Again, to please her, Bull had feigned sleep. Again he returned to his ceaseless watch. Not since he left the train five nights ago had he closed his eyes. Yet his mind functioned as usual. Just as his body was accustomed to move, ride, walk under the heat of a desert sky, so his thoughts flashed and faded in the sultry heat of his brain. If anything, it was stimulated. His vision reached farther; he saw with crystal perception, grasped mental conceptions beyond his normal. As he gazed down on the sleeping pair his mind reached out beyond the danger of the hour.
Unconscious of his kindly scrutiny, the two slept on, Lee gathered in the curve of Gordon’s arm, fair head pillowed on his breast, both faces turned up in the moonlight. Exhaustion had drained most of the girl’s color, and, the redder for it, the arched bow of her mouth showed under the small nose, fine nostrils. The rounded oval of her cheeks, broad, low brow, smooth throat gained delicacy by contrast with the heavier mold of Gordon’s features. His level brows, firm mouth, straight nose, forehead broad and high above wide-spaced eyes, the good, square jaw, supplied the masculine equivalent of her fineness. One face, as the other, indicated quality, breeding. The girlish figure, well rounded in spite of its litheness, complemented the rangy body, flat flanks, long limbs, alongside which it lay so quietly.
In their wholesome, healthy youth they were perfect as a double flower. The man and the woman! given to him for a helpmeet in the Garden of Eden; a helpmeet in joy and sorrow, love and fighting, in play and earnest throughout the generations! The unconscious tenderness of that age-long relation was expressed by his guarding arm, her soft dependence; something of the feeling, mystery, and beauty of all past loves enveloped them sleeping there.
“Jes’ naturally made for each other. Not once in a thousand do you get such a pair.”
Bull’s murmur was founded on truth, for he had seen enough of the world to know of the misfits and mismatings, of the strong with the weak, of health and disease, ugliness and sweetness; the sales of youth to degenerate age; the chance matings of the slums that bring into the world a wretched swarm to fill the hospitals and prisons. Once in a thousand? Not once in a hundred thousand was Nature’s intent so completely fulfilled.
To the greatly wise and the greatly simple are vouchsafed visions, and to Bull, looking out over the dim plains, was given a dream. It began at Arboles. Just as he had seen Lee sitting under the portales many a time, fair head inclined over a bit of mending for one or other of the Three, he now saw her sewing and making for the small children that tugged at her skirt, tried to climb her knee. Small replicas of herself and Gordon, with the marvelous celerity of visions, they grew under Bull’s eyes into strong boys, healthy girls, whose shouts and laughter raised the echoes in the patio. Now they were young men and women! He saw the lads go forth and return proudly with young wives. He saw fine young fellows come in to woo and win Lee’s girls.
With that the vision expanded till it embraced all the land. Under forced peace, he saw the flood of immigration that had been arrested by the revolutions rise again and pour in wider streams by rail and ship into Mexico, now, in her turn, the melting-pot of the world. Ships thronged her ports; over her rich bosom railroads spread their lace of iron; and here, there, yonder, he saw Lee’s children, always strong, always upright, always considerable people among their neighbors. In legislature, church, halls of state, they took place—at first a few white faces among the brown; then, as time moved on and the brown race drowned under the foreign inundation, whites among white, governors, legislators, presidents of the Mexican United States, worthy peer of its neighbor across the Rio Grande.
It required hours for his slow visioning to arrive at this stately consummation. In course thereof the moon sailed down to its setting in the north, but while its dew-light still fell on the sleepers Bull’s gaze came back to them.
Surely they were “fit,” the chosen of Nature, ripe fruit of her age-long process. Surely they and their children, the big-boned, cool-brained children of the north, would displace the hotheads who now laid waste the land with their lusts and passions. Not by war would it be brought about so much as that commercial conquest which is more lasting and complete. “Fit,” morally and physically, in the fullest sense of the term, yet down there in the valley, in the dark Pass beyond, men more ruthless than the tiger, more cruel than the wolf, the “fit” of ten thousand years ago, were waiting for daylight to renew the attempt on their lives.
It should not succeed! As Sliver had sworn to it—and died; as Jake had sworn to it—and died; so Bull took oath. Also, with slow deliberation, heavy practicability, he began his dispositions. First, he examined the cartridge-belts, and his face darkened as he noted that two days of heavy firing had almost exhausted their ammunition. There was left only enough for one rifle; indeed, to fully charge Gordon’s, he had to empty his own.