Red Men and White

by Wister, Owen

  “We could finish them in five minutes together,” said the youth, taking a step.

  “Two up here among all these peppers! Oh no, Luis. We should tread on them, and our ankles would burn all night. If you want to help me, go bring some fresh water. The barrel is almost empty.”

  But Luis stood ardently gazing up at the roof.

  “Very well, then,” said Lolita. “If you like this better, finish the peppers, and I’ll go for the water.”

  “Why do you look down the trail so often?” said the baffled love-maker, petulantly.

  “Because Uncle Ramon said the American would be coming to-day,” the girl replied, softly.

  “Was it Uncle Ramon said that? He told you that?”

  “Why not?” She shaded her eyes, and looked where the cañon’s widening slit gave view of a slant of sand merging fan-spread into a changeless waste of plain. Many watercourses, crooked and straight, came out of the gaps, creasing the sudden Sierra, descending to the flat through bushes and leaning margin trees; but in these empty shapes not a rill tinkled to refresh the silence, nor did a drop slide over the glaring rocks, or even dampen the heated, cheating sand. Lolita strained her gaze at the dry distance, and stooped again to her harvest.

  “What does he come here for?” demanded Luis.

  “The American? We buy white flour of him sometimes.”

  “Sometimes! That must be worth his while! He will get rich!” Luis lounged back against his water-barrel, and was silent. As he watched Lolita, serenely working, his silver crescent ear-rings swung a little with the slight tilting of his head, and his fingers, forgotten and unguided by his thoughts, ruffled the strings of the guitar, drawing from it gay, purposeless tendrils of sound. Occasionally, when Lolita knew the song, she would hum it on the roof, inattentively, busy rolling her peppers:

  “‘Soy purita mejicana;

  Nada tengo español.’”

  (I am a pure Mexican. I have nothing Spanish about me.) And this melodious inattention of Lolita’s Luis felt to be the extreme of slight.

  “Have you seen him lately?” he asked, sourly.

  “Not very. Not since the last time he came to the mines from Maricopa.”

  “I heard a man at Gun Sight say he was dead,” snapped Luis.

  But she made no sign. “That would be a pity,” she said, humming gayly.

  “Very sad. Uncle Ramon would have to go himself to Maricopa for that white flour.”

  Pleased with this remark, the youth took to song himself; and there they were like two mischievous birds. Only the bird on the ground was cross with a sense of failure. “El telele se murió,” he sang.

  “‘The hunchback is dead.

  Ay! Ay! Ay!

  And no one could be found to bury him except—’”

  “Luis, aren’t you going to get my water for me?”

  “Poco tiempo: I’ll bring it directly.”

  “You have to go to the Tinaja Bonita for it.”

  The Pretty Spring—or water-hole, or tank—was half a mile from the cabin.

  “Well, it’s not nice out there in the sun. I like it better in here, where it is pleasant.

  “‘And no one could be found to bury him except

  Five dragoons and a corporal

  And the sacristan’s cat.’”

  Singing resentfully, young Luis stayed in here, where it was pleasant. Bright green branches of fruit-trees and small cottonwoods and a fenced irrigated square of green growing garden hid the tiny adobe home like a nut, smooth and hard and dry in their clustered midst. The lightest air that could blow among these limber, ready leaves set going at once their varnished twinkling round the house. Their white and dark sides gleamed and went out with chasing lights that quickened the torpid place into a holiday of motion. Closed in by this cool green, you did not have to see or think of Arizona, just outside.

  “Where is Uncle Ramon to-day?” inquired Luis, dropping his music.

  She sighed. “He has gone to drive our cattle to a new spring. There is no pasture at the Tinaja Bonita. Our streams and ditches went dry last week. They have never done so in all the years before. I don’t know what is going to happen to us.” The anxiety in the girl’s face seemed to come outward more plainly for a moment, and then recede to its permanent abiding-place.

  “There cannot be much water to keep flour-sellers alive on the trail to Maricopa,” chirped the bird on the ground.

  She made no answer to this. “What are you doing nowadays?” she asked.

  “I have been working very hard on the wood contract for the American soldiers,” he replied, promptly.

  “By Tucson?”

  “No. Huachuca.”

  “Away over there again? I thought you had cut all they wanted last May.”

  “It is of that enterprise of which I speak, Lolita.”

  “But it’s October now!” Lolita lifted her face, ruddy with stooping, and broke into laughter.

  “I do not see why you mock me. No one has asked me to work since.”

  “Have you asked any one for work?”

  “It is not my way to beg.”

  “Luis, I don’t believe you’re quite a man yet, in spite of your mustache. You complain there’s no money for Mexicans in Arizona because the Americans get it all. Why don’t you go back to Sonora, then, and be rich in five minutes? It would sound finely: ‘Luis Romero, Merchant, Hermosillo.’ Or perhaps gold would fall more quickly into your lap at Guaymas. You would live in a big house, perhaps with two stories, and I would come and visit you at Easter—if your wife would allow it.” Here Lolita threw a pepper at him.

  The guitar grated a few pretty notes; otherwise there was silence.

  “And it was Uncle Ramon persuaded them to hire you in May. He told the American contractor you owned a strong burro good for heavy loads. He didn’t say much about you,” added the little lady.

  “Much good it did me! The American contractor-pig retained my wages to pay for the food he supplied us. They charge you extra for starvation, those gringos. They are all pigs. Ah, Lolita, a man needs a wife, so he may strive to win a home for her.”

  “I have heard men say that they needed a home before they could strive to win a wife for it. But you go about it the other way.”

  “I am not an American pig, I thank the Virgin! I have none of their gringo customs.”

  “You speak truly indeed,” murmured Lolita.

  “It is you who know about them,” the boy said, angry like a child. He had seen her eye drawn to the trail again as by a magnet. “They say you prefer gringos to your own people.”

  “Who dares say that?”

  The elated Luis played loudly on the guitar. He had touched her that time.

  But Lolita’s eye softened at the instant of speaking, and she broke into her sweet laugh. “There!” she said, recapturing the situation; “is it not like old times for you and me to be fighting.”

  “Me? I am not fighting.”

  “You relieve me.”

  “I do not consider a gringo worth my notice.”

  “Sensible boy! You speak as wisely as one who has been to school in a large city. Luis, do you remember the day Uncle Ramon locked me up for riding on the kicking burro, and you came and unlocked me when uncle was gone? You took me walking, and lost us both in the mountains. We were really only a little, little way from home, but I thought we had got into another country where they eat children. I was six, and I beat you for losing me, and cried, and you were big, and you kissed me till I stopped crying. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember child’s tricks.”

  “Luis, I have come to a conclusion. You are still young enough for me to kiss quite safely. Every time you fight with me—I shall kiss you. Won’t you get me some fresh water now?”

  He lounged, sulky, against his barrel.

  “Come, querido! Must I go all that way myself? Well, then, if you intend to stand and glare
at me till the moon rises—Ah! he moves!”

  Luis laid the guitar gradually down, and gradually lifting a pail in which the dipper rattled with emptiness, he proceeded to crawl on his journey.

  “You know that is not the one we use, muchacho,” (little boy), remarked Lolita.

  “Keep your kisses for your gringo,” the water-carrier growled, with his back to her.

  “I shall always save some for my little cousin.”

  The pail clattered on the stones, and the child stopped crawling. She on the roof stared at this performance for an open-mouthed moment, gloves idle among the spicy peppers. Then, laughing, she sprang to her feet, descended, and, catching up the water-jar (the olla de agua), overtook him, and shook it in his face with the sweetest derision. “Now we’ll go together,” said she, and started gayly through the green trees and the garden. He followed her, two paces behind, half ashamed, and gazing at her red handkerchief, and the black hair blowing a little; thus did they cross the tiny cool home acre through the twinkling pleasantness of the leaves, and pass at once outside the magic circle of irrigation into Arizona’s domain, among a prone herd of carcasses upon the ground—dead cattle, two seasons dead now, hunted to this sanctuary by the drought, killed in the sanctuary by cold water.

  A wise, quiet man, with a man’s will, may sometimes after three days of thirst still hold grip enough upon his slipping mind to know, when he has found the water, that he must not drink it, must only dampen his lips and tongue in a drop-by-drop fashion until he has endured the passing of many slow, insidious hours. Even a wise man had best have a friend by his side then, who shall fight and tear him from the perilous excesses that he craves, knock him senseless if he cannot pin him down; but cattle know nothing of drop by drop, and you cannot pin down a hundred head that have found water after three days. So these hundred had drunk themselves swollen, and died. Cracked hide and white bone they lay, brown, dry, gaping humps straddled stiff askew in the last convulsion; and over them presided Arizona—silent, vast, all sunshine everlasting.

  Luis saw these corpses that had stumbled to their fate, and he remembered; with Lolita in those trees all day, he had forgotten for a while. He pointed to the wide-strewn sight, familiar, monotonous as misfortune. “There will be many more,” he said. “Another rainy season is gone without doing anything for the country. It cannot rain now for another year, Lolita.”

  “God help us and our cattle, and travellers!” she whispered.

  Luis musingly repeated a saying of the country about the Tinaja Bonita,

  “‘When you see the Black Cross dry,

  Fill the wagon cisterns high’”

  —a doggerel in homely Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and passed beneath the desert.

  “But the Black Cross has never been dry yet,” Luis said.

  “You have not seen it lately,” said Lolita.

  “Lolita! do you mean—” He looked in her troubled eyes, and they went on in silence together. They left behind them the bones and the bald level on which they lay, and came to where the cañon’s broader descent quickened until they sank below that sight of the cattle, and for a time below the home and trees. They went down steeply by cactus and dry rock to a meeting of several cañons opening from side rifts in the Sierra, furrowing the main valley’s mesa with deep watercourses that brought no water. Finding their way in this lumpy meeting-ground, they came upon the lurking-place of the Tinaja Bonita. They stood above it at the edge of a pitch of rock, watching the motionless crystal of the pool.

  “How well it hides down there in its own cañon!” said Luis. “How pretty and clear! But there’s plenty of water, Lolita.”

  “Can you see the Black Cross?”

  “Not from here.”

  They began descending around the sides of the crumbled slate-rock face that tilted too steep for foothold.

  “The other well is dry, of course,” said Lolita. In the slaty, many-ledged formation a little lower down the cañon, towards the peep of outlying open country which the cloven hills let in, was a second round hole, twin of the first. Except after storms, water was never in this place, and it lay dry as a kiln nine-tenths of the year. But in size and depth and color, and the circular fashion of its shaft, which seemed man’s rather than nature’s design, it might have been the real Tinaja’s reflection, conjured in some evil mirror where everything was faithfully represented except the water.

  “It must have been a real well once,” said Luis.

  “Once, yes.”

  “And what made it go dry?”

  “Who knows?”

  “How strange it should be the lower well that failed, Lolita!”

  The boy and girl were climbing down slowly, drawing near each other as they reached the bottom of the hollow. The peep of open country was blocked, and the tall tops of the mountains were all of the outer world to be seen down here below the mesa’s level. The silence was like something older than this world, like the silence of space before any worlds were made.

  “Do you believe it ever can go dry?” asked Luis. They were now on the edge of the Tinaja.

  “Father Rafael says that it is miraculous,” said the girl, believingly.

  Opposite, and everywhere except where they were, the walls went sheer down, not slate-colored, but white, with a sudden up-cropping formation of brick-shaped stones. These also were many-layered and crumbling, cracking off into the pool if the hand hung or the foot weighed on them. No safe way went to the water but at this lower side, where the riven, tumbled white blocks shelved easily to the bottom; and Luis and Lolita looked down these natural stairs at the portent in the well. In that white formation shot up from the earth’s bowels, arbitrary and irrelevant amid the surrounding alien layers of slate, four black stones were lodged as if built into the wall by some hand—four small stones shaping a cross, back against the white, symmetrical and plain.

  “It has come farther—more uncovered since yesterday,” Lolita whispered.

  “Can the Tinaja sink altogether?” repeated Luis. The arms of the cross were a measurable space above the water-line, and he had always seen it entirely submerged.

  “How could it sink?” said Lolita, simply. “It will stop when the black stones are wholly dry.”

  “You believe Father Rafael,” Luis said, always in a low voice; “but it was only Indians, after all, who told the mission fathers at the first.”

  “That was very long ago,” said she, “and there has always been water in the Tinaja Bonita.”

  Boy and girl had set the jar down, and forgotten it and why they had come. Luis looked uneasily at the circular pool, and up from this creviced middle of the cañon to the small high tops of the mountains rising in the free sky.

  “This is an evil place,” he said. “As for the water—no one, no three, can live long enough to be sure.”

  But it was part of Lolita’s religion. “I am sure,” said she.

  The young Mexican’s eyes rested on the face of the girl beside him, more beautiful just then with some wave of secret fear and faith.

  “Come away with me, Lolita!” he pleaded, suddenly. “I can work. I can be a man. It is fearful for you to live here alone.”

  “Alone, Luis?” His voice had called her from her reverie back to her gay, alert self. “Do you consider Uncle Ramon nobody to live with?”

  “Yes. Nobody—for you.”

  “Promise me never to tell that to uncle. He is so considerate that he might make me marry somebody for company. And then, you know, my husband would be certain to be stupid about your coming to see me, querido.”

  “Why do you always mock me, Lolita?”

  “Mock you? What a fancy! Oh, see how the sun’s going! If we do not get our water, your terrible Tinaja will go dry before supper. Come, Luis, I carried the olla. Must I do everything?”

  He looked at her disconsolate. “Ah!” he vibrated, re
velling in deep imaginary passion.

  “Go! go!” she cried, pushing him. “Take your olla.”

  Upon the lightest passing puff of sentiment the Southern breast can heave with every genuine symptom of storm, except wreck. Of course she stirred his gregarious heart. Was she not lovely and he twenty-two? He went down the natural stairs and came slowly up with the water, stopping a step below her. “Lolita,” he said, “don’t you love me at all? not a very little?”

  “You are my dearest, oldest friend, Luis,” she said, looking at him with such full sweetness that his eyes fell. “But why do you pretend five beans make ten?”

  “Of course they only make ten with gringos.”

  She held up a warning finger.

  “Oh yes, oh yes! Strangers make fine lovers!” With this he swelled to a fond, dangerous appearance, and muttered, “It is not difficult to kill a man, Lolita.”

  “Fighting! after what I told you!” Lolita stooped and kissed her cousin Luis, and he instantly made the most of that chance.

  “As often as you please,” he said, as she released herself angrily, and then a stroke of sound struck their two hearts still. They jumped apart, trembling. Some of the rock slide had rattled down and plunged into the Tinaja with a gulping resonance. Loitering strings of sand strewed after it, and the boy’s and girl’s superstitious eyes looked up from the ringed, waving water to the ledge. Lolita’s single shriek of terror turned to joy as she uttered it.

  “I thought—I thought you would not come!” she cried out.

  The dismounted horseman above made no sign of understanding her words. He stepped carefully away from the ledge his foot had crumbled, and they saw him using his rifle like a staff, steadying its stock in successive niches, and so working back to his horse. There he slid the rifle into its leather sling along the left side of his saddle.