Over the Border: A Novel

“Nothing!”

“Very well, gentlemen!” His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his handshake – the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. “I shall observe your wishes – if possible. Well – ” His shoulders rose again. “Hasta luego! Till we meet again.”

“A brave man in a weak place!” The correspondent rightfully placed him, outside. “Now, Diogenes, for the front.”

An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a battery of French “threes” was spitting shrapnel with the feverish energy of an angry cat.

Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting that flank.

Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.

Seizing the dead man’s rifle, Bull stepped into his place.

It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment’s surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and hisvaqueros on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction.

“Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he’ll soon get over it.”

Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy.

A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her heels patting out tortillas while she gossiped with another girl, in complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while screaming frightful curses.

“Damned dogs of Carranzistas!” she finished with her last, spent breath. “Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with tails between the legs!”

Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. “Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my first prisoner.”

Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its mark; she collapsed in a heap.

Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent’s yell: “Come back, you fool! She’s dead! shot through the head!” he ran out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall.

As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic curses at the distant line.

“Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day shall be my lover!”

“And here comes he that will do it!” The man on Bull’s left touched his shoulder.

Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, rifle-fire, booming guns.

“It’s Valles!”

As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black horse launched out and shot up the hill.

“Make way, hombres, for the guns!”

Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension flashed in his hot eyes.

“Ole, compañero!” His wave of the hand took in all. “Hot work! but nothing to that which is to come. Mira!”

Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. “Carranzista cavalry! But – look again!”

Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles shook his fist at the distant dust.

“Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!”

The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling bullets, he directed their emplacement. “To the left, hombres! a little more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!” The last one set, he rasped out a last command: “Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!” Then followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.

“He bears a charmed life!” The man next Bull spoke again. “Out of a hundred battles he has come with never a hurt.” He added, with a wink, “An’ it was not always from his front the bullets came.”

Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.

“What are you trying to do?”

“Justice on that grinning devil.”

“Good job no one saw you.” A quick glance around showed the artillerymen and revolutionists absorbed in their own work “Do you know what they would have done to both of us – skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don’t care yourself, just think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, ‘Having toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.’”

“I hadn’t thought of that. But if I’d been alone – ”

He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to his loophole.

On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and sabers, machetes, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

“Weekes was wrong!” It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. “He’s smashed ’em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!” But as the cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, “That is, if Valles stops and comes back.”

When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved into criticism. “Whatever is he thinking of? There he’s gone with all the cavalry and left his flank exposed!”

At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand drums. Answering the “threes,” shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next to Bull collapsed without a groan.

Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns.

“Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of their guns! They’ve drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they’ll flank us! My God! there they come!”

From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. He leaped and caught Bull’s arm.

“Come on! Let’s get while we can!”

They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head.

“Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself.”

“Man! Valles is defeated!” The other seized and shook him. “Do you know what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. If you won’t consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against Americans?”

Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; then the feel of Lee’s soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.

“Come on!”

Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his jokes.

“Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!” he gasped. “Gosh! but that chaparral is going faster the other way!”