CHAPTER XI
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 certainobstructionists 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, pickingtools 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 ifpuzzled 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.
“Takeyourpictures?” 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 anexcellent 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 anhour’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,wantedto 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 pencilor 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,
2MI.WINDMILLHELP!
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 wasthickest, 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 slipperylead 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.”
“Therearetwo 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 indisputablevachero. 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 adrink, 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 theirbobbing 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 ourfolding 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 onhis 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 thehall 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 awayinto the canyons, and was ridin’ with them on his heels for three days and nights, with his eye like that.”
“Then the lawdidtry to redress the murder of those five hundred Mexicans.”
“I guessnot. 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 ofthem, 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 westwe 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 inthiscountry.”
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 aboutthem,” he chuckled mirthfully, “But you don’t know what ructionswemay raise in the night.”
“Better take it,” Toby whispered. So we bore ourarms 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 midnightrevel, 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 ourbody 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.