Also it showed that which, while not nearly so interesting, had its immediate uses – a candle stuck in a tequila bottle; and its steadier flare presently helped them to another find – a chemisette and other garments of feminine wear, spotlessly clean and smoothly ironed, arranged on a string that ran over a bunk in one corner.
“The fiesta wear of our hostess,” Francesca remarked. “How lucky! for I am drenched.”
“And look at that pile of dry wood!” he exclaimed. “The gods are with us. I’ll build a fire, then while I rub down the horse you can change. What’s this?”
It was a rough sketch done with charcoal on the table. Two parallelograms with sticks for legs were in furious pursuit of certain horned squares which, in their turn, were in full flight toward a doll’s house in the far corner.
“Oh, I know!” the girl cried, after a moment of study. “Here, in the wild country where they never see man, are raised the fighting bulls for the rings of Mexico. This hut belongs to a vaquero of San Angel, and this is an order, left in his absence, to drive the bulls into the hacienda.” Laying her finger on a triangle which had evidently been added later, she continued, laughing: “This shows that his woman has gone with him. They were evidently called away unexpectedly, for she had already set the corn to soak in this olla for the supper tortillas. And the saints be praised! Here are dried beef, salt, and chilis. Now hurry the fire, and you shall see what a cook I am.”
While he was building it in the center of the mud floor she made other finds – a cube of brown sugar, coffee, a cake of goat’s cheese; and her little delighted exclamations over each discovery both amused him and proved how sincere was her acceptance of the situation. “She’s a brick!” he told the horse, rubbing him down, outside, with wisps pulled out from the under side of the thatch. “Thoroughbred in blood and bone.” As the animal had already experimented with the thatch and found it quite to its liking, the question of provender was settled. But in order that Francesca might have ample time to change, Seyd rubbed and rubbed and rubbed till a rattle of clay pots inside gave him leave to come in.
At the door he paused to admire the picture she made in the red glow of the fire. In place of the slender girl of the stylish raincoat a pretty peona raised velvet eyes from the stone metate on which she was vigorously rubbing soaked corn for the supper tortillas. By emphasizing some features and softening others strange attire always gives a new view of a woman. The sleeveless garment showed the round white arms and foreshortened and filled out her slender lines.
Glancing down at her arms, she confessed, with an uneasy wriggle: “I don’t like it, though I wear décolleté every evening when we are in the city. But I shall soon get used to it.”
Conscious of his admiring eyes, she found them employment in watching the tortillas. But, having grown accustomed to the new dress by the time supper was ready, she left him free to watch the white arms and small hands which hovered like butterflies over the clay pot. In the lack of all other utensils, they used bits of tortilla for spoons, dipping alternately into the pot which she had set between them; nor did he find the chili any the worse for its contact with the tortilla which had just taken an impression of her small teeth. It required only an after-dinner pipe, to which she graciously consented, to seal his content.
After the wet and fatigue of the trail the warmth and cheer of food and fire were extremely grateful, but not conducive to talk. While he sat watching the tobacco smoke curl up into the blackened peak of the roof she leaned, chin in her hands, elbows on crossed knees, studying the fire. Leaping out of red coal, an occasional flame set its reflection in her deep eyes, and as his gaze wandered from her around the rough jacal Seyd found it difficult to realize that it was indeed he, Robert Seyd, mining engineer of San Francisco, who sat there sharing food and fire with a girl, on the one hand scion of the Mexican aristocracy, descendant on the other of a line which ran back into the dim time of the Aztecs. The thought stirred the romance within him and helped to prolong his silence. It would have held him still longer if his musings had not been suddenly interrupted by her merry laugh.
“Si?” he inquired, looking suddenly up.
“I was thinking what they would say – my mother, Don Luis, the neighbors?”
“Horrible!” he agreed. “Your mother? What would she say?”
As the white hands flew up in a horrified gesture it was the señora herself. “Santa Maria Marissima!”
“And Don Luis?”
Her expression changed from laughter into sudden mischievous demureness. “His remarks, señor, are not for me to repeat.”
“Well – the neighbors?”
Once more her hands went up. “‘Was it not that we always said it of that mad girl! Maria, thou shalt not speak with her again.’” Smiling, she added, “For you must know, señor, that I have been held as a horrible example of the things a girl should not do since the days of my childhood.”
“Like the devil in the old New England theology,” he suggested, smiling, “you make more converts than the preacher?”
He had to explain before she understood. Then she laughed merrily. “Just so. What they would do were I to marry, die, or reform, I really cannot tell. It would leave a gap almost equal to the loss of the catechism.” She finished with a mock sigh, “They will never appreciate me till I’m dead.”
“Any present danger?”
The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. “I am afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my mother, who would have me more delicate and refined.”
“Marriage?”
“No one wants me.”
“Don Sebastien?”
It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed. “Tut! tut! A cousin?”
Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as velvet, she added: “I will confess. There were others. Some too fat, some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were triflers – or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, señor, never a man among them.” With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, “Among all of them – never a man.” Though she was looking directly at him, her glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. “Never a man,” with a change of accent.
“But he will come – some day,” he teased.
“And go – after the fashion of dream men.”
“And dream women.”
For a while she studied him curiously. “Then she has not come?”
“Yes,” he answered, with sudden impulse. “But – ”
She softly filled the pause. “‘But’ and ‘because’ are woman’s reasons.”
“Unhappily, sometimes man’s,” he gravely answered; and, feeling, perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe latitudes, he rose and began to pull dry grass from the under side of the thatch. “For you,” he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. “I knew you wouldn’t care to sleep there.”
Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back. “To make my bed,” he answered her question.
“In the wet?”
“Oh, it isn’t so bad – here under the eaves.”
“Only an inch of water,” she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and, indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane siding, she gave him his orders. “You will sleep here – inside.”
“But – ” he began.
“Señor, I said that you would sleep inside.”
As a matter of fact, the “prospect” outside was not inviting, and his acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised. She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the white fullness of her doubled arm.
As a matter of fact, it was his wife’s face that returned his steady gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received the first intimation of Francesca’s sleep from a sigh which caused him to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have displayed when he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.
For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations, the pre-eminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coarse woman in Albuquerque.
His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, “Your cake is baked, son. The sooner you let this girl know it the better,” was none the less tragic. The thought was the last in his waking mind.
Before going to sleep he performed one last service. Noticing that she shivered under the wet breath of the night, he took off his coat, tiptoed across, and, after laying it softly across her shoulders, returned with equal caution. She did not stir or even change the slow rhythm of her breath, but he had no more than lain down before her eyes slowly opened. When his deep respirations told that he was fast asleep she rose on one elbow and looked at him across the fire.
In her turn, with glances shyly curious as those with which Eve, newly formed, may have eyed Adam still in “deep sleep,” she noted the wide-spaced, deep-set eyes, strong nose, the ideality of the brows, the humorous puckers at the corners of his mouth. Though she did not analyze their individual meanings, the totality made a strong appeal to instinct and intuitions formed by the vast experience of the race. Her impression phrased itself in her murmur, “A wholesome face.”
Only the cleft chin seemed to carry a special meaning. Surveying it, a gleam of mischief shot through the soft satisfaction of her look, and she murmured beneath her breath in Spanish, “Oh, fickle! fickle! Thy wife will need the sharpest of eyes.”
The thought brought a little laugh, and for a minute thereafter she sat, a finger upon her lip, listening for a break in his breathing. When it did not come she rose slowly, stole like a mouse across the floor, and laid his coat, light as a feather, over his unprotected shoulders. Back again on her own couch, she looked across at him again; a glance naïve in its enjoyment of the romantic impropriety of the entire proceeding. Then, curling up under her raincoat, she fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER XII
Thoroughly fagged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him to knowledge of a golden cobweb of light streaming in between the flimsy siding of the hut. Through the open doorway he obtained a glimpse of a bejeweled world, resonant with the song of birds. After informing him of these facts, his eyes reintroduced him to the young lady in the tan riding habit who had ousted the pretty peona of last night from her command over fire and dishes. The satisfying odor of hot coffee completed the verdict of his senses.
“Breakfast all ready? I must have slept like a log.”
“You did.” She laughed. “I rattled the dishes in vain. I was just about to throw something at you.”
Now, his last waking thought had outlined a purpose to inform her at once of his marriage, and while they were eating breakfast it recurred again. But not with the same force. That which, when imbued with the sentimental values of firelight and silence, appeared necessary and right somehow appeared almost absurd when viewed in broad day. Checking sentiment, too, by its very friendliness, her manner did not invite confession.
“It would be impertinent,” he concluded. “She has no personal interest in me.”
If he had observed her only an hour earlier re-entering the jacal after a shivering exchange outside with the peona he might not have been quite so sure. Once or twice she had indulged in softer thought, whose key was to be found in her murmur just before she tried to awake him:
“Adios, Rosario.”
Also the morning had brought its own problem to fill his mind. He could not but see that their appearance at the inn in the Barranca so early in the day would be a confession of their breach of the most rigid of Spanish conventions. But how to broach the subject without offense? Though he racked his brains while saddling the horse and, later, when it was carrying them double upon their way, he had come to no conclusion up to the moment that she settled it herself with a little cry.
“Now I know where I am.” She was indicating an outcropping of rock on a sterile hillside. “We strayed miles away from our trail. We shall soon come to a path that leads past a rancho where I can borrow a horse.”
Almost as they spoke the cattle track they had been following joined a trail, and shortly after she spoke again, laughing. “And now, Señor Rosario, I must bid you good-by. This good beast has done nobly, but we shall gain time if one rides forward to the rancho and sends back a horse. Which shall it be?”
But he was already on the ground, hat in hand. “Rosa, adios.”
Laughing, she rode on while he sat down on an outcropping of rock to wait, for he was not minded to wade through the wet grass and brush of some woods at the foot of the hill. Until she passed from sight he sat watching, then, feeling a little lazy, he fitted his angles into a sort of natural couch in the rock and fell to musing, reviewing again the incidents of the night. He had not intended to sleep. But what with the warmth and stillness, he presently passed quietly away, was still unconscious when the stroke of a hoof on a rock awoke him to the sight of two horsemen with a led beast.
“For me,” he thought. Then, as he recognized Sebastien Rocha in the second horseman, he whistled his consternation. If the hacendado had not actually met Francesca he must surely have pumped the mozo dry, and now the sight of him, Seyd, would fully reveal their case!
“Now for a big fat row,” he told himself. But, greatly to his surprise, Sebastien passed on with a nod, and presently turned from the trail, following their fresh hoof tracks over the hill. The mozo had already gone on to retrieve Francesca’s saddle from the dead horse, and, irritated and alarmed, Seyd mounted the led beast and rode on at a gallop. But, quickly realizing that his further company was not likely to improve the girl’s case, he presently pulled the beast back to a walk. Lost in frowning thought, he rode on slowly until, an hour later, there came a beat of galloping hoofs, and Sebastien rode up from behind.
His reiteration of the thought “Now for the row!” was colored by the way in which the hacendado’s hand went to his holster. But Seyd’s hand, which moved as quickly to his own gun, dropped, and he blushed crimson as the other held out his brier pipe.
“Merely this, señor.” He glanced meaningly at Seyd’s gun. “For that you would have been too late. I could have shot you through the back. After this do not let your foolish Yankee pride stop you from looking behind.”
Though both angry and alarmed, the cold impudence of it made Seyd laugh. “Yes? How did you resist the temptation?”
“It was a temptation.” He gravely approved the word. “Your back made such a fine smooth mark. I could see the bullet splash in the center.”
“Then why didn’t you? Since you are so frank I don’t mind saying that I believe that you already had a hand in at least one of three attempts on my life! Is it that you would prefer to have me blown up?”
“Like your predecessor, the Hollander?” Sebastien’s shrug might have meant anything. “I have, of course, my preferences, and some day I shall have to decide in just which way I would wish you put to death. In passing the opportunity now you ought to feel complimented, for let me tell you that I would never leave any Mexican lips free to tell of your experiences last night.”
The man’s tone of quiet certainty robbed the words of extravagance; and, accustomed now to a life that out-melodramaed melodrama, Seyd knew better than to take them for jest. “That’s very nice of you,” he quietly answered, and as just then the trail narrowed to pass through a copal grove he added: “Forewarned is forearmed. Just to keep you out of temptation – will you please to go first?”
“With pleasure.”
Faint though it was, the smile that loosened the firm mouth made it easier for Seyd to continue when they were riding once more side by side. “For the young lady’s sake I am glad to have you take such a sensible view of an unavoidable situation. I take it that you were going the other way. If you can trust me – ”
“Trust no one and you will never be deceived. If I had my way of it there would be an end to the girl’s wild tricks. But since she will be abroad, what better escort could she have than her kinsman?”
“None,” Seyd agreed. “I overtook her by accident, cared for her the best that I could; now she is in your hands.”
Sebastien shook his head. “Not so swiftly. She would hardly thank me for your dismissal.” While the shadow of a smile lifted the corner of his thin lips he added: “The last time I mixed in her affairs she refused to speak with me for over a year, and I have no mind to repeat the experience. We are all going to San Nicolas. It would be foolish to ride apart.”
“Very well,” Seyd agreed, not, however, with any great degree of pleasure. Apart from the strain involved by a day’s travel with a man who had just confessed to a permanent intention of killing him he felt more disappointment than he would have cared to admit at the spoiling of the tête-à-tête with the girl. In fact, the feeling was so acute that he found it necessary to justify it in his own thought. “It was only for a day,” he mused, slightly changing his previous conclusion to fit the case, “and I’d like to have seen it out.”
“So! so! The storm proved a little too much for this one.”
They had just ridden into copal woods, and, looking up, Seyd saw that he was pointing at a pile of bones and wet tatters of clothing that lay under a swinging fray of rope. If possible, it was more grisly of appearance than a second mummy which still swung, clicking its miserable bones in the wind. Whether or no he noticed Seyd’s shiver of disgust Sebastien ran easily on:
“He was a stout rogue, this fellow, with a keen eye for a pretty woman and small scruples as to how he got her. It was, indeed, through this little weakness that we caught him, using a girl to bait the trap. But he died game – with a joke on his lips. ‘Señor,’ he said, as the mule went from under him, ‘if but one-half of my brats walk in my steps thou wilt have need of an army to finish us up.’
“He had humor, too. He it was that stole the altar service from the church of San Anselmo to pay the priest of Guadaloupe to say a thousand masses for the repose of his soul. He was dead and the masses said before the service was traced by a pilgrim to the Guadaloupe shrine, and ever since the priests have been at war – both over the return of the service and to decide the burning question as to whether it is possible to nullify a heavenly title obtained through fraud. It makes a pretty point in theology, and the battle still rages. Being debarred from physical expression, the brute in a priest exercises itself through the tongue, and they will not leave such a choice morsel till the last shred of meat has been gnawed from the bones.”
In presence of those dumb witnesses to its truth, the grim banter sounded even grimmer. During the long white nights that followed hard days at work on the smelter nothing had suited Caliban more than to be drawn on to talk of the war against the brigands. Under the red light of a camp fire, with the vast night of the Barranca yawning below, the tales had been spun – tales that had outdone the dime novels of Seyd’s youth. Of them all, that which had ended with the hanging of the last bandit in this very glade had outdone all in sheer desperation.
Kindling to the romance of it all, he took stealthy note, as they rode on, of the lithe muscular figure, which was as extraordinary in its balanced strength as the calm power of the quiet brown face. When memory drew a vivid contrast between Sebastien and his early training in the sober atmosphere of the English commercial boarding-school Seyd wondered, and finally put his wonder into words.
“Didn’t you find the transition from Manchester rather sudden? It must have been like plunging head first into a romance.”
“Romance?” For the first time that morning, for matter of that, in all their intercourse, Sebastien laughed outright. “Oh, you Anglo-Saxons! Romance is a creature of your own dreamy idealism. We do not know it. We are passionate, nervous, hysterical, gross, materialistic, but for all our heat we see life more clearly than you. It would be better for us if we did not. For where in the mirror of your imaginings you see your strength enormously magnified our clearer perceptions show our weaknesses. Even at the point of death you neither see nor accept defeat. But we, cowering before it, are swept the quicker away.” Just as on that other occasion when he stood talking beside their fire on the rim of the Barranca, this came out of his quiet with volcanic heat. Dropping as quickly into his usual calm, he finished, “No, I did not find it romantic – merely amusing.”
Nettled a little by his amused contempt, Seyd quickly retorted: “I fail to see how you can claim to have no ideals? You who are striving with all your might against the American invasion?”
Sebastien shrugged. “Racial aversion – backed up by the instinct of self-preservation. Even cattle will band together against the wolves. But remove the danger and the bulls fall at once fighting for command of the herd. Before Diaz we had sixty-five rulers in sixty years, very few of whom died in their beds. Once remove his iron hand from our throats and we shall go at it again, revolution upon revolution, for the sole purpose of satisfying some man’s personal ambition, lust, or individual greed. No, señor, we are individualists in the extreme. We have nothing in our make-up to correspond to the racial ideal that makes you Northmen subordinate personal interest to the general good. And because of our lack you will eventually rule us.”
“Yet you strive against it?”
“For the one reason, as I told you, that the weaker wolf declines to be eaten. Individually, I find it amusing. I would much prefer shooting gringo soldiery to hanging Mexican bandits.”
“And the General – Don Luis?”
Once again Sebastien laughed. “That old revolutionist? He would deny all I have said as rank heresy, though he himself is its most startling example. He would say that he was for Mexico, but Mexico, to him, is Mexico with a Garcia for president. Selfish to the backbone, every one of us.”
In a phrase he had described Don Luis, and, while he could not but smile at its truth, Seyd was just a little startled by the keen intelligence and flashing intuition. Even after allowing for advantages of travel and education the man’s sharp reasoning and originality were remarkable. Like a clear black pool his mind sharply reflected all that passed over it, and always the conception stood out as under a lightning flash.
“No, señor,” he went on, after a pause, “we are individualists, and as such can only obtain happiness by following our own bent. If we are held back for a while by Porfirio, be sure that sooner or later we shall return with greater zest to our ancient pastime of cutting each other’s throats.”
His uncanny intelligence, too, threw sinister lights on everything they passed. “I told you we were gross,” he said, indicating a youth and a brown girl who were flirting through the barred windows of an adobe ranch house. “The proof – the bars. With us love is a passion; the ideal exists only in our songs.”
Shortly thereafter they rode out on the rim overlooking the Barranca, and the necessity of riding in single file down the zigzag staircases brought an end to their talk. Neither did he begin it again as they crossed the bottom flat to the inn. Coming after a long silence, the invitation which he delivered at last, as they rode into the patio, came as a greater surprise.
“I feel certain, señor, that my cousin will wish you to lunch with us.”
Because another trait in Sebastien’s nature was not revealed until, a few minutes later, he knocked at Francesca’s door, Seyd failed to see that which, after all, was perhaps even more surprising. As he entered in response to her call she rose and stood, one hand resting on the small altar where burned a tiny taper; and as he stood looking at her across the length of the room the inquiry in her wide eyes became touched with fear.
“It is you?” she broke the silence. “They told me that you spent last night here. How was it that I did not meet you on the way?”
“Simply because I had happened to turn in at the Rancho del Rio to look at some cattle. But I overtook the mozo you sent back with the horse for the gringo. Also I called in at the jacal of Miguel, the vaquero of San Angel, where I found Maria, his woman, just returned. She was rejoicing over a supernatural visitation. It seems that while she and Miguel were away the Virgin Guadaloupe abode in their house, and even honored Maria by putting on her best fiesta clothes. In proof thereof she showed me a silver peso that the Virgin left tied up in one corner of her chemisette. It was truly remarkable, and I was well on my way to a healthy conversion when I happened to stumble on the gringo’s pipe – at least, he claimed it on sight.”
“And you immediately turned about to tattle this to me?”
He merely smiled under her bright scorn. “To see you home.”
“Where you will proceed to make my mother eternally miserable, and uncle – ”
“ – Infernally angry? On the contrary, I am prepared to back up with pistol and knife the tale of Maria’s visitation. Why should I wish to bring suffering to the good mother? It was a hap of the trail, and, much as I hate all gringos, it was far better that you should have been in this man’s hands. Some day I may have to kill him, and I shall do it with greater pleasure because of this!”
“If the attempt does not fail as miserably as that which you made on his soul.”
“Put it morals, cousin, just to bring it within the bounds of my comprehension. You know my beliefs as to souls.”
“In any case it was a mean trick.”
“Tricks are tricks only when they fail. Successful, they rise to the dignity of strategems. And he ought not to complain. Did he not come out of the ordeal unscathed, tricked out in the flowers of virtue? He’s really in my debt. But returning to my point, some day I shall kill him; but in the mean time I have asked him to lunch with us. As he looked hungry, I should suggest a little haste.”
“I am ready now.” Going toward him, she spoke, hesitantly: “Let me – thank you. Were you always thus, Sebastien, we should be better friends.”
“Gracias, anything but that.” Bowing, he stood aside to permit her to pass. “The half liking that you deal out to Anton, Javier, and other fat-jowled hacendados, your admirers, would never do for me. I prefer your – fear.”
“But I am not afraid of you.” She looked straight in his eyes passing out.
“You will be – some day.”