Herman Whitaker - Over the Border - A Novel

“Yes, I s’pose we’ll have to move on.” If not actually dismal, Sliver’s indorsement both expressed regret and invited contradiction.

Bull did not speak. He was watching Lee and the Lovell girls, who had just then stepped out of her room across the patio . Phyllis, the younger, was to stay for a week, while Phœbe, the elder, returned home with her father, who had just brought the horses to the gateway. As Lee walked with her guests the length of the patio she took with her the sympathetic glances of the Three.

Nature mercifully provides her own anesthesia, stunning the victims of her catastrophes till the dangerous period of shock be passed. Later, the sight of Carleton’s riding-whip, spurs, or gloves, carelessly thrown in a corner, would bring a violent recurrence of grief, set her agonizing once more before the great blank wall of death. But just now complete emotional exhaustion left her quiet and calm. Neither had she made any attempt to bury her youth under the frowsy trappings of grief. Even the black velvet riband she wore at her throat was purely accidental, a natural trimming of her dress.

Indeed, the other girls showed more outward sorrow. Though American born, they were almost Spanish in their coloring, and their dusky eyes, dark hair, rich cream skins provided a vivid foil for Lee’s fairness. If their eyes were swollen and nose tips chafed, the fact merely accentuated their feminine charm. To the Three, deprived for years of association with any but the lowest Mexican women, they swam in sweetness and light. The graceful turn of a rounded neck, lift of a smooth chin, flexure of a lithe waist aroused powerful memories. Like a cleansing stream, the sweetness of their first young, cool loves swept through their beings, purging them, for the moment, of shame and dross and passion.

“Adios, you fellows!” Lovell’s friendly voice came floating back from the gate. “Come and see us at San Miguel.”

It was the climax; the climax of a week during which, in place of suspicion and distrust bred of the knowledge that every man’s hand was against them and theirs against every man, they had met only faith and trust and friendship. The invitation instigated Sliver’s muttered exclamation: “Lordy! I’d like to! but – ”

“ – it’s no place for us.” Bull nodded toward Lee. “It ’u’d be easier if she was provided for. Think of her, alone here, an’ a new revolution breaking every other day!”

“Pretty fierce,” Jake coincided. “But if ’twas left to that young Mex at the funeral yesterday – Ramòn Icarza, wasn’t that what they called him? If ’twas left to him she’d soon be – ”

“ – damned an’ done for!” Sliver exploded. Hard eyes flashing, he added: “Come to think of it, the son of a gun did behave sorter soft. No Mex that was ever pupped is fit to even herd sheep for the little lady-girl. Hell! if I thought she’d look twice his way, I’d croak him afore we left.”

“It wouldn’t be unnatural, she being raised here an’ not knowing much else.” Bull’s gloom was here pierced by a flash of thought. “I’ll bet you that’s what her father dreaded when he said for Benson to try an’ get her up to the States. I wish the man was here so’s I could tell him afore we left.”

“Tol’ her yet?” Sliver asked.

Bull nodded. “Las’ night. Said she hadn’t given any thought, yet, to the future.”

The two girls were now coming back from the gate. At first they made to go down the opposite portales . Then Lee paused, gently disengaging her arm from the other girl’s waist, and came walking on alone.

They rose and though she was, as before said, tall for a girl and well formed, she appeared childlike by comparison with their crude bulk. They felt it, and it drove in more keenly the sense of her loneliness.

“Oh, shore!” with his customary impulsiveness, Sliver cut off her attempts to thank them for their kindness. “We hain’t done nothing worth while.”

“Sliver’s right.” Jake’s bleak eyes had grown almost soft. “You don’t owe us anything. All that’s bothering us is – ”

“ – that we kain’t jest see how you’re going to manage,” Bull finished. “Your father’s idea – ” He stopped.

Her smooth white brow had drawn up into a thoughtful little frown. “It isn’t practicable. Valles would never permit us to drive horses across the border. We have asked him once before. And if he would – ” Her sweeping hand took in the sunlit patio , the brown criadas soft-footing it along the corredor ; the compound ablaze with barbaric color; the peonas gossiping in the shade at the well; all of that medieval life that wraps Mexico in the sunshine of the past. “And if he would – I could never be happy in the United States. I was brought up to this. I’m part of it, and it of me,” she concluded, with a firm little nod. “I shall carry on my father’s work.”

The Three looked at one another. Bull’s troubled look, Jake’s dubious brows, Sliver’s cough, all expressed their common doubt. “Can you do it, Miss, alone?”

“I sha’n’t be altogether alone. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Benson will be here to advise, and I shall hire an American foreman. If you – ” she paused, looking them over with sudden interest, then shook her head. “Of course, that’s absurd! You have your own business. But perhaps you might know some one?”

The Three looked at one another again, the same thought in the mind of each. Well they knew how close they were to the end of their rope. As in a cinematograph they saw Don Manuel, insolent and threatening; the American border tightly closed; the fusilado against a ’dobe wall that would surely end their Mexican operations. Black as a thundercloud that dark prospect stood out against the sunlit peace of the past week. Yet, to do them justice, the girl’s helpless situation affected them most. If they paused, it was with the natural hesitation of men surveying a new path.

Jake spoke first. “To tell the truth, Miss, we ain’t exactly what you’d call rushed with business.”

“Like all of us – upset by the revolutions.” She jumped to the natural conclusion, “Were you – mining?”

A picture of the lair on the bench of the abandoned mine flashed before all Three. Not without truth was Bull’s statement, “We ain’t worked it much, of late.”

“Peones all gone to the wars, I suppose?”

A sudden memory of Rosa’s desertion permitted Sliver to say, “The las’ we had left jest t’other day.”

Her pretty face brightened. “Then you mean to say that you are free for the present?”

That was exactly what they had!

She went on, slowly: “I’ll have to be frank. We own about a hundred and sixty or seventy thousand acres of land. But we haven’t been permitted to sell any stock for two years, so have no ready cash. I don’t know, even, whether I could pay a regular wage. But if you would take what I can scrape up and wait for the remainder till things quieten – ”

“Don’t you be bothering about that, Miss,” Bull broke in. “We’ll stay, an’ when it comes that you don’t need us any longer – ”

“ – we ain’t a-going to bust you with no claims for high wages,” Sliver concluded. “To tell you the truth, Miss, I’d be willing to work for my board jest to feel at loose on a range ag’in.”

His enthusiasm brought her smile, and though it was but a wintry effort, it still added warmth to her words. “Then – now you are my men.”

The accent on the “my” unconsciously expressed the deepest lack of her bereavement, the sudden check to the natural feminine instinct to own and care for a man. The isolation of herself and her father amid an alien brown people had undoubtedly tended to develop it in her to the fullest. Though Carleton had grumbled, man-like, at her pretty tyrannies in manners and modes, shirts and socks, he had, surreptitiously, hugely enjoyed it. Now, the stronger for her sorrow, that dominant trait broke loose on the devoted heads of the Three.