NOBODY knew his history--they of the Junta least of all. He was their
“little mystery,” their “big patriot,” and in his way he worked as
hard for the coming Mexican Revolution as did they. They were tardy in
recognizing this, for not one of the Junta liked him. The day he first
drifted into their crowded, busy rooms, they all suspected him of being
a spy--one of the bought tools of the Diaz secret service. Too many of
the comrades were in civil an military prisons scattered over the United
States, and others of them, in irons, were even then being taken across
the border to be lined up against adobe walls and shot.
At the first sight the boy did not impress them favorably. Boy he was,
not more than eighteen and not over large for his years. He announced
that he was Felipe Rivera, and that it was his wish to work for the
Revolution. That was all--not a wasted word, no further explanation. He
stood waiting. There was no smile on his lips, no geniality in his eyes.
Big dashing Paulino Vera felt an inward shudder. Here was something
forbidding, terrible, inscrutable. There was something venomous and
snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They burned like cold fire, as with
a vast, concentrated bitterness. He flashed them from the faces of
the conspirators to the typewriter which little Mrs. Sethby was
industriously operating. His eyes rested on hers but an instant--she
had chanced to look up--and she, too, sensed the nameless something that
made her pause. She was compelled to read back in order to regain the
swing of the letter she was writing.
Paulino Vera looked questioningly at Arrellano and Ramos, and
questioningly they looked back and to each other. The indecision of
doubt brooded in their eyes. This slender boy was the Unknown, vested
with all the menace of the Unknown. He was unrecognizable, something
quite beyond the ken of honest, ordinary revolutionists whose fiercest
hatred for Diaz and his tyranny after all was only that of honest and
ordinary patriots. Here was something else, they knew not what. But
Vera, always the most impulsive, the quickest to act, stepped into the
breach.
“Very well,” he said coldly. “You say you want to work for the
Revolution. Take off your coat. Hang it over there. I will show you,
come--where are the buckets and cloths. The floor is dirty. You will
begin by scrubbing it, and by scrubbing the floors of the other rooms.
The spittoons need to be cleaned. Then there are the windows.”
“Is it for the Revolution?” the boy asked.
“It is for the Revolution,” Vera answered.
Rivera looked cold suspicion at all of them, then proceeded to take off
his coat.
“It is well,” he said.
And nothing more. Day after day he came to his work--sweeping,
scrubbing, cleaning. He emptied the ashes from the stoves, brought up
the coal and kindling, and lighted the fires before the most energetic
one of them was at his desk.
“Can I sleep here?” he asked once.
Ah, ha! So that was it--the hand of Diaz showing through! To sleep in
the rooms of the Junta meant access to their secrets, to the lists of
names, to the addresses of comrades down on Mexican soil. The request
was denied, and Rivera never spoke of it again. He slept they knew not
where, and ate they knew not where nor how. Once, Arrellano offered him
a couple of dollars. Rivera declined the money with a shake of the head.
When Vera joined in and tried to press it upon him, he said:
“I am working for the Revolution.”
It takes money to raise a modern revolution, and always the Junta was
pressed. The members starved and toiled, and the longest day was none
too long, and yet there were times when it appeared as if the Revolution
stood or fell on no more than the matter of a few dollars. Once, the
first time, when the rent of the house was two months behind and the
landlord was threatening dispossession, it was Felipe Rivera, the
scrub-boy in the poor, cheap clothes, worn and threadbare, who laid
sixty dollars in gold on May Sethby's desk. There were other times.
Three hundred letters, clicked out on the busy typewriters (appeals for
assistance, for sanctions from the organized labor groups, requests for
square news deals to the editors of newspapers, protests against the
high-handed treatment of revolutionists by the United States courts),
lay unmailed, awaiting postage. Vera's watch had disappeared--the
old-fashioned gold repeater that had been his father's. Likewise had
gone the plain gold band from May Setbby's third finger. Things were
desperate. Ramos and Arrellano pulled their long mustaches in despair.
The letters must go off, and the Post Office allowed no credit to
purchasers of stamps. Then it was that Rivera put on his hat and
went out. When he came back he laid a thousand two-cent stamps on May
Sethby's desk.
“I wonder if it is the cursed gold of Diaz?” said Vera to the comrades.
They elevated their brows and could not decide. And Felipe Rivera, the
scrubber for the Revolution, continued, as occasion arose, to lay down
gold and silver for the Junta's use.
And still they could not bring themselves to like him. They did not know
him. His ways were not theirs. He gave no confidences. He repelled all
probing. Youth that he was, they could never nerve themselves to dare to
question him.
“A great and lonely spirit, perhaps, I do not know, I do not know,”
Arrellano said helplessly.
“He is not human,” said Ramos.
“His soul has been seared,” said May Sethby. “Light and laughter have
been burned out of him. He is like one dead, and yet he is fearfully
alive.”
“He has been through hell,” said Vera. “No man could look like that who
has not been through hell--and he is only a boy.”
Yet they could not like him. He never talked, never inquired, never
suggested. He would stand listening, expressionless, a thing dead, save
for his eyes, coldly burning, while their talk of the Revolution ran
high and warm. From face to face and speaker to speaker his eyes
would turn, boring like gimlets of incandescent ice, disconcerting and
perturbing.
“He is no spy,” Vera confided to May Sethby. “He is a patriot--mark me,
the greatest patriot of us all. I know it, I feel it, here in my heart
and head I feel it. But him I know not at all.”
“He has a bad temper,” said May Sethby.
“I know,” said Vera, with a shudder. “He has looked at me with those
eyes of his. They do not love; they threaten; they are savage as a wild
tiger's. I know, if I should prove unfaithful to the Cause, that he
would kill me. He has no heart. He is pitiless as steel, keen and cold
as frost. He is like moonshine in a winter night when a man freezes to
death on some lonely mountain top. I am not afraid of Diaz and all his
killers; but this boy, of him am I afraid. I tell you true. I am afraid.
He is the breath of death.”
Yet Vera it was who persuaded the others to give the first trust
to Rivera. The line of communication between Los Angeles and Lower
California had broken down. Three of the comrades had dug their own
graves and been shot into them. Two more were United States prisoners
in Los Angeles. Juan Alvarado, the Federal commander, was a monster. All
their plans did he checkmate. They could no longer gain access to the
active revolutionists, and the incipient ones, in Lower California.
Young Rivera was given his instructions and dispatched south. When he
returned, the line of communication was reestablished, and Juan Alvarado
was dead. He had been found in bed, a knife hilt-deep in his breast.
This had exceeded Rivera's instructions, but they of the Junta knew the
times of his movements. They did not ask him. He said nothing. But they
looked at one another and conjectured.
“I have told you,” said Vera. “Diaz has more to fear from this youth
than from any man. He is implacable. He is the hand of God.”
The bad temper, mentioned by May Sethby, and sensed by them all,
was evidenced by physical proofs. Now he appeared with a cut lip,
a blackened cheek, or a swollen ear. It was patent that he brawled,
somewhere in that outside world where he ate and slept, gained money,
and moved in ways unknown to them. As the time passed, he had come to
set type for the little revolutionary sheet they published weekly. There
were occasions when he was unable to set type, when his knuckles were
bruised and battered, when his thumbs were injured and helpless, when
one arm or the other hung wearily at his side while his face was drawn
with unspoken pain.
“A wastrel,” said Arrellano.
“A frequenter of low places,” said Ramos.
“But where does he get the money?” Vera demanded. “Only to-day, just
now, have I learned that he paid the bill for white paper--one hundred
and forty dollars.”
“There are his absences,” said May Sethby. “He never explains them.”
“We should set a spy upon him,” Ramos propounded.
“I should not care to be that spy,” said Vera. “I fear you would never
see me again, save to bury me. He has a terrible passion. Not even God
would he permit to stand between him and the way of his passion.”
“I feel like a child before him,” Ramos confessed.
“To me he is power--he is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking
rattlesnake, the stinging centipede,” said Arrellano.
“He is the Revolution incarnate,” said Vera. “He is the flame and the
spirit of it, the insatiable cry for vengeance that makes no cry but
that slays noiselessly. He is a destroying angel in moving through the
still watches of the night.”
“I could weep over him,” said May Sethby. “He knows nobody. He hates
all people. Us he tolerates, for we are the way of his desire. He is
alone.... lonely.” Her voice broke in a half sob and there was dimness
in her eyes.
Rivera's ways and times were truly mysterious. There were periods when
they did not see him for a week at a time. Once, he was away a month.
These occasions were always capped by his return, when, without
advertisement or speech, he laid gold coins on May Sethby's desk. Again,
for days and weeks, he spent all his time with the Junta. And yet again,
for irregular periods, he would disappear through the heart of each day,
from early morning until late afternoon. At such times he came early and
remained late. Arrellano had found him at midnight, setting type with
fresh swollen knuckles, or mayhap it was his lip, new-split, that still
bled.