Over the Border Part 45

From this his mind turned again in a dull way to the question, "Why?" He had no skill in the philosophy of words. The doctrine that evil is merely good out of place, that the ferocity which had brought this terrible thing to pa.s.s had origin under the power that set the stars in their courses, the suns on their ways, would never have appealed to him.

His mind turned to a nearer cause, and found it in what clearer minds than his denounced as the slack policies of a government that had utterly failed in its duties to its own-the government that, with the purblindness of the mole, had intrigued with bandits, played fast and loose with the fates, crowned its follies by permitting a barbaric people to attempt the impossible task of guiding its own destinies.

Raising his head, he turned his face of dark despair to the northward.

Then, with the truth of a simple vision that is not to be blinded by diplomatic sophistries, with power beyond the wildest raving, his stern nod placed the responsibility where he believed it belonged-across the Rio Grande.

"You done it!" His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the force of his indictment. "Yes, _you_ done it!"

The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from sharing.

When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains-and revenge.

x.x.xVI: "IN THE MIDST OF LIFE-"

Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined days before obscured by gathering dangers.

Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise counsel of Lee's good friends, the _jefe_ and priest, Gordon had prevailed.

"These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own," the priest had advised. "Los Arboles needs a man's hardness."

To which the _jefe_ had added his little joke, "Managing thee, nina, will not be his lightest work."

No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church are on Cupid's side-well, there is no country on earth where his business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow ma.s.s of the town Lee and Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures.

Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl's expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon's notice.

Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder.

"I was thinking of the girl I left down there." She expressed the feeling common to new-made wives in looking back on the place where they have left their girlhood. "She meant well, but-was _so_ foolish. I was just wondering if-if-"

"Lee Nevil will be different from Lee Carleton." He helped her out. "If she isn't the same contrary little tyrant that gave me my first taste of heaven"-he paused, grinning-"and h.e.l.l-"

"You didn't make _me_ suffer, of course!" She flashed up in quite the old manner. "The way you carried on with that _dreadful_ girl. But there goes Lee Carleton again! and after the lecture I gave her this morning.

Yes, sir, I awoke her at dawn and gave her a real good talking to.

Henceforth she is to be kind and quiet and sympathetic, and never lose her temper and-What are you laughing at? Don't you _want_ me to reform?"

"There! there!" Her distress was genuine, and he repressed a second laugh. "If I thought there was the slightest chance of it, I'd-I'd march you straight down the hill again and have the padre say the service backward." Quite illogically he went on: "I, too, had a serious hour with myself. I made up my mind-"

He got no further, because of the small hand that closed his mouth. "Not to change? Don't dare to say it!"

Perhaps her alarm rooted in the age-long experience of woman that change is the law for man. At any rate, she fought the very suggestion.

"You won't, will you?"

He a.s.sured her, of course, that he wouldn't-and believed it, no doubt.

So, this mighty business settled, each being duly bound to the other to remain as they were and attempt no reforms, however well intended, they turned their bright faces to the future; rode on, planning as they went with the brilliant optimism of youth. While the dusty miles slid underneath and the trail heaved them up and down over the mountains and valleys, they built up and tore down and reconstructed. By the time, midway of the afternoon, they looked down from the plateau into the mountain pastures they had settled the revolution, placed the country on a basis of peace from which it should never be moved thereafter.

In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was trans.m.u.ted by sun-scorched gra.s.ses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon's beast dropped hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes Pedro's _jacal_ in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of ripening peppers. A white patch presently resolved into the _camisa_ and _calzones_ of Pedro himself, and as they reined in at his door the old fellow came out of the garden, his wrinkles and pouches drawn into a welcoming grin.

"He's really part of the scenery"-Lee communed aloud with herself-"almost as much as that old dead tree. We might let him stay.

But, no!" She shook her head. "I don't want any human being here but ourselves. Oh, I know! We'll send him in to Los Arboles with a note to Sliver and Jake."

Neither would she-after Pedro had saddled up and departed, have any commerce with the _jacal_. "It isn't that it's dirty. Old Pedro is as clean in his habits as any white man, and quite fussy over his housekeeping. But it has been lived in. We'll camp by the stream at the far end of the valley."

She did borrow a few clay drinking and cooking bowls; also appropriated a savory stew of _frijoles_ which Pedro had ready for supper, adding it to the supplies they had brought from San Carlos. On his part Gordon commandeered an old shot-gun.

"What for?" Though he laughed, repeating her question, the glow in his eye proved him at one with her in spirit. "To kill the meat for our first meal, Mrs. Stone-Hatchet. Also protect you against the attack of any saber-toothed tiger or dinosaurus that may be roaming at night in this neck of the woods."

"That will be fine!" Her hands being full of clay dishes, she could not clap them; but her shining eyes supplied the applause. "The wood at the end of the valley is alive with wild pigeon. They're just lovely broiled over hot coals."

"Broiled over hot coals?" he teased her. "Wild doves, the symbol of love? What desecration!"

"I don't care," she pouted. "One has to eat-and they're awfully good."

Nevertheless, after they had pitched camp where the stream plunged down a small rapid into a long, still pool, he shouldered the gun and went after wild pigeon without compunction.

After he departed she looked around and took a deep breath.

It was all as it should be. In antic.i.p.ation of their coming, a great oak had spread a leafy carpet under its wide branches. It required only to gather them and spread their serapes to form the softest of couches.

First she brought water and built a fire; then, after a shy glance around, she followed down-stream to a spot where the pool curved into a natural arbor of alders. When Gordon returned, half an hour later, with a half-dozen pigeons he found her all red and rosy from her swim.

"Your turn, Dirty Man," she rallied him. "Go and take your bath."

When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and served the _frijoles_ on golden husks of corn from Pedro's garden.

Nature supplied the other utensils-fingers for forks, their sharp young teeth for knives, bits of _tortilla_ to scoop up the stew. Both in its preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down.

"Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is _my_ work. You can watch and smoke."

Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation.

"I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven't tried." The confession was nullified by a little sigh. "But it always makes me sick.

You don't know how I envy Maria and Teresa!" Lighting it, she took a couple of small puffs, then pa.s.sed it on. "I always tried to get Bull and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father's den and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so tobaccery and strong and-_manny_. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort and protection."

Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of s.e.x, the attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands.

She came on a little run and thereafter-it was as she had wished it in her girl's dreams-as far as dawn and dark from the conventional marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed-the law older than theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church.

In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, in the whisper of the wind among the gra.s.ses, in the lazy drift of pink cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening song of the insects, its sanctions were recited.

In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the _blase_ modern viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may never know; and-your real philosopher will admit it-most divinely in accord with the scheme of things.

Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from the rest of the world.

Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other!

"In the midst of one we are in the other," and the friendly night that wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It also lit the march of Gonzales's bandits across the desert.

Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the preparation of their breakfast.