Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that undulated like a woman’s mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in one mood as the other.
“A wonderful land!” Gordon breathed it.
Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled Garden of Eden—could he have done all this, even then imagination would have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to prophecy.
“Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth.”
That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration but an eagle’s flight away. Following battle and retreat across sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon’s blast over the face of the land to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burning haciendas. With them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded and tortured, wailing of ravished women.
In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that had spied the mozo’s signal and were now watching them from the chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on.
“Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease.”
If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few hundred yards away, might have heard the argument.
She would easily have recognized Ramon’s voice. “True, amigo, and I love him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it—to make no attempt on their lives.”
“A promise?” A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. “What is it but a deadfall for one’s enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it to find a hot enough corner in hell. But I gave no promise—and he killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to me.”