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Title: Somewhere south in Sonora
A novel
Author: Will Levington Comfort
Release Date: May 27, 2023 [eBook #70867]
Language: English
Produced by: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by University of California
libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOMEWHERE SOUTH IN
SONORA ***
Somewhere South in Sonora
SOMEWHERE SOUTH
IN SONORA
_A NOVEL_
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: OLD LIGHTS OF THE RIO BRAVA 3
I. THIRTY YEARS LATE 23
II. AT HEASLEP’S RANCH 29
III. THE LEATHER-STORE 35
IV. ‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’ 44
V. ‘I, ROBERT LEADLEY--’ 54
VI. THE LISTENING MARE 64
VII. THE SOFT SIDE OF A SADDLE 71
VIII. HEASLEP’S AGAIN 78
IX. INITIATION 87
X. ‘WATER IS FOR HORSES’ 94
XI. GAS AND GUNS 101
XII. FLASHLIGHT AND FAWNSKIN 106
XIII. VALLEJO’S LINES 113
XIV. A LETTER 119
XV. TUCSON 120
XVI. THOROUGHBREDS ENTER 131
XVII. THE ART OF DYING WELL 138
XVIII. ONE SANG WITH GUITAR 146
XIX. A CORNER OF THE WALL 153
XX. THE TWO WHO HAD NOT HEARD 160
XXI. THE RIO MORENO BRIDGE 167
XXII. FRAMED IN A DOBE GATEWAY 173
XXIII. FENCELESS FOOTHILLS OF SONORA 178
XXIV. SHEATH-KNIFE 187
XXV. ELBERT LEARNS TO WAIT 196
XXVI. SILENCE 203
XXVII. WORDS 206
XXVIII. ‘LIKE THE VIRGIN SPEAKING--’ 211
XXIX. HIGH COUNTRY 218
XXX. TUCSON AGAIN 226
SOMEWHERE SOUTH IN SONORA
PROLOGUE
OLD LIGHTS OF THE RIO BRAVA
I
BOB LEADLEY moved toward the sound of guitars. The strumming came
from over the stream where the Mexicans had their own little cantina
and their dobe huts. Back from the ‘Damask Cheek,’ which was the
palpitating core of the white settlement, voices of the miners reached
him, not loud to-night, not uproarious. Things were seldom duller than
now on the Rio Brava, shrunken to a trickle at this time of year. The
eke of gold had been at its lowest for days on the placers. A hot,
still August night in Bismo, Arizona--the night that changed one white
man all around.
Mexican figures bowed to him. A woman laughingly called from a darkened
doorway: ‘Buenas noches, señor!’ Another laughed from behind her,
adding somewhat wistfully: ‘Hace un calor sofocante.’
He walked on past the dobe huts and on to the mesa. He heard the
coyotes--different from any time before. There was no moon and the
stars were indistinct, run together in the heat haze. Bob Leadley took
off his hat; drops of sweat held by the tight hatband, dropped down
on his face. He had to laugh at himself--the feelings that rolled
and tumbled over each other within. Nobody would have believed it of
him--feelings to keep a secret of. It was as if some one he had always
been waiting for, had come to town--not yet seen, a friend or enemy,
he couldn’t tell, but a life-or-death meaning to the arrival. Running
steps reached him from behind; a panting voice calling:
‘Bob! Bob!’
‘Hello, Mort,’ he answered as the other came up, the tone so quiet and
cool, it was almost whimsical.
‘What you doing away off here?’
‘She didn’t want me there.’
‘It’s a boy, Bob, only--’
‘I thought as much.’
‘It’s a boy all right, only she--they say she ain’t going to live.’
The mother was already dead, but this was Mort Cotton’s way of
softening the shock for a friend.
The same easy tone answered: ‘Guess we’d better walk back.’
‘I wouldn’t hurry, if I was you. Bob. I’ll run back if you like and get
the rest of the word.’
* * * * *
It was her doings that they called the child Bart, after some saint
of her religion. She had a lot of saints, one for every day or so--a
Spanish woman, and she hadn’t asked much, come to think of it.
The oddest thing Bob Leadley had ever done was to marry her. He never
would have thought better of it, except it made a difference in the
town. It would make more of a difference now--leaving a boy with her
blood in his veins. They wouldn’t call it ‘Spanish’ blood in Bismo.
Mexicans weren’t held high on this side of the Border.... Queer little
birdlike ways, she had--little vanities and secrets--always shrinking
farther indoors in daylight, always more alive in the night time.
She had sung and cooked and washed for him; pleasant to be with,
but he never really knew her. She was like ripe fruit that couldn’t
last--pleasant to the taste and pretty to look at, but nothing much for
real hunger. Come and gone with her curious ways, her brightenings up
in the dark--only asking one thing--that the boy be called after this
particular one of her saints, and ‘Bart’ was as good a name as any.
So there was a gray-eyed white man in Bismo, Arizona, with a black-eyed
boy in his cabin. No problem about it at all, from the standpoint of
the other miners, just scorn--only Bob Leadley had been known from away
back as cool and gamy as they made them; nothing like the squaw-man,
cholo-man type. The miners couldn’t give much play to their contempt
before those pleasant gray eyes of Bob’s, which might inquire their
meaning, and look into it. Men weren’t mind-readers in Bismo. They saw
the steady eyes, the whimsical smile, but no one knew what was going
on; not even Mort Cotton, who had punched cattle, skinned mules, and
washed for gold with Bob Leadley for ten years; not even the Mexican
woman and her daughter who brought Bart up. But it was all a matter
of how you gave advice. Bismo found out gradually that Bob wasn’t set
up very high in his idea of being a successful parent. They found he
listened attentively to comment given within a certain range of tones;
discovering this, the miners supplied it plentifully.
The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers
worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two
settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves
of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to
Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not
infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’ Letchie Welton, the town
marshal, wasn’t even to be approached on a matter like this, and sounds
of mourning from one or more dobe huts seldom reached as far as the
‘Damask Cheek,’ any more than the strumming of guitars....
* * * * *
Several times in the next dozen years, Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton were
on the point of leaving Bismo, but the Rio Brava had a way of suddenly
picking up, the gold eke rising to quite a little color. There was
another thing; it was hard for Bob to make up his mind to take Bart
away from the Mexican woman and her daughter. It didn’t seem fair. The
old señora had been a friend of Bart’s mother and loved the white man’s
boy; also her daughter loved him. But Bart was growing up more Mexican
than white; talked Spanish in preference to English; was more often
seen across the stream than on this side, and running with the Mexican
boys, one Palto especially, than with the four or five white boys of
his age in town. Bart’s whole business was horses, but Mexican words
having to do with them were too easy on his tongue--hondos, latigos,
reatas, conchos, yakimas. A slim, black-haired youth, slow to rouse,
not cruel or a fool; an easy way with him; not stirred in the least
by the thought of washing gold; no idea of working hours, as being
superior to all others.
Just to see Bart leaning against the doorway--on his feet, but relaxed
in a way no white boy could stand, a guitar in his hand, perhaps--had a
way of filling his father with a revulsion that Bob had to take out to
the mesa to quiet. It was as if the man saw the face of his boy under
a high-tinted sombrero (instead of the cast-off cavalryman’s campaign
hat with a Copley peak) as if a sash of seda were thrust back over the
shoulder. Bob didn’t quite know it, but it was because he was seeing
Bart with the eyes of the other miners at these times--that he was
stung so. The town had put a secret fear on him that his boy was not
showing up white.
The father lacked one thing that parents usually have to work with.
He didn’t have the sense of being right at all times. Once or twice
he felt so sure of himself that he treated Bart to a whipping, which
the boy took without a murmur, minding pain no more than an Indian. He
never explained. The father got one of the starts of his life to find
he had whipped Bart for a thing he didn’t do, the boy not taking the
trouble to clear himself. Bob’s feeble sense of rightness was shaken
by that; it about all went out of him, and something else with it. The
deep hurt of it was that Bart held no grievance afterward.
A master at letting other men alone, Bob couldn’t keep his thoughts and
his will-power off the boy. He made up for his rare rough periods by
being lenient. All the time his actions and reactions brought advice
from his fellow townsmen. It was Letchie Welton, the town marshal, who
started the saying that Bart wouldn’t live to be hanged. All this time
Bob Leadley’s eyes were the most light-hearted anywhere.
‘As a male-parent, I’m considerable of a botch--I admit that,’ he would
say, in a way to delude anybody that he ever suffered real care, and
at the same time there was a sorrow burning at the center of him like
a red lamp. Often at work on the placer, he knew a loneliness to get
close to his boy. He might have seen Bart at breakfast, but that made
no difference. He felt lonely for him more than once, when they were in
the same room together.
II
BART was past twelve, when he was missing for a day or two, and rode
back into town on a gray rat-tailed pony that was raked from shoulder
to crupper with fresh wounds and old scars. Letchie Welton, in the
capacity of deputy sheriff, halted him at the edge of town, looking the
outfit over.
‘Where did you get that briscut?’
‘Over at the Cup Q.’
‘Did you do all that fresh hookin’ on his hide?’
‘No.’
‘Buy him?’
‘No, they didn’t want him much over at the rancho. Said I could have
him for sitting thirty seconds--’
‘And you did?’
‘Yep--more. I ain’t got off.’
Letchie Welton looked queer and rode back to the placers where he found
Bob Leadley. ‘Your kid’s just brought in a man-killer from the Cup Q--a
gray rat-tail I remember seein’ over there. If I was you, Bob, I’d put
a bullet in the head of that cayuse, and I’d leave off work and do
it now--before he kicks a hole out of Bart’s face or eats his scalp
off.’ Letchie Welton went on to recall further details of Rat-tail’s
reputation--of the fits he threw, the men he had maimed.
Bob left the placer and went to his own little corral where he found
Rat-tail unsaddled, Bart leaning in the fence shadow, looking over his
new possession.
‘I hear he’s an outlaw, Bart. I wouldn’t ride him if I was you.’
‘I rode him over from the Cup Q all right.’
‘I know. He may have been glad to get away from there--but look at
him!’ Bob took a few steps closer to the old gray head which suddenly
looked deformed. A float of baleful red appeared back of the near,
filmy eye.
‘I’ve seen that look once or twice before, Bart, and I’ll have to tell
you to stay off him.’
‘All he knew from the Cup Q was rakin’ and quirtin’, Dad.’
‘But that ain’t the look of a nice hoss.’
‘I like him.’
‘It ain’t the look of a broke hoss, Bart.’
‘I don’t want no broke hoss.’
‘You’ll have to stay off, that’s all--’
Bob saw that deep questioning look in the eyes slowly turned his
way--no anger, no hate, but separateness, a widening gulf.
‘At least, stay off him till I try him out for a few days.’
Bob was sincere in his attempt to make the rat-tail safe for his son,
but the toughest saddle-sessions he had ever known, followed in the
next ten days. Where the ordinary outlaw left off with sun-fish and
rail-fence, the old gray opened fresh spontaneities. One of the last
things he did with Bob forked, was to make a quarter-mile sprint
toward a low-hanging cottonwood limb, the idea being to rake off his
tormentor, which he carried out. Another time when Bob persisted
several seconds longer than usual, the rat-tail came out of a buckling
snap--to fling himself on the ground. The day came when Bob Leadley,
cool-eyed, a smile on his lips, would have preferred to stand up and be
shot at, than mount the gray monster again, but that’s what he did, it
being his code. That day Rat-tail plunged into a dobe wall and left
Bart’s father on the inside of a crowded chicken yard with a broken leg.
‘I should have done what Letchie told me, Bart,’ Bob said that night.
‘He ain’t a man-killer just; he’s a man-eater. You’ll have to leave him
alone from now on.’
‘You tried hookin’ him, the way they did over in the Cup Q. It makes
him crazy. He ain’t crazy natural, his mouth’s tender. He’s been driven
crazy. He needs humorin’, Dad.’
Anger flamed up in the father. He had been a horse-hand all his life.
‘I say keep off him, from now on.’
Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows
showing curiously white. ‘I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it’ll
get to you anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s been riding that rat-tail on a
hackamore--he’s ridin’ him now. And what I’m gettin’ at is, he ain’t
havin’ trouble.’
Bob’s face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while
his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right?
Didn’t Bart have something on the gray others hadn’t--with other
horses, too, perhaps? It wasn’t a matter of just sitting a horse.
Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was
something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of
the gray’s head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the
eye die down. Bart had something on him--a new feel with a horse.
‘I belong to the old school,’ he muttered. ‘All we know is that a hoss
has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart
ain’t a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him
his courage back. But it’s disobedience--I dasn’t let Bart get away
with it. They’d think I was crazy--if I didn’t get rid of the rat-tail.’
Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse.
III
FINALLY the morning, a year or two later, when old Batten, the
storekeeper at Bismo, was found murdered by Bob Leadley’s serving woman
who had gone over for a can of condensed milk. Her outcry roused the
town. The old man had been hammered over the head and pulled out from
his own back room, or else he had reached that far before they finished
him. Things were spilled. There were sticky tracks on the floor and
a winy smell in the gray of morning. A cask of apricot brandy in the
place, no one knew how old, was still dripping when Bob Leadley got
there. He recalled that Batten had never sold any of this brandy,
holding it choice and sending a little flask to any one who was sick.
What struck him queerly, too, was old Batten’s thin white hair, not
combed back as usual.
Letchie Welton came in and propped the old man up against the counter
for a better look. The marshal’s jaw got harder and whiter as he
repeated that it was a Mexican job. The town was crowding in. Bob
Leadley noted that his boy, Bart, was standing around. ‘Go on back home
and get your breakfast, Bart,’ he said.
The whole white settlement was inside or at the store doors by this
time. Mort Cotton’s voice seemed to find the strangest hush for this
sentence: ‘They needn’t have killed him. Old Batten would have given
them all that they took--at least trusted ’em for what they took--’
It sounded so innocent and mournful, but it was like blowing on
fire--the effect on the crowd. Every one was thinking something of
the same kind, and a sort of hell took hold and united them--the same
contagion that makes a mob. The cask had ceased to drip--not yet five
in the morning. No one knew how much money Batten had in the place.
‘A Mexican job,’ repeated Letchie Welton, his jaw getting harder and
whiter. ‘We’ll just go over to Dobe-town right now and see who’s
missing.’
They routed out the shacks across the river. Two Mexicans, Marguerin
and Rueda, couldn’t be accounted for; also a boy, called Palto around
the diggings, was gone. About this time Bob Leadley noticed that Bart
hadn’t done what he was told, but had come over the stream with the
rest.
‘I told you to get out of here. Go home and wait till I come.’
Now Bob recollected that Bart and Palto had been thick at times.
No work on the mines that day. The ‘Damask Cheek’ filled early. Ten men
chosen by Letchie Welton took the trail after the three Mexicans--a
trail that showed clear--three ponies headed toward the Border, six or
seven hours’ start.
All were thinking, as they rode, of that old white head; ten men and
the marshal, still keyed to that sentence which Mort Cotton had spoken.
The thoughts of the posse working together this way made the purpose
deadly. Each man grew painfully fond of old Batten, and the other side
of the fondness was rising hate for the Mexicans ahead. Every little
while some one said: ‘Poor old Batten, he wouldn’t have hurt a toad.’
They were several miles out, before Bob Leadley noticed that Bart was
overtaking them from behind. At first he thought Bart was bringing a
message from the town, but it proved he merely wanted to go.
‘You turn around and ride back, just as fast as you can, young man!’
the father said.
Those were the words which fixed it the other way.
‘Let him stick. Good chance to see what he’s made of,’ Letchie Welton
laughed, just as he would have said: ‘Send him home,’ if Bob had asked
to let him stay.... The next day the posse was pressing the three
Mexicans a lot closer. They didn’t seem more than three hours ahead.
It was desert work now, hot and grim. Toward nightfall, they came to
a fork where the fugitives had broken apart, two turning to the left,
one to the right. Letchie Welton sent four men after the lone pony to
the right, and kept on with seven after the other two. On the third
noon the two Mexicans, hard pressed, made their final split. This broke
up the pursuing party a second time; Letchie Welton, Mort Cotton, Bob
Leadley and Bart keeping on straight south, the other four turning east.
Toward sundown that third night, over a hundred miles from Bismo, only
Bart was riding light and easy; his pony with a reserve left, the other
three horses done for, and their riders as well. Canteens were empty;
desert country, here and there a big solitary cactus, rising like a
shade tree gone crazy.
‘There’s water ahead,’ Bart told his father. ‘I can tell by my pony’s
ears.’
The lower rim of the sun was out of sight when they came to the
Mexican’s horse, finished, lying at the edge of a pool of stagnant,
coated water, choked in the hollows of a dry stream bed. The man-tracks
stretched on toward a shadowy mass that proved to be the old hard-rock
diggings of Red Ante, long since abandoned by any miners, Mexican or
white. Letchie yanked up his horse’s head from the pool.
‘Our game’s ahead, men. Come on, we’ll get him and then come back to
this pea-soup!’
Now, entering that deserted town, it was as if Bob Leadley had to see
every detail. Not that he wanted to--but there seemed to be a pair
of extra clear eyes, working back of his regular eyes, though he was
partly out of his head from exhaustion. The abandoned street, between
the huts of Red Ante, impressed him as something perpetual--moment
and place. At the same time, a kind of insane anger was in his brain,
because he had to hold up the weight of his horse’s head on the
bridle-rein. The beast with dying strength, was fighting to get back to
that scummy pool; and Bob, a heap in the saddle, was needing all his
strength to keep from falling. At the same time, those deadly clear
eyes of his took in the bone-white curve of Letchie Welton’s jaw, the
big rent in Mort Cotton’s shirt under the left arm toward the back, the
skin showing wet and blistered there--and all the rest in that falling
dark: Huts partly sunken in blowing sand--wide-open door of a deserted
blacksmith shop--familiar as a lithograph that had hung in his room
for years--wide-open door, rusty anvil, sledge standing by--big rusty
bear-trap in the center of the dirt floor, with its half-inch chain
running to the base of the anvil--everything sagging and dust-covered.
Now Bob was letting himself down out of the saddle--when Letchie’s
pistol cracked, and his voice yelled:
‘There he goes. I winged him. I got the son of--’ A second pistol shot,
as Letchie dug his spurs into his horse and pressed on the dark street.
Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton staggered after him on foot, Bart keeping
with them on his pony--to the last hut.
‘It’s Palto,’ they heard the boy say.
The young Mexican was on the ground. The point dawning in Bob Leadley’s
brain was that it would have been so much better, simpler, if one
or both of Letchie’s shots had finished the job. Palto was down to
pray--kneeling on the sand-blown, half-obliterated road. Welton jerked
his horse so close, it looked as if he meant to trample the boy, before
he stepped down. With his boot he shoved the figure over on its side.
‘So it was you who did the hammering on old man Batten’s skull--’
‘Yo, no, señor!’
Not a man looking up, but the ashes of a boy--fag and fright all that
was left.
‘Weren’t even there, were you? Home in bed all night. Just started out
for a morning ride with Marguerin and Rueda--’
‘Si, señor--was there, but no kill--’
Letchie turned his thin smile to the others. ‘I guess you’ve heard
that. I guess we’ve got what we came for. I guess we’ve heard from his
own lips, he was one of the three.’
Bob Leadley wasn’t right in his own head; he knew just enough to know
that one thing. He saw his son looking down at Palto. He saw--a kind of
humor about it--that Bart hadn’t mixed in the pursuit with any sacred
idea of the law’s vengeance. Now the upshot of the whole matter from
Letchie Welton:
‘... accordin’ to law, we can’t finish him here and be done with it.
Bein’ still alive, we’ve got to fix to take him back to where a court
is. Only if he should try to escape--we could put a bullet through him;
but he won’t do that, will you, Palto?’
‘No, Señor!’ sliding away from Welton’s boot.
‘We aren’t the court and can’t hang him here, and there’s no shack in
this hole of a town that will hold him. Our horses are done for--they
won’t get back to Bismo--’
Letchie’s words died out of Bob Leadley’s ears. He was trying to find
himself. He was seeing old Batten’s white hair, not combed as usual;
he was seeing his own boy--a look in Bart’s face, different from ever
before. The hard white curve of Letchie’s jaw was before his eyes and
words again:
‘I, for one, ain’t sittin’ up on guard to-night. I’m not askin’ you
fellows to do what I won’t do myself.’
Something was crowding for utterance to Bob Leadley’s lips, but
Welton’s voice kept it from coming clear. They might be here in Red
Ante for days, while some one rode back to Bismo for fresh provisions
and horses.
‘... He ain’t worth it--no greaser is. Only one way--to fix him so he
can’t get away--’
Now Bart spoke up: ‘I’ll stand guard over him to-night. I don’t feel so
done out--’
The father was glad in a crippled sort of fashion, glad but afraid.
‘I guess not,’ said Letchie. ‘Wouldn’t look so pretty when we got back,
to have you tell ’em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got
our beauty sleep back.... No, I’m figurin’ out a different way from
what I saw up yonder--just as we broke into town.’
He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in
the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself.
‘I won’t take part in it,’ Bob thought. ‘I ain’t marshal to say what’s
what, but I won’t take no part.’
Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn’t turn to meet his son’s eyes.
‘I ain’t a man of law,’ he was thinking. At the same time he felt
Bart’s eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn’t look. ‘I ain’t
a man of law.’
The marshal was managing it alone....
Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his
saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if
running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no
sleep--with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of
Red Ante. He didn’t meet Bart’s eyes again. It was as if he had said
good-bye to his son for life.
Bob had dragged his blankets away from the empty huts, far out on the
sand to get beyond the cries, but they were already in his soul--no
getting away. Long afterward, lying out there, he heard the sound of
a single shot from the direction of the blacksmith shop--the end of
all cries. Welton was there before him, Mort Cotton appearing from
the side. Palto’s troubles were over--Bart missing. It was not until
daybreak that the father found a note pinned to his saddle--written by
Bart before the shot had been fired.
I guess I don’t belong here, Dad. I’ll take Palto with me, if I can
get him loose. Otherwise--well, you’ll know. So long for good, BART.
I
THIRTY YEARS LATE
ARRIVING when the present century was well started, Elbert Sartwell had
now concluded that his was a most untimely birth. For instance, all
that war amounted to in his case, was the matter of wearing puttees to
school. The magic of his youth was moreover smothered in a houseful
of sisters--imprisoned in a sorority-house, he found himself--all his
aching and persistent dreams unexpressed.
But the end had come. Elbert had reached decision; so had his father on
the same point. They were at odds. It was a matter of grief to the son
that for once there could be no compromise.
Fall darkness had closed about him, as these things appeared before
Elbert’s mind with finality. He left his room, followed the long wide
hall to the door of his father’s dressing-room and knocked. It was the
last quarter of an hour before dinner, and the tone of the ‘Come in’
was not encouraging, but it didn’t occur to Elbert to wait until dinner
and tobacco had combed down his father’s tag-ends of the day.
Mr. Sartwell was standing before his mirrors and did not turn, as the
hall door opened. Elbert nodded at the reflection; also he observed in
the glass a look of fresh vexation, which reminded him that his sister
Nancy this very afternoon had smashed the fender and left front wheel
of the new phaëton. His father had probably just heard about it. The
present moment couldn’t be worse, but Elbert didn’t see how he could
back out now with his ultimatum unreported.
‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said, ‘and I can’t start to work in
the office, at least not now. You see, I’ve always wanted--’
‘“Always wanted”--’ broke in Mr. Sartwell, ‘“always wanted” against
my better judgment.... A houseful of “always wanteds”! How can a man
be expected to stand in the midst of six people, always wanting in
different directions?’
‘I hate to be an added trouble to you,’ Elbert said in his unruffled
way, ‘but there’s no use of my trying to go into the business, the way
I feel.’
‘What is it now?’
Still addressing the mirror, the younger man outlined with some
embarrassment that he hadn’t been able to get over his ardor to tackle
life on a cattle range. The broad back before him suddenly jerked
about. Elbert was held by the first direct look of one whose son has
proved a definite disappointment. Many words followed; some heat:
‘... pack a pair of pistols! Step along out over the real-estate
ranges and prairie sub-divisions! Why, I’m actually ashamed to have to
tell you, what any kid half your age knows--that there isn’t a West any
more, no cattle country--hasn’t been for--why, you’re only about thirty
years late--’ Also a final sentence, as Elbert withdrew, to the effect
that if he did go forth, he would have to pay his own car fare ‘out
into the fenceless spaces.’
There was present at dinner that evening one of sister Nancy’s young
men friends, who had no dreams of the West whatsoever. The Sartwell
family, diminished by recent marriages of two elder daughters, was
pulling together socially, in spite of internal trouble. Elbert’s
thoughts were mainly afar on his own problem, but after a time, he
couldn’t help noticing the art with which the gentleman-guest played up
to his father. It could be done, Elbert reflected. The two sons-in-law,
already connected up, had also gone about it this way. He felt like a
crossed stick; a spectator merely, in the home dining-room. His glance
moved from face to face in the soft creamy light that flowed down
through a thin bowl of alabaster, hanging from the ceiling. He alone,
an only son, lacked a sort of commonplace craft to smooth his ways. He
might have asked for a trip around the world before settling down to a
business career--and gotten it.
Elbert retired to his room early. The Sartwell mansion faced the West,
and sunsets had reddened his windows from as far back as he could
remember. Long ago he had stared into a crimson foam of one certain
day’s end, thinking that it was the color of Wyoming. The lure of
that crimson foam hadn’t ceased, though it had moved farther South
and farther West--Apache country, Navajo country--leading on over the
border of late into Mexico itself.
He had been given an automobile at the end of high-school days, but he
had wanted a pony. Hours at home he had spent in the garage, secretly
wishing all the time it was a corral.
Elbert turned on the lights. Over the back of the chair he was sitting
on, was a blanket of Indian red. There were framed Western drawings on
the wall, paintings of rodeo and round-up, lonely cattlemen, bison,
longhorns, desert and mountain scenes; and in among his books, pasted
in an old ledger, was his collection of Indian pictures--heads of all
the tribes, famous braves and medicine men--from cigarette, gum, candy
packages--no end to the lengths he had gone to get the lot together. He
looked back upon the time when the bronzed head of Red Cloud, of the
Nez Perces, was the noblest countenance he had ever gazed upon.
A tall, cool person, Elbert could hardly remember ever being really
tired. He was practically a stranger to all stimulants and dwelt
altogether unaware in a calm that made nervous people either envious
at once or hopeless altogether. His steady, homely hands were of that
considerable size as to appear empty most of the time, and his blue
eyes were so steady and cool that any one undertaking to go against his
will, felt a surge of fatigue and irritation at the outset.
Elbert had been pondering a good deal of late on what sort of stuff he
was made of. When he read of some hero’s exploits in a newspaper, he
asked himself could he have done that. And when he heard of some great
suffering or privation of explorers, he wondered how he would have
acted, had he been along. But it was the Southwest that perennially
and persistently called. He moved to his phonograph, and picked out a
book of records from the shelf below. The one he wanted wasn’t there;
in fact, he found it still in the machine, from a solitary performance
of last evening--a Mexican record. He set it going now and a man’s
announcement in Spanish preceded the music, something about ‘Paquita
Conesa, tonadillera española, la mas famosa en Mexico y Sudamerica--’
... His favorite record. The song was ‘La Paloma.’ It always seemed to
Elbert as if Señorita Paquita were singing in the open air. He smiled
at a secret thought that always came to him, too--that the words of the
song were carved out of starlight.
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios--’
Up from the street, at the end of the song, reached his ears the
tiresome sweep and swish of tires and carbureters, and from the
drawing-room, Nancy’s singing voice. Her young man would be standing
beside the piano at this time, his waxen hair brushed back. Elbert
smiled wistfully. ‘Thirty years late.’
II
AT HEASLEP’S RANCH
FROM Kansas City, he sent his first letter back, regretting to leave
home without talking it over further, but there didn’t seem to be any
use. Possibly there wasn’t any more West, he allowed, but he had to go
out and see. He hopped off the train at Tucson and heard of a stage
that ran south toward the Border. That sounded right, and he walked
three blocks with his bags to perceive--no jehu with long flicking
lash, but a chauffeur, the stage being a motor-bus.
Elbert couldn’t appreciate the scenery. Yes, there was a big ranch down
yonder, the driver said. Yes, there was cattle. Irrigation and alfalfa
had reclaimed this waste stuff. Some cows presently appeared wearing an
‘HCO’ brand.
‘What does that stand for?’ Elbert asked.
‘Heaslep and Company.’
No Circle X or Lazy M--but irrigation, alfalfa fields, Heaslep and
Company!
‘The HCO runs everything down here--big land grant stretching almost to
the Border,’ the stage driver said.
Elbert was let down and made his way to a group of low buildings in the
distance. At the farrier’s shop, he inquired for the foreman, and was
told to look for a door ahead, marked ‘Office.’ ‘You’ll find Frost-face
in there or somewhere about,’ the blacksmith said.
Elbert’s pulse picked up a little at the name of the foreman, but it
was certainly a business office he entered.
‘We’re not short-handed,’ snapped the little gray man, with worried
face. ‘Things dull down in winter. Nothin’ much to do right now but
keep off the hoof-and-mouth disease.’
Outside there was a succession of sick blasts from a truck--the sound
of an engine, not only decrepit, but dirty and dry. Elbert turned to
the door.
‘Wait a minute, young fellow. We might use a man on the chuck wagon--I
wonder if you could drive old Fortitude?’
‘A mule?’ said Elbert. ‘I’m sure I could learn--’
‘Mule, hell, motor truck--can’t you hear her?’
‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right.
One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however--no women in the
establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was
hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically
as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything
but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in
no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly
penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing
for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of
domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced
alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as
tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the
dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike.
Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather
settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his
first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished
the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday,
the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment
of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak
old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a
stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher
season. This was the height of it, he was informed.
‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said.
‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.
Elbert set about his work, a bit coldish and blank at the extent of
the job before him. He had never read of this department of ranch work,
and wondered if it meant he was to be relieved of the motor truck.
Toward midday he looked up from his poking, to find that at least ten
of the cowhands had closed in, having stalked him like an Indian band.
Their enthusiasm was high and prolonged. Elbert smiled and blushed,
but said nothing. For a day or two after that they tried to call him
‘Poke,’ but the name didn’t take hold. The men liked to say Elbert too
well. ‘Elber-r-rt,’ they would chirrup, and inquire if he had ever done
any bull-dogging.
He was not relieved from the truck. His work was to carry mails and
bring in supplies from the town of Harrisburg, eleven miles to the
north. He sometimes made two trips a day when the truck would permit,
but the tantrums of old Fortitude were a subject of conversation at
Heaslep’s only a little lower in the scale than the hoof-and-mouth
disease.
On his third or fourth Sunday, Elbert spread newspapers on the ground
and set about taking down Fortitude’s strained and creaking mechanism
part by part. His activity and absorption began to attract a Sabbath
crowd.
‘He’s gettin’ her whole plumbin’ out,’ Slim Gannon remarked. ‘I’m
layin’ four to three that we’ve heard her last belch.’
Cal Monroid considered for half a minute, noting the orderly lay-out of
tools, inwards, greases and oils, and how carefully Elbert had numbered
the parts. Cal began to fancy a vague purpose underneath it all and
casually remarked: ‘I’ll just take you on, Slim, for half a month’s
pay.’
Elbert toiled through the hours. By sundown when he took his place at
the wheel, all Heaslep’s was taut with strain. The works purred, the
car moved. ‘It’s down-grade, she’s just rollin’!’ breathed Slim. But
Elbert reversed; old Fortitude backed and curved, did a figure eight to
new music without hitting post or wall.
‘I win,’ said Cal.
‘She ain’t belched yet,’ said Slim.
The two moved off to settle the technicality.
Dreary months of trucking. Elbert’s insatiable interest in horsemanship
had been little encouraged at Heaslep’s. He was permitted to learn
the bad ones by experience, and was rapidly disconnected several
times, discovering his audience when it was too late, as on the day of
‘poking’ gopher holes. Though it was generally allowed things looked up
a little when the range grass began to grow, Elbert lost heart before
the winter was over. It seemed a long time to him since he had left
home, but it wasn’t so by the calendar. To judge by letters, the family
had its hands out beckoning, but Elbert felt neither his father nor
sisters would miss having the laugh at his expense.
Hard to leave Cal and Slim. This pair had warmed up a trifle toward the
last. It was Cal Monroid who helped Elbert up from the turf the last
time he was spurned by an HCO untameable, and Cal’s easy tones had a
soothing effect:
‘It’s about time you were sitting a real horse, Kid. Give me your
shoe--’
And Elbert was lifted up on old Chester, who had his ‘stuff’ down
so fine, you wouldn’t believe he knew anything. Chester was the
morning-star of Cal’s string, and right then Elbert began to know the
difference between an outlaw and a real man-horse. That one brief word
‘Kid,’ still sounded in his ears. It seemed to have let him into a new
world, the world of Cal Monroid and Slim Gannon, the latter said to
have taken the Tucson Bronk Cup two years straight; both men being held
as cool and fast in a pinch. This episode held the faintest possible
answer to what he had come West for, but Elbert had already decided
to depart, his plan being to go on to the coast, before starting back
East.
III
THE LEATHER-STORE
HIS first night in Los Angeles was like summer, though it was February.
In the core of the old town he found the Plaza, and strolled through
the Mexican crowd. His heart started a queer beat as the band struck up
‘La Paloma,’ his lips forming the words of the first line or two:
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios--’
A wonder took him as to what Los Angeles used to be like when there
were empty hills all around and how ‘La Paloma’ would have sounded in
those days. ‘Carved out of starlight,’ he whispered.
The next day in the window of an old leather-store near the Plaza, he
saw a cardboard sign reading: ‘Young man wanted.’ Elbert didn’t suppose
they would take on one without experience, but the impulse grew upon
him to try his luck. The thought of going East so soon hadn’t become
any easier, nor did he consider with relish the idea of asking his
father for money to stay away with. To his surprise he was given a
trial in the leather-shop, and gradually he became pleased with the
arrangement, for the store proved to have quality and background. Real
cattlemen used to swear by it, he found out, and occasionally, even
now, an old-timer would come in and talk with the proprietor. They
would chat of the days when cantinas still welcomed the passer-by
around the corner on North Main Street, little games going on upstairs.
In those days the Mexicans hanging around the Plaza still had bits of
color in their sashes and sombreros.
There was a gray wooden horse in the leather-store, fragile but full
height, on which Elbert was accustomed to show bridles, saddles,
blankets, and pack-gear, talking to customers a lot wiser than he felt,
for he still resented life’s conspiracy which had kept him from sitting
a live horse where he belonged.
In the evening he would go out and lounge in the Plaza under the
dusty palms and sycamores. It was better than Heaslep’s in a way--the
Mexicans had a friendly feel, and sometimes when the band played, he
could imagine himself down in the City of Mexico, or in the heart of
Sonora at least. One day during the dinner hour, when Elbert was alone,
a calm-eyed, oldish man pushed ajar the door of the leather-store,
looked slowly around and remarked in mildest tone:
‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do, is
to saddle their pony.’
The voice was so gentle and leisurely, Elbert was warmed and interested
at once. He was quite sure that nothing he could say about saddles
would astonish such a customer, so he approached with a smile merely.
The stranger had come to a halt before as fine a bit of workmanship in
plain leather as the store contained.
‘It ain’t hem-stitched,’ he began reflectively. ‘Thirty-eight pounds.’
‘Would you like to see it on the model?’ Elbert inquired.
The other didn’t seem to hear. ‘Now, what would you expect me to lay
out for a little tan kack like this?’ he asked.
‘Hundred-seventy-five,’ Elbert said throatily. ‘Would you like to look
at it on the model?’
‘No, it might confuse me a whole lot to see it on your dappled gray.
Anyway, I can see Buddy Pitcairn made her from here. I’m shore partial
about him monogram when I fork leather.’
A check was written with the remark: ‘You can ship her to me, care of
Mort Cotton’s ranch at San Forenso, Arizona, and take plenty of time
to look up this paper, young man. I never feel sure that the bank will
like it, when I write out money for myself.’
The easy, rapid writing hinted an intelligence in curious contrast
to the quaint speech and big loose hands, blackened and rounded to
tool handles. The name on the check was Robert Leadley, and that
was but the first of several calls which this customer made at the
leather-store, ostensibly for further purchases, but always lingering
to talk with Elbert. The latter had never known any one so easy to be
with, and one late afternoon at closing time, when Mr. Leadley, with
embarrassment, invited him to go out to supper, Elbert had been on the
point of asking the same thing. They stopped for a soft drink at an old
brown rail in Main Street.
‘I ’member when this was a great sportin’ place,’ Mr. Leadley said. ‘I
used to come in here from the mountains with gold in a little chamois
sack. Had a California claim in those days. I’m back in Arizona now,
not a great ways from where I began. When the time came for me to go
out this last trip, I felt like coming over to L.A., just like I used
to from these mountains. Why, I was in this very place one night when
a man was shot. Just yonder by that plate of hard-boiled eggs, he went
down, callin’ on a woman.’
‘I didn’t quite understand what you mean by “going out,”’ said Elbert,
not wanting to miss anything.
‘When you’ve got a claim in the mountains and you figure on leaving,
you designates it “going out.”’
‘Is it a gold mine?’
‘Well, by stretchin’ a trifle you might call her a gold mine--just a
little claim by myself. Southeast a ways and high up. You go to San
Forenso first. You can look back into California and down into Sonora
from my diggin’s.’
‘Do you have horses up at the mine?’ Elbert asked, thinking of the
Pitcairn stock-saddle.
The quaint laugh sounded. ‘Just a little vanity, young man. They do say
Bob Leadley would have his saddle-hoss, if he was runnin’ a canal boat.
I can’t seem to do proper without a bit of hoss-flesh handy, though
Mamie sure costs me no end money and trouble, not bein’ the sort of
hoss as can pick her livin’ off the north side o’ trees--’
He paused, as if pleased to recall the mare to mind in minutest detail.
‘Mamie’s father was the stake-hoss, Ganopol--one of the first ten
runners, they do say, and bone and blood to go with it, if not a whole
lot of hoss-sense essential. Mamie’s mother was just a cow hoss ...
just a cow hoss, with a little clock workin’ between her eyes--that
was Clara. Thirteen years, I had her, and we got real domesticated
together, you might say. Mamie’s a five-year-old now--just about
growed up--don’t resemble neither parent none, bein’ a jewel box by
herself, full of her own little knick-knacks.... Yep, bred right out
of the purple royalty on one hand and the black sage on the other, but
approachin’ my idea of saddle-hoss, plumb satisfyin’--
‘An’ p’raps it ain’t such a chore, as I’m makin’ out, to get hay and
grain up to the mine,’ Mr. Leadley added, ‘because once or twice a
year, Mort Cotton sends his mule train up from San Forenso to pack down
my ore. Takes just about a week’s work, three times a year, for a dozen
or fourteen mules; and ’stead of the train pilin’ back uptrail with
empty riggin’s, I stock up the cabin and the corral. Makes it easy, but
a whole lot of times, I don’t know where to put all I got--’
‘But what do you do with your mare when you leave the mine?’ Elbert
asked.
‘Leave her with Mort Cotton at his ranch in San Forenso. All hands have
got to know her at Mort’s.’
After supper they strolled back to the Plaza. The band began playing
‘La Paloma.’ Elbert started to speak, but Mr. Leadley’s hand tightened
on his knee for silence.
‘I’ve got reason to remember that piece,’ he said, when it was over.
‘The Mexicans never get tired of it. It’s like the Virgin speaking to
them. Do you know what that word means?’
‘Dove,’ said Elbert.
‘Correct. You must have studied the language?’
‘Only the last few weeks. I’d like to know more. It would come handy
in the leather-store. You know a lot about Mexico, don’t you?’
‘Not so much as I used to believe, young man, but I ain’t averse
to these people. I used to think I was, but as I look back now, I
’casionally catch myself wishin’ I’d treated them as well as they have
treated me. Just a curious feelin’ at times--’
It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so
pleasant.
‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a
farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight
a whole lot--at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the
barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean
Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and
ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’
Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that
he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle
tone hadn’t changed.
‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much
about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted
to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only
diff’rent. Young punchers and miners--we thought we was the people--’
The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer.
‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he
said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’
‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora--’
The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private
world--‘somewhere south in Sonora--’
‘He used to like that song--used to whistle and sing it at all times. A
dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then--that would make
him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show
up a speck taller by this time.’
‘What’s your son doing down there?’
‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be
excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it
politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again--if we sit down
for a spell.’
And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart--no
mother--life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona--a sorry sort
of helpless attachment in the father.
‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse
let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said.
Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail:
‘I had everything mapped out for him, but he wouldn’t follow the map.
That broke me, because I mapped so hard and set so much store.... Bit
by bit Bart showed me he’d have his way--taking his whippings easy,
looking white, but ready to laugh, and going his own way just the same
afterward. I never seemed able to do the right thing by him; couldn’t
let him alone; cared too much, I guess--the kind of care that hurts.
Why, I’d get lonesome for him when he was right in the room, and flare
up over things I’d never dream of getting sore about in any one else.
Altogether, what I didn’t know in them days was so much, young man,
that I’ve been fillin’ in ever since, and ain’t through yet.’
IV
‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’
AFTER they had parted, on the night of their first supper together,
Elbert fell to thinking of his own relationships at home. This occupied
him for an hour or two before going to bed--mixed in with memories of
what he had heard about Mr. Leadley’s missing son, and old days on the
Rio Brava. He saw for the first time that there were two sides to this
father-and-son business; that it was just possible a man might be able
to talk to another man, saying things he couldn’t tell his own son.
Moreover, Elbert was able to see something of the tangle between Bart
and his father with a clearness that had never come to him in regard to
his own affairs.
He was a touch lonely that night, but queerly glad, for the first time,
that he had never shown the knack to ‘work’ his father. All regret
eased about that; better as it was.
Mr. Leadley didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get back to his mine.
It seemed to do him good to talk about the old days. Elbert listened
eagerly, especially about Bart as a horseman.
‘You see, he learned all we knew about hosses and all that the Mexicans
know besides. He rode light, his hand quick, a sort of kidding way with
him that got right into the good feelings of a hoss. I made him give
up a bad one once and I had no right to do that, but I didn’t see it
straight until afterward. It was an old gray outlaw he brought home
from a near-by ranch--a discard, but Bart was sitting him upright and
amiable. That hoss pretty near finished me. I’m limpin’ yet, on rainy
days, from tryin’ to correct his misdemeanors. And because I couldn’t,
it bore down on me not to let Bart ride him, who could. That was
another mistake.... A hossman at ten, Bart was; had to have his six-gun
before he was twelve. He could fan it, too. No use me tryin’ to keep
him from it, and the fellows I worked with at the mines whisperin’ that
he’d kill himself--that he wouldn’t live to be hanged. You always hear
what you’re afraid of.
‘Slim, black-haired, easy smilin’ and Spanish on his tongue, Mexican
spurs and reata, more interested in guitar music than gold mining,
and off by himself or with the Mexicans instead of with his own kind.
You know, Bart’s mother was Spanish.... Yet any one could see Bart
was game and gritty--life a feather to him--take it or leave it;
laughin’ but dangerous. No, they couldn’t see it, either,’ Mr. Leadley
finished abruptly. ‘I’m talking from a distance, from where I am now,
I didn’t see it myself then--not rightly, I didn’t. I’m shore gettin’
talkative.’
‘I like to hear about him,’ said Elbert.
‘Now as to that, I had a queer feelin’ you did from the first day
I came to the leather-store. Guess that’s why I’ve kept hangin’
around--that, and your bein’ about Bart’s age and size.’
* * * * *
And yet, if it hadn’t been for the curious sensitiveness within him
that registered Mr. Leadley’s feelings, Elbert would have thought that
the other was merely recalling matters of pleasantness from years ago.
Finally one evening, after talk touching Bart’s prolonged stay below
the Border, Elbert said:
‘I’d certainly like to get somewhere down in Sonora.’
‘Don’t you ever draw a vacation at your store?’
Elbert laughed. ‘I’ve only been there a few weeks.’
‘I’d hate to cause any disaster in the leather business--’
‘How do you mean?’
The other’s voice became husky with strain. ‘I was thinkin’ as a
starter, possibly, you might come over to my claim on your vacation.’
It began to appear more and more feasible as they talked. Directions
opened right here at the Plaza. Elbert was told that an old friend and
mining partner of Mr. Leadley’s--Mort Cotton, now a cattleman, the
same to whom the saddle had been shipped--would meet him at San Forenso
and drive him up as far as the road went on the way to the mine.
‘That’s at Slim Stake Camp,’ Mr. Leadley added. ‘From there you just
keep on hikin’ up the canyon trail till you come to White Stone Flats,
where I’ll be watchin’ for you--’
It sounded somewhat complicated to Elbert. ‘But suppose I should miss
the trail?’ he said.
‘I can’t see how you could, unless you got headstrong--’
‘But how am I to know when I get to White Stone Flats?’
‘By composin’ yourself to listen a little longer. First you see two big
pines less’n twenty feet apart, still alive, but showing marks of a
forest fire ten or twelve years back.’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how a tree would look, twelve years after a
forest fire--’
‘Right, you wouldn’t, but that ain’t all to go by. It is a Flats,
remember, and on the Flats is a lot of big white stones, and printed on
the biggest of ’em in black letters, “ARE YOU DOOMED?”’
Elbert saw himself getting there.
‘... humorist--now I wonder?’ Mr. Leadley went on. ‘Or just a pious
gent coming up into Nineveh, as if sent for? “Are You Doomed?”--he
paints, right on the big stone facin’ the trail, and a little ways
off on a smaller stone, he fixes the answer: “JESUS SAVES.” That there
handwritin’ on the rock seems to be for me, ’cause every time I go for
water--there it is. But as I was sayin’, you’ll know you’re comin’ to
the Flats when you get to the last water.’
‘How shall I know it’s the last water?’
‘’Cause pretty soon after that you’ll come to the Flats. Anyway, I’d be
watchin’ on the day set--’
Elbert was finally able to arrange a few days off, without losing his
job outright, though he felt queerly uncertain about coming back, the
claim being beyond Yuma on his way East. On a morning in late March, he
reached San Forenso, where he was met by Mr. Cotton, with a two-horse
rig. The hand that Elbert gripped was crippled in shape, but did
not lack strength, and the eyes of Mr. Leadley’s old partner peered
into his with such frequency and deep intent from under their bushy
white brows, that Elbert began to feel he had never before been so
exhaustively appraised.
‘Has Bob started in tellin’ you about Red Ante, yet?’ Mr. Cotton asked
after they had driven some time.
‘No,’ said Elbert, wondering if Red Ante were a game.
‘Now that’s funny--he never gets away from that when I see him. That’s
one reason I don’t see him a whole lot more. Told you about Bart, of
course--’
‘Yes.’
‘Way back in Bismo--’
‘Yes--’
‘And stopped short at Red Ante?’
‘I didn’t hear him mention--’
‘Now that’s queer--nothin’ about a man not bein’ able to wash his
hands?’
‘No,’ said Elbert, more mystified.
‘Can’t be it’s dyin’ out of him,’ Mr. Cotton mused, eyes rigid on the
flanks of his team, as they wound up a canyon trail. ‘But that ain’t
the kind of thing as dies out,’ he added.
At Slim Stake Camp, where the road ended, Mr. Cotton excused himself to
write a note to Mr. Leadley, which Elbert was asked to deliver. ‘And
don’t let him fill you up none on how bad he’s treated Bart,’ was the
last swift injunction. ‘I was along myself in them days and I didn’t
miss all that was goin’ on.’
Elbert nodded attentively.
‘Remember what I say, when he starts tellin’ you about Red Ante!’
shouted Mr. Cotton, holding hard on his swerving team.
A while after that Elbert was alone on the steep canyon trail, his
ears cracking like drying wallpaper from the altitude, and his heart
windily at work. Springs saturated the earth from time to time. There
positively didn’t seem to be any last water, until the trail widened in
mid-afternoon and there faced him:
‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’
White Stone Flats. He found the two pines that had lived through the
fire--all straight, but no Mr. Leadley to meet him. He called a little,
but the raising of his voice left him queerly uneasy. There was food in
his roll, and he finally spread his blankets and stretched out for the
night. The idea struck him that he must soon get back to work, for it
seemed like ten days already.
Mr. Leadley must have forgotten the date. Up here anything was
possible. Hours after, a white glare through the eastern trees and
a tardy, bulging moon showed up; then quite the most curdling wail
sounded through the whitish night. It was ‘doggy’ in depth and volume,
but the wauling of it was like a greatly enlarged cat. Now Elbert had
an opportunity to study the stuff he was made of. He wasn’t encouraged.
His heart was knocking to get out. Nothing short of a mountain lion
made that noise.
There was another sound--hard to place, that welled out of the dragging
hours--a queer hum, so soft that one didn’t know whether it was a
mile away or in his hair. It was like a woman going insane, but not
violently.
Hard to believe, but the sky began to show signs at last that another
day was actually to be given to mankind. Elbert was making coffee in
full daylight, when another outcry reached him--his first dawning
suspicion as to the human quality of these tones. He stood up; his hand
actually shook as he set down his tin cup, and his eye caught the black
letters:
‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’
‘How did you know?’ he muttered--and right then, the call
again--vaguely like his own name. A minute later he was running across
the Flats, his ears verifying as he ran:
‘Oh, Sartwell--this wa-a-ay!’ ahead, and somewhat above.
‘Yes, I’m coming!’
On the easy slope before his eyes, he saw a trail.
‘... turn to the left at the rotted cedar!’
The voice nearer, his own steps soundless for sixty or seventy feet
along the punk of fallen timber; then a bald ridge which the winds had
swept clean--a hand raised from the gravel--the old man crumpled there,
his lips stretched white in a pained smile.
‘A long time gettin’ to you ... couldn’t make it last night. Where’s
your canteen?’
‘Back with my stuff--shall I get it?’
‘No, I guess I can wait a little longer. We’ll get to the cabin.
Mebby, leaning a whole lot, I can walk a bit.’
‘What did you do? You haven’t been lying out here all night?’
‘Yes. It happened in the tunnel yesterday ’bout noon--falling rock ...
too big for the small of a man’s back. Started a trickle in there,
somewhere--’
Did he mean in the mine or in his back?
‘Left me uncoupled. Too bad to spoil that vacation of yours this
way.... Figured I could reach you by crawlin’--but played out--couldn’t
make you hear in the night. Feared you might have gone back to town.’
Mr. Leadley couldn’t stand now, even with help. Elbert shouldered him
at last; a long hard pull up to the cabin. No need for directions
the latter part of the way, for a horse kept up an incessant
nickering--like showers of gold coins falling upon a metal surface.
‘That’s Mamie. She ain’t been fed since yesterday mornin’,’ the old man
apologized. ‘She never misses bestowin’ her welcomes, though it ain’t
like her to be quite so noisy. She’s a real listener, too, Mamie is.’
A cabin in the midst of a group of great yellow pines. Elbert entered
the open door, gasping with his burden. The old man’s tortured mouth
still smiled up at him from the bunk. The room smelled like cigar-box
wood. It was stuffed with chests, cupboards and cabinets--a hand-hewn
room, with massive frame and heavy cedar shakes on the outside. Elbert
brought water and started to unlace the nearest boot.
A ghost of the old chuckle and the words:
‘No, nothing for me, ’til you go feed Mamie. She ain’t used to bein’
treated like this--’
Half in a dream, Elbert went out to the little corral, lifting the
wooden pin that let him in. The mare played curiously about him, but
mainly kept her eyes to the cabin; her ears straight out for a voice
from there. He only saw a bay butterball at first--shiny satin in the
bright sunlight--a lot more rounded out than the wooden horse in the
leather-store, not so tall as Cal Monroid’s Chester, which had stood in
Elbert’s mind up to this moment as all that a horse could be.
He was thinking of the look he had seen in Bob Leadley’s face; and of
the rock, too big for the small of a man’s back, and of feeding the
mare before anything could be done. He dropped a measure of grain into
the manger under the shed roof, but Mamie didn’t stay with it. She kept
running up and down the corral, nickering softly, listening, her head
cocked toward the cabin, her ears held forward pointing to the open
door. She seemed appareled in sunshine.
V
‘I, ROBERT LEADLEY--’
THAT leak wasn’t in the mine.
‘I feel a trickle inside, young man--’
Thus, every little while, through the heat of the day, the old man
intimated his hurt, and how he felt himself bleeding internally.
Elbert’s idea was to set out at once and in a hurry to bring help from
Slim Stake Camp, but Mr. Leadley so far had persistently refused to let
him go.
‘Things I’ve got to say are more important. You never can tell when I’m
apt to start talkin’--don’t go yet. I’m restin’ a little first, that’s
all--’
When he dozed, Elbert roamed about outside, but within call. Everything
imaginable in the way of canned goods, dried fruits, preserves, were
stored in a shed as commodious as the cabin; ample supplies of tobacco,
quantities of unused tools. Stocked for a year, the place looked; with
at least a ton of baled hay and many bags of grain in the corral-shed.
All the carpenter work was made of cedar; hand-tooling everywhere--work
of a man who liked to bring out the best with a sharp blade; quaint art
about the cabinets and wooden insets in the fireplace.
Down trail to the right from the cabin door was the tunnel entrance to
the mine, and ahead out over many tree-tops, a glimpse of the Flats,
in a great pit of saffron light. Elbert kept thinking he should go for
help in spite of Mr. Leadley’s protestations. A call from the cabin
hurried him in shortly after noon.
Twice the injured man’s lips started, before he got words going:
‘Maybe I ain’t goin’ to die, and maybe I am. That’s all right--only
there’s some things I mean to say first. It wasn’t only a vacation I
brought you here for--that and somethin’ else, though I didn’t expect
to be hurried like this, in unburdenin’ my mind. Yes, sir, I took to
you the minute you looked so inquirin’ as to what I meant, when I
came in that leather-store ... same age and all that, as Bart down in
Sonora--and when you hints you’d like to get down there .... Draw up a
box to write on, and bring me a little leather sack of papers in the
lower cabinet by the fireplace--the key in the wallet here. You’re to
write down what I say.’
Reserves of will-power were drawn upon; part of the quaint twang went
out of the old man’s speech:
‘I, Robert Leadley, of the Dry Cache mine, near San Forenso, Arizona,
in sound mind, so far as I know, but badly hurt from a fallen rock in
the tunnel of said mine--my own fault because I knew for a long time
there were spots that needed timbering--do hereby confer upon my young
friend, Elbert Sartwell, who is writing this at my word, the sole right
and authority to manage and administer all property I possess--’
Elbert had no chance to interrupt. The enumeration went on without a
break, including the Dry Cache mine, saddle-horse, all goods stored in
cabin and corral-shed, bank-books, documents and keys to a lock-box
in the San Forenso Bank--amounting to about ninety thousand dollars,
Mr. Leadley explaining that he had refused an offer of seventy-five
thousand dollars for the mine itself.
‘Don’t sell in a hurry,’ he broke in. ‘There’s a gold tooth in her
head. Mort Cotton understands. You can tell that to Bart--’
‘I tell Bart--’
‘That’s the general idea--’
‘But how do you mean, Mr. Leadley?’
‘Because Mort Cotton can’t go--I’ve talked to him--and administerin’
property isn’t his line. It’s--it’s because I took to you--that’s the
main reason. Listen on--let me get it all out straight.’
Gradually it appeared that Mr. Leadley’s desire was to leave the bulk
of what he possessed to his only son, Bart Leadley, now somewhere in
Sonora, Mexico, at large, and Elbert’s work to find same. Elbert was
to be identified by Mr. Cotton who would help him through business
of bank and possible probate, and answer all questions as to why
the property could not be left and arranged for in the usual way. A
generous salary and expense account was provided, and on the day Bart
Leadley was brought back to the States, Elbert was at liberty to assign
to himself a one-fifth interest in the Dry Cache mine; a second one
fifth to go to Mort Cotton, memo of which was on separate paper, and
three fifths to the son, Bart Leadley.
Elbert’s eye was held to the page, after this was written, his mind
so lost in what it all meant, that the voice from the bunk actually
startled after a silence:
‘Well, how about it, young man--does the paper stand?’
‘But--in case your son isn’t to be found--at least, from anything I can
do?’
‘All you have to do is convince Mort Cotton of the facts, and the whole
business then lies between you and him. There’s nobody else.’
Elbert went to the door to breathe, more astonished than ever before
in his life; astonished and hurt, too, by the reality of this
friendliness, and the mystery of the smiling courage with which Mr.
Leadley bore his pain. Sonora--to find Bart Leadley at large in
Sonora--expenses to draw from--an interest in the mine. His eyelids
narrowed as he turned from the corral, where the mare stood listening
in the vivid afternoon light.
Then presently he saw, stretched from one branch of scrub-oak to
another, between him and the corral gate, a shining thread that hung
and waved in the sunlight. Just a spider’s suspension cable, but a
deep meaning now about that connecting thread; so thin one wouldn’t
see at all, if the sun hadn’t been shining just right. Mr. Leadley
had trusted him, felt drawn to him, even before the accident in the
shaft--mysterious threads binding people together. Why, that must have
been the meaning of his taking the job in the leather-store. The voice
called from behind:
‘But Bart Leadley isn’t dead! I don’t feel he’s dead,’ Mr. Leadley
said, when Elbert hurried in. ‘No, you won’t be able to go for a doctor
just yet--little later for that, maybe. The paper’s done, but there’s
something to tell about Red Ante before you go--and, yes, about Mamie.
I’m giving her to you outright, not that Bart isn’t a horseman--he’s
that before everything else--but you might be a long time findin’ him,
and I don’t want her to change hands too often. And then you’re the one
who’ll need her in Sonora.... Don’t try to run her, young man. Just
try to come to an understanding. Stand around and talk to her--she’s
one more listenin’ mare. She likes to be consulted about family
affairs. It won’t do you no harm. And don’t ever tie her up, when you
camp in the open. She’ll graze within range and keep an eye on you
besides, like her mother used to. You’ll get the hang of each other.
Keep on her right side, and whistle when you want her--’
He put two fingers to his lips to show how. Elbert couldn’t make a
sound that way. He thought of getting a whistle to carry.
As dusk thickened, a wind stirred across high country--sometimes
the sound of a waterfall, sometimes the sound of the sea in the top
branches of big timber. The mountains grew heavy on Elbert’s heart with
the falling night. Meanwhile he was encouraged to bake a honey-cake for
his own supper.
‘No, you don’t need salt nor sodie--all that’s in the flour--just
can-milk and honey in the batter, an’ grease on the pan.... Not too
near the coals, an’ keep turnin’ her round and round. You’ll have
a cake yet, young man, and what you have over you can feed Mamie
to-morrow. She’ll like it, if it’s good.’
* * * * *
‘Just a trickle--’
Elbert heard the words from time to time through the first half of the
night. Then for a while delirium was unmistakable:
‘_You didn’t have to go, Bart--_’ the voice once said in a wistful
tone, and names were uttered with dread, yet a kind of life-long
familiarity as well: ‘Welton--Letchie Welton.’ ... ‘Palto’ ... ‘Mort
Cotton’ ... ‘Red Ante’ and in and out through sustained incoherencies,
with dreadful impressiveness, references to a blacksmith shop: and once
starting up, the old man found Elbert’s eyes and spoke slowly with
intolerable contrition:
‘_There are times when you can’t wash your hands, I’m sayin’. It wasn’t
what I did--but what I didn’t do!_’
Toward daylight he slept, but it was only for an hour or so. Elbert,
drowsing in a chair, heard the call.
‘Start some coffee for yourself, and turn in a measure of grain for
Mamie; then draw your chair close. You’ll be goin’ down trail for a
doctor this morning--I know it’s bearin’ heavy on you, and maybe there
won’t be much talkin’ after the doctor comes.’
Altogether quiet and hasteless--so different from the delirium of the
night. It was dim and cool in the cabin; the sun not yet over the
ridge; fragrant firelight, coffee on to boil.
‘You can telephone Mort, too, from the lower camp. He wouldn’t like
it, if I didn’t let him know, and bring your coffee here.... Yep, sit
in close.’
At times it seemed as if the old man were easing a burden from
his heart, as gradually Elbert began to get it all straight: The
mining town of Bismo, Arizona, one morning twelve years ago; an old
storekeeper, murdered in the night--young Bart hanging around, though
sent back--Bart following the posse and being permitted to stay by the
marshal when they were ten miles out.
Elbert had to be reminded of his coffee as the story of the three
days’ chase carried on--hunger, thirst, fatigue: how one of the
Mexicans split, breaking up the pursuing party also--Letchie Welton,
Mort Cotton, Bob Leadley and his son Bart continuing straight south,
four others turning east. Then it was that the telling took on an
unprecedented intensity, though the voice was held low.
‘Over a hundred miles from Bismo, and just before dark, coming to water
and an abandoned town called Red Ante. Bart ridin’ light and easy; the
rest of us done for, my horse dyin’ under me, ears loppin’, the weight
of his head hangin’ on my arm. I’d ridden him to death--that made me
all the uglier.... Gettin’ dark, as I say, and we halted at the edge of
that dusty hell-hole, everything saggin’ and sand-blown.... Palto--our
work wasn’t over--’
* * * * *
‘But what did they do to him?’ Elbert burst out a moment later; yet
he was afraid to hear. The cabin interior had taken on a startling
unreality. He seemed to be back in Red Ante ... the lone sandy road
that nightfall twelve years ago. Then the quiet words:
‘Recollect what I told you was in the blacksmith shop?’
Elbert moved to the door, his eyelids narrowed by the sunlight. He was
ill, intolerably shaken, but the weary voice followed him.
‘I know it ain’t pleasant to hear, young man. It ain’t been pleasant
to live through--that night, nor for a dozen years. It don’t get no
better, but you’ve got to know. And there’s only a little more--’
Elbert braced for the rest. What called his will-power to bear it was
that he was only listening to a story a dozen years later, and this man
had lived through the action of it--had heard the sounds--had lost his
boy--just a note pinned to the saddle, all that was left.
The old man turned his face away.
‘I guess that’s about talk enough from me right now,’ he said after a
moment, ‘only that when we got back to Bismo, they entered a murder
charge against Bart. ‘Mebbe it was murder Letchie,’ Mort Cotton said
at the hearin’, ‘but the most merciful bullet I ever heard fired, was
that one of Bart’s just ’fore he rid out of Red Ante.’ But no words of
Mort’s or mine did any good.... You can go down trail now. Mort’ll tell
you the rest, if I don’t get to it--’
VI
THE LISTENING MARE
TWO weeks later Elbert was closing up the cabin. He had been through
all the papers. There was one having to do with the lineage of
Ganopol, a running horse, with lines tracing back to Europe and the
Near East, and the days when man and horse were mates of the world.
Names--feminine names of the desert like those of the Old Testament,
for the horse-lines of Araby were kept from mother to daughter and not
from father to son--‘The Listening Mares.’ There were sweet meadow
names of England ... there was a remark in pencil on one corner of the
big sheet:
‘Her pedigree isn’t any longer than a piece of burnt string, and where
she got herself from, I’m not prepared to state, but for a horse to sit
on and come across with good sense, little Mamie’s mother, old Clara,
was sure a triumph of breeding--’
It was almost like a voice. Elbert turned his eyes to the empty cot.
It was as if he could see Mr. Leadley looking over the certificate of
registration and writing down that remark--not having any one to speak
aloud to. A lot of talk about Mamie’s father--too much silence about
old Clara, he had probably thought. A little later as Elbert touched a
match to some papers in the fireplace, these brief but laborious lines
caught his eye:
‘... On looking him over at your request, Bob, I don’t feel troubled
about his honesty, but I’m not so sure he’s real bright.’
It was the letter he had brought up trail from Mort Cotton that first
day at San Forenso. Another proof that Mr. Leadley had been thinking
of sending him down into Sonora for Bart, before the accident in the
shaft. He had asked his old partner’s judgment. This reminded Elbert of
Mr. Cotton’s first fierce appraisal of him in San Forenso. A low nicker
reached him from the corral and a flushed smile came to his face, as he
moved out.
Somehow in lifting the wooden pin of the cedar gate, the sense
came over him again of the quality of the man whom he had known so
well--just a pin of manzanito to hold the gate, but there was an art
about the way the knots were cut. The mare came up to him nodding
and stepping high with her front feet. She seemed to say that this
conspiracy to keep her in the dark had gone far enough; that the time
had come for her to know what was going on.
‘... And you’re to be mine, Mamie--from now on!’ Elbert muttered. He
had been trying to get used to it for days. ‘What do you think about
that? Not very much, I guess.... Not much more than Mort Cotton did,
probably.’
The mare wasn’t telling. She was friendly, however, nudging under the
arm, nosing at his hands and pockets.
‘Oh, I know what you want--a piece of cake.’
He went back to the cabin. The strangest feeling came over him in
the shadows. This was his place to come and go in, but the fact was
slow to settle in him. He missed his old friend and didn’t feel quite
up to the reality of possession. One man’s whole life--these things
represented--and a mare that couldn’t be bought.... There might have
been some hope, the doctor had repeatedly suggested, if Mr. Leadley
could have been moved down to San Forenso, but the old man had refused
to hear to that. He had to come to his own conclusion, apparently. Days
of just sitting around--Mort Cotton there, the doctor riding up to the
claim every day--about as hard days as the young man had lived through
so far.
* * * * *
The last chest was locked, the last cabinet.
Elbert glanced around before shutting and padlocking the outer door
of the cabin--a wonder passing through him about sometime coming
back--with Bart.... In a sense, this meant his start for Sonora right
now. Of course, there were matters to close up in San Forenso--affairs
of the Dry Cache, of banks, papers and probate, but Mamie was now to be
ridden down trail and it was like the beginning of a new life. From the
doorway, he studied the mare’s sculptured head. There she stood, as if
listening to sounds which she alone could detect.
Practically his first experience in saddling anything but the wooden
horse. The horses he had failed to tarry on at Heaslep’s had been
saddled by others--even old Chester on that unforgettable day. He knew
the straps and cinches--part of his recent business, and Mamie wasn’t
too restive, so far. Funny, Elbert thought, that he should have sold
that Pitcairn stock-saddle to himself, after all.
‘Thirty-eight pounds,’ he muttered.
Trouble came to Mamie’s eyes as he undertook to tuck the steel between
her teeth. She didn’t like the way he went about it; also it seemed,
he had to mash her ears about to get the bridle on. She was nervous
as a child being severely washed. Finally the man got his foot in the
stirrup and raised himself. With a little dance to the right, the mare
glided from under, and stood with trailing bridle-rein, looking at him,
confused and incredulous.
‘I guess I couldn’t have stepped up on her in the way she’s used to,’
he remarked.
He tried again. Mamie seemed to have a certain responsibility for him
this time, like a mother-hen trying to get on with an unfamiliar chick.
But she had her own mysterious forces and impulses to cope with, too.
She had been penned-in for altogether too many days and darted out of
the corral gate with a suddenness that jerked the man’s body and arm
back to keep his place. Mamie’s head flung upward in utter dismay,
and the awfulness of having put weight like that on her tender mouth,
uncentered Elbert entirely for the time. It was like clashing gears
in a fine machine that has been desperately hard to obtain--only ten
times--infinitely worse--this, a living thing, cherished from a baby by
an old man who had been a horseman all his days.
The saddle kept slipping forward. Elbert hadn’t known at first how
to tighten the girths. He didn’t dare to look underneath. At least,
there was no blood mixed with the foam around the steel of her bit....
Twenty-two miles down trail, and long before the end, his own agony
took the edge of strain from the fierce imaginings of damage he was
doing the mare. Mamie didn’t stop to walk; she danced down trail--to
friends of hers at Mort Cotton’s ranch. It was as if she expected,
when she got there, to hear the voice that had been silent so long.
A hundred times Elbert thought of this. His bones crunched; he felt
the scald of blood and sweat on his thighs. But once or twice, even in
the pain, a flash of splendor went through him--at her arched lathered
neck, the lift of power from beneath, some new magic from the earth--
No need to ask the way to Mort Cotton’s place. Mamie veered to the
left, at the end of San Forenso’s main street, following the wagon
tracks at a show-trot to the wide gateway, where she was welcomed from
all quarters at once. Mort Cotton called his greeting from the doorway
of the ranch house, as Elbert let himself down, steadying himself
before letting go of the pommel. Mort approached. What was left of the
younger man withered as those eyes, under the white bushy brows, fixed
upon the mare. This was far more severe than being appraised himself.
‘Lucky old Bob couldn’t see her, with the saddle as far back as that,’
Mr. Cotton remarked.
Elbert had ceased to breathe. Raw and angry patches wavered in
imagination before his eyes, as the saddle was being removed. Hide and
hair unruffled--a flood of thankfulness went through him. He moved
around to Mamie’s far side and all looked intact there, too. Mort’s
twisted hand was now knuckling down the buttons of the mare’s spine.
‘Thought so, all the weight on her kidneys. Say--’ The old man’s
glance had turned to Elbert really for the first time, the sharp eyes
settling upon his riding cords. ‘Caked, or I’m a Spaniard! I see you’ve
been punished, too. Come on into the house. The boys will take care of
Mamie. They know her.’
Elbert obeyed, but made no move to a chair as they entered the cool
front room.
‘I led her down part of the way,’ he confessed unsteadily. ‘But she
wanted to get here. She’s so much--all the time--’
‘She sure is--so much hoss all the time. I know her. And what you want
now, young man, isn’t to hurry away nowhere too sudden, but quarters to
cool down in right here, good upstandin’ quarters. And say, I’ve got
some hosses for you to do your rough ridin’ on. Mamie’s a bit too fine
to break a man in. I’m goin’ to give you some lessons personal, before
you leave, and bring you up, so’s you’ll know what you’re ridin’, when
you get Mamie under the saddle--’
‘Not at once,’ said Elbert.
‘No, you’ll be walkin’ like a bear for a week yet.’
VII
THE SOFT SIDE OF A SADDLE
ELBERT limped out to Mort Cotton’s stables next morning. Mamie saw him
coming, her head hanging out above the half-door. She began nodding in
a way that made him know she was pawing the ground, though he couldn’t
see her feet. It wasn’t hay she wanted. Was it word of the one who did
not come, or more of the Road, she was asking for? Elbert wouldn’t
have confided to any one the humility he felt, as he moved close. All
through a painful night, he had dreamed of the mare running from him,
fighting his approach and presence. She would stand up on her hind
legs and strike at him when he came near. Ugly lot of sleep torments,
in which Mamie was always getting hurt--his fault--but nothing to them
after all. Here she was fresh and blithe as usual, nudging, nosing,
ready as a child to begin all over again. A fine lift went through him,
that she didn’t hold a grudge.
He had to rub his eyes after a moment ... Mexico, riding South, plazas
at night, camps in the open, days in the saddle, the freedom he had
dreamed of.
... In the next ten days all business was finished in San Forenso and
Elbert was healed enough to begin his course in horsemanship under
Mort Cotton--the actual riding part. So far as words went, the drill
had begun at once.
‘What you need is hardenin’, young feller, and that comes gradual.
You’ve been sittin’ on cushions all your life and a stock-saddle ain’t
like that. The soft side of a stock-saddle is placed next to a horse.
You got to learn to fit to it, because it’s made not to give. After
that, you’ve got to learn to ride easy. It ain’t like sittin’ on a box
in a grocery store. You can always tell a man with no sense to a horse,
sitting up and takin’ it for granted, that a horse is meant to carry
him. A man’s weight’s got to be alive--part of his horse--not a dead
weight like a pack-mule carries. Bob Leadley used to say a good deal at
the last that there’s plenty of good “riders” but only one in a hundred
real horsemen.’
‘I’ve heard him say that,’ said Elbert. Times like this, he wished
Mort Cotton wouldn’t stop. The old cattleman was altogether unlike
Mr. Leadley, but the two had been so much together, that a feeling of
closeness to Bart’s father came to him as he talked and rode with Mort.
There was much still he needed to know about the old days.
‘... I wasted a lot of time hatin’ Letchie Welton,’ Mort Cotton once
said. ‘But there’s no good in that. Old Bob found that out, too. You
wouldn’t fancy him a fightin’ man, but I saw him flare up. Letchie
Welton can thank me that he lived for Lon Bimlock to kill him. It
was at the hearin’ back in Bismo, and Letchie was tellin’ our fellow
townsmen that he had a suspicion right at the beginning that Bart was
in with the other three in the murder of old Batten. That, he said, was
why he insisted on Bart bein’ allowed to ride on with the posse--so he
could watch him. As it happened Bart got away. No question in his mind,
Letchie Welton gave down at the hearin’, but that Bart had killed Palto
to prevent him squealin’, before ridin’ out to connect up with his
share of the loot. “Didn’t he want to stay up all night in order to let
Palto go free?” Letchie wanted to know.... As I say, I had my work cut
out to keep old Bob from killin’ our deputy sheriff that day.
‘... No, sir, we weren’t exactly right--never have been, Bob and me,
since that night in Red Ante,’ Mr. Cotton observed, another time. ‘They
talk of shell-shock these days. It wasn’t shells that got us, but we
were shocked men just the same. It worked this way: We never could
stay long where men were--never could get along in the settlements any
length of time. We took up prospectin’ to get up into the mountains
alone, but we couldn’t be too close, even to each other, for very long.
I’ve seen Bob go apart to smoke of an evenin’, after we’d worked
separate ridges all day, and I’ve felt the same way. It was quite a
while before we came to know we were so different. I began to see it in
Bob, and gradually it worked out that he could see it in me.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it of Bismo, and Bob couldn’t, but that town
wasn’t wrought up over what happened in Red Ante, like we were. Seems
as if Bob and me took the full shock of that, though we were slower
catchin’ on, than young Bart was. Palto’s bein’ a Mexican seemed to
make it all right for Bismo. A greaser had murdered a white man and
a whole Mexican village of men, women and children couldn’t pay for
that.... Always a man of law, Letchie Welton was. Bismo called him a
trail-burner for bringin’ in his man, and made him sheriff afterward.
He held his job until three or four years back when he was shot from
his horse, as I told you, on the trail of Lon Bimlock. They say Letchie
was sleepin’ his last sleep before he touched ground that day, havin’
taken Lon’s forty-five between the eyes.’
There was a lot of inexpressible feeling in Elbert’s chest as he
listened to certain observations of Mr. Cotton on the relationship
between Bob Leadley and his son. It made him draw a step nearer that
mystery of mysteries, his own father. ‘Bob was a strong man with men
before Bart came,’ Mort once said. ‘Then gradually on that one point
they came to think of him as the favorite fool of the diggin’s. Some
said he was too easy, some said he was too hard, but all said he was
wrong.
‘... But I was tellin’ you about the last days in Bismo. You see Bart
couldn’t come back if he had wanted to. It got worse against him as
weeks passed and Marguerin wasn’t brought in. Rueda was caught and
hung, his last words bein’ that Marguerin had done the killing. Word
reached Bismo that Marguerin and Bart were together in Mexico, ridin’
with Monte Vallejo, who was just a bandit-leader down in Sonora in
those days, but high up in Sonora politics right now--apt to be the big
gun if the Government turns over. Also we’ve heard various times that
Bart is still ridin’ with Monte Vallejo--that’s one of the things Bob
must have wanted you to know.
‘Bob was down in Mexico five years back and might have come up with
Bart, except as he tells it, all at once the rurales began to take an
interest in his case. They couldn’t do enough to help him find what he
was after. You see the rurales are a strong body of men, workin’ sort
of alone-like, mainly on the side of the Government, and hell-bent
after all bandits, when they feel like it--’
‘How did the rurales find out what Mr. Leadley was down there for?’
Elbert asked.
‘Now as to that, my mind’s at rest. Letchie wasn’t done for at that
time. He tipped ’em off, as I see it--always a man of law, Letchie
was. And, of course, the rurales would be interested in a white man
down there, lookin’ for his son who was said to be ridin’ with Monte
Vallejo, for the rurales have been tryin’ to get their hands on Vallejo
for years, but you see the common people like the big bandit, and are
not so strong for the rurales, who lord it over ’em and feel important,
havin’ the law on their side.
‘Old Bob always kept track of Monte on Bart’s account. He used to
bring me translations from the Mexican papers, how Monte had burned
this, and beaten his way through that, and how the rurales had just
missed capturin’ him. If I was you, I wouldn’t try to cross the Border
straight down from here. Ride east for three or four days, takin’ your
time and make your crossing at Nogales. You’ll be able to get in there,
more quiet and unwatched, and you’re more apt to be closer to the scene
of operations of the man you’re lookin’ for. It won’t be long before
you’ll be hearin’ of Monte Vallejo’s doings. He’s ’specially active
right now. If Bart’s still with him--that’s another thing. Anyway take
it easy, an’ take your time--’
‘I know that road south of Tucson to Nogales--worked at Heaslep’s
drivin’ a truck,’ said Elbert, ‘I might stop off for a day or two to
see a couple of friends of mine--’
‘So long as you don’t tell anybody what you’re out on,’ warned Mr.
Cotton. ‘I’m sure Bob would have advised you this way--if he’d had
time.’
‘I’ll be careful about that,’ Elbert said, and yet his pulse pricked up
at the thought of another sight of Cal and Slim.
VIII
HEASLEP’S AGAIN
HE was actually on the Road, traveling east toward Tucson, Mamie
showing up from hour to hour a little better than he could ask or
expect. Elbert had to keep telling himself that there was no hurry, no
stress, but the urges of all past years rose up in him, trying to make
him believe that everything was ahead, instead of here and now.
Expense money to work with, a gold mine back of him; best of all, there
was a purpose to carry out; a meaning back of his setting forth. Had he
tried to plan it all before leaving the East, he couldn’t have arranged
an adventure half so satisfactory as this--not just an aimless ride, no
mere purposeless freedom. By some marvelous destiny he had come into
the right to venture forth--a quest to work toward, an allegiance to
make good with Mr. Leadley and his son, with silence on his tongue all
the way.
No, he was not to tell any one--not even Cal and Slim, if they were
still at Heaslep’s.
He reached the main buildings of the big ranch shortly after noon, five
leisurely days of riding from San Forenso. Approaching the ‘Office,’
faces looked out from cook-house, farrier shop, and other doors and
windows. Elbert waved and nodded, but there was no flare of welcome,
no adequate answer for him--all eyes fixed on what he rode. He had to
wait a minute for Frost-face, who appeared from his back room, nodding
curtly. He moved at once to the outer door, where his sleety gaze fixed
on Mamie at the far end of the rail.
‘Your’n?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘In the advertisin’ business?’
‘No.’
‘Been workin’ in a movie?’
‘No.’
‘Show horse?’
‘No--’
‘Want a job?’
‘No. Just thought I’d stop off--possibly see Cal and Slim--and some of
the boys.’
‘Thought you’d come back to locate. Here’s a letter an’ telegram.
Thoroughbred?’
‘Her father was.’
Frost-face moved out to Mamie. The telegram was from Mort Cotton,
advising him to wait at Heaslep’s for a letter containing a certain
newspaper clipping. The letter already at hand, was the one referred to
in the telegram, for Elbert drew out a half-page of a Sunday newspaper
and a moment later was deep in the latest Sonora doings. Frost-face’s
jerky tones cut in presently:
‘Cal and Slim are out in the northeast range--about fifteen miles.
They’ll be ridin’ farther north to-morrow, but you can get to ’em by
sundown. Better drive the truck out, though.’
‘The mare isn’t tired,’ said Elbert.
‘Her thorough-breedin’ might wilt down.’
‘She can do fifteen--’
‘Be careful not to let any of the cow-truck out there bite her.’
‘I’ll watch close.’
‘Stop off here for a package of paper napkins and readin’ matter to
take out to the range--before you start.’
All that afternoon as he rode, Elbert conned the alleged facts of
the newspaper story. Monte Vallejo was said to be greatly enlarging
the number of his followers, turning away hundreds of peons because
they had no horses. This Monte was certainly a cavalry leader first
and last, Elbert reflected.... American holdings threatened; gold and
silver mines and oil properties of Northern Sonora, unsafe; General
Cordano reported to be establishing garrisons near the big mines in an
attempt to forestall seizure, but none could tell when Monte Vallejo
would strike--
Elbert reached the distant camp at sundown, but full darkness had
fallen, before the final thud of ponies on the range grass, and Slim’s
voice called from outside the circle of firelight.
‘... if it ain’t Elber-r-rt!’
And big Cal rocked forward, taking him by both shoulders at once--one
of those moments when Elbert wouldn’t have dared to use his voice.
‘What’s this I hear about a she race horse you’re ridin’?’ Slim asked.
Elbert pointed out toward his picket pin, and the two moved toward it.
Mamie was led in toward the fire, and examined in all points, her owner
being entirely overlooked for the time being.
‘Where did you say you come from?’ Slim asked severely.
‘San Forenso.’
‘Any more like that there?’
‘I didn’t see any.’
‘Somebody leavin’ the country?’
‘She was given to me.’
‘Was he dyin’?’
‘Yes.’
Cal and Slim glanced at each other.
‘Elbert,’ said Slim. ‘You didn’t hurry him off none?’
‘No.’
‘You see, it _has_ been done,’ said Cal. ‘For a hoss like that, it has
been done. I recollect hearin’ that old Chester was fought for in his
gay young days. Ever hear about that, Slim?’
The other nodded solemnly.
‘Ain’t back to stay, Elbert?’
‘No--’
‘Where you goin’?’
The partner’s eyes checked off each other again, and finally Cal
remarked: ‘Looks as if Elbert might need help--’
‘He’s makin’ me restless,’ said Slim.
After supper, the three sat down at a small fire a little apart from
the main camp. Elbert was watching himself closely, some tension not to
be lured into disclosure of any kind. One fact rested lightly on his
faculties at this time. The more that men knew about horses, the more
Mamie was appreciated. Cal and Slim had opened a newspaper package and
divided a big Sunday paper between them.
‘Please excuse us, Elbert, while we cool down our passions for news,’
said Cal.
A poring silence of many minutes; then from Slim: ‘This fellow’s crazy.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The fellow writin’ this--either crazy, or else there’s goin’ to be a
war less than a hundred miles from here!’
‘Who’s fightin’, Slim?’
‘Mexican war--over some oil wells--down San Pasquali way--’
‘Any white men?’
‘Sure. That’s why. This fellow Burton--“Mexicali” Burton--he’s
American. Struck it rich in oil, but looks to be unpopulyar with a
revolutionist, called Vallejo--’
‘Just a Sunday newspaper yarn,’ said Cal.
‘This feller who’s writin’ says Mister Vallejo could use them oil
wells of Burton’s to pay off his soldiers and finally take over the
government.’
Elbert wasn’t breathing right. Another version of the same newspaper
story Mort Cotton had sent. He felt as if the truth was being extracted
in spite of him; that Cal and Slim had somehow landed into the midst of
his private business. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come. At the same time,
he was powerfully thrilled by some vague prospect, his mind repeating
to itself that he had given nothing away so far.
Slim, meanwhile, was reading aloud laboriously about an American oil
man, named Burton, who had sent in a call for help to General Juan
Cordano, in charge of the Government soldiers in Sonora. This man
Burton was said to be standing pat on his property at San Pasquali with
a few dozen white men and some Mexican laborers he wasn’t at all sure
of.
‘Every time them newspaper fellers up in Tucson can’t think of anything
else to write on, they start a Mexican revolution,’ Cal said.
‘But why couldn’t it be?’ asked Slim, sitting up straighter, more
and more sleepless, his bridle-arm lifted, his right fallen limp as
if he were in the saddle. Slim had to wear his belt tight or it would
drop down over his hips. One had a feeling that it could be pulled up
over his shoulders without loosening a notch. ‘Why couldn’t it be?’ he
wanted to know in a louder tone.
‘You’re breaking in on my rest,’ Cal murmured.
Slim straightened out his legs and helped himself to his feet with
both hands. Taking a quart cup from his mess-case, he went back to the
cook-wagon and returned with it full of hot coffee. ‘This ain’t no
night for rest; this ain’t no place for me, Cal. I’ve been making forty
dollars a month so long, anybody’d think I was keepin’ up a twenty-year
endowment policy--’
The big one bent over to Elbert, whispering: ‘I shore hoped he was over
them spells. Six months since Slim’s been took like this. Sad, ain’t
it?’
But Elbert saw a reddish flare in Cal’s eyes, usually so icy gray and
cool. Something queer was taking place in himself at the same time, a
wild hope--the last chance on earth. But he couldn’t miss that he was
forgotten now, the pair more and more involved in each other as the
tension grew.
‘You’ll admit we’re dyin’ off here,’ said Slim.
‘Not so loud; hush yourself,’ said Cal. ‘We ain’t got no grudge
against Heaslep’s. We don’t want to start a stampede of hands just as
round-up’s comin’ on.’
‘That’s so,’ Slim muttered.
Elbert suddenly found the eyes of both men boring into his. ‘You won’t
tell ’em anything about this, will you? We ain’t got nothin’ against
old Frost-face,’ said Slim.
‘I shore would hate to see this outfit left short-handed through any
abrupt transformations takin’ place between me and Slim,’ added Cal.
‘I won’t say anything,’ Elbert declared, but the sound of his own voice
was strange and unsteady. A moment later he strolled off into the dark.
He didn’t trust his face or his feelings which to himself, at least,
were conveying meanings louder than words. In a moment or two, Cal’s
easy tones reached him.
‘Elbert!’
He went back.
‘Anything eatin’ you?’
‘No--’
‘You ain’t figurin’--’
‘No, I won’t tell Frost-face, or any of the fellows--’
Cal chuckled: ‘It ain’t that. Slim and me sort of forgot ourselves.
Bein’ married a long time, it works that way. Can’t be you’re honin’ to
perforate the Border like Slim?’
‘Wouldn’t I slow you up?’
‘We thought of that, but concluded we could do with a balancer--’
‘I think it would be fine--’
‘It’ll be a blow to Frost-face, if we do break out. Speak Mexican?’
‘I’ve been studying it lately a little. I had some Latin which helps--’
‘Lord, does Latin run in your family, Elbert?’
‘I speak Mexican,’ Slim reminded, in the tone of one wronged.
Cal squinted at the fire. ‘Sure, I forgot. Slim eats her.’
Elbert looked up at the stars. They had suddenly blazed out friendly,
and over the cattle came a warm wind and folded him in.
‘Excuse me,’ Cal added. ‘I’ve got some very close work to do right
now--threadin’ a needle to tack my war-sack together.’
IX
INITIATION
THEY crossed the Border at Nogales, Cal riding old Chester, Slim on his
‘Indian’ and Elbert astride.
‘Yes, Elbert,’ said Cal that first afternoon in Mexico, ‘she’s shore an
indulgence for the eyes.’
A few minutes before sundown they entered the small pueblo of Cienaga.
Six hours in the saddle; Elbert was tired, athirst; the early May
sunlight had been burning, but except for the occasional oppressive
doubt as to his power to carry on without his two friends finding out
his real mission, and the fear that his tenderfoot ways might slow up
their adventuring, Elbert was possessed by an extraordinary elation;
as if part of his lungs that had never known air before, had quietly
opened, alive at last.
The moment of fastening the horses at the hitching-rack in the sleepy
sandy street, before the little cantina in Cienaga, was memorable from
all others in life. There was a dust cloud in the low dobe doorway.
Such was the stillness and deep ease in the air, that each grain of
dust hung in enticing suspense, a meaning and purpose Elbert was sure
of, and needn’t try to think out.
‘Tequila,’ said Slim, as they entered the shadows.
‘Same here,’ said Cal.
It was like the hold of a ship in a way; the smell of dried
orange-peel; a range of barrels with Spanish writing on them, a breath
of coolness; shelves of canned and bottled goods, wines and catsup and
pickles resting together in dusty composure.
‘I will, too,’ Elbert said.
The little fat man of the place had been trimming his oil lamp, pouring
in coal oil from a large glass jar. He drew out a second piece of
glassware from under the counter, slightly smaller, but of similar
shape to the first. The contents of the two jars were of identical
color.
‘Here goes,’ said Slim, and the three small glasses were raised.
For a second Elbert thought he had been shot in the neck. Out of the
pandemonium of his faculties then formed the suspicion that either they
burned tequila in the lamps, or else that was the Mexican name for
kerosene.
‘The first one always hits me where I ain’t lookin’,’ Cal remarked.
‘Suppose we go through the formalities of three more.’
Elbert braced to do it again. He felt himself standing very straight,
only there was a curious illusion that his spine extended clear through
to the top of his head. The reverberations of the second shot having
died away, Elbert was conscious of a faint aroma, as if all the dried
fruits and tubers and woodwork had blent in enticing fragrance. A
horse nickered from afar down the street and their three ponies at the
hitching-rail raised their heads--Mamie’s instant answer being ramified
by Chester’s dignified head-tones, and a shrill broken pipe from the
‘Indian.’ A kind of union and interplay in all things--glint of drift
and daring in Cal Monroid’s eyes. The little fat man was shaking his
match box. It really wouldn’t do for the lamp to be lighted just yet.
Elbert spoke up:
‘We might risk one more,’ he said with slow care.
Now Cal and Slim took his invitation in a queer way. They pawed each
other and kept saying: ‘I told you so.’ Could they mean they weren’t
regretting they had let him come?
‘I like it here,’ said Slim.
‘I feel like stayin’,’ said Cal. ‘I could eat some of these here dried
herrin’ and pickles standin’ up, but I suggests we saunter to a table
somewhere and feed on somethin’ firm. I could stay all night--’
Elbert, standing very straight, turned away to the doorway that last
moment before the lamp was lighted, and there he beheld his Crimson
Foam--the whole West over the horses’ heads, shot with Indian red. It
was worth the beginning at Heaslep’s, the struggle with Fortitude, the
leather-store and even the years of Eastern schooling. Only he mustn’t
fall to telling how joyous he was. Meanwhile Slim and the little fat
man were having words. The former turned to Cal with his wronged look:
‘What you goin’ to do with a fellow like this? He keeps hornin’ in with
English. Says I called him a horse. Says I mean caballero, not caballo.
Wants to know if we’ll have our chickens boiled or fried.’
‘Quickest for me,’ said Cal. ‘Only tell him I ain’t broke off with
beans.’
After supper, Cal suggested that they go out to the corral to see
if the horses were making out as well as they were. Elbert sat back
against a stone. The straw smelled dry and clean; the sky was close and
velvety; the three horses were grinding sun-parched corn, a soothing
sound; everything expansive and exactly right, only a persistent
tendency to be reminiscent, which Elbert checked. Finally at his right,
a chuckle from Cal:
‘Slim--’
‘Yep?’
‘For a tenderfoot, I’m sayin’ our young friend Elbert holds his
fire-water aloft some successful, don’t you think?’
Slim allowed that, and Elbert’s face turned away to the dark, so his
exultation might not be seen. He felt on the eve of a mysterious
graduation ceremony....
* * * * *
Toward mid-afternoon two days later they entered the pueblo of
Nacimiento, and two thin dogs skulked across the road ahead of their
horses. An old man, beyond human speech, was sitting in the sun against
a wall, and a little farther on, another. That seemed the end of life,
as they paused before a fonda marked ‘El Cajon.’ The sandy road at this
point was beaten with many pony tracks.
‘Looks as if a troop of cavalry had halted here,’ Slim said in a hushed
tone.
A moment of rich promise to Elbert, except that he wished he didn’t
feel so played out. They entered the deserted wine-room. Slim drew a
finger over the bar-board and left his mark in the dust. A scared lame
boy finally came out from the shadows behind. No mistake about his
gestures; they were urged to move on.
‘What do you think we’re up against?’ Cal inquired. ‘Yellow fever or
just war?’
‘Can’t say,’ said Slim, ‘only far from home--far from home.’
‘We might keep on going to Burton’s oil wells at San Pasquali. Can’t be
more than eighteen miles from here, but it would take the edge off the
horses; also what little nape of Elbert’s, as ain’t wore off already.’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Elbert hastened to say, ‘whatever you think best.’
At the end of town they heard a phonograph, the twisty piping tones of
‘El Chocolo.’ In a doorway presently appeared a barefooted old woman
with a broom in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. Slim
uncorked his Spanish. It sounded to Elbert as if he were asking for
rooms with bath. The Señora’s mouth opened, but no sound came. She
raised one foot and clucked the castanets, finally coördinating:
‘No sabe, Señor.’
Slim repeated.
The other foot vanished; the castanets vibrated and a single word
shot forth: ‘Baños,’ was the nature of it, the Señora pointing to a
tin wash-tub under the eaves. At this point Elbert had to attend to
Mamie, who wasn’t taking to the Señora and her castanets. Her feet
were planted firmly against advance to the hitching-rack, and a long,
tremulous wheeze poured out of her nostrils, signifying distrust, alarm.
‘I’ll love up the Señora,’ said Slim, confidently. He dismounted and
bowed low. The Mexican woman couldn’t resist and turned into the
doorway, bidding them follow. Mamie now relaxed, and Elbert was the
last to enter a flowered patio, where the Señora brought pans of water
for them to wash, and then began stirring in the ashes of the ancient
fireplace.
‘I’m takin’ on hope,’ Cal breathed. ‘She’s fixin’ to boil something, if
it’s only grool.’
‘Frijoles,’ lightly called Slim. ‘Also, huevos, Señora, also tortillas
tom bien.’
Her back was toward them, her face still bent over the fireplace, but
her hand shot up, registering the orders on the castanets.
At this instant something began to be wrong in the air. A far-off sound
took the heart out of Elbert; hatefully familiar, it was, spoiling at
once all the mysterious warnings of deserted Nacimiento--the chug-chug
of an earth-eater, high-powered, and coming fast.
A small, square, vined window in the patio faced the road. Elbert moved
to it, Cal and Slim following. The three heads looked out, a hush
fallen upon them. A cherry-colored sedan, dust of Mexico unable to
cover its incredible modernity, halted before the Señora’s door, and
three queer boyish figures hopped out.
X
‘WATER IS FOR HORSES’
‘THEY’RE white,’ whispered Slim. ‘They’re play-actors.’
Then from Cal: ‘What kind of little boys would you say them were,
Elbert?’
‘I wouldn’t. They’re girls in hikin’ clothes. Don’t you see their
vanities?’
‘Short hair and short pants, Elbert--where do you look for them points
you speak of--oh, you mean them little satchels?’
Mexico had petered out; hope dead.
‘You go in first, Elbert. I never coped with nothin’ like them,’ Cal
murmured.
They followed the Señora into the front room. A chunky, black-haired
girl, who had sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan, was letting it be
known that she and her two friends had stopped for refreshments, on
their way to San Pasquali. Her voice was resonant, and she tried to
make volume do, being without Spanish.
The Señora held up her empty hand; her mouth opened, no sound. Slim
hurried back to the fireplace to fetch her clappers.
The black-haired one stamped her foot. She was used to getting what she
wanted. ‘Oh, can’t you see, we’re hungry, thirsty--something to eat
and drink?’
She had muscle, and big blue eyes.
‘Put your hand on your belt. Miss,’ Cal called. ‘Make signs of bein’
caved in.’
‘Hush up, Cal. That ain’t no language to use,’ said Slim, stepping up
from the side. ‘Allow me to interperate for you, lady.’
‘Thanks, if you please.’
At this point Elbert’s hand touched a hand at his left. He turned and
said ‘Excuse me,’ in severe tones. A swift shy smile met his eyes--the
face of one unmistakably frightened, but handling it--a girl who could
cry engagingly, but only after everything was over. Her tones had a
curious way of not disturbing the stillness.
‘I think we made a mistake in coming--an awful mistake,’ she laughed.
‘I told Florabel we ought to turn round and go back, but she wouldn’t
hear to it--’
Elbert turned to Florabel whose blue eyes were flashing up to Cal’s.
‘I’m Miss Burton, and I’m going to San Pasquali to surprise Papa!’
‘Won’t you, though!’ enthused Cal.
The third of the girls was smaller, younger--a whitish, wide-eyed face,
hovering above a large and high-colored necktie. Slim had taken over
this little one, but she was slow to soothe, her eyes getting wider,
the white of her skin fading into colorless fear. Meanwhile, in shy
tones, Elbert was hearing the story of their coming from the girl at
his left.
‘We’re from Miss Van Whipple’s Finishing School in Tucson. It’s spring
vacation now, and we were sight-seeing in Nogales this morning, when
Florabel got the idea to rush down here and see her father. It was only
seventy miles, she said, and wouldn’t take more than three hours, and
then we’d be safe. I’m afraid we’ve made a terrible mistake--’
‘I’m afraid you have,’ said Elbert. He was used to a houseful of
sisters and he carried no heartstrings whatsoever for passing winds to
flap.
Her name was Mary Gertling. Her short hair was neither black nor
blonde, but there was a roll to it, down over her temples, that Elbert
remembered as a sort of aim of all his sisters’ girl friends before he
left. He forgot what Mary was saying for a minute, studying the creamy
light through her skin. It made him remember the thin bowl of alabaster
on the ceiling of the dining-room at home. She didn’t seem to mind his
severe ways. She just couldn’t seem to believe it of him. He recalled
the ominous signs which attended their riding into Nacimiento, the many
pony tracks.
‘If I were you, I’d ask Miss Burton to turn around now and go back,’ he
said.
‘But Florabel never would. She never turns back--in anything. She says
her father is less than twenty miles from here.’
She talked up to him so trustingly. The little fawnskin coat covering
her shoulders had that texture which draws the hand to touch. Her ways
were swift and still; but Elbert had lost his revolution and his heart
held hard as flint.
‘Come on, Mary!’ called Miss Florabel.
The three girls followed the Señora into the patio. Elbert stood in
deep thought a moment, before he realized that Cal and Slim had closed
in upon him.
‘Our little Elbert ain’t no hosstipath,’ said Slim. ‘I’ve seen smoother
hands all around with hosses, but for women and motor trucks he’s
faster than a coiled whip--’
‘Faster than the human eye,’ said Cal.
‘They belong to the Van Whipple Finishin’ School up in Tucson,’ Elbert
said thoughtfully.
‘So we draws.’
‘It’s vacation. They were sight-seeing in Nogales. They ought to be
sent back--’
‘We heard you tell her!’
‘It’s all this Burton girl’s fault.’
‘Slim,’ said Cal, unheeding, ‘you and me ain’t got no sway with this
finishin’ school, if Elbert ain’t.’
‘We’ve got to have some sway,’ said Slim, ‘or it’s goin’ to be the
plumb finish.’
‘What do you think our duty is?’ Elbert asked absently.
‘Our duty, I’d say, by these finishers,’ Slim whispered with
considerable weight, ‘our duty is to stay with ’em whether they like
it or not, and I’m meanin’ to do just that, only--’ He pointed to an
empty place in the room where the littlest of the girls had stood,
‘Only, every time I takes a step to her, this little one with the
rainbow necktie and the ruffle on her uniform, she looks as if she’s
goin’ to stagnate down an’ die. I shore expects a bleat out of her, my
next step, and all the time I see Elbert out of the corner of my eye,
gettin’ closer and closer and talkin’ lower and faster--’
‘Must be some perfume he has on,’ said Cal.
‘I didn’t take it she was particular afraid of my advance,’ modified
Slim, ‘just generally hos-tile. I sure drew the outlaw, though.’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Cal, ‘if we turn over little Rainbow to Elbert, we
could manage the other two.’
‘That is as nature fixes it, Cal. We’d have some trouble right now,
tearin’ that little Mary female away from Elbert, the inroads he’s
made. But no use standin’ here. I’m goin’ to get a pair of knives and
whetstone out of my war bags an’ freshen up for supper.’
‘You’re not meanin’ to shave, Slim?’
‘That’s the presumption.’
Elbert rustled hay from the shed and carried it out to the
hitching-rack, the Señora’s house being suspiciously short-handed. Half
way between the corral and the kitchen door, he sat down, and moodily
watched the Señora getting supper. She did her work on the run, back
and forth in the old stone kitchen, castanets off. Her bare feet seemed
to roll up under her as she sped, one at a time reappearing to give the
stone floor a shove. It was like a double-action paddlewheel. Curious
sizzlings reached his ears from the open fire, also fascinating scents.
He was sure sliced onions were curling and browning on the pan.
Supper was set for six. Elbert found Mary Gertling seated at his
left. He rose from the table to get a glass of water, but the Señora
prevented, thrusting red wine in his hands.
‘Vino tinto! Vino tinto!’ she exclaimed.
‘I’m s’prised, Elbert,’ Slim corrected. ‘Didn’t you know water is for
the horses?’
‘Isn’t everything wonderful?’ whispered Mary Gertling.
‘Do you think so?’ Elbert inquired.
‘Dulzura!’ flamed Slim; then Cal’s easy voice as he monopolized the
attention of Florabel Burton: ‘So your father hasn’t written to you
none, Miss, that there’s a mixture of politics going on about his oil
wells?’
‘Oh, yes. Papa always allows for that. He says it wouldn’t be
Mexico--if there wasn’t some trouble in the air.’
‘No special trouble lately--things comin’ to a head?’
‘Oh, let’s go back!’ trembled the voice from behind the big necktie.
‘Just take it easy, lady,’ in Slim’s gentlest corral tones.
‘Things are always coming to a head down here,’ said Miss Burton.
‘I know,’ said Cal, ‘I can understand just how you feel. But we’re
concerned, especially Elbert here. If you knew that boy as well as I
do, you’d seen by his face that he’s sick with concern right now.’
‘Oh, Florabel!’ said Mary Gertling. ‘Can’t we ask them to go with us?
I’ll breathe so much easier.’
‘Oh, let’s!’ faintly from the little one, whom they called Imogen.
‘Why, we’ll be down there in an hour, before it’s really dark!’
Florabel objected, but finally gave way.
XI
GAS AND GUNS
ELBERT smelled gas, as he rode behind the sedan. It had always been
so; gas belonged to the deep fatigue of his bones. One of the keenest
minutes he had ever lived was that in which they had leaned down toward
the wide tangle of tracks in front of the fonda marked El Cajon--all
able-bodied men gone from Nacimiento, and big doings promised farther
on. And then, a matter of mere minutes afterward, his old enemy had
come roaring down the dirt road. Girls--everything spoiled--Cal and
Slim all changed around.
The sedan was just rolling forward, but it kept the ponies at a
lope. It seemed hours; the sliver of a moon had sunk out of the sky.
Florabel’s resonant voice reached him from the car. No secret now
why ‘Mexicali’ Burton dared to stand off Northern Sonora for his oil
wells--the father of this girl would be like that. Cal loomed in the
dark, having waited for Mamie to come up.
‘Your lady-friend’s got her mind made up to sit a horse for a ways,
Elbert. Slim’s Indian ain’t that kind of a horse, and your Mamie’s a
filly yet. I figure she’d better try old Chester, but you sort of ride
close and keep him consoled and her camped in the right place.’
‘How about you, Cal?’
‘Nothin’ else will do, but I’m to test my morals in the little red
buggie.’
The transfer was made. Elbert rode on through the thick May dark with
Mary Gertling at his left.
‘I’ve been on a horse before,’ she said.
No answer.
‘I’m afraid you think I’m being a trouble.’
Still Elbert’s lips were locked. He couldn’t see her clearly, but her
hands certainly were not in sight. Nobody with any sense of a horse
would leave her hands in her lap.
‘Oh, I’m afraid you don’t like to have me here!’ reached him in the
stillness.
‘Sure. Pick up your reins. We’re falling back--’
‘But he bumps so--’
‘They don’t make horses any smoother than he is. Want to get back in
the car?’
‘No-o.’
‘You’re doing all right.’ He had lied in spite of himself, and this
didn’t make him feel any better. Old Chester, tired as he was,
couldn’t be expected to keep his feet trim, with no hand of authority
communicating with the bit. Heat increased under Elbert’s collar. A
heave in the road and his left hand shot out before he thought. It was
clutched. Warm, small, firm. The two horses pulled apart a little, but
the hand didn’t let go. He was afraid of yanking her out of the saddle.
‘I’m so sorry to make you cross. I think it was awful for Florabel to
think of coming--oh--I’m falling!’
The hand slid out of his. He hurriedly dismounted. Mary was hanging
sideways, both hands on the pommel. Elbert knew the abused look of
Chester’s head, hanging low in the dark. He pushed her back up in the
saddle.
‘Need any help?’ Slim sang back from in front.
‘No!’
‘Why, Elbert, I never heard such tones as them, spoke from you before--’
‘Oh, please don’t be cross!’ in a whisper from his side. ‘I don’t know
what I’d ever have done--’
‘Oh, that’s all right.’ The miles were the longest in his experience.
During the last twenty minutes the horses had trudged up hill, the
motor making noisy business of the grade. Then the ridge and lights
below, San Pasquali, doubtless. Elbert fancied he smelled the oil
wells. He would never get away from gasoline.
‘Hadn’t you better get into the car?’ he remarked to Mary Gertling.
Cal was back on old Chester. The sedan had just started down-grade,
when Elbert saw three red perforations in the dark ahead. The fraction
of a second later, three separate concussions shocked his ears--not gas
explosions, guns! There was one scream--from the little one--and Cal’s
yell directed toward the car, as he spurred forward. ‘Better turn back,
Miss--they may have the town surrounded!’
Slim’s Indian and Mamie had settled down after Chester. Shouts of
Mexicans sounded beyond the car, just as Elbert’s mare came to abrupt
stop. The sedan had halted, too, but the lights still pointed straight
ahead. Florabel wasn’t making the turn; she was either shocked
helpless, or her engine stalled. In the wide fling of the head-lights,
Elbert saw armed Mexicans standing across the road. Then they started
this way--six or seven figures running toward them, hands upraised,
rifles held aloft For once Cal’s voice lost its drawl.
‘Get in the car, Kid! Let your horse go!’
Elbert’s leg lifted out of the stirrup--one of the hardest things he
was ever called to do, but that very second the lights of the sedan
went out. There was one clear call from Mary Gertling, deadened by
a blasting roar from the sedan’s exhaust at the very knees of his
mount. Too much for Mamie. She went straight up and tried to keep
going, Elbert at the very top, arms around her frantic throat at the
narrowest--as the darkened sedan gouged forward like a speed-boat.
Cal’s voice reached him:
‘... that Burton girl--she’s shootin’ the lines! Come on, Slim, it
means us, too! Come on, Kid!’
Shots in the air--shots from ahead and at the sides.
He felt Mamie tottering still on her hind feet; then a jerk as if some
one had given her a cut with a whip, and over she went backward. He
pushed her neck from him and fell back, and knew no more, until Cal’s
low tones, as he was being lifted.
‘It’s all right. Kid. Chester’s good for both of us.’
For a time, in spite of that, he thought he still had Mamie round the
neck, but it was Cal’s ample chest--Slim’s Indian in an easy gallop
alongside.
‘Where’s the sedan?’ he finally mumbled.
‘Lord, Kid, she’s surprised papa by this time!’
XII
FLASHLIGHT AND FAWNSKIN
ELBERT kept shaking his head; no bones broken there or elsewhere, but
seemingly no end to the phases of his coming-to. It dawned on him there
had been a blank from the time Mamie went over backwards, until he
found himself here on Chester with Cal. He regretted missing some part
in there--going through the Mexican lines.
‘Where’s Mamie?’ he demanded, jerking erect.
‘Came through all right. Slim’s got her safe.’
Now Elbert gradually made out that they were in ‘Mexicali’ Burton’s oil
town. They had been halted--first a voice in Mexican, then American,
Cal answering quietly. He saw the sedan, and heard from aside in the
dark, Mamie’s long-drawn wheeze, the same protest as when she had
refused advance to the hitching-rail before the Señora’s house in
Nacimiento. There was one cabin door from which light streamed, and
in the aperture a blocky, bareheaded man appeared, legs planted wide
apart, the air suddenly burned by withering profanities.
‘... bringin’ three young women through Vallejo’s lines!... Sap-heads,
you fellows. It’s running out of your ears!’
‘I’m not takin’ no free talk from no oil man,’ growled Slim.
Cal mildly broke in. ‘Now as to that, Mister--’
‘Can’t you see we’ve got a war on?’ the blocky one in the doorway
yelled. ‘Can’t you see they’re twenty to one, tryin’ to get our oil
wells?’ His face had turned sidewise; light fell upon the uncovered,
close-cropped head--massive jaw, thin lips and startlingly familiar
blue eyes. Around that roaring neck from behind, a pair of white arms
were flung at this instant, ‘Mexicali’s’ fury shut off:
‘But Papa! I keep telling you it was all my fault!’
Florabel had the floor, but another figure had moved into the light
behind her. ‘You see, Mr. Burton, when we three wouldn’t turn back,
they rode along with us, to protect us.’ That was Mary Gertling. So
they had all reached the cabin.
Elbert still felt confused. Slim’s voice broke in now, stern with
dignity. ‘Seein’ as there’s no further need for us to be engaged in
protectin’--otherwise we might ride on--’
Another rip. ‘... ride on what? Ride on where? Don’t you see we’re
surrounded?’
‘Papa!’
‘Mexicali’ slowed down to bellow orders to his men, both Mexicans
and Americans hurrying in and out. He rang bells in both languages.
Meanwhile Cal and Slim had entered the lamp-lit quarters, and Elbert
followed, meeting the eyes of Mary Gertling. Still those eyes hadn’t
broken into tears; still that inexplicable stillness around her--the
same faint trace of a smile, as in the first moment in Nacimiento.
Now ‘Mexicali’ Burton and Cal Monroid were facing each other, like two
chiefs--one instantaneous look. All they had seemed to need was this
one look in the lamplight. Each knew a man. It was a moment of romantic
fulfillment to Elbert. His mind had suddenly renewed its grasp on the
fact that Bart Leadley might be a part of Vallejo’s lines now closing
about; yet at the same time he could not miss the way the fighting face
of ‘Mexicali’ Burton had suddenly softened and turned in appeal to Cal.
‘It was bad enough before,’ he was saying, slowly. ‘Vallejo’s got
numbers. I trust my white men, but you never can trust the Mexicans.
Cordano himself may double-cross me. Can’t tell when he’ll get some
troops here. It was bad enough before, but what can a man do with three
girls--?’
A whimsical smile was on Cal’s lips, which formed to answer, but the
words were never spoken.
That was the instant the gods of North America undertook to get
a flash-light photograph of the lower end--stupefying flash and
crash--blinding glare, heaving darkness, falling timbers, the scream of
one horse.
Elbert was on his knees, eyes and nostrils choked with dust. He thought
of Mamie outside; then certain new business and nothing else occupied
his brain. In that unbelievable glare, he had seen the face of Mary
Gertling. The light hadn’t shone upon her face, it had flowed into it,
through it. He had seen the secret of her stillness, and though he
couldn’t recall the nature of it now, he was perfectly aware that an
explosion like that might breed another and he must somehow get to her,
before it happened again.
He was calling. She called back just once. He was groping for her
now. His hand touched objects, but they had nothing to do with what
he groped for. His ears were filled with voices, but he was really
listening only for one. His fingers touched the little fawnskin jacket,
and beneath his face as he knelt, there was the queerest low sob; one
arm came up and held him, and the words:
‘You shouldn’t have been quite so long--’
At his side was the distracting rattle of a match box, the strike of
the stick. A face appeared--‘Mexicali’ Burton--all below the eyes, a
gleaming black of blood.
‘Florabel!’
‘Papa!’
‘You and the other two--get into the sedan--before they explode the
second powder house. One of my own natives probably. Get into--get
into the sedan--’ subdued, sincere, not an extra syllable. Father and
daughter--they had found each other. Cal and Slim had found each other.
Elbert bent. ‘I didn’t mean to be so long--’ he said.
The one arm tightened around him. Another match was struck. Florabel
screamed at the sight of her father’s face. ‘Mexicali’ drew the hollow
of his sleeve down over it. ‘Shut up, Flo’,’ he said in the same
subdued way. ‘Just a scratch. Pile into the sedan--’
‘I can’t move.’
‘You must--who’s this lyin’ across your lap?’
‘That’s Imogen. She’s fainted. She did it before.’
‘I’ll put her into the sedan. Come on--’
‘I can’t--’
‘I’ll lift you in.’
‘I can’t drive--’ The sentences shot back and forth; even Cal Monroid
spoke: ‘Speakin’ of drivin’--that’s the Kid’s job--’ all while the
second match burned.
‘Sure, Elbert’ll drive,’ from Slim.
Elbert bent again. ‘We’ve got to go to the sedan.’
‘Yes--’ from under his lips, but she did not stir.
‘Come on. Won’t you help me?’
‘Oh, yes--’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come then--they’re putting Imogen in.’
‘But you--’
‘I’m going with you--’
‘Oh!’
He felt the queer uncertainty of her body, as she gained her feet, yet
she seemed trying to help him. Yes, she had promised to help; her one
hand was actually trying to lift him, at the same time holding on.
Florabel and Imogen were in the back of the car. He couldn’t see if
they were rightly in the seats. Elbert took the wheel, and drew Mary
Gertling in after him. Her hand didn’t feel right. Another hand was now
thrust in through the door after Mary was seated--‘Mexicali’s’--wet,
hot, hairy.
‘You’ve got to get there, young fellow!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Clear through to Nogales.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll vouch for Elbert,’ came from Cal, who seemed standing just behind
Burton.
‘But how about Mamie?’
‘Slim and me’ll take care of her.’
‘I ain’t gone over her, but she’s on her feet.’ This last was from
Slim. ‘We’ll keep her for you.’
‘You can’t take the road you came by--not for a ways.’ ‘Mexicali’ went
on, thickly. ‘Keep goin’ toward the derricks. Follow the wheel-tracks;
they’ll work you back to the main road later. Use your lamps--when you
have to--’
‘Papa--’
‘Don’t bother me!’ The voice was thick, as if ‘Mexicali’s’ throat was
filling with blood. ‘We’re stayin’ here, but these oil wells aren’t a
hell of a lot, compared to the baggage you’re carryin’, young fellow.
Clear through to Nogales, do you hear?’
‘He’ll get through, Mister,’ said Cal, and then the same voice trailed,
‘So long, Kid.’
XIII
VALLEJO’S LINES
ELBERT’S mind didn’t steady down at once to the wheel. A moaning kept
up from behind. That was Imogen. Part of him, too, seemed listening
for Florabel’s voice; he had vaguely counted on her undertaking to
drive from the back seat, as his sisters used to, but not a word....
Gasoline.... Girls.... ‘Thirty years late.’... Tequila--coal-oil--vino
tinto.... ‘Water is for horses.’... Mamie.... Thus his mind kept
churning, as if to get a certain harrowing review out of the way,
before he took up the matter at hand. Certainly matters at hand--the
wheel, the girl at his side. He expected her hand to rise out of the
dark and tangle him further, but it didn’t come. Queer to have her on
his right. She had been on his left always before.
He was following the wheel-tracks among the derricks, using his
lights when he had to. Perhaps he was getting close to the second
powder house; anyway, he was doing what he was told.... He wasn’t
exactly right; he had to stop to think that he wasn’t back in old
Fortitude’s stiff-backed seat. A deep hurt about leaving Mamie behind
and not being exactly true to his secret quest, preyed upon him; also
the possibility that Bart Leadley was within a mile of him at this
moment, working with Vallejo to get Burton’s oil. A voice shouted from
ahead--Mexican--part of Vallejo’s cordon. Now Bart or not, he had to
get down to business. He had baggage. He had to get through.
All was black before his eyes. He was holding the sedan to a mental
picture of the dirt road, impressed upon his memory an instant ago when
he turned on the lights, but the black scaffoldings of the derricks
wove crazily before his eyes; the chance of a smash taking his breath.
He felt the wheel jerk as it left the tire-grooves. A row of rifle
flashes showed ahead; glass splintered around them.
‘Get down--way down,’ he gasped.
He pressed the throttle, holding the wheel toward the guns; the engine
roared underfoot. The firing was from behind now, but he kept going
into the blackness until he couldn’t risk another second; the sense of
leaping off into an abyss of darkness was so keen.
Lights showed the wheel-tracks; still the derricks on either hand. Not
a sound or a touch from his side. More rifles cracked ahead. It had to
be done again.
‘Get down, way down!’ he called. Again the car shot forward through
the flashes. This time hands touched the outside; bumps of metal,
more splintered glass. The wheel jerked out of his hand; the sedan
ditched, but didn’t overturn. In a flash of one rifle, he saw a second
figure--mouth open, pistol raised. He seemed to look right into that
open mouth and belching muzzle. The fenders on the same side screeched
against stone.
He wasn’t right. He had to throw his body forward on the wheel to hold
it, as he turned on the lights--only the right hand working. He was
back in the wheel-tracks, but the car kept fighting away from him--a
flat tire. He felt an absurd need to explain. ‘It was that left front
tire that threw me--’ but she wasn’t listening. His foot sank upon the
throttle.
Now Elbert was badly mixed about that left front tire and his own left
side--both flat. He had to hurry now while his right arm lasted. ‘I’ll
vouch for Elbert.... He’ll get through, Mister.... So long, Kid.’ But
all the time he was getting farther and farther from Mamie--from Bart!
The wheel-tracks had circled back to the main road. His right foot
steadied down. He had to hold the wheel with all his strength to make
up for the retard on the left.... Not a touch or a sound from his side.
Thirst was stealing into him like the cold. Maybe she was thirsty....
Maybe they wouldn’t know which was which--tequila, coal oil.... ‘I’ve
been on a horse before.... He bumps so.’... ‘Thirty years late.’... He
had lights; he held to the highway, his foot pressed to the floor....
She wasn’t helping--not a touch, or did she mean to help by keeping
still?
* * * * *
Vaguely Elbert heard low words like this:
‘He doesn’t relax. He keeps listening for a voice. The rest of the
time he seems to think he’s driving something--a horse or a car. It’s
not always clear. If he could only stop driving himself, every time he
comes to, and get some rest’--a strange woman’s voice.
‘Put him to sleep again,’ a man replied from the far side of the room.
‘I’ll answer his father’s telegram, but nobody could satisfy these
newspaper men, and have time for anything else.’
Of course, they didn’t understand. He had to get through. He had to
keep on, while his right arm lasted--clear through to Nogales. And even
if he did, it wouldn’t mean that he was making good to what he set out
for. He had passed up the main chance, falling for another.... There
was a pricking in his right arm now, but no sound from that side, not a
word--everything muffled and getting farther away ... until Cal’s easy
tones really began to set him straight:
‘Take it easy, Kid. You got ’em here--right here in Nogales! You
brought ’em through--days ago. Listen, Kid, you don’t need to drive no
more!’ That voice always straightened things out.
‘But Mamie--’ he finally broke out.
‘She’s waitin’ for you. We brought her up--fine--’
Elbert felt himself moving softly after that, into an altogether
different zone of sleep. ‘But where?’ He locked his lips. He mustn’t
ask anything more.
Cal came again, and finally with Slim, but it was a dreary time before
they let him ask questions. Mamie was right here in Nogales. ‘Mexicali’
Burton’s party had held out until morning at San Pasquali, when General
Cordano had come, driving Vallejo away.
‘Did he lose any men?’ Elbert mumbled.
‘Who?’
‘Vall--I mean Cordano--or Mr. Burton?’
‘Some,’ said Slim, suspicious of delirium again.
* * * * *
... Another time, and they were telling him everything but what he
wanted especially to know. Yes, Mexicali with a crushed jaw had kept on
his pins all through that night of the explosion, until relief came.
‘He’s here in Nogales right now--jaw in a sling,’ added Cal.
Elbert craftily inquired about Florabel.
‘She got broke somewhere--I didn’t hear where,’ said Slim.
‘Not so she ain’t goin’ to recover,’ finished Cal.
Elbert’s lips forced him to say, ‘And little Rainbow?’
‘Not a scratch,’ said Slim. ‘She just fainted and wasn’t there to get
hurt--when that explosure took place.’
Elbert was silent. Cal’s voice took up the story: ‘As for that little
Mary-woman, I’m holdin’ a letter for you she left before her parents
took her up to Tucson.’
It was like splintered glass, the way Slim broke in: ‘We’d better go,
Cal. Elbert ain’t lookin’ as well as he should.’
Cal arose: ‘She got all right before she left, except for one broken
arm.’
Several seconds ticked, before the question: ‘Which arm?’
‘Now it was the left arm, as I recall.’
‘Oh, I see, she couldn’t--’ Elbert halted with a jerk. It seemed they
never would go.
XIV
A LETTER
THEY had put out the lights. Even the night-light at the far end of the
hall was turned low, but sentences wrote themselves out on the ceiling;
a pause, then a sentence; a pause, then another.
‘_... Could it have been the wine she gave us at supper--the
barefooted old woman? I was so very thirsty!... I can’t understand. I
can’t believe, yet I distinctly remember insisting that I ride that
horse.... I was so horribly frightened--except when I was near you....
I couldn’t help seeing how the others turned to you.... Won’t you
please believe I never acted like that before?... It was because you
were so firm--that I could breathe better where you were.... And in
the car--it was like hanging on a cross, wasn’t it?... Oh, won’t you
get word to me that you forgive?_’
Such a stillness around each sentence.
XV
TUCSON
HE was sitting up when Cal and Slim came again. That was the day of the
telegram that his father was leaving the East and would be in Tucson in
three days more. Also there were more Tucson and Border papers with a
lot extra to say about Vallejo’s attack on the San Pasquali oil wells;
of the rescue of the American party by Mexican government troops; but
especially of the motor drive of one white man through the rebel’s
lines--seventy miles north, clear through to Nogales--how the car had
been found at dawn at the edge of town, the driver close to death from
a gunshot wound in his left side, two American girls unconscious in the
car, and another unhurt, but too scared to talk.
‘Not a drop of gas in the tank or you’d have rammed right into the
Border, Elbert,’ Cal said.
‘You sure stepped on the oats,’ said Slim.
‘We didn’t get to stay in Mexico,’ Elbert complained after a time. ‘We
had to come right back.’
Cal and Slim looked at each other, faces long and grave.
‘He didn’t get to stay,’ said Cal.
‘Only one horse went over back with him,’ said Slim. ‘Only one powder
magazine blew up. Only hit by one forty-five--’
‘Had to come right back,’ said Cal.
‘I thought I’d get to ride,’ said Elbert, ‘but I had to drive that
car--’
Cal inquired after a moment: ‘Do you reckon we might take Elbert along
again sometime?’
‘I ain’t a well man. I ain’t ready to state as to that right now’,’
said Slim. ‘I need to be babied along at Heaslep’s, where they ain’t
rough, and talk gentle--’
‘He wants to hear about old hoof-and-mouth,’ Cal suggested.
‘They’re going to let me out of here to-morrow,’ said Elbert. ‘I’ll be
goin’ up to Tucson--to meet my father.’
* * * * *
Elbert was clear of the hospital before he began to see things
straight. In fact, he was standing with Mamie in her box stall the
next day in the livery stable at Nogales, on the American side, when
some perfectly useless frictions and pressures fell away. In the first
place, here was Mamie safe and sound, and the future opened with a new
chance to begin over again at the bottom. Had he lost the mare, there
could have been no real beginning over, at the bottom or anywhere else.
Secondly, he hadn’t divulged his secret, even in delirium. Certain
time had been lost, the fault his in deciding to stop at Heaslep’s for
a friendly call on the way from San Forenso to the Border.
Beyond doubt he must travel alone from now on. He was breathing easier.
A bit weak on his legs--too long in bed--but ready to begin again.
Queer, how it all cleared up for him standing with Mamie like this.
‘Stand around and talk to her,’ Bob Leadley had said. ‘She likes to be
consulted on family affairs. It won’t do you no harm. She’s one more
listening mare.’
‘I’ll just leave you right here, Mamie,’ he whispered, ‘while I go
up to Tucson for a day or two. These people seem to be treating you
right--and it’s handy to the Border. Take it easy till I come back,
because we’ll be losing ourselves in work after that.’
* * * * *
... A queer, embarrassed half-embrace, neither knowing just what to
do or say, and a swift look into his father’s eyes after several
months--really the first exchange that had the beginnings of
understanding in it. Elbert finally grasped what a son is so slow to
find out--that his father was not merely a parent, but a separate human
being, with his own struggles, silences, dilemmas, like the rest of the
world. It was Elbert’s first understanding of his own house, and the
man of it, from the attitude of an outsider. Another moment of a fresh
beginning in life, he realized. Meanwhile sentences like this were
passing:
‘Got yourself pretty badly shot up?’
‘It was a bad jumble for a minute--’
‘But you saw them through--’
‘I had to. I don’t even remember, most of it.’
‘Come on, let’s go in to dinner.... No, Nancy isn’t married yet, but
the house feels as if news might break out any day--likely by the time
I--we--get back--’
The last was nothing like a foregone conclusion, but phrased
tentatively, with questioning look.
‘No, I won’t be going back just yet,’ Elbert said.
He felt the silence; also suddenly he felt his father’s side as well as
his own. A man accustomed to a houseful of daughters might really want
to have his only son standing beside him very much. It was an entirely
new angle.
‘Haven’t got enough?’
‘Not quite through--’
‘Going back to Heaslep’s?’
‘Oh, no--’
No resistance from his father. Elbert hardly knew how to handle this
new man-to-man acquiescence--no tampering. He had braced himself, but
no strength was required; and now for a moment he was unnerved by
friendliness. Was his father changed, because of things the newspapers
said about his drive to Nogales? A whole lot of stuff had been written
which no fellow could pay any attention to, about himself. Elbert began
to feel an almost irresistible impulse to tell the whole story to his
father.
‘Not going back to San Pasquali?’ the latter asked.
‘No.’
‘I was hoping you didn’t mean to tie up with this man, Burton--’
‘Oh, no.’
‘And those friends of yours--those cowhands--’
‘I’m planning to be alone for a while.’
Elbert’s answers were automatic. A fight was still on in him, not to
divulge about Bob Leadley and the gold mine. It seemed almost that his
father had the right to know--but Elbert kept his mouth shut.
Toward the end of dinner the elder man said with a laugh: ‘You’ll be
needing some money--’
‘No, I’m all fixed, thanks.’
Elbert couldn’t follow his father’s reaction to that. Mr. Sartwell said
nothing, but seemed both glad and sorry at the same time. After that he
spoke with even a little more care, not to impose his will. It was like
two men talking in a club, about anything in the world, except what
each meant to the other.
* * * * *
Elbert was waiting in the reception room of the Finishing School.
It was the summer season and only a few of the girls were staying
over--those whose families did not live in Tucson, possibly. The place
was shaded and flowery; blossoms on all the tables, and one great
basket, shaped like a French hat of an old day, on the piano, filled
with young pink roses. He heard laughter and whispering in the hallway.
It wasn’t exactly clear to him what he must say or do. He felt his
wound right now, a sort of general breakdown. The door he was looking
toward--the direction the voices came from--didn’t open. Her step
sounded from behind. He saw her first among the vines at the window,
facing the porch. Her lips moved, her hand lifted, the door opened, but
everything was stiller than one could imagine.
‘I would have known you--’
‘Of course--’
‘It’s probably because I saw you before--I mean before dark that
night--’
He felt a vague surprise in himself that he caught the drift so
readily. ‘At the barefooted woman’s--’ he finished.
‘Yes--’
‘It was different, after supper that night,’ she went on, ‘but I’m
glad I would have known you, as you are to-day. Reading the papers was
so confusing.’
‘They never know when to stop.’
‘They didn’t tell it nearly all, either--’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t have known it was the same story by reading it in the
papers.’
‘I see--’
She was changed--less glitter somehow, as if her light came from deeper
in, a light more delicate. She had on a creamy dress, no folds in it,
but not tight anywhere. This meeting wasn’t like the first time in the
Señora’s house; nor yet, was it like the sense of her which had come
in the hospital, from so many hours of pondering over the separate
sentences of her letter. Suddenly he knew he must never tie himself to
any particular moment when with her, because she wasn’t going to be the
same the next time. Tying to one meeting would keep him from catching
on to all that the next held in store. His mind clung for a moment,
however, to the memory of the alabaster bowl at home, while she was
still going on about the newspapers.
‘They didn’t see you. They didn’t know what we did--what we tried to
do. They sort of laughed at us, and talked of your great bravery, but
there was something no one saw--’
She was standing at his left--a hush between the sentences. ‘... They
didn’t know that somebody was helping us--’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean it wasn’t just your strength. Why, you were like one dead;
and yet you still drove. It was only when we were safe that your hand
relaxed--’
‘A case of knowing I had to, wasn’t it?’
‘More than that. That helped, of course, but there was something more--’
He said: ‘I didn’t know much of what was happening at the time--that
is, to remember, but I had a feeling you were helping--’
‘Did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really, did you know that?’
‘I had the feeling you were helping,’ he repeated. ‘First I thought
your hand--you know, I thought your hand would come up and help--’
‘It couldn’t.’
‘I didn’t know then.’
‘It was because it couldn’t, don’t you see?’
‘No. I don’t understand.’
‘When I found I couldn’t lift my hand, I knew I had to help another
way!’
‘You mean you--you prayed?’
‘I never did before,’ she laughed. ‘Yes, it was like that--’
It was as if the windows were all thrust open into a wide silent
summer, like the stillness of mountains, where there is not even the
rustle of a wing. A clean perfume came in, and there was a clear seeing
in Elbert’s brain, as if an arc-light were burning, where only candles
had shone before.
‘It was so dreadful, because I had promised,’ she said.
‘How was that?’
‘You had asked me to help you, and I had promised. Then I found I could
not even lift my hand. It was then I kept saying, “I have to help him,
please. I have to help him, please--”’
‘I see,’ said Elbert.
‘And then it was as if I could see the car below--see right through
into it, and I could see you and me, sort of little and broken inside,
and I could feel _our_ pain, but we were really together outside and
above, and we knew it would be all right--’
Now he could actually help carry out her picture. ‘I remember in the
hospital,’ he said quickly, ‘when they gave me an anæsthetic, I could
look down at myself like that. I wouldn’t tell anybody--if I were you.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t for worlds! They’d call it being out of the head!’
So she had kept all this, until he came. Just now he turned to her, and
there wasn’t a sound from the halls. The light was easy and flowing in
the room. Everything was like a slow movement. His right foot raised to
take the step toward her, but suddenly he knew if he took the step, it
would be next to impossible to remember clearly that he must find Bart
Leadley; quite plain, it was, that if he took this step toward her, he
wouldn’t be able to go down into Mexico alone and keep his mind to the
allegiance he had entered with Bart’s father. His foot settled back to
the floor.
‘... And the later part--all different--I’ll never forget!’ she was
telling him. ‘It was when the dawn came--the time we were in the
awful cold--and they found us, and you were hanging forward on the
wheel--your face was like stone--eyes open, but no life. Oh, I’ll never
forget! It was as if the skin of your face were pulled back over the
bones from behind ... and they lifted me out to an ambulance, before
they lifted you, and I saw your left side--all wet and stained dark ...
and then I knew I wasn’t helping--so frightened from your look--and I
knew I must not fall into fears, nor pay any attention to your wound,
but help more--from higher up, and never stop--’
It was getting harder and harder to think of the work ahead. Elbert
plunged into the inevitability of it right now.
‘I’ve got a work to do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go away. I’m glad I came
to-day. About all this--I won’t forget any of it. I’ll know more about
it--when I come back--’
The most astonishing thing of all, she seemed to understand even
that--no resistance whatever from her, as there had been none from his
father. Was it always like this--when one was sure of himself?
‘I have work to do, too,’ she told him at the window. ‘We’ll know all
about everything, when the time comes.’
XVI
THOROUGHBREDS ENTER
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios--’
WEEKS afterward in old Mexico. He hadn’t moved straight down toward
Nacimiento and San Pasquali, where Monte Vallejo was last heard of,
but had followed the Border west, leaving the main highway, sinking
himself into the country. He was taking it easy, learning the language
from the voices in the daytime and his Spanish book at night. Days
of learning--getting to know the feel of the people, learning Mamie,
and that was not all--learning himself. No more leather-store; he
wasn’t dreaming. An old fear that something was wrong about him, even
anatomically wrong, in relation to a saddle, had pretty well died out.
Sometimes he even fancied that Mamie answered his rein, as if it were
old man Leadley’s velvety touch.
‘Era la que me miraba
Diciendo adios’
That song was like an ever-continued story. A woman’s voice with
guitar, this time, and the old wistfulness came over Elbert--the same
that he had felt in the Plaza of Los Angeles. Here he was in a little
native plaza--far from travel-lines, not even sure of the name of the
town, yet he had to stop and think that all he had wanted so restlessly
a while back, had come to pass. At least, he was working out the old
dream day by day, Sonora at her sleepiest and dustiest now, days
interminably long and changelessly hot.
Though the fierce daylight had faded out the shine from her bright bay
coat, Mamie was hardening to the road, and the man was coming to know
some of her movements and whims, if not all. Gradually Elbert perceived
also that she was aware of many of his. He never tethered her at night,
yet she never strayed. He hadn’t been able to learn the lip-and-finger
call, the way Bob Leadley had shown him, but there was a whistle in the
handle of the sheath-knife he carried, and a blast from that brought
the mare in from the sweetest herbage.
He liked the nights in the open, Mamie grinding at her forage the
last thing--drowsiest sound in the world to him. And her early call;
out of the deepest sleep he would hear that. But by the time his eyes
were open, the mare was merely to be seen feeding at a distance, her
head turned away. If he dozed again, a more peremptory summons would
sound, but Mamie was apparently calling to the hazy hills, her farthest
concern to do with him.
One morning he didn’t doze a second time, but covertly watched. About
ten minutes after first call, the mare stopped feeding and came toward
him, her hind feet lifting high and quickly, like a race horse, under
the big blanket. Suddenly she stopped, blatted her loudest toward
Elbert’s partly covered head, but wheeled on the instant and was
cropping again.... Fearless and winsome, a walk-trot mare, ready to
go, ready to keep on, invariably increasing the pace as his hand idled
at the reins, or his thoughts roamed away. Often Elbert would come to
himself finding Mamie in a full ten-mile trot, when he had not been
paying attention for several minutes. The pace seemed to steal upon
her, and would end in a run if he did not bring her down.
One day it occurred to him that she never dropped into a walk from a
trot, or back into a trot from a gallop, unless pulled up. There was no
exception that he could remember. But the black night at San Pasquali
had left a double-died complex at the core of Mamie’s emotional self.
The sound of a motor car made her unreasonable at once. She would have
been glad to do the day’s work over again any night, to get away from a
town where machines had penetrated. Her one other deranging influence
was an oil derrick. One of these attenuated triangles spoiled her whole
horizon, like a finger of doom.
Gradually his rides took him farther south and west. Plenty to hear of
Monte Vallejo, the bandit, of whom the peons of some districts were
passionately fond. But never a word of a possible white man who rode
with him. It would be a matter of luck, Elbert often thought, that
would bring him up with Bart, if that ever happened. What he needed
now, more than knowledge of Spanish, or anything else, and he came
to know this very well, was sheer patience to carry on. It wasn’t
possible to ask questions about Monte Vallejo, without the people
becoming suspicious at once. They thought he was somehow interested
in helping the rurales, who did much of the hard work in keeping the
districts in order, and yet were disliked as a matter of course by the
people. Elbert often wondered what he could ever do single-handed,
when the rurales for years had failed to bring in the bandit. Also
General Cordano, who commanded the military of the whole country-side,
was Vallejo’s sworn enemy for political reasons, and yet with all his
soldiers had been unable to put a stop to the activity of the bandit.
Everywhere it was related that the notorious Monte had the best horses
in Sonora. Elbert was in a way to hear much of this, because the people
seemed inevitably reminded of the point by his own coming to their
different towns. It wasn’t himself who attracted the people, however,
nor held their eyes. It was Mamie whom they gathered to see, looking
her over, even bringing lanterns in the evening, ever drawing near and
saying to each other:
‘Monte Vallejo would like that mare,’ or, ‘Monte Vallejo rides a horse
like that.’
Many weeks passed before his task became actual. He had been as far as
a hundred and fifty miles southwest, and had made a big circle north
again toward the Border, when word sped from town to town that Monte
Vallejo had held up a westbound Yuma Pacific train in the San Isidro
Gorge, not primarily to loot the passengers--that was incidental--but
to relieve two express coaches of a string of thoroughbreds en-route to
the running meeting at Tia Juana.
At this very time, Elbert was in the little town of San Isidro, less
than twenty miles from the scene of the hold-up.
Southwest with his new saddle-stock, the master of the road and his
band were said to be galloping with three troops of rurales beating
the trail behind--the latter stung and aroused as never before. Gold
bar couldn’t have challenged the mounted police like this theft of
bang-tails.
Elbert got it all as straight as he could in his mind that night, and
the next morning before full light, he filled his saddle-bags with what
provisions he could procure in San Isidro and rode out, following the
trail which a northern squad of rurales had taken after the bandit. He
tried not to appear in too much of a hurry, but Mamie unquestionably
felt the force of this fresh clue and the excitement in the air. Sonora
was really wrought up. The entire body of rurales had taken the road to
make a sure job of it this time. Meanwhile the people kept it a secret
where the bandit’s picket lines were stretched, and fixed their faces
for a great laugh at the expense of the mounted police.
But the hour had evidently arrived for an astonishing turn of affairs.
The second day out from San Isidro, Elbert became aware of a persistent
rumor to the effect that Monte Vallejo was having trouble covering
ground with his new string of horses. They were sprint-bred, but few of
them took to steady distance work, so important in the present flight.
On the third day, the most incredible of all announcements shocked
Sonora--that Monte Vallejo and seven of his men had been captured a few
miles beyond Arecibo; that they had been brought back to that town, and
were being held there under a guard of rurales, as well as watched over
by the little garrison of Cordano’s soldiers located at that point.
No trial; only an order from General Cordano was awaited, it was said.
Upon the receipt of this, Monte and his seven, without reservation,
would be put to death in el cuartel at Arecibo. ‘A mere formality,’ the
natives moaned, intimating that supplying the paper would be a pleasant
task for General Cordano. This ‘mere formality’ sunk into Elbert’s
head. Later the news reached him that another wing of Monte’s band had
been taken. The rurales were having their turn of luck at last.
XVII
THE ART OF DYING WELL
ARECIBO was thirty-five miles away, when Elbert received this news.
He did fifteen miles more that day, and the next mid-afternoon when
he was close to the town where Monte Vallejo was said to be held, a
most inviting level stretch of turf showed ahead. Mamie did not miss
the fact. She had been well rested in San Isidro; her fitness brought
to a fine point, which two full days’ work had not dulled. She was
teasing at the man’s arm, at this very moment, and rising under him, as
a small boat in open sailing after the drag of a breakwater. She took
the gallop and Elbert wasn’t so hard to persuade, as she stretched out,
loosening her mouth from the restraint of his hand.
There was a laugh on his lips, as he let her go. These were some of
their best moments together, and this particular dash promised to be a
jewel among them--only in the lee of a big boulder as he flicked round
a bend, stood one of the rurales at ‘raise pistol,’ and a snapping bark
to halt from his throat.
It took nearly a hundred yards for Mamie to slow down. Elbert turning
her about at length, perceived the native trooper riding his way--one
of Sonora’s finest--gunned, spurred, saber-sheathed on one side,
carbine-booted on the other, a heavy cartridge-belt flung over left
shoulder and under right arm. Around the mustacios was a restless,
uncertain look.
‘Magnificent horse you ride, Señor.’
‘She’s a good mare--just trying her out.’
‘Had her long?’
‘Oh, yes--’ but that didn’t seem to go with ‘just trying her out.’
The rurale was sizable for a Mexican; not so tall, but thick in
proportion; heavy wrists, bulging forearms, thick, straight back. His
pony looked small and desperate compared to Mamie, but kept going with
outstretched head.
‘And where does the Señor travel?’
‘The next town--Arecibo.’
‘I also go to Arecibo.’
Mamie was now being regarded with even more than customary interest,
back and forth, up and down, the rurale’s eye roving, so that it was
with difficulty that he kept his mind upon conversation at this time.
Still Elbert was used to this sort of thing, having frequently found
himself judged as a caballero of some great and elaborate house by the
horse he rode.
‘I have heard that the notorious Vallejo is being held in Arecibo,’ he
began with sociable impulse.
‘Yes?’ questioned the trooper in return.
Elbert wondered at the curious tone. This man had reservations.
‘I have been on the road for two days and possibly am misinformed,’
Elbert added carefully.
‘On the road--from where, Señor?’
‘From San Isidro--’
The other’s hand jerked at his bridle-rein.
Now Elbert began to realize that San Isidro was hardly a town to
mention--so close to the gorge of the same name where the recent
hold-up had taken place.
The Mexican slowly pulled himself together to reply. ‘Monte Vallejo is
not being held in Arecibo. In purgatorio, at this hour, so I trust. Ah,
it was magnificent!’
Mamie was now forgotten. Transformation in the rurale was to be
witnessed, moreover, at this point. The man seemed higher, rising in
his saddle with enthusiasm. Here was one of the pride of the Republic,
indeed, having banished all present care, in the thought of the
recent exploits of his troop, and especially of the light-hearted and
inimitable courage of his chief, Ramon Bistula, el capitan, to whom the
bandit’s capture was largely due.
Tributes, dithyrambs, even--but no news.
‘You say Monte Vallejo is dead--already put to death?’
‘To-day. This very day, Señor.’
‘And by the hand of this famous captain of your troop?’
‘Si, Señor.’
‘Where is your captain now?’ Elbert asked at random.
‘In Arecibo--have no fear. The Señor will be welcomed by el capitan
Ramon, himself, who put the bullet in the head of the chief of the
bandits, Monte Vallejo!’
Elbert struggled with his own composure.
‘I do not understand about your captain’s bullet--if Monte was already
taken captive--surely he--’
‘This very day!’ exclaimed the rurale. ‘It was so, Señor--a most
charming thing! The great Vallejo had many wounds at the time--many
wounds, but would not fall. Laughing, he stood unbound--his head
uncovered, trying to light with wet fingers a second cigarette that
would not burn--’
‘I did not hear about the first. Please, not so fast,’ said Elbert. ‘My
Spanish is of the book--not so fast, please--’
‘Ah, Señor, your Spanish is quite--Castillano, quite. The Spanish of el
capitan Ramon is like that, also--’
And this was the story that Elbert heard, through many repetitions, as
they rode forward toward Arecibo:
‘... At daybreak this very day, seven men put to death in the patio
of el cuartel in Arecibo by the limping idiots of Cordano who call
themselves soldiers. Seven prisoners, bound and blindfolded, shot down
by the soldiers of Cordano, while Monte himself and el capitan, Ramon
Bistula, laughed and smoked and chatted together, until there were no
more prisoners standing, and it became time for Monte himself to stand
against the wall.
‘No bandage for the eyes--ah, no, not for such as he! No thongs for his
hands--he waved them away; then stepping carefully to avoid the dead
and shaking ones of his band, Monte took his place against the blank
wall--lighting another cigarette.’
Elbert felt a frightful closeness about it all--this very day, under
this very sun, the town where it happened, looming just ahead, the man
at his side, having witnessed it all. Moreover Elbert was enduring a
positive strain to know if one of the bodies Monte Vallejo stepped
over, as he took his place at the wall, was Bart Leadley. Not without
great difficulty, his pressure was so keen, did Elbert follow the
details of the trooper’s story, but the telling was folded over
and over again on itself. It appeared that as Vallejo lighted his
cigarette, taking his place against the wall, Ramon Bistula called to
the soldiers not to fire for a moment, until the chief of bandits had
taken one or two deep breaths of smoke.
‘... Such courtesy!’ exclaimed the enraptured rurale, pouring out the
rest. ‘And then it was, in a moment more, with a gesture of thanks to
my captain, Señor Vallejo bowed his head for death, but there was not
one of the soldiers who cared to put an end to such courage, and none
could fire straight in any case; so “boom-boom” from the volleys and
Monte Vallejo did not fall.’
Now the trooper swung his shoulders to the right and left--unsettling
the gait of his pony--in the way of portraying the manner the doomed
bandit kept his feet.
‘Several times--in the arms and legs, struck, Señor--yet smiling still
and trying to light his tobacco from which the fire had dropped--’
The trooper’s speech had become very rapid; his bridle-rein changed
from hand to hand, the ears of his mount cocking with the gestures.
Here, manifestly, was the climax of his narrative. Once he dropped the
bridle-rein entirely, needing both hands:
‘... Then it was that my captain, Ramon Bistula, hastened forward,
beckoning the soldiers back. He caught the reeling Vallejo in his own
hands. He held him still. From his own case he drew a cigarette. He
struck the match, lit it in his own lips. He placed it in the lips
of the other. This I heard, “I have the honor in a moment to end the
work of these frightened butchers. You are a brave man, Monte Vallejo!
Speak, when you would have me fire!”
‘And with that, such a beautiful look came into the eyes of the bandit
chief, as he said, “Gracias, Capitan, your words and your tobacco are
of one excellence!” And after that, “I will thank you now to put me to
sleep, Brother Ramon--”
‘It was then with his own hands--’
* * * * *
Florid life was closing in upon Elbert a bit too fast. Riding in
silence into Arecibo, he reflected upon the quiet life of the
leather-store, and upon the manner of life he was entering upon right
now. He couldn’t have chatted and smoked like Monte Vallejo. He
couldn’t have done the elegant butchery part of el capitan Ramon. It
was like the story of Red Ante--there just wasn’t the stuff in him to
endure certain phases of that, nor the sort of thing pulled off in el
cuartel, Arecibo, this very day.
In so many cases in this country, he reflected, one but arrived to the
estate of manhood, when he met death in violent form. And out of all
this death, what hope for Bart Leadley, and the rounding-out of that
old bitter tale?
Elbert felt very confused and inadequate.
The little plaza, with only one building of more than one story
surrounding, and that el cuartel, looked cold and forbidding to his
eyes that late afternoon; the little shops with dirt floors, where
old cheese and new rum struggled together to reproduce the flavor of
by-gone Spain, had lost their accustomed romance. It was not until
Mamie was safely cared for in a clean corral by herself; not, in fact,
until her master sat down to tortillas and huevos rancheros (the flavor
of garlic coming in from the open fireplace of the little fonda)--that
a certain wistful zest of life really began to stir again in his veins
once more. Black tobacco in the air, black coffee sweetened to a syrup.
‘If one could only live to enjoy all this,’ he reflected, leaning back.
Dusk was already in the room--candle-lights across the plaza, the first
strum of guitars. At this moment a young Mexican officer appeared;
elegantly dressed, and quite as Elbert might have pictured such an
entrance--whipping a riding crop against his polished boot.
‘May I humbly present myself, Señor--I, Ramon Bistula?’
XVIII
ONE SANG WITH GUITAR
ELBERT arose, but before he caught himself, his fascinated glance
had darted to the gloved right hand that had put the closing touch
to Monte Vallejo this very day. Not a bristling murderer of outlaws,
Ramon appeared, but a youth of cultured turn of thought--brown eyes and
boyish lips, a face whiter than his own ... uninterested apparently in
soldiers, rurales, even in bandits, but asking many questions regarding
America, the States and cities, the night life, and how long it took to
go from Chicago to San Francisco--
‘Not three days, Señor!’
‘Yes,’ said Elbert.
‘Not three days, at fifty miles an hour, night and day?’
Like a child--or, at least, a younger brother, was this aristocrat
who had taken the job of slaying out of the hands of the despised
soldiers of Cordano. How many others had this small gloved hand put
to death? Elbert certainly felt under a painful pull, as they chatted
and complimented. Secret stiffness was still upon him, as leisurely
together, they walked out of the fonda into the starlight.
‘Si a tu ventana llega una paloma--’ from the guitars, and by this time
the girls of Arecibo were moving softly by. It was their brief hour of
night, and they were abroad, eyes shining, under their mantillas; all
from seven to the great age of twenty-seven, passing by the beloved
captain and his friend, the American who came on the magnificent horse.
What did these soft-eyed girls think of the killing manner of life of
their men? Doubtless that it was all that life should be.
With his absorbing interest in America, the elegant Captain Ramon would
certainly have mentioned the detail--had there been an American among
the seven executed this day. Was Bart more Mexican than American? Was
he regarded as a native, pure and simple, by his fellow-bandits and the
rurales, or had he left Sonora altogether? These questions continually
hammered through Elbert’s consciousness. Meanwhile, since compliments
were the order in all conversation, he was with difficulty trying to
convey to Ramon Bistula how enthusiastic the trooper he had ridden with
in the afternoon, had expressed himself toward his captain.
‘Do all your men feel the same toward you?’ he inquired.
‘They are pleased with small things,’ lightly said Ramon. ‘To-morrow,
perhaps, you will see the rest of my troop.’
‘They are not all here in Arecibo then?’
‘Ah, no--a third party is due to report at this time. We look for
further captives with them. Six more of Vallejo’s men were brought in
to-day by a second squad.’
‘Six more prisoners here alive in Arecibo now?’
‘Yes, Señor, waiting death now in the patio of el cuartel yonder--a
mere formality--the paper from General Cordano--any moment.’
Elbert turned his head away. ‘Great night for guitars,’ he said.
‘Ah, to hear the bands of countless pieces in the great plazas of
America!’
Elbert heard his own voice reach out plaintively in the hush. ‘When do
these further executions--?’
‘To-morrow--next day--who can tell? We wait the order only. You care
for these things?’
‘I could hardly say that, Captain. I was only wondering at the manner
in which the prisoners face the end--if an American would act the same?’
‘Ah, doubtless Americans would accept with perfect composure--it is the
least a man can do--’
‘Are all these men calm?’
‘Again, please?’
‘Are they all calm?’
‘Calm. I had not thought of that! They are so-so. Why not come with me
now, and let us see if they are calm.’
The Captain explained that he was due to report at el cuartel at this
time, but that his personal quarters were in the fonda, the picket-line
of his own men being at the other side of town. El cuartel, it was to
be noted, was spoken of with faint scorn, as the home of Cordano’s
soldiers--a poor-house and prison combined.
The two strolled across the plaza and the heavy wooden gate of the
quarters swung wide. Only the front of the building had a second floor.
It was like a tunnel of clay they entered, wide and high enough for
a horseman to ride in, with a narrow door leading to the barracks on
one side and to an office on the other. Elbert smelled the earthiness
of the dried clay walls, as he passed through at the spurred heels of
Ramon Bistula. The suggestions of underground began to haunt him--the
presence of condemned men--this very day--the blank wall!
The passage opened to a large patio with low cells on all sides. The
cells were open, the prisoners and Cordano’s soldiers moving freely
together. Captain Ramon informed him that for a time in the cool of the
day like this the cells were unlocked, but the prisoners were returned
to their quarters at nine promptly. Small fires were here and there;
perhaps fifteen men in all, lounging about the fires, the guards mixed
freely among them, ponies feeding in far corners. Some of the men
gambled. All smoked; one sang with guitar. No sign of a face that might
be an American. At least, not for Elbert’s first fierce look. He noted
the inner blank wall of the barracks, but dusk covered what stains
might have been on the ground.
To-morrow, the next day--six more of these men to die--and they played
cards to-night. Tobacco was as good to them as ever; peace was abroad
... one boyish voice sang, but Elbert remembered the underground smell
of the long clay arch.
No American save himself in the prison court--no troubled thoughts save
his own apparently. He moved from knot to knot among the fires, Ramon
Bistula having excused himself to enter the office. The faces turned
up to him from the cards, from the interminable little match boxes and
papers of tobacco. The one with his guitar looked up with a gray thin
smile as he hummed, but did not lose a beat of his song....
Scarred, pocked, peaceful faces--they did not seem to know any more of
what was coming than the ponies in the farther shadow. There was one
with the luminous welt of a knife-wound, running down the side of his
throat and vanishing like the head of a worm under his collar ... boys
and men.
All smoked, and one sang with guitar.
Ramon Bistula approached, but only to excuse himself again. Round
and round among the little fires, Elbert moved. No, he was not as
they were. It was as if in passing the clay tunnel to the little
court, something had fallen from them--ghastly responsibility of
self-preservation--the very thing that choked his throat now.
He had paused a second time, before the feet of the boyish figure with
the guitar. The words of the song were of some curious provincial
Spanish, and slowly uttered. It was this that the youth sang:
_A girl once stood in a doorway and there was dust of corn upon
her elbow, upon her cheek, and pale gold corn in a pile upon the
mortar-stone at her side ... a girl with corn like sun-dust, shining
on her skin ... with a golden bud springing like young corn in her
breast._
Something like that, chaste as the light of that endless summertime.
And the youth strumming the guitar seemed not to feel the great
wounding of separation--but to take a vague sweetness from repeating
the words--as of approach to that far doorway.
Elbert could stand the tension no longer. Through his mind flicked
memories of the supper in the old barefooted woman’s house in
Nacimiento, of the ride afterward, of the strange, still, flowered room
in Tucson. He longed to be alone, his thoughts turned yearningly toward
the fonda of Arecibo; he longed to stand alone with Mamie in the clean
corral behind it. A sentry, one of the soldiers of Cordano stopped him,
as he started to enter the portal from the patio.
‘I am leaving,’ he said. ‘I am with the captain of the rurales--’
Ramon Bistula now came forward from the low side door in the wall, and
at the same instant, the heavy wooden gate opened from the street,
and Mamie veered in under the arch, led by a soldier. Another soldier
followed, bearing the big stock-saddle and blankets--Mamie entering
this portal of clay! He called her name; she nickered back. Now Captain
Ramon was saying:
‘I trust it will not be of great inconvenience--your things being
brought from the fonda for this one night--you to pass this one night
here, instead of at the fonda--more air, more room--a room being
prepared, in fact, for yourself quite alone.’
XIX
A CORNER OF THE WALL
A ROOM of his own. It was a cell with wooden bars, looking out upon the
court where the prisoners and soldiers still played and lounged. A huge
moon, almost full, came up over the opposite roof of low cells, and in
the distant shadow there, Mamie squealed and let fly--a plebeian pony
venturing too close, no doubt.
A sickish smile he was not aware of hung around Elbert’s mouth. The
floor of the cell was of stone. The wooden bars very thick, the ceiling
low. There was a wide wooden bench for him to lie upon--blanket roll,
saddle, and saddle-bags had been brought.... So the voluble rurale had
had but one idea all the time in the afternoon; and crafty little Ramon
Bistula with amiable guile--so pleasantly impersonal in leading one
astray and putting men to death--Ramon, keeping him in the plaza while
his men doubtless went through saddle-bags and roll. But they could
have found nothing to implicate him--some silver and canned stuff. His
papers of identification were in order. Then he remembered his mention
of San Isidro; he would have to prove that Mamie was not one of the
stolen horses. Perhaps they would think his papers were stolen, too!
The sickish smile remained--the smile of one who has seen his quest
ending in failure. He thought of Mr. Leadley’s affection and care for
Mamie, and he had known no better than to let her show her speed on a
highroad, and mention the name of San Isidro to the rurale.
His hand came up to his mouth--an ache of muscles that didn’t seem to
know enough to relax by themselves. The moonlight felt cold, a creeping
cold on the stone floor.... The same song from the patio--guitar and
corn-dust maiden--but so different, coming to him through the bars. El
capitan was at the door, the sentry unlocking the cell.
‘I have brought blankets of my own for you, Señor. Very soft and
warm blankets. I am grieved; but it is only for the present--this
interesting mare of yours--a puzzle to the soldiers of Cordano.... A
very good night, Señor--’
* * * * *
He had actually dozed, for the plaza was empty. Elbert had heard
of people going to sleep as usual, with death hanging over, but he
wouldn’t have believed it of himself. All was still, the moon very
white upon the turf. The blank wall of the main building within forty
feet from where he lay.... This very morning ... word from Cordano
all that was necessary for more executions ... ‘mere formality.’ Now
gradually, he entered one of the deep and memorable hours of his life,
lying propped up against the saddle, looking out through the bars,
moonlight flooding down outside, everything so still that he could
hear the drops of water from the pail into the cistern in the center
of the prison patio. He waited for the isolated drops, but his mind
often wandered before the sound came--back to his own house in the
East, to his own room, where he had dreamed so much, but nothing like
this--slowly through the days at Heaslep’s and the leather-store; the
noon-hour in the latter place, when the door was pushed open and a
certain whimsical voice started the whole works going:
‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do--’
And that very saddle was under his head! Heaslep’s again, Nacimiento.
His Spanish book said that word ‘Nacimiento’ meant Birth ... the old
Señora with her castanets, and her house in the town called Birth....
Then the part he never remembered clearly, not even now--the ride to
San Pasquali, the ride back; Nogales, its smell of drugs, and the
Letter; Tucson and that still room where so many flowers were, still as
the patio out yonder.
Until just now, he had never let himself go, in thinking about that
room. Too much of a magnet about it all; it drew all the strength of
mind and feeling back to it, taking the force from the work at hand
here in Sonora. But this was a sort of show-down--locked up here in
Arecibo. He dared now to remember that Tucson hour, moment by moment.
... And what did she mean--that she could see the car below--see right
through it, and their own bodies, sort of little and broken? He knew
what she meant. More than that, he knew her meaning when she said,
‘And I could feel _our_ pain, but we were really together outside and
above.’ And ‘You were like one dead, yet you still drove.’... ‘Your
face was like stone, eyes open, but no life, the skin pulled back over
the bones from behind.’... ‘It was when the dawn came--the time we were
in the awful cold--’
Such a stillness around her as she spoke, the stillness of the
mountains. He didn’t remember that dawn part after reaching Nogales,
but she remembered it all. There was another thing now that he dared to
ponder a moment, because he was locked up in this place of birth--no,
death. ‘We will know all about everything when the time comes.’ How
much did she mean by that?
It would likely be a lot harder to keep on looking for Bart, after
letting these memories have their way, but was there to be any more
mission? Was this not the end--a cell in Arecibo? His eyes focalized
again on the moonlit patio. Deserted and ashen white now, but he was
seeing once more the figures of the condemned men--that face of the
youth with the guitar and song of the corn-dust maiden--one of the boys
who had ridden with Monte Vallejo, ridden with Bart, perhaps.
Elbert had fallen asleep and awakened again to find the silvery sheen
gone from the patio. Gray light was there, but no moonlight. A calling
of Mexican names:
‘Revas--Marcè--Trastorno--Sarpullir--’
There were one or two more, but he missed hearing the names, curiously
struck by the meaning of the last ‘Sarpullir’--‘to be covered with
flea-bites,’ as he recalled from his Spanish book. Now the clanging of
an iron door broke in upon him, and a thudding on the turf, which he
recognized without having heard it before--the dropping of rifle-butts
as the pieces were stacked. The Mexican voice was still carrying on.
It made him think of the voice of the phonograph record back home,
announcing the singer of ‘La Paloma.’
Straight across the patio, one of the sentries was unlocking a cell
door. The sentry stood back, as the prisoner emerged. Neither hurried.
The prisoner made the sign of the cross, and then held forth his hand.
The sentry gave him a cigarette and struck the match on his own box.
Then they moved forward--out of sight.
Elbert was on his feet now, rubbing his eyes. It had all been mixed
with his dream so far, but now he knew that it was really dawn and the
Mexican voice was telling off the deaths of ‘Sarpullir’ and the others.
The one across the patio had moved forward to the wall.
It was altogether incredible. The rurale’s story of yesterday, all the
stories of death he had ever heard, did not make the present moment
believable. It could not be so, here and now.... Men fell off horses,
off cliffs, out of parachutes; men were run over by cars, blown to
pieces in mines, broken by many labors and inventions, but men could
not be put to death--a’ sangre fria--at daybreak by other men!
Now he was standing at the bars of his own cell. Something was pulling
him back to the bench, but another force more rigidly held his right
cheek-bone pressed between two wooden bars. Only the far corner of
the wall could be seen, even so--just one man standing at the blank
wall--face of a youth, looking away, head uncovered and looking
away.... And now from the left, where Elbert’s eye could not reach,
came an old man’s voice raised in wailing. It was like the voice of an
old beggar at some city gate--crying out softly against what he saw,
not desperately, a low mourning; and all the time the phonograph-voice
gave commands--until a shock of volley-fire and a few ragged shots.
The hands of the youth lifted, as if he were treading water, as if he
were pushing something from him, as if he were trying not to fall--an
altogether different, divided look--the face of one being stoned, yet
exalted, too--all this in the succession of shots, and Elbert had drawn
back by this time, rubbing his cheek which was bruised from the wood,
and there was something in him older, far older and quieter, than he
had ever known before; something in him that could not laugh yet, but
would sometime, something that knew that the corn-dust maiden would be
waiting in that far doorway.
XX
THE TWO WHO HAD NOT HEARD
DAY was actually breaking clearer. Mamie was dancing at her tether
across the patio. The recent sound of guns had not been to her liking,
nor certain odors which now moved in the air. The firing squad had
gathered at the cistern. The men were drinking water and lighting
cigarettes, talking jerkily with laughter. The sudden surge of pity
which Elbert knew was for them, not for the others.... That was his day
of quiet waiting. The sun rose and steadily shone; such was a fact of
continual amazement. The hours didn’t drag, because his thoughts were
out of himself so much of the time. He would finally feel an ache in
his body and rouse from the deeps of contemplation to find that he had
sat in one position for an hour or more. Queerly enough, he couldn’t
take his own predicament so seriously as last night.
Of course, he wouldn’t give up. He would see his Sonora job through,
but for the time, practically all sense of personal danger had eased
away. Cordano’s little infantry garrison was merely holding him until
his case was straightened out. Perhaps the officer in charge had
telegraphed North to verify his papers. Sooner or later he would be out
of this, and if they sent him back to the States, he would return when
possible and start in all over again.
Noon, afternoon. Captain Ramon appeared, commiserated with him, but
announced that four more of Monte Vallejo’s men were being brought in.
Elbert saw the prisoners enter at nightfall, and once more, for an hour
or two in the evening, the prison cells were unlocked, and after that
the silence again, the lone American’s last thought that there would be
another death party at dawn....
He was ripped out of sleep by a full-powered neigh from Mamie. He sat
up--moonlight whiter than ever upon the empty patio. Faintly he could
see the mare standing in the thin shadows--that high-held listening
head--the arch of her crest. He heard a horse answer from a distance,
probably from the picket-line of the rurales across the town. A sentry
walking past, back and forth across the entrance to the arch, paused,
but resumed his pacing again.
Now, slowly, on the low roof of the cells opposite, a human figure
lifted--then another. Mamie nickered; the figures flattened again. This
time horses answered from both sides of the town. The sentry was slower
to resume his pacing.
Elbert rubbed his eyes. The two figures on hands and knees were now
moving cautiously forward on the roof of the cells toward the arch.
They came to halt, as the sentry approached below. Slow seconds, Mamie
dancing nervously back and forth on her tether. From one of the cells
came a low grumbling at the disturbance she made--then the launching of
the nearer and shorter figure from the roof, to the shoulders of the
sentry, as the latter reached the turning-point of his post below.
Hardly a scream. The sentry was stretched upon the turf; the other
rising from it. The second and taller stranger, meanwhile, had dropped
down from the roof and vanished under the arch. Sleepy voices from
the cells; a hissing command to silence; the name of Monte Vallejo
spoken--another demand for silence in a tone of suppressed fury.
And now the taller of the two strangers reappeared from under the
arch, leading by the hand a second sentry, who proved to have in his
hands the keys of the cells. The name of Monte Vallejo seemed on every
lip. Some of the prisoners in the cells appeared to know the two who
had come, but kept repeating that Monte Vallejo was dead. Could it be
possible that these two strangers had not heard? With this question in
his brain, Elbert began to realize that the two who had come over the
roof were of Vallejo’s band--on a long chance to rescue their chief.
The soldier with the keys was now being forced to unlock the cells,
and the way of this forcing by the tall bandit, began to fascinate
Elbert in spite of his own suffocating tension. No savagery about
it; the voice was cool, hasteless. Lilt and leisure in his words, as
he forced the sentry from cell to cell, twirling a gun on his first
finger. ‘He could fan it, too--’ an old sentence of Bob Leadley’s
flashed through Elbert’s brain. The shorter bandit now hurried up,
breathlessly reiterating the fact of Monte Vallejo’s death.
‘So I hear,’ said the tall one, ‘but we can turn loose the boys still
alive, can’t we?’
‘But the soldiers are awaking, Señor--’
‘I locked the door to the barracks,’ coolly answered the other.
‘Cordano’s men will have to get down into the street from the upper
windows.... We can’t leave these men while we’re at it. Tell everybody
to be quiet.... Pronto, hombre,’ he added lightly to the soldier with
the keys.
Sounds of the soldiers’ arousing was heard from the upper floor of el
cuartel facing the street.
‘Pronto, hombre--’ the tall bandit repeated. ‘We’ll fight our way to
the horses--’
Elbert in the dark of the cell was folding his blankets in a distracted
way, fascinated at the same time by that easy flowing voice of the tall
one. He was drawing on his boots--the keys sounding nearer. Another
of Mamie’s nasal protests reached his ears. Would they take her? The
thought actually weakened him--hardly a chance for men of Monte Vallejo
to miss one of her kind in the moonlight. And now, standing at the bars
of his own cell door--the tall one--that voice, the sentry beside him
with the keys, wailing:
‘No bantit aqui, Señor,--esta ’Mericano. Caballero ’Mericano--’
‘American?’ queried the bandit in English. ‘Oh, I say, in there--is
that right?’
Elbert cleared his voice: ‘That you, Bart?’
‘What the hell--?’ same genial tone.
‘Yes, I am American. I come from your father--’
‘Open, hombre!’ the command now, and, ‘I don’t know you. You’re a lot
safer where you are, but I’m letting you out.’
‘I came down for you. I’ve got a horse--’
Banging was now heard at the lower door to the barracks.
‘You’ll have to saddle fast. The soldiers are sure coming-to, but they
can only get out the upper windows.’
For just a second, as the cell door swung, Elbert saw the lift of a
dark face--a glitter to the laugh, that low, easy flowing tone; then
he was running across the moonlit patio--saddle-blankets over his left
arm, saddle itself trailing from his right hand, a call on his lips for
the mare to stand round. The blankets fell in place; cinches came to
hand. Mamie’s clean warm mouth closed over the bit, her ears wiggled
straight in the head stall. Still, Elbert was the last man out of the
patio, Bart standing in the street, covering the flight of his men.
Shots rained down from the windows of the second floor of the barracks.
A few of Cordano’s soldiers had already dropped down to the street;
others were crashing at the lower door which Bart had locked.
‘The horses are in the hollow back of the quarters!’ he yelled in
Mexican.
The hand of one soldier reached up to Mamie’s bridle-rein, but Bart’s
pistol-butt thudded upon the bone. Even in the tumult, Elbert saw that
nothing escaped Bart--that he was marvelously on the job, but cool.
‘Follow the others, stranger!’ he called now. ‘I didn’t catch your
name!’
‘Get up here behind me, don’t you want to?’ Elbert answered above the
din.
‘Thanks, no. It’s only a little ways to the horses.’
The dark laughing face was upturned again for an instant, and at this
moment, from beyond the plaza across the town, came the first trumpet
call of the rurales.
A rush past the small closed huts of Arecibo, women’s voices uttering
prayers--guttural tones of frightened men--the signal from the hollow,
where other horses were waiting. Elbert saw their pricked ears in the
whitish light--nine or ten horses apparently, three men in charge. The
released prisoners mounted at random, but Bart cleared from the tangle
on a leaping wheeling mount that looked ashen-colored in the moonlight.
A cracking of rifles from behind, the soldiers now having broken out
the lower door. The rurales quartered across the town, couldn’t have
gained the road so soon. Mamie had forged to the lead; at least, she
was now abreast with the hound-bodied runner Bart sat.
‘That’s some horse you’re sittin’, Mister!’ the big fellow called.
‘Some more to her, too--she just can’t help it, can she? And handles
with a light hand!’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Elbert.
He felt the strangest lift in his chest--Mamie beneath, Bart and
the ashen runner at his side--a sorrel, to show that color in the
moonlight--scatter of shots from behind, the deep whimsical voice again
from his side:
‘I say, amigo mio--did you hold up a race-track special, too? They tell
me I’m riding a stake-horse--old Mallet-head, here--but your mare isn’t
asking any odds!’
‘She belonged to your father,’ Elbert answered throatily.
XXI
THE RIO MORENO BRIDGE
THEY were out of the town, riding west through open country--ten men,
including himself, Elbert counted, one led-horse trailing. Bart had
fixed the pace of the sorrel at a full run, but still Mamie had to be
held in, not to forge ahead. Finally the words from Bart:
‘I don’t hear much American--but that didn’t sound so
cheerful--“belonged,” you said?’
Elbert had to stop to recall his last words. He had said the mare he
rode ‘belonged’ to Bart’s father.
‘Yes, that’s what I meant,’ he called back. ‘I came down from him--at
the last--’
For a full minute, only the drum of hoofs; then from Bart, as steadily
as before:
‘Some night for news--Monte Vallejo and this about Dad--same night.’
‘But I’ve got a lot to say to you from him!’ Elbert answered above the
roar. ‘In case anything happens to separate us--I want you to know he
has left you some money--quite a lot of money.’
‘Struck gold at the last?’
‘Yes, the mine’s rich, too--a gold tooth, he calls it,’ Elbert went
on, absurdly. ‘Only filed the top off her so far. If I don’t get a
chance to tell you all about it--you go to Mort Cotton, the cattleman
at San Forenso--’
‘Say, amigo mio, aren’t you expecting to live?’
‘Yes, but I’ve been carrying this message all summer. Been down here
looking for you--long time. Remember--Mort Cotton at San Forenso--he’ll
fix you up, and I want to tell you, your father never forgot--but kept
thinkin’ about you--ever since Red Ante--’
His relief was inexpressible for a minute. He had made good, if there
was not another word spoken. ‘One of the finest men I ever knew!’ he
added.
No answer from Bart.
Now gradually Elbert began to realize he was running with what was left
of Monte Vallejo’s band. There hadn’t been any time to think or choose
back in el cuartel. He had jumped at the chance to ride out with Bart;
that meant he had cast his lot with the bandits; identified once and
for all with a fragment of the outlaws, now hunted from all quarters of
Sonora. Still, a kind of freedom throbbed in him, his nostrils dilated
to the smell of dust in the night--a man beside, a horse beneath.
Finally above the thud of hoofs, Bart’s voice again:
‘What did they lock you up for?’
‘My mare, Mamie here, I guess. They thought she was one of the
race-horses--’
‘Thought you were one of us,’ Bart chuckled. ‘How long have you been
locked up?’
‘Last night--or night before last--if it’s getting on toward morning.’
‘Two hours to daybreak yet.’
In the silence after that, Elbert became queerly aware that Bart wanted
to ask more about his father, but couldn’t get his voice to working.
The words reached him:
‘So they kicked off Monte yesterday morning?’
‘Day before yesterday--’
‘You weren’t there then?’
‘No, but they told me he had the nerve--that Bistula of the rurales,
himself, finished the job. The soldiers wouldn’t shoot straight!’
‘I sure wanted to get to Monte in time,’ Bart said, queerly. ‘The
game’s up, with him gone--’
Did he mean he regarded their own capture as inevitable? After another
pause, Bart asked: ‘And what do you get, Mister, for coming down here
and mixing up in this?’
‘Your father arranged all that. We were friends, you know--’
‘Don’t you know you’re in bad, ridin’ with this outfit?’
‘I took the job--’
‘Better if I’d left you locked up in that cell. You’re along with
what’s left of a losing game--’ Bart’s laugh sounded forlorn as he
added: ‘Why, they’re after us from every town--’
Elbert cleared his throat ‘You see, I took the job--’
His eye had fastened on the north star as he spoke. It was over his
right shoulder, so they were riding west. He could see the mountains
lying northward there in the moonlight. A sudden passion mounted in him
to turn north right now; to ride straight north, crossing the Border
with Bart, yonder in the mountains where there were no roads; to find
himself in the States with Bart, asking the way to San Forenso; after
that, the trail west to the cabin, his mind finishing the picture in a
flash--with Mamie and the sorrel safe in the corral. The deep laughing
voice at his left:
‘I guess when you take a job, you try to see it through, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Elbert in fainter tone. He was deeply drawn to the man he
had come for. Sometimes it was as if Cal Monroid were riding at his
side; sometimes a feeling of Mr. Leadley’s presence.
‘I’d like to get you out of this, Mister, but it’s a sort of tight
web--’
Silence and hard riding after that; finally Bart called a halt for a
few seconds to listen or get his bearings. There was a scratching of
matches in the outfit as he pressed on again--the interminable little
boxes and sheaves of tobacco.
‘Don’t hear ’em behind. The town of Alphonso is about five miles ahead,
I figure. Another squad of rurales stationed there--’
‘Telegraph in between?’ Elbert asked.
‘I’m not sure; not along this road, anyway. May be a roundabout wire.
I’m taking the chance to reach the bridge of Rio Moreno. Two miles yet.’
They galloped on. The moon was tilting over toward the west. It must
have been after three. He saw the lather on Mamie’s neck, yet he was
still holding her in. A wooden bridge loomed ahead. Bart pulled up,
and turned off the main road to a parallel sandy track at the right,
leading down to the water. He didn’t mean to cross the bridge, Elbert
perceived. The arroyo was broad and filled with stones, but the horses
smelled water ahead. Mamie was whipping her head up and down, trying to
take the bit. Now Elbert saw the mare’s ears cock suddenly, and knew
she had caught something in the wind. His hand shot down to shut off
her breath, but the nicker broke out in spite of him.
An answer in kind from under the bridge. Then a volley from the
same source, Elbert’s second experience under rifle fire that
night--venomous roaring of slugs in the air. He never could have
dreamed how utterly malignant the sounds. That instant at his right
hand (Bart was still at his left) it was as if the picture unfolded for
his eyes alone--an upturned face, then a crumpled, falling body, horse
leaping aside--empty saddle--one of the four released from the prison
at Arecibo. In the midst of the shots, a yell from Bart:
‘We split right here, men!’
Elbert heard certain names shouted--those who were to turn back, those
to ride north. Then Bart’s face jerked around to him. ‘This way for us,
Mister, we ride together.’
Their horses were at full run, along the river-bed, where the clear
sand showed at the edge of the stream--shots still peppering after.
‘Your mare!’ Bart laughed. ‘Why, they’d have gotten all of us, if she
hadn’t given warning! We’d have gone right into their gun-barrels under
the bridge!’
‘She’s one more listening mare,’ Elbert called back.
XXII
FRAMED IN A DOBE GATEWAY
NORTH, they were riding straight north, though the going for a way was
a bit heavy through the sand and stones.
‘Not so fast quite!’ Bart warned. ‘The other three can’t keep up--’
Elbert was bending forward because the rurales were following, their
shots still in the air. His heart was filled with elation that Mamie
had given the warning, and that their course had turned north. He had
forgotten the three of Bart’s men still riding with them. More shots
from behind, a queer gulping cough from Bart.
‘Are you hurt?’ Elbert called.
‘Yes, one of ’em got me. I’ve--been--hit--before--but not so close in--’
Elbert’s hand tightened; his eyes still held to the north star. ‘Can
you ride a ways?’
‘Sure. Long as you do--’
‘Don’t forget to give me a warning, if you’re going to--’
‘I’m not going to fall, amigo mio! They’ll never get us now, but our
three behind--we’re ridin’ too fast for their ponies!’
Elbert did not look back; nor did he check Mamie’s speed. This was the
instant he realized he was in command of affairs, if anybody was. His
momentary concern wasn’t with the three bandits, whipping their ponies
to hold the pace, but with the one who called him “amigo mio” and bent
forward now as if pushing the saddle from him.
The sorrel galloped at Mamie’s side with great easy leaps. To keep
going with Bart was Elbert’s game, not with this remnant of Vallejo’s
band; to keep going north with Bart at any price; to turn loose the
horses faster and faster, their heads to the north--if only Bart
could stay in his seat! The river road running north assumed clearer
outline--wheel-tracks, a hardening pebbled way. Again from his
companion:
‘We’re ridin’ too fast for the others, Mister--’
‘I think we’d better not wait for anybody now, Bart. This is a
running match right now, while you’re in the saddle. Who’s got the
stuff--that’s what we’re going to find out--Mamie here or your
Mallet-head!’
A chuckle in answer. ‘You’re the doctor!’
Elbert bent forward. ‘I say, Mamie, we’re off!’ She knew that tone--a
wide-open throttle, it meant, and the big sorrel settled lower at the
left, his fish eye fixed on her nose.
Now part of Elbert’s private reaction to the headlong pace was the
sense that he had been fixing for this race all his life--a sort of
climax of all days, and his eyes glanced often up to old Polaris, as
if the north star were a silver cup for the winner. A distance-course,
seconds pounding on into minutes, the minutes into tens, dusk of
earliest morning blent with the low moon’s rays; only two horses in the
finish, silence as deep from behind now as from the desolate foothills
ahead--a friend to stick by at his left--white smile, two slits of
black for eyes, body hanging forward.
Every little while: ‘Don’t fall, Bart! Give me a word if you’re
slipping!’
‘I’m not going to fall, Mister--’
The river had narrowed to a creek; the road to a path; the blowing
horses pelted forward on rising ground--
Then it was all as queer as a dream. Breaking day, a face framed in a
dobe gateway, a face by the side of the road. Just a glimpse--girl or
child or woman, he did not know--but a face in the ashen light--oval
beauty in the gateway of a dobe wall! Elbert’s head flung back as they
passed, but the face was gone. That instant thickly from Bart:
‘Pull up, pardner!’
Elbert’s hand went out to the left, as he drew Mamie sharply in with
the other. The look of death was on Bart’s face; his lips moved.
‘Big town ahead--Fonseca--three miles or so. Rurales--they’ll be
waitin’ for us there--’ The gamy head rocked back, the spine drooping
sideways.
‘We’re not going there,’ said Elbert, leaping down. ‘God, how you’ve
sat it out! You can fall now--I’m underneath!’
‘I’m not goin’ to fall--’ Bart mumbled, but his hand relaxed on the
pommel.
Elbert looked forward and back; not a sign of life either way, but the
face at the dobe gate was strangely before his inner eyes. Something
queerly to do with the song of the corn-dust maiden in that far
doorway, it seemed to have for him. His face lifted to the cold gray of
the dawn-lit sky. Rurales still following possibly ... ‘mere formality’
... blank wall ... oval beauty.
Now he was carrying Bart back, leading both horses.
‘I’m taking a chance to get you a berth,’ he gasped, coming in sight of
the dobe gateway, now empty.
An aperture in a dobe wall for a gate--face gone. Over the gate as he
led the horses into the yard, his eye caught the letters formed of
faded tile, ‘El Relicario.’ He fancied the movement of a dress through
a low arbor ahead. Still with his burden, he moved toward it.
She was there--in the doorway of a broad low dobe ruin. He seemed at
first to see only her wide eyes. And then his Spanish came to him and
words inspired by another’s need--pressure he had never felt back of an
effort before.
‘Look, Señorita--he must have shelter and care--my companion! Will you
not give help to him? I will pay a great price!’
The girl made no sound, her eyes fixed on Bart’s back, where Elbert’s
hands pressed a dark saturation.
‘May I take him into your house for shelter, Señorita?’ he panted.
She led the way indoors, halting in a large, all but empty room.
‘There are those who want his life,’ Elbert said unsteadily under his
burden. ‘May I not take him farther in?’
She turned instantly toward an inner door.
XXIII
FENCELESS FOOTHILLS OF SONORA
THERE was a room in which he saw a full-sized harp in its shroud;
there was a trellised patio, two great ollas standing on the heaved
tiles and jasmine vines very thick and ancient. At the far corner, in
the gray morning light, stood an elderly man with bared head. To him,
the señorita gave the signal of silence with her finger touching her
lips, and also to an old woman in the latticed kitchen.... Ruin of an
old plantation house, very large, some of the windows unglazed; El
Relicario--the name ran through Elbert’s brain which throbbed from the
stress of his burden--all this a matter of seconds only.
Then a corridor and a little room to the left--queer warmth rising in
Elbert’s heart, as he placed Bart upon a cot that had recently been
slept in. The sense came to him that this was a kind of sanctuary--a
cross upon the wall, a white flower beneath, the girl standing against
the wall, her arms slightly lifted, her hands toward the long booted
figure on her own cot. Elbert bent over Bart now--a rush of memories
of the day he had brought his father to the cabin and set him down
like this. The eyes were looking up to him; the lips moved with hardly
audible words.
‘Back at the gate--as we turned in--the tracks of our horses!’
‘Yes, sure, I’ll fix them.’ Then he added: ‘Listen, can you hear me,
Bart?’
‘Yes, sure--’
‘I’m going to ride on and leave you here. I’m taking both horses--so
the rurales won’t stop, but follow me on. I’ll hide in the foothills
to-day, and circle back here to-night or to-morrow night.’
‘I hate to see you go, but you’re--you’re the doctor!’ Bart laughed.
‘About the sorrel--he knows the whip, but goes mad under a spur--just a
pointer in handling him--but you know a horse.’
Elbert’s jaw hardened. ‘Thanks, I’ll remember,’ he said.
The voice went on faintly: ‘I didn’t miss how you handled the mare!’
‘You didn’t miss--anything!’ Elbert replied, fearing the other was
delirious from his wound.
‘Sorry--you go--’
‘It’s the only way. Adios, Bart--and to you, Señorita, this--’
He placed two gold pieces on the table, but saw her hurt and troubled
look, as she came forward from the wall.
‘You see, I’m leading them away from him!’ he said, as if the point
were of great moment to her.
Bart’s hand lifted; but his face was cut off by the girl’s bending
profile. Queer joy lived in him from Bart’s recent words about his
handling of the mare, but a sudden weariness came over him, too, as he
turned away. A nicker outside answered his step as he hastened across
the broken stonework of the patio. Mamie had never before been left
unceremoniously to cool in a yard--in company with a stranger.
He led the horses out to the road; no sight or sound so far at least,
from the direction he had come. Leaving them standing on the highway,
he reëntered the gate and began fanning out the hoof-marks in the yard,
using his broad hat. Out through the gate again, he worked until all
was clear; then mounted and pushed on, leading the sorrel.
Day was brightening among the foothills. The big range he had ridden
toward through the night was now intimately uncovered on his right
hand; Fonseca, three miles straight ahead, Bart had said. Both horses
were pulling toward the creek. They were too hot for a deep drink, but
might have a few draughts without harm. Besides, he must replenish his
pack-canteen.
The sorrel fought to drink his fill. Elbert had to climb into Bart’s
saddle to get the big fellow out of the stream. Back on the road again,
he followed for about a quarter of a mile, toward Fonseca, before
turning eastward to the mountains. He had left a clear trail so far,
and now off the road, he began to weave back and forth along the stony
waste, following a vague idea to confuse and delay pursuit, being well
past the old dobe house. Bart would have done all this better, he
thought, recalling how the other, half dead, had not forgotten to tell
him to wipe out the tracks leading from the road in through the dobe
wall.
Many minutes afterward, he came to a halt upon an eminence and looked
down, at a frail low smoke pattern of the town to the north. Also he
glanced back to familiarize himself with the lay of the land around El
Relicario. The hills shut him off from much of the road; he caught no
glimpse of possible pursuit. Still later in full sunlight he halted in
a rift between the hills and forked out a few mouthfuls of breakfast
from a glass jar of frijoles, packed in his saddle-bags at San Isidro
three days before.
Now in a rush it closed upon him--the heaviness, the coldness, the
blur of fatigue. Languidly, he set to work upon the horses. They
were sweated out, cakes of dust and salt at the cinchlines and
blanket-edges, both restlessly athirst, but apparently not lastingly
hurt by the long gallop of the night. He took off only one saddle at
a time; holding the other ready instantly to mount and be off at the
first sight or sound, working meanwhile with wisps of grass and cloths
from his kit. Strange, it seemed, to play the groom to another than
Mamie; unfamiliar, the bones and textures of this rangy gelding; no
curiosity or particular affection from the sorrel runner such as Elbert
was accustomed to. Running was what this one knew, but Mallet-head was
presently adapting his taste, nevertheless, to the scant sun-dried
grass with better grace than the mare. She couldn’t see why a stop
should be made in this waterless, fenceless wilderness. Standing by,
she nudged the man’s arm repeatedly for light on the subject.
‘Night-running’s all right with her,’ he mused, ‘but she doesn’t get
the inconveniences of being a bandit’s mare.’
His thoughts were running queerly from so many shocks and tensions.
The sun was well above the eastern mountains, but not yet nine
in the morning--just about the time he used to be getting to the
leather-store. Fenceless foothills of Sonora, a wearing grind of
thoughts and questions. Little inner room--cross and white flower and
cot so recently slept in. Did the señorita always get up so early? Were
the old people her parents? How had it all been arranged with so few
words, as if some power intervened to help in a pinch? Was Bart going
to live, or would it be as it was with his father? Had the rurales by
this time stopped at that open dobe gateway? Had it been yellow of him
to run away from the other three bandits?
He began to think he had done rather poorly. If Bart had held the lead,
he wouldn’t have run away from his men. Bart had spoken of the matter
three or four times after his wound, and then given up--‘You’re the
doctor!’ In the thick bruised feeling of his brain, Elbert’s depression
deepened. He recalled his bad judgment in letting Mamie out--so close
to Arecibo, and in telling the rurale that he had come from San Isidro.
The sickish smile came again to his lips. He wasn’t much for this sort
of life; he ought to be driving a car, a truck, possibly. He recalled
his funk in the prison at Arecibo, even before he was locked up, and
afterward in the cell--and how the bandits had given themselves to
death. ‘... peaceful to be with like cattle. I don’t mean they’re
cattle, only that they loll around and ruminate like ’em,’ old Bob
Leadley had said, summing up the whole matter in the remark that he
wished he had treated the Mexicans as well as they treated him.
Moreover, the old man had found out that there were times when a man
couldn’t wash his hands. ‘Wasn’t that just what I did about the other
three?’ Elbert questioned, squinting up at the sky. Now a painful rush
of pictures went through his brain--the wall in the prison patio, the
corner of the wall--only yesterday morning--standing at the bars of the
cell.
He caught himself rubbing his right cheek.
No, there was something in him that didn’t belong to this sort of life.
As for Red Ante, he couldn’t have done the thing Bart did--he couldn’t
have lived through it, as Bart’s father did.
All day the horses kept their heads turned down hill. They snipped
the sparse grass--eyes and ears and muzzles stretched toward distant
hollows--all instincts fixed upon unseen water. Elbert didn’t trust the
sorrel, not even to tether him, but kept a hand on his bridle-rein.
Once he dozed and was awakened from a thirst dream by the sound of
horses sucking in water from a stony stream.
... Mexico with her quaint, gentle ways--a plaintive singing voice
‘carved out of starlight’--but underneath--violence. Men fell to
killing each other. Just so much of all this killing a man could stand,
and no more. How had Bart stood it for so long? Bart wasn’t like that,
himself. He hadn’t even roughed it with the soldier of the keys in the
Arecibo prison--not even in that moment of fierce danger and haste! ...
and that easy flowing voice of coolness and laughter and daring, but
how had Bart dared to put Palto out of his misery?
Elbert pondered a long time, finally remembering how he had felt the
need of carrying Bart deeper and deeper into the house, as if he had
known all the time there was an inner room. When he reached there and
had laid his burden down--a sudden sense of peace had come over him.
What was the meaning of that? With his eyelids closed he saw a light
shining through alabaster. Yes, he had met one who would know the
meaning and could answer this.... But what was the meaning of the power
that had seemed to come to him to make the señorita understand with so
few words?...
Cross and white flower--Spanish-faced girl standing back against the
wall... Elbert dozed again, and the inner room of El Relicario and the
still flowered room of Tucson softly, magically folded into one. It
seemed quite easy and natural.
A grim day, his nerve at lowest ebb, nothing of the lift or glow he had
known in moments of last night’s riding with Bart. Would they ever ride
together again? Was Bart lying dead now in that inner room?
Fenceless foothills of Sonora--ages in a day! He didn’t feel quite
sane, riding down to the creek in the dusk at last. He couldn’t hold
his mind to thought of danger, but to water only. Mamie smelled it and
could scarcely be held in; the sorrel plunged at her side.
XXIV
SHEATH-KNIFE
IN full darkness he left the two horses fastened among the alders of
the stream bed and started for the dobe house. At least, there were
no horses of rurales waiting at the gateway of El Relicario, nor any
lights to be seen in front; but moving around to the side, he fancied
a faint ashen shaft farther on from an unglazed window. He knocked. A
pall seemed to have fallen upon the world--before the step, the moving
candle--and the señorita’s face, finger pressed across her lips as she
pointed to the little room. Then he was following her candle through
the passage.
There was Bart--bloodless, startlingly altered, but asleep, not dead,
as he had thought in the first flash. And presently, Elbert began to
feel himself standing about like a stranger. Either he hadn’t seen
straight at daybreak, or the señorita had become a woman since then;
no face of a peon girl by a lonely roadway, this woman of El Relicario
to whom he had offered coins, but of one risen to emergencies, as only
quality and breeding can arise. She had led him out into a hallway and
was speaking as one who had found her place and work in life.
‘He will be so glad to hear you have come. I have said you would
return, but he could not be sure. There is food for you waiting--please
come.’
He followed her through a firelit room, where the elderly man he
had seen in the patio in the morning, arose and bowed with courtly
grace, and from behind him the faded-faced woman smiled in the manner
of far-off times. A wooden table, a pitcher of milk, corn-bread and
rubbery cheese of goat’s milk--but Elbert hardly tasted what he put in
his mouth.
Horsemen had ridden by in the early morning to Fonseca, the señorita
told him, an unusual thing, but they had not stopped, and others had
passed later, going the opposite way.
She left the room and returned, dragging a small sack of grain for the
horses, which Bart had asked her to procure, and there was a package of
food for Elbert’s need of to-morrow--all this spoken of with frequent
gestures toward the wounded man in the little room; her every thought
and sentence apparently blent with something Bart had said or wished.
Yes, he would live, she repeated, but his recovery would take many
days. Then Elbert heard his own words in careful Spanish of the book:
‘Tell him I shall be waiting--that I will come again to-morrow night
or the next night--that I shall wait for him until he is ready to
travel--’
‘You mean to leave now--at once?’
‘Yes, I see that he is being well taken care of. The horses might call
to any horses traveling by--’
His words were getting slower and quieter, but there was in his body
and brain an intolerable burden having to do with the thought of
to-morrow--not only to-morrow, but ‘many days.’ It had been all he
could do to live through to-day. Now he left her, knowing she would
steal back to the little room at once. He crossed the inner garden, the
room of the harp, nodding to the elders, crossed the yard, passed out
through the dobe gate--in unbroken darkness, moving toward the alders
of the creek-bed.
His feet dragged; the early night, so dark that he had to keep constant
thought to the road, burdened by the sack of grain over his shoulder.
Still distant from the alders, he began to listen for Mamie’s signal,
but the sound of trotting hoofs came instead.
One horse only, coming his way, no accompaniment of wheels. He let down
the grain-bag at the side of the road, instinctively aware that if
either of his horses had pulled loose a hunch like this on his shoulder
would make any effort at capture practically impossible in the dark.
‘Hoo-ooo, baby, easy, little one!’ he softly intoned. He could see no
movement yet; the hoofs were still. Then like an explosion, a snorting
blast of fright from the horse ahead--not Mamie. He well knew her
protest of fear. ‘Come in, kid--easy, old-timer!’ from his lips, as he
moved forward very slowly, his fingers closing at last upon the broken
bridle-rein of the sorrel.
The big runner was standing almost rigidly in the dark, as Elbert made
a quick tie of the two shortened leather ends, his ears still straining
for a sound from the mare. He mounted, but had difficulty in turning
back toward the alders. The gelding fought the bit, tossing his head.
The man’s unspurred heel knocked his ribs, but the runner snorted like
a crazed colt at this, standing straight up, and Bart’s warning about
the spur flashed back. Elbert, getting control again, snatched off a
small branch as he brushed the foliage at the road-side, and the sorrel
started forward at a stiff-legged, unwilling trot, still unruly as he
neared the alders.
The mare was gone. Holding to the shortened bridle-rein, Elbert was
on his knees, lighting matches--an ashen smile on his lips. Yes, he
actually smiled at himself now--so miserably hopeless a few minutes
before, just at the thought of waiting days. Something to be dismal
about now.
Countless horse-tracks among the alders, conveying nothing to his eyes.
Passing rurales had possibly heard the horses, and tried to take them.
Possibly one of the police had mounted the sorrel and attempted to
force him with a spur. That might account for old Mallet-head breaking
loose.
Elbert rode slowly on toward Fonseca, head bowed. Yes, they had given
him something to be dismal about all right. What hope--if they had
taken her into town.
He couldn’t brace into Fonseca and attack the town single-handed.
Still he kept on, until--it was almost a sob that surged up in his
throat--the sound of a nicker--far to the right! His hand darted
forward to the muzzle of the sorrel to shut off possible answer. No
need of that. The big gelding was unconcerned about that far-off sound.
Mamie--letting him know! He could tell that call of hers in the midst
of a herd of horses; and the rurales or whoever had her, were not
pushing on to Fonseca, but eastward toward the mountains. ‘I’m coming!’
he muttered. He flicked his branch on the sorrel’s flanks.
Minutes afterward, the call again; and presently from over the eastern
mountains, appeared the moon, a shaving less full than last night.
Last night--that moon from the cell of Arecibo--far-off as childhood.
Two hours, at least, of fierce strain--following those whom he supposed
were looking for him; finally a faint haze of firelight over the rim
of a hill just ahead--the mysterious party having come to a halt. If
they were rurales, why hadn’t they gone to Fonseca--why this halt in
the open? He was close as he dared to be with the sorrel. Even now, the
big stake-horse might undertake to announce his presence and need of
forage. Elbert turned him back to a live-oak scrub, made him fast, and
retraced his way up the slope again, struggling with weariness and many
fears. The moon was now well clear of the eastern ridges.
On top, he gradually discerned two figures stretched out in the
firelight below--in ordinary Mexican garb, not in uniform of rurales.
Moving nearer, he presently made out Mamie, still saddled, a third
Mexican sitting on the ground at her head. Seconds crawled by, as
he waited breathlessly, with a vague hope that this third one might
doze, but nothing of the kind. Instead, the Mexican now rose, leading
his charge to a low tree clump, where other horses were faintly to be
discerned.
Evidently the Mexican was about to fasten the mare. Once tied, there
was less chance for her to break clear, than from the Mexican’s hand.
Only a second or two to think in; in fact, Elbert didn’t think it out.
His fingers reached for the handle of the sheath-knife, bringing the
whistle to his lips. Its shrill scream cut forth. Mamie’s head lifted
and yanked back, but the Mexican did not lose his grip upon the rein.
Running forward Elbert whistled again; then stretched his lungs in a
yell, as strange and startling to himself as to the sleepy Sonora hills.
The knife in his hand was not to kill; he had merely not put it back
in its sheath. The two men by the fire were on their feet; the third
stubbornly trying to gain the saddle, but Mamie slid from under, and
kept pulling away. Then an instant of utter amazement--the face of
Mamie’s tormentor near enough to be recognized--one of Bart’s bandits
whom he had raced away from the night before.
Elbert changed the quality of his shouting, but the Mexican had
let go the bridle-rein, and was speeding after his two companions,
who had vanished from the circle of firelight. They were at their
horses--mounting and spurring away. Elbert rubbed his dazed eyes--they
were gone--Mamie trotting toward him, head extra high to keep from
tripping on her bridle-reins.
The whistle had done it--and his shouts, which must have sounded like
a platoon closing in, to the leaderless bandit party. The whistle for
Mamie, the yell--Elbert did not know how he had come to vent that,
unless for his own courage.
Never before had he felt such a sense of belonging anywhere, as when
he folded over the Pitcairn stock-saddle. Sitting straight did not
suffice; he seemed fallen to clinging to the neck of his mare. Even a
minute later, he would have forgotten Bart’s sorrel, tied securely in
the bristling live-oak scrub, had not Mamie flirted her signal as she
galloped by on the moon-drenched hill.
‘They sure thought I was the rurales,’ he laughed.
At this juncture he missed his saddle-bags.
‘I suppose Bart would go back and get them right now,’ he thought. ‘Not
for me. Nothing in them I can’t do without. What silver there is--those
three fellows I ditched last night--may need that!’
His eyes were craning about the sky to locate the north star.
‘I won’t have to tell Bart how I lost Mamie, nor about the other
three,’ he communed later. ‘Now that I’ve got her back, I won’t have to
speak of it at all.’
It was a different matter about that grain-sack, however. The horses
would need that, and another drink from the creek to-night, before
facing to-morrow in the brown and sultry hills. He made the big circle
to the Fonseca road and the alders, but was back in a star-rimmed
mountain wilderness two hours before daybreak, the big gelding taking
an occasional nip at the grain-bag as he trotted along.
XXV
ELBERT LEARNS TO WAIT
NEXT day Elbert climbed the foothills and explored the mountains
eastward. He found many tracks of water, stream-beds of the rainy
season, but it was now autumn, the dryest time of the year, and hours
passed before he followed a trickle up a dim ravine to its first
pool. He had to grant that it was the horses that helped him locate
the water in the first place, but there was queer satisfaction about
the experience, as if he had been marooned on an island and his life
depended. No water ever tasted just like that. He watched the horses
drink and graze, and made them stand for a half hour at a time in the
sludgy grass at the side of the stream, while he stared up from the
shadowed cañon to where the sunlight burned on the ridges. ‘Only one
thing better than water for a horse’s hoofs,’ old Bob Leadley had said,
‘and that’s more water.’
No further need to cross the Fonseca road night and morning to reach
the creek. He would risk a night-call at El Relicario once in a
while--grub for himself and forage for the horses, but the old ruin was
now fifteen, possibly eighteen miles, and Bart was in good hands....
One by one, Elbert beat back the days, though he actually lost count,
even before it became apparent that Bart Leadley was going to live.
During his first two or three calls at the ranch house, there was a
good deal of doubt on this main point. From the very beginning, the big
fellow weakly pressed him not to stay.
‘No use of you hangin’ up all these days in the mountains, Doc,’ he
said. ‘I’ll follow north across the Border, as soon as I can make a
break.’
‘But I’m getting to like it out there,’ Elbert would tell him. ‘Only
lonesome a little at first. Why, there’s no place I could leave the
sorrel for you, if I went. The rurales would know that horse anywhere.’
‘Take him along. I’ll get a cayuse, somewhere--’
‘No, Bart, I came down here for you. That’s what your father
wanted--for me to bring you back--’
The other’s eyes held the low ceiling. ‘I’d hate to have you _after_
me,’ he laughed. ‘I mean like a sheriff--’
Elbert conned this all next day in his high solitude. He couldn’t get
it quite clear. Surely, no sheriff would ever suffer from hopeless
spells of faint-heartedness such as he was given to.... They were oddly
embarrassed with each other in those first talks, but when silence
became oppressive, Bart would enquire regarding some detail concerning
the horses. On this one subject alone, Elbert expatiated.
‘A little grain from here is keeping them fit,’ he would report in
effect. ‘And say, your Mallet-head sure has an appetite,’ he once
observed. ‘Mountains agree with him. He flavors up his forage with all
sorts of new leaves--even pine needles. Mamie’s more particular.’
Elbert caught a gleam from the cot. Bart’s black eyes were holding him.
‘You like ’em, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Horses.’
‘Sure,’ said Elbert.
‘I knew--the minute you climbed on that mare in front of the quarters
in Arecibo. We were a bit in a hurry right then, but you didn’t jerk
her round. I got to know pretty well before daylight that you were a
real hand with a horse, Mister.’
So Bart was really fooled. He had said something of this kind before,
that first daybreak here in El Relicario, but Elbert had feared then
that his mind was wandering. He didn’t answer now.
‘I like these people,’ Bart was saying, about the Mexicans. ‘I get
along with ’em pretty well, but they don’t savvy the horse. It doesn’t
seem to run in the blood. Monte Vallejo who had all Sonora thinking
he was a caballero--even to Monte, a horse was something to ride to
death. All these people saw and hack and ride on the bit. That’s what
got us into trouble with those race-horses, and that’s what got to me
from you, the first minute in front of el cuartel--to see a white man
sitting a horse and knowing what he was doing and what her mouth was
made of.’
‘Your father told me all about Mamie,’ Elbert said.
‘All the telling in the world wouldn’t do it, if a man didn’t have the
feel of a bridle-rein on his own hook.’
It was like being called to the carpet to be presented with a diploma
or a medal--no time for Elbert to trust his voice to relate that Mamie
was practically his first experience, and that only a few months ago.
‘How was it that the race-horses got you into trouble?’ he asked.
‘We couldn’t manage ’em. They were used to being babied for the
track--used to the sprint; didn’t know anything about saving themselves
for distance-running. There was a lot of young stuff among them, and
all our old cayuses were done for. We tried hammering the bang-tails to
the road, and they went crazy.... I drew the prize of the lot. All old
Mallet-head knows is to eat and run--so long as you keep the spur off
him!’
‘He keeps his feelings to himself, so they can’t be hurt. He’s sure
rugged,’ said Elbert.
Sometimes Bart seemed to be listening for a step as they talked; and
when the señorita appeared in the doorway, Bart’s eyes and hers would
meet and cling for a second.
There began to be a secret heaviness connected with this for Elbert.
What would happen to her when Bart left the little room of the cross
and the white flower?... So much taller she seemed, than in that first
moment in the dobe gateway. Had he seen her then as now, he might not
have asked her help. Perhaps, even if he had not heard the song of the
corn-dust maiden, he could never have thought of imposing as he did
that morning upon Valencia Vidaña, the daughter of El Relicario, now a
dobe ruin of many rooms, but in its day one of the famous ranch-houses
of Sonora.
‘Great name in these parts in the old days,’ Bart once whispered.
‘Valencia’s father was one of the big men of Sonora under Diaz, but
everything’s broken down since. Loot and confiscation’s the trick
here--worst of all from Juan Cordano. We happened in the right house.
The old don told me the other morning, he had hoped to see Monte
Vallejo in Cordano’s place here in Sonora.’
Long talks concerning all that led to Elbert’s coming to Sonora. Bart’s
deep laugh once sounded in the little room.
‘I’m used to Mexicans,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much about the States. I
s’pose there are a lot of people up there you can trust offhand, like
Dad trusted you.’
‘You see, he had to have somebody interested in Sonora, and willing
to do a lot of riding,’ Elbert answered. ‘You know, he wanted you to
have Mamie, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find you--a
chance even, that I might not. He didn’t want her to change hands
another time. He always thought about her feelings--’
Elbert found himself staring at the little crucifix as he talked. Bart
didn’t seem to be troubled as much as he was--about the feelings of the
one in this house.... One night after about ten days in El Relicario,
Bart turned over and drew his right shoulder clear from its covering to
show how the wound was healing.
Elbert cleared his throat. ‘I don’t see how you stayed in the saddle
from that bridge until daybreak when we got here,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Why, that bullet would have knocked me out of the saddle like--like--’
He had quite forgotten--‘clear through to Nogales.’
A low laugh again. ‘Say, amigo mio--say, Mister, you’re sure nervous as
a filly, about being caught makin’ a move like a gamester!’
Elbert conned that all the next day in the hills.
XXVI
SILENCE
MEANWHILE he was learning undreamed-of-matters about himself. No amount
of riding such as he had done down in the valleys could have shown him
what he was getting now, in the stillness and sunlight and starlight of
high country. A hundred times a day, the flick of a lizard over leaf or
pebble or twig called his eye; that was the only continual distraction.
The days were mainly silent, though the nights were full of sound; the
coyotes sometimes a maddening chorus that stirred up unheard-of deeps
in the listener, and once as he lay awake at night a muffle-winged owl
swept past so close as to fan his face. That shook him like the sounds
during his first night out in White Stone Flats. In the stillness,
thoughts rose up in him with a power he hadn’t known before; one could
get so accustomed to this sort of life, he reflected, that he would be
entirely unfit in a little while for the towns again.
Here’s where a man reverted to type. What he was at bottom came
out. One might sink into being just an animal--eating and drinking
and sleeping--or get more fiery alive with the days, more quick and
sensitive with strange inner activity. There were times when Elbert’s
thoughts carried him along with a clear cool strength that was almost
frightening. He knew now that he had never been alone before; that a
man isn’t quite alone, even if locked in his own room--that he is only
really alone with the sky above and the earth beneath.
He had told Bart that he was getting to like it, but that didn’t become
wholly true until quite a number of days had passed. Again and again he
felt his jaw hardening, his lips pressed together; gradually his fears
fell away and the silence bit into the very center of his being. He
became a part of the outer silence of the days, a part of the fierce
still sunlight that slowly blackened his hands and face. He looked back
upon his dreams in the room at home, remembering the things he had
treasured there--Indian blankets, pictures, leather work--all had meant
something.
Out of these kid treasures and symbols, Cal and Slim had come to life,
Heaslep’s, Nacimiento, San Pasquali; Bob Leadley, Bismo on the Rio
Brava, Red Ante, the Dry Cache mine; Sonora, the cells, the corner of
the wall, flight from the rurales, El Relicario. He could shut his eyes
and think way back to the very beginning--hear the swish of motor cars
from his bedroom window, the sound of the piano below, the sounds of
his phonograph, and that last swung him swiftly across the continent
to the Plaza at Los Angeles--‘Cuando sali--’ and the leather-store.
All these a part of him now, but in the beginning there had only been
a little room of books and pictures and yearnings--yearnings that
finally drove him out to find his Crimson Foam. Something else he had
found--that still room in Tucson. Not a symbol of that in his father’s
house--oh, yes, of course, the alabaster bowl in the dining-room!
His thin lips stretched into the beginnings of a smile. He had heard
it said that each day brings to a man nine parts review and one part
advance work. Everything seemed like review to him now--the whole
circle rounded (at least, it would be when Bart and he were safely over
the Border into the States) everything review, except that still room
in Tucson. Very much advance work, that. His heart pumped so that he
could actually hear its beat.
Sometimes he felt, if he could get a little deeper into the silence,
he would know all about--even that. Anyway, it began to dawn on him
that everything would have been spoiled if he had rushed north alone,
leaving Bart--that the greatest adventure of all lay right in the
core of these days of solitude and silence. One night he felt like a
different man altogether, as he started down toward El Relicario in the
dusk.
XXVII
WORDS
‘YOU see, I was lazy--no two ways about it--lazy, from the very
beginning,’ Bart said during one of the night-talks. ‘I can see how Dad
felt now. I didn’t know any better than to think he was against me in
those days. I got the feeling I was wronged, and that’s bad. It’s bad
to let that wronged feeling pile up in a kid’s chest, until there is
no seeing it any other way. The thing that hurt me most was about that
horse--old Rat-tail from the Cup Q.’
Elbert kept still with effort. He knew the story of the rat-tail from
Bob Leadley’s telling, almost as well as Bart did, but the latter got
to talking too rarely to be interrupted.
‘A bad name, that horse had, but he wasn’t really bad. A horse isn’t
like a man; he isn’t like a dog. A horse is more like a woman--he
goes by feeling, not by his head. A dog will dope a thing out; a mule
will, but a horse feels his way. Why, that mare of yours--I’ll bet she
doesn’t miss much that’s goin’ on, even if her back’s turned. You’re
not foolin’ her a lot, even if you think you are. She’s cute as a
woman--
‘The more a man knows about a horse, the more he respects him, the more
careful he is,’ Bart went on. ‘You never see a real hand yank his
horse around or flourish none. You’re apt not to know a real ridin’
gent unless you’re one yourself. He works easy, and doesn’t attract the
eye. You never see him starting a horse into a run as soon as he leaves
the corral--unless there’s mighty pressin’ business, like that night we
first got together. You don’t see him rowel or quirt, because a real
hand doesn’t bring up a horse to need stimulants that way. And he isn’t
botherin’ with one that does--not for long. Nine times out of ten a bad
horse is man-spoiled, and a real hand doesn’t care to mix with other
men’s botched jobs.’
Elbert couldn’t help but see Cal Monroid in all this--Cal, and the way
he handled and sat old Chester. Bart and Cal were curiously alike in
the one utterly cool and nerveless quality. Evidently it was in this
quality, first of all, that their mastery over horses lay--no nerves to
confuse the feelings of a mount.
‘That old gray had been raked and hooked so long that all he knew was
to fight back. Everybody over at the rancho was afraid of him. Of
course, the fellows didn’t say they were; they’re more afraid of each
other finding out that they’re afraid, than they are of what they’re
afraid of--’
‘I can see that,’ said Elbert.
A curious look came into Bart’s eyes--a trace of deep rest. ‘You see,
a horse knows when a man’s afraid. He smells fear, or feels it. He gets
afraid, too, or confused--loses what little head he’s got. He begins
to look out through a sheet of blood, if you drive him deeper into
fear. If pushed far, he goes crazy, and that’s what they call a bad
horse. Sometimes they are ten times as strong as a horse in his right
senses--just like a man-maniac--’
Elbert had so much to say it was hard to keep still.
‘You see, I wanted that old gray so badly for my own,’ Bart went on.
‘They told me how bad he was, but I couldn’t believe it. He let me
get up to him--let me climb on his back. But when I got him back to
Bismo, everybody remembered him bein’ an outlaw. Dad tried breakin’ him
again--and they took him back to the Cup Q.’
Bart chuckled. One would think he had been telling some amusing boyhood
experience. His voice was easy, almost careless--Bob Leadley all over
again--not a sign for the listener that a deep misery of life was
being discussed. Suddenly Elbert realized that it was not only with
horses, but with men like Bob Leadley and his son--one had to trust his
feelings, or else miss a lot. And with women--
‘But your father knew better afterward,’ Elbert finally said.
‘How’s that?’
‘He knew you had something on the rat-tail, he didn’t have--’
‘How’s that?’
‘He told me. Everybody in Bismo kept warning him that the gray would
kill you. He got afraid _for you_, but he knew better afterward. Your
father came to understand what you meant about not wanting a ‘broke’
horse. He told me he thought about that one thing for years. It was
from him and some things from Mort Cotton--that I got any idea about
handling Mamie--’ Deep relief, Elbert knew as he halted a moment, the
same that he had known that night, as they rode away from el cuartel in
Arecibo. He was making it all clear at last. He got a queer feeling, as
if Bob Leadley were resting easier, too.
‘One of the squarest men anywhere, your father,’ he went on. ‘He knew
you had something on Rat-tail that he didn’t. He knew that “breaking”
a horse is old stuff. He said he had belonged to the old school that
thinks a horse is ruined if it ever gets its own way. One of the things
he liked to say best was that there are a whole lot of good riders, but
only once in a long while a good horseman--’
‘But he didn’t understand about Palto.’
‘Oh, yes, Bart. Even Mort Cotton did.’
‘They didn’t think I did right, did they?’
‘Yes,’ said Elbert.
‘Foolin’, aren’t you, amigo mio?’
‘Not on your life! He and Mort Cotton were crazy-tired, all shot to
pieces--that night in Red Ante. Of course, Letchie Welton only had his
idea of law. Why, your father thought it out for years, never got over
it--his part--or rather, what he didn’t do. Kept saying at the last
that a man can’t “wash his hands.”’
‘Took it hard?’
‘Rather, but he understood it all at the last. Mort Cotton did, too. It
was Mort who said at the hearing back in Bismo--that the most merciful
shot he ever heard fired was yours that night before you rode out of
Red Ante.’
‘I’m sorry Dad took it so hard.... You see--you see, I couldn’t get
Palto loose. He might have lived for days--until they got him to a
place where they could string him up--’
The next day alone in the mountains, Elbert found that the old story of
Red Ante was slipping out from him--that it didn’t hurt any more, that
it would be difficult, and likely unnecessary, ever to talk about it
again.
XXVIII
‘LIKE THE VIRGIN SPEAKING--’
FINALLY came the night when Bart said he would be ready to ride within
a week, but just then they heard a light step in the next room, and
Elbert’s voice became very hushed.
‘I’ve been looking for a way north through the mountains. My idea is to
take it easy, riding nights--keeping our eyes on--’
‘On what?’ Bart asked.
‘On the north star,’ in embarrassed tone.
‘Why, we’re not thirty miles from the Border right now. We can do it in
a night.’
‘But I’ve been thinking we’d better not enter Arizona on any of the
regular roads--and there’s quite a ride west after that--’
Señorita Valencia was in the doorway.
‘You’re the doctor!’ Bart laughed.
* * * * *
Two nights later Elbert made Mamie fast in an old lane about three
hundred yards from the Fonseca road directly back of El Relicario. This
was his next to last trip from the mountains down, according to the
plan. He was to bring both horses next time, two or three nights later.
Then north and west with Bart through the high range, which he had
explored so many days with the one single thought of ending his mission.
Nearing the old ranch house, he moved around in front to approach
by the road, but heard Mexican voices before reaching the gateway.
Stealing closer he saw three ponies standing just within--carbine-boots
and saber-sheathes! Only the rurales carried that outfit. He moved back
and circled among the scented vine-tangles of the grounds, at length
drawing near an unglazed window of an empty room, which was just across
a corridor from the little room where Bart lay. Faint reflection of
the candle-light came from there, careless strumming of a guitar and
laughter of the Mexicans from the front of the house.
A light step at his left, a movement of white, visible as he
turned--Valencia, alone in the grounds. Softly he called her name.
‘Oh, I prayed you would come, Señor! The rurales are here. They have
seen him! I have left them but a moment--saying I must dress--’ She was
all in white, her face held close to his, the breath of her whispering
part of the perfume of the dark.
‘You must take him away to-night--now, while they wait--or he will have
to go with them! You see, they are not quite sure yet, it is he, but
have sent for others in Fonseca who will know. Before the others come,
while I keep the ones here in the front of the house--you must take him
to the mountains--to your country!’
‘Have they got Bart in front with them?’
‘No, he’s still lying in there--but one of the men is watching in the
corridor. I have told them how ill he is!’
Elbert spoke swiftly: ‘I’ll go and bring the mare closer in, Señorita,
and be back to this window in ten minutes. Get word to Bart that I’m
coming back!’
‘I will try--or perhaps my mother. They are waiting for me in there
now. I must keep them in the front!’
He heard the Mexican voices. ‘In ten minutes--’ he hastily whispered.
He was running back toward Mamie’s tether. No moon, but a few great
stars, fireflies in a near low tree--a perfumed, humid night. Thoughts
ran with him. It was like the mystery of life--her pale upheld face in
the dark, with an untellable meaning for his heart, having to do with a
corn-dust maiden. Even as he ran, he marveled that she could help him
get Bart away ‘to the mountains, to your country!’ ... the breath of
her whispering--
Mamie was dancing, as his hands ran over the cinches. ‘The job of our
lives!’ he panted. ‘You’re fit, little one. Won’t be your fault if we
don’t make it! It’s for him--for old Bob Leadley, Mamie!’
He was riding back. He could not bring the mare too near to the ranch
house, lest she signal to the rurales’ horses standing in front. He
reached the unglazed window of the unused room. Perhaps she had been
unable to get Bart word, for he had not come. Perhaps, the full ten
minutes had not passed.
He waited a moment, then climbed into the empty room, crossing softly
toward the faint sheen of light in the corridor. Reaching the door,
he could look across the corridor into the little room where a single
candle burned. Only the foot of Bart’s cot was visible.
Now a step sounded down the corridor at his left. He drew back into the
dark. A Mexican approached, glanced into the little room, then turned
back toward the patio--the rurale pacing his post.
Elbert craned forward as far as he dared; this time he saw the covering
of the cot flung back, a single booted leg beneath. Something familiar
in the way it jerked that second, made him know that Bart was drawing
a boot on the other leg. How could he let Bart know he had come? The
slightest whisper was as impossible as it was for him to cross the
corridor while the sentry moved back and forth.
At this instant a liquid shower of chords sounded through the
house--the great harp in the front room coming to life--Valencia’s
voice lifting above her accompaniment:
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios!’
A heart-break in itself--that song.
At the same time, another voice from the patio--quavery tones of the
old señora offering the sentry a glass of wine. Was she trying to hold
him at the far end of his post? Now in the opposite doorway, tipping a
little weakly, hatless, without coat, but fully booted, Bart Leadley
showed himself, a cool laugh on the dark face. Elbert darting a glance
down the corridor, saw the back of the rurale’s head. He thrust out his
hand to steady Bart across the corridor.
‘... Era la que me miraba
Diciendo adios--’
They had crossed the empty room; Elbert outside the window, was helping
Bart through--the rurale still held to the patio-end of the corridor
by the señora--or was it by the song? Even in the fierce drum of his
excitement, words of old Bob Leadley flashed to Elbert’s mind: ‘...
like the Virgin speaking to them.’ Yes, he could understand being held
by that song; a wonder above everything, that Bart could leave at all.
‘Qui es mir persona
Cuentale tus amores--’
They had crossed the grounds to Mamie’s tether; Bart’s left ankle was
in his hand for a lift. He swung up behind on the spacious saddle-tree;
Mamie darting off in the dark toward high country with her double
burden. Hauntingly from behind:
‘Me la han matado
Me la han matado--’
And from Bart:
‘That there song, Mister, has followed me all the way!’
* * * * *
Miles back among the hills, they picked up the sorrel; still no sound
of pursuit. Then it was northward among the foothills--the north star
for Elbert’s eyes. At any moment he half expected to hear, ‘No, I’m not
going to fall, Mister,’ but to-night it was: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m
sittin’ easy.’
Before daybreak they followed a little stream up higher--less volume
but more noise all the way, and came to rest in the deep privacy of a
sunless ravine.
The second night, long after midnight, they heard the far scream of a
train from the north.
‘The Mexican Pacific,’ suggested Elbert.
‘Where?’ said Bart.
‘That train--’
‘The Mexican Pacific cuts north through San Isidro Gorge ten miles
southeast of here. Ask old Mallet-head, that’s where we dragged him out
of his Pullman--’
‘You think we’ve crossed the Border--that this is a U.S.
Transcontinental?’
‘The States is a large place, but I sure thought you’d know home when
you got there, Doc.’
But Elbert could hardly believe. A little later they caught a glimpse
of the crawling serpent of coaches, faint lights for scales. Finally in
the first daylight the two horses crossed the tracks--‘Safety First,’
authoritative like an Eleventh Commandment on a big water tank in the
dusk of morning.
XXIX
HIGH COUNTRY
THEY found the highway north of the railroad and turned their horses
west.
Bart looked a bit white and shaky but made no sign to stop.
‘Don’t you think we’d better lay up for a day or two in one of these
towns, so you can rest, Bart?’ Elbert asked.
‘I’m not sleepy,’ said the other. ‘I’m gettin’ what I need outdoors,
and aboard old Mallet-head. I always did need the outside of a horse to
pull myself together.’
As it began to get hot in the morning, they veered into the hills and
found shade, resting several hours.
‘How far west of Nogales do you think we are right now?’ Elbert asked.
‘About a hundred miles, I’d say. You see Fonseca lay a long ways west
of the main road south from Nogales, and we’ve kept pushin’ west
through the mountains since then. We can find out by askin’ along the
railroad--’
‘I’m figurin’ we might not have to go to San Forenso first to get to
the cabin,’ Elbert said. ‘You see, San Forenso is still farther west
from here than your father’s mine--’
All through the recent weeks in Mexico, Elbert had felt his mission
would end when he safely crossed the Border with Bart, but now he knew
a secret restless urge actually to reach the cabin, before letting even
Mort Cotton know.
‘You see, everything we need is there,’ he added.
‘Lead the way, Doc.’
The second morning afterward, Elbert looked up into a range of hills,
remarking that he thought the Dry Cache was up there. ‘San Forenso is
twenty miles ahead, and we’d have to circle back, if we went there.
The mine must be straight up from here. Yes, I think those are our
mountains, all right,’ he added. ‘I remember your father said you could
look over into California and back into Sonora from just above the
mine--’
‘It’s giddap with me. Persuade yourself--’
But the mountains that had looked so feasible from the railroad turned
sinister and rebellious as they climbed. Forty miles around would
have been simple to the twenty they had made before sundown that
day--a waterless fight all the way. They were in the big timber of the
altitudes again in the lengthening shadows, and Elbert looked at the
man beside him, riding on hard gray nerve; then at the drooping head of
his own mare in front. He had given in to a sort of mania to get into
high country. It had been getting clearer for hours that he should
have gone straight to San Forenso, from where he could have been sure
of his way to the claim. It might be best to turn back to the railroad
now--while there was a bit of light.... Just at this instant Mamie’s
ears pricked; her body came to life under the saddle. The sullen eye of
the gelding caught a flash of her new fire.
She broke into a trot, starting down-grade. They crossed a sloping
bench of big timber and checked down into a valley open to the western
light.
‘I don’t see any trail, but she’s sure got an idea!’ Elbert called.
‘She sure has,’ Bart panted, ‘and I’m for it--’
In the open, she veered swiftly to the left, making for a cañon mouth,
and then in letters writhing a little before Elbert’s dazed eyes: ‘Are
You Doomed?’ on its white rock! The living fact of the Flats broke upon
him.
‘Why, we’re home, Bart!’ he gasped. ‘The cabin’s back a ways. She’s
makin’ for the last water--’
‘First water I’ve seen in some time,’ came from the other, as Elbert
helped him down.
* * * * *
There was dusk and wood-smoke; the grinding of the coffee-mill,
the sputter of bacon oil for flapjacks, a deadlock on the matter
of whether a can of Michigan pears should be opened or Hawaiian
pineapple--finally both, for it was a fiesta night at the Dry Cache
mine, and the stores were endless. They had fared slim for some days
and ridden hard. Few words, because Elbert felt a bulge in his throat
from the pressure of unfamiliar joys. After supper, he left Bart and
led the two horses, in their ‘cooling’ blankets, down to the last water
to finish their deep drink for the night, also to refill canteens. Bart
came out of the cabin, as he returned, and they sat down in the clean
straw when grain was fed, leaning their backs against the fence.
That astonishing sense of unity crept over Elbert that he had known
once or twice before. He remembered Bob Leadley’s story of when he was
a little chap, leaving the supper table where there was a fight on
between his father and mother, and going out into the barnyard where
the cattle ruminated, and there was peace. Yes, he must have listened
deeply to all Bob Leadley’s words. It was almost as if he had been
that little boy; almost as familiar to him as that night of tequila
in Cienaga, in his own experience, when he had sat with Cal and Slim
(Chester and the Indian and Mamie grinding at their sun-parched corn).
A warm breeze fanned his face now with a smell of sunlit rocks and
pine bark and that carried him back to the night of that warm wind at
Heaslep’s ranch, when Cal and Slim asked him to join them in a ride
south, where he was going anyway. Exquisite ease in the very fatigue
that closed in, delight of relaxation complete for the first time in
his life.
The next day they didn’t stir far from the claim, only moving about the
different patches of sun and shade to stretch out in the deep languor
that followed days of strain.
‘Pretty near everything a man could want here--don’t you think?’ said
Bart.
‘Pretty near,’ said Elbert.
‘The old man made it all to suit himself, didn’t he?’ the voice drawled
on. ‘Always a great hand for keeping things up, Dad was. Left his mark
on everything. I can see it now. A kid wouldn’t--’
‘I think he was making it for you all the time,’ Elbert said, ‘just as
if he was writing a letter to you, when he built those cabinets and
stored them. I know he was--always thinking you would come back like
this.’
‘A lot of work in that tunnel for one man to do alone,’ said Bart.
‘Must have taken him a year--’
‘More,’ said Elbert.
The next morning at breakfast a curious quiet settled between the two
men. The spell was breaking, a different gleam in the eyes of the big
fellow across the table. In a wordless fashion, Elbert sat for a time.
Another sentence of old Bob Leadley’s cleared with deep meaning. ‘I’d
get lonesome for him when he was right in the same room--’
‘We’d better not wait any longer before letting Mort Cotton know,’
Elbert finally said. ‘I’ll ride down to the Slim Stake and get him on
the telephone--’
He was back within four hours and Mort reached the claim before
sundown. It took two days for everything to be settled, and Elbert
was tired in an altogether different way at the end. He had done more
talking in those two days than in all the weeks in Sonora.
‘Bart,’ he said, when they were finally alone once more, ‘there’s
nothing I’d like better than to work that gold tooth with you, but I’ll
have to be away for a few weeks.’
‘Which way you headin’, Doc?’
‘East. Been away from home for a long time. I’ve got to see my
father--’ Elbert caught that strange gleam again in the eyes of the
other. ‘And my sisters,’ he added.
‘I’m ridin’, too, Mister. For a while--’
‘You’re not going--you’re not going back?’
‘Back into Mexico?’ the other laughed.
‘I thought, perhaps--’
‘Why, you don’t seem to believe I like it here,’ Bart chuckled.
‘Pretty near everything a man could want--’
Just words, perhaps, Elbert thought. He didn’t see how Bart could
forget. He couldn’t have, if he had been in Bart’s place.
‘Oh, yes, I like to look and listen around here,’ the big fellow went
on, ‘and back in that tunnel there’s a message for you and me all
right, but no hurry, as you say. We’ll wait a little longer for that. A
whole lot of times down in Sonora I’ve wondered just how it would feel
to turn loose in an American town--Tucson, for instance.’
‘I’ll be stopping off in Tucson,’ Elbert allowed.
* * * * *
That day they rode down to San Forenso and left the horses at Mort
Cotton’s ranch. Elbert planned to take the night train.
‘I’ll stay on with Mort for a day or so,’ Bart said. ‘I might hunt you
up in Tucson, if I get there before you leave. They say there’s a hotel
there--’
‘The Santa Clara,’ said Elbert.
He looked back toward Mort’s corral, as the old cattleman was bringing
the rig to take him to the station. He moved to the gate and let
himself in. Mamie walked toward him, but halted with lifted head, in
the afternoon light, as he had seen her the first day, only now her
coat was faded by many sweats and suns. Her head lifted higher. She
was listening for something no one else could possibly hear--
‘One more listening mare,’ Elbert whispered.
Her forehead presently bumped his shoulder. Farther off the sorrel
stake-horse was sniffing at the cracks in Mort’s hay-shed.
‘I’ll be coming back, Mamie. Oh, yes, I’ll be coming back--’
XXX
TUCSON AGAIN
IT wasn’t a dappled gray this time, but one of the same breed. Elbert
was abroad in the streets of Tucson, long before the city was astir,
his train having set him down at an unseemly hour. He passed a harness
shop and peered in through the window, where his eye encountered the
cocked ears and pointed head of a wooden horse. Evidently its place was
the sidewalk, daytimes, being wheeled into the shop at closing-hour on
castors.
It was as if he were in the Plaza at Los Angeles again. It was more:
like a man coming back to find his old nursery unchanged. Elbert’s lips
moved.
‘Wouldn’t Mamie shy if she passed that palfrey on a lonely road?’
* * * * *
His hand pained. He was clutching the arm of a rocking-chair. He had
left a network of invisible foot-tracks over two sections, at least,
of the city of Tucson. The day was now advanced to eight-thirty in the
morning, and he was back in his room at the Santa Clara. His strong,
blackened fingers relaxed on the oak. He arose and pulled down both
outer windows. He went to the hall-door to feel that it was locked. He
took off coat and vest, wiped the sweat from his forehead, called a
number at the telephone.
‘May I speak with Miss Gertling?’
‘Miss Gertling--why, she doesn’t live here any more--’
‘Does she--where?’
‘She’s only here part of the day--some days--’
‘Could you give me her address?’
‘Who is it, please?’
‘Mr. Sartwell--’
‘Oh.’
‘Elbert Sartwell--’
‘Oh,--you’re--wait a moment, please!... Yes, Mr. Sartwell, you may
call--’ the snappy tone had softened.
Elbert’s mind fumbled the number, but he got it down.... His second
call was entered. A man’s tone advised him respectfully not to
disconnect. Then out of the smothering stillness:
‘Hello?’
‘Mary Gertling!’
‘Yes.... Oh, I know ... and where are you?’
‘At the Santa Clara.’
‘Will you come over?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, wait! I know better. I’ll come for _you_! In the street in front
of the hotel--in ten--fifteen minutes.’
He bathed a third time. He was below watching the street both ways.
Crowds were passing, by this time--on the way to work. Elbert’s
feelings were torturingly divided. Sometimes he pitied all these people
going to work; sometimes he envied their calm matter-of-fact seizure
of life. As for himself, he seemed dangling in space, having lost his
clutch entirely.
The crowd jostled him back against the entrance. It must be a half
hour. Could there have been a mistake? His eye verified the fact that
it was the Santa Clara hotel he was standing against. Many faces coming
from the right, as many more from the left. He would hold his eyes one
way, until he felt she must be standing at his back. Yet it was from
neither right nor left that her call came--from the throng of cars in
the street, a roadster pressing in toward the curb. She was alone. She
had opened the door. Like that day in the flowered room, he had been
listening and watching toward the hall and she had come from the porch.
‘I gave you a ring at the Finishing School,’ he said, as if he had been
waiting months to say just that.
‘I finished last June, but stayed on part-time for other work there.’
‘Post-graduate work?’
‘I’ve been learning to ride a horse. I thought you might come there
first.’
Any one could see she had driven a car for a long time--queer ease of
her own, no thought. She straightened her dress and thrust her wrap
back from her shoulders, as if ready for all day. The small boot poured
gas with mathematical accuracy and steadiness.
They were out of heavy traffic now; passing through an end of town
increasingly familiar to Elbert.
‘Everything has seemed tangled and lonesome during this last week,’ she
was saying. ‘But before that, it all grew clearer and clearer.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘For three weeks, just before this last, everything seemed to get
clearer and clearer.’
‘Why, those were the weeks I spent in the mountains,’ he said. ‘I
was alone all the time, and high up. It sure was a change coming
down, though. Last few days, it seemed my mind was trying to make up
something that never really happened. Hardest of all, just before I got
you on the ’phone this morning.’
Yes, it was the Border Highway they were on. She was at his left.
Gradually he was breathing better. At first he had thought she would
have to hurry back, but that thought was slipping away. She wasn’t
speeding, but pressed the car forward steadily, as if making a day’s
passage. It was a white dress she had on, a sort of linen--like a
handkerchief. The white road stretched ahead, very straight, but gently
rolling. The sense of on and on came to him. He had always felt like
fighting when with a girl before--except in that flowered room--but
there wasn’t a fight in the world to-day. The wide empty road stretched
ahead for miles; a film of dull shining vapor gleamed over the top
of each rise, but always as they rolled up to it, the film vanished,
showing up presently above the next. They never arrived, always
approaching, as to a mirage.
‘Sometime we’ll get to know it down here on the roads and even in the
midst of the city,’ she said.
‘You mean that sense of clearness--I spoke of having in the
mountains--?’
‘Yes, we must not lose it anywhere--as we did last week. Why, I thought
some of the time you weren’t coming back--’
‘I thought some of the time, you weren’t expecting me to come back,’ he
said with a shiver.
They were running through Harrisburg of trucking days. Evidently she
had no mind to return--Heaslep’s beyond. It would break in upon their
day to stop, yet she had chosen the way. He couldn’t tell her to go
back. He had wanted to see Cal and Slim, but not to-day. Still, she
kept on, the ranch-houses finally showing ahead.
‘I know ’em there--we’ll have to call, since we’re going by. That’s
where Cal and Slim are. At least--’
‘Shall I turn in?’ she asked strangely.
‘Yes.’
He saw the faces jerking out from the farrier’s and the cook-house, one
or two Chinese. Elbert nodded and gestured, but not an eye turned to
him, all cooling upon the one at his side.
‘Drive on to that door marked “Office,”’ he whispered.
Frost-face appeared in the doorway. Elbert’s fixed smile of greeting
had not yet registered for a return glance. Frost-face began lifting
off his wide hat. Elbert couldn’t remember ever having seen before that
hard white head, uncovered.
‘She’s some--car,’ Frost-face said suddenly.
‘We were just ridin’ by. Thought I’d--’ Elbert began, but the foreman
wasn’t paying attention. Finally in the strain Elbert pursued:
‘Any sick cattle?’
‘No, but we’re on the watch. Is she a six?’
‘No, an eight--straight eight. Thought we’d like to see Cal and Slim--’
‘Up in Wyoming--when I heard last--playin’ the round-ups and the
rodeos.’
‘We were just ridin’ by,’ Elbert said.
‘I hear Slim sat Poison-face for twenty-five seconds at Cheyenne.’
‘Are they coming back?’
‘Ain’t likely. They--you see, we’re using tourin’ cars mostly to ride
range and keep up fences.’
Now Elbert received his first direct glance. ‘I see you’re wearin’
everything but your likker this morning,’ Frost-face remarked.
‘I’m starting East,’ said Elbert.
‘Round by Panama?’
Elbert chuckled. ‘I mean, I’m startin’ East to-morrow night.’
‘Takin’--the filly?’
‘No, she’s back in San Forenso. You’ll sure remember me to the boys,
won’t you?’
The roadster was rolling quietly out of the ranch driveway. Mary turned
the car south toward the Border. No word about it.
* * * * *
Twilight--Nogales--they were having supper in a little Yaqui restaurant
There were paper-thin leaves of corn-bread baked in the sun. He was
looking away toward the South.
‘Sometime we must go clear down to the señora’s house in Nacimiento
where we first met,’ he said.
‘I don’t know. We can’t ever find what we’re looking for by going
_back_ to any place. It’s always ahead.’
‘What we’re looking for,’ he repeated, but not as a question.
‘It would seem so easy to find; it would seem so easy to keep,’ she
went on, ‘but I don’t know any one who has kept it. Certainly none of
my girl friends who have married. I don’t even know what it is exactly.’
‘It’s something that’s kept on building. Really started when I was in
the hospital--no, before that--at the explosion.’
‘No, before that,’ she said.
‘Did it?’
‘Yes, at the barefooted woman’s, where you were so firm. And then
something really happened to us in that ride back from San Pasquali,
when we were not in our heads.’
‘I had your letter in the hospital.’
‘And then, that day you came to the Finishing School.’
‘That was a great room to me,’ he said.
‘Every day has been different, but it has kept right on building.’
‘Especially in the mountains.’
‘Yes, wonderfully then--until last week when I spoiled everything, by
getting so nervous and expectant.’
‘It’s been building all day to-day--with me,’ said Elbert.
‘Yes,’ she helped, ‘differently from ever before. And to-morrow night
you are starting East--’
‘It will keep right on, won’t it?’
‘It must, but it’s so easy to spoil--that’s what frightens me. You
wouldn’t think it could, only you see so many others who do--who have.’
‘It couldn’t be with us.’
‘I think everybody says that at first. You won’t let me spoil it, will
you?’
‘I was going to ask you that.’
‘But you are so firm. You must always be like that. Why, it’s all
because you were so firm that first night.’
The day was passing fast as a theater scene, but in the last moments
of Nogales, he kept thinking of the seventy miles back to Tucson. At
least, they had that much left to-day.
‘Won’t you drive back?’ she said at last.
‘Not unless you’re tired?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think about it.’
‘Then you--’
Sixty miles still to go. She was driving slightly under ‘thirty,’ but
the minutes were racing by. She didn’t go any slower. Fifty miles.
The roadster kept its pace, the meter staying around twenty-eight
or twenty-nine, always between twenty-five and thirty. Forty miles;
then half way. She didn’t cheat.... Stars, sage, warm wind, early
evening.... A thoroughbred, always different.... What could possibly be
spoiled, if two kept on and on like this? But she knew something; and
others, he knew, certainly had spoiled it.... Twenty-five miles.
The night suddenly opened for him. He was nearer to her than ever
before, though he had not changed position. He could not feel himself
or her, but there was a white ball of light between his eyes--like all
the stars of the gray haze fusing into one, like all the perfumes of
the air fusing into one, all the stillnesses he had ever known fusing
into one.
‘You--’ from her.
‘Yes, I’m here--’
‘You know something--I must know!’
‘_You are something--I must be_,’ he went on, as if finishing a magic
formula which she had begun.
‘Oh, what has happened to us?’ she cried suddenly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you suppose--the others--ever know anything like that--like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elbert.
‘If they did--I don’t see how they could ever go apart.’
* * * * *
Lights of Tucson, streets. The amazement that he knew now, was that she
had kept on steadily driving.... ‘_You are something--I must be--_’ Had
she said that, or had he? Had it really been spoken at all? And the
car hadn’t halted a moment.
‘But we must never stop--no matter how wonderful it is--and say “This
is it,”’ she repeated. ‘We must always keep on and on--’
‘It’s so very much--right now--’
‘I know--I know it is--but don’t ever let me stop and say: “We’ve found
it.”’
The car drew up at the curb of the Santa Clara.
‘To-morrow. Luncheon. I’ll come at twelve--right here.’
Then he stood upon the pavement, differently alone.
* * * * *
It was after 11.30, next morning. Elbert had sent a telegram to his
father that he was starting East to-night. Passing the desk he saw a
paper in his box.
‘Friends of yours in Suite 14,’ it read. No signature. Writing he
hadn’t seen before.
He stood still for a moment. It wouldn’t be necessary to go up right
now. She would be in front in fifteen or twenty minutes. He might let
the message wait until afternoon. But after that, perhaps they would
be going out somewhere. Better now, yet the hush he was in was hard to
break. It was like a spell, yet the elevator door stood open.
It wasn’t Bart who opened the door of the upper room but the old
don of El Relicario, and graciously behind him, biding her time, the
señora. Then from an inner room (was the crucifix there, too, and the
white flower?) came the corn-dust maiden.
‘Ah, Señor, you were so brave--it was all because you were so brave!’
And behind her sounded the easy flowing laugh--words from Bart:
‘Everybody here but the rurales!’
‘Only--’ said Elbert, ‘only my friend--a girl--I’ll get her now--and
bring her up.’
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Minor, silent changes have been made to regularize punctuation and
hyphenation.
Archaic spelling, slang and dialect have been retained as typeset.
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