder. - -"He can't bluff a British subject that way! He'll give me his answer -_himself_--and he'll give it _to-day_." - -As Bull followed out a hand touched his shoulder. Thinking it was the -secretary, he turned--then stood staring at the sentry on guard at the -door, who returned a sheepish grin. Though the face seemed familiar, he -did not recognize the man for one of the raiders Lee had saved from -hanging till he spoke. - -"Ah, senor, 'tis fine to see an old face. The senorita, she that saved -us from your just anger, she is well? Tell her that fine mercy was -defeated by the _revueltosos_ who took us from her servants. Ask if she -will in her great kindness have the general set us free that we may -return to our wives and babes in Las Bocas." - -In spite of his own stress, Bull could not but grin. "Was the jefe of -Las Bocas a better master than Valles?" - -"A master is always a master." The man shrugged. "But one's pais is -one's pais and the ninas, the flesh of one's body, blood of his blood, -cannot be forgotten. Thou wilt speak to her, senor?" - -The tear that trickled down his villainous face earned him a civil -answer. Though he knew the futility of it, Bull nodded. "Si, I will -speak." - -Below he found Benson shoving like an angry bull through the _peon_ -crowd. On its outskirts he turned and shook his fist at the building. - -"I'm going back to the consul--to tell him something that he'll take -better alone. Where shall I meet you?" - -"Here?" - -"No, I can't tell how long I may be. Make it after lunch at the car." - -Bull nodded. Then remembering the correspondent's warning, he called -after him, "I'd like to be there when you tackle him again." - -Nodding, Benson walked on. Left alone, Bull sat down on a bench in the -plaza. Already the drink desire was returned upon him. And as he sat -there, in the grip of his mortal weakness, three soldiers seated -themselves on the same bench and proceeded to pass a bottle of -_tequila_. - -Before he even saw it Bull's mutinous nostrils snuffed the odor. Looking -away, he tried to think, to recall the vision that strengthened and -cooled him in his hour of torture last night. But now, the stronger for -his long abstinence, that enormous desire inflamed his brain; enveloped -it in heated mists through which the pretty, wholesome faces loomed dim -and indefinite. And then-- - -After a curious glance up at the huge figure, the nearest soldier tapped -his arm. "You will drink with us, senor?" - -What it cost him to refuse and walk away! Men have gone down in history -as martyrs by the exercise of no more effort. But just as pressure -enough will snap a bone, as persistent fatigue will paralyze a muscle, -so the effort weakened his will, broke his resolution. Feeling curiously -weak, utterly exhausted, he stopped at the plaza corner and gazed at a -_cantina_ across the road. - -Even then he did not give in. Hands writhing behind his back, face one -purple suffusion, he circled and recircled the plaza half a dozen times -before he stopped at the same spot again. In that time desire has no -height he did not reach; passion no heat, hell no torture, he did not -endure. And while he stood watching the _cantina's_ roaring trade, -reluctant but conscious in his soul that the end was come, a hand -dropped with a hearty slap on his back. - -"Come on, Diogenes, you're just in time. We've discovered some beer, -good cold beer, down at the German Club. Counting the consul, there's -only two Dutchmen left in the town, but trust them to have their beer. -Don't waste time in astonishment. Come right along." - -In his mortal weakness Bull snatched at the straw. He could drink a -barrel of the thin Mexican stuff without knowing it--at least he felt he -could! But while, for an hour thereafter, they sat in a cool _patio_ -talking and sipping, the despised brew was still potent enough to loose -the mad rustler spirit that hearkened only to the voice of desire. - -When the correspondents left to file their despatches, he remained. - -"I'm waiting for Benson," he told them. "If you see him, tell him I'm -here." - -While they walked down the _patio_ and out through the bar into the -street, he sat nervously making rings with his beer-glass. Then, -trembling with eagerness, he called the waiter. - -"This stuff hasn't a kick in it. Bring me a bottle of whisky!" - - - - -XXX: THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH - - -As they sat at breakfast Gordon's glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her -smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in -his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal. - -"I'm going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day," she told Jake. - -Sliver's nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement. -"It's a cinch," he chuckled. "'Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never -seen two folks more sot on each other." - -Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. "An' who in hell might they be?" - -"Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other -like two stamps at the end of a day's ride in a sweaty pocket; allus -that close up walkin', standin' or settin', you had to walk around 'em -twice to find the jine." - -"An' after they was married?" Jake questioned. - -Sliver scratched his head. "You-all mightn't believe it, but you c'd -have fired a charge of buckshot between 'em at long range without -hittin' either." - -Jake nodded. "I'd have allowed as much. But these ain't that kind. Did -you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she'll keep him -on aidge that-a-way all his life. He'll never get all at once; never -quite reach the end. They'll allus be something beyond." - -"Say!" Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. "Fer an old bachelor you -know a heap. Where'd you learn it?" - -"Where any man learns it--from a woman." A shadow swept, for a moment, -the reckless face. "On'y--I didn't have sense enough to stay be my -teacher." - -Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up--for -it was his day on guard--Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover, -he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon -ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his -being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had -somehow failed to fill. - -Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in -morals which has puzzled wiser heads. "Ain't Natur' the fickle jade, -a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he's still -terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn't she a' b'en more single-minded?" - -His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a -flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were -now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at -correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver's could easily have -perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the -attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch. - -"Say," he called down, "d'you allow it's all right for them two to go -off that-a-way by themselves?" - -Jake snorted. "Didn't she ride with you yesterday an' me the day afore?" - -"Yes, but she's our boss an'--well, they love each other a whole lot." - -"So that's what's biting you?" In one sentence Jake countered heavily on -the common view of things. "She kin ride with tough guys like you an' me -an' it's all right; but she mustn't go out with the man that loves her -more 'n anything on earth. Where's your sense?" - -Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing, -he made weak answer, "I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a -chapperonny." Vanquished by Jake's disgusted snort, he withdrew and went -down to close the gates. - -Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise, -from where she and her father had overlooked the _hacienda_ on that last -fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge -painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As -then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant -cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range -rolling in bright billows to the far hills. - -Her cry was the same: "Oh, isn't it beautiful? Soon the rains will come -and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be -had anywhere, but these golds--that is Mexico." - -Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her -father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges, -scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and -their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential -calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the -soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and -grace of its flexures from her man's riding-clothes, the mobile face, -molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest -subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when -she showed signs of stopping. - -"Oh, I'm so glad that you love it!" she sighed, happily. "It would have -been such a disappointment if you-- But that is so silly, because it -wouldn't have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark -evenings after"--she went on with a little flourish--"I shall read you -stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old -leather trunk. It will be lots of fun." - -Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where -she left off, he began. "Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big -streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees -this--well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled -down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary -nonsense, we'll--" - -The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his -imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid, -healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot -she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy -pause. - -Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to -their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged -in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a -trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods -freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly -scheme of things according to their hearts' desire, the gods in -resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were -to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from -the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently -joined hands and rode on. - -At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher's purpose. After they -passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always -out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the -mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their -course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went -after them at a gallop. - -Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and, -as he drew nearer, she recognized the _mozo_ who had brought Ramon's -message from El Sol. - -"Que? Filomena?" - -As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her -happiness. "Oh, Betty is ill!" she translated for Gordon. "Mary Mills -sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as -my escort, so it won't be necessary for you--" She paused, anticipating -rebellion. - -It came. "Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn't let -you, anyway." - -If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. "That's what -one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I'll have to put up with it." -Turning to the _mozo_, she gave him his orders in Spanish: "The senor -will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the -gringo senor, where we have gone." - -Disconcertion showed through the man's _peon_ immobility. But with an -obsequious "Si, senorita!" he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, -dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly. - -Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to -be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight -he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he -built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the -succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet. - -Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it -soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and -lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke -puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, -mounted and rode away. - - -About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight -embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the _fonda_. But in -place of Felicia's smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of -old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an -_arriero_ whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream. - -As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her -glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, -she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled -around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the -kiss, into neutral territory. - -Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the -night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge -to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and -violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that -undulated like a woman's mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the -hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with -green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and -plains, canon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in -one mood as the other. - -"A wonderful land!" Gordon breathed it. - -Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and -its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across -brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; -then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, -and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the canons, streets of the -mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, -rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in -the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, -richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled -Garden of Eden--could he have done all this, even then imagination would -have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to -prophecy. - -"Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this -is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth." - -That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet -brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration -but an eagle's flight away. Following battle and retreat across -sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was -scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon's blast over the face of the land -to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range -columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning _haciendas_. With -them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded -and tortured, wailing of ravished women. - -In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that -had spied the _mozo's_ signal and were now watching them from the -chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on. - - -"Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease." - -If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few -hundred yards away, might have heard the argument. - -She would easily have recognized Ramon's voice. "True, amigo, and I love -him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his -companero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it--to make no -attempt on their lives." - -"A promise?" A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. "What is it but a -deadfall for one's enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, -women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it -to find a hot enough corner in hell. But _I_ gave no promise--and he -killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to -me." - -"No, no!" Ramon's voice rose in quick protest. "His killing would still -be at my hands. Also"--the addition came in lower tones--"I would rather -he lived--to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in -my arms. No, senor, we will rope him from behind." - -"Bueno! Have it thy--" A sharp hiss cut them off. - -Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of -a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through -thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, -with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with -the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men -before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above. - -She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her -stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. "I'll go down first. If I break my -neck you can pick up the remains." - -Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way -on her beast's haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with -skilful use of the bridle. - -"Come on!" she called back, laughing. - -But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the -noose of a _riata_ writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and -was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a -man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under -her horse's belly. - -"Run!" From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her -shoulder. "Run! Oh, _run_!" - -He could not--had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had -barely time to use the spur, and if Ramon's cast had been made a second -sooner he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the -loop settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next -second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. -While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. -Now he turned it loose downhill. - -That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker's boast, -and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious -through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, -shooting close to the ground. - -His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging -of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, -the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the -leader's head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm -in against his body. - -At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. "He -has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!" - -Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them -snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill. - -Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only -have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while -the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness -and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break -his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee's voice, shrill in its -mortal terror, rang out: - -"If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!" - -To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, -like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, -but without answer raised a warning hand. "The gringo is not to be -harmed, hombre." - -"But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our companero." - -"The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own -life in the hollow of his hand." - -Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. -Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in -all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a -_peon_. Behind them rose a coarse laugh. - -"Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou -forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave -thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? -As for Tomas--I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us -to divide this senor's money." - -The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. "Bueno, Rafael, -bueno!" Another called: "Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man's -shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas's throat it flashed at -last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee." - -The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to -back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon -pulled a roll of notes from his breast. - -"Here, hombre." - -The man's huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his -share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee's horse by the -bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last -odd note, she spoke in English. - -"I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against -me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster." From which she ran -on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of -memory--their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her -own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. "And now would you -destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And -what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love." - -She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked -and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes -stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic -fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the -hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its -grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took -out of bitter anger. - -"What have I to gain?" He threw up his head in defiance. "You! with love -or without it!" - -By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent -outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear. - -"Ramon, what are you going to do?" - -Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. -"Take you to San Angel--to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and -priest." - -"Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known -me from childhood--" - -"They are Mexican--would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like -themselves. They will do as I say. If not"--his nod carried a sinister -significance--"so much the worse for you." - -Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the -brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his -insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned -away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its -mate. - -She bent her head in sudden shame. "Ramon, please take me home." - -"Yes, to _ours_." He snatched her bridle. "Come! already we have wasted -too much time." - -As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. "You -stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember -she is no _peona_, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you -will be called to account by our government." - -"Your government?" Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. "Your -government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and -hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a -villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the -massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and -obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government--for -the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it -has lodged--complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us--nor help -_you_. Come on, hombre!" - -As he moved off, leading Lee's beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to -break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to -his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking -back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the -moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm, -her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then -the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair. - -Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot -swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The -revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at -him. - -"Going to cut my throat, now he's gone," Gordon read it--and did not -care. - -But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts -even a bandit nature. "We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him." -Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the -others. "Let us lift him over there in the shade." - -"'Tis hard on thee, amigo," the fellow went on, after they moved him. -"'Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no -fear"--though he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the -gestures, helped out by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning -on his meaning--"we will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to -the strong. He has not got her yet. Adios--and better luck!" - -As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored, -for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear, -cold vision to face its dread facts--the tragic realities even then in -course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In -agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them -go. - - - - -XXXI: "BRAINS WIN" - - -Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken -faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad -phantasmagoria, devil's dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting. -As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a -window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More -clearly, a second picture stood out--of a big black rustler--to wit, -himself--set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the -rifles aimed, and yet--his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he -lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet -across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the _patio_ of -the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the -staccato pulsations of rifle-fire. - -"The battle's on!" - -As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony, -poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and -covered his face, but could not shut out despair. "My God! I've fallen -down!" - -Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood, -face buried in his hands, till he recognized the "dean's" voice. - -"Well, come on, fellows! They're going to it again. Let's get out where -we can see." - -"I'll take a look at Diogenes first," came the voice of his friend. "You -chaps go on. I'll catch up." - -Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the -correspondent's gaze. "Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went -it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but--last night!" He shook his head in -mock reproof. - -"What did you do? What didn't you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then -went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in -business--those you didn't break up. It took a troop to round you up. -They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. -Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here." - -"Well, I'm sorry! damned sorry that he did!" Bull shrugged. "On'y to be -shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother -in the gutter." - -His bitterness touched the other. "Look here, old man, don't take it so -hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and -go on again." - -Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling -had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, -as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent's face grew grave. -Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way. - -"Where's Benson?" He looked up. "Did he go again to Valles?" - -"Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it--without avail. -What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he -said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done -much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. 'So if the -son of a gun kills me,' he told him, 'the boys will know it for murder.' -He must have had a hunch, for he never came back." - -"Dead?" Bull broke a shocked silence. - -The other nodded. "They acknowledge it--say he tried to kill Valles, -which is, of course, all rot." - -Bull had leaped up. "Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It's -no use." He waved away expostulations. "You yourself warned me not to -let him go alone!" He started out the door. - -"Here!" the correspondent seized him. "Where are you going?" - -"Out--to get drunk--get killed if I kin!" - -Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the -correspondent stuck. "All right! all right! But what's your hurry? -You'll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with -me." - -Through Bull's black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. "Humph! Stand on -a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?" - -"Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that's -exactly the crack Valles made about 'gringo correspondents' and -'long-distance reporting.' I'm going to show the beggar. It's me for the -outposts where folks get killed." - -Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. "Don't be a fool! You're paid -to get the news, not to do Valles's fighting." - -The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not -repress a grin. "What's sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have -a right to get yourself killed, so have I." - -The black shadow again wrapped Bull. "I've good reason. If I kin git -myself shot, like a man, I'm just that much ahead. But you--" - -"Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away -with a crack like that? We're doing too much talking. Come on!" - -"I'd--" Bull hesitated. "I'd like to see--_his_ consul first. His -wife--she'd naterally like to know. She's in El Paso, just now, an' I -know her address." - -"We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don't -turn up, I wouldn't want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too -long." - -Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. "You needn't to be scairt." He -answered the other's look. "My thirst's over--for a while. But I need a -bracer." Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier -significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return -to the old life. - -Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet -of despair he listened while the consul talked. - -"I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I'd -succeeded. If it hadn't been that he was seen going in, he would simply -have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several -stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he -carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being -placed under arrest. Lastly--to satisfy me and give his murder the -semblance of a military execution--that he was tried by drumhead -court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general. -But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin"--he went on from a heavy -pause--"this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon -my records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one -year--it may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come -up again. No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may -have fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite -the name of William Benson in our archives, 'The murderer was brought to -justice.'" - -The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among -wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented -thereon in his breezy fashion. - -"That's Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than -hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up -goes a regiment and decimates the tribe--or a brigade, or an army, if -necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a -British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat -old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He'd make shorter work -of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the -Hindu rajahs." - -In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally -impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet -square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the -United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a -letter. - -"Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!" He coughed -ironically. "Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact -that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and -in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle -Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial -ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or -property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save -this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints! -Oyez! Oyez! Frankly," he turned to the consul, "what do you think of -it?" - -The consul shrugged his shoulders. "You wish to register?" - -His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the -correspondent's name and commission. "Anybody else you wish to notify?" - -The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then -he reached for the letter the correspondent handed. - -"To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?" - -The pen scratched Lee's name and address. - -"Anything to send?" - -"Nothing!" - -"Very well, gentlemen!" His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his -handshake--the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. "I shall -observe your wishes--if possible. Well--" His shoulders rose again. -"Hasta luego! Till we meet again." - -"A brave man in a weak place!" The correspondent rightfully placed him, -outside. "Now, Diogenes, for the front." - -An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last -quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and -rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of -stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the -flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a -battery of French "threes" was spitting shrapnel with the feverish -energy of an angry cat. - -Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, -whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot -through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile -in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting -that flank. - -Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were -to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in -a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista -positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the -ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would -strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping -through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist. - -Seizing the dead man's rifle, Bull stepped into his place. - -It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would -have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment's -surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights -and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler -spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his -_vaqueros_ on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every -other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully -as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter -puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, -grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the -dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction. - -"Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he'll soon get over it." - -Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and -began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The -spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling -rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of -the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture -of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy. - -A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her -heels patting out _tortillas_ while she gossiped with another girl, in -complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was -indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her -coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face -convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while -screaming frightful curses. - -"Damned dogs of Carranzistas!" she finished with her last, spent breath. -"Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with -tails between the legs!" - -Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The -fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. -"Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my -first prisoner." - -Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while -making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards -separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that -burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, -shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its -mark; she collapsed in a heap. - -Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent's -yell: "Come back, you fool! She's dead! shot through the head!" he ran -out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall. - -As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept -space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was -not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a -while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes -flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic -curses at the distant line. - -"Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day -shall be my lover!" - -"And here comes he that will do it!" The man on Bull's left touched his -shoulder. - -Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling -gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great -black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance -the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, -rifle-fire, booming guns. - -"It's Valles!" - -As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black -horse launched out and shot up the hill. - -"Make way, hombres, for the guns!" - -Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken -vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the -correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension -flashed in his hot eyes. - -"Ole, companero!" His wave of the hand took in all. "Hot work! but -nothing to that which is to come. Mira!" - -Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of -dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. -"Carranzista cavalry! But--look again!" - -Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, -brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the -west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. -Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching -as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles -shook his fist at the distant dust. - -"Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!" - -The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse -with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling -bullets, he directed their emplacement. "To the left, hombres! a little -more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!" The last one set, he -rasped out a last command: "Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!" Then -followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill. - -"He bears a charmed life!" The man next Bull spoke again. "Out of a -hundred battles he has come with never a hurt." He added, with a wink, -"An' it was not always from his front the bullets came." - -Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit -with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The -artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up -his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, -the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to -the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle. - -"What are you trying to do?" - -"Justice on that grinning devil." - -"Good job no one saw you." A quick glance around showed the artillerymen -and revolutionists absorbed in their own work "Do you know what they -would have done to both of us--skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or -something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don't care yourself, just -think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, 'Having -toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.'" - -"I hadn't thought of that. But if I'd been alone--" - -He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to -his loophole. - -On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the -massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown -blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and -sabers, _machetes_, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then -the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, -like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. -Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that -other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud -rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. - -"Weekes was wrong!" It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. -"He's smashed 'em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!" But as the -cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, "That is, if -Valles stops and comes back." - -When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved -into criticism. "Whatever is he thinking of? There he's gone with all -the cavalry and left his flank exposed!" - -At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with -greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand -drums. Answering the "threes," shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking -curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next -wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next -to Bull collapsed without a groan. - -Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps -where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill -came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns. - -"Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of -their guns! They've drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they'll -flank us! My God! there they come!" - -From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of -smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. -He leaped and caught Bull's arm. - -"Come on! Let's get while we can!" - -They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, -maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head. - -"Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself." - -"Man! Valles is defeated!" The other seized and shook him. "Do you know -what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. -If you won't consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to -leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against -Americans?" - -Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and -smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, -there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; -then the feel of Lee's soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, -the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear. - -"Come on!" - -Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden -their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain -of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and -low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the -dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his -jokes. - -"Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!" he gasped. "Gosh! but that -chaparral is going faster the other way!" - -A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that -dire moment he remained his cheerful self. - -"Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they'd ever get -me. Here's my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck -'em on to the wires. Now, _run like hell_!" - -And Bull did "run like hell"--with the correspondent across his -shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded -out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the -knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief -twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his -saddle, arms around his horse's neck, he headed for the town. - -As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging -yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. -Followed the terrible roar of a rout--yells, shrieks, curses, victorious -shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it -caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated -above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked -with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted -adobe streets to the railroad yards. - -There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains -and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the -hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, -then--the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass -be-spattered with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, -sentient human beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with -Valles's own guns. - -"We're farther up!" the correspondent whispered through white, drawn -lips. "We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main -line to insure our getaway." - -He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile. -"That's queer. It stood about here, yet I don't see the placards. -Perhaps we have overshot." - -But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car -ahead. "Here, senores! This way!" - -Just then, too, the door rolled back and the "dean" looked out. "Hurry -up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales -Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick -sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out. -We're traveling, for the present, incognito. You're hurt! Here, you -fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!" - -After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the "dean" turned to -Bull. "That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning, -looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the -Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants." - -But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome -accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang, -and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine's tug. - - - - -XXXII: TRAVAIL - - -The instant she passed from Gordon's sight Lee's smile went out, -quenched by mortal fear. For years tales that defied by their black -horror exaggeration by even the fervid _peon_ minds had filtered into -Los Arboles, and, more vividly than Gordon, she realized her danger. - -It was not so much Ramon. At San Carlos she would have a fighting -chance; stood ready to match her woman's wit against his man's strength. -Her fear centered on the men. - -As, overtaking them, he rode by on the narrow path, Ilarian pressed -close against her. "Cheer up, little one! 'Tis the fighting cock that -wins his hen. 'Tis the way of the world, and what matter it so long as -she be won? 'Tis his turn now, but later 'twill be for thee to keep him -itching." - -Laughing hoarsely, he rode on, but in passing his rude fingers searched -the softness of her arm and she caught the bold look into her eyes of -his grinning fellow. Thereafter she felt their glances touching, -plucking at her like fumbling fingers. Now glowing with shame, again -frozen with terror, she endured it--to her it seemed hours before she -spoke to Ramon. - -"I'm afraid of those men. Can't you--send them away?" - -He shrugged. "You have more reason to be afraid of me." - -"You?" In spite of the deadly chill at her heart she managed a little -laugh. "That is impossible." - -"Why?" - -"Fear one's oldest friend?" Already, with intuitive guile, she was -laying the foundations of her defense. Though he looked at her with -quick suspicion, she returned the innocent eyes nature has given woman -for her chief protection. "For you--a man of whom I have known only -good? But these men fill me with fear." - -Suspicion clouded, for a moment, his eyes. Passing, it left his gloom -lighter. Reassurance softened his tone. "Don't be afraid. They will -leave us at San Carlos." - -"But, Ramon, it is now noon. If we ride hard we cannot get there before -dark." She shuddered at the thought. - -"You would rather we were alone?" - -"A thousand times." She returned to his gaze the same innocent eyes--and -once more his gloom lightened a shade. - -"They are going to San Carlos anyway, so I can hardly send them away. -But I am armed, and there is no necessity for you to be afraid. -Also--you said that the jefe and priest at San Carlos would refuse to -marry us. If so, these are the men who can help me compel." - -"Ramon!" she spoke with dread earnestness, "look quickly behind you!" - -He did, and his quick frown told that he was not pleased. Dismounting -under a pretext of cinching up his saddle, he motioned for the two men -behind to pass ahead. - -"You saw!" she said, riding on. "You are armed, but they are four to -one; may take you unawares. I ask only one thing. Keep my feet bound, -take any other precaution you choose, but unfasten my hands and--lend me -your knife." - -"To use on _me_, if you get the chance?" - -"Not on you nor them!" Her steady look carried her meaning. - -His glance went forward to the revolutionists, who broke out, just then, -in uproarious laughter. - -"If I thought--" His hand went to his gun, then fell again. "No! they -are rough and coarse, but they know well that my father is Valles's -friend; that if they lifted a hand against me he would flay them alive. -Really, there is no danger, yet--if it will make you less fearful. But -you promise--to return it, the knife, at San Carlos?" - -"I promise." - -"I never knew you to lie, and I--" His face lost a little of its -hardness. "I would prefer to be gentle." - -Leaning over, he unbound her arms, then gave her the case-knife that -hung at his hip. "I suppose I'm a fool," he said as she slid it under -her belt inside her shirt. - -"Indeed you are not!" she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a -picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned -her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead -rope and go galloping back. - -The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse. -Also, with a woman's self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the -thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on -till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her -again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the -afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and -rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley, -thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them. -While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows -drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which -men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped, -suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with -apprehension. - -"The beasts are tired, senor, and this is a good place to camp," a voice -came back. - -"Oh, don't! Let us keep on!" she pleaded. - -"The animals are tired and must be fed," Ramon answered. "After they are -rested we will go on." - -As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a -wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been -possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a -match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her -down and seated her close to the fire. - -Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her -swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet--all -the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror. -Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from -his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her, -she broke out with a sudden scream: - -"Take care!" - -Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him, -pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee -leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started -toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his -pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the -wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and -pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white -shoulder and threw her to the ground. - -She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish -face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark -lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay -till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily. - -"No, no!" The snatch of the second man loosened the other's grip so that -she fell between them to the ground. "No, hombre, fair play between -companeros. We shall gamble for her. The winner, if he choose, can then -sell his chance." - -The fighting, writhing mass at the other side of the fire now -straightened out, and as they rose, leaving Ramon securely bound on the -ground, the other two added their protests. "Si, hombre, we will not -stand for that. She goes first to the winner, according to our custom. -Bring her back to the fire." - -To avoid their handling, she rose and walked herself. As she came where -the light fell on Ramon she saw that he had managed to struggle up on -his knees. Now he began to speak, pleading, arguing, threatening his -captors with the displeasure of their general. - -But he drew only jokes and laughter. "Valles?" Ilarian answered him. "He -was defeated by the Carranzistas, and has trouble enough to care for -himself. The requisition el capitan showed was made out months before -the battle. Had the senor, your father, been fool enough to fill it, we -should have taken the horses for ourselves." With a shove that sent -Ramon flat on his back, he added: "Lie down, hombre! For these many -years thou and thy fathers laid the whip on our backs. While we starved -they fed fat and made free with our women. Now it is for thee to watch -us at the eating and loving." - -Laughing, he caught Lee again with a sudden snatch, was forcing her head -back, when Rafael again interfered. "Hands off, hombre, till the cards -say she is thine!" - -"Si, muddle not the waters for our drinking," the others added. "Let us -eat, then get to the cards." - -"The bride? She must not go hungry at the wedding feast." The fourth man -offered her food. "Here, little one." - -Weak and faint, she was backing away, but stopped with a sudden -inspiration. "If I may share it with him?" - -"Seguro." Rising, the man dragged Ramon a few feet away and set him up, -back propped against a tree. "Only take care he bite not thy pretty -fingers." - -Laughing, he went back to the fire, leaving her to sit and watch their -feeding of meat and _tortillas_, with gulps of liquor from clay bottles. - -Between her and them yawned a gap in time wider than the centuries that -intervened between herself and her wode-stained ancestors running wild -in the woods of Britain. Their low, sloping foreheads, unbalanced heads -with all the weight below; their loose mouths, brute jaws, dark skin, -nature's infallible stigma of inferiority, pronounced them half a -million years behind her, the last-bloom of a higher race. - -In her a solitary youth had intensified the delicate fancies, -sensitiveness, timorous imaginings, shrinkings, and retreats that mark a -young girl's first reachings toward love. And now--her idealizations -were suddenly confronted with the caveman's brutal practice. Sitting -there, she endured a thousand tortures. Worse than their coarse jests -were their glances. She shrank under them in hot shame; to escape them -took the food they offered, moved over and knelt beside Ramon. - -He was sitting, head hanging, but as, now, he looked up the firelight -showed the sweat in beads on his brow. "_You_ bring _me_ food?" His -accent carried more than a thousand self-reproaches. - -She did not attempt consolation she did not feel. "Pretend to eat." She -spoke in English. "They are watching, now. But soon they will -gamble"--she shuddered, thinking of the stake--"will see only the cards. -I still have your knife. When the time serves I will cut you loose. -Their rifles are piled behind us with the saddles. They may shoot you -down from the fire. But to reach them is our only chance." - -He lowered his head to hide a sudden flash of hope. "I will do anything, -take any chance. Greater punishment no man could suffer than I am -enduring. But it has made me think--realize my blind selfishness. I can -only ask your forgiveness." - -"Now, companeros, the cards! Cut and shuffle for love!" A hoarse voice -came from the fire. - -While the first hand of a game she did not understand was being dealt -she watched the flying cards with dread interest; was still watching -when Ramon whispered: - -"I know that game. Five minutes will see it finished. By leaning a -little to one side, your body will cover my elbows. One cut will set -them free. I will still sit as I am, and when I whisper slash the riata -at my feet, then run! run into the depths of the woods. From here to San -Carlos is but a couple of leagues. Once there--with the jefe, you will -be safe." - -Ilarian's bellowing laugh rang out, just then, marking the close of the -first hand. "One to me, little one! Be not impatient. The luck is with -us. Soon we shall take a little pasear together." - -"If he wins again it will be over in a minute," Ramon whispered, while -the cards were fluttering around again. As the men bent over them, -thumbing their hands, he gave the word, "Now!" - -With two slashes she did it, one at his arms, the other at his feet. But -swift as was the movement, Rafael caught it in the tail of his eye. When -he turned she had dropped the knife in the grass and, though her heart -stood still, she resumed her pretense of feeding Ramon. As he watched -her the suspicion died out of the man's stare. He was just about to turn -again to the game when, as Ramon leaned forward to take the bite she was -offering, the severed _riata_ fell from his elbows. - -Given two men in a sudden juncture, the one with a definite plan wins -the lead. As the man jumped up, pointing, Ramon sprang, reached the -rifles, aimed and shot him down. The others looked up, startled, and as -he aimed again they pulled and fired. - -"Run, querida, run!" Ramon had called it, leaping up. As he collapsed on -the heap of saddles it issued again on his last dry whisper, "Run!" - -It had all happened while she was scrambling up. Naturally she turned -when Ramon fell and paused, horror-stricken. Not till the others were -almost upon her did she turn and run--too late. - -As, heart fluttering like that of a frightened quail, she ran for the -wood Ilarian seized her. Wildly beating the brutal, pock-marked face, -she writhed helplessly in his arms. - - - - -XXXIII: THE DEATH IN THE NIGHT - - -During the rest of the day, while the train rolled and rattled and -jolted its slow way over the heated face of the desert, the -correspondents stewed with Bull in their own juices in semi-darkness. At -intervals there would come a stop. With the mad, blind selfishness of -panic the _brigada_ Gonzales had burned the watering-tanks as they -passed. So those that followed had to draw for the engine with buckets -from wells. Also there were occasional rails to be replaced which, with -equal selfishness, they tore up again the moment the train passed over. - -When the sun finally set in a fiery conflagration and dusk brought some -cess of the heat the conductor came in with tales of wholesale -desertions from the _brigada_ Gonzales, and shortly thereafter began the -dispersion of their own men. As they approached familiar country, or -tempted by tales of rich loot to be taken from near-by _haciendas_, they -began to drop off in fives, fifties, tens. Of those that had kept the -corrugated-iron roof beating like a drum with their stampings and -shufflings throughout the afternoon, there remained only a single -solitary figure when, after dark, Bull climbed up on top to air his -choked lungs. - -As he sat down on the running-board the figure looked up, then moved -closer. "It is thee, senor?" - -Peering, Bull made out the face. It was the sentry who had spoken to him -at Valles's door. As his mind associated what the "dean" had said with -the recognition he spoke quickly. "The senor Benson? Didst thou see--" - -"Si, senor." His head moved in the gloom. In the rambling _peon_ fashion -he ran on: "'The close mouth admits no flies,' said Matador. 'Keep thine -shut and we shall make thee a captain to-morrow.'" - -"A captain of what, senor? Of ghosts? For I was not deceived. He that -was sentry when they killed the German? He became a captain? Also they -that helped to roast the Spaniard till he told where he had hidden his -gold? And the three that killed el presidente for Huerta? Captains and -majors and colonels were they--of the dead. Si, among the _revueltosos_ -it is become a saying, 'Be not a captain till thou hast grown -lieutenant's spurs.' Si, I knew that I should be dead before the eve of -another day, so I fled my guard, senor, and came straight to thee." - -Though he was on fire to hear, Bull knew better than to bring his crude -thought into confusion by interruption. While the train ambled along he -let the narrative take its own course. - -"'A captain?' said Matador!" His eloquent shoulders quivered in the -gloom. "Better to be a live mozo at the tail of Don Miguel's horses in -Las Bocas." - -From a second pause he ran on: "He came to the cuartel general, the -senor Benson, while I was sentry of the second watch at the door of my -general. He was in there, Valles, with a girl. I had seen her go -in--such a girl! tall and straight, with eyes misty as twin nights, -teeth white as bleached bone, hair thick and black as the pine forests -that clothe the Sierra Madras! Santisimo, senor! such a girl as one may -have when he has combed a country and taken first pick of its women! I -could hear her laughing in there when the senor Benson came striding up -the stairs. - -"I saw, when he drew near, that his face was flushed, but there was no -smell of liquor upon him. 'Twas the red of the great anger that burned -in his veins, kept his head shaking like that of a tormented bull. When -I barred the way he looked at me with eyes that snapped like living -sparks, shoved me aside into the corner with one sweep of his arm, -before I could stop him had opened the door and walked in--walked in, -senor, through the anteroom into the private office where Valles was at -play with the girl! - -"El Matador himself had warned me, 'Let no man pass!' But when I had -picked myself out of the corner and followed in, there he stood in front -of Valles, who had dropped the girl and leaped to his feet. Surprise and -fear showed on his face--the fear of bullet, knife, and poison that dogs -him everywhere. But it changed at once to a grin--the terrible grin his -people fear. His glance at me said, 'Stay!' and as I stood, waiting in -fear and trembling, he spoke with a voice that cut like a knife. - -"'It is my amigo, the senor Benson.' - -"Senor, I have seen his generals tremble when he spoke like that. Even -el Matador, tiger that he is, would slink before him like a whipped cat. -For all the pesos in all the world I would not have taken his place. Yet -that great Englishman stood before him solid and square as a stone; -answered with a voice of a hacendado in speech with a _peon_. - -"'I came to tell you, Valles'--just like that he spoke, senor, without -even a 'my general'--'I came to tell you that I do not take my answers -from secretaries. The offer I made you this morning was fair and square -and good business for both of us. It deserved more than a threat of -'requisitions.' You'll never get my horses that way--if I have to cut -their throats. If you want them, say so--yes or no.' - -"He got it, the 'no,' quick and hard. Then the great anger that was in -him burst forth like a river in flood. Like bear and tiger they -quarreled, the senor threatening Valles with the power and vengeance of -his government, Valles snarling defiance, their passions feeding each -other as brands burn together in a fire. - -"One other thing, and you will have a picture of it, senor--the two at -their furious talk, the girl against the wall behind Valles, one hand -held out, fear in her great eyes, and a fourth; for as they wrangled -there came a stir behind me. So quietly that I, whom he touched in -passing, did not hear, el Matador came into the room. One second he -stood, watching them from narrow eyes, then, slowly and quietly as a -snake slipping through grass, he drew up behind the senor. I have shot -men in this war. At home in Las Bocas I have drawn the knife in passion. -But the cold glittering of his eyes, slow snake crawl, chilled the blood -of me. - -"He had gained knifing distance when the senor roared in disgust. 'Bah! -Why do I waste words on a _peon_? My general, is it? I have had such -generals whipped on my place! General? A bandit _peon_ who steals horses -in place of the chickens with which he began his thieveries!' - -"'Bandit _peon_? Stealer of chickens?' This, senor, to Valles that had -killed a hundred men with his own hand before the wars ever began? The -yellow eyes of him seemed to leap out of his face. At the sight of him, -frothing like a mad tiger in lust to kill, the girl screamed, hiding her -face! At his belt hung pearl-jeweled pistols, the best of their kind. -But with the instinct of his old trade the hand of the butcher flew to -his knife. - -"They say that the senor tried to kill him. It is a lie! Even when the -knife flashed in his eyes he still stood at his distance, shaking his -big fist, growling his threats, angry but unafraid; so big, strong, -masterful, that Valles, even in his fury, hesitated. But not el Matador! -Looking back as she ran out of the room, the girl saw as I saw; screamed -aloud as the knife passed, once! twice! with a hiss and 'heigh! -splitting the backbone, piercing the heart." - -With that strong sense of the dramatic which makes the _peon_ a born -story-teller he stopped. For a moment the flash of a match lifted the -brown, hard face from the gloom under a tattered _sombrero_, lighting -the faded red of his blanket serape. Then they faded again into a dim, -huddled figure that swayed with the rack and swing of the cars. - -Bull had unconsciously suspended his breath. Now it expired in a sigh. -"His disposal. Know you aught of that?" - -The shrug quivered again in the darkness. "There is little more that I -saw. Across the body el Matador looked at me, and I chilled with the -sure knowledge that I should never see my ninas again. He even stepped, -then Valles spoke. - -"'This is a good hombre. He will help thee with--that!' He followed the -girl into the next room. - -"Between us, el Matador and I, we rolled the senor in serapes, binding -them with cords so that the face should not be seen by them that carried -him out to the secret place; and it was then that he spoke of my -captaincy. - -"'Go now to thy quarters, senor.' He clapped me on both shoulders. 'And -dream of the stars the morning sun will see flashing here.' - -"But lest I sleep too well, senor, I came from the cuartel here." - -For a full minute, while Bull chewed the bitter cud of remorse, the cars -racked on through the night. Then he spoke. "There is one in El Oro, the -consul Ingles, that would have given many pesos--not the currency of -Valles, but real pesos of silver and gold--for thee to set thy name to -this!" - -"Si!" His cigarette glowed in the midst of a shrug. "Of what use pesos, -even silver and gold, when the sight is darkened and the mouth shut? -When one may no longer see the ninas at play, watch the dancing of -girls? When the taste of good food is gone from the mouth, the feel of -warm liquor from the throat? He that betrays Valles will have no more -use of these." - -"But in El Paso," Bull urged, "one would be beyond the reach of his -hand. There, also, is a consul Ingles." - -"One's pais? The rise and set of sun across the desert beyond Las Bocas; -the chatter of the women at their washing by the stream; the soft -laughter of girls; one's children watching at dusk for the return--these -are not to be bought with pesos. One's pais is one's pais. To it one -always returns." - -"Si," Bull acknowledged the call, the most powerful in the feeling of a -Mexican. "But from El Paso one could go by the ferrocarril Americano. In -one day he could cross from El Paso to Nogales, thence south to Las -Bocas and live in plenty beyond the reach of Valles. And one's woman and -ninas--would smile the sweeter at the sight of a bulging pocket." - -The cigarette glowed again, this time without the shrug. "There is -something in that. Si, senor, I will do it!--go to the consul Ingles in -El Paso." - -Just then the Chinaman called for Bull to come down to supper. He was -not hungry, but he had food handed up for the man, who, after eating it, -rolled up in his serape and went to sleep. Then, while he snored and the -train racked slowly along the chain of fires, each a station that lay -like red beads on the desert's dark breast, Bull lay suffering agonies -of shame and remorse that grew more vivid as the miles lessened between -him and home. - -It was long after midnight before he fell into troubled sleep. When he -woke, at gray dawn, the revolutionist was gone. - -"Homesick and scared out!" Bull shrugged--and what did it matter? That -which was done was done! - -Nor was he the only deserter. All through the night the train had -dribbled away its evil freight in trickles that would spread through the -land till it was inundated with a flood of carnage, robbery, rape. Of -the clustering brown swarm on the roof there remained only a few dozens -scattered in heavy sleep throughout the train's length. - -Across the brightening east the mountains now laid a familiar pattern. -Beyond--the _patio_ and compound of Los Arboles were lying still and -gray under the dawn. Bull saw, with the distinctness of vision, the -sheet across Lee's doorway quiver under the breath of dawn. Then it -faded, gave place to the Mills _rancho_, equally still, equally silent; -its warm gold walls pale gray, the clustering bougainvilleas dark as -clotted blood. - -That feeling analogous to the chill of death which envelops a sleeping -house held him in thrall. While he gazed, there appeared on the veranda -the familiar vision. But he shut it out, tightly closing the eyes of his -mind. He turned his face to a dark dot, walls of the burned station, -that appeared to be moving toward him across the desert's grays. -Climbing down over the end, he passed through the Chinaman's kitchen -into the car. - -It was still dusk in there, but he could hear the deep breathing of -correspondents, sleeping heavily after the exhaustion of the hot night. -Quietly he gathered his belongings, had shoved open the door -sufficiently to pass out, when a whisper came from behind: - -"Adios, Diogenes!" - -Turning, he saw the correspondent leaning out of his bunk. - -"Don't take that little slip too seriously, old man," he whispered as -they shook hands. "Try again. If it wasn't for this"--he tapped his -knee--"I'd have helped you to get out your girl. But you'll make it all -right. Only don't dally. There's going to be hell to pay." - -The engine was whistling for the station. Though it did not stop, Bull -jumped and, if a bit shaken, landed unhurt. He was watching the train -recede, his hand still tingling, heart warmed by the strong pressure of -his friend's hand, when his name was called. - -"It is you, senor Perrin?" - -Drowsy and heavy-eyed from lost sleep, the Mexican agent stood in the -doorway of his box-car station. Anxiety and fear shadowed his face. - -"Wicked times, senor. Up and down the line they are robbing and -murdering, Valles's defeated soldados. Many gringos have been slain. -Early in the night a company of fifty dropped off here and are gone, mad -with hate, to loot the gringo haciendas." - -Appalled, Bull stared at the distant mountains. - - - - -XXXIV: ---------------------? - - -Left alone on the trail, Gordon suffered his own agonies--the poignant -anguishes of youth unmitigated by the fatalism or philosophy of -experience. Time and again his spirit rose in furious rebellion against -the frightful injustice of fate. Eyes starting with the strain, sweat -pouring from his brow, he rolled in successive paroxysms, vainly -striving to burst his bonds--only to subside each time into a coma of -utter despair. Then, as the very violence of his exertions cleared the -blood from his brain, he did that which an older head would have done at -first--lay still and began to think. - -How to get loose! There must be some way! He had once seen a prisoner in -a "movie" burn off his bonds with a fire of hay started by the coals -from his pipe. But if it were possible--outside of a "movie"--where were -the hay and pipe? An attempt to cut the _riata_ by abrasion on a stone -behind him produced only a sore on his wrists. Yet there must be some -way! If he could only loosen them by flexing and reflexing his muscles! -He stopped thinking, at this point, and lay staring downhill. - -His struggles had carried him to within a few feet of the dead -revolutionist. Before leaving, his followers had looted the body of its -guns, bandolier of cartridges, but had left the belt. Under the body -Gordon now caught a glimpse of his knife. - -To roll downhill was simple. With his butting shoulders, it was no trick -to move the body till the knife came up into position where he could -draw it with his teeth. But thereafter--a knife in the teeth could not -be used to free hands bound behind one's back! - -He looked about him. The problem was simple. If the knife could be held -firmly so that he could turn and rub the wrist-cords against the edge. -Presently his eye lit on the stump of a _palo verde_ that had been -bruised and split off by the slip of some passing beast. Working his way -over to it, he bent and carefully placed the horn handle in the split, -edge up, point resting at an angle of forty-five on the ground. Then, -shuffling around, he felt delicately till the razor edge came squarely -between his wrists. Very lightly, in mortal dread of a miscarriage, he -sawed, sawed, sawed until his hands suddenly split apart. One slash at -his ankles and he was upon his feet. - -His first thought was to run, wildly, madly, after Lee. Then his usual -good judgment resumed command. The revolutionists were mounted and had -an hour's start! He must have a horse! And with the thought there rose a -mental picture of the _arriero_ they had seen at the _fonda_. - -A general freighter, the fellow often brought cordwood and charcoal from -the mountains into Los Arboles, and in seasons of sickness and want Lee -had helped him and his family out. Undoubtedly he would be willing to -help. - -He started running up the steep and backward along the trail, and now -the fates relented and threw a piece of big luck in his way. For as he -came swinging along the flank of the mountain, a tinkle of bells rose -out of the canon; a black head shoved up from below; urged on by the -_arriero's_ sharp hisses and driving curses, three mules came scrambling -up out on the level. - -The sight of a man, breathless, dusty, and disheveled, running at top -speed with a naked knife in his hand, meant to the _arriero_ only one -thing. The celerity with which, slipping from the saddle, he trained his -rifle across the animal's back showed how he came to be still riding the -trails when mule-trains had been swept away by raids and "requisitions." -As he had seen Lee pass the _fonda_ with Gordon, one word, -"revolutionists," fully explained the situation, and though Gordon got -only about a third of his voluble Spanish, it was easy to understand his -clucks of commiseration. - -"Carried off! Tut! tut! tut! She that was so kind to the poor! supplied -remedies to my own ninas when they fell ill of a fever! Josefina will -cry her eyes out over this!" - -Neither did he stop with idle sympathy. While talking he pulled the -hitches and with one shove sent a cargo of pottery on his likeliest mule -crashing to the ground. Then, while hastily rigging a saddle out of -serapes and cord, he filled the air with crackling Spanish, larding his -questions with frightful oaths. - -"How many were they, senor? Six? And you shot one. Bueno! bueno! That -leaves us but two and a half apiece. Would that I might gut them all -with one flick of my knife! Take thou this." - -It was an old Colt with a barrel a foot long. Motioning to his own -riding-mule, he ran on: - -"You shall ride her, senor, for she is easier in her gait than the boats -of the sea. Some there are that will tip the nose at a mule for riding. -But in the mountains they will travel three miles to a horse's two. An -hour's start have they? Then by shoving hard we should come on them in -five, or less if they camp at dark." - -He had now finished his saddling. A stream of hisses plus a few pistol -cracks of his long mule-whip sent the remaining animals scampering back -down the ravine to the lush grass by the _fonda_, where old Antonio -would care for them. Then, springing up on the mule, he sat, rifle -across his arm, saddle _machete_ and knife close to his hand, black eyes -glittering under his _sombrero_, a wild, dangerous, bandit figure, ready -for the start. - -Thus, mounted on a mule instead of the gallant steed of fiction, did -Gordon go in pursuit. But that which the animal lacked in looks it made -up in utility. Justifying its owner's boast, it navigated steeps, slid -down into canons sure-footed as a goat, crawled like a fly up the -opposite walls, moved forward on the levels at a swift, easy, rocking -pace. To the eye of the great, scarlet-crested vulture, sailing on free -wing half a mile above, pursued and pursuers appeared as dust clouds, -now rising from the deep trough between two great earth waves, again -hovering like smoke on the crest of a hill. But by the bird it would -easily have been seen that as the hours slid by the second gained -steadily upon the first. - -Fast as the little beasts traveled, however, their pace appeared like an -insect's crawl when measured by Gordon's fears. Action, at first, -brought relief. Later he fell again a prey to anguish. The threat of the -revolutionists filled him with horror through which, as in a dreadful -nightmare, he saw Lee struggling frantically. Of Ramon he never even -thought. It was always the men. Yet he managed to hold himself in hand; -refrained from lashing the mule into the furious pace that would, while -killing it, have still lagged far behind his fears. - -And he had always at his side the _arriero_, with his repeated, "Do not -trouble, senor; they will keep traveling till dark!" to cheer him. - -The latter's sharp glance it was that picked out the sign where the -revolutionists had swung on to the San Carlos trail. His hawk eyes -found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the -opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn -veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists' -fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly, -it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them, -after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently -shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light -of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside -Ramon. - -"One to me, little one," Ilarian's bellow just then rang out. "Be not -impatient. Soon we shall take a little pasear together." - -At the sight of Ramon, the _arriero's_ brows had gone up under the roots -of his hair, for, had he wished it, Gordon's Spanish would not have -permitted a full explanation. Now he touched Gordon, pointing. Nodding, -he nipped off a few leaves, then leveled the long Colt, aiming at the -nearest man. A glance to his right showed him the _arriero_ slowly -shoving his rifle-barrel through the leaves. Then, turning again to his -aim, he was just in time to see Lee slash Ramon's bonds. - -The next instant the latter sprang for the rifles. Lee was up and -standing almost in line with the man he had covered. He dared not shoot, -and in the next five seconds, before they could readjust themselves to -the rapid change, the situation had flashed into its final stage--Ramon -had fallen with one revolutionist; the others were rushing at Lee across -the firelit space. - -By that time Gordon had risen. As, standing, he fired from the edge of -the wood a second man fell forward upon his face. The _arriero's_ rifle -cracked sharply, and there remained only Ilarian. Swinging with Lee, -still in his arms, he faced Gordon charging across the firelit space. - -Usually Gordon could be depended upon to keep his head. But Lee's bitter -cry, the sight of her helplessness, combined with the awful strain of -the afternoon, produced in him a berserker rage. Teeth bared in a snarl, -his gun completely forgotten, he seized Ilarian with his naked hands -just as he dropped Lee; threw him with such violence that his feet rose -in the air and he struck shoulders first on the ground. Then, without -even a second glance, he lifted and gathered Lee in his arms. - -Fortunately, the _arriero_ not only kept his wits, but was working them -overtime. As, rolling over, Ilarian pulled and pointed his gun the -_arriero's_ second bullet plumped between his shoulders. - -It is doubtful whether Gordon heard the shot. His face in Lee's hair, -hers hidden in his breast, they remained without looking around even -when the _arriero_ spoke. - -"Warm work, senor!" - -Receiving no answer, he grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose. -"They are all that way--at first," he confided in the stars. "But wait -till the priest ties them so that neither can wriggle without the other. -Wait!" - -A cough also passing unnoticed, he walked over and knelt beside Ramon. -With a heavy shake of the head, he passed to the revolutionists. Three -were dead, but, though unconscious, Ilarian still breathed stertorously. - -"The worse for thee, amigo," the _arriero_ addressed him. "The old senor -Icarza will pay well to do thy killing with his own hands. By sunrise, -manana, I should have thee to him, and then"--he gave a little sinister -nod at the dead--"and then thou wilt be envying these." - -A glance at the lovers having shown them to be, to all intents and -purposes, still alone under the stars, he went off, shaking his head, to -bring up the mules. "Santa Maria Marisima! to think that I, also, was -once so foolish!" - -On his return he gathered up the arms, belts, knives, bandoliers of -cartridges, guns--it has to be written, also stripping the khaki coats -and riding-boots from the dead. "They will serve thee no more after the -old senor finishes," he addressed the unconscious Ilarian, as he tore -off his. - -While he was packing his loot in an orderly and methodical manner on the -mules a murmur of talk rose behind him. But as it was couched in English -he was saved from further reflections. - -"Oh--_dear!_" Lee's exclamations, partially smothered in a rough and -dirty shirt, still conveyed a curious mixture of confidence and fear, -regret, relief, sorrow, and happiness, hope and doubt. "Oh--_dear!_ I -used to be so independent and fearless. Now--I feel so weak." - -"Time you did." A hug mitigated the severity of the comment. "After this -perhaps you will let me do a little of your thinking?" - -"For a while." The shirt choked a little, perverse laugh. "Till I get -over it." - -"Very well, we are going on, right now, to be married in San Carlos." - -"Oh, but--" - -"No 'buts.' We'll take no more chances." - -She hesitated and--gave in. "Oh, isn't it nice to have some one decide -for you?" - -Had the _arriero_ been consulted he could have told a tale. But Gordon -quite believed it. He was raising her face to his when her eyes -distended with a sudden sorrow. - -"Oh, poor Ramon! Whatever are we thinking of?" - -Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the _arriero_ had -finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent -her back into Gordon's arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the -_arriero_ took affairs into his own capable hands. - -"I shall take him home to the old senor, with this wicked one, and tell -him that he died in defense of thee." - -With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better. -"They will never--know," she sobbed, more quietly. "And--at the end--he -was sorry." - - - - -XXXV: WHY? - - -While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the -chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky -that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills. - -"The bandits moved toward the senor Lovell's." He answered. "Praise the -saints! the senoritas are both in El Paso." - -"Then they'll go straight on to Mary's!" The last vestige of color -drained from Bull's face. - -Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle -of foul humanity dribbling down upon the _rancho_. He saw Mary Mills on -the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and -trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating -the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty -dribble swept around her and the child. - -He turned to the agent. "My horse? Did they get him?" - -"No, senor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral." He -pointed eastward. "Come!" - -Half an hour later the _mozo_ shoved a shock head out of the chaparral -in answer to the agent's whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was -on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare -of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed -through his mind. - -In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and -Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden -agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. -But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he -would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end. -At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that -afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a -mountain ahead. - -He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson -to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line -with the widow's _rancho_ his fears crystallized around its slender -column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched -till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in -bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast. - - -Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always -timed Bull's arrival at the _rancho_ with the lowering of the sun. As he -urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow -lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the -ominous cloud had died on the mountain's high shoulder; but, more -ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though -prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the -place. - -The externals were the same--crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny -pastures. At this hour the widow's cattle were usually to be seen -forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now--in all the -wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, -lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills. - -The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the -evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with -purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that -stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that -shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, -Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle -and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then -a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer. - -A wild rush of hope swept his being--to die the next moment when, -rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio's woman. On her knees, hands raised -in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see -or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder. - -She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked -beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull's face. Though -she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that -follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only -the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half -vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections -of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at -him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a -passion of tears. - -At any other time Bull's dominant racial contempt would have caused him -to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his -sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion. - -"Aie!... Aie!" Soon she began to speak. "Aie! the poor senora ... and -the nina ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! -Aie! where were they?" - -A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited -with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man -on the train, to tell the tale in her own way. - -"They came in from all sides, senor." Her hands swept the round of the -hills. "Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, -escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The senora -was at breakfast with the nina in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came -running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White -as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. -But she shook it off, senor, went forward to meet them with smiles and -greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while -she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to -them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of -pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its -paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating -them off with her smiles. - -"'Enter, senores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.' -Thus she spoke them. - -"Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of -beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it -reeked with their evil presence. - -"At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the -sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in -place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so -their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, -soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad -talk, they proceeded to worse--entered her bedroom and the child's, -broke open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing. - -"For that she did not care--not for anything, could she but keep the -child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her -with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon -them. - -"'Get Betty away!' she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to -that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard. - -"Still she had hope--that, being fed and flattered and pleased with -their plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and -went among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and -pinches, she still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with -smiling reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from -her hand, and then--and then--how shall one tell it? - -"They demanded that the senorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At -first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her -'Linda' and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At -last one beast pulled her on to his knee. - -"To me, in the kitchen, came the child's scream and the senora's bitter -cry. 'For the sake of your mothers, senores!' followed by the crash of -furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor. - -"At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at -the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One! -Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went -down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the -ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I -gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward -upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams -of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of -God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?" - -Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she -cowered at Bull's feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame. - -"Go on!" He stooped and shook her violently. "Go on!" - -She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. "I was wrong, senor. -One mercy was granted--death! They murdered them ... murdered them! -Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them--the innocent -woman, sweet child!" - -"Yet you--escaped?" - -"Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was -almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, -they were gone--gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after -they have slain the white heifer of the plains." - -Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his -arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, -blind struggle filled his mind. - -The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in -a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this -horror? "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to -the fourth generation," says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills's -blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and -farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement? -And she--who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout -her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul? -Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration? - -Not in these clear terms did Bull's thought run. Blind anguish kept him -straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he -felt--felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any -doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it. - -While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his -consciousness a sound that rose above the woman's sobbing--the dry -murmur of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. -They were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone -forever beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! -Surely they were gone! Yet--the corruption of the tomb, mold of the -grave, would never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames -they had passed into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains -that he was, born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took -comfort in the thought. - -Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in -upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw -through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills's -face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a -timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then--with deep -thankfulness he realized it--now she would never know! never know how -far he had fallen below his resolves. - -Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did -enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, -was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own -sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they -were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, -he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary -way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his -breast the thought--now she would never know! - -From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, "Why?" He -had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is -merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this -terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in -their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him. -His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds -than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had -utterly failed in its duties to its own--the government that, with the -purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and -loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric -people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies. - -Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward. -Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by -diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern -nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged--across the -Rio Grande. - -"You done it!" His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the -force of his indictment. "Yes, _you_ done it!" - -The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his -attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still -forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he -knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to -supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from -sharing. - -When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the -sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains--and -revenge. - - - - -XXXVI: "IN THE MIDST OF LIFE--" - - -Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night -that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam -of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined -days before obscured by gathering dangers. - -Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his -arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in -their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos -nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the -railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it -had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed -like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a -picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise -counsel of Lee's good friends, the _jefe_ and priest, Gordon had -prevailed. - -"These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own," the -priest had advised. "Los Arboles needs a man's hardness." - -To which the _jefe_ had added his little joke, "Managing thee, nina, -will not be his lightest work." - -No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, -taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican -law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the -wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would -have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church -are on Cupid's side--well, there is no country on earth where his -business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that -shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and -Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, -according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures. - -Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl's -expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon's notice. -Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder. - -"I was thinking of the girl I left down there." She expressed the -feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they -have left their girlhood. "She meant well, but--was _so_ foolish. I was -just wondering if--if--" - -"Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton." He helped her out. "If -she isn't the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of -heaven"--he paused, grinning--"and hell--" - -"You didn't make _me_ suffer, of course!" She flashed up in quite the -old manner. "The way you carried on with that _dreadful_ girl. But there -goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning. -Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to. -Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose -her temper and--What are you laughing at? Don't you _want_ me to -reform?" - -"There! there!" Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second -laugh. "If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I'd--I'd -march you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the -service backward." Quite illogically he went on: "I, too, had a serious -hour with myself. I made up my mind--" - -He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. "Not -to change? Don't dare to say it!" - -Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change -is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion. - -"You won't, will you?" - -He assured her, of course, that he wouldn't--and believed it, no doubt. -So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to -remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they -turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went -with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid -underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and -valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, -midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the -mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on -a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter. - -In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by -sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining -along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in -many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It -looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon's beast dropped -hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still -longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes -Pedro's _jacal_ in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of -ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the _camisa_ and -_calzones_ of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old -fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a -welcoming grin. - -"He's really part of the scenery"--Lee communed aloud with -herself--"almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay. -But, no!" She shook her head. "I don't want any human being here but -ourselves. Oh, I know! We'll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to -Sliver and Jake." - -Neither would she--after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any -commerce with the _jacal_. "It isn't that it's dirty. Old Pedro is as -clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his -housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We'll camp by the stream at the -far end of the valley." - -She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated -a savory stew of _frijoles_ which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it -to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon -commandeered an old shot-gun. - -"What for?" Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his -eye proved him at one with her in spirit. "To kill the meat for our -first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of -any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in -this neck of the woods." - -"That will be fine!" Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not -clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. "The wood at the -end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They're just lovely broiled -over hot coals." - -"Broiled over hot coals?" he teased her. "Wild doves, the symbol of -love? What desecration!" - -"I don't care," she pouted. "One has to eat--and they're awfully good." - -Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down -a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went -after wild pigeon without compunction. - -After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath. - -It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak -had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to -gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches. -First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance -around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a -natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with -a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim. - -"Your turn, Dirty Man," she rallied him. "Go and take your bath." - -When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow -wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and -served the _frijoles_ on golden husks of corn from Pedro's garden. -Nature supplied the other utensils--fingers for forks, their sharp young -teeth for knives, bits of _tortilla_ to scoop up the stew. Both in its -preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first -meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a -dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all -sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to -help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down. - -"Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is _my_ work. You can -watch and smoke." - -Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a -cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation. - -"I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven't tried." The -confession was nullified by a little sigh. "But it always makes me sick. -You don't know how I envy Maria and Teresa!" Lighting it, she took a -couple of small puffs, then passed it on. "I always tried to get Bull -and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own -quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father's den -and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he -went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into -his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so -tobaccery and strong and--_manny_. It gave me the oddest sense of -comfort and protection." - -Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the -attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, -rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few -utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a -squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of -the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really -clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or -relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most -powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so -entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his -eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing -her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he -rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands. - -She came on a little run and thereafter--it was as she had wished it in -her girl's dreams--as far as dawn and dark from the conventional -marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed--the law older than -theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. -In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, -in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink -cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening -song of the insects, its sanctions were recited. - -In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all -things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a -cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, -supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature -to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of -pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the _blase_ modern -viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his -roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of -young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may -never know; and--your real philosopher will admit it--most divinely in -accord with the scheme of things. - -Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, -had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, -her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson -lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars -wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening -vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from -the rest of the world. - - -Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! -"In the midst of one we are in the other," and the friendly night that -wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar -of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles -whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, -incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon -dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It -also lit the march of Gonzales's bandits across the desert. - -Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the -stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary -splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face -and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the -preparation of their breakfast. - -In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on, -of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their -second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the -gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies. -Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee's -knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond -the rim. - -"Look!" - -Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out: -"It's the Millses' beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses! -Quick!" - - - - -XXXVII: THE THREE--AGAIN - - -Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering -knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He -returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she -looked up at his touch. - -"You heard them talking before--before--" - -"Si, senor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them -speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell -them at the border." - -Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the -ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a -voice called out, "Ole, senor!" - -Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes, -weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved -mistress--to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame. -From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father -of the woman. - -"I had thought thee one of those wicked ones." The old fellow slapped -the butt of an old musket. "Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but -by the mercy of God I waited. Si, senor, I saw them go. After I sent up -the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always -the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted -them when they passed; a full score, senor, and more, on their way by -the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the nina, senor? They -did not harm--" - -He stopped, halted by Bull's look, then cried aloud while the tears -coursed down his wrinkled face. "The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and -I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of -the best! I would go after them, senor, those wicked ones; but of what -use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The -biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take -thou my horse." - -Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the -smoldering beacon on the mountain's shoulder before daylight failed. -Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued -to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson -wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull -felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint -stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the -fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to -intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it -that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull -sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary -systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That -pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it, -this peace that quieted his troubled spirit. - -He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt -and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in -his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief. -He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a -clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the -sage. - - -Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had -been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough -to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained -the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of -the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee's note the preceding evening, -Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment's thought he voted -down Sliver's proposal to ride down for Gordon. - -"He'd come in handy. Kin shoot some an' his nerve's all right. But you -jes' kedn't shut her out. Better to leave them where she's safe." - -"That's right," Sliver had added. "An' it 'u'd shore be a shame to break -up their honeymoon." - -Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake -and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on -Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman's -yell issued simultaneously from their throats. - -"Why, you dolgorned old son of a--" Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he -saw Bull's face. "Why, hombre! What--" - -Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark -valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in -those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that -which is denied to speech--the soul agony of a strong man. Given that -blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest. - -"Murdered!... Mother and child!... Burned ... with the house!" - -To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in -readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the -news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the -darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining -a fray in his _riata_. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city -person would have been greatly shocked. - -"The poor damn kid!" - -"Hell, ain't it?" Jake's tone was quite indifferent. - -But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking -lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold, -snake sparkle in Jake's bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient. - -"They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail." After a long -silence he answered Jake's question concerning the raiders. "Must be -nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an'--" - -"They ain't there." Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. "They're--" -He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs. -Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon. - -Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had -weighed down the girl's spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot--for -the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him, -hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look. - -"Why--what--" Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, -their inaction, told all before he spoke. "Gone!--both!--burned with the -house!" Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to -Gordon. Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about -again and ran to Bull. - -"Oh, you poor, _poor_ man!" - -Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee -while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull -gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake -led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to -hear when she began to sob out a broken confession. - -"Oh, I feel--so wicked. While all this--was happening--I--I was--getting -married!" - -"Married?" - -"Yes--to Gordon." She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of -all that had happened since his departure--her abduction, Ramon's death, -Gordon's ultimatum. "He begged so hard--and the padre and the jefe -said--that I ought--and I wanted to, myself--and we were so happy -until--we saw the smoke. And now I--I feel like a criminal." - -"Then you needn't." He patted her shoulder. "The jefe was right. Never -again will you have more need of a man's strength." - -"But? At this time? While--" - -"How were you to know? An' remember how hard _she_ worked and wished to -bring this very thing about. 'Twould have filled her with joy to know -that it had come to pass. 'Deed, Missy, she does know an' is glad at -this very moment." With that mixture of rude faith and humility that -made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: "Sure she knows an' -some day she'll tell you so herself. 'Twon't be for me to hear it. My -kind don't go where she is. But you will, an', mark me, the first thing -she'll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage." - -"Oh, if I thought she would!" - -"Be certain of it, child." The last lights had now gone out on the -highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited -many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed. - -While he talked Lee's sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished. -"That makes me feel better. And _you_? You, too, think I did right?" - -She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. "For what d'you -s'pose I brought him here?" - -"Not to marry _me_?" She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment, -her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl -who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from -the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. "Oh, if I'd -only known it!" She added, with loving illogic, "I'm _so_ glad that I -didn't." - -"That's fine." He patted her head. "It will be easier, now, if you have -to live for a while in the States." - -"_The States?_" she repeated. - -In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson's death--she had enough to -bear--he described the scattering of Valles's army, concluding, "They're -wild against Americans." He nodded at the fire. "The men that did this -are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there." - -"My poor people!" she broke out, in sudden distress. "Gordon! Come -here!" When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried -it again: "Our poor, poor people! They are on their way--the raiders! To -Arboles! We must go--at once!" - -"Too late!" Bull spoke heavily. "Even an aeroplane couldn't get us there -in time." After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others -recent events, he went on: "I came back to bring you and Mary and the -child out. For them it's too late, but you must go at once--you an' your -husband an' Sliver an' Jake." - -"And you?" Lee questioned. - -"I'm going on." The statement in its simplicity carried more -significance than the wildest vow of revenge. - -"Alone?" Lee again demanded. "And you think we'd go slinking home to the -States and leave you to face that band yourself?" - -"It's my quarrel, my work." His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the -darkness. "You are young and have your husband. Your future is all -ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With -Sliver an' Jake to guard you--" - -But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver's voice rose in the -darkness. "An' there's nothing I'd like better 'n to look after -Lady-girl. But I ain't so much of a fool that I don't know the store she -sets by you, Bull, that's been father an' mother to her, now, for nigh -on a year. So it don't go that-a-way. It's me for Arboles while you-all -hit with them for the States." - -"Good enough!" Jake's acid tones trembled through the gloom. "With a -small amendment. You're that young an' foolish, Sliver, it 'u'd be a -shame to cut you off--worse 'n the green grass that goes to the oven. So -it stan's like this--you-all go back; I go on." - -"No, you don't." Gordon's quiet voice interrupted. "At any other time -I'd feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I -could never look my wife"--he felt her hand steal up into his--"I could -never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get -out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border--" - -"They won't--till we all go," Lee broke in. "It's easy to see that -you've all made up your minds to stay--and you'll need me to hold the -horses. We'd better be getting on." - -"But, Missy--" Bull began. - -But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse's hoofs returned -unmistakable answer. - - - - -XXXVIII: FIRE - - -Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee's right, but when the trail -permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded -his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the -mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of -creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail, -the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above -Antonio's _fonda_ when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an -exclamation. - -Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow -which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and -swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them -to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon -it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the -flames roaring through the Arboles _patio_, bursting from doors and -windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows -of adobes. - -"My poor people!" Lee sat her horse and gazed. - -The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality -strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up -in flames--her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects -and _hacienda_ stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of -old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately -connected with her father's memory. Surely a great loss! but if it -flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming -indignation--not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being -destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice, -ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand -such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with -its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver's voice broke in the darkness -behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock. - -"Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain't burn them yard-thick walls." - -"An' we left word for the _ancianos_ to drive the stock into the -mountains," Jake added. "Must ha' b'en cl'ar away long before they got -there." - -"It isn't that." She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper. -"My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they -escaped." As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added: -"There's only one thing left. We must--" - -Bull's heavy voice completed it for her,--"catch 'em before daylight." - -While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose -above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march -the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one -thing--they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock of -_aguardiente_! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep. -And then-- - -His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the -change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black -bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the -yellow walls of the _fonda_. It also restored a little color into the -bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children, -herded together like sheep around its blaze. - -When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy, -apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their -babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a _peon_ who -had run in from Lovell's _rancho_; second, that the _ancianos_ had -driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle -among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust -forward to tell his tale. - -He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with -that _peon_ indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of -raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep. -Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic -stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them -he recognized a _peon_ who had run away to the wars after being whipped -for some grossness by the senor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard -them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast -over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the -renegade's expressions of reassurance. - -"Si, senores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los -Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded -stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for -safe-keeping, 'twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret -pasture in the great Bowl." - -Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed -the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a -vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the -precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be -caught in the same way? Jake's remark expressed their joint conclusion. - -"It 'u'd be a _cinch_!" - -"Horses all tired out now, too," Sliver added. "If anythin' went wrong, -we'd have no getaway. Not that I'd care, but we kain't take no chances -with Lady-girl." - -Bull's word decided. He made his dispositions, sent the youth to sleep -out on the plains and bring early warning of the raiders' movements; -posted other sentries at intervals. Finally, he saw first to the horses, -that they were watered and fed and groomed; then to the serving of a -meal. - -He ate, but even his steady, methodical munching bespoke purpose, the -conserving of strength for his ends. As he sat, after the meal, gazing -into the fire, even Lee failed to discern much difference from his usual -self. But after the others, refugees and all, lay wrapped in their -serapes, dim, muffled figures under the red light of half a dozen fires, -he still sat, a somber figure in black outline against the glow. - -After Lee had cried herself to sleep he sat on. At midnight her -awakening eyes showed him still there. When she awoke again he was -gone--on the round of sentries. He returned before she fell asleep again -and sat on, staring into the fire, an ominous figure fraught with -danger. - - - - -XXXIX: "VENGEANCE IS MINE" - - -From the "hog's back" where Sliver had accidentally discovered Felicia -and the _fonda_, Lee, Gordon, and the Three watched a yellow dust cloud -rolling slowly across the plains. The occasional silver flash that -stabbed it through as the sun struck a saber or bayonet told that it -enveloped the raiders. Three hours ago Sliver had come galloping in from -a reconnaissance with the news of their advance. Instantly the refugees -had fled like frightened quail into the secret places of the hills. -After burying various bottles that contained the liquid abominations -wherewith he burned out the stomachs of his customers, Antonio had -followed. So for two hours the ravine had been untenanted. - -Even after the watchers sighted the dust, an hour passed before it -disappeared in the mouth of the ravine; for, as their few horses were -loaded down with loot, the raiders moved slowly. Another half-hour -dragged by before they appeared, filing like ragged ants up the path -along the silver stream. Sighting the _fonda_, they stopped, hastily -took cover behind some bushes, and held a hurried consultation. When the -file split and began to work its way through the chaparral on each side -of the ravine Jake interpreted the manoeuver. - -"Nobody home, amigos. Fooled this time." - -A hoarse yell presently confirmed his diagnosis. Its note changed almost -immediately to rage and disappointment, and presently a thin coil of -smoke issued from the doorway, followed by a bright flash of flame as -the fire licked up the dry thatch of the _ramada_. Like infuriated ants -the raiders ran next to fire the stables. They were within easy -rifle-shot and Sliver was drawing an experimental bead when Jake knocked -up his rifle. - -"One shot," he replied, to Sliver's grumble, "an' they'll go like a -flock of quail into the chaparral." - -Happening to glance at Bull just then, he nudged Sliver to look. - -On his knees, peering through a bush, the man looked for all the world -like some great animal, bear or black tiger, crouching for its prey. -Under dark brows, his coal eyes burned. Like some huge dog held in -leash, slow shivers coursed through his frame. Always the two had -recognized in him depths of feeling beyond them. The slow shake of the -head that passed between them expressed consciousness of a hurt beyond -their plumbing. They looked quickly away as Bull turned toward them. - -"Time to be moving. They'll be coming presently." - - -An hour later saw them all placed--Gordon in the chaparral at the top of -the trail; Bull, Sliver, and Jake at intervals of quarter of a mile down -the zigzag trail. - -"No shooting as they go down," Bull cautioned them. "Coming back, -they'll be among the horses without a chance to turn." - -The arrangement, while wise, was not altogether to Sliver's taste; he -grumbled to Jake as they moved on down to their places: "Fat chance for -us. He'll pick half of 'em off going up between him and Gordon, then -turn and plug the others. Any maverick that gets by to us will be that -riddled a bullet 'ull slip through him without t'eching." - -"Ain't it coming to him?" Jake scornfully questioned. "He's welcome to -my share--if it's any comfort. But listen, hombre--let me tell you that -the killing of every _revueltoso_ in Mexico ain't a-going to cure his -hurt." - -Leaving Sliver at his post, Jake moved on down, and after he also -disappeared in the chaparral silence spread a warm spell over valley and -mountain; golden, sunlit silence that was emphasized rather than broken -by the wild screech of a hawk. - -From above Gordon looked right down into the amber heart of the Bowl. -Almost beneath him, the _jacal_ rose like a doll's house out of the -vermilion splash of Pedro's ripe peppers. From it the green veining of -the stream ran through the tawny pastures that were spotted with black -dots, the feeding horses. Far down, just where the stream slipped out of -the Bowl, he could see the giant oak that marked their camp; and though -even his strong young eyes were unequal to the distance, imagination -supplied the ashes of their fire, the bed of leaves under the spreading -branches. - -Instantly he began reliving, tenderly reliving that happy day so -absorbed that he forgot for the moment the tragedy that had brought it -to a close. He did not notice a slight rustle in the chaparral nor catch -the gleam of peering eyes. Were it a raider, he had proved an easy prey. -But the eyes were soft; the hand that presently stole out of a bush and -shook his foot was small and white. Whirling, he came face to face with -Lee. - -"What are you doing here?" - -She placed her finger to her lip. "Hush! they are coming! I just -couldn't stand it, up there in the chaparral all alone. So I tied the -horses and--here I am." - -There was nothing that could be done--except to look stern. Reaching, he -pulled her down beside him, shook her a little, then spoiled the effect -by a kiss. Then, lying flat on their stomachs, they kept a joint watch -till the scrape of a hoof, rumble of voices, broke on the trail. - -Peeping cautiously, they saw a motley procession file on to the plateau. -Like the soldiers of Las Bocas, their clothing ran the gamut of the -service uniforms of Porfirio Diaz's army; the silver and gray of -_rurales_, red and blue of the infantry, variations from these of -cavalry and artillery, fatigue linen mixed in varying quantities with -_charro_ and _peon_ costumes. Accentuating this motley, their loose -gross mouths, blunt animal noses, lewd eyes in the midst of faces -swollen by last night's debauch, fully justified Gordon's judgment: - -"Gosh! what a gallows crew!" - -Weary and footsore after two days of heavy marching, neither their -appearance nor their spirits were improved by the fact that half of them -limped. Their voices had been raised in strident altercation. One -fellow's angry complaint carried across to Gordon and Lee. - -"The two gringo senoritas at the Lovell _rancho_, where were they?--fled -to El Paso. At the second we got what?--one woman, a child, and three -horses--and lost three men. At Los Arboles there were to be women, a -score at least, young and pretty; also a gringo girl with golden hair -and a skin of milk? And horses by the hundred, blooded beasts of fine -breeding? What got we?--an empty house! Thou art a pretty leader, -Filomena." - -"Si!" came a second growl. "And the _fonda_? 'Courage, senores,' he says -but two hours ago. 'In the barranca we shall find a _fonda_ with liquors -and a girl, none prettier in all Chihuahua.' And--" - -"Again an empty house!" - -By one and another it was kept up. "We limp like lame cats," the first -man spoke again. "If this business go like the first and there be no -horses--I know of one throat that will be cut." - -"And I of another!" The guide, an ugly, squat _peon_, turned on him with -a snarl. "Was it I that sent up the warning smoke? No? Then fasten your -tongue with your teeth. If you want women, they are to be had at San -Carlos, a few hours away, a fine town untouched by war." - -"Si, more marching," the first grumbler was beginning, when the other -cut him off. He had advanced to the edge of the plateau and stood -pointing down into the Bowl. - -"And horses, say you? There they are--scores! Si, hundreds! enough to -make us all rich when sold at the border." - -Success! the shibboleth of the modern world! Even among these scoundrels -it wrought the customary effect; turned malcontents into enthusiastic -friends. "Bueno!" He who had issued the sinister hint of cut throats was -the first to clap the guide on the back. "Bueno, amigo! thou art a -leader indeed. 'Twas no fault of thine that the white-skinned girl -escaped. I will slit the gizzard of the next that says it." - -On his part the guide swelled and ruffled in the flattering sunlight. "I -told ye. 'Leave it to Filomena,' said I. 'Leave it to him to show ye fat -booty.' Behold!" - -Also he assumed the airs and authority of real leadership. "The horses -we shall need to rope fresh mounts. Hide the stuff in the bushes till we -return. 'Twill be only for a couple of hours." - -Fired by the sight of the horses, the raiders fell feverishly to work -unloading their loot, which--Gordon noted it with satisfaction--was -largely provisions. Then, lameness and blisters forgotten, unaware of -the cold, fierce eyes watching from the bushes, they followed the -horsemen downhill, yelling and hooting, raising the echoes with snatches -of ribald song. - -A thin wisp of smoke above the _jacal_ followed by an explosive flash as -the dry thatch took fire announced their arrival at the bottom. From -above Gordon and Lee saw them move down the valley in a long line that -presently came sweeping back in a half-circle with the horses in its -belly. - -There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts -were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid -vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then -the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single -file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider -sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers -looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and -around the trail's yellow convolutions. - -After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose -to Jake's post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in -the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked -more like "The Python" he appeared in _peon_ eyes. And he had the -serpent's patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle -trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull's -shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward -grumblings as the file rose to him. - -"If 'twasn't for orders," he mentally harangued the first raider that -passed, "your black soul 'u'd be a-busting now on its way to hell!" - -High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes -transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But -his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic -vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine -across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift -of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow -winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a -vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray's "Elegy." In place -of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which -man's imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight -and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for -that peaceful contrast, he felt--felt with savage joy--Death, the grim -angel, hovering above. - -With her girl's strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the -wriggling black line rose up to Bull's station she leaned forward and -broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon's sighting. Yet, -in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a -black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon -drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands. - -And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line -of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain--the beast mouths, -blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in -the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish -spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was -the face of Death itself--the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near. - -In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic -emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles -too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the -bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a -flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when -nothing better offered. - -About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed -below. Instantly Bull's rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its -sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But -the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that -the last two raiders were still below Jake's station. - -He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let -three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the -action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the -world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a -haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for -the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a -fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the -edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a -mad stampede. - -A hoarse yell marked the first raider's realization of his danger. With -spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a -hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and -beast sideways over the cliff. - -Springing up as the mare whirled, Gordon saw laid out directly beneath -the course of the stampede down and around the stony staircases. At -first it stood out clearly as in those cinema pictures of galloping men -taken from a height. Following the first man's cry came the wild yells -of the second and third. One! two! three! he saw them squeezed out over -the cliff; saw them strike the next level and bound off and over on a -longer leap; saw them turn, slowly in midair till the horses showed like -fat slugs above the men; saw the final crash and disappearance in the -chaparral below. But when his glance came back the crystal clearness was -gone, obscured by yellow dust cloud from the bowels of which men and -horses were ejected sideways as the stampede whirled on down. - -Of the thirty raiders, but one had a chance--he who brought up the rear. -But as he turned to run he came face to face with Jake, who had sprung -up to see. Instantly Jake raised his gun, but there came a roar and -rattle of stones and hoofs. Before he could fire the dust cloud -swallowed the man. Three minutes later it rolled down the last night to -the pastures. - -Over the Bowl silence fell again, golden, sunlit silence broken only by -the screech of the hovering hawk. As before, the wind whispered in the -sage, the clouds marched slowly across the blue fields above, the bees -went busily upon their ways; but in the mean time--when the dust settled -there remained, of the two hundred horses and thirty men, only the few -animals that spread out fanwise as they galloped across the level -bottoms. - -With the swiftness, sureness of a lightning stroke in the night it had -come, the doom--so swiftly that Lee and Gordon above, Jake and Sliver -below, could only stand and stare, doubting their eyes. And Bull-- - -The instant the mare turned his mind leaped to the inevitable -conclusion. With a roar, bellow of rage, inchoate, wild as the snarl of -a balked tiger, he threw his hands on high, rifle waving like a reed in -one great fist. Crash! lock, stock, and barrel, it flew in a thousand -pieces as he brought it down on a rock! From the bank he leaped down to -the trail, in his hot mind some mad idea of stopping the rush. But -already the stampede had passed. He ran a few yards, as though to -overtake and pull it back. But it swept on and down beyond his speed. -Stopping, then, arms raised skyward, fists clenched, teeth bared, eyes -glaring in the midst of his swollen, purple face, he stood, a towering -figure of furious despair. - -Into those few minutes were compressed all the agonies he had endured in -the last few weeks--his trial, temptations, failure, bitter -disappointment, tragic grief, crowned by this, the robbing of his just -revenge. Swelling with a sense of vast injustice, the injustice that -created the world on a scheme of struggle and pain, he turned maniacal -eyes to the sky; stood shaking his bunched fists while a terrible -blasphemy rose to his lips. But it never issued. For in the moment that -it seemed his reason must crack there came slipping into his hot mind, -like a cooling breath, the old vision--of Mary and Betty as on that last -night. - -In the sunlight that wrapped the valley, just as in the vast world -loneliness under the quiet stars, he sensed her presence. His arms -dropped, the mad light died. Bowing his dark face in his hands, he shook -again with the throes of silent grief--but only for a short space. -Presently he looked up, the old humility restored, its expression on his -lips. - -"'Twasn't for me. I wasn't fit. 'Twas taken out of my hands." - -Quiet now, he watched the horses careering over the bottoms. When at -last Sliver joined him he gave quiet orders: "Go down, you an' Jake, an' -collect up their guns--an' ammunition. Bring up fresh horses for all of -us an' a couple for the packs. We'll have to light out for the border at -once." - - - - -XL: SLIVER "MAKES GOOD" - - -By the time Sliver and Jake returned the sun hung like a red-hot ball in -the smoke of the horizon. Even if the horses had not been tired, it was -too late to start that night. Accordingly, after loading the raiders' -provisions, they rode on down into the ravine and used the glowing -embers of the _fonda_ for their camp-fire. - -To them, sitting there, by ones and twos and threes the refugees came -straggling in to gather for the night around their own fires. Going from -one to another, Lee and Gordon dealt comfort and advice. They were to -reap the standing corn and sow again for their own use in the secret -places of the mountains. The _hacienda_ cattle they could herd in the -canons of the lower hills. Thus, with plenty of milk for butter and -cheese, corn, and beans, their own chickens, goats, and pigs, they would -be able to live in rude comfort till the coming of peace permitted Lee's -return. - -"The knowledge that they will not suffer makes it easier to bear." - -Lee spoke, looking back at the brown faces enlivened by the ruddy glare -of the fires. But when, next morning, they crowded around her, old men, -women, young girls, and little children, mixing prayers, blessings, and -lamentations with their good-bys, she was less philosophical. She was -still weeping when she looked back at those that had followed her as far -as the mouth of the ravine. - -"Oh, if our government could only see them! Surely they would help." - -Gordon looked for another outburst when, later, they sighted ruined -Arboles from the very spot he and Mary Mills had overlooked it. How well -he remembered it! The walls and courts, _patio_, rainbow adobes, a small -city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun; -the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy -of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far -horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into -the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by -laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. Now, roofless, windowless, its -blackened walls upreared in the midst of a wide, blurred smudge. Yet -though the contrast brought stinging tears to her eyes, Lee took it -calmly. - -"What does it matter? It can be rebuilt. But there are other -things"--her voice lowered and trailed away--"that can never be -replaced." - -They were both sad and sick at heart. Yet youth may not permanently be -cast down. When, riding on, they left the smoke-blacked ruin behind them -and passed from the dreary waste of burned pasture into golden plains -she began restoration. A native carpenter could replace every loved -beam; rebuild the massive old furniture just as it was. The _peones_ -would lime-wash the exterior in its usual rainbow color! Also, -restoration would give opportunity for remodeling and improvement. - -As she ran on Gordon sensed another motive; perceived that she was -striving to draw Bull out of his sorrow. Not a plan that did not include -him! A great fireplace, for use during the rains, was to have a -comfortable settle at one side, on which the Three could lounge and -smoke while basking in the blaze. Each was to have his own room. Thus -and so! Nor was her prattle without effect. Always sensitive where she -was concerned, Bull divined her motive, and, albeit with an effort great -as a physical strain, he responded, listened, and nodded acquiescence, -occasionally forced a smile. - -Only Sliver was fooled. "Say," he remarked to Jake, who rode with him in -the rear, "did you allow she'd have taken it so light?" - -But Jake, the keen, discerning critic, quickly opened his eyes. "Take it -light, you ----! ----! ----! ----!" The epithets, if printed, would -scorch a hole in the page. "Kain't you see she's grieving her little -heart out? She's doing it all for Bull." - -At any other time one of those epithets would probably have produced a -retort that would have tumbled Jake out of his saddle. But, -conscience-stricken, Sliver accepted all. With humility that was almost -pathetic, he actually put into words feeling that was, for him, quite -subtle. "'Tain't that I'd set in jedgment on Lady-girl, on'y--I reckon -it's so with all of us--I jes' kain't bear to see her say or do anything -that don't jes' fit." - -After a pause he went on: "About these plans o' her'n? If there warn't -no revolution, an' we ked stay along here without a break, an' they'd -destroy all the licker in the world an' forgit the art of making it, I -don't know but that we might live up to 'em. But I'm telling you, -hombre, it's been awful wearing an' I jes' know what a spell in El Paso -'ull do for me--I'll be that swinish I'll never dare to come near her -ag'in." - -When Jake had admitted like feelings Sliver continued: "Sure, under them -conditions, licker an' its makers being, so to say, put on the hog-train -an' run off the aidge of the earth, I'd hev' one chanst to make good. -But as 'tis, an' seeing that she's now settled with a fine young husband -an' kin get along very nicely, I'm sorter allowing that El Paso 'ull let -me out." While his eyes blinked guiltily and his lips quivered with -anticipatory thirst, he concluded, "Sure I'm that dry 'twon't take much -temptation for me to tell my troubles to a barkeep an' have him drown -'em in drink." - -"Nor me," Jake seconded. "Besides, my fingers is jes' itching to get -into a game." - -"Drink, cards, flat broke--back to rustling." Sliver laid down the law -of their being. "With me it runs like, the A-B-C." - -"I drink, you drink, he drinks, we drink," Jake chanted it _sotto voce_. -"If folks wasn't so onreasonable a feller might make an honest living. -But the best tinhorn that ever turned a card from the bottom is bound to -make a slip, an' when he does--whoosh! if he's lucky enough to make his -getaway, rustling's all that's left." - -"Bull?" Sliver nodded at the broad back ahead. "D'you allow he's a-going -to stay put?" - -Jake's shake of the head mixed doubt with concern. "If we meet up with -any Mex--we'll never get him away. He'll run amuck among 'em." - -Sliver's reckless eye lit with a fighting gleam. "An' the country's jes' -lousy with _revueltosos_? Hombre, it's a cinch! Not that I'd want it," -he hypocritically added, "Lady-girl being along. But if we do chance on -a few--hum! what's the exchange, jes' now, in Valles's money? Seven to -one, heigh? Well, we've three rifles apiece, counting the extras on the -pack-horses. One man with three rifles is as good as two men. Twice four -of us makes eight. At current exchange, one gringo for seven Mex, we -orter account for fifty-six." - -"There or thereabouts," Jake agreed. "But, as you say, Missy being -along, it's up to us to dodge 'em." - -"Five days?" Sliver hopefully repeated. "We'd jes' as well look out for -trouble." - - -Not till the morning of the third day did the "trouble" loom up over the -horizon. - -To avoid raiders along the railroad, Bull laid a course that would -strike the American border a hundred miles or so east of El Paso. -Confirming his judgment, they had seen during the first two days only a -few _peon_ herders, who scampered like rabbits at their approach. But -while it made for safety, the course he had laid out also carried them -away from water, the first necessity of desert travel. - -From the Los Arboles pastures they had passed, first, into a sparse -grass country dotted with _sahuaros_; thereafter into sage desert -sprinkled with limestone boulders and bounded by arid hills of the same; -a dry, inhospitable land, lifeless, without sign of human habitation, -its heated silence unbroken by the cry of animal or bird, tenanted only -by the dreary yucca that threw wild arms about like tortured dwarfs. -Toward the middle of the second day they had been forced to head almost -due west in search of the water that was to be had only near the -railroad. - -Dusk was falling when they--more correctly, the horses--found a small -_arroyo_. It was so late, and the animals tired, and in order that they -might drink their fill Bull took a chance and camped by the water. They -did not light a fire. They ate cold food in darkness. Before dawn, too, -they were in the saddle, by sunrise had placed nearly ten miles between -them and the water which, just there and then, was another name for -danger. As a matter of fact, Bull had not expected to get it without -fighting. He had not yet ceased marveling at their luck when the -"trouble" showed up in form of a line of _sombreros_ behind the peak of -a limestone ridge--unfortunately, to the eastward. - -Jake saw them first. At his sharp hiss Bull looked, and, driving the -pack-horses ahead, rode headlong for the next ridge. Looking back as -they rode, Gordon saw the line of _sombreros_ rise in correspondence as -the land fell off. Soon a head showed; then, almost simultaneously, the -ridge bristled with mounted men, a hundred at least, in bold relief -against the sky-line. - -"They've seen us!" - -As he called it a yell, strident, raucous, pierced the clatter of their -galloping hoofs. "Gringos! Mueran los gringos! Kill them!" - -A volley followed. But, fired from the saddle in movement, the bullets -chipped only a few twigs off the scenery. Scattering shots, too, flew -overhead; but, intent on overtaking them, the Mexicans in the main -wasted no time in shooting. They were only a couple of hundred yards -away when the four men dropped from their horses behind the crest of the -ridge. - -Differing speed had strung the pursuers out in a scattering column, and -Sliver grinned his delight at the arrangement. "Like bowling at the -county fair. Miss one, you've still a chance at the next behind. Set 'em -up again!" he yelled as, following their volley, two men and a horse -plunged forward on the ground. - -"A bit lower, Son," Bull quietly admonished Gordon. "Aim at the jine of -man an' horse. That gives you a seven-foot target." - -"One cigar, one baby down!" - -Sliver's second yell marked the fall of two more horses and another -man--shot by Bull out of his saddle. Aiming and firing with the deadly -accuracy bred by years of just such fighting against more sagacious -foes, they dropped the leaders as fast as they came on; in three minutes -had drawn a dead-line of men and horses across their front. And that -deadly practice told. Brave enough, after their lights, the raiders were -not accustomed to such shooting. In the revolutionary wars their own -practice, like that of their opponents, was to spring up out of a -trench, yell "_Viva Mexico!_" fire in the enemy's direction, and drop -back again, trusting to the god of war to find a billet for the bullet. -Turning, they raced back for the opposite ridge, spurred on by the -galling shooting that emptied two more saddles. - -Bull's black glance following them with longing that confirmed Jake's -diagnosis--he would have "run amuck among 'em" if left to himself. The -more steadily, perhaps, for his deadly thirst to kill, he had aimed and -fired with automatic precision. Withal, he had found time to note -Gordon's steady shooting. - -"You done fine, lad," he commented. "If there was only ourselves, I'd be -in favor of carrying it to 'em. But"--his glance went to Lee, who was -holding the horses--"we'll have to fall back. They've had their lesson -an' ain't a-going to try any more fool charges. Now they'll try an' -flank us. While Sliver an' Jake hold 'em, we'll run back to the next -ridge." - -But Gordon, flushed with his taste of battle, rebelled. "What's the -matter with me staying? You fellows care for me like three hens -scratching for an orphan chicken. I'm tired of this sheltered life." - -"'Sheltered life'?" Communing with himself, Jake glanced at the grisly -dead-line. "'Sheltered life,' an' him with two stretched out down -there." - -"Comes o' being married," Sliver added. "No married man has a right to -run with batchelders." - -"That's right," Jake approved. "It's up to you to look after your wife." - -"Well?" Gordon protested. "How can I do it better than by staying here?" - -"What?" Sliver looked scandalized. "Us take a chanst of her being -widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree! -Git out." - -"Come on, Son, you're delaying the game." Bull had already joined Lee. -His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug, -Gordon obeyed. - -The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others -had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. "Bet you -they've split already an' are moving around us. Now if we do the same, -keeping well out of sight, we'll mebbe get another crack at 'em." - -And so it was. When, after a half-mile detour through limestone and sage -chaparral, the halves of the raiders' party showed in the open two -rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless -horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From -the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back -and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the -nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an -occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead. - -While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its -southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like -an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge -behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But -with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in -unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely -upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only -roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would -bring forth no new enemy. - -Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut -the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered -more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an -impassable barrier, forcing a detour. Worst of all, the denser growths -permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver, -midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than -two hundred yards away. - -"If 'twas on'y black powder they was using," Sliver bitterly complained, -"we'd stan' some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their -smoke." - -"You're onreasonable," Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting -from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los -Arboles: "In order that these here bandits kin exercise the 'sacred -right of revolution to reg'late their own internal affairs' your Uncle -Samuel has kindly supplied 'em with the latest smokeless cartridge. -Thanks to his benevolence, some one's going to get hurt pretty soon." - -He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they -evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down -Sliver's horse. Hanging on to Jake's stirrup leather, he made the next -ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load -abandoned. - -"An' this is on'y the beginning." Jake continued his remarks from the -next ridge. "The railroad's not far away, an' as I remember the country -hereabouts, she runs right out in the open, with nary a snitch of cover -for over twenty miles. There'll be nothing to stop 'em from shooting us -down by volleys at long range. So it all boils down to this--some one's -got to hold 'em at the next good stand while the others make their -getaway." - -They had been carrying two rifles apiece. Now Sliver quietly -appropriated Jake's extra weapon. "With three rifles I orter be good for -two hours." - -"When I said 'some one'"--Jake quietly repossessed himself of the -weapon--"I naterally allowed his name was Jake Evers. Git! before I bust -you over the head." - -"If 'twasn't for them"--Sliver's hard glance went out to the -chaparral--"there's nothing I'd like better 'n to take time to rub your -long hoss face in the dust." - -The threat, however, produced from Jake only his wolf grin. "You damned -fool! D'you know what's going to happen to the man that stays behind? -He's a-going to be what the society columns call 'the piece de -resistence' at a Mexican barbecure. There ain't a thing in the line of -torture that them bandits won't do to you." - -"You ked never stan' it." Sliver displayed great solicitude. "You're -getting along, Jake, an' your nerve ain't what it used to be." - -"You've said it." Jake's cold eye warmed. He placed a friendly hand on -Sliver's shoulder. "You're dead right, Son. I'm getting on. What's more, -I'm that dyed-in-the-wool with deviltry 'twon't hurt anybody when I -pinch out. But you're young yet. You'll--" - -"--hit El Paso an' go straight to the devil. You know it darned well. -We'll gamble for it." He spat on a pebble and threw it up. "Wet or dry, -which? Wet! I win!" - -"Jest my luck!" Jake's complaint was sincere as though, instead of death -or torture, life and fortune had been the hazard. "I don't have no -chance at all except with cards. What did I wanter go an' do that for, -anyway, an' me with a deck right here in my pocket?" - -"Too late!" Sliver pressed his triumph. "Now git!" - -But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the -stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon -were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it -loomed even more inaccessible. - -"'Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the -middle." - -Sliver's glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the -ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. "Don't tell -Lady-girl--that is, not jes' now. Let her think I'll make my getaway to -the northward. But some day, after she's safe in El Paso, you kin tell -her--that Sliver was on'y too damn glad to give his life for her'n." He -went on, dreamily: "'Course I knew it 'u'd be all off after I'd hit the -city. But I'd sorter thought, now an' then, that if the rangers didn't -get me too quick, some day I'd come back to Arboles, when her kids was -about hip-high, an' teach 'em to ride an' shoot. But that was jes' a -dream." - -Jake's glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the -_revueltosos_, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver's request -might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other -trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he -could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone. - -"Funny, ain't it? But that's just what I'd often thought myself. Sure -I'll tell her--if them devils don't down me on the next run. They're -damn close now, and they'll be up here before we're half-way across. -Against that limestone front we'll make some mark, an' with fifty of 'em -cracking at us it 'ull be the luck of hell if they don't down one or -both." - -Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the -boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering -behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks -or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless -scramble up the last steep two found their mark--one through Sliver's -knee, the other dropped Jake's horse. - -Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of -his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried -him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a -full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain -traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see--not the tracks; it -was too far away for that--a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine. -Bull and Gordon still lay answering the _revueltosos'_ fire. But Sliver -and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in -which the dead horse lay out of sight. - -"Hey!" Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. "Let 'em go! -You'll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I'm hurt. You -kin take my horse; on'y lift me down first an' prop me up among the -rocks where I kin lie comfortable an' pump a gun." - -Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his -rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well -and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him, -painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride -with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands, -shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring -raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the -memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other -beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends; -all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound -the "Three Bad Men of Las Bocas" closer than brothers--all this combined -in an emotion that revolted at desertion. - -"My _God_, hombre!" he broke out in protest. "I kain't leave you here, -wounded, to fall in the han's of them wolves!" - -"You kain't do nothing else!" Hard eyes flashing, Sliver went on: -"Didn't we gamble, jest now, for who was to stay? An' didn't I win? Now -you're trying to renig?" As he noted the sweat standing out on Jake's -brow, he went on more quietly: "Look at it sensible. What ked you-all do -with a wounded man? You'd on'y sign Lady-girl's death warrant. And don't -worry about them wolves. They ain't a-going to light no fires on my -belly nor burn my feet. If I don't get done up in the scrap--the last -bullet will be for myself." - -Also he turned an adamant face to a proposal that Jake should stay too. -"No, hombre, it's still over a hundred miles to the border, an' they -need you. There's nothing left for you but to take my horse an' git." - -It had all been said and done without strain, effort, or -self-consciousness; was entirely the expression of his hardy, careless -soul that had never known the vice of self-pity. But when Jake still -stood, his long, lean face working lugubriously in his attempts to hide -his grief, Sliver did that which, for him, was a miracle in -divination--entered into and felt the pain of another soul. - -"Oh, shore, hombre!" His face lit up with sympathy. "You orter be glad. -Ain't it better to die clean, this-a-way, than to choke slowly at the -end of some ranger's rope? Go on, now, an' catch up to 'em an' keep 'em -moving till night. With the least bit of luck, you'll pull through all -right." - - -As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver's -consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee -was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake's -departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; _i.e._, to -inflate to the limit the current exchange of one _gringo_ for seven -_revueltosos_. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark, -addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake -had left at his elbow. - -"Gosh, but I'd like a drink!" - -His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. "You're -going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You've taken your last." - -Pulling his Colt's .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle. -"Handy for the funeral." He uttered a second grim chuckle. - -The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he -lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge--so quiet that a -lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully -away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent -history so much firing had invariably brought food. - -From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly -rifles picked them off, the _revueltosos_ had learned caution, only -advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake -had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, the -_revueltosos_ remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple of -_sombreros_ rose cautiously out of a clump of sage. - -"Stuck up on sticks." Sliver criticized their wabbly motion. - -After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly -broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into -the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of -sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he -draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the -_revueltosos_ that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied -the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses -and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two -more as the _revueltosos_ raced back over the opposite ridge. - -"Six added to three I got makes nine!" Sliver grunted. "A few more an' I -kin afford to cash in." - -He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he -noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his -satisfaction. - -"You ain't a-going to try an' pass through me ag'in," he addressed the -invisible foe. "An' you ain't going to leave me here. It'll take you an -hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with -night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you--" - -The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series -designed to keep the _revueltosos'_ attention upon himself, and when, -half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep -face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded. - -"They reckon we're all here, trying to stick it out till night," he -correctly interpreted the movement. "It 'ull take 'em another half-hour -to find out." - -A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the -brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face -of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots -in both directions along the ridge. - -"Not that I'm expecting to bag any of youse," he addressed the unseen -enemy. "But just to slow you up a bit an' let you know I'm here. When -you get there"--his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that -commanded his post on both sides--"good-by an' _good_ night." - -Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to -wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver -stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he -counted each minute, each second in yards--the hundreds, scores of yards -Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day -in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. -While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched -slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge -oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed -neither fear nor softening in Sliver's face when, from the spot he had -long noted, a rifle spoke. - -It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks -about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that -time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff -of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many -years claimed the stakes. - -He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched -arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights, -his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out. - -Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low -sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child. - - - - -XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE "EXCHANGE" - - -By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being, -whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had -withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired -for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth -while to inquire. - -"_Him?_ Oh, he's back there a-holding 'em off while we gain a spell." - -Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not -altogether relieve her anxiety. "But--how will he find us again?" - -Jake's shrug was fine in its indifference. "He'll play a lone han', -Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he'll -likely beat us to it." - -"You really think so?" - -"He'll be there to meet us." - -Jake's tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not -deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of -the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the -knee--he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, -explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the _revueltosos_ came out -in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the -ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, -explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter's slow shake of the -head, signaled then that all was over. - -While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the -sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp -black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose -from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid -his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all -night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along -the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when -they began the fight that morning. - -The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range -glasses at the dark smoke plume. "Enjine an' five cars." - -He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter's keen sight the -lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle -on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay -_rebozos_ told they were mostly women, and that told all. "Nobody there -but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that's chasing us." - -"A hundred miles to El Paso," Jake spoke. "Three days' horseback? Three -hours with that old mogul?" - -"Golly!" The idea fastened on Gordon. "Couldn't we?" In place of their -present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past -as they sped northward in the engine. - -"On'y women and wounded?" Jake repeated it, musingly. - -"Dark in half an hour?" Bull added: "They kedn't tell us from their own. -'Course we should lose the horses." With his accustomed caution he read -the reverse of the shield. "If anything went wrong--we'd be left afoot -on the desert." - -"No worse than we are," Jake argued. "These beasts have been running -sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to -the mountains we're not sure of feed nor water--an' still a hundred -miles from the border." - -"But Sliver?" Lee protested. "We can't leave him." - -She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind -a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and -steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a -good end. "The last thing he tol' me, Missy, was not to wait. ''Twould -hinder me an' hinder you-all. I'll make my run alone.'" - -"Very well." Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that -her boy would be safer under her own eye. "Very well, but I _do_ wish he -were here." - -Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither -spoke. - -While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. "It 'ull be up to -you an' Missy," he told Gordon, "to take care of the engineer while Jake -an' me stan' off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you -pitch the stuff aboard." - -The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its -warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some -were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths -of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the -scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a -_revueltosos'_ train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their -knees at the _metates_, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all -gossiping at their work. Here and there a man's face showed in the fire -glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his -presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the -railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were -stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up -their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man -raised a gun, and as Bull's rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged -headlong from the top of the car to the ground. - -Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the -mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from -Gordon's gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. -Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with -Lee's gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their -stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots -along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened -wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward. - -The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman's shovel. "Here's -where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions." - -Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch -the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he -shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual -caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable -information with the muzzle of his gun. - -His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of -the speeding engine across the cab. "He says the half of Valles's army -is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what's left -he's making a las' stan' north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the -country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to -supply the new base!" The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. -"Hooray! the line's open clean to the border! He don't know of any -trains being run to-night! Thinks we'll have a clear track!" - -Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine -came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section -gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown -faces. - -They suggested Bull's question, "Ask him if there's any revueltosos on -the way." - -"At La Mancha!" Jake yelled back. "About thirty miles this side of the -border!... Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!" - -The _brigada_ Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of -Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull's dark face. His big hands -clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained -control of his voice. - -"Does he allow we kin run through there?" - -Jake nodded. "If we douse the headlight and race by afore they have time -to block us." - -Looking back, just then, at Gordon, now stripped to his undershirt and -growing sootier every minute, Lee heard the answer. She did not, -however, give it much thought. The hills and rocks that took on queer -shapes in the dim light of a rising moon, giant _sahuaros_ that went -slipping past like huge ghosts, the occasional fires and lights, -glimpses of strange brown faces, the rush and roar of the engine -speeding through mysterious night, held her senses. Yet it stuck in her -mind, came popping out when, as the engine rounded a sharp curve, the -headlight beam struck full on a sheaf of glittering wires. - -"Oh!" she called out in sudden alarm. "We ought to have cut the wires!" - -It was a vital error. Gordon's whistle expressed their joint dismay; but -Jake, with his intense practicability, recovered first. "Well, what's to -do--stop an' cut them?" - -Bull shook his head. "Too late! We've been running over an hour. Nothing -left but to take a chanst." - -Jake nodded. But presently he spoke again. "Chanst? If they pull up a -rail an' ditch us at La Mancha, I'd hardly call it a chanst with half of -the brigada Gonzales shooting us up from all around. We'd be pickled for -keeps." - -During their "rustler days" it had always been Jake's craft that pulled -them out of tight places. Habit held Bull silent till, after he had -spoken to the engineer, Jake went on: "He says the track runs two per -cent. down into La Mancha. We kin shut off steam an' pussy-foot it the -last few miles. So here's the dope. We drop you-all"--his glance took in -the others--"a mile this side of the station, give you two hours to go -around, then shoot ahead. If we get through, you-all strike a light an' -we'll stop and pick you up. If we don't--we don't. But you'll be less 'n -thirty miles from the border an' have all night to make your getaway." - -"But--" - -Gordon's objection, however, was nipped by Bull. "It goes." - -Lee, however, was not so easily silenced. Climbing down, she crossed the -wabbling cab with unsteady steps and caught Jake's arm. "Oh, don't take -the risk. We'll abandon the engine. Come with us!" - -Looking down into her face, Jake's bleak eyes were almost soft. He -gently patted her hand. "Now don't be jumping at conclusions, Missy. We -need the enjine to go on, but I ain't a-going to commit suicide. If the -tracks are blocked we'll back right off. Then I'll take to the bushes -an' follow you round." - -With that she had to be content. But, realizing the danger, she climbed -up and sat beside him while the mogul rolled and racked and plunged -forward through the night. She was still sitting there when, an hour -later, a headlight flashed up far away. - -"They've wired ahead!" Bull yelled across the cab. "Make him stop, Jake! -We'll take to the bushes here." - -"Oh! now you come with us!" Lee cried. - -But Jake's answer wiped out her happiness. "No, Missy, I'll pull 'em -along for a few miles while you-all make your getaway afore I drop off." - -Already the throttle was closed. Slowing under the brakes, the mogul -glided to a stop. Leaping down, Gordon caught the provisions, -ammunition, and rifles as Bull threw them down. Meanwhile Lee stood -looking up at Jake with wide, distressed eyes. - -"Come on, dear!" Gordon called up from below. - -"No time to waste." Bull touched her shoulder. - -Still she stood. "Oh, I hate to leave you. _Do_ come!" - -"Oh, shore!" Jake laughed, patting her cheek. "I'll jine you in a few -hours--or at El Paso, if I miss you here." - -Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the -least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed -beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her -hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his -cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon's arms. - -Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer -threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to -glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips -had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some -reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him -in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would -never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames. - -The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before -he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant -waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning -spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught -by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer. - -"What are you grinning at?" - -The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his -seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake. - -"The trouble with you, Alberto, ain't that you Mexicans are a dirty, -lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you're too plumb ignorant to -know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you -call a face there ain't a gleam to show you're sensible of the honor -you've jest been paid. You don't know it, Alberto, an' you probably -never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten -country 'twouldn't come near it. If I don't blow the top of your head -off during the next hour--which I likely will--you'll be able to tell it -to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they're -smart they won't believe you. But it's the closest to fame you'll ever -get, so play it for all it's worth. Now listen, Alberto"--he shook his -finger in the engineer's frightened face--"if you ever expect to hand it -down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to -business." - -Delivered in English, the harangue flew high over the Mexican's head. -But it did Jake lots of good. Having, as it were, palliated his shameful -emotions, he followed his own advice and turned to the business in hand. - -"How far is that enjine, Alberto?" He poked the question in with his -gun. - -"Five miles, senor." - -"Jest an enjine?" - -"No, senor, it rides too steadily. It draws two cars; no more or it -could not take the grade at this speed." - -"How long afore they catch us?" - -"Ten more miles, senor. They travel two to our one." - -"All right, slow up a bit." - -With hollow clank of drivers the mogul moved on at slackened speed until -less than half a mile intervened. It was running, of course, reversed, -and across the intervening space the headlights stared. When, obedient -to Jake's order, the throttle was thrown wide again the two engines ran -like giant insects through the night, one in chase of the other, -thundering across bridges, whizzing around curves, shooting through -cuts, chimneys spitting smoke and flame, headlights flashing defiance -like fiery eyes. - -All the while Jake timed the distance. "Cut her off a notch," he ordered -when the mogul began to gain. "I wanter draw 'em on as far as I kin." - -But out of the dim smoke that trailed behind the pursuing engine broke, -just then, a series of red flashes in furious staccato. The drumming -reports were drowned in the roar and clank of the racing engines; but -the hail of bullets that rattled and glanced from the mogul's side was -unmistakable. - -"Machine-guns!" Jake exclaimed. "Chuck her into high, Alberto!" As, -under a full head of steam, the engine picked up and ran through the -night like a frightened girl, he added: "Sheer accident, they hit us, -anyway. They kain't do it again." - -Proving his words, the next burst of firing went wide. Only one bullet -struck the cowcatcher, and, leaping like a horse from the spur, the -mogul launched in dizzy flight down grade; had drawn two miles ahead by -the time she took the next sharp curve. - -"Hold her at that," Jake ordered. - -But again he had failed to reckon with the wires, which, after blocking -their advance, now cut off retreat. Shortly thereafter came a flash of -light as the engine shot from a cut through the first of the series of -stations they had passed on their way up. - -In accordance with the inscrutable law which governs the location of -Mexican stations, it stood a half-mile from the little adobe town that -dragged its unclean, brown skirts across the tracks. If the inhabitants -thereof had been content to obey telegraphed orders to build an obstacle -and let it go at that, the mogul would probably have gone into the ditch -without a second's warning. But, desiring to see the smash, they had -lighted a huge fire alongside the tracks, and under its glare the pile -of ties, earth, and stones stood out plain as by day. Wheels grinding, -blue sparks shooting from the sanded rails, the mogul stopped within a -hundred yards. - -After he had closed the throttle and thrown on the brakes the engineer's -eye had gone to the cab door. Then it switched to the ugly, black muzzle -of Jake's gun. Releasing the brakes, he reversed and opened the -throttle. - -A sputter of musketry had followed the first yell of disappointment that -went up from the rabble of _peon_ watchers. Fired from ancient pieces, -however, the bullets fell short or rebounded like peas from the mogul's -sides. Picking up her stride, she outran their feeble pursuit in a -hundred yards. - -It was then that the engineer's voice rose in protest: "But, senor, we -shall run into the other train! Mira! Mira! it is now only a mile away!" - -Jake's eye measured the distance. Then, in dry soliloquy that, even if -it had not been couched in English, would still have gone over the -other's head, he spoke. "Do you know what a maquina loca is, Alberto? -You don't? You s'prise me." Scared out of his small wits, the poor devil -had not even answered. "It's the one great invention your pais has -produced. 'Twas first used by Mr. Orozco shortly after he graduated from -a mule's tail to be commander-in-chief of Madero's army. He designed it -for the extirpation of Huertistas that got to tagging after him like -these gents is trailing us. 'Twas very simple. He'd load up half a ton -of dynamite on an enjine cowcatcher an' turn her loose with the throttle -wide open jest where she'd catch a troop-train in a blind cut. Mighty -effective, it was, too. Some o' them Huertistas was so elevated above -their normal they hain't finished raining down yet. Of course we're shy -on the dynamite. But a forty-ton mogul careering along at sixty miles an -hour ain't to be despised. Anyway, we'll try it. At this gait we orter -catch 'em in the cut beyond the station. Hit her up." - -While talking he had not been idle. First he laid his rifle by the cab -door, ready to jump; then slipped over his head and shoulder the -bandoliers of cartridge-clips Gordon had left for him. Meanwhile the -Mexican's frightened glance swung between him and the tracks which were -slipping faster and faster under the mogul. Beyond the station a faint -glow, reflection from its headlight, marked the entrance of the -_revueltosos'_ train into the cut. In his mind the engineer's horror, -burning, mangling, scalding, fought for supremacy with his fear of -Jake--and won. Selecting the moment that the latter's two hands were -engaged with the bandoliers, the engineer crossed the cab in one leap -and plunged down and out. - -"You son of a gun!" Grabbing his rifle, Jake jumped after. - -But in the few seconds that elapsed between their leaps the mogul -carried Jake a hundred yards. A second to a bump and each roll as he -struck rebounded and turned over and over lost more time. A few more -were required before he picked himself up. Then his glance went after -the mogul, now shooting like a comet toward the cut from which the -_revueltosos'_ train had just emerged. In the glare of the headlights -each vividly illuminating the other, like two dragons breathing fire and -smoke, they flew at each other's throats. - -Came a yell! a crash! Then darkness, hazy with steam, wiped out all but -screams and agonized curses. - -"_God!_" It burst from Jake. "If Bull could on'y have been here!" - -Both while in the air and rolling over and over he had an impression -that he must have jumped almost on top of the engineer. But now, looking -around, he became aware--first, that he was standing directly opposite -the station; second, of a dark figure in the lighted doorway; third, of -a flash, pistol-crack, of a bullet singing by his ear; lastly of a -baker's dozen of other dark figures rushing at him from all around. - -In a pinch--how well Sliver and Bull had known it!--Jake could always be -counted upon to do the unexpected. Behind him stretched an open, moonlit -plain where he would be easily shot down or overtaken. Grabbing the bull -by the horns, he rushed straight at the figure in the doorway. Into its -dark midst went the butt of his rifle. Bang! he slammed the door, a -heavy, three-inch affair of oak that fitted against stone jambs and -lintels; was secured by iron swing-bars. As he dropped these in place -the panels quivered under the impact of many shoulders. Leaving the man -he had overthrown writhing and holding his middle, Jake crossed quickly -to the window. - -In readiness for just such contingencies, its iron grill had been set -out six inches to permit a raking fire along the wall, and shooting at -ten feet into the convulsive movement at the door Jake's first shot -dropped a man. As the others dodged around the corner a yell told of -another wounded. - -A smaller window commanded that side, and, crossing over, Jake raked the -fugitives in their flight with a galling fire till the last dim figure -disappeared in the brush. Then, after he had noted with satisfaction -that the window rose high above the ground, he turned to his captive, -who still lay groaning on the floor. - -"Git up!" - -Steel eyes and ugly pistol muzzle enforced the order. - -The man, a fat Mexican with a yellow, bilious face and small, beady -eyes, arose. "If you will only let me live, senor--" - -"Shut up!" Jake cut him off. "You're the station agent?" - -"Si, senor!" - -"What's in those boxes?" - -"Powder, senor, giant powder that was brought in by revueltosos from a -gringo mine. It is to be shipped on the train to-morrow to Valles, who -will have it made into bombs for use in his trenches." - -"Thought so." Jake grinned at the pile of boxes. "'Tain't no trick to -tell gringo dynamite. The markings fairly scream, 'Made in America!' So -Valles is going to make bombs of it? Well, well!" - -"Senor, you will--" - -"Now, Alberto, cut that out." Having thus transferred the cognomen from -the engineer to his present captive, Jake went on. "That precious -existence o' yourn depends altogether upon your paisanos outside. The -longer I hold 'em off the longer you live. Get it? Bueno! Now trot over -to the window. The second you see any one--yelp! If you don't--" He -tapped his gun significantly. - -The agent thus placed, he looked around the room, The blackened stone of -the walls told that it had already been burned in one or other of the -revolutions. He grinned again, noting that the original roof had been -replaced with laminated iron. "Kain't roast us out, anyway, Alberto." - -On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a -small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a -few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall. -Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent -watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid -block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window. - -Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight. -Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of -dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry, -command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst, -then dropped it again. - -"'Tain't square, shooting wounded." But there was no pity in his eyes. -His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: "I'd like to know jest -how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who's -here!" - -It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick -eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred -yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the -chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer. - -"Afraid I've spoiled another of your colleagues." He turned to the -agent. "They ain't very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It's -a cinch they're not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an' -I simply kain't waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep -watch, Alberto." - -Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and -laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after -game Jake's brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and -tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He -could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing -with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a -frontier bunk-house. - -In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face -loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held -him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff -of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he -watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the -gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having -compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung -poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak. - -Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and -looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A -stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing -in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled -in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak -now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded. - -Lee's face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her -arms around his neck, when he murmured, "On'y thirty miles to the -border, a clean getaway." - -Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range -that marked Sliver's last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face -turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small -nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness -settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a -sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the -shutters, he returned to the table--not any too soon; for as he sat down -and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range, -the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters. - -Through all, as a rat in a corner might watch a cat, the agent had -watched him with deadly fascination. From the north window where he -stood it was but a step to the door. Apparently Jake did not notice him -take it, for he did not look up--even when the agent's hand touched the -upper bar. - -"If I was you, Alberto, I'd come away from there." - -The agent froze. But Jake had spoken in English. The hand went again to -the bar, was slowly lifting it when, following a second splintering -crash, he fell forward on his face with a hollow cough. - -"Through the lungs, I reckon." Jake looked down at the gross body, -writhing in its death agony. "I told you to keep away, Alberto." - -The man's last convulsive clutch had swung the upper bar clear of its -sockets, but Jake did not move. The lower bar still held and, standing -up, he watched the oaken panels quiver and split under heavy blows. With -rhythmic regularity came the crash of volleys fired point-blank into the -shutters. Bullets, too, were spitting through the side window--to strike -and flatten on the opposite wall. Over all, above the crash of -rifle-fire, thud of the beam they were using on the door, rose the roar -and howl of a blood-mad _peon_ rabble. - -"The hull town has come to the funeral," Jake muttered. "Well, they'll -see some wake." - -As the door crashed in he stooped and blew out the light. Darkness fell -through the room--darkness that pulsed with convulsive movement. Over -the body of the agent the leaders tripped and fell. Upon them others -piled in a heap, yet under the pressure of the howling crowd outside -still others streamed in. Above the oaths, curses, mad howls, rose yells -for some one to bring a light. - -Presently it came, a piece of engine waste soaked in alcohol at the end -of a stick; and when it did, the rolling eyeballs, furious faces, -vicious mouths, stood out for a second, writhing in murderous lust, then -set in sudden horror. - -For the bluish flare fell full on a grim figure, tall, lean, topped with -a hard face, steel-point eyes. The muzzle of Jake's gun touched the top -layer of powder. Cold, weird, satanic, he must have loomed in their -vision as the Evil One in whose existence they all believed. Paralyzed -by the impending doom, some stood staring. Others, screaming hoarsely, -fought in vain to beat back through the crowd. Till the last moment, -yes, till one hardier scoundrel raised a gun, Jake held them in torture, -then-- - -Both shots were wiped out by the tremendous explosion whose thunder and -red sky-flash were heard and seen by Bull fifteen miles away. - - - - -XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM! - - -After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the -sage-brush while the _revueltoso_ engine approached. With a roar it came -at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead. -For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette -against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and -swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of -smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on -spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared -past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of -dust. - -Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while -they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away. - -"We'll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours," he -said. "We kain't afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we'll have to travel -at night an' hide up during the day--unless we chance on a _rancho_ -where we kin steal horses! Of course, it's terrible on you, Missy. But -if you kin stan' it for a little longer--" He stopped as Lee shook, as -he thought, with a sob. - -It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and -trouble. "It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own, -should have to turn rustler." With a little mothering pat that somehow -reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her -fostering care, she added: "Don't worry about me. If I could only make -you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a -rifle. I can at least carry something." - -But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and -provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding -through sage, _palo verde_, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure -hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they -obstinately refused--and it was well that they did. When Bull called a -halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and -swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock. - -"Don't dare to move," he ordered, "till I get you something to eat." - -They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt -meat. But after "Alberto" cut off the engine Gordon had "requisitioned" -his _tortillas_ and chile stew--plenty for three. Once again Lee wished -she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct -still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery _tortillas_ his -head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the -engine soot off his face. - -Neither did Bull escape. "There!" Bestowing a little, loving box on -Gordon's ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and -washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child. -Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction. - -"Well, you're _half_-clean, anyway." - -Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken -his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew -from Bull a grave smile. "Sleep, now, you kids," he admonished them. -"Two hours an' we'll have to be moving again." - -"You, too!" Lee insisted. - -Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at -once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower -rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet. -Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding -their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles -to the southward Jake was playing his last lone "hand." He was in Bull's -mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with -calcium red. - -"Something doing there." Though he could have no accurate knowledge, -Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. "Bet you Jake had a -finger in it." - -Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and -provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she -needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused -in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open. - -Yet she made light of it. "My feet seem to belong to some one else. All -the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!" - -It was the barbed thorn of a _nopal_, which hurt worse coming out than -it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, "cat's claws" and -"crucifixion thorns" lay everywhere in prickly ambush. "Spanish bayonet" -scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would -rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open -among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of -the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In -daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking. -When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once; -in five seconds were fast asleep. - -This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed -on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to -the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first -pale lights. - -Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and -scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee, -pale, tired, limping, but cheerful. - -She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. "To -be sure! We'll have all day to rest." - -"I didn't mean, though, for you to walk no more." Stooping suddenly, he -rose with her sitting on his shoulder. - -"Your weight ain't no more to me than a fly," he replied to her protest; -and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these -brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a _mesa_ that -raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the -boulders and sage. - -"'Tain't safe to go on," he said, setting her down. "You'd think, to -look around, there wasn't a living thing within a hundred thousand -miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without -being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard. -Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding -from the _rurales_; but there's always some one. We'll stop while it's -safe." - -He was right. Already they had been seen--by a _peon_ who had been -driven by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret -spring from _revueltoso_ lovers. But the tale of their passing did not -go forth by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of -their burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away -"Alberto," the engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop -of _revueltosos_ he had guided up the line. - -"Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet? -These little ones no larger than a child's are those of the woman." - -"A white girl, thou sayest?" the leader asked. - -"Si, senor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man's -riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate -for thee." - -"There should be _some_ pay." The _capitan_ went on, with a vile oath. -"Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us; -si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs -come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt -that gringo. But he goes out like"--he blew out the match with which he -was lighting his cigarette--"this! and takes a hundred more of us with -him. Bueno!" His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. "They -are gone, our companeros, but we shall meet again--in hell. But these -others, the girl and her men, shall pay." - -At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of -which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to -the north and east as they went, they approached Bull's limestone castle -just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon. - -After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a -rough _ramada_ of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting -in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the _revueltoso_ -line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust -clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet -let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so -carefully that Lee slept on. - -"There ain't many of 'em," he whispered. "We must make 'em sick at the -first shooting. I'm going to slip along the ridge to get that second -man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin -see his eyes; then bust him where he's biggest." - -Yesterday's fighting had absorbed most of Gordon's thrills. But now, as -he lay looking down at the _revueltoso_ coming on a little, ambling jog, -he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and -fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed -different--as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon -instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When, -pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon -experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after -fair warning. - -But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened -him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting -from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired. - -At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the _ramada_, startled and -wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide -headlong to the ground. Bull's man was also down, and as the riderless -horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the -sage whirled back and combined half a mile away. - -By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at -a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. "That -is the Tejon Pass--about ten miles away. The American border is on'y -twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold 'em till -then we'll have all night to climb through the Pass." - -They made a good gain while the _revueltosos_ were recovering from that -first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle -around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller -elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further. - -Thus began a repetition of the previous day's fighting--with this -disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone -ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time -with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the -brush with their bullets to keep the _revueltosos_ from crawling up on -them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time -more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the _revueltosos_ -brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired -directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was -complete. - -It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the -circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he -sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into -the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up, -then fell forward. - -So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set -the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a -huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon's -dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance, -supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of -the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly -thereafter they entered the Pass. - -From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell, -hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool, -at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after -they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on -his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail -to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So -tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of -crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering -her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep. - -Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his -ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he -closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was -accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his -thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything, -it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal -perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed -down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the -hour. - -Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in -the curve of Gordon's arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces -turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl's -color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under -the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad, -low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier -mold of Gordon's features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose, -forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw, -supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the -other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in -spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long -limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly. - -In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower. -The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of -Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and -earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that -age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft -dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past -loves enveloped them sleeping there. - -"Jes' naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get -such a pair." - -Bull's murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world -to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of -health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to -degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the -world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a -thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature's intent so -completely fulfilled. - -To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and -to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at -Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the _portales_ many a -time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the -Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that -tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself -and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under -Bull's eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter -raised the echoes in the _patio_. Now they were young men and women! He -saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine -young fellows come in to woo and win Lee's girls. - -With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under -forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by -the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship -into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships -thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of -iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee's children, always strong, -always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In -legislature, church, halls of state, they took place--at first a few -white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race -drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors, -legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its -neighbor across the Rio Grande. - -It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately -consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in -the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull's -gaze came back to them. - -Surely they were "fit," the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long -process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained -children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste -the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought -about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and -complete. "Fit," morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the -term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more -ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the "fit" of ten -thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on -their lives. - -It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it--and died; as Jake had -sworn to it--and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation, -heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the -cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of -heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only -enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon's, he had to empty -his own. - -"Won't need it, anyway." - -Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last -evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley, -then on up here, he had searched for just such a place. - -"No, I won't need it." - -Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into -Lee's face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He -knew it for the last time--just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like -Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had -repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial -with a heavy shake of the head. - -"Twould on'y break them up an' do me no good." - -Very gently he woke up Gordon. "Don't wake her till I'm through telling. -It will soon be daylight. With it they'll be on top of us again. The -border's over there--on'y a few miles." With heavy steadiness he went on -with the last fine lie: "I'm keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an' -I'll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don't you wait for -me. She's well rested now; so keep going and going till you've crossed." - -Reaching up, Gordon took Bull's hand in a strong grip. "I suppose -there's no use asking you to let me stay?" - -"No." Bull shook his head. "An' if I would--she wouldn't! Now wake her -up." - -Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while -making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered -their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet -when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing -there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back. - -"Oh, won't you come?" she pleaded. - -"Sure, come on!" Gordon seconded her plea. "We can fight and run like -yesterday." - -"Yes, _do_?" Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him, -shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread -earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. "Oh, _won't_ -you come? I'm _so_ afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I'm -dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them--will happen to -you. And if it did--oh, what should I do? What _shall_ I do?" - -Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a -year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in -holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, "had walked in an' -come out again, sober, like a man," he might have given in; gone on in -her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the -desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake. - -She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through -events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne -herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to -restrain her tears. "There! there!" Gathering her to him, Bull patted -her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. "There! there! -In a few hours we'll be over the border, and 'twon't be long afore we'll -be back at Arboles, you an' Gordon an' me an' Sliver an' Jake." He said -more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life. -Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of -the pain it covered, he concluded: "So don't bother about me. There's -less risk here than in any of the stan's we made in the last three days. -I've got 'em all down below me an' there's on'y this trail. If they try -to come on, it 'ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I'll hold 'em -jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run -along." - -"You're sure?" - -"Sure!" He had to swallow his heart to say it. - -"Remember," she called back, moving away, "I'll be on pins and needles -till you come." - -Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer. -"I won't be here long." - -Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in -hand, he turned his face to the foe. - - - - -XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN - - -As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and -fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. -From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high -walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a -lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched -down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they -could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting -men. - -After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, -Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the -largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from -below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and -looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to -form in the pale dawn. - -Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so -fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity -or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who -shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first -pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their -great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of -rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in -the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the -emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a -man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was -strong upon him. - -In such moments a man's whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema -drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull's reflections began with -his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden -pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, -coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the -wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados. - -Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute -white fear on the opposite side of Carleton's death-bed. He saw her, -after the funeral, coming toward him through the _patio_ gateway, -swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis -Lovell's rich, dark beauty. - -Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her -diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded -some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. -All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of -match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his -thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one -scene. - -Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he -started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure -her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read -their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her -face buried itself in his breast. - -Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still -in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, -as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills _rancho_, memory leaped -the gap in time and distance--he was sitting in the widow's kitchen, -Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee's birthday -cake. - -From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last -tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her -pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the -bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he -was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm -in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into -dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always -in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through -the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that -his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her -ownership. - -"I shall expect you soon?" - -He heard, too, his own answer, "Sure, ma'am, I'll come straight to you." - -Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty's shoulder, -and--the bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty -windows that stared with fiery eyes from seared walls. - -In the intensity of his visioning the horrible denouement came almost -with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony. - -While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and -strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the -rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple -shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow -interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam -of the sun. - -It announced the _revueltosos_ of the _brigada_ Gonzales! Her murderers! -Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew -into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac -glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a -club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he -peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now -wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was -again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the -_revueltosos_ in the _fonda_ canon. Big, black, burly, he looked more -like a bear than a man. - -If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the -long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that -sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his -care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives -to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his -revolver, a heavy Colt's .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised -them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and -climbed to the crest of the opposite bank. - -Lying there, he looked down on the _revueltosos_ who had begun to climb -up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was -impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high -and fired. - -The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the -_revueltosos_ tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared -with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the -"fight and run" of yesterday's warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they -moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from -which to return his fire. - -Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at -intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust -about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long -silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up. - -Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, -each recording a stage in Lee's advance toward safety. As clearly as -though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but -moving steadily on with Gordon's help. And his imaginings ran with the -facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, -down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the -plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that -marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently -grew into a United States cavalry patrol. - -Suspecting an ambush, the _revueltosos_ came forward slowly. Quarter of -an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the -opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long -silence, three appeared in the open. - -"They have gone! Bring up the horses!" - -The leader's call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they -waited, he heard their conversation: - -"If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, -we had caught them last night." - -"Si," came the answer. "But he wanted the girl for himself." - -"The swine!" The epithet was set in vile oaths. "But he is cured forever -of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The -bullet took him squarely between the eyes." - -There was more of it--their present hope to run the _gringos_ down with -horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition -they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black -eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, -hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of -the horses. - -A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and -sliding, most of the time on their beasts' haunches, down into the rock -pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. -Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage: - -"They are surely gone. Vamos!" - -A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room -for all in the "bore." He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing -of the first beast he waited, then--with a sudden pry of the -rifle-barrel he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast -as he could pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed -rifle waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth -bared, leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the -midst of the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among -them almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound -from the opposite hill. - -For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of -which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the -dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat -time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the -primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that -evil chaff, dropping them as they came on. - -And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds, -they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his -fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and _machetes_. Till -only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up -the hill Bull made no effort to follow. - -Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the -dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with -the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled -and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand -and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two _revueltosos_ -staring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his -rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white -cloud overhead. - -With such intensity did he stare, the second _revueltoso_ also looked -up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the -faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw; -clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills's voice: - -"I shall expect you soon?" - -The _revueltoso_ was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his -answer rang out, "Sure, ma'am, I'll come straight to you." - -The rifle cracked and "Bull" Perrin, the last of the "Three Bad Men of -Las Bocas," collapsed in a heap. - - - THE END. - - - - - ZANE GREY'S NOVELS - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list. - -THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS - - A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of - frontier warfare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she - is captured by bandits. A surprising climax brings the story to - a delightful close. - -THE RAINBOW TRAIL - - The story of a young clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the - great western uplands--until at last love and faith awake. - -DESERT GOLD - - The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and - ends with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had - willed to the girl who is the story's heroine. - -RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE - - A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago when - Mormon authority ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is - the theme of the story. - -THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN - - This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo - Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the - Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful country of deep - canons and giant pines." - -THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT - - A lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love - a young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands - that the girl shall become the second wife of one of the - Mormons-- Well, that's the problem of this great story. - -THE SHORT STOP - - The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win - fame and fortune as a professional ball player. His hard knocks - at the start are followed by such success as clean - sportsmanship, courage and honesty ought to win. - -BETTY ZANE - - This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the - beautiful young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest - pioneers. - -THE LONE STAR RANGER - - After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an - outlaw along the Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of - the river, he finds a young girl held prisoner, and in - attempting to rescue her, brings down upon himself the wrath of - her captors and henceforth is hunted on one side by honest men, - on the other by outlaws. - -THE BORDER LEGION - - Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a - lawless Western mining camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing - that she loved him--she followed him out. On her way, she is - captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots - Kells, the leader--and nurses him to health again. Here enters - another romance--when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes - Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A gold strike, a thrilling - robbery--gambling and gun play carry you along breathlessly. - -THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey - - The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill," as - told by his sister and Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in - Iowa and his first encounter with an Indian. We see "Bill" as a - pony express rider, then near Fort Sumter as Chief of the - Scouts, and later engaged in the most dangerous Indian - campaigns. There is also a very interesting account of the - travels of "The Wild West" Show. No character in public life - makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than - "Buffalo Bill," whose daring and bravery made him famous. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY - WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE - - HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. - - May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list. - -MAVERICKS. - - A tale of the western frontier, where the "rustler," whose - depredations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the - range, abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told. - -A TEXAS RANGER. - - How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried - law into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a - series of thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, - and then passed through deadly peril to ultimate happiness. - -WYOMING. - - In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured - the breezy charm of "cattleland," and brings out the turbid life - of the frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor. - -RIDGWAY OF MONTANA. - - The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where - politics and mining industries are the religion of the country. - The political contest, the love scene, and the fine character - drawing give this story great strength and charm. - -BUCKY O'CONNOR. - - Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, replete - with the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash - and absorbing fascination of style and plot. - -CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT. - - A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a - bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is - a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination - that is fittingly characteristic of the great free West. - -BRAND BLOTTERS. - - A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid - life of the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with - a charming love interest running through its 320 pages. - - Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York - - - - - - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE BORDER *** - - - - -A Word from Project Gutenberg - - -We will update this book if we find any errors. - -This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40600 - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one -owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and -you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission -and without paying copyright royalties. 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