“You have a commission from General Valles?”
He had. It ran in the usual form, setting forth in grandiose language that the necessities of the revolution demanded all good citizens to contribute their uttermost to the cause, authorizing the bearer, el capitan Santos, to seize and expropriate such goods, cattle, horses, or other chattels according to his judgment, and to settle therefor with his note of hand, payable after the revolution; signed in Valles’s own illiterate, crabbed hand and attested with a prodigious seal.
Lee handed it back. “This seems to be in legal form. That being the case”—she returned to the attack with a directness that drew from Jake an appreciative nod “perhaps you will now answer why you attacked my people!”
“I know of no attack except”—the straight brows knit over a black flash at Gordon—“when this man killed one of my men.”
Already Lee had gained the details from the women. She replied at once: “He shot in self-defense—to save one of my girls.”
“Santa Maria!” His mustache drew up in a cynical grin. “What foolishness! As though a good soldier should be shot because he ruffled a dove. You Americanos take these peonas too seriously, fill them with ideas above their station. On our haciendas they are proud to gain a soldado for a sweetheart.”
Could the thoughts of, say, Gordon, Jake, and Sliver have been examined just then they would have shown, respectively, an intense desire on Gordon’s part to break the officer in two across his knee; a cool calculation by Jake as to the possibility of “getting away with it” should they find it necessary to kill the entire command. Sliver, still holding a bead on the file of men, from his gaze, was ardently wondering if he could send one bullet through all four heads.
If the thoughts of the peonas—now gathered in a murmuring, gesticulating mob that showed principally as glistening eyeballs rolling like foam in a sea of brown faces along the wall—a composite of their thought would have shown a mad passion to rend and maim, mutilate and torture, bred of their natural savagery aggravated by centuries of mistreatment under Spanish-Mexican rule. Out of which chaos of thought and passion, vibrant and sweet with the strength and truth of a fine nature aroused by base wrong, came Lee’s voice:
“You say that? You, a follower of a man who was once himself a peon, who boasts that his is the peones’ cause? You, his representative, sneer because we treat like human beings these poor creatures? If you do represent him, then God help us, for we have little but violence to expect from your cause.”
It was a fine chord, strongly struck, should have set in vibration the strings of sympathy in any normal human being. Though he caught but little of the Spanish, Gordon felt and glowed responsively. It aroused even Jake, the cold and crafty, born hater of the peon in all his ways, to mutter: “You bet! they hain’t got nothing coming from him!” But in the nature of the Mexican, warped and blackened forever both by training and by the vicissitudes of bandit war, it aroused only surprise. Though his eye lit up, it was only in secret appreciation of her beauty. It was to ingratiate himself, personally, in her favor that, with a sudden reversal, he ran off with despicable glibness the shibboleths of his “Cause.” Surely they were fighting for the peon; to obtain his rights and restore the public lands alienated by the hacendados.