Kitabı oku: «Over the Border: A Novel», sayfa 4
VI: BULL TURNS NURSE
Passing over into the next valley, they came on the body of old Francisco, hacked almost to bits. So far Lee had kept a strong grip on herself. But now she burst out crying.
“The poor fellow! He was faithful as a dog. We saw them cut him down, and that caused dad to lose his head. Otherwise he would never have tried to pursue them alone.”
“He was old – an’ died a man’s death,” Bull offered her rough comfort. “You couldn’t wish him a better ending.”
It was man’s reasoning, therefore contrary to her woman’s feelings, yet it helped to control her grief. She acquiesced at once when Bull suggested that she ride ahead and prepare a room.
By her departure Sliver was afforded an opportunity to get something off his mind. After a glance at Carleton, who had relapsed again into unconsciousness, he nodded at the horses. “Don’t you allow I’d better leave ’em here? After we get through with him we kin come back an’ – ” He stopped, shuffled uneasily, under Bull’s stare.
“You’re dead right! Don’t trouble to say it. I’d steal the horses offen a hearse.”
Bull’s glance dropped again to the unconscious man. Then, very slowly, he voiced his opinion, formed on frontier code: “Wait till he’s well enough to fight for his own. Till then – we leave him alone.”
Stepping at a lively gait, they passed in half an hour under the patiogateway. Within, arched portales ran around three sides, supporting the gallery of an upper story. From the red-tiled roof above a wonderful creeper poured a cataract of green lace, so dense, prolific, that only vigorous pruning kept it from burying the portales beneath. In the center rose a great arbol de fuego, “tree of fire,” contrasting its flaming blossoms with the rich greens of palms and bananas.
They were met at the entrance by a flock of frightened brown women, house servants, and peonas; for of the scores of men who had worked for Carleton before the wars there were left only three witheredancianos to bear his body up the wide stone stairway to a room that caught the fresh breeze from the mountains.
Here Bull redressed the wounds. His skill, however, was only of the surface. As it would require at least four days to bring a doctor even from Chihuahua, he felt that unless Jake materialized one out of the dry desert air Carleton would surely die. Nevertheless, he stoutly denied the possibility to Lee during the two days that he shared her watch.
Sliver, on his part, also did his best to cheer and comfort, relating marvelous tales of accidents and illnesses that, by contrast, made shooting through the lungs and stomach look smaller than a toothache.
“You she’d have seen Rusty Mikel, Miss, the time his Bill-hoss turned a flip-flop onto him. Druv’ the pommel clean through his chest, it did. Yet he was up an’ around, lively as a bedbug by candle-light, in less ’n five weeks.”
Surely without them the girl would not only have broken down, but her father could never have survived to see the doctor, whose arrival was announced by a rapid beat of hoofs the following evening. For Jake had achieved the impossible, grabbed him, if not from midair, at least from a revolutionary-hospital train that had stopped at the burned station to bury its dead.
The doctor was American. But even as he dismounted at the gate Bull picked him for a “colonist.” Just how, he himself could not have said. His premature grizzle, unhealthy pallor, might have been due to overwork. But a certain brooding quiet, seen only in those who have been cut off for long periods from communication with their fellows, impressed even Sliver. He remarked on it while they sat with Jake under the portales while he ate.
“Say! but he’s whitish. Looks like he’d done time.”
“He has,” Jake nodded. “I had it from a Yankee machine-gunner in Valles’s army that had got himself shot through both arms an’ was being taken back to the base hospital with about a hun’red others. When I landed at the burned station he was a-setting with his legs dangling out of a box-car door, watching ’em bury his compañeros that had died on the way.
“‘Gotter do it quick,’ he says. ‘They don’t keep worth a darn in this clime.’
“He’d met Carleton once in Chihuahua, an’ ’twas him that sent the doctor an’ tol’ me about him while he was packing his grip. Seems that he’d belonged to a gang that worked insurance frauds on American companies. They’d insure some peon that was about ready to croak, paying the premiums themselves an’ c’llecting the insurance after he cashed in. If he lingered ’twas said that they hurried him. That was never quite proved, most of ’em being too far gone to testify when they was resurrected. But the doc had furnished the death certificate, an’ as the Mexicans ain’t so particular about technicalities as our courts, he was sentenced to be shot along with his pals. If he’d been Mexican they’d have done it, too. But Diaz, who liked a bad gringo better than a good greaser, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He’d actually served twelve years – think of it, hombres! twelve years in a Mexican jail before the revolutionists let him out to serve on their hospital-trains.”
“Twelve years!” Sliver echoed it. “An’ just for croaking a few Mex? He orter ha’ practised in New Mexico. They’d have give him a medal up there.”
After Jake had eaten, the Three sat and smoked till the doctor came down. While eating he made his report. “If I could do any good I’d stay. But he will surely die to-night. It’s going to be mighty hard on that poor girl. Like most of us” – his glance took in all Three – “Carleton didn’t come down here for his health. It’s bad form in Mexico to inquire about a man’s past. Nevertheless, it’s pretty well known that he killed the seducer of his wife and came here with the child when she was four years old. She’s never been away since, and has no kin that she knows of. To run a hacienda, these days, is too big a job for a girl.”
His deep concern showed an underlying goodness. Genuine sadness weighted his words when he gave his last orders from the saddle. “I’ve left an opiate in case he suffers. He may regain consciousness, but don’t be deceived. It will be the last flare before the dark.”
It happened at midnight. An hour before, Bull had put Lee out of the room with gentle force to take needed rest. He had then moved his chair to the door, which opened out on the corredor, to secure the free air his rustler’s lungs demanded. Across the compound he could see the moon’s pale lantern hanging in the branches of a yucca that upraised its maimed and twisted shape on a distant knoll. Northward the mountains loomed, dim and mysterious, in tender light that reduced the vivid chromes and blues of lime-washed adobes in the compound to pale violet and clear gold.
Gringo as he was, his people had lived under Carleton’s hand fuller, freer lives than their forebears had ever known under the Mexican overlords, and, day or night, the patio had never lacked a dozen brownpeonas on their knees at their prayers to the saints. Under thearbol de fuego in the center of the patio below three old crones had erected a small altar, and its guttering candles now threw splashes of gold up through the crimson dusk of the tree. Adding the human note which, by contrast, accentuated the infinite mystery of that still night, their mutterings rose up to Bull; bits of gossip sandwiched between prayers.
“Three crows perched here at sundown, Luisa. Thou knowest what that means?”
“Si; they were devils come for a soul.”
“’Tis a pity that all gringos are doomed to the flame. The señor was a good master to us that had felt the iron fist of the Spaniard.”
“The señorita? She that is so sweet and good. Thinkest thou, Luisa, that she also will be cast into hell?”
“Not if my prayers can save, Pancha. Three great candles, at twenty centavos the candle, have I burned on the altar of Guadalupe for her soul’s sake. There is yet time for her. But the poor señor – ” her pause doomed him. Nevertheless, with greater vigor they returned to their prayers for his saving.
The dim beauty of the night with its spread of moonlit plain, loom of distant mountains, querulous supplication rising under cold stars, combined to produce that awful sense of infinity that shrouds the riddle of life. If Bull was incapable of philosophizing upon it, to translate the feeling in thought, he still came under its sway. While it weighed heavily upon him, there came a gasp and feverish mutter from the bed.
In a second he was there. As he removed the shade from the candle he saw Carleton’s face lit by the last flare. Recognition and intelligence both were there.
“Where is – Lee? Sleeping? Don’t wake her. Listen! She – must not – stay here. Tell William Benson – he’s rough and a bully – but honest and good. Tell him to get a permit – from the revolutionists – to drive my cattle and horses – across to the States. They will bring enough – to keep Lee for many – a year. Be sure – ”
The halting voice suddenly failed. Even while Bull was reaching for a stimulant the soul of the man passed out into the mystery beyond the moonlit plains.
For a while Bull stood looking down upon him. Then, very slowly, he made toward the door that led to the girl’s room. But as her tired face rose before him he stopped and shook his head. “Let her finish her sleep.” Tiptoeing, instead, out to the gallery rail, he leaned down and softly called the old women.
VII: THE RUSTLERS ARE ADOPTED
“Well, I reckon this about lets us out.”
The Three sat under the portales, heavily smoking. Bull puffed meditatively at a strong old pipe. Between lungfuls Sliver toyed absently with a cigarette. The necessities of dealing faro-bank had trained Jake in the labial manipulations of his fat native cigar. As all necessary readjustment could be made with the tongue or lips, his hands were thrust deep in his pockets, a proof of profound mental concentration. It was he who had spoken, and the “this” alluded to Carleton’s funeral, which had taken place the preceding day.
It had been a quiet affair. William Benson, the nearest white neighbor, happened to be in El Paso. Of a round dozen Mexicans of the better class, eleven were wearily waiting on the other side of the border till still another revolution should restore their territorial rights. The Icarzas, Ramon and his father, a bewhiskered hacendado, attended, with Isabel, the dusky beauty of the house. The Lovells, a small American rancher and his two pretty daughters, represented the hundreds ofgringos, miners, ranchers, engineers, smelter men, who would have come in normal times. So these, with Lee, Carleton’s peones, and the Three, had followed the rude ox-cart that bore him to the graveyard of a little adobe church in the hills. Their duty in the premises being thus consummated, the Three had resolved themselves into a committee on ways and means.
“Yes, I s’pose we’ll have to move on.” If not actually dismal, Sliver’s indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction.
Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had just then stepped out of her room across the patio. Phyllis, the younger, was to stay for a week, while Phœbe, the elder, returned home with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee walked with her guests the length of the patio she took with her the sympathetic glances of the Three.
Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, the sight of Carleton’s riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely accidental, a natural trimming of her dress.
Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee’s fairness. If their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross and passion.
“Adios, you fellows!” Lovell’s friendly voice came floating back from the gate. “Come and see us at San Miguel.”
It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man’s hand was against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver’s muttered exclamation: “Lordy! I’d like to! but – ”
“ – it’s no place for us.” Bull nodded toward Lee. “It ’u’d be easier if she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an’ a new revolution breaking every other day!”
“Pretty fierce,” Jake coincided. “But if ’twas left to that young Mex at the funeral yesterday – Ramòn Icarza, wasn’t that what they called him? If ’twas left to him she’d soon be – ”
“ – damned an’ done for!” Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: “Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. Hell! if I thought she’d look twice his way, I’d croak him afore we left.”
“It wouldn’t be unnatural, she being raised here an’ not knowing much else.” Bull’s gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. “I’ll bet you that’s what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an’ get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so’s I could tell him afore we left.”
“Tol’ her yet?” Sliver asked.
Bull nodded. “Las’ night. Said she hadn’t given any thought, yet, to the future.”
The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to go down the opposite portales. Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her arm from the other girl’s waist, and came walking on alone.
They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness.
“Oh, shore!” with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her attempts to thank them for their kindness. “We hain’t done nothing worth while.”
“Sliver’s right.” Jake’s bleak eyes had grown almost soft. “You don’t owe us anything. All that’s bothering us is – ”
“ – that we kain’t jest see how you’re going to manage,” Bull finished. “Your father’s idea – ” He stopped.
Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. “It isn’t practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would – ” Her sweeping hand took in the sunlit patio, the brown criadassoft-footing it along the corredor; the compound ablaze with barbaric color; the peonas gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. “And if he would – I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to this. I’m part of it, and it of me,” she concluded, with a firm little nod. “I shall carry on my father’s work.”
The Three looked at one another. Bull’s troubled look, Jake’s dubious brows, Sliver’s cough, all expressed their common doubt. “Can you do it, Miss, alone?”
“I sha’n’t be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you – ” she paused, looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. “Of course, that’s absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know some one?”
The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the American border tightly closed; the fusilado against a ’dobe wall that would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, to do them justice, the girl’s helpless situation affected them most. If they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new path.
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.
