Over the Border Part 44

Shocked at her own thoughtlessness, she turned. But the _arriero_ had finished his packing, now stood beside Ramon. His shake of the head sent her back into Gordon's arms, and as she sobbed on his shoulder the _arriero_ took affairs into his own capable hands.

"I shall take him home to the old senor, with this wicked one, and tell him that he died in defense of thee."

With the most careful planning, it could not have been managed better.

"They will never-know," she sobbed, more quietly. "And-at the end-he was sorry."

x.x.xV: WHY?

While Bull stood on gaze at the distant mountains he shook with the chill of a great fear. His question issued in a whisper so low and husky that the agent took the meaning from his gesture toward the hills.

"The bandits moved toward the senor Lovell's." He answered. "Praise the saints! the senoritas are both in El Paso."

"Then they'll go straight on to Mary's!" The last vestige of color drained from Bull's face.

Leaping the intervening mountains, imagination showed him that trickle of foul humanity dribbling down upon the _rancho_. He saw Mary Mills on the veranda, Betty pressed to her side. But in place of the hope and trust of his previous visions pale horror sat on her face. Obliterating the sweet wholesomeness that surrounded her like an aura, the dirty dribble swept around her and the child.

He turned to the agent. "My horse? Did they get him?"

"No, senor, I had my mozo drive all the beasts into the chaparral." He pointed eastward. "Come!"

Half an hour later the _mozo_ shoved a shock head out of the chaparral in answer to the agent's whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed through his mind.

In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop.

But always his better judgment checked the mad impulse. Reining in, he would proceed at a gait that would keep the animal running to the end.

At least, he so rode until, pa.s.sing into the gra.s.s country that afternoon, he saw a tall smoke column rising on the shoulder of a mountain ahead.

He recognized it at once for one of the smoke signals arranged by Benson to spread the news of a raid, and as he saw that it rose in direct line with the widow's _rancho_ his fears crystallized around its slender column. Beyond peradventure, the place had been attacked. Jaws clenched till the bones stood out white through the flesh, black brows bent in bitter desperation, he urged on his frothing beast.

Whether he came in from Los Arboles or the railroad, distance always timed Bull's arrival at the _rancho_ with the lowering of the sun. As he urged his jaded beast at a shambling trot over the last rise his shadow lay long and black on the rich apricot glow of the slope. Long ago the ominous cloud had died on the mountain's high shoulder; but, more ominous still, a lighter column had risen in the foreground. Though prepared, a hoa.r.s.e sob unlocked his set jaws as he came in sight of the place.

The externals were the same-crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny pastures. At this hour the widow's cattle were usually to be seen forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now-in all the wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills.

The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with purple cl.u.s.ters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer.

A wild rush of hope swept his being-to die the next moment when, rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio's woman. On her knees, hands raised in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder.

She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull's face. Though she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a pa.s.sion of tears.

At any other time Bull's dominant racial contempt would have caused him to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his sorrow, he waited for the pa.s.sing of the first convulsion.

"Aie!... Aie!" Soon she began to speak. "Aie! the poor senora ... and the nina ... where were they? The mercy of G.o.d? Pity of the Virgin? Aie!

Aie! where were they?"

A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man on the train, to tell the tale in her own way.

"They came in from all sides, senor." Her hands swept the round of the hills. "Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The senora was at breakfast with the nina in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear.

But she shook it off, senor, went forward to meet them with smiles and greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating them off with her smiles.

"'Enter, senores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.'

Thus she spoke them.

"Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that sc.u.m of beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it reeked with their evil presence.

"At first they held some order. Not at once, even by their kind, are the sanct.i.ties to be destroyed. In the days that Don Porfirio held them in place a white woman was as high above them as the angels of light, so their tradition held them for a little while. Their first awe, however, soon became as a whet to their evil appet.i.tes. From rough jokes, bad talk, they proceeded to worse-entered her bedroom and the child's, broke open the locked drawers, looted and handled their clothing.

"For that she did not care-not for anything, could she but keep the child from their hands. To have her out of their sight, she left her with me in my kitchen when she herself carried the food and waited upon them.

"'Get Betty away!' she had whispered to me. But the bandits had seen to that. Two of them sat at my kitchen door eating while they kept guard.

"Still she had hope-that, being fed and flattered and pleased with their plunder, they would ride on their way. Even when, as she came and went among them, they began to pluck at her with little pats and pinches, she still clung to the hope; held them off as she could with smiling reproof. But, beasts as they were, they took their bread from her hand, and then-and then-how shall one tell it?

"They demanded that the senorita Betty be brought in to wait on them. At first they took the food she brought, patted her on the back, called her 'Linda' and other pet names. But soon they began to torment her also. At last one beast pulled her on to his knee.

"To me, in the kitchen, came the child's scream and the senora's bitter cry. 'For the sake of your mothers, senores!' followed by the crash of furniture, smash of crockery swept to the floor.

"At the cry I ran to the doorway and saw Terrubio, my man, rush in at the opposite door. The face of him was torn with the fury of h.e.l.l! One!

Two! Three! He split their hearts with his knife, before he also went down under a saber stroke and was hacked to bits as he lay on the ground. From the meat-block I had s.n.a.t.c.hed my fleshing knife. But as I gained the doorway the guards took me from behind and threw me backward upon the floor. As I lay there, fighting with both of them, the screams of the child, desperate moaning of the mother, rang in my ears! Mercy of G.o.d! Pity of the Virgin! Where were they? Where were they?"

Covering her ears, as though to shut out the dreadful echoes, she cowered at Bull's feet while shudder after shudder shook her frame.

"Go on!" He stooped and shook her violently. "Go on!"

She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes. "I was wrong, senor.

One mercy was granted-death! They murdered them ... murdered them!

Angered by the death of their own men, they murdered them-the innocent woman, sweet child!"

"Yet you-escaped?"

"Si. The two had left me for dead in the kitchen, and the fire was almost upon me when I gained strength to rise and stagger out. Then, they were gone-gone like the wolves that sneak into the forest after they have slain the white heifer of the plains."

Turning, Bull walked blindly to his horse and dropped his face on his arms, propped upon the saddle. While he stood, trembling in every limb, blind struggle filled his mind.

The Mercy of G.o.d? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in a universe ruled by a just G.o.d, could one find justification for this horror? "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to the fourth generation," says the old Law; but where in Mary Mills's blameless ancestry, where in their long line of honest merchants and farmers, could one find the fault that demanded this terrible atonement?

And she-who had given forth only kindness, charity, mercy, throughout her life? And Betty, spotless in her innocence as her new-born soul?

Where could one find the fault which called for their desecration?

Not in these clear terms did Bull's thought run. Blind anguish kept him straining as in the throes of a violent nausea. He did not think, he felt-felt the frightful injustice beyond the explanation of any doctrine; and, feeling, his whole being rose in revolt against it.

While he stood, face buried in his arms, there forced upon his consciousness a sound that rose above the woman's sobbing-the dry murmur of the flames. Strange to say, it brought him a certain comfort. They were gone, that pleasant, wholesome woman, sweet child, gone forever beyond the blank wall that rises between the quick and the dead! Surely they were gone! Yet-the corruption of the tomb, mold of the grave, would never touch their flesh. Through the clean, white flames they had pa.s.sed into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains that he was, born of free s.p.a.ces, wide deserts, clean winds, he took comfort in the thought.

Next, intensifying, yet soothing his poignant anguish, there floated in upon him a vision of the soft beauty of that last night. Again he saw through the gloaming the infinite loneliness reflected in Mary Mills's face. Again its dim whiteness turned toward him in the dusk. Like a timid dove he saw her hand come fluttering into his. Then-with deep thankfulness he realized it-now she would never know! never know how far he had fallen below his resolves.

Not for her, now, the pain of listening to his confession. His own did enter into his thoughts. All that he had suffered, was now suffering, was as naught. No anguish, physical or mental, could atone in his own sight for his fall. If he could have restored her and the child as they were yesterday, to go forward with a worthier man to happier destinies, he would have done it, then turned and gone on his own dark and solitary way. But that was impossible, and, being impossible, he hugged to his breast the thought-now she would never know!