Over the Border: A Novel

XXXV: WHY?

While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills.

“The bandits moved toward the señor Lovell’s.” He answered. “Praise the saints! the señoritas are both in El Paso.”

“Then they’ll go straight on to Mary’s!” The last vestige of color drained from Bull’s face.

Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle of foul humanity dribbling down upon the rancho. He saw Mary Mills on the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty dribble swept around her and the child.

He turned to the agent. “My horse? Did they get him?”

“No, señor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral.” He pointed eastward. “Come!”

Half an hour later the mozo shoved a shock head out of the chaparral in answer to the agent’s whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed through his mind.

In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end. At least, he so rode until, passing into the grass country that afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a mountain ahead.

He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line with the widow’s rancho his fears crystallized around its slender column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast.

Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always timed Bull’s arrival at the rancho with the lowering of the sun. As he urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the ominous cloud had died on the mountain’s high shoulder; but, more ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though prepared, a hoarse sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the place.

The externals were the same – crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny pastures. At this hour the widow’s cattle were usually to be seen forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now – in all the wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills.

The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer.

A wild rush of hope swept his being – to die the next moment when, rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio’s woman. On her knees, hands raised in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder.

She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull’s face. Though she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a passion of tears.

At any other time Bull’s dominant racial contempt would have caused him to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion.

“Aie!.. Aie!” Soon she began to speak. “Aie! the poor señora … and the niña … where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! Aie! where were they?”

A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man on the train, to tell the tale in her own way.

“They came in from all sides, señor.” Her hands swept the round of the hills. “Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The señora was at breakfast with the niña in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. But she shook it off, señor, went forward to meet them with smiles and greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating them off with her smiles.

“‘Enter, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.’ Thus she spoke them.

“Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it reeked with their evil presence.

“At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the sanctities to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, soon became as a whet to their evil appetites. From rough jokes, bad talk, they proceeded to worse – entered her bedroom and the child’s, broke open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing.

“For that she did not care – not for anything, could she but keep the child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon them.

“‘Get Betty away!’ she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard.

“Still she had hope – that, being fed and flattered and pleased with their plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and went among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and pinches, she still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with smiling reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from her hand, and then – and then – how shall one tell it?

“They demanded that the señorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her ‘Linda’ and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At last one beast pulled her on to his knee.

“To me, in the kitchen, came the child’s scream and the señora’s bitter cry. ‘For the sake of your mothers, señores!’ followed by the crash of furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor.

“At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of hell! One! Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the ground. From the meat-block I had snatched my fleshing knife. But as I gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of God! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?”

Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she cowered at Bull’s feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame.

“Go on!” He stooped and shook her violently. “Go on!”

She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. “I was wrong, señor. One mercy was granted – death! They murdered them … murdered them! Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them – the innocent woman, sweet child!”

“Yet you – escaped?”

“Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, they were gone – gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after they have slain the white heifer of the plains.”

Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, blind struggle filled his mind.

The Mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in a universe ruled by a just God, could one find justification for this horror? “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to the fourth generation,” says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills’s blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement? And she – who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul? Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration?

Not in these clear terms did Bull’s thought run. Blind anguish kept him straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he felt – felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it.

While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his consciousness a sound that rose above the woman’s sobbing – the dry murmur of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. They were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone forever beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! Surely they were gone! Yet – the corruption of the tomb, mold of the grave, would never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames they had passed into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains that he was, born of free spaces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took comfort in the thought.

Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills’s face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then – with deep thankfulness he realized it – now she would never know! never know how far he had fallen below his resolves.

Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his breast the thought – now she would never know!

From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, “Why?” He had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this terrible thing to pass had origin under the power that set the stars in their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him. His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had utterly failed in its duties to its own – the government that, with the purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies.

Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward. Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged – across the Rio Grande.

“You done it!” His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the force of his indictment. “Yes, you done it!”

The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from sharing.

When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains – and revenge.

XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE – ”

Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined days before obscured by gathering dangers.

Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise counsel of Lee’s good friends, the jefe and priest, Gordon had prevailed.

“These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own,” the priest had advised. “Los Arboles needs a man’s hardness.”

To which the jefe had added his little joke, “Managing thee, niña, will not be his lightest work.”

No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church are on Cupid’s side – well, there is no country on earth where his business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures.

Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl’s expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon’s notice. Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder.

“I was thinking of the girl I left down there.” She expressed the feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they have left their girlhood. “She meant well, but – was so foolish. I was just wondering if – if – ”

“Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton.” He helped her out. “If she isn’t the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of heaven” – he paused, grinning – “and hell – ”

“You didn’t make me suffer, of course!” She flashed up in quite the old manner. “The way you carried on with that dreadful girl. But there goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning. Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to. Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose her temper and – What are you laughing at? Don’t you want me to reform?”

“There! there!” Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second laugh. “If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I’d – I’d march you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the service backward.” Quite illogically he went on: “I, too, had a serious hour with myself. I made up my mind – ”

He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. “Not to change? Don’t dare to say it!”

Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion.

“You won’t, will you?”

He assured her, of course, that he wouldn’t – and believed it, no doubt. So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter.

In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon’s beast dropped hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes Pedro’s jacal in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the camisa andcalzones of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a welcoming grin.