“Picturesque? Yes,” he went on, from a pause. “But it’s mighty hard on the common people. Look at that!”
He was pointing at a shriveled old woman who, with bony fingers, was clawing the horse manure that had been pitched out of a car.
“She’s picking out the undigested corn to grind for her tortillas. Man!” Eyes flashing to the inspiration, he ran on in a flush: “If our wise men in Washington could only see that! Do you know what these armies are doing? Riding the brood mares, eating the seed corn! The seed corn and the brood mares! You know what that means—famine! If I were a poet I’d take her, that old hag scratching her living from the offal of Valles’s war horses—I’d take her for the symbol of Mexico—Mexico bleeding and bludgeoned, ravished, outraged, oppressed.
“It was hard to swallow, what your friend said last night, but it’s true. While the Washingtonians prate of principles, this country is fast returning to its original condition of nomadic tribes warring perpetually upon one another. Already—oh!” He descended to a homely but vital conclusion. “They make me sick. God send us a man! A man with sympathy and insight; understanding of this people’s failings and necessities. God send us another Lincoln!”
“You bet it’s hell!” In spite of the profanity Bull’s laconic comment was reverent in its essence as the most profound “Amen!”
With a shrug Naylor threw off his earnestness; became again his cheerful self. “I hear the Chinaman stirring. Come on down to breakfast.”
Stepping from the ladder, Bull’s glance went, in spite of himself, to the table. It was still there, just as he had pictured it, a squat stone jug with glasses; and though, seating himself on a locker, he turned his back, he was still acutely conscious of its presence. He did not look when the Chinaman carried it back into the kitchen. But he knew, and his sigh expressed more than relief. Moreover, both while he was eating and when, later, he walked with Benson and the correspondents into the town, it went with him, occupied always a corner of his mind.
From the adobe outskirts the soldiers and their women were moving in dirty streams of khaki and peon mantas splashed with the flash of brass, vivid reds, violets, and blues of soiled calico skirts, the loot of a hundred towns. From a hundred painted streets the streams poured into the plaza, the heart of the town, there to move and mass and melt and mass again, a sweating, sweltering jam of brown humanity topped with a scum of evil eyes, dark, unhealthy faces. In dribbles and trickles its evil tide had flowed in from all over the land, and Benson’s remark as they came from a side street into the plaza was fully justified:
“If you could just sink it for half a day a mile under the sea, this would be a safer, cleaner land.”
Overpowering the stenches natural to a desert town, the sickening sweet odor of carrion hung thick in the air.