JUSTICE
The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before
the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few
complexities and knows no interference on the part of prisoners’
welfare leagues or humanitarian congresses. When a man is arrested
south of the Line he straightway ceases to be enumerated among the
living; if, haply, he reappears in the course of weeks or years his
family looks upon the prodigy in the light of a resurrection. Such
resurrections do not occur often enough to dull the edge of the popular
interest attending them. There are several dim roads, peculiarly
Mexican, down which a prisoner may march to oblivion, with no record of
his expunction left behind. Officials with easy consciences find these
extralegal methods of clearing the docket handy and expeditious.
Grant Hickman, new to the Border and utterly ignorant of customs and
manners in the republic of _poco tiempo_, necessarily could not
possess a background of sinister knowledge against which to build
doubts of his immediate future when he found himself locked in a cell.
He was in darkness deep as Jonah’s. He ached from his scalp to his
toes. A gingerly groping hand applied to various parts of his body
took stock of the exterior costs of that healthy fight in the gambling
palace. The heat of battle was still on him. He recalled how nobly the
big Arizonan swung his chair from the vantage of the crap table; what a
virile call to battle was the stranger’s “Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!”
As for Colonel Urgo’s clumsy frame-up--the handful of lead dollars in
his pocket to prompt arrest for counterfeiting--Grant dismissed the
trick as childish spite. When he appeared before a judge in the morning
he could easily prove that the only Mexican money he possessed was
that given him in change by the fat Chinaman and what he had taken in
across the baize. Some tool of the vengeful little wooer of Benicia had
“salted” him during the progress of the game.
But when morning light through a four-inch slit in the wall roused
him from a restless sleep long hours of doubt were ushered in. Came
a jailer with dry tortillas and water but no summons to appear
before a magistrate. Three tortillas--clammy rolled cakes of meal
tasting strongly of a cook’s carelessness in matters of excluding the
unessential--were the sum of his receipts from the outside world that
day. The jailer, who had the features of a bandit, merely grunted a “no
sabe” at the volley of questions the prisoner launched at him during
the minute he was in the cell.
Those hours of solitude in the six-by-ten box of stone gave opportunity
for much thinking. Little by little it was borne in on Grant how
completely he was a victim of whatever spite Colonel Urgo might care
to devise; and recollection of his smiling face seen in the prison
office the night before--thin lips parted over teeth in a ferret’s
grin--confirmed the assumption that at devising mischief Colonel Urgo
would be hampered by no lack of ingenuity.
Grant weighed the hope of aid from the other end of the town across the
Border fence. Bim Bagley, the only friend he had in all the Southwest,
was still out of town and would not be back until the morrow. Doc
Stooder--small chance! The worthy doctor was velvet drunk when he
received Grant in his office; for reasons which only his satiric humour
could explain he had elected to consider his visitor an impostor.
Little chance that Doc Stooder would pay him a thought until Bagley
returned and inquired of his whereabouts. Remained just the cobweb
contingency that the Arizonan who had fought beside him had escaped
the clutches of the rurales; Grant was certain the big fellow’s simple
loyalty to a fellow countryman would prompt him to set going some kind
of inquiry from across the Line.
Night came, with it three more tortillas and a bowl of _carne_ seasoned
with chili sufficient to burn the gullet of a bronze image. Then,
several hours after the scant meal had been shoved in to him, the
bandit jailer opened his cell door and motioned him to step into the
corridor. Two men with rifles were waiting there; they stepped to his
side and marched him off between them.
Down a flight of steps, through a courtyard heavy with shadows, then
up tortuous stairs to a door beneath a dim electric globe. The door
opened from within, and Grant found himself in a chamber which might
have passed as a courtroom. At its far end on a raised dais was a long
desk lighted from above, three men sitting behind it. A sort of wooden
cage stood apart on a platform by itself. Six men with serapes over
their shoulders and rifles hanging by straps across the blanket stripes
were slouching before the judges’ dais. A black headed peon crouched
timorously on a seat to the left and behind the guards.
Grant’s escort halted him before the judges. He kept silence, studying
the faces of the three. Not pleasant faces. A hardness of eye and
cat-like bristle of moustachios over thin line of lips was common to
the trio.
“Grant ’Ickman?” challenged the man in the middle.
Grant nodded. His interrogator gave a sign to one of the rurales. The
latter turned to the peon on the bench, dragged him to his feet and
hustled him to the cage-like affair to the left of the dais, evidently
a witness box. The little fellow’s head hardly showed above the top
rail that fenced him in; his eyes were all whites.
The examining judge jerked a thumb toward Grant as he shaped a question
in Spanish for the witness. The peon bobbed his head emphatically.
Another question and, “_Si_,” chirped the witness. Then a lengthy flow
of interrogation prompted by reference to some dossier in hand.
“_Si! Si!_” The witness hurried to oblige. Cat whiskers lifted in a
smile as the judge turned back to Grant.
“You unnerstan’?”
“I don’t,” bluntly. More twitching of the spiked moustachios.
“Zeese man, ’oo’s make confession of counterfeiting and ’oo ees
to be shot to-day, says ’e sells you thirty pesos made with bad
metal--counterfeit. An’--”
“He lies!” Grant interrupted.
“_Quieto!_” The judge banged his fist on the desk and fixed the
prisoner with a savage glare. “’E says, zeese man, ’e meets with you
las’ night on Calle San Lazar outside Crystal Palacio gambling ’ouse
an’ for ten veritable pesos ’e gives to you thirty pesos of bad metal.
Then zeese man ’e says ’e sees you enter Crystal Palacio. What remark
you make for zeese?”
The monstrous farce of this accusation numbed Grant. Judicial
subornation fabricated to give colour to what was already determined in
the minds of these three puppets. As clearly as if they were bearing
on him he could see the cold, mocking eyes of Colonel Urgo behind the
shoulders of his pawns on the bench. Perception of his peril steadied
him.
“I demand a lawyer if I am to be tried on this outrageous charge. And I
demand that the American consul in this town be told of the accusation
against me.”
The interrogating judge turned to his confreres with a bland
outspreading of the palms. Then to Grant:
“American consul ’as no business with crime against state of Mehico.
You will ’ave lawyer when you are tried before court at Hermosillo.
Zeese court ees not court of condemnation. Court of condemnation ees at
Hermosillo. W’en you arrive there, w’ere you make for a start to-night,
Señor ’Ickman, you ask for American consul if you desire.”
“But you cannot send me to this Hermosillo place without trial.” Grant
took a step toward the bench in his vehemence. He was roughly jerked
back by his guards. The interrogating judge beamed on him.
“In Mehico, Señor ’Ickman, it ees folly to say ‘you cannot.’ Much ees
possible in Mehico. To-night prisoners make start for Hermosillo. You
go weeth them.”
He nodded to Grant’s guards and they closed in on him. He heard a
farewell, “Adios, Señor ’Ickman,” from the bench as he was rudely
hustled out of the courtroom.
An hour later he stood with seven other shadows in the _carcel_
courtyard. About them were the rurales with their rifles; four were
mounted on horseback and a pack mule, lightly laden, slept on three
legs behind the horsemen. Men came with lanterns and heavy loops of
something which chinked metallically when it was dropped. They fixed a
broad steel shackle on the left wrist of each prisoner and linked them
all to a bull chain. Then the door of a courtyard swung inward, the
mounted rurales closed in and the eight chained men went clinking out
to the dark street.
A few midnight dawdlers paused to watch the shadowy procession
stumbling over the cobbles. No word was spoken. The clink of the
horses’ hoofs, the patter-patter of the short-legged pack mule and
the metallic whisperings of the chain fitted into a measured cadence.
Despite the presence of the pack mule, Grant first had thought the
journey would be a short one, ending at the railroad station. But
after fifteen minutes’ marching no railroad line was in sight and the
houses began to be scattered. Suddenly houses ceased; nothing but the
hump-shouldered shapes of mountains about; clear burning stars and
ahead a dim ribbon of road leading out into the desert.
To Hermosillo, a town unheard of and at a distance unknown--across the
desert to Hermosillo afoot and chained in line with seven men. In the
slim rifle barrels so carelessly slung under shadows of sombreros was
the sullen emblem of that unwritten law of Mexico which stills so many
accusing mouths: _ley de fuga_--law of flight.
Out into the desert of Altar marched the American, whose name appeared
only upon a secret cachet in the hands of the puppet judges--a man
gone, as a German once put it, “without trace.”