Over the Border Part 4

payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press, the _gringos hacendados_ had driven their animals into the mountain pastures three-quarters of a day's ride east of the tracks. But omitting the details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant gra.s.s ran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of the raid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses in the hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon.

Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see the difference in size and condition between them and the common Mexican scrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played about the same part in their operations as a "jimmy" in those of a burglar, Bull exclaimed his admiration, "_Some horses!_"

"But-" Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at a fast trot down the valley, "we're out of luck."

"Oh, I don't know." Bull handed him the gla.s.ses. "See what you make of 'em."

"_Colorados!_" Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart on the blue _charro_ jacket. "It's the same outfit that tied up the miner, too. Remember how he described the leader? 'About twice as tall as a common Mexican'? That fellow's six-foot-two if he's an inch."

"The gall of him," Sliver snorted. "What do you think o' that? After _our_ horses! Well, they 'ain't got 'em yet. We'll jest ride along behind the hill here an'-"

But Jake, who was still gazing through the gla.s.ses, dryly interrupted.

"No, you bet he hain't. I've a hunch that the gent coming over the hill, there, is the man that owns 'em."

As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause, he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. "He's sure got his nerve."

"Mebbe he don't know they're Colorados."

Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders' backs were turned, the daring rider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that the marauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford them opportunity when he pulled his gun and fired.

"Here comes his army!" Jake croaked.

"Only a lad."

Bull, who now held the gla.s.ses, made out both the youthful face, white with anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with the galloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on down the slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley from their short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in his tracks. At the same moment the lad's hat, a soft slouch, blew off, loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrill scream would still have proclaimed the rider's s.e.x.

"h.e.l.l!" Bull's astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. "It's a woman! a white girl-dressed in man's riding-togs!"

V: THE "HACIENDA OF THE TREES"

Strange is fate! From two points, perhaps the width of the world apart, two lives begin their flow, and though their mutual currents be deflected hither and thither by the winds of fortune, tides of chance, yet will they eventually meet, coalesce, and roll on together like two drops that join running in down a window-pane.

Now between John Carleton, owner of some hundred thousand broad acres, and the three rapscallions of Las Bocas the only possible relation would appear to be that which could be established by a well-oiled gun.

Between them and Lee Carleton, his pretty daughter, any relation whatever would appear still more foreign. Yet-but let it suffice, for the present, that just about the time the Three had gained almost to the _hacienda_ Carleton and his daughter had reined in their horses on the crest of a gra.s.sy knoll that overlooked the buildings.

A long pause, during which neither spoke, gives time for her portrait.

Rather tall for a girl and slender without thinness, her fine, erect shoulders and the lines of her lithe body lost nothing by her costume; riding-breeches of military cord, yellow knee-boots, man's cambric shirt with a negligee collar turned down at the neck. Her features were small and delicately cut; the nose piquant, slightly _retrousse_. Her eyes, large and brown and widely placed under a low broad brow, vividly contrasted with her fair skin and tawny hair. The face, as a whole, was wonderfully mobile and expressive, almost molten in its swift response to lively emotion. Just now, while she sat on gaze, it expressed that curious yearning, half pathetic, that is born of deep feeling.

"Oh, dad, isn't it beautiful!"

The sweep of her small hand took in the range rolling in long sunlit billows; but her eyes were on the _hacienda_-_Hacienda de los Arboles_, named in the sonorous Spanish after the huge cottonwoods that lent it pleasant shade.

Built in a great square, its ma.s.sive walls, a yard thick and twice the height of a man, formed the back wall of the stables, adobe cottages, storehouses, and granaries on the inner side. It also lent one corner to the house which rose above it to a second story. Pierced for musketry, with a watch-tower rising above its iron-studded gates, it was, in the old days, a real fort. Besides the long row that followed the meanderings of a dry water-course across the landscape, a cl.u.s.ter of giant cottonwoods raised their glossy heads within the compound, shading with checkered leaf.a.ge the watering wells and house. Set amidst growing fields of corn and wheat at the foot of a range that loomed in violet, crimson, or gold, according to the hour, it was as pleasant a place as ever a man looked upon and called his home.

Carleton smiled as she added, "I'd hate to have been brought up in El Paso or any other prosy American city."

He might have replied that there were American cities she might find less prosy than El Paso. But he was well content to have her think as she did.

His own gaze, overlooking the prospect, expressed the pride of accomplishment with which men survey their completed work; nor was his satisfaction less because the buildings themselves were not of his creation. Coming here, sixteen years ago, with a nest-egg of two or three thousand dollars, he had leased and let, bought and sold with Yankee shrewdness; added acre to acre, flock to flock, until, at last, he was in position to buy Los Arboles from a "land-poor" Spanish owner.

To a man without imagination the fact that its foundations had been laid almost four centuries ago by one of Cortes's _conquistadores_ might have meant little. With Carleton it counted more than its broad acreage. From a trove of old papers left by the former owner he had gathered many a story of siege and battle, scandal and intrigue, consummated within its ma.s.sive walls. Instead of fairy-tales, he had told these to Lee during her childhood, so that medieval atmosphere had penetrated her very being.

They seldom overlooked the _hacienda_, as now, without making some observations anent its past. As in some vivid pageant, they saw the old Dons, their _senoras_, _senoritas_, savage brown retainers, in the midst of their fighting, working, loving, praying. By self-adoption, as it were, Carleton, at least, had allied himself with them, had come to think of himself as belonging to the family.

"Great old fellows they were!" Though he spoke musingly, now, without connection, she instantly caught his meaning, knew he was harking back.

"Great old chaps! I was looking into one of our land t.i.tles the other day, and the records read in princely fashion. 'Between the rivers such and such, of a width that a man may ride in one day,' that was a favorite method of establishing boundaries. No paring of land like cheese rinds; everything done by wholesale; no haggling over a few square leagues."

"And here comes one of them." Lee pointed her quirt at a horseman who had just topped the opposite rise. "Doesn't he look it?"

Surely he did. The _charro_ suit of soft tanned deerskin with its _bolero_ jacket and tight pantaloons braided or laced with silver; the lithe figure under the suit; dark, handsome face, great Spanish eyes that burned in the dusk of a gold-laced _sombrero_; the fine horse and Mexican saddle heavily chased in solid silver; the gold-hilted _machete_ in its saddle sheath under the rider's leg, even the rope _riata_ coiled around the solid silver pommel, horse, rider, and trappings belonged in that pageant of the past.

"It is Ramon Icarza," Carleton nodded. "He hasn't been here for a long time." This he repeated in Spanish when the young man rode up.

"Attending to the herds and the horses, senor. As with you, the most of our _peones_ have run away to the wars. We have left only a few _ancianos_ too feeble and stiff to be of much service. Still, with the aid of the women we manage. That last requisition for the"-his shrug was eloquent in its disdain-"_cause_. You paid it?"

"Had to-or be confiscated." With a grin comical in its mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and anger, Carleton went on, "I raked up five thousand pesos of Valles's money and took it to him myself. And what do you think he said? 'I don't want that stuff. I can print off a million in a minute.

You must pay me in gold.'"

Perhaps because humor has no place in the primitive psychology of his race, Ramon received the news with a black frown. "The devil take him!

Yet you Americans are better treated than we, his countrymen. With us, he takes all. Those poor Chihuahua comerciantes!" His hands and eyebrows testified to Valles's scandalous treatment of the merchants. "First he demands a contribution to the _cause_. Those who refuse are foolish, for first he shoots them as traitors, then confiscates their goods. But the poor devils who contribute, see you, fare little better; for with the money he runs off a newspaper press he buys up the goods they have left.

In the old days we used to curse the locusts, senor; but they, at least, left us our beasts and lands. Who would have thought, four years ago, that you and the senorita here and my venerable father would be reduced to become herders of cattle?"

"Oh, but it's lots of fun!" Lee's happy laugh bespoke sincerity. "I love it out here. They will never be able to get me back in the house. And that reminds me that we're almost due there for lunch."

"You'll stay, of course, Ramon?" Pointing to a couple of mares with foals they had brought in from a distant part of the range, Carleton added, "There's still another over in the next valley. If you will take these along, I'll get her."

Left to themselves, the young man and girl headed the mares toward the _hacienda_, riding sufficiently in rear to check the sudden, aimless boltings of the foals. The helplessness of the little creatures touched the girl's maternal instinct, and though their stilts of legs, wabbly knees, long necks, and big heads were badly out of drawing, she exclaimed like a true mother over their beauty.

"Oh, aren't they pretty!"

Ramon agreed-as he would had she called upon him to admire a Gila monster. Not that he had always followed her lead. Close neighbors-that is, as neighboring goes in range countries where distance is reckoned by the hundred miles-their childhood had compa.s.sed more than the usual number of squabbles. Until the dawn of masculine instinct had bound him slave to her budding beauty, they had upset the peace and dignity of many a ceremonial visit by fighting like cat and dog. Lee knew, of course, his mother and sister, and not until she had extracted the last iota of family gossip did she bestow a sisterly inspection on himself and clothes. Having pa.s.sed favorably on the material, fit, and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, she reached for his _sombrero_.

"You are quite the hacendado, now, Ramon, in that magnificent hat. Let me look at it. What a beauty!"

While she turned and twisted it, fingered the rich gold braid, examined it with head slightly askew like a pretty bird, the natural glow intensified in Ramon's big dark eyes; a wave of color flowed through the gold of his skin. His mouth-too red and womanish for Anglo-Saxon standards-drew into a tender smile.

According to the canons of fiction, this was wrong. A man with a black or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, with singular disregard, for writer's law, Nature continued to weave for Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee's hair, rose blush of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande.

On her part Lee ought to have resented his admiration. But here, again, Nature utterly ignored "best seller" conventions. Brought up among Mexicans, counting Ramon's sister her best friend, Lee felt no racial prejudice. Wherefore, like any other young girl possessed of normal health and spirits, she made the most of the situation. After sufficiently admiring the hat, she tried it on.

"How does it look?"

As she faced him, saucily smiling from under the enormous brim, there was no mistaking the "dare." Whether or no the custom obtains in Mexico, Ramon caught the implication.

"Pretty enough to-kiss!"