FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
It was one of those days when everything goes wrong, and it fell on
Friday the thirteenth.
Three days earlier, on reaching Globe, we learned we could not take the
direct road to Santa Fe without chartering a steamer to ferry us across
the untamed Gila. Most roads in Arizona are amphibious; to be ready for
all emergencies, a motor traveling in that region of surprises should
be equipped with skates, snow-shoes and web-feet. As our chosen road
lay under some eight feet of river, we were obliged to make a slight
detour of five hundred miles, or half the distance from Boston to
Chicago. So we retraced the dizzy Winkleman trail, far less dizzy since
we had become indifferent to tight-rope performances, passed through
Tucson without attracting attention from the Sheriff of Pima County,
and were rewarded for our digression by a sunset drive over the famous
Tucson-Bisbee route, where a perfect road, built by convict labor,
combined with perfect scenery to make our crossing of the Continental
Divide for the dozenth time an event.
There are about as many Continental Divides in the West as beds
in which Washington slept in the East. I first crossed the Divide
somewhere up in Montana, and thinking it the only one of its kind, I
was properly thrilled. But later I met another in Wyoming, and in the
Southwest they seemed to crop up everywhere.
We were soon glad chance had sent us over the route we had discarded
when we first entered Arizona. It was a mellow, gracious loveliness we
passed, looking down from the top of the world on fields of silvery
pampas, on stretches of velvet-brown grazing country, misted over with
moon-white and sun-yellow poppies, and patches of wild heliotrope
whose intoxicating scent tempted us to frequent stops. Then on again
to overlook a magnificence of blue and ochre canyons, down which we
swooped and circled into Bisbee.
Many-terraced as a Cornish village, Bisbee straddles a canyon and
climbs two mountains in its effort to accommodate the workers who
swarm its tortuous streets, and spend their days in its huge copper
mines. When Bisbee finds a mountain in its way, down goes the mountain,
carried off by great steam shovels working day and night. But always
beyond, another ring of hills holds her prisoner. In the town’s center
lies a tiny, shut-in square into which streets of various levels
trickle. Here at any day or any hour, agitators of one sort or another
violently harangue small groups. There is always at this spot an air
of unexploded tenseness. No wonder! Precious minerals imprisoned
by Nature,--machinery fighting Mother Earth,--labor resisting
capital,--conservatism against lawless radicalism,--greed against
greed,--all braced to hold their own and push the other down; all pent
in by the enclosing hills, and pressed down to the narrow confines of
the little Plaza. No wonder the steam from these conflicting forces has
at times blown the lid into the air.
From this Plaza, during the war, gathered the citizens of Bisbee,
and escorted to the Mexican border certain obstructionists claiming
to be striking in the cause of labor. The suddenness of their taking
off has been criticized, but its effectiveness was admirable. In the
informality of the grim-purposed patriots who acted as body-guards on
that dusty march south, one sees the old West, which emerged into law
and order through similar bands of exasperated citizens.
Friday the thirteenth, the date of our own exit from that picturesque
and turbulent town, opened inauspiciously. A flat tire, incurred
overnight, caused an hour’s delay at the start. While we breakfasted at
the Copper Queen, it again lost courage, and we had no choice but to
thump downhill to the garage, near the great Copper Queen mine which
daily levels mountains and fills up valleys. But our spare tire was
found to be locked, and the key was in one of our seven suitcases.
All work ceased till by a miracle of memory we recalled that the key
was in a coat pocket, the coat was in a suitcase, the suitcase in the
bottom of the trunk,--but where was the trunk key? More delay while
we both searched our overflowing handbags,--and nothing embarrasses a
woman more than to have half a dozen men watch her futile dives into
her handbag. At last it appeared, and in due time, when we had wrestled
like born baggage-smashers with the heavy suitcases, opened the bottom
one and found the key, repacked the suitcase, put it back, lifted the
other four on top, locked the trunk, and replaced the other baggage,
we unlocked the spare tire. It did not budge from the rim. Earlier
that luckless morning, I had backed into an unexpected telegraph pole,
jamming the spare tire braces out of shape. So the garage men went back
and forth on futile errands, as garagemen will, picking tools up and
dropping them again with an air of satisfied achievement. Finally a
young Samson came to the rescue, bending the tire into place with his
bare hands, and after that they took only an hour to change the tires.
With the sun high in front of us, we drove through the smoke and fumes
of the mines, past pretty suburbs, into the open plateau leading to
Douglas. We expected to be in Deming that night.
The mountains and canyons of yesterday subsided into a broad plain,
with a poplar-bordered canal trickling prettily through it. At noon we
sighted Douglas, a city of smoke-stacks simmering in a fog of coal gas.
A once-good macadam road wound into an unsightly group of smelters and
huge slag heaps,--the usual backdoor entrance of a Western town,--and
suddenly reformed into a main street, imposing with buildings so
new they looked ill at ease among the old-settler lunch shacks and
ex-saloons. Side streets beginning bravely from the new electric light
pillars, became disheartened at the second block, and were smothered in
sand at the third.
To crown a banal hobby with the height of banality, I have for years
amused myself wherever I may be by collecting postcards of Main Street
looking South, or North, depending on the location of the public
library and the fire station. Every orthodox postcard artist begins
with Main Street. An extra charm to Main Street looking South in
Douglas lay in its crossing the border and fizzling out into Mexico.
Each time we had skirted the border, Mexico had beckoned alluringly,
tempting us to discover what lay behind her drop curtain of monotonous
blue and brown.
A little band of Mexican Indians, clad in the rainbow, and making big
eyes at the wonders of this gringo metropolis, staged a gaudy prologue.
“They say you can’t get into Mexico without a passport,” mused Toby.
“We might as well find out and be done with it,” said I.
A half mile led us to a row of government tents, followed by several
buildings,--the first a low, wooden house, the second a neat, almost
imposing two-story brick affair. Beyond was a smaller group, which we
decided was the Mexican customs-house.
A long man untangled himself from a couple of porch chairs, and
sauntered out to the road, as we whizzed past the first cottage. He
shouted something and held up his hand, but we failed to catch what he
said. A moment later we reached the fine looking brick house. A swarm
of dark-complexioned gentlemen speaking an excitable language rushed
out and surrounded our car. Toby gave a sigh of satisfaction.
“They said you couldn’t get in without a passport,” said she.
We were in Mexico. We could gather so much from the dazed attitude of
the U. S. official, who stood enveloped in our dust, staring after us,
but still more from the flood of questions, increasingly insistent,
which came from the bandit’s chorus surrounding us. They seemed to be
asking for something,--possibly our passports. Looking ahead, Mexico
didn’t seem worth our while. We saw only bare brown hills, sand and
cactus. Perhaps, like Toby’s namesake, we had better leave before being
kicked out. I displayed our camera.
“Take a picture? Turn round? Go back?” said I in purest Mexican.
The bandit’s chorus gathered in an interested if puzzled group about
the camera, and looked as if they were waiting for me to do a trick
proving that the hand is quicker than the eye. After a few repetitions,
aided by liberal gestures, they got our meaning and laughed, showing
dazzling sets of teeth.
“Take _your_ pictures?” we added, at this sign of clemency. The Latin
in them rejoiced at our tribute to their beauty. Two senoritas coming
all the way from the Estados Unidos, passportless, braving the wrath
of Carranza entirely because the gringoes were not handsome enough to
snap! They straightened their uniforms, and curled their mustaches and
flashed their teeth so brilliantly that Toby had to use the smallest
diaphragm of her kodak. Before they could unpose themselves, we were
back in the United States. They started after, as if to assess us for
ransom, or something, but too late.
The U. S. official met us. “Why didn’t you stop when I signaled?”
“We didn’t see you. We thought the brick building was the United States
customs,--it’s so much grander than yours.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” he said. “They could a held you there for
months, confiscated your baggage, and made things pretty unpleasant
generally. They’re doing it all the time, under the name of official
business. I tell you, I was scared when I saw you go through there.”
Grateful to him for taking this humane view rather than arresting us,
we said good-by and went our way, exhilarated at having triumphed over
the custom departments of two nations in one short hour. It offset the
morning’s gloom, and the two horrible sandwiches (fried egg) with which
Douglas had affronted our digestions.
At three o’clock we reached Rodeo, which means “round-up.” We should
have been there at ten. The town faced the desert, and seemed
permanently depressed at its outlook. It contained a few Mexican
shanties, a garage and general store, and a poison-green architectural
crime labeled “Rooms,” surrounded by a field reeking with dead cattle.
Even our Optimist, when he laid out our route, had exclaimed, “If your
night’s stop is Rodeo, Lord help you!” The next town, Deming, lay a
hundred miles beyond, with no settlement between. We looked once at the
hotel, bought gas at fifty cents the gallon, and pushed on.
Whether we would reach Deming that night, we had no idea. Nearly a day,
as desert travel goes, lay between us and food, drink and shelter. We
had an orange apiece, and our folding tent, stove and lantern. We had a
guidebook which, to escape a libel suit, I shall call “Keyes’ Good Road
Book,” though it was neither a good road-book nor a good-road book.
We had an abounding faith in guardian angels. Lastly, we had Toby’s
peculiar gift at reading guide-books, whereby she selects a page at
random, regardless of our route, telescopes paragraphs together, skips
a line here and there, and finishes in another state.
For this reason, as I pointed out with some heat, we took a road
which led fourteen jolty miles out of our way. It came out that Toby
had been reading the Colorado section. So chastened was she by this
misadventure that at the next doubtful corner, where a windmill marked
two forks, she kept her nose glued to the page and read with meticulous
faithfulness, “Pass wind-mill to the left.”
Now the left led through a muddy water-hole, while an excellent road
apparently trailed to the right of the windmill.
“Left?” I inquired, with pointed skepticism, “or right?”
She peeked again into the guidebook, and answered firmly, “Left!”
Toby was right for once, but she had chosen the moment to be right when
the guidebook was wrong, which entirely canceled her score. I drove
into the chuck-hole,--and stayed there. The hole was V shaped, two feet
deep at the point, and shelved so steeply that our spare tires made a
barrier against its edge when we tried to back out. We were following
Horace Greeley’s advice literally. We had gone West, and now we were
settling down with the country. We settled to our running board, then
to our hubs, and then over them. It was the more exasperating because
our car was immersed in the only water hole within a hundred miles.
We got out and surveyed the road to the right. It proved to be an
excellent detour, which a few yards further joined the left fork. This
was the last straw. I left Toby, who was trying to redeem her criminal
rectitude by busying herself with the jack, and went out hatless into
the scorching desert, like a Robert Hichens heroine. My objective was
not Oblivion, but the crossroads two miles back, where with luck I
might still hail a passing car.
Though the sun was low, the heat drove down scorchingly. Only the
necktie I tied about my forehead saved me from sunstroke. It was
bright green, and must have made me look like an Apache; I had the
consciousness of being appropriately garbed. At the crossroad half an
hour’s wait brought no car to the rescue. Night was too near for anyone
with commonsense to start across that uncharted waste. Obviously I
could not wait longer, leaving poor Toby to fish disconsolately, as I
had last glimpsed her, in the mud. Obviously, too, if I returned nobody
would know of our plight, and I should have my four-mile walk for
nothing.
Looking aimlessly for help in this dilemma, my eye caught a scrap of
a poster on a fence rail, which savagely and in minute pieces, I tore
down and scattered to the desert. The poster read, “Keyes’ Good Road
Book. It Takes You Where You Want to Go.”
Heaven knows neither I nor Toby, with all her faults, _wanted_ to land
in that chuck-hole. After I tore the poster, I wished I had saved it to
inscribe a message to the passerby. “Well, take your medicine,” thought
I. “You have no right to get into any situation you can’t get out of.
Think of David Balfour and Admirable Crichton and Swiss Family Robinson
and Robinson Crusoe. What, for instance, would Robinson Crusoe do?”
Undoubtedly he would have found a way out. I only had to think
constructively, putting myself in his place. The thought alone was
stimulating. Gifted with omniscience in hydrostatics and mechanics, he
would probably have skinned a few dead cattle, with which the desert
reeked, made a rope, fastened it about the car’s body, looped it over
the windmill, and hoisted it free,--and been half way to Deming by
this time. As for that copycat Mrs. Swiss Family Robinson, she would
certainly have produced a pull-me-out from her insufferable workbag.
How would Crusoe have left a message without pencil or paper? I knew.
Collecting handfuls of large white stones,--white, because darkness was
imminent, I arranged them at the crossroads in letters two feet long,
reading,
2 MI.
WINDMILL
HELP!
I added an arrow to point the direction. And then, to make sure that
my sign was noticed, I placed a few sharp stones in the ruts. These
would probably puncture his tire, and in looking for the cause, he
would observe our appeal and come to our rescue. It took a long while
to collect enough white stones to make the sign, but when I had
finished I felt much elated, and more kindly toward Toby for reading
the guide book right when she should have read it wrong. It was cooler
walking back, though my tongue was swollen with thirst. Our canteen
had displayed a leak only yesterday, and we had tossed it into the
sagebrush.
At the windmill I found the car partly jacked up, so that she careened
drunkenly to one side, but her right dashboard was now above water.
Toby’s skirt was caked with mud, and her shoes and stockings plastered
with it. She seemed depressed. She explained she had slipped trying to
balance on a plank, and had fallen in the chuck-hole.
“This pool is full of dead cattle,” she said, dolefully. “I just put my
finger in something’s eye.”
About to take off shoes and stockings and wade into the pool, something
gave me pause. Gingerly we stood on the brink, and poked planks where
the mud was thickest, in the forlorn hope of making a stable bottom.
Alas, they only sank, and vexed us by protruding on end whenever we
tried to back the old lady. We knew the first step was to jack the
rear wheels, but while we raised one wheel, the other sank so deep in
the mud that we could get neither plank nor jack under it. After many
embittered attempts we gave it up, and tried placing the jack under
the springs. It worked beautifully; in a few seconds the body of the
car was a foot higher, and seemed willing to continue her soaring
indefinitely. We took turns jacking; still she rose. We were greatly
encouraged. After several minutes Toby said, “The jack’s at the top
notch,--what shall I do next?”
It was so easy we might have guessed there was a catch somewhere. To
our astonishment we discovered that in rising, the body of the car
had not taken the wheels with it. Two feet of daylight gaped between
mudguard and wheels. A moment more, and the two would have parted
company forever. Jacking is easy in theory, or in a garage, but the
trouble with the outdoor art is that the car usually lands in a
position where it has to be jacked up in order to get planks under
it in order to jack it up. “Pou sto,” said Archimedes, defining our
dilemma succinctly.
New Mexico boasts an inhabitant to every eight square miles, but the
member for our district continued to ignore our invasion of his realm.
Two fried egg sandwiches, consumed that noon, was--or were--our only
sustenance that day. We were so hungry we sounded hollow to the touch.
Our mouths felt like flannel, and our throats burned with thirst. Not
forty feet away a stream of pure water ran from the windmill. But it
ran from a slippery lead pipe which extended a dozen feet over a
reservoir. The water was there, but we could not get at it without a
plunge bath. Muddy and weary, we worked on without courage.
At sundown, from one of the other squares appeared the Inhabitant on
horseback, driving some cows to our cattle-hole. He was a youth of
sixteen, running mostly to adenoids and Adam’s apple, which worked
agitatedly at sight of us, but his eyelashes any beauty specialist
would envy. As to his voice, the strain of making it reach across eight
miles to the next Inhabitant had exhausted it, or perhaps embarrassment
silenced him; we could not get a word out of him till he had watered
his cattle and started away. Then emboldened by having his back safely
to us, he shouted that at a house, a “coupla miles southeast,” we might
find a team,--and vanished into nowhere.
Toby had by this time managed to crawl out on the lead pipe, and after
gyrations fascinating to watch, captured a pail of water. Drinking
eagerly, we set out for the house the Inhabitant indicated, with the
pail in our hands to guard against future thirst. Sunset was making
transparent the low mountain range skirting our valley, when we left.
The sand filled our shoes, and the persistent “devil’s claw,” zealous
to propagate its kind, clung to our feet with a desperate grip. Our
pail became heavy, but we dared not empty it. At last we reached the
ranch. A half-starved dog sprang out eagerly to meet us. The house was
deserted; there were no teams to pull us out, nor any food to give the
poor, famishing beast. He watched us leave, with a hurt, baffled look
in his brown eyes, as if patiently marveling at the inhumanity of man.
From the ranch, we glimpsed another house, a mile further away, and
again we started hopefully for it, while a horned moon circled up a
pink sky. The desert from a barren, ugly waste was become unbelievably
lovely in the transfiguring twilight.
The crescent moon brought us no luck, for we saw it over our left
shoulders. It was still Friday the Thirteenth. The second house, even
to the hungry dog, duplicated the first. It stood dismantled and
deserted. We saw nothing ahead but a ten mile tramp to Rodeo in the
dark, the poison green hotel, and “Lord help us!” whatever that meant.
Our flashlight was in the car. To return for it meant three more weary
miles. Toby was for risking the road without it, but my sixth sense
warned me to return, and I persuaded her to this course. As we crossed
the desert the dim shape of our marooned machine loomed up in the dusk.
And beside it--
“Another mirage!”
“Where?” asked weary Toby, indifferently. At this moment the wonders of
Nature meant nothing to her.
“There seem to be two cars,--I can see them quite plainly.”
“There _are_ two cars,” said Toby, and we ran, the pail slopping water
on our feet.
With a broad grin on each face, two men watched us approach. They were
young; I judged them thirty and thirty-five. They stopped just short of
being armed to the teeth. Each wore a cartridge belt, and they shared
two rifles and a revolver. The older and the more moderately arsenaled,
looked like a parson. The younger wore a tan beaver sombrero, of the
velvety, thirty-dollar kind proclaiming its owner a cow-puncher,
an old-timer, a hard boiled egg who doesn’t care who knows it. His
shirt was of apple-green flannel, his small, high boots festooned
with stitching and escalloped with colored leather like a Cuban taxi,
his purple neckerchief was knotted with a ring carved from ox-bone,
and from his cartridge belt in a carved leather case hung the largest
revolver I ever saw. His generous silver spurs were cut in the shape of
spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field and
Sears-Roebuck combined never turned out a more indisputable _vachero_.
We greeted them with joy; their happy grins told us they would see us
through our difficulties. It was nine by the village clock of Rodeo, if
they had one, which I doubt. It was not the sort of town which would
have a clock, or even an Ingersoll.
“You girls nearly caught us pullin’ out,” Sears-Roebuck greeted us. “We
figured how the feller who owned this car would be cussin’ mad, and we
was plannin’ to stick around to hear his language, an’ then we seen
women’s things in the seat, so we jest had our supper here, while we
waited for you.”
It never would have happened east of Chicago. They had waited nearly
two hours that they might do us the favor of another hour’s hard work
in setting us on dry land again. They had been “making time” for El
Paso, and the delay spoiled a half day for them, but they did not
complain. They acted as if persuading our dinosaur from her nest of
mud were a most delightful joke,--on us, themselves and the car. They
did not regard what they were doing as a favor, but as their sole
business and recreation in life. In sheer high spirits, Biron, as
he speedily introduced himself,--the giddier of the two in dress and
deportment,--whooped, cleared the mud-hole in one leap, and pretended
to lassoo the inert machine. The other, smiling benevolently at his
antics, went steadily to the serious work of harnessing the car.
Toby made a jesting remark to Biron about the revolver hanging at his
belt, not from fear but as a pleasantry. Misunderstanding, he unslung
it instantly, and tossed it into his car.
“I don’t want that thing,” he elaborated, “it gets in my way.”
They got to work in earnest, with great speed and skill. Twice the
rope which they hitched to their car broke as we turned on our power.
Meanwhile the old lady churned herself deeper into the mud, skulls, and
shin-bones of the pool. After an hour’s work, with much racing of the
engine, and a Niagara of splashing mud which covered us all from head
to foot, she stirred, heaved over on one side, and groaning like seven
devils commanded to come out, lumbered to terra firma, looming beside
the pert wrecking car like Leviathan dug out with an hook.
After all, it was a glorious Thirteenth. No sensation is more
exhilarating than to be rescued from a mud-hole which seemed likely to
envelop one for life. Even the slender arc of the young moon, in that
clear air, poured a silver flood over the desert, now a mysterious
veil of luminous blue. The vibrant heat waves of day had risen and
twisted into the thin air, and frosty currents swept and freshened the
simmering earth. The elder, a slow-speaking chap from Tucson, gravely
filled our radiator from the reservoir, filled his canteen and offered
us a drink, and then asked us if we had eaten supper. We bravely
fibbed, with hunger gnawing within, not wishing to put ourselves
further in their debt. As they prepared to leave I was uncomfortably
reminded we had no breakfast for next morning, and no water, owing
to our canteenless state. They were our food and drink--and we were
letting them depart!
But I wanted to make sure what they would do next. In businesslike
fashion they started their car, then bade us a cordial good-by. They
made no hint toward continuing our acquaintance, nor asked our plans,
and even the merry Biron showed only an impersonal twinkle as he shook
hands. So I spoke, choosing between apple jelly for breakfast, and ham,
eggs, coffee and impropriety.
“Would you mind if we followed you and camped somewhere near?”
They accepted our company with the same jovial enthusiasm with which
they had met us,--Biron I thought a trifle too jovial, but Tucson
steady as a Christian Endeavorer. They jumped in their car, took the
lead, and in the dark we streaked after their red lantern, over thirty
miles of “malpais.”
We had been warned of “malpais” in the untrustworthy Keyes, but
without knowing what it meant. Several thousand years ago, the tire
trust manipulated a geologic cataclysm which strewed millions of
needle-pointed granite stones over our road. To drive a newly-tired car
over malpais hurts one’s sensibilities as much as to stick a safety-pin
into a baby, with the difference that the baby recovers. Over
chuck-holes, down grades, into arroyos, always over malpais we dashed
after their bobbing light, terrified lest a puncture should deprive us
of their guardianship. Thirty miles of weariness and mental anguish at
the injury we did our springs and tires gave way to relief when the red
lantern suddenly turned to the left, and we found ourselves in an open,
treeless field. We sank to the ground, worn out with waiting for the
“plop” that never sounded.
Save for a waning moon, it was pitch dark. We were on a high tableland,
with looming hills completely enclosing us. For the first time, it
occurred to me that here we were unarmed, at midnight, fifty miles from
a settlement, at the mercy of two men fully armed, whom we had known
two hours. What was to prevent them from killing or wounding us, taking
our car, and abandoning us in that lonely spot where we should never be
found? Or, as the novelist says,--Worse? I could see Toby gripped by
the same terror. Chaperoned only by the Continental Divide, with not
even a tree to dodge behind if they pointed their arsenal our way, we
wondered for a fleeting moment if we had done wisely.
Our neighbors for the night pulled two bedding rolls from their car,
threw them on the ground, and announced they had made their camp. An
awkward moment followed. We looked for a sheltered place for our tent,
but there was none. Seeming to have no other motive than that, lacking
a tree, we had to sling our tent-rope over the car, we managed to use
the old lady as a discreet chaperone, placing her in front of our
tent-door, which we could enter by crawling over the running-board.
With widening smiles they took it all in; took in our efforts to
be ladies, took in our folding stove, folding lantern and tiny air
pillows. As we put together our folding shovel and proceeded to dig a
hip trench, their politeness cracked, and a chuckle oozed out.
“My!” said Tucson, as profanely as that, “you’re all fixed up for
camping out, aint ye?”
Our tent invited, after our weary day, but an expectant something in
our host’s manner made us hesitate. Politeness, ordinary gratitude in
fact, since we had nothing but our company to offer, seemed to demand
that we visit awhile. We sat on a bedding roll; Biron joined us, while
the parson-like Tucson took the one nearby.
“Was you ever anyways near to being hung?”
Biron shied a pebble at a cactus as he put this question. All in
all, it was as good a conversational opening as the weather,--not so
rock-ribbed, perhaps, but with more dramatic possibilities.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think I ever was. Were you, Toby?”
It was mean of me to ask her. Toby hates to be outdone, or admit her
experiences have been incomplete. I saw her agile mind revolving for
some adventure in her past that she could bring up as a creditable
substitute, but she had never been anywhere near to being hung, and she
knew I knew it.
“H’m-m,” she said noncommittally, her inflection implying tremendous
reserves,--“were you?”
“Onct,” replied Biron, “only onct. But if anyone ever tells you he was
near hanging, and was brave under the circumstances, don’t you believe
him. There I was with the rope around my neck, and I a hollerin’ and
a squealin’ like a baby, and beggin’ to be let off. There aint no man
livin’, I’ll say, feelin’ them pullin’ and sawin’ away on his neck
that aint a goin’ to bawl and cry an’ beg f’r mercy.”
“What was the--occasion--if you don’t mind our asking?”
Biron shied another stone at the cactus and missed.
“Well, you see,” he raced along, “another feller had stole some horses,
an’ knowin’ how he come by them an’ all that, I jest sorter relieved
him of them. An’ I was a ridin’ along toward Mexico when they caught up
with me.”
“But I thought they no longer hanged people for,--er--for----”
“Horse stealin’? They don’t much, but y’see this feller had happened to
kill a coupla men gettin’ away, and when they seen me with the horses
he started off with they natch’ally thought I was the one done it all.”
How dark and gloomy looked the encircling hills!
“They got the rope on me, and my feet was off the ground, but I
blubbered so hard bimeby they let me off.”
He looked at Tucson with a glance that seemed to share a common
experience.
“I aint sayin’ I didn’t do other things they might ’a got me for----”
Tucson nodded, and opened his slow mouth to speak, but the nimbler
Biron cut in.
“Oh, I been pretty bad some times. Any feller thirty years old or so,
if he gits to thinkin’ all the fool things he’s done, he’s likely to
kill himself laughin’.”
Tucson nodded gravely. “I reckon----”
“We uster to go down to the border, to them Mexican dances, to have fun
with the Mexican girls. They have music an’ everthin’ an’ the greasers
sit on one side of the hall and the girls on the other. We’d mix in
and take the girls away from the men, an’ every time the big bull
fiddle give a whoop, we’d take a drink of mescal. Then we’d go shoot up
the town. Whenever we’d kill a Mexican, we’d put a notch on our gun, as
long as the’ was room. I knowed one feller, Tom Lee by name, knowed him
well, they say accounted for five hundred, all in all.”
“And didn’t you get into trouble with the law?”
“_Law?_” Biron snorted. “Law? They aint no law against shootin’
_dawgs_, is they?”
His seemed a reasonable attitude, demonstrating the superiority of a
real American over the contemptible greaser. This excitable mixture of
half a dozen inferior and treacherous races turns ugly when our boys,
out for a harmless lark where it will do least harm, shoot up his towns
and his neighbors, and violate his women. Then the Mexican uses a
knife. No decent man uses a knife. And so our border is kept in a state
of constant turmoil.
“There aint no harm potting Mexicans,” continued Biron, “especially
when they get fresh. The Mexican girls aint so bad. Sometimes an
American will marry one, but it has to be a pretty low white girl that
will marry a greaser.”
“That’s so. I--” drawled Tucson. He seemed collecting his slower wits
for a narration, but Biron rattled on.
“This Lee is out hidin’ somewhere now, in the mountains,--him and his
brother. The sheriff shot at him just as he was ridin’ past a glass
window, and cut his eye half out so it hung down on his face. But he
got away into the canyons, and was ridin’ with them on his heels for
three days and nights, with his eye like that.”
“Then the law _did_ try to redress the murder of those five hundred
Mexicans.”
“I guess _not_. They was after him for committing a crime, and serve
him right,--he tried to evade the draft.”
“They was two ignorant boys,” explained Parson Tucson to me, “raised in
the backwoods, who didn’t rightly know what the draft was for, or they
wouldn’t have done it.”
The attitude of both men was gravely patriotic. Yet one could see they
cherished the idea of the outlawed boys, eighteen and twenty, who
could bear with traditional stoicism such unendurable pain. The West
clings pathetically to these proofs that its old romantic life is not
yet extinct, even though it is but the wriggle which dies at sunset.
Stories like those of Biron’s are still told with gusto even amid the
strangest familiarity with Victrolas,--though the saloon is replaced by
the soda fountain, and the only real cowboys are on film, and the hardy
tenderfoot now rides so well, shoots so well and knows his West so well
that he is an easy mark for the native, only when the latter tries to
sell him an oil well, an irrigated ranch, or a prehistoric skull.
We made a move for our tent, but Biron had not finished his thirty
years’ Odyssey. He had lightly skipped from tales of outlawry to big
game, and the dangers of the hunt. He was now among the Mormons,
and the subject was deftly moon-lit with sentiment. He was enjoying
himself, and he glanced from one to the other of us as he rattled on.
“Up in the Mormon country, I met two Mormon girls, only I didn’t know
what they was, and was cussin’ the Mormons and what I thought of them,
when one of them ast me what I thought of Mormon girls, so then I
caught on. So I expressed a little of what I thought of _them_, an’ we
got on fine. She ast me to a dance, an’ I said I’d go if I could ride
back to my bed in time to get my other pants. But it was a day’s trip,
an’ I couldn’t make it. I meant to go back later, to ask some questions
of her,--personal ones, I mean,--” he took time to hit the cactus
blossom squarely,--“relating to matrimony, if you know what I mean. But
I never did get to go back.”
Now like most men, the westerner recognizes two kinds of women, but
with this distinction;--he permits her to classify herself while he
respects her classification. The Merry One seemed to be leading up to a
natural transition.
“I don’t know nothin’ about love. Jest kinder cold, I am, like a
stone.” He snickered softly.
“Truly?” said Toby, innocently interested. “Why is that?”
He shied a pebble at the long-suffering cactus.
“Jest my nature, I reckon. My French blood. Didn’t you know all
Frenchmen was marble-hearted?”
Tucson beamed slowly, like a benevolent minister of the gospel.
“Toby,” I said, “you have yawned twice in the last five minutes.”
Toby never needs to hear the word bed repeated. She got to her feet,
sleepily.
“We can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done today,” I went on in a
cordial way. “All through the west we have met with the greatest help
and courtesy. People ask us if we’re afraid to travel alone, but we
always tell them not when we are among westerners.”
Tucson beamed, bless his heart, at my model speech, and found tongue.
“That’s right,” he said, leaning toward us earnestly, “There won’t
nobody hurt you in _this_ country.”
We shook hands all around. As we were nearing our tent, Biron followed
us with something in his hand, which he proffered with the flourish of
an eighteenth century marquis.
“Here,” he said, “take this.” I jumped. It was his ferocious revolver.
“What is this for?” we asked.
“For protection.”
“Against what?”
“Against us.”
“Oh, no, thank you. We feel quite safe without it,” we prevaricated.
“Go ahead and take it,” said Biron, politely stubborn.
Here was a dilemma. Could one accept such an offer from one’s hosts,
even though on their own confession unhonored and unhung horse thieves,
light-hearted murderers and easy philanderers? And yet he seemed so
sure we should need it.
“Never for that reason,” I said, thinking to make a graceful exit from
the dilemma, “still if all the stories you have told us of wild animals
and outlaws----”
Biron blocked my exit; “You needn’t worry about _them_,” he chuckled
mirthfully, “But you don’t know what ructions _we_ may raise in the
night.”
“Better take it,” Toby whispered. So we bore our arms to our tent,
where they helped us pass a restless night. When I did not wake in a
cold agony from dreaming I had rolled over on the pistol and exploded
it, Toby would wake me to warn me against the same fate. I think we
would have been happier if we had relied on the honor system. Once a
shriek and a roar startled us awake, and a half mile away a Southern
Pacific express streamed by like a silver streak. Occasionally a placid
snore from Tucson reached us, and once an old white ghost of a horse,
her bones making blue shadows in the moonlight, crunched at our tent
posts, and fled kicking terrified kicks as I looked out to investigate.
Later sleep came, deep sleep, from which Toby woke me. Toby is brave,
but her whisper had a tremolo. “There’s a wild animal of some sort,
butting against the tent.”
I looked out cautiously. “It’s a huge bull,” I reported. Toby
shuddered. A moment later I saw it was only a moderate sized cow,
but to impress Toby I did not mention this discovery, as I boldly
left the tent and approached the beast. She was chewing with gusto
a shapeless mass lying on the ground,--was it a calf? Was she a
cannibal among cows, an unnatural mother? She muzzled it, licked it,
and tossed it in the air, where against the setting moon her smile of
delight was silhouetted like the cow in Mother Goose. I took courage
to investigate her new form of caviar,--and found she had chewed our
new yellow slicker, in which we wrapped everything which would not go
anywhere else, into a slimy, pulpy mass. To her hurt astonishment, she
was immediately parted from her find, and went galloping off into the
brush. It seemed cruel to break up her midnight revel, but at the rate
her new taste was developing we should not have had a tire left by
morning.
Before going back to sleep, I looked about me. Long gray shadows
drifted over from the low range of black hills which cupped our camp.
The air, crisp, and faintly scented with sage, exhilarated me with
a sense of wild freedom. Often, in the East, I am awakened by that
scent, and am filled with a homesick longing to go back. It is not
sage alone, but the thousands of little aromatic plants graying the
desert imperceptibly, the odor blown across hills and plains of charred
camp fires, bitter and pungent, the strong smell of bacon and sweated
leather, all mingled and purified in millions of cubic feet of ether.
Two blue-black masses stirred, and a sigh and a chuckle came from our
sleeping Galahads. No danger of “ructions” from that quarter now. I
went back to our lumpy bed, put the revolver outside the tent, and
fastened the flap. A few minutes sped by, and I was startled awake by a
gunshot, thunderous in my ears.
Toby and I sat up. It was broad daylight. We peered under the car
cautiously. Tucson had built a fire, and a coffee-pot sat atop, which
he soberly tended. Biron swanked about in his fleecy chaps, shooting
into the air.
“Come alive, girls,” he called, tossing a flapjack at us. “Throw that
into your sunburned hides.”
We obeyed this playboy of our Western world without demur. We had
barely eaten since the previous morning. At eight we were off. Our
car had no spare tire, two broken spring leaves, and a dustpan which
dragged on the ground, loosened by miles of high centers. Our friends
were in haste to reach El Paso, so we suggested they leave us, but they
refused, and became our body guard as far as Deming, stopping when
we did, mending our dustpan with a bit of stolen fence wire, getting
water and gas for us at Hachita, a dismal little collection of shanties
which Biron regretfully described as “the wickedest town in the United
States, before prohibition spoiled it. Yessir, prohibition is what
ruined New Mexico.”
In the midst of a swirling sand storm we said good-by to our friends
and asked their names and addresses in order to send them some
photographs we had taken. Biron gave his readily,--“Manchester, N. H.,
is where I was born, but most of my folks live in Fall River, Mass.”
It was not the address we expected from a man who had seen worse
deeds than Jesse James. It was out of the picture, somehow. I knew
Manchester, N. H., and had met nothing in the town so tough and bad as
Biron had described himself, unless it were the sandwiches sold in the
Boston and Maine station. When we turned to Tucson for his name, we
were prepared to have him give the address of a theological seminary,
and again we were surprised. For Tucson hesitated and stammered, and
took longer recalling his name than is usually needed. I remembered
a remark Biron threw off the night before,--“a man gets to calling
himself a lot of different names in this country,” and snickered, while
Tucson remained grave as a judge. I wondered, if his voluble friend
had given him a chance, whether Tucson might have told us something
interesting. However, Tucson had just discovered a copper vein on his
land, and as this book goes to print may already be a respectable Fifth
Avenue millionaire.
As we thanked them and said good-by, Toby said, “We can’t be too
grateful you saw our sign in the road.”
“Sign? What sign?”
“Didn’t you see a sign made of white pebbles on the road from Rodeo,
asking for help?”
“No, we didn’t see no sign. We didn’t come from Rodeo. We came the
other road,--over the hills.”
There it is. No matter how much one does as Robinson Crusoe would have
done, the other characters will not play up to their opportunities.
Instead of following your footprints cunningly, step by step, they will
insist on catching sight of you across lots, completely spoiling the
climax. No doubt Crusoe was firm with infringers on his plot. Probably
when they came by the wrong road, he refused to be rescued till they
had gone back and done the thing properly.
But then, we were very glad to be rescued at all.