The Project Gutenberg EBook of Children of the Desert, by Louis Dodge This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Children of the Desert Author: Louis Dodge Release Date: September 7, 2008 [EBook #26550] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF THE DESERT *** Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net CHILDREN OF THE DESERT BY THE SAME AUTHOR BONNIE MAY. Illustrated by Reginald Birch. 12mo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . net $1.35 CHILDREN OF THE DESERT BY LOUIS DODGE NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1917 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published March, 1917 TO THE FRIENDS OF EAGLE PASS AND PIEDRAS NEGRAS—IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS CONTENTS PART PAGE I. Harboro and Sylvia 1 II. The Time Of Flame 65 III. Fectnor, The People’s Advocate 99 IV. The Horse With The Golden Dapples 177 V. A Wind From The North 211 VI. The Guest-chamber 243 VII. Sylvia 273 PART I HARBORO AND SYLVIA Children of the Desert CHAPTER I They were married in the little Episcopal church in Eagle Pass on a September day in the late eighties. The fact may be verified, I have no doubt, by any who will take the trouble to examine the records, for the toy-like place of worship still stands. The church structure is not, perhaps, so small as my imagination presents it to me; but I cannot see it save with the desert as a background—the desert austere and illimitable. You reach the prim little front door by climbing a street which runs parallel with the Rio Grande, and the church is almost the last structure you will pass before you set forth into a No-Man’s land of sage and cactus and yucca and mesquite lying under the blazing sun. Harboro his name was. Of course, there was a Christian name, but he was known simply as Harboro from Piedras Negras to the City. She was Sylvia Little. Sylvia, people called her, both before and after her marriage. The Little might as well never have belonged to her. Although neither Harboro nor Sylvia really belonged to Eagle Pass, the wedding was an event. Both had become familiar figures in the life of the town and were pretty well known. Their wedding drew a large and interested audience. (I think the theatrical phrase is justified, as perhaps will be seen.) Weddings were not common in the little border town, unless you counted the mating of young Mexicans, who were always made one by the priest in the adobe church closer to the river. Entertainment of any kind was scarce. But there were other and more significant reasons why people wanted to see the bride and the bridegroom, when Harboro gave his name to the woman of his choice. The young people belonging to some sort of church guild had decorated the church, and special music had been prepared. And indeed when Harboro and Sylvia marched up the aisle to the strains of the Lohengrin march (the bridegroom characteristically trying to keep step, and Sylvia ignoring the music entirely), it was not much to be wondered at that people craned their necks to get the best possible view. For both Harboro and the woman were in a way extraordinary individuals. Harboro was forty, and seemed in certain aspects older than that. He was a big man, well built, and handsome after a fashion. He was swarthy, with dark eyes which seemed to meditate, if not to dream. His hair was raven-black, and he wore a heavy mustache which stopped just short of being unduly conspicuous. It was said of him that he talked little, but that he listened keenly. By trade he was a railroad man. He had been heard to remark on one occasion that he had begun as a brakeman, but there were rumors of 1 2 3 adventurous days before he became a member of a train crew. It was said that he had gone prospecting into Mexico as a youth, and that he had spent years working at ends and odds of jobs about mines and smelters. Probably he had hoped to get into something in a big way. However, he had finally turned to railroading, and in the course of uncertain events had become an engineer. It was a year or two after he had attained this position that he had been required to haul a special train from Torreon to Piedras Negras. The General Manager of the Mexican International Railroad was on that train, and he took occasion to talk to the engineer. The result pleased him mightily. In his engine clothes Harboro looked every inch a man. There was something clean and level about his personality which couldn’t have been hid under a sarape. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the General Manager, making the latter look like a manikin, and talked about his work and the condition of the road and the rolling stock. He talked easily and listened intelligently. He was grave in an easy fashion. He took no liberties, cracked no jokes. The General Manager got the idea that the big fellow would be a good man to stand shoulder to shoulder with in larger events than a special trip. When he got back to headquarters he made a casual inquiry or two, and discovered that Harboro wrote an exceptionally good hand, and that he spelled correctly. He assumed that he was an educated man—though this impression may have been largely due to the fact that Harboro was keenly interested in a great variety of things, and had a good memory. The General Manager waited for certain wheels to turn, and then he sent for Harboro and offered him a position as chief clerk in one of the headquarter departments. Harboro accepted the position, and said “Thank you,” and proved to be uncommonly competent. The people of Piedras Negras took a liking to him; the women wanted to get acquainted with him. He was invited to places, and he accepted the invitations without either belittling or magnifying their importance. He got on rather well from the beginning. The social affairs of Piedras Negras were sometimes on a fairly large scale. The General Manager had his winter residence there—a meticulously cultivated demain which lay like a blue spot in a cloudy sky. There were grass and palms and, immediately beyond, the vast desert. At night (on occasion) there were Chinese lanterns to add their cheerful note to pretty revelries, while the stars lay low and big over all the desert expanse. The General Manager’s wife had prominent social affiliations, and she used to bring winter guests from the north and east—from Chicago and New York and Boston. There were balls and musicales, and a fine place for conversation out on the lawn, with Mexican servants to bring cigars and punch, and with Mexican fiddlers to play the national airs under a fig-covered band-stand. The young people from Eagle Pass used to go over when the General Manager’s wife was giving one of her less formal affairs. They were rather refreshing types: the Texas type, with a good deal of freedom of action and speech, once they were drawn out, and with plenty of vigor. On these occasions Eagle Pass merged itself into the Mexican town, and went home late at night over the Rio Grande bridge, and regarded life as a romance. These affairs and this variety of people interested Harboro. He was not to be drawn out, people soon discovered; but he liked to sit on the lawn and listen and take observations. He was not backward, but his tastes were simple. He was seemingly quite as much at ease in the presence of a Chicago poetess with a practised—a somewhat too practised— laugh or a fellow employee risen, like himself, to a point where society could see him. In due course Eagle Pass gave an entertainment (at the Mesquite Club) and invited certain railroad officials and employees from the other side of the river. Harboro was included among those invited, and he put on correct evening dress, and rode over in a coach, and became a favorite in Eagle Pass. He seemed rather big and serious for complete assimilation, but he looked well with the club settings as a background, and his name appeared later in the week in the Eagle Pass Guide, in the list headed “among those present.” All of which he accepted without agitation, or without ceasing to be Harboro himself all over. He did not meet Sylvia Little at the Mesquite Club. If you had known Sylvia and the Mesquite Club, you would laugh at so superfluous a statement. Eagle Pass was pleasantly democratic, socially, but it could not have been expected to stand for Sylvia. People didn’t know much about her (to her credit, at least) except that she was pretty. She was wonderfully pretty, and in a way which was all the more arresting when you came to consider her desert surroundings. She had come, with her father, from San Antonio. They had taken a low, homely little house, standing under its mesquite-tree, close to the government reservation, where the flagstaff stood, and the cannon boomed at sundown, and the soldiers walked their posts. Back of the house there was a thicket of mesquites, and through this a path ran down to the river. The first thing people mistrusted about Sylvia was her father. He had no visible means of support; and if his manner was amiable, his ways were furtive. He had a bias in favor of Mexican associates, and much of his time was spent down under the river bank, where a few small wine-shops and gambling establishments still existed in those days. There were also rumors of drinking and gambling orgies in the house under the mesquite-tree, and people said that many strange customers traversed that path through the mesquite, and entered Little’s back door. They were soldiers 4 5 6 7 8 9 and railroad men, and others of a type whose account in the bank of society nobody ever undertakes to balance. Sylvia was thought to be the torch which attracted them, and it was agreed that Sylvia’s father knew how to persuade them to drink copiously of beverages which they paid for themselves, and to manipulate the cards to his own advantage in the games which were introduced after a sufficient number of drinks had been served. Possibly a good deal of this was rumor rather than fact: an uncharitable interpretation of pleasures which were inelegant, certainly, but possibly not quite vicious. Still, it seemed to be pretty well established that up to the time of Sylvia’s marriage her father never worked, and that he always had money—and this condition, on any frontier, is always regarded with mistrust. Sylvia’s prettiness was of a kind to make your heart bleed, everything considered. She was of a wistful type, with eager blue eyes, and lips which were habitually parted slightly—lips of a delicate fulness and color. Her hair was soft and brown, and her cheeks were of a faint, pearly rosiness. You would never have thought of her as what people of strictly categorical minds would call a bad woman. I think a wholly normal man must have looked upon her as a child looks at a heather-bell—gladly and gratefully, and with a pleased amazement. She was small and slight. Women of the majordomo type must have regarded her as still a child. Her breasts were little, her neck and shoulders delicate, and she had a trick of lifting her left hand to her heart when she was startled or regarded too shrewdly, as if she had some prescient consciousness of coming evil. She was standing by her front gate when Harboro first saw her—and when she first saw Harboro. The front gate commanded an unobstructed view of the desert. It was near sundown, and far across the earth’s floor, which looked somewhat like a wonderful mosaic of opals and jade at this hour, a Mexican goatherd was driving his flock. That was the only sign of life to be seen or felt, if you except the noise of locusts in the mesquite near by and the spasmodic progress of a horned toad in the sand outside Sylvia’s gate. Yet she was looking away to the vibrating horizon, still as hot as an oven, as yearningly as if at any moment a knight might ride over the rim of the desert to rescue her, or as if a brother were coming to put an end to the existence of a Bluebeard who, obviously, did not exist. And then Harboro appeared—not in the distance, but close at hand. He was passing Sylvia’s gate. He had a natural taste for geology, it seemed, and he had chosen this hour to walk out beyond Eagle Pass to examine the rock formations which had been cast up to the surface of the desert by prehistoric cataclysms. He was close enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been observing away on the horizon. He stopped as if he had been startled. That was a natural result of Sylvia’s appearance here in this withered place. She was so delicately, fragilely abloom. Her setting should have been some region south of the Caucasus. Her period should have been during the foundations of mythology. She would have made you think of Eve. And because her hand went to her heart, and her lips parted tremulously, Harboro stopped. It was as if he felt he must make amends. Yet his words were the inevitable banalities. “You have a fine view here,” he said. “A fine view!” she echoed, a little incredulously. It was plain that she did not agree with him. “There is plenty of sun and air,” she conceded after a pause. He rested a heavy hand on the fence. When Harboro stopped you never had the feeling that some of his interests had gone on ahead and were beckoning to him. He was always all there, as if permanently. He regarded her intently. Her voice had something of the quality of the Träumerei in it, and it had affected him like a violin’s vibrato, accompanying a death scene—or as a litany might have done, had he been a religious man. “I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another,” he suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. “You live here, then?” She was looking across the desert. Where had the goatherd hidden himself? She nodded without bringing her glance to meet Harboro’s. “I know a good many of the Eagle Pass people. I’ve never seen you before.” “I thought you must be a stranger,” she replied. She brought her glance to his face now and seemed to explore it affectionately, as one does a new book by a favorite author. “I’ve never seen you before, either.” “I’ve been to several entertainments at the Mesquite Club.” “Oh! ... the Mesquite Club. I’ve never been there.” He looked at her in his steadfast fashion for a moment, and then changed the subject. “You have rather more than your share of shade here. I had no idea there was such a pretty place in Eagle Pass.” He glanced at the old mesquite- tree in the yard. It was really quite a tree. “Yes,” she assented. She added, somewhat falteringly: “But it seems dreadfully lonesome sometimes.” (I do not forget that path which led from Sylvia’s back door down to the Rio Grande, nor the men who traversed it; yet I believe that she spoke from her heart, and that her words were essentially true.) 10 11 12 13 14 “Perhaps you’re not altogether at home in Eagle Pass: I mean, this isn’t really your home?” “No. We came from San Antonio a year ago, my father and I.” His glance wandered up the brick walk to the cottage door, but if Sylvia perceived this and knew it for a hint, she did not respond. Harboro thought of other possibilities. He turned toward the desert. “There, the sun’s dipping down beyond that red ridge,” he said. “It will be cooler now. Won’t you walk with me?—I’m not going far.” She smiled happily. “I’d like to,” she admitted. And so Sylvia and Harboro walked together out toward the desert. It was, in fact, the beginning of a series of walks, all taken quite as informally and at about the same hour each day. CHAPTER II Some of the cruder minds of Eagle Pass made a sorry jest over the fact that nobody “gave the bride away” when she went to the altar—either then or during the brief period of courtship. Her father went to the wedding, of course; but he was not the kind of person you would expect to participate conspicuously in a ceremony of that sort. He was so decidedly of the black-sheep type that the people who assumed management of the affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to present to Harboro’s mind’s eye. Her father (she said) was not very well and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was fearfully lonesome at times. Harboro had accepted all this readily. He had asked no questions. And so Little went to the wedding. He went early so that he could get a seat over against the wall, where he wouldn’t be too conspicuous. He looked decidedly like an outsider, and, as a matter of fact, a good many people did not recognize him as Sylvia’s father. He was probably regarded as a stranger who had drifted into the church to enjoy the familiar yet interesting spectacle of a man and a maid bound together by a rite which was the more interesting because it seemed so ephemeral, yet meant so much. Several of the young women of Eagle Pass had aided Sylvia in getting ready to meet her husband-to-be at the altar. They were well-known girls, acting with the aid (and in the company) of their mothers. They did not admit even to one another what it was that separated Sylvia from their world. Perhaps they did not fully understand. They did know that Sylvia was not one of them; but they felt sorry for her, and they enjoyed the experience of arraying her as a bride and of constituting, for the moment, a pretty and irreproachable setting for her wistful person. They were somewhat excited, too. They had the feeling that they were helping to set a mouse-trap to catch a lion—or something like that. And after the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Harboro emerged from the church into the clear night, under the stars, and went afoot in the direction of their new home—an attractive structure which Harboro had had erected on what was called the Quemado Road. A good many of the guests looked after them, and then at each other, but of definite comment there was mighty little. Sylvia’s father went back to his house alone. He was not seen in the Maverick Bar that night, nor for quite a number of succeeding nights. He had never had any experiences in Eagle Pass which proved him to be a courageous man—or to lack courage; but in all probability a sensation akin to fear bothered him more or less during those first days and nights after his daughter had got married. Perhaps it would have been better for Sylvia if he had brazened it out just at that time, for on the very night of the wedding there was talk in the Maverick Bar. Not open or general comment, certainly. The border folk were not loose of speech. But two young fellows whose social versatility included membership in the Mesquite Club, on the one side, and a free and easy acquaintance with habitués of the Maverick Bar on the other, sat over against the wall behind a card-table and spoke in lowered tones. They pretended to be interested in the usual movements of the place. Two or three cowboys from Thompson’s ranch were “spending” and pressing their hospitality upon all and sundry. A group of soldiers from the post were present, and Jesus Mendoza, a Mexican who had accumulated a competency by corralling his inebriated fellow countrymen at election times, and knowing far more about the ticket they voted than they could ever have learned, was resting a spurred boot on the bar railing, and looking through dreamy eyes and his own cloud of cigarette smoke at the front door. Mendoza always created the impression of being interested in something that was about to happen, or somebody who was about to appear—but never in his immediate surroundings. “It’s too bad somebody couldn’t have told him,” Blanchard, of the Eagle Pass bank, was saying to the other man behind the card-table. The conversation had begun by each asking the other why he wasn’t up at the wedding. “Yes,” assented Dunwoodie, the other man. He was a young lawyer whose father had recently died in Belfast, leaving him money enough to quench a thirst which always flourished, but which never resulted in even partial disqualification, either for business or pleasure. “Yes, but Harboro is.... Say, Blanchard, did you ever know another chap like Harboro?” “I can’t say I know him very well.” 15 16 17 18 19 20 “Of course—that’s it. Nobody does. He won’t let you.” “I don’t see that, quite. I have an idea there just isn’t much to know. His size and good looks mislead you. He doesn’t say much, probably because he hasn’t much to say. I’ve never thought of there being any mystery. His behavior in this affair proves that there isn’t much of the right kind of stuff in him. He’s had every chance. The railroad people pushed him right along into a good thing, and the women across the river—the best of them—were nice to him. I have an idea the—er—new Mrs. Harboro will recall some of us to a realization of a truth which we’re rather proud of ignoring, down here on the river: I mean, that we’ve no business asking people about their antecedents.” Dunwoodie shook his head. “I figure it out differently. I think he’s really a big chap. He won all the fellows over in the railroad offices—and he was pushed over the heads of some of them when he was given that chief clerkship. And then the way he’s got of standing up to the General Manager and the other magnates. And you’ll notice that if you ever ask him a question he’ll give you an answer that sets you to thinking. He seems to work things out for himself. His mind doesn’t just run along the channel of traditions. I like him all the better because he’s not given to small talk. If there was anything worth while to talk about, I’ll bet you’d always find him saying something worth while.” “You’re right about his not being strong about traditions. There’s the matter of his marriage. Maybe he knows all about Sylvia—and doesn’t care. He must know about her.” “Don’t make a mistake on that score. I’ve seen them together. He reveres her. You can imagine his wanting to spread a cloak for her at every step—as if she were too pure to come into contact with the earth.” “But good God, man! There’s a path to her back door, worn there by fellows who would tremble like a colt in the presence of a lady.” Dunwoodie frowned whimsically. “Don’t say a path. It must be just a trail—a more or less indistinct trail.” Blanchard looked almost excited. “It’s a path, I tell you!” And then both men laughed suddenly—though in Dunwoodie’s laughter there was a note of deprecation and regret. CHAPTER III And so Harboro and Sylvia went home to the house on the Quemado Road without knowing that the town had washed its hands of them. Harboro had made certain arrangements which were characteristic of him, perhaps, and which nobody knew anything about. For example, he had employed the most presentable Mexican woman he could find, to make the house homelike. He had taken a little sheaf of corn-husks away from her so that she could not make any cigarettes for a day or two, and he had read her a patient lecture upon ways and means of making a lot of furniture look as if it had some direct relationship with human needs and pleasures. And he had advised and aided her in the preparation of a wedding supper for two. He had ordered grapes from Parras, and figs—black figs, a little withered, and candied tunas. And there was a roast of beef with herbs and chili sauce, and enchalades. The electric lights were turned on up-stairs and down when they entered the house, and Sylvia had an alarmed moment when she pictured a lot of guests waiting for them. But there proved to be nobody in the house but just they two and the old Mexican woman. Antonia, her name was. Harboro took her by the hand and led her up-stairs to the door of her room. It didn’t occur to him that Antonia might better have attended to this part of the welcoming. Antonia was busy, and she was not the sort of person to mother a bride, Harboro thought. She wouldn’t have been asked to perform this task in any case. You would have thought that Harboro was dealing with a child rather than a woman—his wife. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to take complete charge of her from the beginning. She uttered a little cry when she entered the bedroom. There by the bed was her trunk, which she had left at home. She hadn’t known anything about its having been transferred from one house to the other. “Who brought it?” she asked, startled. “I sent for it,” explained Harboro. “I knew you’d want it the first thing.” “You didn’t go to the house?” “Oh, no. I sent the expressman to the house and instructed him to ask for your things. I suppose he met your father. It’s all right.” She looked at him curiously. There was a little furrow in her forehead. “Do you always do things—that way?” she asked. He didn’t appear to understand what she meant. He had other things on his mind. He stood away from her, by the door. “If I were you I’d take off that—harness,” he said. “It makes you look like a picture—or a sacrifice. Do you know the old Aztec legends? It would be nicer for you to look just like a little woman now. Put on one of the dresses you wore when we walked together. How does that strike you?” “Well, I will.” She looked after him as if she were a little bewildered as he turned away, and closed the door. She heard him call back: “I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for Antonia. Supper will be ready when you come down.” 21 22 23 24 25 26 It seemed to her that his conduct was very strange for a lover. He was so entirely matter-of-fact. Yet everything about him seemed to be made up of kindness—to radiate comfort. She had never known any other man like this, she reflected. And then an unfamiliar light dawned upon her. She had had lovers before, certainly; but she realized now, with a deep and strange sensation, that she had never really been loved until Harboro came. She had some difficulty in getting out of her wedding-finery. There was a momentary temptation to call for help. But she thought better of this, and in the end she came down-stairs like a girl, in a light, clinging dress of Chinese silk, with a girdle and tassel at the waist, and a red ribbon woven into the throat. You might have thought she was seventeen or eighteen. As a matter of fact, she was only twenty-two. Harboro met her and kissed her, and led her to the table. He had a forceful manner. He was hungry, and it seemed that his efficiency extended to a knowledge of how a dinner should be served. He took his seat at the end of the table where the roast was, and the carving implements. At Sylvia’s place there was a percolator, and the coffee-cups, and the sugar and cream. Antonia, wizened and dark, came and went silently. To the people of her race a wedding means a fiesta, a village hubbub, a dance, and varying degrees of drunkenness. She was not herself in this house of a wedding supper for two, and a prosaic attitude toward the one event in life when money ought to be spent freely, even in the face of impending bankruptcy. But Harboro speedily set her at ease. They were there to eat their supper—that was all there was to it. He wasn’t drinking toasts, or making love. He seemed thoroughly contented; and it didn’t occur to him, clearly, that there was any occasion for making a noise or simulating an excitement which he did not feel. Antonia regarded him furtively, from over his shoulder, as she waited for Sylvia’s plate with its portion of the roast. He was a strange hombre. Well, she had known big, quiet men before. They were like rocks. It was all very well for a woman if she stood behind such a man for protection as long as she remained quiet; but Heaven help her if she ever undertook to beat him with her fists. She would only break her hands and accomplish nothing else whatever. Sylvia was not in a mood, seemingly, to eat very heartily; but Harboro thought he understood that, and he made allowances. He did not urge her, unless reassuring tones and comfortable topics may be said to consist of urging. He regarded her with bright eyes when she poured the coffee; and when her hands trembled he busied himself with trifles so that he would not seem to notice. He produced a cigar and cut the end off with his penknife, and lit it deliberately. Only once—just before they got up from the table—did he assume the rôle of lover. He turned to Antonia, and with an air of pride and contentment, asked the old woman, in her own language: “Isn’t she a beautiful child?” Sylvia was startled by his manner of speaking Spanish. Everybody along the border spoke the language a little; but Harboro’s wasn’t the canteen Spanish of most border Americans. Accent and enunciation were singularly nice and distinct. His mustache bristled rather fiercely over one or two of the words. Antonia thought very highly of the “child,” she admitted. She was bonisima, and other superlatives. And then Harboro’s manner became rather brisk again. “Come, I want to show you the house,” he said, addressing his wife. He had taken a great deal of pride in the planning and construction of the house. There was a young Englishman in one of the shops—a draftsman—who had studied architecture in a London office, and who might have been a successful architect but for a downfall which had converted him, overnight, into a remittance-man and a fairly competent employee of the Mexican International. And this man and Harboro had put their heads together and considered the local needs and difficulties, and had finally planned a house which would withstand northers and lesser sand-storms, and the long afternoons’ blazing sun, to the best advantage. A little garden had been planned, too. There was hydrant water in the yard. And there was a balcony, looking to the west, over the garden. She preceded him up-stairs. “First I want to show you your own room,” said Harboro. “What do you call it? I mean the room in which the lady of the house sits and is contented.” I can’t imagine what there was in this description which gave Sylvia a hint as to his meaning, but she said: “A boudoir?” And Harboro answered promptly: “That’s it!” The boudoir was at the front of the house, up-stairs, overlooking the Quemado Road. It made Sylvia’s eyes glisten. It contained a piano, and a rather tiny divan in russet leather, and maple-wood furniture, and electric fixtures which made you think of little mediæval lanterns. But the bride looked at these things somewhat as if she were inspecting a picture, painted in bold strokes: as if they would become obscure if she went too close—as if they couldn’t possibly be hers to be at home among. It did not appear that Harboro was beginning to feel the absence of a spontaneous acceptance on the part of his wife. Perhaps he was rather full of his own pleasure just then. 27 28 29 30 31 They closed the door of the boudoir behind them after they had completed their inspection, and at another door Harboro paused impressively. “This,” he said, pushing the door open wide, “is the guest-chamber.” It would have been small wonder if Sylvia had felt suddenly cold as she crossed that threshold. Certainly she seemed a little strange as she stood with her back to Harboro and aimlessly took in the capacious bed and the few other simple articles. “The guest-chamber?” she echoed presently, turning toward him. “We’ll have guests occasionally—after a while. Friends of yours from San Antonio, perhaps, or fellows I’ve known all the way from here to the City. We shouldn’t want them to go to a hotel, should we? I mean, if they were people we really cared for?” “I hadn’t thought,” she answered. She went to the window and looked out; but the gray sands, pallid under the night sky, did not afford a soothing picture. She turned to Harboro almost as if she were a stranger to him. “Have you many friends?” she asked. “Oh, no!—not enough to get in my way, you know. I’ve never had much of a chance for friendships—not for a good many years. But I ought to have a better chance now. I’ve thought you’d be able to help me in that way.” She did not linger in the room, and Harboro got the idea that she did not like to think of their sharing their home with outsiders. He understood that, too. “Of course we’re going to be by ourselves for a long time to come. There shall not be any guests until you feel you’d like to have them.” Then, as her eyes still harbored a shadow, he exclaimed gaily: “We’ll pretend that we haven’t any guest-chamber at all!” And taking a bunch of keys from his pocket he locked the door with a decisive movement. On the way down the hall they passed their bedroom. “This room you’ve seen,” he said, “our room. But you have not seen the balcony yet.” He was plainly confident that the balcony would make a pleasant impression upon her. He opened yet another door, and they stepped out under the night sky. The thing had been planned with certain poetic or romantic values in mind. Standing on the balcony you were looking toward the Rio Grande—and Mexico. And you seemed pretty high. There was the dull silver of the river, and the line of lights along the bridge, and beyond the huddled, dark structures of Piedras Negras. You might have imagined yourself on the deck of a Mediterranean steamer, looking at a town in Algeria or Tunis. And beyond, under the low- hanging stars, was the Mexican desert—a blank page, with only here and there the obscurity of a garden, or a hacienda, or a mere speck which would be a lonely casa built of earth. “Do you like it?” he asked. He had seated himself with a sigh of contentment. His outstretched arms lay along the back of the settee, and he was looking at her eagerly. Yes, she said, it was nice.... “It is strange that he should be thinking of the view just now,” she was saying to herself. A painful turmoil raged within her; but outwardly she was so calm that Harboro was puzzled. To him, too, that view became a negative thing for the moment. “I suspect that house down under the mesquite-tree was a bit shabby,” he was thinking. “She’s oppressed by so many new things.” He gave her time to find her bearings. That was a thing she would do better by being left alone. And out of the chaos in Sylvia’s mind there came the clear realization that Harboro was not living for the moment, but that he was looking forward, planning for a lifetime, and not for a swift, passing storm of passion. There was something static in his nature; there was a stability in the house he had provided and furnished. Her experiences with him were not to be like a flame: sanctioned, yet in all other respects like other experiences she had had in the past. The silence between them had become uncomfortable—inappropriate; and Harboro put a gentle arm about her and drew her closer to him. “Sit down by me,” he said. He was dismayed by the result of that persuasive movement. The hand he had taken into his trembled, and she would not yield to the pressure of his arm. She hung her head as if desolate memories were crowding between him and her, and he saw that moisture glistened in her eyes. “Eh?” he inquired huskily, “you’re not afraid of me?” She allowed him to draw her closer, and he felt the negative movement of her head as it lay on his shoulder; but he knew that she was afraid, though he did not gauge the quality of her fear. “You mustn’t be afraid, you know.” He continued the pressure of his arm until she seemed to relax wholly against him. He felt a delicious sense of conquest over her by sympathy and gentleness. He was eager for that moment to pass, though he held it precious and knew that it would never return again. Then he felt her body tremble as it lay against his. “That won’t do!” he chided gently. “Look!” He stood her on her feet before him, and took her arms at the elbows, pinioning them carefully to her sides. Then he slowly lifted her above him, so that he had to raise his face to look into hers. The act was performed as if it were a rite. “You mean ... I am helpless?” She checked the manifestation of grief as abruptly as a child does when its mind has been swiftly diverted. 32 33 34 35 36 “God bless me, no! I mean anything but that. That’s just what I don’t mean. I mean that you’re to have all the help you want—that you’re to look to me for your strength, that you are to put your burdens on me.” He placed her on the seat beside him and took one of her hands in both his. “There, now, we’ll talk. You see, we’re one, you and I. That isn’t just a saying of the preachers. It’s a fact. I couldn’t harm you without harming myself. Don’t you see that? Nobody could harm you without harming me, too.” He did not notice that her hand stiffened in his at those words. “When we’ve been together awhile we’ll both realize in wonderful ways what it means really to be united. When you’ve laid your head on my shoulder a great many times, or against my heart, the very blood in my veins will be the blood in your veins. I can’t explain it. It goes beyond physiology. We’ll belong to each other so completely that wherever you go I shall be with you, and when I go to work I shall have only to put my hand on my breast to touch you. I’ll get my strength from you, and it shall be yours again in return. There, those are things which will come to us little by little. But you must never be afraid.” I would rather not even try to surmise what was in Sylvia’s mind when, following those words of his, she swiftly took his face in her hands with unsuspected strength and hungrily kissed him. But Harboro read no dark meaning into the caress. It seemed to him the natural thing for her to do. CHAPTER IV Harboro adopted the plan, immediately after his marriage, of walking to his work in the morning and back to his home in the evening. It was only a matter of a mile or so, and if you kept out of the sun of midday, it was a pleasant enough form of exercise. Indeed, in the morning it was the sort of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy: the walk through Eagle Pass, with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going to meet the early train from Spofford Junction, and a friendly greeting from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy passage across the Rio Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits and vegetables from nobody knew where. But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river. Such people employed a cochero and drove, quite in the European style, when business or pleasure drew them from their homes. There was an almost continuous stream of peones on the bridge in the mornings and evenings: silent, furtive people, watched closely by the customs guard, whose duties required him on occasion to examine a suspicious-appearing Mexican with decidedly indelicate thoroughness. And all this did not tend to make the bridge a popular promenade. But Harboro was not squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive most of the time. He was at an age when men take on flesh easily. Nevertheless, people weren’t favorably impressed when they looked down from their old-fashioned equipages on their ride between the two republics, and caught a glimpse of the chief clerk marching along the bridge railing—often, as likely as not, in company with some chance laborer or wanderer, whose garb clearly indicated his lowly estate. And when, finally, Harboro persuaded Sylvia to accompany him on one of these walks of his, the limits of his eccentricity were thought to have been reached. Indeed, not a few people, who might have been induced to forget that his marriage had been a scandalous one, were inclined for the first time to condemn him utterly when he required the two towns to contemplate him in company with the woman he had married, both of them running counter to all the conventions. The reason for this trip of Harboro’s and Sylvia’s was that Harboro wanted Sylvia to have a new dress for a special occasion. It happened that two or three weeks after his marriage Harboro came upon an interesting bit of intelligence in the Eagle Pass Guide, the town’s weekly newspaper. It was a Saturday afternoon (the day of the paper’s publication), and Harboro had gone up to the balcony overlooking the garden. He had carried the newspaper with him. He did not expect to find anything in the chronicles of local happenings, past or prospective, that would interest him. But there was always a department of railroad news—consisting mainly of personal items—which had for him the quality of a letter from home. Sylvia was down-stairs at work in the dining-room, directing the efforts of old Antonia. Perhaps I should say that she was extraordinarily happy. I doubt very much if she had come to contemplate the married state through Harboro’s eyes; but she seemed to have feared that an avalanche would fall—and none had fallen. Harboro had manifested an unswerving gentleness toward her, and she had begun to “let down,” as swimmers say, with confidence in her ability to find bottom and attain the shore. When at length she went up to the balcony to tell Harboro that supper was ready, she stood arrested by the pleasantly purposeful expression in his eyes. She had learned, rather creditably, to anticipate him. “You are to have a new dress,” he announced. 37 38 39 40 41 42 “Yes.... Why?” “I see here”—he tapped the paper on his knee—“that they’re getting ready for their first dance of the winter at the Mesquite Club.” She forgot herself. “But we’re not invited!” she said, frankly incredulous. “Why no, not yet. But we shall be. Why shouldn’t we be?” Her hand went to her heart in the old wistful way. “I don’t know ... I just thought we shouldn’t be. Those affairs are for ... I’ve never thought they would invite me to one of their dances.” “Nonsense! They’ve invited me. Now they’ll invite us. I suppose the best milliners are across the river, aren’t they?” She seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. “I believe some women get their dresses made over there, and wear them back to this side—so they needn’t pay any duty. That is, if they’re to be handsome dresses.” “Well, this is going to be a handsome dress.” She seemed pleased, undeniably; yet she changed the subject with evident relief. “Antonia will be cross if we don’t go right down. And you must remember to praise the enchalades. She’s tried with them ever so hard.” This wasn’t an affectation on Sylvia’s part. She was a good-hearted girl. “It’s to be a handsome dress,” repeated Harboro an hour later, when they had returned to the balcony. It was dusk now, and little tapers of light were beginning to burn here and there in the desert: small, open fires where Mexican women were cooking their suppers of dried goat’s meat and frijoles. Said Sylvia: “If only.... Does it matter so much to you that they should invite us?” “It matters to me on your account. Such things are yours by right. You wouldn’t be happy always with me alone. We must think of the future.” Sylvia took his hand and stroked it thoughtfully. There were moments when she hungered for a bit of the comedy of life: laughter and other youthful noises. The Mexican bailes and their humble feasts were delightful; and the song of the violins, and the odor of smoke, and the innocent rivalries, and the night air. But the Mesquite Club.... “If only we could go on the way we are,” she said finally, with a sigh of contentment—and regret. CHAPTER V Harboro insisted upon her going across the river with him the next day, a Sunday. It was now late in October, but you wouldn’t have realized it unless you had looked at the calendar. The sun was warm—rather too warm. The air was extraordinarily clear. It was an election year and the town had been somewhat disorderly the night before. Harboro and Sylvia had heard the noises from their balcony: singing, first, and then shouting. And later drunken Mexicans had ridden past the house and on out the Quemado Road. A Mexican who is the embodiment of taciturnity when afoot, will become a howling organism when he is mounted. Harboro had telephoned to see if an appointment could be made—to a madame somebody whose professional card he had found in the Guide. And he had been assured that monsieur would be very welcome on a Sunday. Sylvia was glad that it was not on a weekday, and that it was in the forenoon, when she would be required to make her first public appearance with her husband. The town would be practically deserted, save by a few better-class young men who might be idling about the drug-store. They wouldn’t know her, and if they did, they would behave circumspectly. Strangely enough, it was Sylvia’s conviction that men are nearly all good creatures. As it fell out it was Harboro and not Sylvia who was destined to be humiliated that day—a fact which may not seem strange to the discerning. They had got as far as the middle of the Rio Grande bridge without experiencing anything which marred the general effect of a stage set for a Passion Play—but with the actors missing; and then they saw a carriage approaching from the Mexican side. Harboro knew the horses. They were the General Manager’s. And presently he recognized the coachman. The horses were moving at a walk, very slowly; but at length Harboro recognized the General Manager’s wife, reclining under a white silk sunshade and listening to the vivacious chatter of a young woman by her side. They would be coming over to attend the services in the Episcopal church in Eagle Pass, Harboro realized. Then he recognized the young woman, too. He had met her at one of the affairs to which he had been invited. He recalled her as a girl whose voice was too high-pitched for a reposeful effect, and who created the impression that she looked upon the social life of the border as a rather amusing adventure. You might have supposed that they considered themselves the sole occupants of the world as they advanced, perched on their high seat; and this, Harboro realized, was the true fashionable air. It was an instinct rather than a pose, he believed, and he was pondering that problem in psychology which has to do with the fact that when people ride or drive they appear to have a different mental organism from those who walk. Then something happened. The carriage was now almost at hand, and Harboro saw the coachman turn his head slightly, as if to hear better. Then he leaned forward and rattled the whip in its place, and the horses set off at a sharp 43 44 45 46 47 48 trot. There was a rule against trotting on the bridge, but there are people everywhere who are not required to observe rules. Harboro paused, ready to lift his hat. He liked the General Manager’s wife. But the occupants of the carriage passed without seeing him. And Harboro got the impression that there was something determined in the casual air with which the two women looked straight before them. He got an odd feeling that the most finely tempered steel of all lies underneath the delicate golden filigree of social custom and laws. He was rather pleased at a conclusion which came to him: people of that kind really did see, then. They only pretended not to see. And then he felt the blood pumping through the veins in his neck. “What is it?” asked Sylvia, with that directness which Harboro comprehended and respected. “Why, those ladies ... they didn’t seem quite the type you’d expect to see here, did they?” “Oh, there’s every type here,” she replied lightly. She turned her eyes away from Harboro. There was something in his face which troubled her. She could not bear to see him with that expression of wounded sensibilities and rebellious pride in his eyes. And she had understood everything. She did not break in upon his thoughts soon. She would have liked to divert his mind, but she felt like a culprit who realizes that words are often betrayers. And so they walked in silence up that narrow bit of street which connects the bridge with Piedras Negras, and leads you under the balcony of what used to be the American Consul’s house, and on past the cuartel, where the imprisoned soldiers are kept. Here, of course, the street broadens and skirts the plaza where the band plays of an evening, and where the town promenades round and round the little square of palms and fountains, under the stars. You may remember that a little farther on, on one side of the plaza, there is the immense church which has been building for a century, more or less, and which is still incomplete. There were a few miserable-looking soldiers, with shapeless, colorless uniforms, loitering in front of the cuartel as Harboro and Sylvia passed. The indefinably sinister character of the building affected Sylvia. “What is it?” she asked. “It’s where the republic keeps a body of its soldiers,” explained Harboro. “They’re inside—locked up.” They were both glad to sit down on one of the plaza benches for a few minutes; they did so by a common impulse, without speaking. “It’s the first time I...