Herman Whitaker - Over the Border - A Novel

“Bueno!” Jake nodded his satisfaction. “Then if you’ve finished I’m free to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. That’s where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you’ve gotter do is to find a bottle, but mine’s simply gotter have cards in it. I don’t get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining business of our’n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow.”

“All right, get it over,” Bull agreed, after a moment’s rumination. “Tell her at breakfast. She’ll fix you up with the fare.”

“‘Tell her at breakfast’?” Jake looked his scorn. “An’ have her running an’ fixing me out with socks an’ shirts an’ things like I was going off on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an’ through, I simply kain’t fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest give me all you’ve got. With any kind of luck it’ll turn you big interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so’s to catch an early train.”

So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed.

When Jake arrived in El Paso – But the less said about his sojourn there the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, a week later, coming through the patio gateway.

“Oh, you poor man!” she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. “They must have worked you all night.”

“Which they did work me overtime,” he confessed to Bull, in the adobe that evening. “Five days an’ most of the nights I sat inter one game. Look at this!”

The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of American dollars. “When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten Miss Lee’s hand. He was a —

“What are you crinkling your nose at?” he hotly demanded of Bull. “This ain’t no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of ’em came from this very ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better right to their money than the little girl?”

“’Tain’t that.” Bull shook his head. “I was on’y thinking that I’d liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don’t look like she’d take easily to charity.”

“ That so? ” Jake regarded him cynically. “Now kain’t you jest hear me a-saying, ‘Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?’ But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple of thousand in horses?”

“No; but she will.”

And Bull was right. When, next morning, Jake, speaking for the Three, made his proposition, Lee shook her head. “It’s only a question of time before the revolutionists run off all the stock. Then where would be your two thousand dollars?”

“In the same box with yours – stowed safely away where we can’t spend or lose it, till Uncle Sam makes Mexico pay our claims,” Jake argued. “The risk we’re willing to take, because we expect to buy cheap on that account.”

At that she wavered; with a little more pressing, acceded. And thus by devious ways did the blind god of chance atone for many a former error, turning evil to good, if only for once.

“Lady-girl’s a-going to have a birthday.”

The remark issued from the blue tobacco reek that filled the bunk-house. So thick it was the lamp on the table sent forth a feeble golden glimmer that barely revealed the sketchy outlines of the Three stretched at ease on their catres . But the title “Lady-girl,” Sliver’s especial name for Lee, stamped the remark as coming from him.

“That so?” Bull and Jake spoke in chorus. “How’d you know?”

“She asked me to write a piece, t’other day, in her birthday-album, an’ looking through it I kem on her day.”

“She asked me, too,” Jake admitted. “What did you write?”

“‘Roses is red, violets is blue; sugar is sweet, an’ so air you.’”

“A real nice piece, too,” Jake commented upon this classic. “I like it better ’n mine.” Nevertheless, with the secret pride of your true poet, he gave his own:

Under pressure, Bull also admitted a descent into poetry. “I ked on’y think of a verse that a girl once wrote in my sister’s album when I was a kid. ’Tain’t near as good as yourn.

“I think it’s pretty fine,” the others commended the effort.

After a thoughtful pause, consecrated by heavy smoking, Bull asked, “How old is she, Sliver?”

“Rising twenty, be the date.”

“Seems to me we orter raise a little hell in honor of the ’casion – if it’s on’y to keep her from feeling lonesome.”

“Little bit close on the funeral,” Jake tentatively suggested. “Jest about three months, ain’t it?”

“Yes, for a regular party. My idea was just to tip off the Lovells an’ have ’em drop in that day.”

“We might shoot things up a bit, too,” Sliver began, but Jake cut him off with utter scorn.

“This ain’t no cowman’s jamboree. Girls don’t like any shooting except what they do with their own pretty mouths. A cake with candles ’u’d be my idee.”

“‘Cake’?” Sliver now returned the scorn. “Kain’t you see these Mexican dames baking a real, sure-enough birthday cake made out of raisins an’ curran’s an’ cit-tron peel, an’ with spice fixin’s to it? An enchilada stuffed with store prunes ’u’d be the best they ked do.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Bull poured the oil of quiet counsel on the troubled waters. “What about Mrs. Mills?”

He referred to the widow of an American rancher who, with the aid of her young daughter and a few peones , had kept their rancho going since her husband’s death. “If one of us was to ride over to-morrow I’ll bet you she’d fix up a cake, if ’twas only a three-layer chocolate. As for candles, candles an’ beer-factories are the main products of Mexico.”

Thus was the ball set rolling, not only for the party, but also toward consequences unforeseen; and it received a second fillip when Bull delivered his invitation to the Lovells at San Miguel midway of the following afternoon. It chanced that Phoebe’s fiancé , a young mining engineer, had arrived the preceding evening, bringing with him a friend, a smelter man from El Paso. With the enthusiasm of youth they proceeded to enlarge upon the plan after Bull rode on.

“It would be a shame to leave out Isabel Icarza,” Phyllis warmly declared. “She and Lee have always been such good friends.”

Accordingly, a mozo delivered an invitation at the Hacienda del Sol about the same time that Bull dismounted at the widow’s rancho .

The widow, a woman of thirty-five or six, whose comeliness indicated former real beauty, fell at once for the plan. While Bull was eating supper she began on the cake. Having met her but once before, he developed a certain shyness. But if his communications with her bordered on the formal, he yielded himself captive without reserve to Betty, her small daughter.

Though nearly thirteen, with the promise of being as pretty in her flaxen whiteness as Lee herself, isolation had conserved, if anything, the girl’s childishness. Sitting on a chair opposite Bull, she prattled happily while they both seeded raisins, questioning him with an artless directness that sometimes proved embarrassing.