[XXVII: AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE]
Riding steadily and hard, Bull made the railroad just as the sun dipped and hung like a smoky lamp on the smoldering horizon. From a distance he had spied Benson leaning in the doorway of the box-car which served the Mexican agent for a telegraph station. The Englishman called to him across the tracks.
“There’s a battle pending down the line. Troop-trains have been streaking through all day carrying Valles’s reserves from Chihuahua. Don Pedro, here, says another is due to stop for water in half an hour. If we hand the comandante a few compliments, he may take us along.”
“Half an hour?” Bull snorted. “That means half the night an’ then some. We’ll have time for supper an’ a sleep.”
But for once the railroad went back on all precedents. Just as the crimson tip of the sun slid down behind a black-velvet mountain, the train came puffing in loaded with the usual picturesque rag-and-bobtail of brown soldiers, women, and children clustered like hiving bees on top.
“Must be yesterday’s train a bit overdue,” Bull defended his theory, as the cars clicked by with slowing rhythm. “The comandante’ll be in the passenger-coach ahead. We’d better to mosey along an’ brace him.”
But their passage was much more easily gained. A man who sat with legs dangling from the open doorway of a box-car emitted a whoop.
“Ole! Diogenes! Como le va! What of our matrimonial venture? How did it pan out?”
It was Naylor, the correspondent, Bull’s friend and Cupid’s aide. As his car rolled slowly up, there hove in sight placards that announced the titles of certain American papers in dignified Spanish that their oldest subscribers would never have recognized. But there was nothing foreign in the half-dozen of friendly faces that filled the doorway. From the dignified visage, with its short, gray beard and trim mustache, of their dean, down to the boyish face of a field photographer, all joined in a composite welcoming grin.
“Weekes, Mason, Martin, Roberts, Cummings.” The correspondent breezily ran off the names. “There were more before Santos-Coy, Valles’s chief of staff, stuck us all up against a wall the last time our government clapped one of its hit-and-miss embargoes on munitions. Valles saved us, but after that most of the fellows skipped out. So we have lots of room. Come right up.”