I
Bob Leadley moved toward the sound of guitars. The strumming came from over the stream where the Mexicans had their own little cantina and their dobe huts. Back from the ‘Damask Cheek,’ which was the palpitating core of the white settlement, voices of the miners reached him, not loud to-night, not uproarious. Things were seldom duller than now on the Rio Brava, shrunken to a trickle at this time of year. The eke of gold had been at its lowest for days on the placers. A hot, still August night in Bismo, Arizona—the night that changed one white man all around.
Mexican figures bowed to him. A woman laughingly called from a darkened doorway: ‘Buenas noches, señor!’ Another laughed from behind her, adding somewhat wistfully: ‘Hace un calor sofocante.’
He walked on past the dobe huts and on to the mesa. He heard the coyotes—different from any time before. There was no moon and the stars were indistinct, run together in the heat haze. Bob Leadley took off his hat; drops of sweat held by the tight hatband, dropped down on his face. He had to laugh at himself—the feelings that rolled and tumbled over each other within. Nobody would have believed it of him—feelings to keep a secret of. It was as if some one he had always been waiting for, had come to town—not yet seen, a friend or enemy, he couldn’t tell, but a life-or-death meaning to the arrival. Running steps reached him from behind; a panting voice calling:
‘Bob! Bob!’
‘Hello, Mort,’ he answered as the other came up, the tone so quiet and cool, it was almost whimsical.
‘What you doing away off here?’
‘She didn’t want me there.’
‘It’s a boy, Bob, only—’
‘I thought as much.’
‘It’s a boy all right, only she—they say she ain’t going to live.’
The mother was already dead, but this was Mort Cotton’s way of softening the shock for a friend.
The same easy tone answered: ‘Guess we’d better walk back.’
‘I wouldn’t hurry, if I was you. Bob. I’ll run back if you like and get the rest of the word.’
It was her doings that they called the child Bart, after some saint of her religion. She had a lot of saints, one for every day or so—a Spanish woman, and she hadn’t asked much, come to think of it.
The oddest thing Bob Leadley had ever done was to marry her. He never would have thought better of it, except it made a difference in the town. It would make more of a difference now—leaving a boy with her blood in his veins. They wouldn’t call it ‘Spanish’ blood in Bismo. Mexicans weren’t held high on this side of the Border.... Queer little birdlike ways, she had—little vanities and secrets—always shrinking farther indoors in daylight, always more alive in the night time. She had sung and cooked and washed for him; pleasant to be with, but he never really knew her. She was like ripe fruit that couldn’t last—pleasant to the taste and pretty to look at, but nothing much for real hunger. Come and gone with her curious ways, her brightenings up in the dark—only asking one thing—that the boy be called after this particular one of her saints, and ‘Bart’ was as good a name as any.
So there was a gray-eyed white man in Bismo, Arizona, with a black-eyed boy in his cabin. No problem about it at all, from the standpoint of the other miners, just scorn—only Bob Leadley had been known from away back as cool and gamy as they made them; nothing like the squaw-man, cholo-man type. The miners couldn’t give much play to their contempt before those pleasant gray eyes of Bob’s, which might inquire their meaning, and look into it. Men weren’t mind-readers in Bismo. They saw the steady eyes, the whimsical smile, but no one knew what was going on; not even Mort Cotton, who had punched cattle, skinned mules, and washed for gold with Bob Leadley for ten years; not even the Mexican woman and her daughter who brought Bart up. But it was all a matter of how you gave advice. Bismo found out gradually that Bob wasn’t set up very high in his idea of being a successful parent. They found he listened attentively to comment given within a certain range of tones; discovering this, the miners supplied it plentifully.
The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’ Letchie Welton, the town marshal, wasn’t even to be approached on a matter like this, and sounds of mourning from one or more dobe huts seldom reached as far as the ‘Damask Cheek,’ any more than the strumming of guitars....
Several times in the next dozen years, Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton were on the point of leaving Bismo, but the Rio Brava had a way of suddenly picking up, the gold eke rising to quite a little color. There was another thing; it was hard for Bob to make up his mind to take Bart away from the Mexican woman and her daughter. It didn’t seem fair. The old señora had been a friend of Bart’s mother and loved the white man’s boy; also her daughter loved him. But Bart was growing up more Mexican than white; talked Spanish in preference to English; was more often seen across the stream than on this side, and running with the Mexican boys, one Palto especially, than with the four or five white boys of his age in town. Bart’s whole business was horses, but Mexican words having to do with them were too easy on his tongue—hondos, latigos, reatas, conchos, yakimas. A slim, black-haired youth, slow to rouse, not cruel or a fool; an easy way with him; not stirred in the least by the thought of washing gold; no idea of working hours, as being superior to all others.
Just to see Bart leaning against the doorway—on his feet, but relaxed in a way no white boy could stand, a guitar in his hand, perhaps—had a way of filling his father with a revulsion that Bob had to take out to the mesa to quiet. It was as if the man saw the face of his boy under a high-tinted sombrero (instead of the cast-off cavalryman’s campaign hat with a Copley peak) as if a sash of seda were thrust back over the shoulder. Bob didn’t quite know it, but it was because he was seeing Bart with the eyes of the other miners at these times—that he was stung so. The town had put a secret fear on him that his boy was not showing up white.
The father lacked one thing that parents usually have to work with. He didn’t have the sense of being right at all times. Once or twice he felt so sure of himself that he treated Bart to a whipping, which the boy took without a murmur, minding pain no more than an Indian. He never explained. The father got one of the starts of his life to find he had whipped Bart for a thing he didn’t do, the boy not taking the trouble to clear himself. Bob’s feeble sense of rightness was shaken by that; it about all went out of him, and something else with it. The deep hurt of it was that Bart held no grievance afterward.
A master at letting other men alone, Bob couldn’t keep his thoughts and his will-power off the boy. He made up for his rare rough periods by being lenient. All the time his actions and reactions brought advice from his fellow townsmen. It was Letchie Welton, the town marshal, who started the saying that Bart wouldn’t live to be hanged. All this time Bob Leadley’s eyes were the most light-hearted anywhere.
‘As a male-parent, I’m considerable of a botch—I admit that,’ he would say, in a way to delude anybody that he ever suffered real care, and at the same time there was a sorrow burning at the center of him like a red lamp. Often at work on the placer, he knew a loneliness to get close to his boy. He might have seen Bart at breakfast, but that made no difference. He felt lonely for him more than once, when they were in the same room together.