A hasty glance through the arch showed Sliver on his way to the stables. Jake was shooing the peonas back to their quarters with much language and little ceremony. There was no one to see when, with a quick movement, she threw one arm around his neck, pulled down his head, and planted a swift kiss on his cheek.
“I don’t want to be widowed—before I’m married.”
At midnight Sliver brought in his report. “They’ve gone on to El Sol. After dark I drew up so close that I almost ran into ’em when they stopped suddenly at the other side of a ridge. Luckily my horse stood quiet an’ the air was so still I heard every word of their wrangling. The captain he was fer coming back, but the others wouldn’t hear of it.
“‘The damned gringos shoot straight,’ I heard one of ’em say. ‘Already have they killed one of us, an’ now they be ready. Also the horses are tired an’ we hungry. Let us go forward to Hacienda El Sol.’ Then, after some jawing, they moved on.”
“An’ they won’t come back,” Jake commented on the report. “Not so long as they kin find something that looks easier.”
Which was only half of the truth!
[XXIX: TEMPTATION]
Bull’s eyes opened at dawn on a cloudless sky that lay like an inverted pink bowl over desert so level and vast that the customary bordering mountains showed only blue tips up above the horizon. He had been half conscious of the cessation of movement during the night. Now silence, the cool quiet of dawn, lay over the hot and drowsy earth.
Sitting up, he saw on each side the brown adobe skirts of a desert town enwrapping in their squalid embrace miles of troop-trains which stood in the yards twelve deep and blocked the main line. Twenty thousand revueltosos, at least, heaped the roofs. As yet the men lay huddled in their bright serapes. But already the women were astir, lighting the scene with a flash of brilliant skirts. From rude hearths built of earth within a circle of stones a myriad thin, violet columns uprose and hung straight as strings in the crystal air.
“’Morning, Diogenes!” The correspondent’s cheerful face poked up from under the edge of the car. “Some picturesque, heigh? Who’d think, to look at them sleeping so peacefully, that they were bent on the destruction of another outfit like this less than ten miles away? But that’s your Mexican. With us war is a stern necessity to be shoved to a quick conclusion. With him it is a pleasure. Day is to fight in, night for sleep, noon for siesta, and he arranges his warfare accordingly. A night attack would be considered discourteous; not at all according to the Mexican Hoyle. At noon they quit, on the advanced posts, even visit each other and exchange gossip and cigarettes. Whereafter, with a cheerful, ‘Adios, señor, it is time to begin fighting!’ they return to their respective lines and go to it again. A cheerful people in the midst of their dirt and disorder.” He added, thoughtfully, “I never see them like this without thinking of them as a band of careless children shrieking with laughter over the destruction they are wreaking with the powerful weapons we placed in their hands.”