Over the Border Part 12

Thus left to his own devices, Bull carried on the campaign with diplomacy quite foreign to his Goliath makeup. From thanks and casual observations anent the weather, he led by gradual stages to labor conditions as exemplified by the surrounding out-of-works. His simulated astonishment when the young fellow claimed community with them was remarkably well done.

"_No-o-o!_" he protested.

"Sure!" the other nodded. "I was turned out of my hotel only half an hour ago."

Quite in the fashion of grand dukes and caliphs, Bull still pretended doubt. "Broke, mebbe, but you don't belong with these. What was it?

Wine, weemen, or cyards?"

The young fellow grinned a little ruefully. "A woman, yes, but not in the usual way. What would you think if I told you-But, pshaw! what's the use? It would sound to you just like any other out-of-work fairy-tale.

Well, it may amuse you. If you really want to know, I'm here, busted and broke, because I refused a hundred thousand dollars' worth of gilt-edged securities and real estate."

"A hundred thousand!" Bull's financial acquaintance having rarely risen above the sixty-a-month cla.s.s, he could not repress his surprise.

"There, I told you. Nevertheless, it is true. I am here because I refused a hundred thousand-with a girl attached."

Bull's face fell. "I see. Folks wanted you to marry her an' you refused beca'se you'd already picked one for yourself."

The young man nodded. "Correct except in one or two particulars. I disliked the girl so much that her money couldn't tempt me. As for the one I'll marry, I haven't picked her yet. But I mean to when I'm taken that way."

Bull's face lit up with hope again as, with nave frankness, the young fellow went into details; told how his father had set his heart on a marriage that would unite the wealth of two families. The girl, an only daughter, was desirable; pretty, accomplished, played, sang, and all that! They had been brought up almost like brother and sister, and there was the hitch!

"For a fellow doesn't want to marry his sister," he explained. "I know her so well she hasn't a surprise in her hand. When I hook up, it will be with a girl that can bowl me over at first sight and keep me guessing forever after. But the Relieving Officer"-he broke off, laughing at Bull's puzzled look-"that's my name for my father. He was always coming through when I got in debt at college, hence the t.i.tle. He's a good old scout, but obstinate as-as-"

"-yourself?" Bull suggested.

"Right-o! Well, you know what happens when the irresistible force hits the immovable obstacle-something busts. That was me. Without even the last check the stern parent presents to the undutiful son in melodrama, I got. Of course the dear old gentleman wouldn't have me suffer. He supposed I'd presently come home to partake of the fatted calf; and just for fear that I might, I took my last money and bought a ticket West. So here I am, without money and without friends. Add it up and subtract the result-pick and shovel. I see them looming in the future."

"Oh, sh.o.r.e!" The caliph-that is, Bull-was proceeding very cautiously.

"You'll get a job in some bank."

"Don't believe it. You see, I'd just come home from Princeton and had no commercial training. Anyway, I'd rather work in the open, ranching, or something like that. If I had a little capital, I'd buy in. As I haven't, I'm open for any kind of a job. But there, again, I've got no experience further than the fact that I can ride a horse. I'm afraid it's pick and shovel."

The abused and hackneyed psychological moment had arrived! The net was spread, the twigs limed, the cage door open! With great artfulness Bull proceeded to shoo the bird inside. He knew of a job-in fact, it was on the same _hacienda_ where he worked himself! Of course it had the disadvantage of being located in Mexico, across the line where nothing was certain but death and "requisitions"! And there was always the chance of a sc.r.a.p! He, Bull, wouldn't advise any one to try it that had too strong a grip on this life, for there was no saying just when one might be launched into "Kingdom Come." But for a man who liked action and would take a fighting chance-so forth and so on.

A disinterested listener would have thought these and kindred inducements were eminently fitted to scare the bird away. If so-Bull did not want him. But, sizing him for a lad of spirit with the romantic outlook of his years, he counted on their appeal. Nor was he mistaken.

He had finished telling of Carleton's death at the hands of the Colorados, and was relating the accidental manner in which he and his _companeros_ had a.s.sumed the guardianship of Lee, when the young fellow thrust out his hand.

"Say, that's fine, old man! I'd be proud to have you take me in. My name is Nevil-Gordon Nevil, at your service. When do we start?"

"Whenever the train goes, an' that's be guess an' be G.o.d. It's billed to pull out from Juarez this evening, but we'll be lucky if it leaves before morning. But sometimes they do make a mistake an' start almost on time. So we'll go aboard to-night."

"What about clothes?" The recruit glanced down with distaste and dismay at his fashionable tweeds. "I can't punch cows in these."

"Hardly," Bull grinned. "You'd come out from your first bunch of pear chaparral naked as on the day you were born. Come on an' we'll see about an outfit."

It was found without any trouble in a convenient Jew store, and Gordon changed into it there and then. In cord riding-breeches, a brown army shirt, shoes, and leather puttees, topped with a conical cowman's hat, his length of limb, flat flanks, deep chest, appeared to even better advantage. Bull's expression, looking him over, would have fitted a match-making mama surveying a pretty daughter arrayed for her debut. His comment, "You'll do," would have surprised the recipient could he have divined all of its implications.

Thoroughly satisfied, Bull was producing the money to pay, when Gordon stopped him. "Here, you can't do that!"

"But you're broke."

"I still have these." He held out the tweeds. "How much boot do I get, Father Abraham?"

Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he stood for his tradition. "Only vot iss on your feet. These ain'd much good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade."

"You'll chuck in that pair of chaps?"

With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were stowing away the _chaparros_ and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents.

Gordon burst into a merry laugh. "Father Abraham isn't on to real clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York."

XI: GORDON'S DeBUT

Starting "be guess an' be G.o.d," the train left Juarez at five the next morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one pa.s.senger-coach, Bull had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first "shoo-fly" around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could never be obtained through a Pullman window.

It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly revealing a wall of burnished bra.s.s behind. As yet the desert slept in purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, startling evidence of the cyclonic pa.s.sion that had devastated the land.

"Destruction's the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys," Bull answered Gordon's question. "You orter see them at it. They run the loop of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith's hammer. After cutting down the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an' yank a mile of it away at a time. As wreckers, they can't be beat, for in four years they've completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty years to build."

"Are they still at it?"

The sudden illumination of the young man's face so palpably expressed hope that Bull had to grin. "Yes, farther south, where Valles is fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it pretty close. Still"-his nod went beyond the distant mountains-"it's pretty much all bandit out there. Now an' then they attack the trains.

There's allus a fifty-fifty chance for a sc.r.a.p."

"That isn't so bad."

Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to the scenery.

In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash in the night; civilization itself but a film over pa.s.sions and instincts violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and had his being.

The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a p.r.i.c.kling at the roots of his hair.

It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican _haciendas_ did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the scenery as such.

"I'm glad we're up here." From the engine, puffing away at the head of a dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the pa.s.senger-coach far to their rear. "I wouldn't exchange this for a Pullman."

"Well, don't imagine that you're traveling second-cla.s.s," Bull grinned.

"I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it's worth it. You'd suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some _peon_ spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it an' grin. Sure!" He answered the young fellow's look of disgust. "That is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you're German or English, or b'long to any other nationality that looks after its people, you might resent it an' get away. But, thanks to our Government's policy, it's open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a few, too, every so long."

"Would _you_ stand for that?"

Bull shrugged. "Kain't say, till I've been tried. But it's good advice, nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don't like it, you'd better be toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home.

"Here, here!" he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on a telegraph-pole. "Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t'other day for plugging insulators. Besides, it's waste. Every bullet is worth a life-mebbe your own."