Over the Border Part 21

Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; deep forests, quaint gra.s.s villages of Java and Borneo; the inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet-these and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain.

Some day he would see them all, following adventure's trail!

He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one's joy in beautiful things! Come to think of it-Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest!

He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall dragging its ma.s.sive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the earth's fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not belong.

Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!

It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it's the feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but actually triumphed over, Lee's severe man's riding-clothes, took a billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure rhymed again with a silk sweater of peac.o.c.k-blue. A pair of white pumps, that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.

"Why, Sister!" he returned her greeting of the morning. "What killing clothes!"

"Right, Brother!" she answered, in kind. "That's what they're for."

Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders' wit. But under all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she reacted to it-though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam still sparkled in her eye.

"I wonder what she's up to?" The thought formed in Mrs. Mills's mind.

She soon found out, for just then the "wind," alias Ramon, "blew in."

"Oh! I'm _so_ glad to see you!"

With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the _corredor_, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, aunts, cousins-goodness knows! the category might have embraced every one of his _peones_ if she had not been warned by the deepening of the young fellow's rich color that it was about time to let go.

"Just a bit too effusive," the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, "You are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear."

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" But the glint in her eye took it back and she managed the introductions with malicious skill. "Ramon, this is Mr.

Nevil, our latest acquisition."

"Just as if he'd been a horse," the widow inwardly commented. To prevent further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.

On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced _sombrero_; the _charro_ suit of soft leather that so finely displayed his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle-made such a figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.

Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from Gordon's impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point of view.

"I do not know of myself," Ramon replied to his question concerning the outcome, "but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, without forming some opinions. No, senor, we shall never settle our troubles ourselves-because, first, it isn't in us; second, we do not try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside-but that we should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, senor"-he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug-"we should fight any attempt on your part to limit our 'G.o.d-given right'-as your political speakers would say-to cut one another's throats and run off with one another's women as we have been doing for thousands of years.

We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have done our best to make up the arrears."

So quietly was the a.n.a.lysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. "I think your father must be a bit of a cynic."

"No, senor." Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. "He merely knows us. In your schools-I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your big military academies-you teach that every American boy has a chance to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your political speakers would call 'our G.o.d-appointed place.' As there are many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to result.

"Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a compet.i.tor; nothing the crushing of children's and women's lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces our _peones_ live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your system."

"In other words," Gordon suggested, "'you prefer the frying-pan to the fire'?"

For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application of the strange proverb, he laughed. "Exactly, senor. Why trade devils?"

"So that is how you Mexicans feel?" Gordon commented on these strange ideas after a thoughtful pause. "Then why did you ever let the foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective countries, you can never turn them out."

Ramon's nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.

"Why did we do it? _We_ did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But after him-Diaz, the Flood!" Flicking the ash carelessly from his cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: "No, we cannot throw them out-now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time-we shall fight."

From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she addressed him half an hour later.

"We are going for a little walk. You may come-if you choose."

He didn't _choose_! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off alongside the _charro_ suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common to two creatures under the sun-to wit, a bull being played with the _capa_ by a skilful _matador_ and a man under torture by a woman.

When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of a-well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet under his wrath the "wind" was fanning another flame into quite a respectable blaze.

If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon pa.s.sed from sight, Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases.

In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out.

But never for a moment was she deceived.

"Flirting their young heads off against each other," she summed the situation.

With secret amus.e.m.e.nt she observed the dignity of Gordon's good-night at the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee's answer; also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.

A certain restraint in the girl's good-night to herself caused her inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down on one's offense. She entered with Lee into her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, thereby, from a correct judgment of results.

"On the whole honors were even," she mused while making her toilet. "I wonder who will score to-morrow?"

It was Lee.

"I'm coming home later," she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast.

"You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me."

There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note that contained-at least so she said-the recipe for a liniment Terrubio used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.

Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the curtains. "That's downright cruelty," she scolded.

"Well?" Lee shrugged. "Didn't he say, yesterday morning, that he didn't take any interest in girls after they grew up?"

"But he does."

Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little laugh, "I know it."

Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure-that is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. "Oh, he's going back by the _fonda_!"

"Ah-ha!" the widow mused. "Now we shall see."

She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pa.s.s from sight, Lee routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.

XVIII: THE "WIND" BLOWS CONTRARY