Chapter XXX: The Other Half of the Truth

As they sat at breakfast Gordon's glance went repeatedly to Lee. Her smile, soft and mischievous, told that she knew very well what was in his mind, but she did not answer till the end of the meal.

"I'm going to ride with Mr. Nevil to-day," she told Jake.

Sliver's nod and grin outside expressed his opinion of the arrangement. "It's a cinch," he chuckled. "'Cepting Lee Haskins and his Sal, I never seen two folks more sot on each other."

Jake evidenced a dry curiosity. "An' who in hell might they be?"

"Folks I knew up in the Palo Verde country. They was stuck on each other like two stamps at the end of a day's ride in a sweaty pocket; allus that close up walkin', standin' or settin', you had to walk around 'em twice to find the jine."

"An' after they was married?" Jake questioned.

Sliver scratched his head. "You-all mightn't believe it, but you c'd have fired a charge of buckshot between 'em at long range without hittin' either."

Jake nodded. "I'd have allowed as much. But these ain't that kind. Did you see how she deviled him all through breakfast? Well, she'll keep him on aidge that-a-way all his life. He'll never get all at once; never quite reach the end. They'll allus be something beyond."

"Say!" Sliver looked at him in dumb wonder. "Fer an old bachelor you know a heap. Where'd you learn it?"

"Where any man learns it--from a woman." A shadow swept, for a moment, the reckless face. "On'y--I didn't have sense enough to stay be my teacher."

Just then Gordon overtook them, but while helping them to saddle up--for it was his day on guard--Sliver curiously watched Jake. When, moreover, he mounted to the watch-tower above the gates and saw Lee and Gordon ride away, the sight accentuated a new feeling, one of a vacancy in his being which, so far, a long succession of fluffy, blondined ladies had somehow failed to fill.

Their strongly perfumed memory set his head wagging over that problem in morals which has puzzled wiser heads. "Ain't Natur' the fickle jade, a-setting a man to fall dead in love with one girl while he's still terrible fond of two dozen? Why kedn't she a' b'en more single-minded?"

His brooding over these inconsistencies was suddenly disrupted by a flash of doubt, so pronounced as to be almost alarm. Lee and Gordon were now silhouetted against the sky-line. They were, however, no longer at correct riding distance. Eyes less keen than Sliver's could easily have perceived they were holding hands. He drew the phenomenon to the attention of Jake, who just then came riding from under the arch.

"Say," he called down, "d'you allow it's all right for them two to go off that-a-way by themselves?"

Jake snorted. "Didn't she ride with you yesterday an' me the day afore?"

"Yes, but she's our boss an'--well, they love each other a whole lot."

"So that's what's biting you?" In one sentence Jake countered heavily on the common view of things. "She kin ride with tough guys like you an' me an' it's all right; but she mustn't go out with the man that loves her more 'n anything on earth. Where's your sense?"

Sliver feebly scratched his head in a vain effort to find it. Failing, he made weak answer, "I was jest sorter thinking they orter, have a chapperonny." Vanquished by Jake's disgusted snort, he withdrew and went down to close the gates.

Meanwhile Lee and Gordon held on their way. At the crest of the rise, from where she and her father had overlooked the _hacienda_ on that last fatal day, they reined in and looked back upon it lying like a huge painted cup in the great gold saucer of the sun-scorched plains. As then, the sweep of her hand took in the house, adobes, compound, giant cottonwoods sweeping with the dry arroyo across the view, the range rolling in bright billows to the far hills.

Her cry was the same: "Oh, isn't it beautiful? Soon the rains will come and turn everything green, but I like it best this way. Greens are to be had anywhere, but these golds--that is Mexico."

Stimulated by his responsive smile, just as she used to do with her father, she began to dive into the past, relate the battles and sieges, scandal and intrigue, recreate the vivid pageants of the old dons and their savage brown retainers. If she had chosen the differential calculus for her subject, he would have listened with pleasure to the soft, eager voice. The lithe, graceful figure that gained so in ease and grace of its flexures from her man's riding-clothes, the mobile face, molten under the touch of emotion, would have illumined the heaviest subject. But he was equally interested, plied her with questions when she showed signs of stopping.

"Oh, I'm so glad that you love it!" she sighed, happily. "It would have been such a disappointment if you-- But that is so silly, because it wouldn't have been you. Soon the rains will come, and in the long, dark evenings after"--she went on with a little flourish--"I shall read you stacks and stacks of the old letters and documents we found in an old leather trunk. It will be lots of fun."

Naturally they dipped into the future, building their own castles. Where she left off, he began. "Wait till we get my old dad down here! A big streak of romance crosscuts his business sense, and when he sees this--well, he promised me a hundred thousand when I finally settled down. After Uncle Sam steps in and puts an end to all this revolutionary nonsense, we'll--"

The reconstructed and beautiful Los Arboles that emerged from his imaginings was inhabited by a contented peasantry, better paid, healthier, and happier than the country had ever seen. What he forgot she filled in till, from sheer lack of material, they came to a happy pause.

Business concluded and the Mexican millennium achieved, they turned to their own pleasure. A certain Java forest was, of course, again lugged in by the ears. She, however, did not appear to notice it was getting a trifle shopworn, but enthused as brightly as though it were new goods freshly displayed. And while they ran on, rebuilding their earthly scheme of things according to their hearts' desire, the gods in resentment of their presumption were forging the thunderbolts that were to shatter it to bits. Unconscious of sharp eyes that were watching from the heart of the chaparral thicket half a mile away, they presently joined hands and rode on.

At first the direction seemed to suit the watcher's purpose. After they passed, he rode his horse out in the open and followed, keeping always out of their sight. Even when, an hour later, Gordon circled toward the mountains on his regular beat, the watcher followed. But when their course began to bend to the south he laid on quirt and spurs and went after them at a gallop.

Turning at a call, Lee and Gordon saw him coming down a long slope, and, as he drew nearer, she recognized the _mozo_ who had brought Ramon's message from El Sol.

"Que? Filomena?"

As he answered, in rapid Spanish, sudden distress wiped out her happiness. "Oh, Betty is ill!" she translated for Gordon. "Mary Mills sent word to El Sol and asked them to send for me. Filomena can act as my escort, so it won't be necessary for you--" She paused, anticipating rebellion.

It came. "Bull told me that you were not to ride alone. I wouldn't let you, anyway."

If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. "That's what one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I'll have to put up with it." Turning to the _mozo_, she gave him his orders in Spanish: "The señor will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the gringo señor, where we have gone."

Disconcertion showed through the man's _peon_ immobility. But with an obsequious "Si, señorita!" he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly.

Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet.

Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, mounted and rode away.

About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the _fonda_. But in place of Felicia's smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving an _arriero_ whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream.

As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the kiss, into neutral territory.

Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that undulated like a woman's mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in one mood as the other.

"A wonderful land!" Gordon breathed it.

Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled Garden of Eden--could he have done all this, even then imagination would have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to prophecy.

"Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth."

That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration but an eagle's flight away. Following battle and retreat across sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon's blast over the face of the land to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning _haciendas_. With them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded and tortured, wailing of ravished women.

In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that had spied the _mozo's_ signal and were now watching them from the chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on.

"Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease."

If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few hundred yards away, might have heard the argument.

She would easily have recognized Ramon's voice. "True, amigo, and I love him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it--to make no attempt on their lives."

"A promise?" A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. "What is it but a deadfall for one's enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it to find a hot enough corner in hell. But _I_ gave no promise--and he killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to me."

"No, no!" Ramon's voice rose in quick protest. "His killing would still be at my hands. Also"--the addition came in lower tones--"I would rather he lived--to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in my arms. No, señor, we will rope him from behind."

"Bueno! Have it thy--" A sharp hiss cut them off.

Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above.

She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. "I'll go down first. If I break my neck you can pick up the remains."

Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way on her beast's haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with skilful use of the bridle.

"Come on!" she called back, laughing.

But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the noose of a _riata_ writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under her horse's belly.

"Run!" From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her shoulder. "Run! Oh, _run_!"

He could not--had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had barely time to use the spur, and if Ramon's cast had been made a second sooner he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the loop settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. Now he turned it loose downhill.

That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker's boast, and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, shooting close to the ground.

His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the leader's head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm in against his body.

At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. "He has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!"

Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill.

Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee's voice, shrill in its mortal terror, rang out:

"If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!"

To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, but without answer raised a warning hand. "The gringo is not to be harmed, hombre."

"But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compañero."

"The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own life in the hollow of his hand."

Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of a _peon_. Behind them rose a coarse laugh.

"Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? As for Tomas--I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us to divide this señor's money."

The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. "Bueno, Rafael, bueno!" Another called: "Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man's shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas's throat it flashed at last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee."

The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon pulled a roll of notes from his breast.

"Here, hombre."

The man's huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee's horse by the bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last odd note, she spoke in English.

"I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster." From which she ran on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of memory--their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. "And now would you destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love."

She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took out of bitter anger.

"What have I to gain?" He threw up his head in defiance. "You! with love or without it!"

By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear.

"Ramon, what are you going to do?"

Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. "Take you to San Angel--to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and priest."

"Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known me from childhood--"

"They are Mexican--would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like themselves. They will do as I say. If not"--his nod carried a sinister significance--"so much the worse for you."

Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its mate.

She bent her head in sudden shame. "Ramon, please take me home."

"Yes, to _ours_." He snatched her bridle. "Come! already we have wasted too much time."

As they had spoken in English, Gordon heard all. Now he spoke. "You stopped them killing me, but that would have been less wicked. Remember she is no _peona_, but an American subject. For any mistreatment you will be called to account by our government."

"Your government?" Turning his head, Ramon spat aside in the dust. "Your government? The Germans harried us for three years till we ran down and hanged the murderers of their countrymen at Covodonga. In Guerrero a villageful of people were shot for the murder of one Englishman. For the massacre of its citizens at Torreon even the Chinese demanded and obtained an indemnity of five million dollars. But your government--for the murder of hundreds of its men, dishonor of scores of its women, it has lodged--complaints. One more or less will not embarrass us--nor help _you_. Come on, hombre!"

As he moved off, leading Lee's beast, Gordon writhed in a last effort to break his bonds. For the moment he was blinded by the rush of blood to his straining eyeballs, but as his sight cleared he saw Lee looking back. That womanly pity which transcends fear had lifted her for the moment above her own terrors. Like a light filtering through a storm, her smile gleamed wanly through the pale window of her distress. Then the chaparral swallowed her, and he settled back in black despair.

Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed an hour passed before a foot swinging into his line of vision caused him to look up. The revolutionists had finished dividing the money and were looking down at him.

"Going to cut my throat, now he's gone," Gordon read it--and did not care.

But he had failed to count on the streak of good humor that crosscuts even a bandit nature. "We are the richer by a hundred pesos by him." Ilarian, the fellow who had tried to cut his throat, grinned at the others. "Let us lift him over there in the shade."

"'Tis hard on thee, amigo," the fellow went on, after they moved him. "'Tis hard to have thy girl snatched thus away. But have no fear"--though he caught only an occasional word of Spanish, the gestures, helped out by a gross leer, threw light brilliant as lightning on his meaning--"we will avenge thee. These days the pretty ones go to the strong. He has not got her yet. Adios--and better luck!"

As, laughing loudly, they left him, all the romance that had colored, for him, the Mexican revolutions, drained away, leaving him with clear, cold vision to face its dread facts--the tragic realities even then in course where the smoke columns rose, far away, under brazen skies. In agony of fear for Lee that transcended physical torture he watched them go.

XXXI: "BRAINS WIN"

Two days later Bull awoke from a wild nightmare through which drunken faces, infuriated faces, maudlin women faces, had whirled in a mad phantasmagoria, devil's dance of singing, drinking, swearing, fighting. As though it were another, he dimly saw himself hurling men through a window while glass crashed and furniture crumbled around him. More clearly, a second picture stood out--of a big black rustler--to wit, himself--set up against a wall before a firing-squad. He even saw the rifles aimed, and yet--his brain cool and that enormous desire gone, he lay in a little cell-like adobe room. Light streamed over the sheet across the doorway, and as, rising, he looked out into the _patio_ of the German Club he heard far off the boom of cannon punctuating the staccato pulsations of rifle-fire.

"The battle's on!"

As the thought passed through his mind it was killed by sudden agony, poignant, though mental, as physical pain. His great hands went up and covered his face, but could not shut out despair. "My God! I've fallen down!"

Outside people were moving and talking. But he paid no heed; just stood, face buried in his hands, till he recognized the "dean's" voice.

"Well, come on, fellows! They're going to it again. Let's get out where we can see."

"I'll take a look at Diogenes first," came the voice of his friend. "You chaps go on. I'll catch up."

Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the correspondent's gaze. "Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but--last night!" He shook his head in mock reproof.

"What did you do? What didn't you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in business--those you didn't break up. It took a troop to round you up. They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here."

"Well, I'm sorry! damned sorry that he did!" Bull shrugged. "On'y to be shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother in the gutter."

His bitterness touched the other. "Look here, old man, don't take it so hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and go on again."

Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent's face grew grave. Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way.

"Where's Benson?" He looked up. "Did he go again to Valles?"

"Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it--without avail. What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. 'So if the son of a gun kills me,' he told him, 'the boys will know it for murder.' He must have had a hunch, for he never came back."

"Dead?" Bull broke a shocked silence.

The other nodded. "They acknowledge it--say he tried to kill Valles, which is, of course, all rot."

Bull had leaped up. "Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It's no use." He waved away expostulations. "You yourself warned me not to let him go alone!" He started out the door.

"Here!" the correspondent seized him. "Where are you going?"

"Out--to get drunk--get killed if I kin!"

Though he waved like a blown leaf at the end of the club-like arm, the correspondent stuck. "All right! all right! But what's your hurry? You'll be a long time dead, old man. If you must get killed, come with me."

Through Bull's black despair flashed a sardonic gleam. "Humph! Stand on a hill with a pair of glasses five miles off?"

"Not on your life, hombre! When we interviewed him yesterday that's exactly the crack Valles made about 'gringo correspondents' and 'long-distance reporting.' I'm going to show the beggar. It's me for the outposts where folks get killed."

Now, in his turn, Bull showed no concern. "Don't be a fool! You're paid to get the news, not to do Valles's fighting."

The change of positions was so swift, the correspondent could not repress a grin. "What's sauce for Diogenes is sauce for me. If you have a right to get yourself killed, so have I."

The black shadow again wrapped Bull. "I've good reason. If I kin git myself shot, like a man, I'm just that much ahead. But you--"

"Aw, shut up! Do you think I am going to let that greasy bandit get away with a crack like that? We're doing too much talking. Come on!"

"I'd--" Bull hesitated. "I'd like to see--_his_ consul first. His wife--she'd naterally like to know. She's in El Paso, just now, an' I know her address."

"We go past there. Then I want a minute with our consul. In case I don't turn up, I wouldn't want my San Francisco girl to be wearing weeds too long."

Going out, Bull stopped at the bar. "You needn't to be scairt." He answered the other's look. "My thirst's over--for a while. But I need a bracer." Yet the half-glass of raw brandy he swallowed had a deadlier significance. It marked the utter abandonment of hope, sealed his return to the old life.

Shortly thereafter the two entered the British consulate. With the quiet of despair he listened while the consul talked.

"I did my best to prevent Mr. Benson from going back, and thought I'd succeeded. If it hadn't been that he was seen going in, he would simply have disappeared. As it is, the cuartel general has given out several stories. First, that he tried to shoot Valles; which is absurd, for he carried no gun. Then that he was shot while trying to escape after being placed under arrest. Lastly--to satisfy me and give his murder the semblance of a military execution--that he was tried by drumhead court-martial and fusiladoed for his attempt on the life of the general. But of one thing I can assure you, Mr. Perrin"--he went on from a heavy pause--"this does not end it. Already the particulars are entered upon my records, and the British government never forgets. It may be one year--it may be ten. But when peace is restored this business will come up again. No matter how high the murderer may have risen, how low he may have fallen, the case will never be dropped till there appears opposite the name of William Benson in our archives, 'The murderer was brought to justice.'"

The quiet surety of his speech, based on a record of centuries among wild peoples, made it impressive. Outside, the correspondent commented thereon in his breezy fashion.

"That's Johnny Bull for you, dignified, slow in speech, but surer than hell! One of his subjects is killed in a far corner of Afghanistan. Up goes a regiment and decimates the tribe--or a brigade, or an army, if necessary; in which case, to offset the expense, the country becomes a British province. Hombre! how long do you suppose it would take that fat old fellow to settle this Mexican affray? Humph! He'd make shorter work of these mushroom generals and sawdust presidents than he did of the Hindu rajahs."

In another way the scene at the American consulate was equally impressive. When they entered the single little stuffy room, twelve feet square and entered from an alley, that conserved the dignity of the United States the consul looked up, then handed the correspondent a letter.

"Hum! Last call for Americans to get out of Mexico!" He coughed ironically. "Know ye, all gringos, by these presents: Owing to the fact that four hundred of you have been murdered, ravished, or tortured, and in order to remove further temptation from the path of the gentle Mexican, you are hereby ordered, without regard to your financial ability, consideration for the lives you endanger in transit, or property left behind, to return to your own country and thereby save this department from further annoyance by your kicks and complaints! Oyez! Oyez! Frankly," he turned to the consul, "what do you think of it?"

The consul shrugged his shoulders. "You wish to register?"

His pen scratched in the silence for a while, setting down the correspondent's name and commission. "Anybody else you wish to notify?"

The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then he reached for the letter the correspondent handed.

"To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?"

The pen scratched Lee's name and address.

"Anything to send?"

"Nothing!"

"Very well, gentlemen!" His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his handshake--the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. "I shall observe your wishes--if possible. Well--" His shoulders rose again. "Hasta luego! Till we meet again."

"A brave man in a weak place!" The correspondent rightfully placed him, outside. "Now, Diogenes, for the front."

An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a battery of French "threes" was spitting shrapnel with the feverish energy of an angry cat.

Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting that flank.

Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.

Seizing the dead man's rifle, Bull stepped into his place.

It was not that he particularly desired to kill Carranzistas. He would have shot Vallistas with equal will. But besides wringing a moment's surcease from his black despair, the instant his eye fell to the sights and he felt the familiar pressure of the butt, the old daredevil rustler spirit revived. As on the night he fought off Livingstone and his _vaqueros_ on the Little Stony, as on a hundred other occasions, every other feeling was drowned in a heady lust for fight. Just as carefully as though his life depended on it, he drew his beads on the lighter puffs that peppered the distant smoke. Watching him load and fire, grimly earnest, the sweat trickling in pale runlets down through the dust on his face, the correspondent nodded his satisfaction.

"Poor old Diogenes! But if he keeps busy he'll soon get over it."

Drawing his own weapons, a pencil and pad, he sat down on a boulder and began to take notes. And surely there was no lack of material. The spitting guns, trenches crammed with brown, ant-like men, the crackling rifle-fire, the desert shining like brass under the intolerable glare of the sun beyond the smoke haze, formed the background for a queer mixture of dirty comedy and squalid tragedy.

A few yards away, behind a second short wall, a brown girl sat on her heels patting out _tortillas_ while she gossiped with another girl, in complete indifference to the bullets flying overhead. At least she was indifferent until, glancing from the top stones, one upset her coffee-pot and quenched her little cooking-fire. Then, pretty face convulsed with rage, she shook her fist at the distant smoke-line while screaming frightful curses.

"Damned dogs of Carranzistas!" she finished with her last, spent breath. "Wait! Wait for the Valles riders! Then there will be a scampering with tails between the legs!"

Her mishap had drawn a roar of laughter from the revolutionists. The fellow that stood next to Bull now turned his grinning, sweaty face. "Ole, Amalia! Bring me a drink and thou shalt have the knifing of my first prisoner."

Her coarse answer drew a second roaring laugh. Nevertheless, while making it, she picked up her water-bottle. Less than a score of yards separated the two walls, yet it afforded stage room for the tragedy that burst in the middle of the comedy. For as she ran with a swift, shuffling step across it, the bullet of an invisible enemy found its mark; she collapsed in a heap.

Bull, also, had looked around. Now, heedless of the correspondent's yell: "Come back, you fool! She's dead! shot through the head!" he ran out, picked up the poor creature and brought her behind the wall.

As he laid her down the other girl came running across the bullet-swept space and threw herself on the body with cries and lamentations. She was not dead! She could not be dead, Amalia! the friend of her soul! For a while she ran on in a passion of grief. Then, springing up, eyes flashing white in her furious, distorted face, she flung her frantic curses at the distant line.

"Kill them, the damned Carranzistas! He who kills the most this day shall be my lover!"

"And here comes he that will do it!" The man on Bull's left touched his shoulder.

Up the hill behind them a battery was coming, stretched on a scrambling gallop. Alongside the guns, urging the drivers on, a man rode a great black stallion at the head of a cavalry detachment. Even at a distance the harsh, monotonous voice rose above the rattle of the limbers, rifle-fire, booming guns.

"It's Valles!"

As the correspondent pointed, looking back at Bull, the great black horse launched out and shot up the hill.

"Make way, hombres, for the guns!"

Amber eyes aflame, brute mouth working, face quivering like shaken vitriol, he was herding the men aside when his glance fell on the correspondent. Then, though his face drew into a grin, comprehension flashed in his hot eyes.

"Ole, compañero!" His wave of the hand took in all. "Hot work! but nothing to that which is to come. Mira!"

Following his pointing finger, they saw to the westward a great cloud of dust, long, thick, and low, rolling in upon their right flank. "Carranzista cavalry! But--look again!"

Looking always to their front, they had seen nothing of the cavalry, brigade after brigade, which was forming under cover of the hill to the west and behind them. Ten thousand wild horsemen were in the mass. Thousands of others were streaming out of the town. Big hands clutching as though he had them already in his grasp, eyes again aflame, Valles shook his fist at the distant dust.

"Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!"

The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling bullets, he directed their emplacement. "To the left, hombres! a little more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!" The last one set, he rasped out a last command: "Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!" Then followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.

"He bears a charmed life!" The man next Bull spoke again. "Out of a hundred battles he has come with never a hurt." He added, with a wink, "An' it was not always from his front the bullets came."

Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.

"What are you trying to do?"

"Justice on that grinning devil."

"Good job no one saw you." A quick glance around showed the artillerymen and revolutionists absorbed in their own work "Do you know what they would have done to both of us--skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don't care yourself, just think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, 'Having toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.'"

"I hadn't thought of that. But if I'd been alone--"

He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to his loophole.

On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and sabers, _machetes_, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

"Weekes was wrong!" It came out of the correspondent in an excited yell. "He's smashed 'em to smithereens! Me for a wire at once!" But as the cloud continued to sweep on he added a qualification, "That is, if Valles stops and comes back."

When, later, the cloud drew steadily down the horizon the doubt evolved into criticism. "Whatever is he thinking of? There he's gone with all the cavalry and left his flank exposed!"

At intervals along the far blue haze the flash of cannon now broke with greater frequency. The rifle-fire rivaled the rapid roll of a thousand drums. Answering the "threes," shrapnel shell came on long, shrieking curves and burst around them. In as many minutes one blew up the next wall, killing half its defenders. A second disabled a gun. The man next to Bull collapsed without a groan.

Turning his glasses eastward, the correspondent saw men piling in heaps where shrapnel was bursting on the edge of the trench. On the far hill came the flash of explosions among the Valles guns.

"Brains win! They were only playing with us, using less than a third of their guns! They've drawn Valles off with a false retreat! Now they'll flank us! My God! there they come!"

From the chaparral, on their right, had burst a new, thick line of smoke. Bullets were slipping like hail along their flank, tumbling men. He leaped and caught Bull's arm.

"Come on! Let's get while we can!"

They could already see the Carranzistas, thousands of them, half-wild, maniacal figures, looming through the smoke. Yet Bull shook his head.

"Some chance for shooting now. Light out yourself."

"Man! Valles is defeated!" The other seized and shook him. "Do you know what that means? This army will be scattered throughout northern Mexico. If you won't consider yourself, think of your girl! Are you going to leave her to face this bandit rabble, stung by defeat, mad against Americans?"

Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; then the feel of Lee's soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.

"Come on!"

Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his jokes.

"Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!" he gasped. "Gosh! but that chaparral is going faster the other way!"

A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that dire moment he remained his cheerful self.

"Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they'd ever get me. Here's my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck 'em on to the wires. Now, _run like hell_!"

And Bull did "run like hell"--with the correspondent across his shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his saddle, arms around his horse's neck, he headed for the town.

As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. Followed the terrible roar of a rout--yells, shrieks, curses, victorious shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted adobe streets to the railroad yards.

There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, then--the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass be-spattered with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, sentient human beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with Valles's own guns.

"We're farther up!" the correspondent whispered through white, drawn lips. "We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main line to insure our getaway."

He spoke again, with an effort, when they had ridden another half-mile. "That's queer. It stood about here, yet I don't see the placards. Perhaps we have overshot."

But as Bull made to turn a man slipped from the brake-rods under a car ahead. "Here, señores! This way!"

Just then, too, the door rolled back and the "dean" looked out. "Hurry up! Ten minutes more and you would have been too late. The Gonzales Brigada played discretion for the better part of valor and made a quick sneak. We go next! We tore off the signs for fear they might cut us out. We're traveling, for the present, incognito. You're hurt! Here, you fellows, lift him in and shut the door quick!"

After the correspondent had been laid in his bunk the "dean" turned to Bull. "That chap outside has been here ever since yesterday morning, looking for you. He said his business was muy importante, so the Chinaman kept him fed. Perhaps you had better see what he wants."

But when Bull looked out the man was gone. Also, just then, a welcome accompaniment to the roar of the mad rout outside, came the groan, bang, and rattle of cars starting in succession under the engine's tug.