Over the Border Part 3

"Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that."

Jake's glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped _mesas_ uplifted their chrome and vermilion facades from the dead flat. Very far away, one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere; burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the little winds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple of distant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitary reaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not so very far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against the blue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post.

"Vultures," Sliver pointed. "Must be something dead over there."

"Or dying?" Bull questioned. "Otherwise the birds 'u'd settle. These days it's as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way."

And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out of encircling cactus into an open s.p.a.ce around a giant _sahuaro_. Head fallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed, limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the full stretch of his arms around the _sahuaro's_ barrel. During the sixty hours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk till it lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition to the vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hot sands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus.

Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slow roll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At the approach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, filling the air with the beat and swish of coffin wings.

"He's white! a gringo!" Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords.

"The poor devil!" Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor, limp body on his outspread coat.

While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, on the man's swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of the wrists and cut away the cords.

If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had suffered through their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, have noted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they would probably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still too weak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to the point where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself.

He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out from the sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. His house, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildings up there. If he could only get to it, he'd be all right.

And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull and cradled like a child in the rustler's great arms, he scarcely felt the journey. Viewed as he hung on the _sahuaro_, dirty, bruised, shrunken by fever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed, washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerky and some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typical American miner of middle age-short gray beard, hawk profile, high cheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cooked for themselves-for even if his condition had permitted, it was now too late to go on-he had recovered his voice and told them all.

"It was the 'Colorados' that tied me up. I knew them by the 'red hearts'

on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of their charro jackets."

Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the terror a.s.sociated with the name. Originally the "Colorados" had been Orozco's soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolution against Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northern Mexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot by the Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latter power was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids.

"But I was lucky to get off with that," he said, after describing the beating that had preceded the tying-up. "They cut the soles off the feet of two of my _peones_, then drove them, stark-naked, through spiky chollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to death where they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn't been that they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I'd have got the same. They left me to raid some _rancho_, but swore they'd come back."

Riding in, they had pa.s.sed the dead _peones_, and, bad man that he was, Jake shuddered at the memory. "But why do you stay here, with that kind of people running loose?"

"Why do I stay?" The miner repeated the question, with heat. "The American consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any man stay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treaties that guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country had been at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine, and I'd worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital to come in when that fanatic, Madero, turned h.e.l.l loose.

"At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after our rights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out-we that had invested a thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred million dollars' worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have it all go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned!

"Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. But most of the others had. We'd thought, of course, that the mistreatment of one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicans till the thing had been done again and again. Since then-know what that Colorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of our Government?"

"'Your Government!' he sneered. 'We have killed your men, we have ravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell me what else we can do to make your Government fight?'"

He concluded, with bitter sadness, "I was brought up to love and revere the flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever it floated. But, men! I've seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiled by filthy _peones_, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies of Americans who believed in its power to save."

In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had suffered princ.i.p.ally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in the central states had found their way westward; enough of them for the Three to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief.

"It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light," Jake agreed. "He don't seem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through to Mexico City."

Bull's big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud of tobacco smoke. "Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he put the Apaches outer the scalping business an' got through spanking Johnny Reb."

Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. "Jest wait! D'you-all know what's going to happen one o' these days? That same Uncle Sam, he's mighty patient an' he's been handed a heap o' bad counsel; but one of these days he's a-going to get mad. When he does-listen! he's a-going to walk down to the Mexican line an' take a look at it with his nose all crinkled up like he smelled something bad. 'Things ain't quite right here!' he'll say, ca'm an' deliberate, that-a-way. Then he'll stoop an'

pick up that line, an' when he sots it down again-it 'ull be south of Panama. Jest you-all wait an' see!"

"'Wait? Wait?'" the miner sarcastically repeated. "Seems as though I'd heard that before. Wait all you want. As for me-one thing I know. Unless your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there'll be darned few of us gringos left to see."

"Why not watch from the other side?"

"Watch h.e.l.l!" The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that, despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, and indignation over his fellows' wrongs, that despite all the indomitable American spirit, the spirit that dared Indian ma.s.sacres in the conquest of the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and California to the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself from disintegration, the fine old spirit of '76, still burned under all.

"Watch h.e.l.l! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed protection. We have a right to stay, and by G.o.d! we're going to stay!

To-morrow I'll get together my _peones_ and go right to it again; only"-he observed a significant pause-"the next time the Colorados come there'll be a machine-gun trained on 'em from up here on the bench. All I ask is that the Lord sends me the same bunch again."

In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about, the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of the gorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, a solitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and he pa.s.sed out of their lives-in person, but not in other ways. His was one of the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a life and, in pa.s.sing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothing had he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull, at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in the sudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on the pommel as they rode along.

"I was thinking of what that fellow said las' night," he replied to Jake's questioning look. "To think, after that, we're out to rob our own countrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser."

"That's so." Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomed alacrity. "d.a.m.ned if I seen it that way afore."

But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with a sudden injection of rustler's sense. "Aw, come off! You fellows may be out for Mexicans, but I'm for myself. We robbed our countrymen on the other side of the line, an' what's wrong with robbing them on this? I kain't see the diff. Business is business; we've gotter eat."

"That's right, too." Sliver caught the sense of it. "We've sure gotter eat."

But Bull's face grew blacker. The Colorado's boast, "We've raped your women, exterminated your brats," had aroused in him instincts older than the race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristling hair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hind at the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated the entire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribal women.

He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to become a prey of _peon_ bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, his black brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quivered with indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race in the defense of a common cause. And yet-

Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched their evil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan.

About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the Mexican Central Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. As they drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved into the rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due east to round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack and ruin of three revolutions pa.s.sed under their eyes.

Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated carca.s.ses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves of their wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyond their view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carca.s.ses, and crosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the _Nacional_ railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical of the vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown.

Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a huge wooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of the evening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon it to save the station.

While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistle sounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen, whose glaring headlights s.p.a.ced off the dusk which was now falling like a dusty brown blanket over the desert.

As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed in surprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed some thousand _peon_ soldiers, part of Valles's army on its way south to pursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction.

Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies were loaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top of box-cars.

In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating with tight _charro_ suits and _peon_ cottons, they were exceedingly picturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with at least fifteen pounds of shining bra.s.s cartridges.

Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, their brown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built on earthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the _frijoles_ and _chile_ simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled, smoked, or slept.

Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legs dangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasal drone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets, violets, blues, yellows of the women's dresses and serapes, wreathed in the faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of and pa.s.sed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minor to their roar and rattle.

As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that was set up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: "Come on, fellows! We're going to belt h.e.l.l out of the Federals at Torreon!"

It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men, she who was largely responsible for their "rustlings," investing it, as she did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides through hot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede, the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to its essence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turned from it in disgust.

If the train had stopped-perhaps their lives would have been deflected into those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in the trenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as it vanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower in the window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter they were in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may be had all over Mexico for "a cigarette and a smile."

While eating they extracted from their host, a simple _peon_, all the information necessary for the horse raid. To avoid "requisitions"