IV: THE TRAIL OF THE COLORADOS
Five days later the Three looked down from a mountain shoulder upon thefirst and greatest of the Chihuahua _haciendas_.
Far beyond the limit of sight its level ranges ran. From the crest ofthe blue range in the distance, their glances would still have traveledon less than half-way to the eastern limit. The Mexican Central train,then running southward in the trough between two ranges thirty milesaway, had been speeding all day across lands whose ownership was vestedin one man. The half-score of towns, hundred villages, in its environswere there only by his consent. Until the bursting of the firstrevolution had sent him flying into El Paso with other northernoverlords, their thousands of inhabitants, shopkeepers, muleteers,artisans, _peones_, drew by his grace the very breath of life.
"Seems foolish even to think that one could own all that."
Jake's glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shiningdistances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped _mesas_ upliftedtheir chrome and vermilion facades from the dead flat. Very far away,one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of amirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place ofthe familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewnover a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parchedwindings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! its shimmer was everywhere;burned in the sand; in the dust whorls that danced with the littlewinds; in the air that flowed like wine around the royal purple ofdistant ranges. Lifeless, without sign of human tenancy, its solitaryreaches were infinite as the ocean. Yet man and his works were not sovery far away. Certain black specks that hovered or wheeled against theblue of the sky a mile away served as a sign-post.
"Vultures," Sliver pointed. "Must be something dead over there."
"Or dying?" Bull questioned. "Otherwise the birds 'u'd settle. Thesedays it's as likely to be human as horse. We might ride down that way."
And human it proved to be when, half an hour later, they rode out ofencircling cactus into an open space around a giant _sahuaro_. Headfallen back so that his face was turned up to the torrid sun; relaxed,limp as a rag, a man hung by his wrists that had been tied at the fullstretch of his arms around the _sahuaro's_ barrel. During the sixtyhours he had hung there without food or water the skin had shrunk tillit lay like scorched parchment on the bones of his face. In addition tothe vultures that hovered above, others hopped or fluttered over the hotsands, or perched, patient as death itself, on the surrounding cactus.Now and then a bolder scavenger hopped upon his shoulder. But a slowroll of the head, sudden hiss of dry breath, would drive it away. At theapproach of the Three the evil creatures rose in a black cloud, fillingthe air with the beat and swish of coffin wings.
"He's white! a gringo!" Bull cried it while he hacked at the cords.
"The poor devil!" Sliver spoke softly as he lifted and laid the poor,limp body on his outspread coat.
While he laved the shrunken face and Bull poured water, drop by drop, onthe man's swollen tongue, Jake carefully parted the swollen flesh of thewrists and cut away the cords.
If old man Livingstone, or other of the border ranchers who had sufferedthrough their raids, could have seen them at their merciful work, havenoted their gentleness, heard their sympathetic comment, they wouldprobably have refused the evidence of their own eyes. Though still tooweak to even raise his head, they brought the man in an hour to thepoint where he was able, in whispers, to give an account of himself.
He was a miner and his claim lay on a natural bench that jutted out fromthe sheer wall of a great gulch in the mountains about a mile away. Hishouse, a hut of corrugated iron, stood with a few rough work buildingsup there. If he could only get to it, he'd be all right.
And he soon did. Lifted by the others to the saddle in front of Bull andcradled like a child in the rustler's great arms, he scarcely felt thejourney. Viewed as he hung on the _sahuaro_, dirty, bruised, shrunken byfever and thirst, he might have been any age. But when laid on his bed,washed, fed with a quick soup compounded by Sliver out of pounded jerkyand some pea meal he found on a shelf, he proved to be a typicalAmerican miner of middle age--short gray beard, hawk profile, highcheek-bones, eyes blue and hard as agate. By the time they had cookedfor themselves--for even if his condition had permitted, it was now toolate to go on--he had recovered his voice and told them all.
"It was the 'Colorados' that tied me up. I knew them by the 'red hearts'on the breasts of their charro jackets."
Even up into their far corner of Sonora had penetrated something of theterror associated with the name. Originally the "Colorados" had beenOrozco's soldiers. But when dispersed by the collapse of his revolutionagainst Madero they had split up into bands and overrun the northernMexican states. Because of their frightful cruelties they were shot bythe Carranzistas whenever caught. But though the spread of the latterpower was driving them farther south, they still made occasional raids.
"But I was lucky to get off with that," he said, after describing thebeating that had preceded the tying-up. "They cut the soles off the feetof two of my _peones_, then drove them, stark-naked, through spikychollas. When the poor devils fell, exhausted, they beat them to deathwhere they lay on the ground. Surely I was lucky, for if it hadn't beenthat they thought I had money, and tied me up to make me confess, I'dhave got the same. They left me to raid some _rancho_, but swore they'dcome back."
Riding in, they had passed the dead _peones_, and, bad man that he was,Jake shuddered at the memory. "But why do you stay here, with that kindof people running loose?"
"Why do I stay?" The miner repeated the question, with heat. "TheAmerican consul in Chihuahua is always asking that. Why does any manstay anywhere? Because his living is there. We came here under treatiesthat guaranteed our rights in the time of Diaz when this country hadbeen at peace for thirty years. Every cent I had was put into this mine,and I'd worked it along to the point where it would pay big capital tocome in when that fanatic, Madero, turned hell loose.
"At first we naturally expected that Uncle Sam would look after ourrights. But did he? Yes, by ordering us to get out--we that had investeda thousand million dollars in opening up markets for a hundred milliondollars' worth a year of his manufactured products. Get out and have itall go up in smoke the minute our backs were turned!
"Luckily for me, I had no women folk to complicate the situation. Butmost of the others had. We'd thought, of course, that the mistreatmentof one American woman would bring intervention, and so did the Mexicanstill the thing had been done again and again. Since then--know what thatColorado leader replied when I threatened him with the vengeance of ourGovernment?"
"'Your Government!' he sneered. 'We have killed your men, we haveravished your women, we have exterminated your brats; will you tell mewhat else we can do to make your Government fight?'"
He concluded, with bitter sadness, "I was brought up to love and reverethe flag; to believe that an American citizen was safe wherever itfloated. But, men! I've seen it trampled in the mire, spat upon, defiledby filthy _peones_, then spread in mockery over the dead bodies ofAmericans who believed in its power to save."
In Sonora and on the west coast, so far, foreigners had sufferedprincipally in their goods. But rumors and reports of excesses in thecentral states had found their way westward; enough of them for theThree to find all the miner had said quite easy of belief.
"It sure puts Uncle Sam in rather a poor light," Jake agreed. "He don'tseem a bit like the old fellow that sent General Scott right through toMexico City."
Bull's big head moved in an emphatic nod through a thick cloud oftobacco smoke. "Looks like the old gent had lost his pep sence he putthe Apaches outer the scalping business an' got through spanking JohnnyReb."
Only Sliver, the optimist, stood by the accused. "Jest wait! D'you-allknow what's going to happen one o' these days? That same Uncle Sam, he'smighty patient an' he's been handed a heap o' bad counsel; but one ofthese days he's a-going to get mad. When he does--listen! he's a-goingto
walk down to the Mexican line an' take a look at it with his nose allcrinkled up like he smelled something bad. 'Things ain't quite righthere!' he'll say, ca'm an' deliberate, that-a-way. Then he'll stoop an'pick up that line, an' when he sots it down again--it 'ull be south ofPanama. Jest you-all wait an' see!"
"'Wait? Wait?'" the miner sarcastically repeated. "Seems as though I'dheard that before. Wait all you want. As for me--one thing I know.Unless your Uncle Samuel crinkles his nose pretty soon, there'll bedarned few of us gringos left to see."
"Why not watch from the other side?"
"Watch hell!" The sudden firing of the hard agate eyes showed that,despite his wounds and torture, his just grievance, sorrow, andindignation over his fellows' wrongs, that despite all the indomitableAmerican spirit, the spirit that dared Indian massacres in the conquestof the plains, the spirit of the Alamo which added Texas and Californiato the Union, the spirit that preserved the Union itself fromdisintegration, the fine old spirit of '76, still burned under all."Watch hell! As I told you, we came here under treaties that guaranteedprotection. We have a right to stay, and by God! we're going to stay!To-morrow I'll get together my _peones_ and go right to it again;only"--he observed a significant pause--"the next time the Coloradoscome there'll be a machine-gun trained on 'em from up here on the bench.All I ask is that the Lord sends me the same bunch again."
In this stout frame of mind and recovered sufficiently to move about,the Three left him next morning. Looking back from the mouth of thegorge, they got a last glimpse of him between the towering walls, asolitary figure on the edge of the bench. A wave of the hand and hepassed out of their lives--in person, but not in other ways. His was oneof the stray figures that stroll casually across the course of a lifeand, in passing, deflect its course into alien channels. Not for nothinghad he suffered torture. That and his talk last night had sown in Bull,at least, a certain leaven; the first fruits whereof showed in thesudden, vicious thump with which he brought his big fist down on thepommel as they rode along.
"I was thinking of what that fellow said las' night," he replied toJake's questioning look. "To think, after that, we're out to rob our owncountrymen for the benefit of a rotten little greaser."
"That's so." Sliver accepted the new point of view with his accustomedalacrity. "Damned if I seen it that way afore."
But Jake, always practical, sterilized this absurd sentimentality with asudden injection of rustler's sense. "Aw, come off! You fellows may beout for Mexicans, but I'm for myself. We robbed our countrymen on theother side of the line, an' what's wrong with robbing them on this? Ikain't see the diff. Business is business; we've gotter eat."
"That's right, too." Sliver caught the sense of it. "We've sure gottereat."
But Bull's face grew blacker. The Colorado's boast, "We've raped yourwomen, exterminated your brats," had aroused in him instincts older thanthe race; the instinct that set the gorilla-like caveman with bristlinghair, grinning teeth, in the mouth of his cave; that sent the Saxon hindat the throat of the Norse rover; the instinct that has animated theentire line of men through eons of time to rise in defense of the tribalwomen.
He felt their soul agony, these tribeswomen of his, condemned to becomea prey of _peon_ bandits; and while the feeling swelled within him, hisblack brow drew down over narrowed hot eyes. His huge frame quiveredwith indignation as righteous as ever animated the best of the race inthe defense of a common cause. And yet--
Business was business, they had to eat! The feeling left untouched theirevil habit of life; compelled no immediate change of plan.
About midway of the afternoon the Three sighted the poles of the MexicanCentral Railway, a gray line of sticks running off in the distance. Asthey drew nearer, a certain dark blur on the embankment resolved intothe rusted ironwork of a burned train. The line here ran almost due eastto round a mountain spur, and as they followed along it the rack andruin of three revolutions passed under their eyes.
Linking burned trains, that occurred every few miles, long lines oftwisted rails writhed and squirmed in the ditch. The desiccatedcarcasses of dead horses, small twig crosses that marked the graves oftheir wild riders, ran continuously with the telegraph poles. Far beyondtheir view they ran, those twisted rails, wrecks, carcasses, andcrosses, for ten thousand miles throughout the ramifications of the_Nacional_ railroads, to the uttermost corners of Mexico; and typical ofthe vast destruction was the burned station they came on at sundown.Topping a black hill that rose abruptly from the plain behind it, a hugewooden cross stood blackly out against the smoldering reds of theevening sky, futile emblem of the simple faith that had relied upon itto save the station.
While the Three sat their horses and gazed at the ruin, a whistlesounded, and out from the north steamed a troop-train, first of a dozen,whose glaring headlights spaced off the dusk which was now falling likea dusty brown blanket over the desert.
As the first rolled past Jake swore softly and Sliver exclaimed insurprise, for never before was seen such a sight. On it were packed somethousand _peon_ soldiers, part of Valles's army on its way south topursue the merry trade that had wrought the prevailing destruction.Unlike any other army, its guns, horses, munitions, and supplies wereloaded inside, while the soldiers rode with their women on top ofbox-cars.
In their motley uniforms, regulation khaki or linen alternating withtight _charro_ suits and _peon_ cottons, they were exceedinglypicturesque, and not a man of them but was belted or bandoliered with atleast fifteen pounds of shining brass cartridges.
Under shelters of cottonwood boughs or serapes stretched on poles, theirbrown women crouched by clay cooking-pots, set over fires built onearthen hearths within a ring of stones; so while the _frijoles_ and_chile_ simmered and sent forth grateful odors, their lords gambled,smoked, or slept.
Nor did they lack music. On every car careless fellows sat with legsdangling precariously over the edge, while they chanted in a high nasaldrone to the tinkling of a guitar. Ablaze with vivid color, scarlets,violets, blues, yellows of the women's dresses and serapes, wreathed inthe faint blue smoke of cooking-fires, the trains flashed out of andpassed on into the brown dusk, while the guitar tinkled a subdued minorto their roar and rattle.
As the last rolled by a tall Texan rose alongside a machine-gun that wasset up on the car roof and yelled to the Three: "Come on, fellows! We'regoing to belt hell out of the Federals at Torreon!"
It was the trumpet call of adventure; Adventure, the mistress of men,she who was largely responsible for their "rustlings," investing it, asshe did, with the fireglows of romance. Subtract the long rides throughhot dusks, sudden swoop on drowsy herds, the thunder of the stampede,the fight, pursuit, take away all this and reduce the business to itsessence, plain thievery, and not one of the Three but would have turnedfrom it in disgust.
If the train had stopped--perhaps their lives would have been deflectedinto those roaring, revolutionary channels that led on to death in thetrenches outside Torreon. But it rolled on into the dusk, and as itvanished their eyes went to a light that burst like a golden flower inthe window of a hut built of railroad ties. Five minutes thereafter theywere in full enjoyment of that hospitality which, such as it is, may behad all over Mexico for "a cigarette and a smile."
While eating they extracted from their host, a simple _peon_, all theinformation necessary for the horse raid. To avoid "requisitions"payable in revolutionary currency wet from the nearest newspaper press,the _gringos hacendados_ had driven their animals into the mountainpastures three-quarters of a day's ride east of the tracks. But omittingthe details of the long ride next day over plains where the scant grassran in sunlit waves ahead of the wind to the horizon, the history of theraid may proceed from the moment the Three sighted the first horses inthe hollow of a shallow valley late the following afternoon.
Even at the distance, almost a quarter-mile, they could see thedifference in size and condition between them and the common Mexicanscrubs. After long study through powerful binoculars that played aboutthe same part i
n their operations as a "jimmy" in those of a burglar,Bull exclaimed his admiration, "_Some horses!_"
"But--" Jake indicated five Mexicans who were herding the animals at afast trot down the valley, "we're out of luck."
"Oh, I don't know." Bull handed him the glasses. "See what you make of'em."
"_Colorados!_" Jake spied at once the dreaded ensign, the red heart onthe blue _charro_ jacket. "It's the same outfit that tied up the miner,too. Remember how he described the leader? 'About twice as tall as acommon Mexican'? That fellow's six-foot-two if he's an inch."
"The gall of him," Sliver snorted. "What do you think o' that? After_our_ horses! Well, they 'ain't got 'em yet. We'll jest ride alongbehind the hill here an'--"
But Jake, who was still gazing through the glasses, dryly interrupted."No, you bet he hain't. I've a hunch that the gent coming over the hill,there, is the man that owns 'em."
As yet the new-comer was unseen by the Colorados, and as, without pause,he raced after them down the slope, Bull growled his admiration. "He'ssure got his nerve."
"Mebbe he don't know they're Colorados."
Perhaps Sliver was right. As the raiders' backs were turned, the daringrider could not see the dreaded ensign. Or he may have thought that themarauders would fly at the sight of him; intended to afford themopportunity when he pulled his gun and fired.
"Here comes his army!" Jake croaked.
"Only a lad."
Bull, who now held the glasses, made out both the youthful face, whitewith anxiety, and the lithe swing of the young body in rhythm with thegalloping horse. The anxiety was justified, for as he also raced on downthe slope the Colorados swung in their saddles, let go a volley fromtheir short carbines, and dropped the first rider and horse in histracks. At the same moment the lad's hat, a soft slouch, blew off,loosing a cloud of fair hair on the breeze. If it had not, a shrillscream would still have proclaimed the rider's sex.
"Hell!" Bull's astonishment vented itself in a sudden oath. "It's awoman! a white girl--dressed in man's riding-togs!"
Over the Border: A Novel Page 4