“I still have these.” He held out the tweeds. “How much boot do I get, Father Abraham?”
Already the Jew had felt with secret rumblings of the material, but he stood for his tradition. “Only vot iss on your feet. These ain’d much good. But you are a nice young veller. I make it an even trade.”
“You’ll chuck in that pair of chaps?”
With the customary grumblings that he would be ruined by his own generosity, the Hebrew eventually complied. While his customers were stowing away the chaparros and a few extras in a slop-bag, he made out a ticket for the suit, and pausing on their way out, their late owner read the legend which announced to the world that it was to be had very cheap for twenty-nine dollars and ninety cents.
Gordon burst into a merry laugh. “Father Abraham isn’t on to real clothes. They stung me a hundred and ten for that in New York.”
[XI: GORDON’S DÉBUT]
Starting “be guess an’ be God,” the train left Juarez at five the next morning. To avoid, as before, the jam in the one passenger-coach, Bull had climbed with his recruit on top of a box-car. Thus, when awakened by the jerk and rattle as the train plunged down and out of the first “shoo-fly” around a burned bridge; Gordon saw his first dawn break over the desert with a clear, fresh vision, intimacy of detail that could never be obtained through a Pullman window.
It was altogether different from the slow sunrises of his Eastern experience. A puff of hot, dry wind shook the velvet curtains of night, tossed and split them into shreds of black and crimson, suddenly revealing a wall of burnished brass behind. As yet the desert slept in purple shadow. But this paled to faint violet, then gray. As the sun rolled up out of crimson mists, the land appeared in all of its nakedness of hummocky sand a-bristle with cactus beard. There was also revealed the first of the burned trains and twisted rails which, with grave crosses and dead horses, were to run all day with the train, startling evidence of the cyclonic passion that had devastated the land.
“Destruction’s the one kind of work a Mexican really enjoys,” Bull answered Gordon’s question. “You orter see them at it. They run the loop of a big steel chain under the rails, hitch it to a hundred-ton engine, then go shooting down the track, ripping it up at twenty miles an hour, spikes flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. After cutting down the telegraph-poles, they hitch to the wires an’ yank a mile of it away at a time. As wreckers, they can’t be beat, for in four years they’ve completely destroyed mills, factories, smelters, railroads, property that took Porfirio Diaz and a thousand millions of foreign capital forty years to build.”
“Are they still at it?”