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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 somecentavos, 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, thecomerciante 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 thecomerciante 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 thecantina 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 thecantina 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, sansgroceries, 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 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.
