Over the Border: A Novel

Bull tapped his empty pockets.

Sliver mourned, “All I’ve got is a Confederate five some one slipped me during my last toot in El Paso. I’ve carried it sence for a lucky piece.”

“An’ lucky it is!” Jake extended an eager hand. “After this revolutionary currency that’s run off by the million on a newspaper press, these greasers are crazy for gringo bills. What if it has got Jeff Davis’s picter on it? This fellow don’t know him from Abe Lincoln. All gringo bills look alike to him. He’ll never know the diff.”

Neither did he. The note, when thrown with elaborate carelessness on the bar, brought in exchange at current ratios thirty-two pesos and somecentavos, along with three stiff copas. Deceived by the size of the roll, the Three now proceeded to order from the tienda behind the bar coffee, sugar, maize, the grease of Rosa’s desire, and other necessaries. With half a dozen bottles of tequila, it made a goodly pile on the counter, but the offer of the roll brought a second lesson in finance – to wit, that cheap money buys few goods. After segregating the tequila from the groceries, the merchant explained with a bow and shrug that the thirty-two dollars and some centavos aforesaid represented the value of either.

From the groceries, the glances of the Three passed to the tequila; then, with one accord, their hands went out and each closed on the neck of a bottle. They were already outside when, looking back, Sliver happened to catch the merchant’s eye.

He grinned, answering Sliver’s wink. “Si, señores, this time you shall drink with me.”

That which followed was quite accidental. While the Mexican was setting out three glasses, Jake drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began to throw two kings and an ace in the “three-card trick.” So deftly he did it that Sliver, who was really trying to pick the ace, failed half a dozen times in succession. Their backs being turned, only Bull noticed the Mexican’s interest in the performance. Fascinated, he watched the flying cards.

“Looks easy, don’t it?” Bull suggested. “Here, Sliver, give this hombre a chance.”

Of course he succeeded, and, being Mexican, his conceit prodded him on to try again. He could do it! He’d bet his sombrero, his horse, his store, that he could do it every time! The Three being possessed of no other stake, he finally wagered the pile of goods, which still stood on the counter, against their bottles of tequila– and lost! In the course of the next half-hour, being judiciously led on by occasional winnings, there were added to the groceries six other bottles, the original thirty-two pesos and some centavos, a bolt of lace and linen for Rosa; but for a large, greasy, and infuriated brown woman who charged them suddenly from the rear of the store he would undoubtedly have lost his all. Further acquisitions being balked by her unreasonable interference with the course of nature as applied to fools, the Three packed their winnings in the saddle-bags and rode on their way.

As a rule a certain fairness is inherent in the externally masculine. Even a Mexican expects to pay his losings, and, of his own impulse, thecomerciante would probably have let things go with a shrug. But not so his woman! The eternally feminine is ever a poor loser – perhaps because she has usually no hand in the game – and as the Three rode off she let loose an outcry that brought a gendarme running from around the corner.

“It is that honest Mexicans are robbed by gringo thieves while thou art lost in a siesta!” she assailed him. “After them, lazy one, and recover our goods!”

By her violence she might have lost her case. With an answer that was quite ungentlemanly the gendarme had already turned to go, when the two girls whom Jake had robbed of their lingerie came tearing up the street and added their outcries to the woman’s clamor. And now the Three were surely out of luck. It chanced that for a week past this very gendarme had been making sheep’s eyes at the larger of the two girls, and now the saints had sent this chance for him to gain her favor.

“They stole thy – ” Delicacy gave him pause; then, his natural indignation increased by the nature of the robbery, he hot-footed it up the street and overtook the Three.

Ordinarily the arrest would have been accomplished with lofty Spanish punctilio, but in his heat the gendarme allowed his zeal to exceed his discretion, and thereby invited disaster. For as he seized Bull’s bridle, the rustler reached over, spread his huge hand flat over the man’s angry face, and sent him toppling backward into the kennel. He was up, the next second, long gun in hand. But in that second Jake’s bleak eyes squinted along his gun, Sliver had him covered, Bull’s rifle was aimed from the hip.

To give the Mexican policeman his due, he does not easily give up. If one man cannot bring in a prisoner, ten may. If they fail, perhaps a company can – or a regiment. The man’s shrill whistle was really far more dangerous than his absurd long gun. Instantly it was taken up on the next street and the next; went echoing through the town till it finally brought from the carcel a squad on the run.

By that time the Three had backed up against a wall and stood with rifles leveled across the backs of their beasts. Every particle of human kindness, humor, that had showed in their dealings with one another was gone. Jake’s long teeth were bared in a wolf grin. Sliver’s reckless face had frozen in stone. Bull’s head and huge shoulders rose above his breast, his face dark, imperturbable, fierce. Grim, silent, ferocious as trapped wolves, they faced the squad which took cover while messengers brought an officer and company from the barracks.

Now it was really dangerous. The tragedy that lurks behind all Mexican comedy might break at any moment. In its uniform, that ragged soldiery set forth the history of three revolutions. The silver and gray of Porfirio Diaz’s famed rurales, the blue and red stripes or fatigue linen of the Federal Army, even the charro suits of Orozco’s Colorados, were all represented. But in spite of their motley the men were all fighters, tried by years of guerrilla warfare. Their dark brown faces showed only eager savagery. If it had depended on them, tragedy would have burst forth there and then. But the word had to come from the officer, who found himself looking down the barrels of three leveled rifles. It took him just five seconds to make up his mind on this fundamental truth – whoever else survived, he would die. The game was not worth the candle! Very politely he addressed Bull.

“Did I not see you, señor, at the jefatura just now?”

With Bull’s nod tragedy resolved into comedy. Swinging round on thecomerciante and his woman, the officer pronounced on their complaint. “They that gamble must expect to lose. Off, fool! before I throw thee in carcel.”

Having driven in the moral with the flat of his saber across the merchant’s back, he next took up the complaint of the girls. “How know ye that these be they that stole your garments? Only that they passed while you were at the wash? Then back, doves, to your cotes! These be friends of the jefe and no stealers of women’s fripperies.”

Stiffly saluting the Three, he marched his ragged soldiery away.

Five seconds thereafter the Three were again on their way – to thecantina where they usually put up.

“All we’ve gotter do now,” Sliver chuckled as they rode on down the street, “is to rope a stray calf or a pig on the way home, an’ Rosa’ll be fixed for a month.”

But, alas for Rosa! After they had stabled their horses and eaten, followed one of those debauches that occur when men with natural “thirsts” turn loose after a period of deprivation. During its course they spent first the thirty-two pesos and some centavos, drank up their own tequila, finally bartered the groceries to buy still more liquor for the rabble of peones and brown girls that flocked to thecantina like buzzards to carrion.

The “drunk” went through the customary stages from boisterous conviviality, singing, loud boasting, quarreling, fighting. Three times Sliver and Jake locked and rolled on the floor, tearing like tigers at each other’s throats, nor let go till pried apart by Bull. Worse, because really terrible, was it to see the giant rustler, after the other two had lapsed into sottish sleep, sitting with his broad shoulders against the adobe wall, huge hands squeezing an imaginary throat, while his drink-crazed brain rehearsed the details of some past tragedy. Shortly thereafter he also rolled over in drunken sleep.

As they lay there, crumpled, limp, breathing stertorously, there was nothing edifying in the spectacle. It would be unfair to hint at a likeness between them and the swine that snored in the kennel outside; unfair to the swine, which never descend through drink from their natural estate. Drunkards and outlaws, they were probably as low, at that moment, as human beings ever go. Yet when they awoke, sansgroceries, sans tequila, sans money, but plus three splitting headaches, they faced the situation with saving humor.

“Tough on Rosa,” Jake said, with a rueful grin.

“If she’s still there,” Sliver doubted. “An’ I’ll bet a peppercorn to a toothpick she ain’t.”

“Chihuahua, now, or starve,” Bull succinctly summed the situation. He added, grinning, “Anyway, we’ll travel light.”

IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS

Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the first and greatest of the Chihuahua haciendas.

Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train, then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers, artisans, peones, drew by his grace the very breath of life.

“Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that.”

Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped mesas uplifted their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away, one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post.

“Vultures,” Sliver pointed. “Must be something dead over there.”

“Or dying?” Bull questioned. “Otherwise the birds ’u’d settle. These days it’s as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way.”

And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of encircling cactus into an open space around a giant sahuaro. Head fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full stretch of his arms around the sahuaro’s barrel. During the sixty hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus. Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings.

“He’s white! a gringo!” Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords.

“The poor devil!” Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, limp body on his outspread coat.

While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on the man’s swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the wrists and cut away the cords.

If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself.

He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings up there. If he could only get to it, he’d be all right.

And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and cradled like a child in the rustler’s great arms, he scarcely felt the journey. Viewed as he hung on the sahuaro, dirty, bruised, shrunken by fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical American miner of middle age – short gray beard, hawk profile, high cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked for themselves – for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too late to go on – he had recovered his voice and told them all.

“It was the ‘Colorados’ that tied me up. I knew them by the ‘red hearts’ on the breasts of their charro jackets.”

Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the terror associated with the name. Originally the “Colorados” had been Orozco’s soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids.

“But I was lucky to get off with that,” he said, after describing the beating that had preceded the tying-up. “They cut the soles off the feet of two of my peones, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn’t been that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I’d have got the same. They left me to raid some rancho, but swore they’d come back.”

Riding in, they had passed the dead peones, and, bad man that he was, Jake shuddered at the memory. “But why do you stay here, with that kind of people running loose?”

“Why do I stay?” The miner repeated the question, with heat. “The American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, and I’d worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose.

“At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out – we that had invested a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million dollars’ worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned!

“Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But most of the others had. We’d thought, of course, that the mistreatment of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans till the thing had been done again and again. Since then – know what that Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our Government?”