Over the Border: A Novel

“You’re sure?”

“Sure!” He had to swallow his heart to say it.

“Remember,” she called back, moving away, “I’ll be on pins and needles till you come.”

Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer. “I won’t be here long.”

Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in hand, he turned his face to the foe.

XLIII: THE LAST OF THE THREE BAD MEN

As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting men.

After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to form in the pale dawn.

Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was strong upon him.

In such moments a man’s whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull’s reflections began with his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados.

Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute white fear on the opposite side of Carleton’s death-bed. He saw her, after the funeral, coming toward him through the patio gateway, swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis Lovell’s rich, dark beauty.

Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one scene.

Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her face buried itself in his breast.

Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills rancho, memory leaped the gap in time and distance – he was sitting in the widow’s kitchen, Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee’s birthday cake.

From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her ownership.

“I shall expect you soon?”

He heard, too, his own answer, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”

Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty’s shoulder, and – the bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty windows that stared with fiery eyes from seared walls.

In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dénouement came almost with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony.

While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam of the sun.

It announced the revueltosos of the brigada Gonzales! Her murderers! Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on therevueltosos in the fonda cañon. Big, black, burly, he looked more like a bear than a man.

If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his revolver, a heavy Colt’s .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and climbed to the crest of the opposite bank.

Lying there, he looked down on the revueltosos who had begun to climb up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high and fired.

The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack therevueltosos tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the “fight and run” of yesterday’s warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from which to return his fire.

Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up.

Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, each recording a stage in Lee’s advance toward safety. As clearly as though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but moving steadily on with Gordon’s help. And his imaginings ran with the facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently grew into a United States cavalry patrol.

Suspecting an ambush, the revueltosos came forward slowly. Quarter of an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long silence, three appeared in the open.

“They have gone! Bring up the horses!”

The leader’s call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they waited, he heard their conversation:

“If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, we had caught them last night.”

“Si,” came the answer. “But he wanted the girl for himself.”

“The swine!” The epithet was set in vile oaths. “But he is cured forever of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The bullet took him squarely between the eyes.”

There was more of it – their present hope to run the gringos down with horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of the horses.

A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and sliding, most of the time on their beasts’ haunches, down into the rock pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage:

“They are surely gone. Vamos!”

A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room for all in the “bore.” He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing of the first beast he waited, then – with a sudden pry of the rifle-barrel he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast as he could pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed rifle waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth bared, leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the midst of the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among them almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound from the opposite hill.

For a few seconds all was hidden in a cloud of dust, from the bowels of which rose the snorts of wounded horses, groans and yells. Then, as the dust settled, Bull loomed up. Berserk as any Norseman that ever beat time for his death chant with swinging sword, obedient only to the primal instinct to kill, he swung his clubbed rifle, flailing out that evil chaff, dropping them as they came on.

And come they did, those that were able. Accustomed to war and wounds, they ringed him so closely none dare shoot for fear of hitting his fellow. They could only hack and stab with knives and machetes. Till only two were left they fought him, and when they gave and ran back up the hill Bull made no effort to follow.

Running blood from a dozen wounds, he stood swaying drunkenly among the dying and the dead, the ferocious, primal passion gone, evaporated with the crimson mists that had veiled his sight. His hot brain had cooled and cleared. He saw with wonderful clarity the golden sheen of the sand and stones; subdued glow of the rock walls; the two revueltososstaring at him from the hillside above. One of them was raising his rifle, but Bull took no heed. His eyes were lifted to a drift of white cloud overhead.

With such intensity did he stare, the second revueltoso also looked up, then crossed himself. Did he also see in the diaphanous vapors the faint outlines of a woman and child? Clearly as in life Bull saw; clearly as on that last night he heard Mary Mills’s voice:

“I shall expect you soon?”

The revueltoso was aiming, but Bull did not move. Exultantly his answer rang out, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”

The rifle cracked and “Bull” Perrin, the last of the “Three Bad Men of Las Bocas,” collapsed in a heap.

THE END