“You have come to see my new nightingales,” she said. “Jose brought them for me this morning. Aren’t they darling?”
“Pop” Andrews and the British consul regarded the nightingales with great interest. For half an hour there was talk of birds. A parrot performed. An ugly-tempered cuckatoo nipped the finger of the British consul when he tried to feed it a bit of cake.
During tea Mrs. Rattray mentioned her husband’s absence. All three of them made no hint of the dangers into which young Rattray had ridden.
“Oh, I am not at all worried,” she lied, with a smile. “Only Allan is so enthusiastic that he wants to work right through the heat of the day. He took his boy, Pedro, with him. Pedro promised me to remind Allan to take his siesta. And Allan promised me that, if anything happened to delay him, he would send Pedro with a message. “
“I tell him not to work so hard but he is so anxious, of course, to make the mines successful.
“When he comes back, though, he will rest. Maybe we will go to the border for a while.”
“Pop” Andrews and the British consul discussed this possibility with social profundity. Before they left they asked if she would permit them to escort her on an evening carriage ride. It was delightfully cool——
They were very thoughtful and nice. But she thought she had better wait for Allan. He might ride in at night. She would want to be there, of course. He was such a spoiled child. He’d want things to eat that the servants could not cook. He never would get used to Mexican food, she was afraid——
Walking back across the plaza there were no words, except midway “Pop” Andrews eased himself of a vicious stream of curses. The British consul nodded a grave endorsement. They entered the Foreign Club and went at once to the bar. It was always so when the daily visitors returned from the faded vermillion casa
There was a waiting silence in the Foreign Club when it was last drink time. The old-timers felt it in the air. To a stranger it might have been the ordinary, moonlit evening. Crowds of young men and women parading the plaza. The band playing. Carriages rolling through the streets with the cocheros hissing at their horses in the manner of Mexican drivers. An occasional troop of riders going on night outpost duty—songs in the cantina
But the old-timers were too familiar with tragedy not to sense its approach. Something in the look the natives gave them. Something in the air——
The mozo at the club doorway told the Chino boy a messenger wanted to see “Pop” Andrews.
The messenger was Rattray’s Pedro. He still had terror in his eyes. He couldn’t tell Señora Rattray. He thought it best to see Señor Andrews first. Señor Andrews was the good friend of the Rattrays. He, Pedro, was but a poor serviente whose own heart was broken.
Viva la Revoluccion
He began to giggle hysterically. “Pop” Andrews nodded in understanding and took him into a corner of the reading room. He gave him a very large drink of whiskey.
The bandits had come at night to San Ysabel. Don Allan was alone with only Pedro. He told them quite truthfully that he had no money at the mine. They refused to believe. They dragged him, half-naked, to the ant-hill.
The ant-hill is one of nature’s most methodical torture machines. No man can be staked out on an ant-hill for twenty minutes and live. The ants begin their attack at once. A thousand tiny jaws clamping on human flesh. Just the approach to the ant-hill generally is enough for the victim who knows. He tells his story. It is even better to confess a crime of which one is innocent.
Six minutes will break the ordinary resolute one. Ten minutes is a decade of horror. And in fifteen minutes the most courageous man may not be blamed for giving up.
After that it is a gamble with death—up to twenty minutes. After twenty minutes it is no longer a gamble. By that time the ants have reached for the vitals. They are in every orifice. Through the mouth, the nostrils, the eyes, the ears and the nose—they mine to the brain.
A man may live for some squirming, screaming hours but his death is certain after twenty minutes. These are the statistics of men who use the ant-hill as police use “third degree” refinements in another land.
The bandits laughed when Rattray cried out that there was no money at the mine. They jeered at his promises of gold if they would release him. They laughed—and let the ants work.
At last, they dragged the crawling body from the ants. They were fiends. They heated a knife over a fire until it was white hot.
Pedro sobbed. He could still hear Don Allan’s screams. The bandits had driven him off. They set fire to the mine shacks. When they rode off Pedro went back and found the body. The head had been cut off. The eyes——
He had walked from San Ysabel——
“Pop” Andrews quietly called the others of the club.
The band had quit long ago. The streets were deserted. A figure in a black cloak went to the casa of “Pop” Andrews. It was an old friend, Capitan Garza. “Pop” Andrews had done him a kindness. He did not forget.
There was news. Early tomorrow there would be rioting. A demonstration against the gringos. Some things had happened. Those liars on the border! The federalista troops might try to keep order. But it was safer for the Americanos to be aboard the train that would leave at four in the morning.
Once more “Pop” Andrews nodded in understanding——
The old timers were not foolhardy. It was the time to leave. At four in the morning, the old-timers were on the train when the crew dramatically gestured for the start of the journey.
Across the city came the jangling of the cracked cathedral bell. Several shots. There was a heavier smell of smoke than usual. Far off came the rising, unmistakable note of a mob lashing itself with its own fury. Ai-ai-i-i——
“The British consul said he would look after her,” said “Pop” Andrews to one of his countrymen, as the train pulled out. “She wouldn’t come out with us—poor girl! It’s no country for a woman——”
To the border came news of the outbreak. It had lasted twenty-four hours. In its rage, the mob looted the homes of every escaped Americano. It wrecked the American consulate. And it smashed the topaz skylight over the lazy, cool lounging room of the Foreign club.
GREASER AND GRINGO
In the Big Bend country the border is a lazy, leaden snake twisting through a jungle in the moonlight. And it is a panorama of sinister hills with a single pass that a mule, if it does not bear a pack, may negotiate safely.
Again, it is marked only by little heaps of stones such as are used to weigh the dead in their graves. Or it becomes the delicate scribbling traced by the tail of a glittering lizard over the powder of the desert.
But everywhere in its long stretch of miles, the border is a cruel barrier of lies and hate and misunderstanding. At the point where, in tinsel allegories, two nations should clasp hands, they reach instead for each other’s throats.
And the worst elements of two countries meet to match their unlovely wits. On one side the astigmatic intolerance of a gabby, young nation reaching for gold as the sure symbol of greatness. On the other the sullen resentment of a people who have suffered centuries of oppression and slavery.
Not this the place to sit back with a heavy, judicial air and point the damning finger. Nor for this pen the effort to cram down stubborn minds the unbelievable thought that any other way than theirs may not be entirely wrong.
One of Obregon’s Yaquis Nursing his “Baby”
Always a simple record of events and experiences. No more.
Across the border from Juarez is El Paso. El Paso, to the visiting junketeer, is a bustling American city with statistics about the mileage of paved streets, its school system, its per capita tax and its growing manufactures. There are, no doubt, many excellent and worthy men of affairs in El Paso. As there are many charming people.
But there is an aspect of El Paso apart from the chamber-of-commerce point of view. In it, El Paso becomes a hatching place of wholesale crime. The squirming nest of conspirators, g
un runners, smugglers, swindlers, cattle thieves, mine salters—a picturesque and thoroughly villainous crew. What is true of El Paso in this aspect is true of other border towns.
It is a fact, however regrettable, that the blue-eyed, tawny-mustached Americano of fiction often as not turns out to be an affable cut-throat.
In El Paso the Mexican is called “greaser.” The word is used, of course, in contempt. Few who use it, though, know its accepted origin. It was first applied to Mexican dock-wallopers in San Francisco. In the days when vessels from New York sailed by way of the Horn with hides and tallow. The Mexicans handled this greasy cargo and got their name.
The retaliatory “gringo” was born in 1846. When American troops, invading Mexico, assailed musical Mexican ears with their song: “Green grow the leaves of the hawthorn tree.”
The border Americano regards the Mexican as an inferior—and Mexico as a land set apart by gringo gods for gringo looting. On his side of the border he may be termed a capitalist, a promoter, or a hustling, go-getting speculator. In Mexico he is known and hated as a swaggering, bragging thief, a false friend and an unfair foe.
His boast is that any two-fisted American is worth half-a-dozen Mexicans in any kind of trouble. The Mexican has disproved that too often to have it sound convincing—or uttered, at all—anywhere except north of the border. The adventurous Americano of tropical bestsellers too often in actual experience begins howling for the American army to make good his strutting.
Always there is the cry for an American army of occupation. This, the gringo asserts, would be for the good of the Mexican people. He feels that his country could handily undertake such bayonet instruction. Certainly, in his altruism is no thought that military occupation would mean official protection and sanction for his plundering.
Truth is not only stranger than fiction in border propaganda. It is quite obsolete. During the early revolutions, the news reports of Mexican affairs were largely in the hands of irresponsible men—men who sometimes boasted of their hired bias.
It is believed in Mexico that one American expedition went in to Mexico merely to safeguard the property of a notorious owner of American newspapers. The general in command of that expedition stated that the newspaper owner was unscrupulous and had set aside a huge fund to carry out his border plottings.
One of the favored employes of this newspaper owner, his star correspondent in Mexico until he was barred out, and later on the border, was known as the greatest liar on the border. No small distinction.
A simple record of events——
On the border there was a conference between Obregon, Mexico’s war chief, and Scott and Funston for the American military. There were mutual pledges of diplomatic secrecy regarding the official pow-wows in the Del Norte hotel. Yet a man known as the representative of mining interests attempted, and almost succeeded, in getting an agent into the room as an interpreter. And, of course, as an informer.
The same mining man, indignant because the Mexicans had allowed their revolution to hamper the movement of a string of his ore cars, actually tried to start a war between the two nations. He persuaded two news syndicates, represented by New York correspondents, to send dispatches that Obregon had withdrawn in a huff from the conference and had made a formal declaration of war. The story went all over the United States.
The incident never happened. All the time, Obregon was waiting in his private car on the Juarez side for the next day’s palavering.
“It is hopeless,” he exclaimed, when the report was taken to him. “The scoundrels of the border will not let the American people understand, even if they wish to.”
Funston, in his private car on the American side, fumed and declared that he was all for fighting. Thorough Americano, was Funston.
Another event was the crushing defeat of American cavalry troops at the edge of a Mexican town. The gringo press at once, and in astonishing headlines, held this up as a typically treacherous Mexican act. A breach of international agreement. A barbaric ambush.
Yet the officer in command of the American troops, for all he dismounted his men within 300 yards of the Mexican machine guns, was an expert in military tactics. He had written a book about it. And the international agreement was that no American troops, in Mexico on the diplomatic sufferance of the federalista government, should approach a Mexican town as if to pass through it.
The commander of the American army, at his own camp-fire, could not account for the disobedience of his subordinate.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. “He had strict orders to avoid trouble and surely he understood about approaching Mexican towns. He certainly made a mistake in believing the Mexicans would not fight.”
It was not so hard to understand. Other officers had gone through Mexican towns. They “got away with it.” The courteous Mexican garrison officers protested against this wilful violation of the pact. Their protests added flavor to the adventure, recited in gringo mess-tents. It was an inspiration to other officers to do likewise and have a boast to make.
It was the old brag. The Mexican would not fight. Any two-fisted, upstanding American was worth six Mexicans. It didn’t work out that way at Carrizal. Mexican treachery!
Incidentally, Mexican minstrels still sing the praises of one young American officer—a blond, young hero who fought fearlessly to the death. His picture featured the colorful posters when the Carrizal anniversary was celebrated in Chihuahua.
The truth about Mexican treachery may be difficult for gringos to believe. Fancy, then, how hard it is for the Mexicans to believe an accident the incident in which a score of Mexicans were locked in an El Paso jail, soaked in kerosene and hideously burned to death. It is a fact that these prisoners died in this screaming nightmare. It can not be lied away. It was officially explained in El Paso that the kerosene was a delousing formality and that the flames were the result of a careless match.
Perhaps the Mexican would be more ready to believe if he did not know the border gringo so well.
These are simple records of events taken from a long, long scroll that is the history of border troubles, spawned in the half-breed towns of two nations.
The American has the courage of his conventions. Courtesy with him is a symbol of decadence. The Mexican is a “greaser” who, through some oversight of a Providence usually adept in gringo efficiency, is in possession of a land of fabled wealth. Anyway, the Mexican is dark-skinned.
The gringo bows to the inevitable and plots to remove that wealth. To do it by stirring up revolutions, by selling patriots guns that will not shoot and by running off cattle is but a petty expression of his desire. One day he will succeed in getting his army of occupation across the border. Dios halt that day!
The Mexican is no slower to forgive than any one else who has been deeply hurt. To him the Americano is uncivilized—he is a “gringo.” The Mexican, too, may bow to the inevitable. His back has been bent and twisted under the scourge and on the rack of a procession of lusting conquerors.
But his fatalism includes a fearlessness of death. The man who rides into battle singing is an enemy not to be lightly reckoned.
On his side of the border no less than on the side of the gringo there is being built, higher and stouter, the barrier of lies and hate and misunderstanding.
There have been events to record. These have been mere preliminary sketches. But sure, unmistakable sketches that one day will make a picture of violence and shame.
DUST OF MEXICO AGAIN
The buzzard that had been drawing lazy circles across the sky dropped swiftly to the edge of the mesquite. He folded his shabby wings. He drew in his red, raw neck and scabby head—and settled down to wait——
El Humoristo’s horse halted at the edge of the tiny oasis. His rider lurched forward in the saddle. El Humoristo wearily gathered himself together. Slowly he hoisted his right leg and dragged it over the horse’s back.
As his feet touched the ground his knees buckled under him. He collapsed and fell
full length on his back. He looked up at his saddle in stupid astonishment. He was too tired to rise right away. He knew he could never climb back into the saddle. He closed his eyes and rested.
He was very thirsty. There was water in this clump of green trees, the cold pool that was the heart of the oasis. Painfully he struggled to his hands and knees. He lifted himself to his feet and swayed. He took a step—another—like a drunken tight-rope walker. Another step—then he fell. It took all his strength to obey the instinct to throw his hands in front of him.
He tried again and fell. A cactus spike slit his cheek. It took all afternoon to cover the fifty yards to the pool. Once he counted seven steps before he fell.
It was a miserable way to die. He had expected something else. He was a ridiculous romanticist.
It would have been better if he had died in front of the firing squad. A clumsy miracle had saved him from that. To throw him into the hardships of a long campaign in the desert. It had all been gloriously worth while, though. He had gone through it without a mark. He had just grown leaner and tougher. It was funny how a man could go through a slaughtering battle without a trace of fear. And, when the danger was over, become nervous and frightened.
Once, he remembered, he had jerked his horse aside to avoid trampling on a man he had killed. That was funny, too——
They called him El Humoristo because he laughed and made atrocious jokes in time of danger. Well, this was a different kind of joke. And it was on him. It was laughable, at that——
He had looked on himself as a kind of hero, he reckoned. Now he wondered to what audience he had been acting all the while. To himself, of course. His compañeros were the real heroes——
Heroes in books always came back with a picturesque scar on their foreheads or a saber cut on the forearm. They were wounded in places which made decent conversation. It would be difficult to chat lightly in a drawing room about amoebic dysentery.
The Little Tigress: Tales out of the Dust of Old Mexico Page 13