Over the Border: A Novel

So engrossed was he that a gentle agitation of the sheet which hung across Lee’s bedroom doorway on the gallery above passed unnoticed. The rail hid from his view the small, bare feet, but he missed a glimpse of white shoulder, flash of brown eyes under her hair’s bright tousle, round, red mouth opened in a yawn before, seeing him, she hastily dropped the sheet. He did not see her even when she came out in kimono and slippers and soft-footed it down the stone stairs at his back. Though, sitting up on her heels, Maria looked on smiling, Gordon’s first notice came from the soft palms that slipped over his eyes.

With loose treachery the kimono sleeves had slipped back and he could feel the soft coolness of her forearms on his neck and cheeks; wherefore it is not to be wondered at that he found difficulty in guessing whom she might be. Jake, Sliver, Maria, Teresa, Lovell, the ancianos, he was enumerating by name all the women, children, cats, and dogs of thehacienda when she cut him off.

“Your stupidity is suspicious, sir. But it punishes itself. If you had guessed right I might have given you a – ”

He took it – in triplicate, then pulled her down on his knee. “To my father and mother,” he replied to her question. “I thought it was about time I dropped them a line – haven’t written home since I came down.”

“What?” She uttered a small shocked scream. “You’ve let them suffer all this time in suspense and alarm?”

He looked up in innocent surprise. “Why should they suffer? I didn’t.”

He hadn’t? Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against such utter lack of imagination – but dropped again quickly, owing to a second base treachery on the part of the sleeves.

“Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. Youdidn’t suffer? Oooooh!” She pulled his ear till he yelled. “If you ever dare to treat me like that!”

“That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together.”

After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she asked: “But why this sudden plunge into correspondence – after such long abstinence?”

“To inform them,” he replied, with great dignity, “of a certain momentous change impending in my condition.”

“Oh, you are telling them about —me? May I see what you have written?”

She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it had evolved into a bear hug.

“Oh, what a liar they will think you!”

“To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing’s believing.”

Of course she declared it “wasn’t a bit like her” and the rest of it. Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee, picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally and in toto denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent.

“Only you are so blind. They’ll hate me when they see it.”

“Trust dad for that!” he laughed. “He still has a soft spot for a pretty damsel. When he sees this – well, he’ll go straight out and buy a fatted calf.”

“But your mother and sister? They’ll never forgive me for taking you from that other girl.”

“Wrong again! They weren’t a bit anxious about it. It was all my father – with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They’ll love you as much as I – no, that’s impossible! But they’ll love you, all right.”

A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. “That other girl? You never told me about her. Did you ever – kiss her?”

“Lots of times.” Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. “At parties, when I was a kid – and when we played ‘post-office’ and sich.”

“Never since you grew up?”

“Never.”

“Oh, well,” she sighed, “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you since you were so very small, and it’s such a long time ago I’ll really have to – make up.”

Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. “And now – what about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they receive it?”

Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. “Such impatience! Aren’t you happy?”

“Happy?” His voice rang with sincerity. “Happier than I ever thought possible, but – ”

“But – ?”

“I want to be happier still.”

He meant and thought it. But she with her woman’s intuition knew this, their love time, for what it was – the flowerage of their lives. Later would come the ripe fruit – content mixed with the joys and sorrows that form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it.

“After – after Bull comes home.”

In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time before he spoke.

“If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made it a double marriage. Why, what’s the matter?”

She had sat up with a little shiver. “Oh no! I could never be happy in one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!” Coiling up again, she allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. “I never saw him, he who was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon behind a cloud, but he felt – like you. In my visions he always took me into the wilds – the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go.

“It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and gone down the length of the Sierra Madres – at first alone, later traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that impossible. But this we can do – go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, who are both old friends of my father’s, to be married, then ride straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by ourselves till – till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you look after the horses, and we can play that we are simple peones and be – oh,so happy!”

Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. “How perfectly lovely! Why didn’t I think of that myself?”

“You would have, in time. Oh!” She sprang from his knee at a stir and tinkle of water. “Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress.”

“You’ll go out with me to-day?” he called after her.

“No.” She bent down over the rail to answer. “I promised Jake to go with him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts.”

“Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?” he protested. “’Tisn’t fair.”

But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out from behind the sheet.

From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now described about the hacienda, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with Sliver or Jake – and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests of great earth waves – then to sit and muse while the declining sun washed the wide world with its resplendence.

As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted adobes, patio, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the burning hills. But – in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and wild – there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry.

“Beast! she is but a child!”

Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the adobes.

“Raiders!” he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, “Revueltosos!”

A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth.

From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon’s sight, blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a revueltoso. The elder sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing.

“Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!”

At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon’s spine. Blind, breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man’s arms, and threw him violently against the wall.

So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired, aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then, stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll over.

Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them.

The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick, it withstood a violent hammering.

The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse. But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand, the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning.

“They say to bring fire and burn down the door.” Her quick motion simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame. Whispering: “Tira! señor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!” she pointed at the window.

It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside, and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the revueltosos were hugging the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at random, there followed a quick scurry of feet.

Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back before – zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in through the window and plump in the back wall.

Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above the woman’s shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window, they waited – in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman’s excited breathing and an occasional sob under the bed.

“Tempting me to look out,” he read the silence.

But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet and the voice of Maria, the little criada, called through the bars:

“It ess good now, señor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with those evil ones.”

The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned, first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them, “Don” Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back gate Sliver and two ancianos now stood with leveled rifles. Two more poked deadly snouts over the low patio wall, Lee and Jake behind them. And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, machetes, a hysterical, dangerous mob.

In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with evil jokes.

“Drive back those women!” Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. “Then bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over here.”

Nodding in reply to Gordon’s gesture, the leader followed him across the compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature’s mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales and addressed Jake with an authoritative air:

“Now, señor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of General Valles?”

“Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles attacked my people!”

It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man’s riding-clothes, and the man’s surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy. Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair.

“I did not know” – his bold glance wandered over her costume – “you will pardon me, señorita?”

Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time that revolutionists had come with “requisitions” to Los Arboles. She answered from experience.

“You have a commission from General Valles?”

He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, el capitan Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles’s own illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal.

Lee handed it back. “This seems to be in legal form. That being the case” – she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake an appreciative nod “perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my people!”

“I know of no attack except” – the straight brows knit over a black flash at Gordon – “when this man killed one of my men.”

Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: “He shot in self-defense – to save one of my girls.”

“Santa Maria!” His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. “What foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled a dove. You Americanos take these peonas too seriously, fill them with ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a soldado for a sweetheart.”

Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on Gordon’s part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool calculation by Jake as to the possibility of “getting away with it” should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering if he could send one bullet through all four heads.

If the thoughts of the peonas– now gathered in a murmuring, gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall – a composite of their thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee’s voice:

“You say that? You, a follower of a man who was once himself a peon, who boasts that his is the peones’ cause? You, his representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor creatures? If youdo represent him, then God help us, for we have little but violence to expect from your cause.”

It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the peon in all his ways, to mutter: “You bet! they hain’t got nothing coming from him!” But in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the shibboleths of his “Cause.” Surely they were fighting for the peon; to obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the hacendados.

“If my hombre did as you say,” he concluded, “he earned his death. My general would be the first to applaud it.” With a gesture that dismissed the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: “So let us say no more of that. My wish is to serve you!”

Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry blood flooding Gordon’s face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture.

“Leave him to me,” she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in the eye, she gave him his answer. “You wish to serve me? Very well, señor, you may do so very easily – by removing yourself and your men off my place.”

For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise. In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. “Si, señorita – after you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new levy for equipment and supplies. Also” – another black flash went to Gordon – “it will be my duty to take this man to my general.”

“Perhaps I had better go,” Gordon whispered. “It may save you – ”

Lee cut him off without looking around. “And shoot him the moment you get him outside the gates?” She quoted the Mexican law of “The escape.” “No, señor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him with my own hands at your general’s call.” She added, after a significant pause, “Along with the evidence of your own neglect in permitting your men to attack my people.”

For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of effect – especially upon meddlesome consuls – it was the fashion in the revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed through his vicious look.

“Very well, señorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the horses. These I must have at once.”

“Well, think you’ve got ’em, an’ let it go at that!”

While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her meditation flashed a sharp question: “Were you at the hacienda of the señor Benson last week?”

The man’s dark brows rose. “No, señorita. If there was a requisition served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez.”

“When did you leave the cuartel general?”

“Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other side of the railroad. But what difference does it make – ”

“A great deal.” She gave a little nod. “Since you left headquarters the señor Benson, with my manager, the señor Perrin, has gone with an offer of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter may also be left with him.”

“Which lets you out!” Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the background, now burst out. “Now git! That’s what I said – an’ take your dead hombre along.”

From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the man’s glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the peonas who were now crowding the patio gates. Everywhere his glance fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the peonasopened.

While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across thepatio wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and hisancianos still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it.

As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they passed out under the patio arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically, then followed his men.

“Saddle a fresh horse an’ go after them,” Jake ordered, when Sliver came up. “Don’t let ’em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we’ll have to keep one man circling the hills while the ancianos keep watch an’ watch at the gates.”

With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men ride away. “I am sorry to have brought this on you,” he said, in low tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added, “Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him.”

A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. Jake was shooing the peonas back to their quarters with much language and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and planted a swift kiss on his cheek.

“I don’t want to be widowed – before I’m married.”

At midnight Sliver brought in his report. “They’ve gone on to El Sol. After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into ’em when they stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood quiet an’ the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn’t hear of it.

“‘The damned gringos shoot straight,’ I heard one of ’em say. ‘Already have they killed one of us, an’ now they be ready. Also the horses are tired an’ we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.’ Then, after some jawing, they moved on.”

“An’ they won’t come back,” Jake commented on the report. “Not so long as they kin find something that looks easier.”

Which was only half of the truth!