Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon the
first and greatest of the Chihuahua _haciendas_.
Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest of
the blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveled
on less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train,
then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty miles
away, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vested
in one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environs
were there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the first
revolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northern
overlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers,
artisans, _peones_, drew by his grace the very breath of life.
"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 façades 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 space 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 breasts of their charro jackets."
Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of the
terror associated 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 passed 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 hell 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
principally 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 hell!" 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 massacres 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 hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteed
protection. We have a right to stay, and by God! 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
passed 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 passing, 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. "Damned 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 passed under their eyes.
Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines of
twisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccated
carcasses 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, carcasses, 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 spaced 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 brass 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
passed 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 hell 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"
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 grass
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 glasses. "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 glasses, 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 glasses, 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 sex.
"Hell!" Bull's astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. "It's a
woman! a white girl--dressed in man's riding-togs!"