“A rather cold morning for open cars,” I said to the youthful conductor.
“Oh, we run open cars all winter,” he answered. “But I suppose we don’t mind the cold so much,” he continued, emphasizing the pronoun, “because we are out of doors all the time.”
A Northern tenderfoot might naturally be less inured to frigidity, he seemed to imply; but I remarked that he wore the heaviest of overcoats with the collar up. Warm days (much like New England June), cool nights, clear skies, constant winds, dryness and dust—such is the January climate of El Paso, if my four days have given me a fair impression of its quality.
Presently we crossed a short bridge.
“Was that the river?” I asked my seatmate, a minute afterward, a sudden suspicion coming over me, though it seemed so absurd that I was half ashamed to betray it.
“Yes, sir; that was the Rio Grande. You’re in Mexico now,” he answered.
Yes, and that must have been the Mexican Custom House officer whom I had seen step out of the door of a small building on the southern bank of the river and salute our conductor so politely. None of us looked like smugglers, I suppose. At all events, the car was not “held up,” as happened at the other end of the bridge, a day or two later, while two rather boisterous young fellows on the rear seat made themselves merry over the attempt of Uncle Sam’s official representative to collect a duty. International travel, even in an electric street-car, is liable to complications.
As for the river, it was practically dry. Pedestrians were crossing it—to save toll—on a few small stepping-stones at a point where the current could not have been ten feet wide nor more than half of ten inches deep. My seatmate explained that so much water was drawn off above this point for irrigation purposes that the river had little left for its own use; and in fact, more than once afterward I saw its bed absolutely dry, so that even the stepping-stones had for the day gone out of business. Yet it is a real rio grande, for all that, and the life of a long, long strip of Texas.
Drought is the mark of this country. A friendly citizen (of whom, in my ignorance, I had inquired about “suburban trains”!) warned me earnestly against wandering far out of the town. If some Mexican did not kill me “for the sake of the clothes I had on” (an ignoble death, surely), I might get lost (an easy matter, by my adviser’s tell), in which event, if nothing more serious happened to me, I should infallibly perish of thirst.
The car took me through the compact little ciudad (a five-minute passage, perhaps), and I struck out for the country, along the line of the Mexican Central Railroad, in the direction of the mountains, heading my course for a cemetery out on the slope, in the midst of the chaparral. White-necked ravens were foraging beside the track, as little disturbed by human approach as so many English sparrows might have been. “How soon the strange becomes familiar!” I thought. I had never seen a white-necked raven (there is no whiteness visible,[12] the bird being a very imp of darkness to look at it) till less than twenty-four hours ago, and already I was passing it with something like indifference. I was far from indifferent, however, two afternoons later, when for the first time I watched a flock of several hundred soaring in mazy circles high overhead, after the manner of buzzards or sea-gulls.