Over the Border: A Novel

For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?”

“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective countries, you can never turn them out.”

Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.

“Why did we do it? We did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But after him – Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them out – now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time – we shall fight.”

From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she addressed him half an hour later.

“We are going for a little walk. You may come – if you choose.”

He didn’t choose! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off alongside the charro suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common to two creatures under the sun – to wit, a bull being played with thecapa by a skilful matador and a man under torture by a woman.

When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of a – well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a respectable blaze.

If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. But never for a moment was she deceived.

“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the situation.

With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer; also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.

A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, thereby, from a correct judgment of results.

“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I wonder who will score to-morrow?”

It was Lee.

“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. “You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.”

There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note that contained – at least so she said – the recipe for a liniment Terrubio used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.

Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the curtains. “That’s downright cruelty,” she scolded.

“Well?” Lee shrugged. “Didn’t he say, yesterday morning, that he didn’t take any interest in girls after they grew up?”

“But he does.”

Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little laugh, “I know it.”

Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure – that is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. “Oh, he’s going back by the fonda!”

“Ah-ha!” the widow mused. “Now we shall see.”

She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.

XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY

In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.

A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.

The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!”

Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on – madder than ever. Also – but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw thefonda lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly reckless state.

Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the number shall never be told!

In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the fonda’s liquors less than to her.

A peona’s life gravitates between her grinding at the metate and laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between. Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down from above.

From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, led his horse in under the shady ramada, then proceeded calmly with her toilet.

Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.

The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and shoulders.

Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled two copas of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him in Spanish.

“Salud y pesitos, señor!” (Health and a little money!)

In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a pesonote – even after he had filled and drunk again.

A peona refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his years. But being absolutely ignorant of peona nature, and in fine fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.

When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had adiccionario with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.

To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the “long-haired diccionario” was in constant use. While her father and mother dozed under the ramada he consulted it about the scenery and natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer objects – fingers, eyes, hair – the lesson passed the boundaries of etymology into the domain of love.

He was well over that border before he realized it – how far he did not guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” thediccionario answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action to illustrate it.

XIX: A KISS – ITS CONSEQUENCES

If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the “wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation – especially if the party of the second part be of Latin blood – is apt to be disaster. Lee was now reaping where she had sown, garnering in full measure, heaped up and pressed down, last night’s consequences.

With a girl’s keen intuition in such things, she had seen it coming and had thought of turning back. But after her summary dismissal of Gordon, that would have appeared ridiculous – besides, though she would not have admitted it, there he was riding on to a rendezvous with that dreadfulgirl! How she regretted, now, the flirtation! How she berated herself for sending him home! But, there being nothing else to do, she had ridden rapidly, staving off the inevitable with a stream of excited chatter – Ramon’s family, hacienda affairs, the scenery – while she dodged like a chased rabbit she secretly wondered at herself. Supposing this were six months ago? Say, on the morning she had put on his hat? Would she have doubled and dodged? She knew better! She could not say, herself, what her answer might have been! But she did know that she would have let him speak.

If then, why not now? Was it Gordon? Her pride – bolstered by irritation, for with a woman’s illogic she charged her present plight to him – her pride rose in arms at the thought! Nevertheless, it did not prevent her from riding hard on his trail; nor from holding Ramon off with an effort great as a physical strain.

But it was all in vain. Her retreats, though real, were alluring as the mock ones which, at that moment, Felicia was practising on Gordon. And their effect was the same. Her efforts were as bags of sand piled to check a rising torrent. Stayed for a time, it rose the higher; presently leaped over and swept all before it.

A remark of hers concerning his father’s age precipitated the flood. “Si, he has many years.” Then, his dark, handsome face aglow, Ramon ran on: “Yesterday he was saying that he would be content to pass could he but see me settled with a wife. I told him it depended on” – he paused, then added the tu of lovers – “on thee. If – ”

“Oh, Ramon!” she pleaded, in wild distress. “Please– don’t!”

But the dam was gone! In terms that would seem extravagant in English, but flowed naturally in the eloquent, rhythmic Spanish, he told his love. Sunshine and star fire; moonlight and bird-song; the bloom of spring flowers; loom of the mountains; wide spread of the desert – all were she! Warmth, light, happiness, from her proceeded! She was his universe. In her all beauty dwelt! And so on. To a girl who loved him, it would have been delightful wooing. Six months ago she would have listened, charmed; perhaps have been persuaded. But now – it filled her with dismay.

“Oh, you poor Ramon!” She held out her hand in remorse and pity, but when, seizing it, he tried to draw her to him, she pulled away. “Oh no!no! Oh, what a miserable creature I am! Here I have played – ”