Kitabı oku: «Over the Border: A Novel», sayfa 9
XV: BULL AND THE WIDOW CONSPIRE
“Ain’t that queer?”
The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank bench in front of their ’dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to smoke in the house, they preferred it there – partly through a rooted instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the natural enemy of “Lady Nicotine,” regarding her always as a formidable rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver’s remark broke the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who sat in the doorway of a ’dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile.
“Ain’t what queer?” Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through the warm air. “There’s so many queer things down here I’ll have to ask you to come again.”
Sliver nodded at Gordon. “Ain’t it odd how he cottons to them little Mexes? To me they’re no more’ n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat up night afore last with a sick one?”
“No-o-o-o!” Jake’s surprise knew no bounds.
“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he did.”
“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s what they’re all a-wanting.”
“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make her sit up an’ take notice!”
Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly – friendly as a brace of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling, evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as you say – there’s nothing doing.”
Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. “Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As, rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: “I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.”
“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this month – once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was rumored raiders had been seen around her rancho; now beca’se he wants advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’ – ”
“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean, sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my fingers is itching to get into a game.”
“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood. “I’ll soon be due for a night at the fonda.” He added, with comical pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so when I’m through.”
“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull – ”
Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s rancho. The low sun filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack till a voice broke the golden silence.
“It will pay you, señor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the eyes out of you with perfect ease.”
As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull’s question.
“Si, the señora is there. Ride on, señor. I shall watch here for a little while.”
Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull’s knee, the widow explained the apparition. “That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He’s very faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, almost shot to pieces. After I’d nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got his pardon from Diaz on condition that he’d stay with us and behave. That’s over ten years ago. He’s been with us ever since, and that old bandit reputation of his has been our best protection.”
“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bull made hearty comment. “It takes a bad man to scare a bad man. I’ll feel easier for knowing this.”
The widow had already dismissed Terrubio’s woman, who served as hercriada, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull’s supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, though he introduced it then.
“Two months he’s been here, ma’am,” he concluded his tale of woe, “an’ nary a thing doing.”
“Why, what did you expect?” Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter and Betty joined her childish merriment. “Did you think it would happen in the first five minutes? Now just consider – what good would she ever have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a lasting love. It’s good that he isn’t impressionable, for he’ll go down all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn’t have liked Lee to fall in love with him at once. But she isn’t that easy kind. The man that gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they act?”
Bull gave the diagnosis – they appeared to like each other! Were very friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn’t think of anything else!
The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst out laughing. “Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men are! That isn’t much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she him, accidental, as it were?”
Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the question. “Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t’other day. It lashed out an’ upset them an’ for a minute they was that balled up you kedn’t tell t’other from which. Didn’t seem a bit anxious to let go, either.”
“That’s favorable,” the widow nodded thoughtfully. “Looking at it from a distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It’s the life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. They’ll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up like a wind, then – up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles since Mr. Nevil came?”
“A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an’ Ramon was gone afore we kem in.”
“It’s a pity he hadn’t been there. He’d feel the same about as we do, and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t try to cut Ramon out. Let me see.” She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. “I know! I’m having a birthday next week. I’ll make a little party and invite Ramon and Lee. You’ll see to it that Gordon brings her here?”
“But then Bull won’t be able to come,” Betty’s small voice piped, indignantly. “And you told me only yesterday that you weren’t going to ask any one but him.”
Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. “So I did, dear, and I’d rather have him. But when Lee’s happiness is at stake we’ll have to give up our own pleasure. And you mustn’t call him that. ’Tisn’t respectful. Say Mr. Perrin.”
“But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could – didn’t you, Bull? There, you see!” Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with further revelations. “Mother will be thirty-sev – ” when the widow clapped her hand over the small, traitorous mouth.
She broke into a little, conscious laugh. “I know it’s silly. But was there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won’t acknowledge to a day over thirty.”
“And you look five years younger than that, ma’am,” Bull gallantly replied.
He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations.
In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to sleep in Bull’s arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment:
“’Tain’t for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own hand.”
He repeated it next morning, looking back on the rancho from the last rise. “No, Son, ’tain’t for you.”
At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might have read denial of his thought in both the child’s words and the widow’s reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty’s words with a sudden squeeze.
“Mother, I just know he’s falling in love with you. Wouldn’t it be nice if he asked – ”
XVI: ONE MAN CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER, BUT —
The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow’s birthday. Not that there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua – altogether too brightly for a white man’s comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses into the shade of the ’dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of “cat’s cradle” with a loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house.
At the sight of the two heads bent over the “cradle,” the girl’s face lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. “Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?”
“Is this she?” Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. “I had just about made up my mind to adopt her myself.”
“Let me see – ” Lee’s smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. “She’s about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. Oh, you needn’t blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was loud in your praises. ‘Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio’s sick babe all night. What a husband for some happy señorita!’”
“That was very nice of Maria.” He laughed. “Only, I’m afraid there’s nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow up – somehow I lose interest.”
It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe housekeeping around the corner.
“Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the señorita,” came a voice, gruff with masculine authority. “Only we be married.”
“But will they be married, Pancho?” piped a softer treble.
“Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old ’Lupe talking at the well. ‘Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman with never a duenna to her name? ’Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, this may not end without marriage.’ This is what old ’Lupe said to thy mother.”
Rich color swept from the roots of Lee’s hair down to her neck. She hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky sentences, she regained her composure.
“Woman!” “Don Gor-r-r-don” was speaking again. “What is this – the tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? ’Tis sour as swill, fit only for swine.”
“Then it should suit thee very well,” came the softer voice, with unexpected spirit.
“A-r-r-r-h!” It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which Don Gor-r-r-don’s father resented household rebellions. “Thou wouldst answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!”
Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon.
“Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you,” she teased him. “They were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he handed Dolores one on the mouth.”
He laughed. “The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the proper relation of the sexes.”
This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased surprise.
Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician – the widow, for instance – would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled – and mishandled – man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends.
He “lost interest in them after they grew up.” Indeed! Why, the freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature’s cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, he did not know it. The “fire and tow” still lacked a “wind.”
They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell’srancho to the widow’s; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. “It is rougher,” she said, “with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded cañon past a country fonda. There I’ll show you the prettiest Mexican girl in all Chihuahua.”
“At the fonda? Then I have seen her.”
Her quick look said quite plainly, “Oh, you have?”
“Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should say!” He added, laughing, “She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, adding the fonda as an extra inducement.”
Her expression now said, “Oh, she did?” But as she looked away, he failed to see it, got only her words, “And you had the heart to refuse?”
“Sad to relate.”
“And you haven’t even been to see her again?”
“No time.”
She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that expressed – perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy watch as they approached the fonda.
“There’s your beauty – attired like a bride for her groom.”
Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an ollaof water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from under the olla, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty picture overmuch for his companion’s taste.
His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, “Perhaps she hasn’t lost hope?”
She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s fob dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads.
At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette, she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s monogram in gold.
“Ah, ha! señor!”
Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was it the widow’s “wind” fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke:
“I am yours!”
After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling after Gordon’s up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question.
