The sudden illumination of the young man’s face so palpably expressed hope that Bull had to grin. “Yes, farther south, where Valles is fighting the Federals. But this is his base line and he looks after it pretty close. Still”—his nod went beyond the distant mountains—“it’s pretty much all bandit out there. Now an’ then they attack the trains. There’s allus a fifty-fifty chance for a scrap.”
“That isn’t so bad.”
Bull grinned again as the young fellow turned with renewed interest to the scenery.
In comparison with the eons of time which have elapsed since man first took to walking uprightly, his written history is as a lightning flash in the night; civilization itself but a film over passions and instincts violent and deep. Now that every bunch of cactus offered a possible ambush, Gordon experienced a new sensation. Over the desert, vague as its shimmering heat, invisible but real, settled that atmosphere of fear in which primitive man, in common with all animals, lived and moved and had his being.
The wrecks occurred almost invariably near cuttings through shallow sand-hills. From the cactus chaparral that clothed their tops, the revolutionary lightnings had struck sometimes twice or thrice; and when the train ran into one, Gordon would feel a prickling at the roots of his hair.
It was not fear. Some centuries ago his hair would have bristled like the ruff of an angry dog. Through disuse it had lost the knack. But the feeling was the same, the expectancy, repressed excitement of an animal expecting attack. The veneer of home and college influences had peeled away, leaving him the young male of the tribe, eager to prove himself by deeds; the commonplace exit of the train on the other side left him always slightly disappointed. Not till it finally ran out of the hummocky sand into the far-reaching levels of the great Mexican haciendas did he lose hope and return to the contemplation of the scenery as such.
“I’m glad we’re up here.” From the engine, puffing away at the head of a dozen intervening coal-cars, he looked back at the passenger-coach far to their rear. “I wouldn’t exchange this for a Pullman.”
“Well, don’t imagine that you’re traveling second-class,” Bull grinned. “I had to slip the conductor five pesos extra. But it’s worth it. You’d suffocate down in that car; not to mention the chance of some peon spitting in your face. By the way, if that ever happens to you, take it an’ grin. Sure!” He answered the young fellow’s look of disgust. “That is, unless you want to feel a knife in your belly. If you’re German or English, or b’long to any other nationality that looks after its people, you might resent it an’ get away. But, thanks to our Government’s policy, it’s open season for Americans all the year round. They bag a few, too, every so long.”
“Would you stand for that?”
Bull shrugged. “Kain’t say, till I’ve been tried. But it’s good advice, nevertheless. Seeing, though, that you don’t like it, you’d better be toting a gun. Take one of mine till we get home.