“Come on, dear!” Gordon called up from below.
“No time to waste.” Bull touched her shoulder.
Still she stood. “Oh, I hate to leave you. Do come!”
“Oh, shore!” Jake laughed, patting her cheek. “I’ll jine you in a few hours—or at El Paso, if I miss you here.”
Because of his cynical outer crust, she had given him, perhaps, the least affection of the Three. But in the last few weeks she had sensed beneath it his loyal human feeling. Now, trembling, she put out her hand, then, reaching suddenly, she pulled down his head and kissed his cheek. The next second she leaped from the cab into Gordon’s arms.
Bull had already jumped. Left alone, Jake stood still while the engineer threw the reversing lever and opened the throttle. As the mogul began to glide slowly backward he raised his hand and touched the spot her lips had pressed. Perhaps it revived some memory of his boyhood, some reverent memory of the days when other women than wantons had held him in love and respect. His face was very soft; so soft and tender it would never have been recognized by his dance-hall flames.
The engine had moved back a hundred yards with increasing speed before he even moved. Then just as ice spreads its frozen mask over pleasant waters so the outer crust that hid the real Jake from the undiscerning spread again over his lantern features. In sudden shame at being caught by himself in such softness, he turned furiously upon the engineer.
“What are you grinning at?”
The man was not. He was far too much afraid. But though he asserted his seriousness with profuse apologies, it made no difference to Jake.
“The trouble with you, Alberto, ain’t that you Mexicans are a dirty, lying, thieving, murdering lot so much as you’re too plumb ignorant to know your betters when they chanst around. In that brown pudding you call a face there ain’t a gleam to show you’re sensible of the honor you’ve jest been paid. You don’t know it, Alberto, an’ you probably never will, but take it from me that if you was president of this rotten country ’twouldn’t come near it. If I don’t blow the top of your head off during the next hour—which I likely will—you’ll be able to tell it to your descendants that a white girl once rode in your cab. If they’re smart they won’t believe you. But it’s the closest to fame you’ll ever get, so play it for all it’s worth. Now listen, Alberto”—he shook his finger in the engineer’s frightened face—“if you ever expect to hand it down to them descendants aforesaid, cut out them grins and get down to business.”