Over the Border: A Novel

“He’s really part of the scenery” – Lee communed aloud with herself – “almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay. But, no!” She shook her head. “I don’t want any human being here but ourselves. Oh, I know! We’ll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to Sliver and Jake.”

Neither would she – after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any commerce with the jacal. “It isn’t that it’s dirty. Old Pedro is as clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We’ll camp by the stream at the far end of the valley.”

She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated a savory stew of frijoles which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon commandeered an old shot-gun.

“What for?” Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his eye proved him at one with her in spirit. “To kill the meat for our first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in this neck of the woods.”

“That will be fine!” Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. “The wood at the end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They’re just lovely broiled over hot coals.”

“Broiled over hot coals?” he teased her. “Wild doves, the symbol of love? What desecration!”

“I don’t care,” she pouted. “One has to eat – and they’re awfully good.”

Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went after wild pigeon without compunction.

After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath.

It was all as it should be. In anticipation of their coming, a great oak had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches. First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim.

“Your turn, Dirty Man,” she rallied him. “Go and take your bath.”

When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and served the frijoles on golden husks of corn from Pedro’s garden. Nature supplied the other utensils – fingers for forks, their sharp young teeth for knives, bits of tortilla to scoop up the stew. Both in its preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down.

“Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is my work. You can watch and smoke.”

Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation.

“I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven’t tried.” The confession was nullified by a little sigh. “But it always makes me sick. You don’t know how I envy Maria and Teresa!” Lighting it, she took a couple of small puffs, then passed it on. “I always tried to get Bull and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father’s den and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so tobaccery and strong and —manny. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort and protection.”

Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands.

She came on a little run and thereafter – it was as she had wished it in her girl’s dreams – as far as dawn and dark from the conventional marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed – the law older than theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening song of the insects, its sanctions were recited.

In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the blasé modern viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may never know; and – your real philosopher will admit it – most divinely in accord with the scheme of things.

Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from the rest of the world.

Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! “In the midst of one we are in the other,” and the friendly night that wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It also lit the march of Gonzales’s bandits across the desert.

Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the preparation of their breakfast.

In ignorance of all the night had shrouded, that the sun now shone on, of the horror even then in course a few miles away, they pursued their second day, fished and swam, walked among the pasturing horses, had the gayest of times concocting a tasty lunch out of their crude supplies. Thereafter Gordon was lying in luxurious content, head pillowed on Lee’s knee, when he first spied a slender smoke column rising far away beyond the rim.

“Look!”

Though he sat up, pointing, he did not comprehend till Lee cried out: “It’s the Millses’ beacon! Oh, they are attacked! Get the horses! Quick!”

XXXVII: THE THREE – AGAIN

Bull walked a few paces, then looked back at his horse. Its quivering knees, long, slow shivers, told that it was beyond further service. He returned to the woman. She had sunk into a second collapse, but she looked up at his touch.

“You heard them talking before – before – ”

“Si, señor, from our stables they had stolen three horses. I heard them speaking of Los Arboles; that they would take all of its horses and sell them at the border.”

Nodding, Bull went on his way afoot. But as, head bent, he passed the ruined wall from behind which Terrubio had challenged him long ago a voice called out, “Ole, señor!”

Startled, Bull looked up, half expecting to see again the uncanny eyes, weird cold face. But the faithful servitor was gone; gone with his loved mistress – to wait on her, if such things be, beyond the consuming flame. From behind the wall, leading his horse, hobbled old Rafael, the father of the woman.

“I had thought thee one of those wicked ones.” The old fellow slapped the butt of an old musket. “Once my finger tightened on the trigger, but by the mercy of God I waited. Si, señor, I saw them go. After I sent up the smoke I came back slowly, crawling along the valleys, keeping always the height of land between us. Thus I gained so close that I counted them when they passed; a full score, señor, and more, on their way by the plains trail to Arboles. But the mistress and the niña, señor? They did not harm – ”

He stopped, halted by Bull’s look, then cried aloud while the tears coursed down his wrinkled face. “The white ewe and the lamb! Gone! and I, the old dog, am left? But so it was always. Death takes his pick of the best! I would go after them, señor, those wicked ones; but of what use, save to make a noise, is an old dog after the teeth are gone? The biting must be done by stronger jaws; the running by fleeter feet. Take thou my horse.”

Thus freshly mounted, Bull made such time that he climbed to the smoldering beacon on the mountain’s shoulder before daylight failed. Below lay the valleys in mysterious pools from which long shadows issued to crawl up the flaming hills. Westward the dying sun had left a crimson wake, barred with black across the smoldering sky; a reflection, Bull felt it, of the fiery blossom that glowed in one dark valley. The faint stars weaving a wan embroidery across the trailing skirts of night, the fading light, the first cool breath of the evening, all helped to intensify the loneliness that clothed the obscure prospect. Yet in it that loneliness, the stillness of great solitudes, wide oceans, Bull sensed sympathy and peace; Nirvana, the peace of great worlds, planetary systems swinging through space on their appointed ways. She! They! That pleasant woman, lovely child, had been absorbed into, were part of it, this peace that quieted his troubled spirit.

He did not think this. Such philosophies were beyond him. But he felt and, feeling, a hoarse sob rose in his throat. Bowing his dark face in his hands, the big, black rustler shook in the throes of saving grief. He did not hear the thud of approaching hoofs; saw nothing until with a clatter of displaced stones Sliver and Jake came shooting out of the sage.

Because of its position far out on the plains, the warning smoke had been seen at Los Arboles long before its soaring column rose high enough to be noticed by Gordon above the rim; in fact, Jake and Sliver gained the forks of the Bowl trail while Gordon and Lee lacked still a mile of the summit. As Pedro had delivered Lee’s note the preceding evening, Jake knew that the couple were there. After a moment’s thought he voted down Sliver’s proposal to ride down for Gordon.

“He’d come in handy. Kin shoot some an’ his nerve’s all right. But you jes’ kedn’t shut her out. Better to leave them where she’s safe.”

“That’s right,” Sliver had added. “An’ it ’u’d shore be a shame to break up their honeymoon.”

Accordingly, unaware that the pair were riding hard at their heels, Jake and Sliver had held on until, as before said, they came shooting out on Bull. He had whirled, hand on his gun, but it dropped when a cowman’s yell issued simultaneously from their throats.

“Why, you dolgorned old son of a – ” Sliver stopped as, riding closer, he saw Bull’s face. “Why, hombre! What – ”

Turning in his saddle, Bull pointed at the crimson blossom in the dark valley below. He did not explain. With that keen intuition natural in those who live alone in the wide spaces, they had read in his face that which is denied to speech – the soul agony of a strong man. Given that blossom of fire, their knowledge of Mexican raiders supplied the rest.

“Murdered!.. Mother and child!.. Burned … with the house!”

To one skilled in the polished phrases which city folks hold in readiness for all occasions, the manner in which the two received the news might have appeared heartless. Jake looked off and away over the darkening world. Sliver bit a chew off his plug, then fell to examining a fray in his riata. When the latter finally spoke the aforesaid city person would have been greatly shocked.

“The poor damn kid!”

“Hell, ain’t it?” Jake’s tone was quite indifferent.

But Bull had seen Sliver gulping in an attempt to swallow the choking lump in his throat; also the sudden moisture that quenched the cold, snake sparkle in Jake’s bleak eyes. These were all-sufficient.

“They was heading for Los Arboles by the plains trail.” After a long silence he answered Jake’s question concerning the raiders. “Must be nearly there. My God! Miss Lee an’ – ”

“They ain’t there.” Sliver hastened to relieve his anxiety. “They’re – ” He was relieved from further explanation by a second clatter of hoofs. Out of the gathering dusk came Lee and Gordon.

Ever since they spied the smoke column, its dread possibilities had weighed down the girl’s spirit. But at the sight of Bull she forgot – for the moment. Uttering a glad cry, she dismounted, was running to him, hands outstretched, but suddenly halted, shocked by his look.

“Why – what – ” Following his pointing finger, she saw the fire. That, their inaction, told all before he spoke. “Gone! – both! – burned with the house!” Crying bitterly, she turned instinctively, as though to run to Gordon. Then, recognizing a need greater than her own, she faced about again and ran to Bull.

“Oh, you poor, poor man!”

Grasping his big, hard hands, she pressed her wet face against his knee while she sobbed out her sorrow and sympathy. Freeing one hand, Bull gently stroked her hair. Nodding for Sliver and Gordon to follow, Jake led them a few yards back up the trail; so there was none but Bull to hear when she began to sob out a broken confession.

“Oh, I feel – so wicked. While all this – was happening – I – I was – getting married!”

“Married?”

“Yes – to Gordon.” She ran on brokenly, giving him in bits the tale of all that had happened since his departure – her abduction, Ramon’s death, Gordon’s ultimatum. “He begged so hard – and the padre and the jefe said – that I ought – and I wanted to, myself – and we were so happy until – we saw the smoke. And now I – I feel like a criminal.”

“Then you needn’t.” He patted her shoulder. “The jefe was right. Never again will you have more need of a man’s strength.”

“But? At this time? While – ”

“How were you to know? An’ remember how hard she worked and wished to bring this very thing about. ’Twould have filled her with joy to know that it had come to pass. ’Deed, Missy, she does know an’ is glad at this very moment.” With that mixture of rude faith and humility that made his enormous strength incongruous, he went on: “Sure she knows an’ some day she’ll tell you so herself. ’Twon’t be for me to hear it. My kind don’t go where she is. But you will, an’, mark me, the first thing she’ll tell will be how happy she was in your marriage.”

“Oh, if I thought she would!”

“Be certain of it, child.” The last lights had now gone out on the highest peaks. Looking off and away into the gathering gloom, he recited many a hope that Mary Mills had expressed.

While he talked Lee’s sobs diminished. She looked up when he finished. “That makes me feel better. And you? You, too, think I did right?”

She could see, through the gloom, his sadness lighten. “For what d’you s’pose I brought him here?”

“Not to marry me?” She gasped. In spite of the gravity of the moment, her own real sorrow, she could not repress feeling natural in a girl who, having made, as she supposes, her own free choice, finds that, from the very beginning, her husband had been wished upon her. “Oh, if I’d only known it!” She added, with loving illogic, “I’m so glad that I didn’t.”

“That’s fine.” He patted her head. “It will be easier, now, if you have to live for a while in the States.”

“The States?” she repeated.

In a brief way, omitting mention of Benson’s death – she had enough to bear – he described the scattering of Valles’s army, concluding, “They’re wild against Americans.” He nodded at the fire. “The men that did this are on the way to Arboles; must be almost there.”

“My poor people!” she broke out, in sudden distress. “Gordon! Come here!” When, with Sliver and Jake, he emerged from the shadows she cried it again: “Our poor, poor people! They are on their way – the raiders! To Arboles! We must go – at once!”

“Too late!” Bull spoke heavily. “Even an aeroplane couldn’t get us there in time.” After, even more briefly, he had sketched for the others recent events, he went on: “I came back to bring you and Mary and the child out. For them it’s too late, but you must go at once – you an’ your husband an’ Sliver an’ Jake.”

“And you?” Lee questioned.

“I’m going on.” The statement in its simplicity carried more significance than the wildest vow of revenge.

“Alone?” Lee again demanded. “And you think we’d go slinking home to the States and leave you to face that band yourself?”

“It’s my quarrel, my work.” His answer, steady and heavy, issued on the darkness. “You are young and have your husband. Your future is all ahead. Mine is most behind. You folks head at once for the border. With Sliver an’ Jake to guard you – ”

But here he ran against a second obstacle. Sliver’s voice rose in the darkness. “An’ there’s nothing I’d like better ’n to look after Lady-girl. But I ain’t so much of a fool that I don’t know the store she sets by you, Bull, that’s been father an’ mother to her, now, for nigh on a year. So it don’t go that-a-way. It’s me for Arboles while you-all hit with them for the States.”

“Good enough!” Jake’s acid tones trembled through the gloom. “With a small amendment. You’re that young an’ foolish, Sliver, it ’u’d be a shame to cut you off – worse ’n the green grass that goes to the oven. So it stan’s like this – you-all go back; I go on.”

“No, you don’t.” Gordon’s quiet voice interrupted. “At any other time I’d feel diffident about putting in my oar. But these are our people. I could never look my wife” – he felt her hand steal up into his – “I could never look her in the face again if I stood for this. She ought to get out at once, and if you fellows will see her to the border – ”

“They won’t – till we all go,” Lee broke in. “It’s easy to see that you’ve all made up your minds to stay – and you’ll need me to hold the horses. We’d better be getting on.”

“But, Missy – ” Bull began.

But already she had mounted. The clatter of her horse’s hoofs returned unmistakable answer.

XXXVIII: FIRE

Hitherto Bull had always ridden on Lee’s right, but when the trail permitted two to ride abreast he now, with instinctive delicacy, yielded his old place to Gordon. In this order they rode along the flank of the mountain, their hoofs beating a dark tattoo to the lower rhythm of creaking leather, flapping holsters; rode on past the San Carlos trail, the Bowl forks, had almost reached the head of the ravine above Antonio’s fonda when Lee, who was riding ahead, reined in with an exclamation.

Out of the gloom that wrapped the plains below had burst a sudden glow which gave birth, as they gazed, to a flower of flame that quivered and swung under the breath of the night wind. It was too far away for them to see the buildings; but, clearly as though they were looking down upon it from the first rise, their minds filled in the picture; supplied the flames roaring through the Arboles patio, bursting from doors and windows, scaling the guard-house, running a scarlet race along the rows of adobes.

“My poor people!” Lee sat her horse and gazed.

The shock of realization is often less than anticipation; its finality strips away exaggeration. Down there everything Lee valued was going up in flames – her wardrobe, jewelry, girlish treasures; household effects and hacienda stores; that which she valued most of all, the trove of old Spanish manuscripts and letters, doubly dear because so intimately connected with her father’s memory. Surely a great loss! but if it flashed up in her mind, regret was instantly wiped out by consuming indignation – not at her personal loss; not that her loved home was being destroyed under her eyes; but at that which it stood for; the malice, ignorance, wantonness, irresponsibility which has lighted a thousand such fires, would light a thousand more, laying waste all Mexico with its cruelties and lusts. When Sliver’s voice broke in the darkness behind her his attempt at rude comfort came almost as a shock.

“Never mind, Lady-girl. They kain’t burn them yard-thick walls.”

“An’ we left word for the ancianos to drive the stock into the mountains,” Jake added. “Must ha’ b’en cl’ar away long before they got there.”

“It isn’t that.” She spoke so low that only Gordon caught her whisper. “My poor girls! I would give all, place and stock, to make sure they escaped.” As that bitter indignation resurged within her she added: “There’s only one thing left. We must – ”

Bull’s heavy voice completed it for her, – “catch ’em before daylight.”

While the horses slid and slipped down the steep trail his voice rose above the scrape of hoofs, laying out his plan. After their long march the raiders would undoubtedly camp at Arboles! The fire proved one thing – they had broken open the store and drunk up the stock ofaguardiente! At dawn they would be found stretched in swinish sleep. And then —

His surmise was reasonable, founded on probabilities, but subject to the change of circumstance. As they rode on down a red glow in the black bowels of the ravine grew into a fire that dyed a deeper chrome the yellow walls of the fonda. It also restored a little color into the bronze faces of a score of refugees from Arboles, women and children, herded together like sheep around its blaze.

When Lee rode into the firelight they gave tongue in a chorus of joy, apprehension, every shade of feeling from fear to relief. From their babble she gathered, first, that they had been warned by a peon who had run in from Lovell’s rancho; second, that the ancianos had driven the horses into the mountain pasture and scattered the cattle among the ravines. Finally, from out of their midst a lad was thrust forward to tell his tale.

He had been sent to hunt stragglers from the herds. Feeling tired, with that peon indolence which is not to be disturbed by mere rumors of raiders, he had curled up in a bunch of chaparral and gone to sleep. Awakened by voices, he had seen the raiders coming. Men of gigantic stature and evil visage his excited fancy painted them, and among them he recognized a peon who had run away to the wars after being whipped for some grossness by the señor Benson. So close did they pass, he heard them quarreling among themselves. They appeared to be tired and downcast over their poor luck in obtaining horses; and he, the boy, heard the renegade’s expressions of reassurance.

“Si, señores. A few miles more and you will rest with the women at Los Arboles. There we shall find the finest horses, bred by blooded stallions, fit for a general to ride. Or if they have run them away for safe-keeping, ’twill not serve, for I, Pedro Gonzales, know the secret pasture in the great Bowl.”

Flaming up under fresh fuel while the lad talked, the firelight showed the Three deep in reflection. The same thought was in their minds: a vivid mental picture of the raiders from Las Bocas ascending the precarious zigzags of the Bowl staircase. If these others could be caught in the same way? Jake’s remark expressed their joint conclusion.