After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the
sage-brush while the _revueltoso_ engine approached. With a roar it came
at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead.
For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette
against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and
swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of
smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on
spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared
past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of
dust.
Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while
they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away.
"We'll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours," he
said. "We kain't afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we'll have to travel
at night an' hide up during the day--unless we chance on a _rancho_
where we kin steal horses! Of course, it's terrible on you, Missy. But
if you kin stan' it for a little longer--" He stopped as Lee shook, as
he thought, with a sob.
It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and
trouble. "It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own,
should have to turn rustler." With a little mothering pat that somehow
reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her
fostering care, she added: "Don't worry about me. If I could only make
you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a
rifle. I can at least carry something."
But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and
provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding
through sage, _palo verde_, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure
hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they
obstinately refused--and it was well that they did. When Bull called a
halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and
swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock.
"Don't dare to move," he ordered, "till I get you something to eat."
They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt
meat. But after "Alberto" cut off the engine Gordon had "requisitioned"
his _tortillas_ and chile stew--plenty for three. Once again Lee wished
she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct
still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery _tortillas_ his
head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the
engine soot off his face.
Neither did Bull escape. "There!" Bestowing a little, loving box on
Gordon's ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and
washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child.
Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction.
"Well, you're _half_-clean, anyway."
Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken
his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew
from Bull a grave smile. "Sleep, now, you kids," he admonished them.
"Two hours an' we'll have to be moving again."
"You, too!" Lee insisted.
Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at
once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower
rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet.
Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding
their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles
to the southward Jake was playing his last lone "hand." He was in Bull's
mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with
calcium red.
"Something doing there." Though he could have no accurate knowledge,
Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. "Bet you Jake had a
finger in it."
Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and
provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she
needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused
in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open.
Yet she made light of it. "My feet seem to belong to some one else. All
the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!"
It was the barbed thorn of a _nopal_, which hurt worse coming out than
it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, "cat's claws" and
"crucifixion thorns" lay everywhere in prickly ambush. "Spanish bayonet"
scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would
rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open
among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of
the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In
daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking.
When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once;
in five seconds were fast asleep.
This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed
on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to
the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first
pale lights.
Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and
scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee,
pale, tired, limping, but cheerful.
She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. "To
be sure! We'll have all day to rest."
"I didn't mean, though, for you to walk no more." Stooping suddenly, he
rose with her sitting on his shoulder.
"Your weight ain't no more to me than a fly," he replied to her protest;
and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these
brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a _mesa_ that
raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the
boulders and sage.
"'Tain't safe to go on," he said, setting her down. "You'd think, to
look around, there wasn't a living thing within a hundred thousand
miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without
being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard.
Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding
from the _rurales_; but there's always some one. We'll stop while it's
safe."
He was right. Already they had been seen--by a _peon_ who had been
driven by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret
spring from _revueltoso_ lovers. But the tale of their passing did not
go forth by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of
their burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away
"Alberto," the engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop
of _revueltosos_ he had guided up the line.
"Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet?
These little ones no larger than a child's are those of the woman."
"A white girl, thou sayest?" the leader asked.
"Si, señor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man's
riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate
for thee."
"There should be _some_ pay." The _capitan_ went on, with a vile oath.
"Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us;
si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs
come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt
that gringo. But he goes out like"--he blew out the match with which he
was lighting his cigarette--"this! and takes a hundred more of us with
him. Bueno!" His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. "They
are gone, our compañeros, but we shall meet again--in hell. But these
others, the girl and her men, shall pay."
At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of
which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to
the north and east as they went, they approached Bull's limestone castle
just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon.
After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a
rough _ramada_ of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting
in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the _revueltoso_
line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust
clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet
let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so
carefully that Lee slept on.
"There ain't many of 'em," he whispered. "We must make 'em sick at the
first shooting. I'm going to slip along the ridge to get that second
man. Let yourn come right to the foot of the bluff. Wait till you kin
see his eyes; then bust him where he's biggest."
Yesterday's fighting had absorbed most of Gordon's thrills. But now, as
he lay looking down at the _revueltoso_ coming on a little, ambling jog,
he sustained a queer revulsion. Yesterday he had lain and loaded and
fired as steadily as any of the Three. But, somehow, this seemed
different--as different as a duel from a cavalry charge. His Anglo-Saxon
instinct for fair play revolted at this ambushing of a single man. When,
pausing at the foot of the bluff, the fellow looked up Gordon
experienced an absurd impulse to rise and shoot from the shoulder after
fair warning.
But while he hesitated Lee turned in her sleep and sighed. It stiffened
him, that gentle sigh. A glance along the ridge showed Bull sighting
from behind a rock. Drawing his own bead, he fired.
At the crack of the rifle Lee slid from under the _ramada_, startled and
wide-eyed, in time to see the man collapse in the saddle, then slide
headlong to the ground. Bull's man was also down, and as the riderless
horses threw up their heads and galloped away the dust clouds along the
sage whirled back and combined half a mile away.
By that time Bull had returned, and as they moved on back he pointed at
a gap in a low range that drew its jagged line across the horizon. "That
is the Tejon Pass--about ten miles away. The American border is on'y
twelve beyond. Mexicans never fight in the dark. If we kin hold 'em till
then we'll have all night to climb through the Pass."
They made a good gain while the _revueltosos_ were recovering from that
first sharp lesson. By the time the latter had described a wide circle
around the bluff Bull had taken up a second position on a smaller
elevation, and held it while Lee and Gordon retired still further.
Thus began a repetition of the previous day's fighting--with this
disadvantage, lacking horses in open country devoid of the limestone
ridges that afforded natural barriers, and surrounded most of the time
with tall sagebrush, they had to keep up a constant fire, searching the
brush with their bullets to keep the _revueltosos_ from crawling up on
them. It was hot work, slow work, laborious work, growing all the time
more dangerous, for, following up in a wide circle, the _revueltosos_
brought its ends around until, just before sundown, a shot fired
directly from their rear informed Bull that their investure was
complete.
It was not, however, for long. While Gordon threw bullets around the
circle, checking its constriction, Bull crept through the sage till he
sighted, at last, a light smoke puff issuing from a bush. He aimed into
the middle of it and, following the crack of his rifle, a man leaped up,
then fell forward.
So began again the retreats which continued while the lowering sun set
the Tejon range on fire above a desert of lavender and purple. At dusk a
huge, flat moon rose and hung like a polished shield on the horizon's
dark wall. Sailing on up, it flooded the desert with quiet radiance,
supplying light for their tired feet. As they journeyed the dim mass of
the range rose higher and higher till it blotted out the stars. Shortly
thereafter they entered the Pass.
From its mouth a mule path wound up between high rocky walls, then fell,
hours later, into a narrow valley, where they found a spring and pool,
at which they refilled their water-bag. It was hard to leave. But after
they had drunk and washed the dust from their faces Bull hoisted Lee on
his shoulder again; with tireless strength carried her on up the trail
to a plateau almost at the height of land that overlooked the valley. So
tired was she Gordon had to keep her awake while she ate the dole of
crackers and salt meat, the last of their provisions. Then, gathering
her to him, he fell, with her, into dreamless sleep.
Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his
ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he
closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was
accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his
thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything,
it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal
perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed
down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the
hour.
Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in
the curve of Gordon's arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces
turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl's
color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under
the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad,
low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier
mold of Gordon's features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose,
forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw,
supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the
other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in
spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long
limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly.
In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower.
The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of
Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and
earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that
age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft
dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past
loves enveloped them sleeping there.
"Jes' naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get
such a pair."
Bull's murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world
to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of
health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to
degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the
world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a
thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature's intent so
completely fulfilled.
To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and
to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at
Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the _portales_ many a
time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the
Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that
tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself
and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under
Bull's eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter
raised the echoes in the _patio_. Now they were young men and women! He
saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine
young fellows come in to woo and win Lee's girls.
With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under
forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by
the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship
into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships
thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of
iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee's children, always strong,
always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In
legislature, church, halls of state, they took place--at first a few
white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race
drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors,
legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its
neighbor across the Rio Grande.
It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately
consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in
the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull's
gaze came back to them.
Surely they were "fit," the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long
process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained
children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste
the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought
about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and
complete. "Fit," morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the
term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more
ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the "fit" of ten
thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on
their lives.
It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it--and died; as Jake had
sworn to it--and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation,
heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the
cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of
heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only
enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon's, he had to empty
his own.
"Won't need it, anyway."
Muttering it, he sent a satisfied glance around the plateau. All last
evening while they were climbing over the first heights into the valley,
then on up here, he had searched for just such a place.
"No, I won't need it."
Repeating it, he kneeled beside the sleepers and looked closely into
Lee's face, pale from exhaustion, but spirited as ever, and as sweet. He
knew it for the last time--just as Sliver had known it; as Jake. Like
Sliver, he would have loved to say farewell. But just as Sliver had
repressed the desire to save her pain so Bull sealed his self-denial
with a heavy shake of the head.
"Twould on'y break them up an' do me no good."
Very gently he woke up Gordon. "Don't wake her till I'm through telling.
It will soon be daylight. With it they'll be on top of us again. The
border's over there--on'y a few miles." With heavy steadiness he went on
with the last fine lie: "I'm keeping the bulk of the ammunition, an'
I'll stay here, for a whiles, to hold them off. But don't you wait for
me. She's well rested now; so keep going and going till you've crossed."
Reaching up, Gordon took Bull's hand in a strong grip. "I suppose
there's no use asking you to let me stay?"
"No." Bull shook his head. "An' if I would--she wouldn't! Now wake her
up."
Sleep had revived her wonderfully. She chatted quite cheerfully while
making their last small arrangements. All day yesterday Bull had covered
their retreats, and there was nothing unusual in his staying behind. Yet
when, looking back as she and Gordon moved off, she saw Bull standing
there, perhaps with some presentiment she ran hastily back.
"Oh, won't you come?" she pleaded.
"Sure, come on!" Gordon seconded her plea. "We can fight and run like
yesterday."
"Yes, _do_?" Through the dusk her eyes, distended with fear for him,
shone big and black in the dim whiteness of her face. In her dread
earnestness she seized his arm; tried to pull him along. "Oh, _won't_
you come? I'm _so_ afraid. First it was Sliver, then Jake, now you. I'm
dreadfully afraid that something has happened to them--will happen to
you. And if it did--oh, what should I do? What _shall_ I do?"
Her pallid face, earnest pleading, shook Bull like a leaf. For almost a
year now her slightest wish had been his law. If he had succeeded in
holding up his end in Torreon, to use his own phrase, "had walked in an'
come out again, sober, like a man," he might have given in; gone on in
her service. But, besides the deadly hurt that had slain in him the
desire for life, he knew himself; as Sliver had known himself; as Jake.
She was crying now, head bowed on his arm, and small wonder. Through
events that had been enough to shatter nerves of iron she had borne
herself like a man. Even now she sobbed quietly, doing her best to
restrain her tears. "There! there!" Gathering her to him, Bull patted
her back gently, as though she had been a grieving child. "There! there!
In a few hours we'll be over the border, and 'twon't be long afore we'll
be back at Arboles, you an' Gordon an' me an' Sliver an' Jake." He said
more; drew a picture of them all in the full swing of the old life.
Then, with an assumption of cheerfulness that was remarkable because of
the pain it covered, he concluded: "So don't bother about me. There's
less risk here than in any of the stan's we made in the last three days.
I've got 'em all down below me an' there's on'y this trail. If they try
to come on, it 'ull be like shooting turkeys for a raffle. I'll hold 'em
jest for a whiles, then ketch up afore you reach the border. So run
along."
"You're sure?"
"Sure!" He had to swallow his heart to say it.
"Remember," she called back, moving away, "I'll be on pins and needles
till you come."
Strongly, with an accent she was afterward to remember, he made answer.
"I won't be here long."
Till their dim figures vanished he watched them go. Then, empty rifle in
hand, he turned his face to the foe.