Over the Border: A Novel

“He’s been going to see Felicia at the fonda. Sliver took him there, one day, and he says that he has never been again. But – she’s wearing his watch-fob in her bosom – Yes, yes! I know! A peona will beg the shoes off any man’s feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But – ”

Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in peonas’ bosoms, will bear watching. “Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn’t he twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh – ”

She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.

Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. “Oh, wouldn’t that be just too lovely! Is it – settled?”

The widow, of course, shook her head.

“But it will be.”

“How do you know?” She was quite willing to be convinced.

“How do I know?” The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of powder. “Just as if it depended on him. Just as if any woman – who hasn’t a harelip – can’t marry any man she wants.”

Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a “case,” Mrs. Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an honest person, she owned up with a hug.

Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to an equally keen if less discreet examination.

Betty’s major premise agreed marvelously with Lee’s and was stated with the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the subject from different distances and points of view. “I like you – only not so well as Bull. You’re nicer-looking, but – ” A long pause emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways. “I’m going to marry him when I grow up – that is, if mother doesn’t beat me to it!”

“Any danger of that?” Gordon laughed.

“You bet there is. Bull’s dead in love with her, and she – of course, she doesn’t admit it, but I know.”

“Well, well, isn’t that fine!” Gordon really meant it. “Congratulations, I suppose, are not yet in order.”

“I should say not!” Betty’s blue eyes widened with horror. “Don’t youdare! I’m not too big, yet, to be spanked” – she wriggled, reminiscently – “and when mother’s real mad she goes the limit. Nevertheless, it’s true.” After a second calculating survey, she concluded, “But if she grabs Bull, I might marry you.”

“If you only will,” he pleaded, “I’ll be so-o good! Can’t we consider ourselves engaged?”

After a moment’s thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. “No, I’m afraid not.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because doesn’t answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why.”

“Because I’d only be disappointed again.” She added, with a little sigh: “All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You’ll fall in love with Lee.”

“I? With Lee?” His real surprise showed how little that contingency had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of apprehension colored his accent. “Now how do you figure that?”

“Because you’d be a fool if you didn’t.”

The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. “But – but, you know, I am only her hired man?”

“That wouldn’t count – if she liked you.” After another examination: “And she might do worse. Gee! if I were only a man!”

“Yes?” he prompted. “If you were a man?”

“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d – ”

But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with plentiful food for thought.

During the last two months he had seen Lee – riding the range, a pretty lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there something wrong with his head?

Presently he gained an inkling – he had been wearing another’s colors! She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet – these and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail!

He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful things! Come to think of it – Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not belong.

Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the corredor swung in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!

It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.

“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing clothes!”

“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.”

Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she reacted to it – though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam still sparkled in her eye.

“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind.

She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.”

“Oh! I’m so glad to see you!”

With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along thecorredor, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, aunts, cousins – goodness knows! the category might have embraced every one of his peones if she had not been warned by the deepening of the young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go.

“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr. Nevil, our latest acquisition.”

“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.

On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-lacedsombrero; the charro suit of soft leather that so finely displayed his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle – made such a figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.

Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point of view.

“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our troubles ourselves – because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside – but that we should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, señor” – he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug – “we should fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’ – as your political speakers would say – to cut one another’s throats and run off with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years. We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have done our best to make up the arrears.”

So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think your father must be a bit of a cynic.”

“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In your schools – I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your big military academies – you teach that every American boy has a chance to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your political speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to result.

“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces our peones live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your system.”

“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the fire’?”