Over the Border: A Novel

As before said, not one iota of self-pity entered into Sliver’s consciousness. Apart from a heavy fever and dull ache, the broken knee was behaving itself as well as could be expected and, after Jake’s departure, Sliver settled down to the business in hand; i. e., to inflate to the limit the current exchange of one gringo for sevenrevueltosos. Reckless, hardened scamp that he was, his remark, addressed to himself, had no reference to water, a canteen of which Jake had left at his elbow.

“Gosh, but I’d like a drink!”

His grin and following chuckle were natural and unaffected. “You’re going to be a good boy from now on, Sliver. You’ve taken your last.”

Pulling his Colt’s .45 from his belt, he laid it with the water-bottle. “Handy for the funeral.” He uttered a second grim chuckle.

The two extra rifles he placed within easy reach on his left. Then he lay quiet, hard blue eyes fixed on the opposite ridge – so quiet that a lone vulture poised above swooped down, alighted, then hopped mournfully away and stood poised on one leg, hopeful if disappointed. In recent history so much firing had invariably brought food.

From the first severe lesson when, from points a mile apart, the deadly rifles picked them off, the revueltosos had learned caution, only advancing when they were certain the two had retired. Riding away, Jake had exposed himself along the ridge; but, suspecting a trap, therevueltosos remained in hiding. Ten minutes elapsed before a couple ofsombreros rose cautiously out of a clump of sage.

“Stuck up on sticks.” Sliver criticized their wabbly motion.

After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to therevueltosos that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two more as the revueltosos raced back over the opposite ridge.

“Six added to three I got makes nine!” Sliver grunted. “A few more an’ I kin afford to cash in.”

He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his satisfaction.

“You ain’t a-going to try an’ pass through me ag’in,” he addressed the invisible foe. “An’ you ain’t going to leave me here. It’ll take you an hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you – ”

The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series designed to keep the revueltosos’ attention upon himself, and when, half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded.

“They reckon we’re all here, trying to stick it out till night,” he correctly interpreted the movement. “It ’ull take ’em another half-hour to find out.”

A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots in both directions along the ridge.

“Not that I’m expecting to bag any of youse,” he addressed the unseen enemy. “But just to slow you up a bit an’ let you know I’m here. When you get there” – his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that commanded his post on both sides – “good-by an’ good night.”

Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he counted each minute, each second in yards – the hundreds, scores of yards Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed neither fear nor softening in Sliver’s face when, from the spot he had long noted, a rifle spoke.

It was the signal for a leaden rain that began to spatter the rocks about him. It was now only a question of time. He knew it. But till that time came he replied to the fire. He was aiming into the heart of a puff of smoke when the death he had gambled so recklessly with these many years claimed the stakes.

He turned slightly sideways as his head collapsed on his outstretched arm, and through the grime and powder smoke, in the rich evening lights, his face showed with its hard lines all sponged out.

Sliver, the outlaw, gambler, drunkard, horse-thief, turned up to the low sun the quiet, peaceful face his mother had looked down upon as a child.

XLI: JAKE BETTERS THE “EXCHANGE”

By the time Jake caught up with the others that inner humane being, whose occasional appearances caused him so much disconcertion, had withdrawn within his usual cynical shell. His face, when Lee inquired for Sliver, expressed surprise that she should have thought it worth while to inquire.

“Him? Oh, he’s back there a-holding ’em off while we gain a spell.”

Though delivered with masterly unconcern, his explanation did not altogether relieve her anxiety. “But – how will he find us again?”

Jake’s shrug was fine in its indifference. “He’ll play a lone han’, Missy; plug straight for the border. Being alone that-a-way, he’ll likely beat us to it.”

“You really think so?”

“He’ll be there to meet us.”

Jake’s tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the knee – he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the revueltosos came out in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter’s slow shake of the head, signaled then that all was over.

While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when they began the fight that morning.

The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range glasses at the dark smoke plume. “Enjine an’ five cars.”

He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter’s keen sight the lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gayrebozos told they were mostly women, and that told all. “Nobody there but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that’s chasing us.”

“A hundred miles to El Paso,” Jake spoke. “Three days’ horseback? Three hours with that old mogul?”

“Golly!” The idea fastened on Gordon. “Couldn’t we?” In place of their present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past as they sped northward in the engine.

“On’y women and wounded?” Jake repeated it, musingly.

“Dark in half an hour?” Bull added: “They kedn’t tell us from their own. ’Course we should lose the horses.” With his accustomed caution he read the reverse of the shield. “If anything went wrong – we’d be left afoot on the desert.”

“No worse than we are,” Jake argued. “These beasts have been running sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to the mountains we’re not sure of feed nor water – an’ still a hundred miles from the border.”

“But Sliver?” Lee protested. “We can’t leave him.”

She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a good end. “The last thing he tol’ me, Missy, was not to wait. ‘’Twould hinder me an’ hinder you-all. I’ll make my run alone.’”

“Very well.” Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that her boy would be safer under her own eye. “Very well, but I do wish he were here.”

Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither spoke.

While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. “It ’ull be up to you an’ Missy,” he told Gordon, “to take care of the engineer while Jake an’ me stan’ off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you pitch the stuff aboard.”

The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of arevueltosos’ train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their knees at the metates, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all gossiping at their work. Here and there a man’s face showed in the fire glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man raised a gun, and as Bull’s rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged headlong from the top of the car to the ground.

Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from Gordon’s gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with Lee’s gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward.

The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman’s shovel. “Here’s where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions.”

Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable information with the muzzle of his gun.

His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of the speeding engine across the cab. “He says the half of Valles’s army is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!.. With what’s left he’s making a las’ stan’ north of Chihuahua!.. He still bosses all the country from here to Juarez!.. This outfit was out raiding haciendas to supply the new base!” The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. “Hooray! the line’s open clean to the border! He don’t know of any trains being run to-night! Thinks we’ll have a clear track!”

Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown faces.

They suggested Bull’s question, “Ask him if there’s any revueltosos on the way.”

“At La Mancha!” Jake yelled back. “About thirty miles this side of the border!.. Half of the brigada Gonzales is holding the town for Valles!”

The brigada Gonzales! The command that had furnished the murderers of Mary Mills. A spasm of hate writhed over Bull’s dark face. His big hands clenched. He turned and looked out of the cab window till he regained control of his voice.

“Does he allow we kin run through there?”