V
The journey to Fortuna is a scant fifty miles by measure, but within those eighty kilometers there is a lapse of centuries in standards. As Bud and De Lancey rode out of battle-scarred Agua Negra they traveled a good road, well worn by the Mexican wood-wagons that hauled in mesquit from the hills. Then, as they left the town and the wood roads scattered, the highway changed by degrees to a broad trail, dug deep by the feet of pack-animals and marked but lightly with wheels. It followed along the railroad, cutting over hills and down through gulches, and by evening they were in the heart of Old Mexico.
Here were men in sandals and women barefooted; chickens tied up by the legs outside of brush jacales; long-nosed hogs, grunting fiercely as they skirmished for food; and half-naked children, staring like startled rabbits at the strangers.
The smell of garlic and fresh-roasting coffee was in the air as they drew into town for the night, and their room was an adobe chamber with tile floor and iron bars across the windows. Riding south the next day they met vaqueros, mounted on wiry mustangs, who saluted them gravely, taking no shame for their primitive wooden saddle-trees and pommels as broad as soup-plates.
As they left the broad plain and clambered up over the back of a mountain they passed Indian houses, brush-built and thatched with long, coarse grasses, and by the fires the women ground corn on stone metates as their ancestors had done before the fall. For in Mexico there are two peoples, the Spaniards and the natives, and the Indians still remember the days when they were free.
It was through such a land that Phil and Hooker rode on their gallant ponies, leading a pack-animal well loaded with supplies from the north, and as the people gazed from their miserable hovels and saw their outfit they wondered at their wealth.
But if they were moved to envy, the bulk of a heavy pistol, showing through the swell of each coat, discouraged them from going further; and the cold, searching look of the tall cowboy as he ambled past stayed in their memory long after the pleasant "Adios!" of De Lancey had been forgotten.
Americans were scarce in those days, and what few came by were riding to the north. How bold, then, must this big man be who rode in front—and certainly he had some great reward before him to risk such a horse among the revoltosos! So reasoned the simple-minded natives of the mountains, gazing in admiration at Copper Bottom, and for that look in their eyes Bud returned his forbidding stare.
There is something about a good horse that fascinates the average Mexican—perhaps because they breed the finest themselves and are in a position to judge—but Hooker had developed a romantic attachment for his trim little chestnut mount and he resented their wide-eyed gapings as a lover resents glances at his lady. This, and a frontier education, rendered him short-spoken and gruff with the paisanos and it was left to the cavalier De Lancey to do the courtesies of the road.
As the second day wore on they dipped down into a rocky cañon, with huge cliffs of red and yellow sandstone glowing in the slanting sun, and soon they broke out into a narrow valley, well wooded with sycamores and mesquits and giant hackberry-trees.