Chapter XVI: One Man Can Take a Horse to Water, but

The sun shone brightly on the morning of the widow's birthday. Not that there was anything sensational in the fact. Except in the rainy season, the sun always shines brightly in Chihuahua--altogether too brightly for a white man's comfort, so while waiting for Lee, Gordon led their horses into the shade of the 'dobe where dwelt his little playmate. Seated in the doorway, under the pleased eyes of the brown mother, he was initiating the chubby thing into the mysteries of "cat's cradle" with a loop of string, when Lee came walking across from the house.

At the sight of the two heads bent over the "cradle," the girl's face lit up with a soft glow that was not belied by her mock severity. "Hello, Brother! What are you doing to my godchild?"

"Is this she?" Rising, he swung the child up on his shoulder. "I had just about made up my mind to adopt her myself."

"Let me see--" Lee's smooth brow achieved a thoughtful wrinkle. "She's about one-fiftieth of it. You know I am padrina to all that have been born here in the last fifteen years. But this is my favorite, and I cannot suffer you to steal her allegiance as you tried the other night. Oh, you needn't blush! Maria brought the news with my coffee. She was loud in your praises. 'Don Gor-r-r-don sat with Refugio's sick babe all night. What a husband for some happy señorita!'"

"That was very nice of Maria." He laughed. "Only, I'm afraid there's nothing doing. Girls of this size get me going, but after they grow up--somehow I lose interest."

It was an awesome confession to make to a girl whose mirror reflected far more than the average of feminine looks. Like a stag of ten tines that paws the forest mold in the pride of freedom, he had marked himself for the slaughter. It was the due of her sex that his pride be humbled. The soft glow changed to a gleam; but her attention was drawn just then by the prattle of two children who, unaware of the proximity of the parties of the first and second part, were conducting a make-believe housekeeping around the corner.

"Now I shall be Don Gor-r-r-don, and thou the señorita," came a voice, gruff with masculine authority. "Only we be married."

"But will they be married, Pancho?" piped a softer treble.

"Si, that will they. Only an hour ago I heard thy mother and old 'Lupe talking at the well. 'Is not Don Gor-r-r-don a fine man, and she a woman with never a duenna to her name? 'Tis shocking, Amalia, but gringo blood runs colder than Spanish; their ways are not ours. Yet, cold or hot, this may not end without marriage.' This is what old 'Lupe said to thy mother."

Rich color swept from the roots of Lee's hair down to her neck. She hastily hid it from the observation of the party of the first part; then, remembering that his Spanish was still confined to a few jerky sentences, she regained her composure.

"Woman!" "Don Gor-r-r-don" was speaking again. "What is this--the tortillas burned once more? Have I not told thee to be more sparing of the wood I gain with my sweat? And this chile? 'Tis sour as swill, fit only for swine."

"Then it should suit thee very well," came the softer voice, with unexpected spirit.

"A-r-r-r-h!" It was an excellent imitation of the angry howl with which Don Gor-r-r-don's father resented household rebellions. "Thou wouldst answer me? Thy mouth is too big! Take this to fill it!"

Followed a wail and as Lee rushed around the corner to the rescue, Don Gor-r-r-don scuttled like a little pig under her arm and dived into the house. Having comforted the small housewife, Lee returned to Gordon.

"Panchito is not quite so afraid of girls as you," she teased him. "They were playing house. Because the beans were not quite to his liking, he handed Dolores one on the mouth."

He laughed. "The young dog! At least he has a good working idea of the proper relation of the sexes."

This, indeed, was tempting Providence! The little gleam appeared again and lingered till, taking her foot in one hand, he lifted her to the saddle without perceptible effort, when it was wiped out by pleased surprise.

Strength and tenderness? Age-long experience has taught woman to value these above all else in man! A skilful diagnostician--the widow, for instance--would have noted and approved her unconscious content as they rode out through the gates and followed the trail up and down the long earth rolls. Sometimes, when the vagaries of travel forced him ahead, her little stealthy glances were not nearly so unconscious; displayed a curiosity both healthy and sincere. And when, as occurred quite frequently, their frank interest was broken by a return of the little gleam, the diagnostician would still have concurred. For it displayed nothing more than the pride proper in a sex which has handled--and mishandled--man, directed his policies and intrigues, set him at the wars, made his peaces, used him as a catspaw to pull its private chestnuts out of the fires of love and hate, while the poor, blinded being imagined all the time that he was following his own ends.

He "lost interest in them after they grew up." Indeed! Why, the freshness of the morning, the creak and odor of hot leather, rhythmic beat of hoofs, sunlit roll of pastures within the hedging mountains, all the sights and sensations which he mistook for joy in the ride, were nothing more than a setting for her lovely youth. The ebb and flow of her color, easy flexures of her lithe body, counted as much in nature's cosmogony as the rush of the winds, flush of sunset skies; only, as yet, he did not know it. The "fire and tow" still lacked a "wind."

They headed, at first, out on the trail which led through Lovell's _rancho_ to the widow's; but presently Lee swerved toward the hills. "It is rougher," she said, "with a few bits of stiff climbing, but both shorter and prettier. It follows an old, old mule trail up a wooded cañon past a country _fonda_. There I'll show you the prettiest Mexican girl in all Chihuahua."

"At the _fonda_? Then I have seen her."

Her quick look said quite plainly, "Oh, _you have_?"

"Sliver took me there the day we caught the raiders. Pretty? I should say!" He added, laughing, "She made me a very nice proposal of marriage, adding the _fonda_ as an extra inducement."

Her expression now said, "Oh, she _did_?" But as she looked away, he failed to see it, got only her words, "And you had the heart to refuse?"

"Sad to relate."

"And you haven't even been to see her again?"

"No time."

She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that expressed--perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy watch as they approached the _fonda_.

"There's your beauty--attired like a bride for her groom."

Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an _olla_ of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from under the _olla_, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty picture overmuch for his companion's taste.

His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, "Perhaps she hasn't lost hope?"

She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon's fob dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads.

At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl's chemisette, she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon's monogram in gold.

"Ah, _ha_! señor!"

Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was it the widow's "wind" fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke:

"I am yours!"

After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling after Gordon's up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question.

XVII: --BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK

When they rode in to the _rancho_ that afternoon, the "wind"--that is, Ramon--had not yet "blown in"; so there were no complications to interfere with the widow's first attempts at diagnosis of the "case." She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her across to the veranda.

"Promising," she inwardly commented.

A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow's bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:

"Ramon is coming."

"Yes? Isabel too?"

An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills's belief that the indifference was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. "No, it was quite accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and show me to-day."

"Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy."

She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. "Never missed a dab. William Benson's a fool--though, of course, she may have changed her mind." This she proceeded to find out. "Your new man seems nice?"

"He is." Followed a long description of Gordon's night vigil with the child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, "But--"

"But what?"

"He's been going to see Felicia at the _fonda_. Sliver took him there, one day, and he says that he has never been again. But--she's wearing his watch-fob in her bosom-- Yes, yes! I know! A _peona_ will beg the shoes off any man's feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But--"

Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in _peonas_' bosoms, will bear watching. "Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn't he twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh--"

She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.

Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. "Oh, wouldn't that be just too lovely! Is it--settled?"

The widow, of course, shook her head.

"But it will be."

"How do you know?" She was quite willing to be convinced.

"How do I know?" The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of powder. "Just as if it depended on _him_. Just as if any woman--who hasn't a harelip--can't marry any man she wants."

Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a "case," Mrs. Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an honest person, she owned up with a hug.

Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to an equally keen if less discreet examination.

Betty's major premise agreed marvelously with Lee's and was stated with the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the subject from different distances and points of view. "I like you--only not so well as Bull. You're nicer-looking, but--" A long pause emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways. "I'm going to marry him when I grow up--that is, if mother doesn't beat me to it!"

"Any danger of that?" Gordon laughed.

"You bet there is. Bull's dead in love with her, and she--of course, she doesn't admit it, but _I know_."

"Well, well, isn't that fine!" Gordon really meant it. "Congratulations, I suppose, are not yet in order."

"I should say _not_!" Betty's blue eyes widened with horror. "Don't you _dare_! I'm not too big, yet, to be spanked"--she wriggled, reminiscently--"and when mother's real mad she goes the limit. Nevertheless, it's true." After a second calculating survey, she concluded, "But if she grabs Bull, I _might_ marry you."

"If you only will," he pleaded, "I'll be _so-o_ good! Can't we consider ourselves engaged?"

After a moment's thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. "No, I'm afraid not."

"Why?"

"Because."

"Because doesn't answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why."

"Because I'd only be disappointed again." She added, with a little sigh: "All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You'll fall in love with Lee."

"_I?_ With _Lee_?" His real surprise showed how little that contingency had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of apprehension colored his accent. "Now how do you figure that?"

"Because you'd be a fool if you didn't."

The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. "But--but, you know, I am only her hired man?"

"That wouldn't count--if she liked you." After another examination: "And she might do worse. _Gee!_ if I were only a man!"

"Yes?" he prompted. "If you were a man?"

"I'd love her so hard she'd just have to give in. I'd--"

But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with plentiful food for thought.

During the last two months he had seen Lee--riding the range, a pretty lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there something wrong with his head?

Presently he gained an inkling--he had been wearing another's colors! She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet--these and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure's trail!

He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one's joy in beautiful things! Come to think of it--Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the earth's fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not belong.

Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!

It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it's the feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but actually triumphed over, Lee's severe man's riding-clothes, took a billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.

"Why, Sister!" he returned her greeting of the morning. "What killing clothes!"

"Right, Brother!" she answered, in kind. "That's what they're for."

Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders' wit. But under all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she reacted to it--though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam still sparkled in her eye.

"I wonder what she's up to?" The thought formed in Mrs. Mills's mind.

She soon found out, for just then the "wind," alias Ramon, "blew in."

"Oh! I'm _so_ glad to see you!"

With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the _corredor_, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, aunts, cousins--goodness knows! the category might have embraced every one of his _peones_ if she had not been warned by the deepening of the young fellow's rich color that it was about time to let go.

"Just a bit too effusive," the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, "You are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear."

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" But the glint in her eye took it back and she managed the introductions with malicious skill. "Ramon, this is Mr. Nevil, our latest acquisition."

"Just as if he'd been a horse," the widow inwardly commented. To prevent further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.

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.

Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from Gordon's impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point of view.

"I do not know of myself," Ramon replied to his question concerning the outcome, "but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our troubles ourselves--because, first, it isn't in us; second, we do not try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside--but that we should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, señor"--he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug--"we should fight any attempt on your part to limit our 'God-given right'--as your political speakers would say--to cut one another's throats and run off with one another's women as we have been doing for thousands of years. We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have done our best to make up the arrears."

So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. "I think your father must be a bit of a cynic."

"No, señor." Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. "He merely knows us. In your schools--I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your big military academies--you teach that every American boy has a chance to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your political speakers would call 'our God-appointed place.' As there are many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to result.

"Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of children's and women's lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. 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'?"

For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application of the strange proverb, he laughed. "Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?"

"So that is how you Mexicans feel?" Gordon commented on these strange ideas after a thoughtful pause. "Then why did you ever let the foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective countries, you can never turn them out."

Ramon's nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.

"Why did we do it? _We_ did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But after him--Diaz, the Flood!" Flicking the ash carelessly from his cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: "No, we cannot throw them out--now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time--we shall fight."

From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she addressed him half an hour later.

"We are going for a little walk. You may come--if you choose."

He didn't _choose_! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off alongside the _charro_ suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common to two creatures under the sun--to wit, a bull being played with the _capa_ by a skilful _matador_ and a man under torture by a woman.

When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of a--well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet under his wrath the "wind" was fanning another flame into quite a respectable blaze.

If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. But never for a moment was she deceived.

"Flirting their young heads off against each other," she summed the situation.

With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon's good-night at the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee's answer; also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.

A certain restraint in the girl's good-night to herself caused her inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down on one's offense. She entered with Lee into her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, thereby, from a correct judgment of results.

"On the whole honors were even," she mused while making her toilet. "I wonder who will score to-morrow?"

It was Lee.

"I'm coming home later," she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. "You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me."

There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note that contained--at least so she said--the recipe for a liniment Terrubio used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.

Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the curtains. "That's downright cruelty," she scolded.

"Well?" Lee shrugged. "Didn't he say, yesterday morning, that he didn't take any interest in girls after they grew up?"

"But he does."

Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little laugh, "I know it."

Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure--that is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. "Oh, he's going back by the _fonda_!"

"Ah-ha!" the widow mused. "Now we shall see."

She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.