Over the Border: A Novel
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 grindingtortilla 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 hiscatre, 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.”