His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the
correspondent's name and commission. "Anybody else you wish to notify?"
The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then
he reached for the letter the correspondent handed.
"To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?"
The pen scratched Lee's name and address.
"Anything to send?"
"Nothing!"
"Very well, gentlemen!" His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his
handshake--the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. "I shall
observe your wishes--if possible. Well--" His shoulders rose again.
"Hasta luego! Till we meet again."
"A brave man in a weak place!" The correspondent rightfully placed him,
outside. "Now, Diogenes, for the front."
An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last
quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and
rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of
stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the
flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a
battery of French "threes" was spitting shrapnel with the feverish
energy of an angry cat.
Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists,
whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot
through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile
in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting
that flank.
Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were
to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in
a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista
positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the
ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would
strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping
through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.
Seizing the dead man's rifle, Bull stepped into his place.
It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would
have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment's
surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights
and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler
spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his
_vaqueros_ on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every
other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully
as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter
puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire,
grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the
dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction.
"Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he'll soon get over it."
Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and
began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The
spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling
rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of
the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture
of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy.
A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her
heels patting out _tortillas_ while she gossiped with another girl, in
complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was
indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her
coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face
convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while
screaming frightful curses.
"Damned dogs of Carranzistas!" she finished with her last, spent breath.
"Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with
tails between the legs!"
Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The
fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face.
"Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my
first prisoner."
Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while
making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards
separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that
burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift,
shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its
mark; she collapsed in a heap.
Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent's
yell: "Come back, you fool! She's dead! shot through the head!" he ran
out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall.
As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept
space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was
not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a
while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes
flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic
curses at the distant line.
"Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day
shall be my lover!"
"And here comes he that will do it!" The man on Bull's left touched his
shoulder.
Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling
gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great
black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance
the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers,
rifle-fire, booming guns.
"It's Valles!"
As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black
horse launched out and shot up the hill.
"Make way, hombres, for the guns!"
Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken
vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the
correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension
flashed in his hot eyes.
"Ole, compañero!" His wave of the hand took in all. "Hot work! but
nothing to that which is to come. Mira!"
Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of
dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank.
"Carranzista cavalry! But--look again!"
Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry,
brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the
west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass.
Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching
as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles
shook his fist at the distant dust.
"Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!"
The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse
with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling
bullets, he directed their emplacement. "To the left, hombres! a little
more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!" The last one set, he
rasped out a last command: "Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!" Then
followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.
"He bears a charmed life!" The man next Bull spoke again. "Out of a
hundred battles he has come with never a hurt." He added, with a wink,
"An' it was not always from his front the bullets came."
Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit
with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The
artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up
his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back,
the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to
the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.
"What are you trying to do?"
"Justice on that grinning devil."
"Good job no one saw you." A quick glance around showed the artillerymen
and revolutionists absorbed in their own work "Do you know what they
would have done to both of us--skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or
something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don't care yourself, just
think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, 'Having
toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.'"
"I hadn't thought of that. But if I'd been alone--"
He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to
his loophole.
On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the
massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown
blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and
sabers, _machetes_, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then
the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which,
like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs.
Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that
other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud
rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.
"Weekes was wrong!" It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell.
"He's smashed 'em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!" But as the
cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, "That is, if
Valles stops and comes back."
When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved
into criticism. "Whatever is he thinking of? There he's gone with all
the cavalry and left his flank exposed!"
At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with
greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand
drums. Answering the "threes," shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking
curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next
wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next
to Bull collapsed without a groan.
Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps
where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill
came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns.
"Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of
their guns! They've drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they'll
flank us! My God! there they come!"
From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of
smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men.
He leaped and caught Bull's arm.
"Come on! Let's get while we can!"
They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild,
maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head.
"Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself."
"Man! Valles is defeated!" The other seized and shook him. "Do you know
what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico.
If you won't consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to
leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against
Americans?"
Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and
smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells,
there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills;
then the feel of Lee's soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten,
the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.
"Come on!"
Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden
their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain
of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and
low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the
dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his
jokes.
"Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!" he gasped. "Gosh! but that
chaparral is going faster the other way!"
A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that
dire moment he remained his cheerful self.
"Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they'd ever get
me. Here's my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck
'em on to the wires. Now, _run like hell_!"
And Bull did "run like hell"--with the correspondent across his
shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded
out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the
knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief
twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his
saddle, arms around his horse's neck, he headed for the town.
As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging
yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches.
Followed the terrible roar of a rout--yells, shrieks, curses, victorious
shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it
caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated
above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked
with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted
adobe streets to the railroad yards.
There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains
and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the
hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell,
then--the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass
be-spattered with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before,
sentient human beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with
Valles's own guns.
"We're farther up!" the correspondent whispered through white, drawn
lips. "We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main
line to insure our getaway."
He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile.
"That's queer. It stood about here, yet I don't see the placards.
Perhaps we have overshot."
But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car
ahead. "Here, señores! This way!"
Just then, too, the door rolled back and the "dean" looked out. "Hurry
up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales
Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick
sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out.
We're traveling, for the present, incognito. You're hurt! Here, you
fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!"
After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the "dean" turned to
Bull. "That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning,
looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the
Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants."
But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome
accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang,
and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine's tug.