“ His hawk eyes found, just before sundown, dust rising like yellow smoke on the opposite hills. When darkness covered the tossing earth with its solemn veil it was he, again, that saw the first flare when the revolutionists’ fire blossomed like a red rose in the black heart of a valley. Lastly, it was his knowledge of the country that made it possible for them, after tying the mules at a safe distance, to crawl up until, gently shoving the bushes aside, Gordon looked out and saw under the red light of the fire the revolutionists at their gambling and Lee seated beside Ramon. ”

“ In this, the dry season, the giant bowl of jade was transmuted by sun-scorched grasses into living amber bisected by a thin, green veining along the stream. From its rim the trail dropped like a yellow snake in many convolutions as it fell down, down, down into the chaparral. It looked, and was, dangerous. A stone dislodged by Gordon’s beast dropped hundreds of feet sheer, then rebounded and plunged forward on a still longer leap. Following its staircase windings, they had under their eyes Pedro’s jacal in its little garden, splashed now with the vermilion of ripening peppers. ”

“ A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the “wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation—especially if the party of the second part be of Latin blood—is apt to be disaster. ”

“ William Benson had left with Jake and Sliver, when they went out on the range, so Bull sat and smoked alone.
It was very pleasant there. His after-breakfast pipe was always the sweetest of the day, and while puffing contentedly Bull observed with an indulgent grin two small brown criadas, darting with needle and thread and pins from room to room with first-aid-to-injured habits; the transparent flirtations, stealthy glances after the girls came out; the beauty of innocent sex, of youth in love—set his big rough heart aglow. The girls, with keen instinct for honest feeling, felt it. ”

“ In the councils of a nation in the olden time, their strength, ferocity, would have gained them power and place; here, out in the desert, they exactly fitted their environment. As much as the horned toad in the sand at Bull’s feet, as much as the lizard that coursed swiftly along the adobe wall above the sleeper’s head; as much as the sahuaro and the tormented yucca, they belonged to the land. Its gold glowed in their bronze. It were a safe bet that—horses and cattle not being in question—they would, at a given emergency, live in the letter of its best traditions. ”

“ A bluff Englishman, almost as big as Bull, hot-tempered and overbearing in manner, he fell with great joviality into the spirit of the occasion; kissed and congratulated Lee with the license of old friendship. His big, hearty laugh was resounding in the patio when the second irruption of the Lovells and their fiancés—for Phyllis had conquered the smelter man in record time—occurred midway of the afternoon. And they were no more than settled under the portales before, like some rich, dusky bird, Isabel Icarza came floating under the arched gateway into Lee’s arms. ”

“ His eyes now went, first to the two ancianos, a wrinkled old man and woman, who dozed in the shade of the ramada; then to the girl who knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a mule-train going up the cañon added the last touch, vividly raised in his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. ”

“ While Jake took away and tied their horses, Bull gained his position. By that time the leading raider had gained a like distance uphill and, peeping, Bull watched the thin file of animals wriggling like a slow black snake up the yellow trail. So clear was the air he could hear, above the thud and scrape of hoofs, the raiders calling to one another. Now they were directly beneath him; so close that he could plainly see the leader’s face, ugly, pock-marked. As he withdrew into the chaparral Bull carried with him an irritatingly haunting remembrance. ”

“ On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced sombrero; the charro suit of soft leather that so finely displayed his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle—made such a figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage. ”

“ Half an hour later the mozo shoved a shock head out of the chaparral in answer to the agent’s whistle, and five minutes thereafter Bull was on trail, riding hard through a dread nightmare, insensible to the glare of the sun, suffocating heat, conscious only of the terrors that coursed through his mind.
In these dread visions Lee had no part. She had Gordon and Sliver and Jake! His fear centered on Mary Mills and her child. Often, in sudden agony, he would dig in the spurs and rowel his beast into a mad gallop. ”

“ To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the portales many a time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under Bull’s eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter raised the echoes in the patio. ”

“ A man with a black or brown skin must reserve his admiration for women of his race. Yet, with singular disregard, for writer’s law, Nature continued to weave for Ramon her potent spells. The sunshine snared in Lee’s hair, rose blush of her skin, her womanly contours, the fine molding of her limbs, the sweetness of youth, all the witcheries of form and color with which Nature lures her creatures to their matings, affected the lad just as powerfully as if he had been born north of the Rio Grande. ”

“ As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain—the beast mouths, blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was the face of Death itself—the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near.
In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles too light for notice in normal times. ”

“ Your warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces our peones live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your system.”
“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the fire’?” ”

“ In place of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which man’s imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for that peaceful contrast, he felt—felt with savage joy—Death, the grim angel, hovering above.
With her girl’s strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the wriggling black line rose up to Bull’s station she leaned forward and broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon’s sighting. ”

“ The walls and courts, patio, rainbow adobes, a small city of gold magnificently blazoned by the red brush of the sinking sun; the cottonwoods flaming a deep apricot under a sky that spread a canopy of saffron and cinnabar, purple and umber and gold, down to the far horizon; the soft smoke pennons trailing violet plumes off and away into the smoldering dusk of the east; the cooing of woman voices broken by laughter, low, sweet, infinitely wild. ”

“ Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk jacales with their brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands for their men’s return; their small, nude children playing in the hot dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great vaquero, roping chickens and cats with a string riata, then dragging them, captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow. ”

“ He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a mad stampede. ”

“ The patio, with its arched corredors, cool as a grotto under flooding greenery, the bird song, and exotic flowers; flame of the arbol de fuego; glimpses in the crypt-like kitchen of a criada down on her knees rubbing tortilla paste on a stone metate; the soft stealth with which Maria moved around the table on nude feet; all these helped to deepen those profound impressions. And while he watched Lee’s small hands fluttering like butterflies over the breakfast things, and gained confirmatory glimpses of the polished whiteness of her arms, came still others. ”

“ Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped mesas uplifted their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away, one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! ”

“ Though smaller than Los Arboles, the rancho buildings grouped picturesquely in a pocket of the foot-hills. The rich purple and crimson blossoms of a bougainvillea vine that almost buried the house made a fine splash of color against the golden adobe walls and tawny pastures. Drenched in sunlight, roofed in by fleecy clouds sailing across the deep blue vault above, it seemed the abode of peace. But not so did Bull see it. It loomed through a dread mirage that squirmed with ugly fighting shapes. ”

“ Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that “cause”; committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment over these sunlit plains. ”

“ Coming to cases, observe Gordon in the bunk-house after a cooling shower, carefully arranging his tie on the bosom of a brand-new shirt.
Now observe a girl, a vestal in purity, delicately perfumed, flowering in her ribands and laces like a pretty bud. At some time all of them earnestly desire that they had been born men. Yet one moment there is when they are unfeignedly glad to be women. ”

“ Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish hacendado whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape.
Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. ”

“ Sliver, still holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering if he could send one bullet through all four heads.
If the thoughts of the peonas—now gathered in a murmuring, gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall—a composite of their thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. ”

“ Around it, as in a whirling nightmare, revolved all of the horrors, outrages, and murders of three awful years. Turning, he shook his big fist at the northern horizon in fierce rebuke of the political lethargy and executive indifference on the other side of the border that had not only made the long list of outrages possible, but almost set the seal of approval upon it. Anger choked him. With the growl of a furious dog he turned again and rode on.
It may be laid down as a general principle that a woman never forgets and a man seldom remembers anniversaries. ”