Over the Border: A Novel

“Whenever the train goes, an’ that’s be guess an’ be God. It’s billed to pull out from Juarez this evening, but we’ll be lucky if it leaves before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an’ start almost on time. So we’ll go aboard to-night.”

“What about clothes?” The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay at his fashionable tweeds. “I can’t punch cows in these.”

“Hardly,” Bull grinned. “You’d come out from your first bunch of pear chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an’ we’ll see about an outfit.”

It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman’s hat, his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better advantage. Bull’s expression, looking him over, would have fitted a match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her début. His comment, “You’ll do,” would have surprised the recipient could he have divined all of its implications.

Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon stopped him. “Here, you can’t do that!”

“But you’re broke.”

“I still have these.” He held out the tweeds. “How much boot do I get, Father Abraham?”

Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he stood for his tradition. “Only vot iss on your feet. These ain’d much good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade.”

“You’ll chuck in that pair of chaps?”

With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were stowing away the chaparros and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents.

Gordon burst into a merry laugh. “Father Abraham isn’t on to real clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York.”

XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT

Starting “be guess an’ be God,” the train left Juarez at five the next morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first “shoo-fly” around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could never be obtained through a Pullman window.

It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land.

“Destruction’s the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys,” Bull answered Gordon’s question. “You orter see them at it. They run the loop of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. After cutting down the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an’ yank a mile of it away at a time. As wreckers, they can’t be beat, for in four years they’ve completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty years to build.”

“Are they still at it?”

The sudden illumination of the young man’s face so palpably expressed hope that Bull had to grin. “Yes, farther south, where Valles is fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it pretty close. Still” – his nod went beyond the distant mountains – “it’s pretty much all bandit out there. Now an’ then they attack the trains. There’s allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap.”

“That isn’t so bad.”

Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to the scenery.

In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and had his being.

The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of his hair.

It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexicanhaciendas did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the scenery as such.

“I’m glad we’re up here.” From the engine, puffing away at the head of a dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far to their rear. “I wouldn’t exchange this for a Pullman.”

“Well, don’t imagine that you’re traveling second-class,” Bull grinned. “I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it’s worth it. You’d suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some peonspitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it an’ grin. Sure!” He answered the young fellow’s look of disgust. “That is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you’re German or English, or b’long to any other nationality that looks after its people, you might resent it an’ get away. But, thanks to our Government’s policy, it’s open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a few, too, every so long.”

“Would you stand for that?”

Bull shrugged. “Kain’t say, till I’ve been tried. But it’s good advice, nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don’t like it, you’d better be toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home.

“Here, here!” he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on a telegraph-pole. “Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t’other day for plugging insulators. Besides, it’s waste. Every bullet is worth a life – mebbe your own.”

“Maybe his own!” Again Gordon felt the prickling hair – in fact, as they rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a few miserable peonas, ragged and half-starved, begging for centavos. There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied the details.

Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanishhacendado whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape.

Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit tortures!

He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before he was aware of it the sun’s great red orb sank behind a huge black mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at the station at midnight.

“We’d better go right on,” Bull said. “We’d get no sleep here for the fleas, an’ desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we’ll be into the grass country an’ kin take a nap while the animals graze.”

With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours’ more travel brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. Riata swinging in rhythm with her beast’s stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully as any vaquero.

“Pretty neat!” Gordon exclaimed. “That boy can ride!”

“You bet you!” Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, “Sliver himself, that was born with a rope in his han’, don’t throw a better loop than Miss Lee.”

“What?” As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a clear cowman’s yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon exclaimed, “Why, it – it is a girl! In this country do they usually wear – ”

“No more ’n they do in the Eastern States,” Bull dryly filled in the hiatus. “On one thing the Maine Methodist jines hands with the Mexican Catholic – they both cover their weemen from chin to toe-p’ints. Ever sence the revolution, Miss Lee’s been doing vaquero’s work, an’ what kind of a job d’you reckon she’d make of it going ’round in skirts? If you don’t mind, I’ll ride on an’ help her with that critter.”

The light that had flashed over the girl’s face at the sight of Bull spread into an illumination that included white teeth, mouth, and sparkling eyes when he rode up. She thrust out her hand with an impulsive feeling.

“Oh, I’m so glad you have come home! I missed you dreadfully.”

“Home!” And she was happy because he, “Bull” Perrin, the notorious rustler, had returned home! Earth held no terror that could have sent that tremble through his huge frame. It was with difficulty that he controlled his voice.

“Anything wrong? Sliver or Jake been misbehaving?”

“Indeed, no!” She laughed, merrily. “They’re like two old hens ’tending an orphan chick. But – well, you know a girl, even as independent as I, must have some one to lean on, and I was uneasy while you were gone.”

A dew of moisture quenched the brown fire in the giant’s eyes. His sudden seriousness issued from a vivid memory of his late debauch. Whereas for twenty years past they had been matters of course to be forgotten with the passing of the morning head, he now felt convicted of sin. The shadow marked a resolution.

He spoke very gently. “I hope that you’ll allus feel that way.” Then, with mock sternness that covered deep emotion, he went on: “But what are you doing out here on your lonely? Some one will get a wigging for this.”

She laughed saucily up in his face. “Then it is due to me. I gave them the slip. Who is – ” She nodded toward Gordon, who had almost caught up.

Bull briefly sketched his history. “Young chap I found dead broke in El Paso. He’s the right sort.” Perhaps because he divined the probable effect on her feminine psychology, he added: “He’s from the East – college man – wealthy family – turned out because he refused to marry a fortune. I tol’ him you’d likely hire him.”

“I would in ordinary times.” She looked at Gordon, who had now reined in. “But I cannot pay regular wages just now.”

“He’s willing to wait, like us,” Bull began. “He’s – ”

“ – out for experience,” Gordon put in. “To tell the truth, Miss Carleton, I am absolutely green. I doubt whether you’ll find me worth my board.”

He had doffed his hat and the attitude of respect accentuated the quiet reserve of his tone and manner. After a thoughtful pause, during which she took him in from top to toe in a quick, feminine survey, she broke out with a comical little laugh. “If it wasn’t so nice, it would be ridiculous. While the gringos on other haciendas are simply streaking for the border, you men insist on working here for nothing. Whatever is the matter with you?”