_He hadn't?_ Her hands went up, appealing to the wide heavens against
such utter lack of imagination--but dropped again quickly, owing to a
second base treachery on the part of the sleeves.
"Oh, you men! What fools women are ever to bother about you. _You_
didn't suffer? _Oooooh!_" She pulled his ear till he yelled. "If you
ever dare to treat me like that!"
"That would be impossible, for you see we shall always be together."
After he had placed the customary seals on this affidavit of intent, she
asked: "But why this sudden plunge into correspondence--after such long
abstinence?"
"To inform them," he replied, with great dignity, "of a certain
momentous change impending in my condition."
"Oh, you are telling them about--_me_? May I see what you have written?"
She could! And did! With one arm around his neck, heads so close that
his face was hidden in an aura of flying hair, she began. As her eyes
passed along the lines, her smooth cheek came harder and harder against
his. Her clasp on his neck tightened until, just before she sat up, it
had evolved into a bear hug.
"Oh, what a liar they will think you!"
"To guard against that, I want you to let me have the photo in the
silver frame on your writing-table. Seeing's believing."
Of course she declared it "wasn't a bit like her" and the rest of it.
Nevertheless, she brought it and, having resumed her perch on his knee,
picked out the bad points and dwelt thereon while her eyes appealed for
the contradiction which he voluminously furnished. While he severally
and _in toto_ denied her scathing indictments and substituted therefor
panegyrics, she glowed radiantly and finally gave consent.
"Only you are so blind. They'll hate me when they see it."
"Trust dad for that!" he laughed. "He still has a soft spot for a pretty
damsel. When he sees this--well, he'll go straight out and buy a fatted
calf."
"But your mother and sister? They'll never forgive me for taking you
from that other girl."
"Wrong again! They weren't a bit anxious about it. It was all my
father--with his nonsense about rounding out fortunes. They'll love you
as much as I--no, that's impossible! But they'll love you, all right."
A little thoughtful gleam now explained itself. "That other girl? You
never told me about her. Did you ever--kiss her?"
"Lots of times." Laughing, he held her as she tried to break away. "At
parties, when I was a kid--and when we played 'post-office' and sich."
"Never since you grew up?"
"Never."
"Oh, well," she sighed, "I suppose I'll have to forgive you since you
were so very small, and it's such a long time ago I'll really have
to--make up."
Some of the arrears were paid right then. In fact, it was not until she
had demurred at paying all that he tapped the letter. "And now--what
about the date? Shall I tell that we will be married by the time they
receive it?"
Her hair flew in a bright cloud under her vigorous shake. "Such
impatience! Aren't you happy?"
"Happy?" His voice rang with sincerity. "Happier than I ever thought
possible, but--"
"But--?"
"I want to be happier still."
He meant and thought it. But she with her woman's intuition knew this,
their love time, for what it was--the flowerage of their lives. Later
would come the ripe fruit--content mixed with the joys and sorrows that
form the substance of life; but then this hour would have passed
forever. Like all women, with whom love is always the great end, she
would have drained its last sweet essence. But like all women, she was
not at all displeased by his impatience. Presently she yielded to it.
"After--after Bull comes home."
In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the
shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped
in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time
before he spoke.
"If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made
it a double marriage. Why, what's the matter?"
She had sat up with a little shiver. "Oh no! I could never be happy in
one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!" Coiling up again, she
allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. "I never saw him, he who
was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon
behind a cloud, but he felt--like you. In my visions he always took me
into the wilds--the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go.
"It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and
gone down the length of the Sierra Madres--at first alone, later
traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then
down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only
the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that
impossible. But this we can do--go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos,
who are both old friends of my father's, to be married, then ride
straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by
ourselves till--till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you
look after the horses, and we can play that we are simple _peones_ and
be--oh, _so_ happy!"
Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good
as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. "How perfectly lovely! Why
didn't I think of that myself?"
"You would have, in time. Oh!" She sprang from his knee at a stir and
tinkle of water. "Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress."
"You'll go out with me to-day?" he called after her.
"No." She bent down over the rail to answer. "I promised Jake to go with
him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts."
"Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?" he
protested. "'Tisn't fair."
But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out
from behind the sheet.
From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now
described about the _hacienda_, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise
from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had
become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with
Sliver or Jake--and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests
of great earth waves--then to sit and muse while the declining sun
washed the wide world with its resplendence.
As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted
adobes, _patio_, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then,
the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the
burning hills. But--in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and
wild--there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry.
"Beast! she is but a child!"
Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses
standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a
flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the
adobes.
"Raiders!" he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to,
"_Revueltosos!_"
A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a
fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its
panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear
which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd.
Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back
compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway
of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth.
From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon's sight,
blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the
half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw
a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a _revueltoso_. The elder
sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this
helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing.
"Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!"
At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon's spine. Blind,
breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and
tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man's arms, and threw him
violently against the wall.
So savage was the impulse he had never thought to use a weapon till the
fellow reached for his long gun. Then, suddenly aware of death looming
imminent there in the half-gloom, he grabbed his automatic and fired,
aiming with the natural intuitive precision with which one points a
finger. He felt the rush of a body past him through the smoke. Then,
stepping to the door, he saw the man run a few steps, fall, and roll
over.
Suddenly aware that he, Gordon Nevil, had killed a man, intensely
surprised at his lack of emotion, commonplace acceptance of the fact, he
stood with the smoking pistol in hand until, with a sudden rush, the
mother pushed him back in, then slammed and barred the door behind them.
The next moment came a scurry of feet, and the door quivered under a
heavy shove. But it was not the varnished leaf of civilization, designed
to keep out conversation. Barred top and bottom and three inches thick,
it withstood a violent hammering.
The instant she was released the girl had dived like a scared rabbit
under the canvas cot in the far corner and lay there, still as a mouse.
But, picking up the knife which the dead man had wrenched from her hand,
the dark mother ranged herself alongside Gordon. Though he understood
very little of her whispered Spanish, the gleaming intelligence of the
burning eyes, eloquent gestures, carried her meaning.
"They say to bring fire and burn down the door." Her quick motion
simulated the lighting of a match, followed by the upleap of flame.
Whispering: "Tira! señor, tira! Shoot! Shoot!" she pointed at the
window.
It was merely a square hole, flush with the thick wall on the outside,
and barred with heavy oaken staves, and the _revueltosos_ were hugging
the wall. Nevertheless, with a quick thrust of his weapon between the
bars Gordon fired two shots along the wall. Though the bullets flew at
random, there followed a quick scurry of feet.
Watching from one side of the window, Gordon now saw the men working, in
swift rushes, around the corrals to the stables, from behind which they
could command his window. Indeed, he had no more than moved back
before--zip, plug! zip, plug! zip, plug! the bullets began to stream in
through the window and plump in the back wall.
Presently, with a sharp, splitting ping! one pierced the door just above
the woman's shoulder. Reaching hastily, Gordon pulled her close against
him; then, standing against the thick wall between the door and window,
they waited--in deadly silence, for the fire had suddenly stopped. So
still it was, he could distinctly hear the woman's excited breathing and
an occasional sob under the bed.
"Tempting me to look out," he read the silence.
But he was wrong. A minute thereafter came a soft patter of nude feet
and the voice of Maria, the little _criada_, called through the bars:
"It ess good now, señor, for you to come. Don Jake say for you help with
those evil ones."
The instant he stepped outside the situation explained itself. Warned,
first by the firing, then by women who came running out to meet them,
"Don" Jake and Sliver had quietly made their dispositions. At the back
gate Sliver and two _ancianos_ now stood with leveled rifles. Two more
poked deadly snouts over the low _patio_ wall, Lee and Jake behind them.
And now they had leadership the women were swarming like brown hornets
out of the adobes, brandishing knives, cleavers, _machetes_, a
hysterical, dangerous mob.
In accordance with their outlaw tactics, Jake and Sliver had both aimed
at the leader, and, cut off from escape, with still another enemy behind
him, he had taken the hint. Arms reversed, rifle muzzle resting on the
ground, he stood with his four companions. To give them their due, they
showed no fear. Half or whole bandit, ugly, black-browed, one of them
villainously pock-marked, the others with unhealthy erupted skins, they
rolled cigarettes while urging the excited women to greater frenzy with
evil jokes.
"Drive back those women!" Jake called the moment Gordon appeared. "Then
bring the captain, or colonel, or general, whichever is what, over
here."
Nodding in reply to Gordon's gesture, the leader followed him across the
compound. Of medium height, well formed, features aquiline and cleanly
cut, he was a perfect specimen of that tailor-made, detestably handsome
Mexican middle-class type. Conceit, insufferable vanity, bristled at the
ends of his curved mustache. How it could be associated with such
reckless hardihood as he now displayed must remain one of Nature's
mysteries, for, entering the patio, he took a seat under the portales
and addressed Jake with an authoritative air:
"Now, señor, will you please explain why you have attacked a command of
General Valles?"
"Yes, if you will explain, on your part, why a command of General Valles
attacked my people!"
It was Lee that answered. She was wearing her man's riding-clothes, and
the man's surprise when she spoke told that he had taken her for a boy.
Now, with exaggerated courtesy that was far more offensive than his
first hardy insolence, he sprang up and offered her his chair.
"I did not know"--his bold glance wandered over her costume--"you will
pardon me, señorita?"
Though she flushed, Lee returned the stare. It was not the first time
that revolutionists had come with "requisitions" to Los Arboles. She
answered from experience.
"You have a commission from General Valles?"
He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language
that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to
contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, _el
capitan_ Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or
other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with
his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles's own
illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal.
Lee handed it back. "This seems to be in legal form. That being the
case"--she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake
an appreciative nod "perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my
people!"
"I know of no attack except"--the straight brows knit over a black flash
at Gordon--"when this man killed one of my men."
Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once:
"He shot in self-defense--to save one of my girls."
"Santa Maria!" His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. "What
foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled
a dove. You Americanos take these _peonas_ too seriously, fill them with
ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a
soldado for a sweetheart."
Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined
just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on
Gordon's part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool
calculation by Jake as to the possibility of "getting away with it"
should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still
holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering
if he could send one bullet through all four heads.
If the thoughts of the _peonas_--now gathered in a murmuring,
gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling
like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall--a composite of their
thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and
torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of
mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought
and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine
nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee's voice:
"_You_ say that? _You_, a follower of a man who was once himself a
_peon_, who boasts that his is the _peones'_ cause? _You_, his
representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor
creatures? If you _do_ represent him, then God help us, for we have
little but violence to expect from your cause."
It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the
strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but
little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused
even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the _peon_ in all his
ways, to mutter: "You bet! they hain't got nothing coming from him!" But
in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by
training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only
surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of
her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that,
with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the
shibboleths of his "Cause." Surely they were fighting for the _peon_; to
obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the
_hacendados_.
"If my hombre did as you say," he concluded, "he earned his death. My
general would be the first to applaud it." With a gesture that dismissed
the killing lightly, as if it were that of a fly, he added: "So let us
say no more of that. My wish is to serve _you_!"
Though again he did not understand the words, the grin that accompanied
them in its offensive mixture of conceit and admiration sent the angry
blood flooding Gordon's face. He was standing behind Lee, and, hearing
his quick breath, she put back her hand in a restraining gesture.
"Leave him to me," she whispered. Then, looking the other straight in
the eye, she gave him his answer. "You wish to serve me? Very well,
señor, you may do so very easily--by removing yourself and your men off
my place."
For a moment he looked at her, the offensive grin wiped out by surprise.
In turn, surprise gave way to sudden viciousness. "Si, señorita--after
you have produced two hundred horses, which is your share of the new
levy for equipment and supplies. Also"--another black flash went to
Gordon--"it will be my duty to take this man to my general."
"Perhaps I had better go," Gordon whispered. "It may save you--"
Lee cut him off without looking around. "And shoot him the moment you
get him outside the gates?" She quoted the Mexican law of "The escape."
"No, señor, I will be responsible for his safe-keeping and deliver him
with my own hands at your general's call." She added, after a
significant pause, "Along with the evidence of your own neglect in
permitting your men to attack my people."
For a moment he looked nonplussed. Now and then, for the sake of
effect--especially upon meddlesome consuls--it was the fashion in the
revolutionary armies to shoot a few men for just such offenses; and one
could never be certain where the next lightning might strike. He
blinked, tried to pass it with a shrug; but suppressed fury showed
through his vicious look.
"Very well, señorita, the matter shall be left to my general. But the
horses. These I must have at once."
"Well, think you've got 'em, an' let it go at that!"
While Jake muttered behind her, Lee stood thinking. Then out of her
meditation flashed a sharp question: "Were you at the hacienda of the
señor Benson last week?"
The man's dark brows rose. "No, señorita. If there was a requisition
served there it must have been by el coronel Lopez."
"When did you leave the cuartel general?"
"Ten days ago. We have been working among the haciendas on the other
side of the railroad. But what difference does it make--"
"A great deal." She gave a little nod. "Since you left headquarters the
señor Benson, with my manager, the señor Perrin, has gone with an offer
of all our horses on favorable terms to General Valles. So that matter
may also be left with him."
"Which lets you out!" Jake, who had been fuming all this time in the
background, now burst out. "Now git! That's what I said--an' take your
dead hombre along."
From his cold, bleak face, so dangerous in its vitriolic quiet, the
man's glance passed to Gordon, whose hand was on his gun, then to the
peonas who were now crowding the _patio_ gates. Everywhere his glance
fell amid a small sea of hot, brown faces flecked with a scum of
glittering, dangerous eyes. Accustomed to be met always with fawning
fear, defiance was a new experience, not easily assimilated. As his
glance returned to Jake and he felt the danger that loomed imminent
behind his cold truculence, the instinct of defiance wilted. With a
shrug he passed out into the compound through the lane the _peonas_
opened.
While he was assembling his command Jake leaned casually across the
_patio_ wall, his rifle in the hollow of his arm, beside him Lee and
Gordon, the latter now with a rifle. At the back gate Sliver and his
_ancianos_ still stood, wary and watchful. Wherefore, in spite of secret
mutterings, the intruders made quick business of it.
As, with the dead man tied in his saddle and leading the horse, they
passed out under the _patio_ arch, the leader paused, bowed ironically,
then followed his men.
"Saddle a fresh horse an' go after them," Jake ordered, when Sliver came
up. "Don't let 'em see you, but keep them in sight. After this we'll
have to keep one man circling the hills while the _ancianos_ keep watch
an' watch at the gates."
With Lee, Gordon had moved out to the stage and stood watching the men
ride away. "I am sorry to have brought this on you," he said, in low
tones. In his ignorance of Mexican habits and treachery, he added,
"Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone with him."
A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables.
Jake was shooing the _peonas_ back to their quarters with much language
and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick
movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and
planted a swift kiss on his cheek.
"I don't want to be widowed--before I'm married."
At midnight Sliver brought in his report. "They've gone on to El Sol.
After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into 'em when they
stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood
quiet an' the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling.
The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn't hear of it.
"'The damned gringos shoot straight,' I heard one of 'em say. 'Already
have they killed one of us, an' now they be ready. Also the horses are
tired an' we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.' Then, after
some jawing, they moved on."
"An' they won't come back," Jake commented on the report. "Not so long
as they kin find something that looks easier."
Which was only half of the truth!