Over the Border: A Novel
“‘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 theNacional 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 andchile 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? Afterour 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 thehacienda 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 itsbolero 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 machetein 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 ancianostoo 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 thehacienda, 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 thesahuaro, 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.”