Poor brides of Christ! condemned to bear into that wicked world the children of furious lust! Yet, under their bitter sorrow, the leaven of mother love had been at work. The younger, a sweet-faced girl of twenty four or five, raised her pale, olive face. “And may we love them, our babes, when they come?”
The humanity set its reflection in the smile that overflowed the wrinkled face with sympathy and understanding. “God is love, Sisters. He would not wish otherwise.”
In their hope and consolation their quick looks at one another were wonderfully revealing. Bending, they took his blessing, and walked slowly away down the garden while he went back in the house.
Bull had looked and listened with sympathy so acute as to be almost pain. And yet—even while his gaze followed the nuns slowly down the garden, he was conscious of a tray of liquors and glasses that stood on a small side-table. On their way they had passed cantina after cantina, all thronged with half-drunken revueltosos, all exhaling a thick reek of spirits that filled his thirsty nostrils, inflamed the drink desire. Now, after refusing the consul’s invitation, he walked out on the veranda, and not till the bottles were recorked did he return in time to hear the consul’s conclusion on Benson’s business.
“As you say, he needs the horses, never more badly, but, again, he was never in worse humor than he has been since his defeat. It wouldn’t help any for me to go with you, for I’ve been fighting him on other accounts all this week. You know him, and I will provide you with a letter that will secure your admittance.”
On the way back Bull ran again the gantlet of the cantinas. With invisible hands they reached out to throttle his resolution. So powerful was the temptation, he walked like a man in a dream, blind to externals; seeing, hearing nothing till they brought up on the edge of the crowd that blocked always the gates of Valles’s headquarters—simple peones who waited patiently through the long, hot hours on the chance of obtaining a glimpse of their hero, a peon like themselves who had abased the great hacendados, their taskmasters, confiscated their lands, beaten their generals, trampled their pride in the dust. Though he shouldered a path through for himself and Benson, he scarcely saw them; had only a dim vision of a guard in the patio, of officers coming and going up a wide stone stairway. Not till they were met by a secretary, seated in an anteroom, and Benson spoke, did he awaken to what was going on.
“That’s ‘Matador’ Fero, Valles’s killer.” Benson nudged him as a man looked in through the open double doors of the next room and gave them a suspicious stare. “He shot two hundred Federal prisoners, one afternoon, in files of five, one bullet to a file, trying out a new high-power rifle. Looks it, doesn’t he?”
He did. The hulking figure, gross jaw and mouth, small eyes, black, piercing, cold as ice, all bespoke cruelty that was accentuated by his colorless olive skin. Strolling back to his post behind Valles, whom they could see sitting at a desk in the next room, he stood there closely watching, both the American correspondents who were ranged before the desk, and also the revueltoso officers who lounged on the window balconies. Not a hand stirred, foot moved, without his notice.
Fierce beast that the “Matador” was, Bull’s keen knowledge of men, developed by years of hazard to an instinct, still set him down as less dangerous than his master. In the latter a towering forehead, massive upper head, indicated genius of the highest constructive order. But his thick lips, repulsive mouth, great amber eyes that were never at rest, sent always their sharp, suspicious glances darting hither and thither, told why it had been perverted to destructive ends; proclaimed the bandit peon, military dictator. He had stopped speaking when they entered. Now he began again, and as he talked the heel of his hand nervously tapped the table. Now and then, with a gush of savage feeling, it would rise and fall with a bang.
“You may tell your papers, señores, the reverse of the other day was sustained by one of my generals. But to-morrow—you have seen my reinforcements, twenty thousand brought down from Chihuahua?—to-morrow I shall command. We shall drive the Carranzistas like dust before a hot wind. And you can tell them”—he observed a sinister pause—“you may tell them that I am not pleased with the countenance your government is now giving the Carranzistas. So far I have been careful of American lives and property in the country I control, but if your government allies itself with my enemies—” His big fist struck the table with force that emphasized the threatening flash of the darting eyes.