Over the Border: A Novel

“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 thehacienda 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. “Youdidn’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 meananything?”

“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 hatehim!”

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 youkissed 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.”