"No, señor, 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, passing into the grass 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 hoarse 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 clusters, 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
passion 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 passing of the first convulsion.
"Aie!... Aie!" Soon she began to speak. "Aie! the poor señora ... and
the niña ... where were they? The mercy of God? 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, señor." 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 señora
was at breakfast with the niña 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, señor, 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, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.'
Thus she spoke them.
"Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum 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
sanctities 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 appetites. 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 señorita 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 señora's bitter
cry. 'For the sake of your mothers, señores!' 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 hell! 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 snatched 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
God! 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, señor.
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 God? Pity of the Virgin? Indeed, where were they? Where, in
a universe ruled by a just God, 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 passed into the original elements; and, wild man of the plains
that he was, born of free spaces, 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!
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 pass 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.