“Here, here!” he hastily struck down the barrel as Gordon drew a bead on a telegraph-pole. “Valles shot eight of his own soldiers jest t’other day for plugging insulators. Besides, it’s waste. Every bullet is worth a life—mebbe your own.”
“Maybe his own!” Again Gordon felt the prickling hair—in fact, as they rattled and jerked along there was scarcely a mile of the road that failed to produce it. Here it was a station, sacked, and burned, with a few miserable peonas, ragged and half-starved, begging for centavos. There a huddle of bones, residue of a hanged wire-thief, at the foot of a telegraph-pole. A broken rifle-butt, rusted cartridge-clip, empty brass shell, told with eloquent tongues stories of which Bull supplied the details.
Somewhere between these two stations a Mexican general, a prisoner of war, had been thrust down between two cars and ground under the wheels! That great adobe house with black windows staring like empty eye sockets from the fire-scarred walls had been the home of a Spanish hacendado whose three lovely daughters had been carried off by raiders. Death and torture, ravishments, farms laid waste, lives maimed and ruined, the full tale of fire and sword belonged in the landscape.
Yet to youth, egotistic masculine youth, even horrors may be romantic. Awed pleasure inhered in the thought that he, so lately from Princeton, the spoiled son of a wealthy father, was a possible subject for bandit tortures!
He found it all so fascinating that the day passed like an hour. Before he was aware of it the sun’s great red orb sank behind a huge black mountain. The desert faded once more to gray, violet, purple. For a while the oil smoke from the laboring locomotive laid miles of soft dark pennon against a crimson sky. Then this also faded and left them rattling along through heated dusk. Sprawled at length on the running-board, the young fellow gazed up at the fiery desert stars, in a luxury of content. He was lost to the world when the train stopped at the station at midnight.
“We’d better go right on,” Bull said. “We’d get no sleep here for the fleas, an’ desert travel is easiest at night. By morning we’ll be into the grass country an’ kin take a nap while the animals graze.”
With an additional horse hired from the Mexican station agent they moved off at once and had passed into the range country before day broke over its long grassy rolls. Breakfast, a nap, then three hours’ more travel brought them to the shallow valley where the Three first saw Lee and Carleton charging the Colorados. Indeed, Bull was telling of it when, just as on that other day, she came galloping over the opposite rise in chase of a runaway mare with a colt at its side. Riata swinging in rhythm with her beast’s stride, she shot down the slope, made her cast, took a turn around the saddle-horn and brought the captive up skilfully as any vaquero.
“Pretty neat!” Gordon exclaimed. “That boy can ride!”
“You bet you!” Eyes sparkling with pride, Bull slyly added, “Sliver himself, that was born with a rope in his han’, don’t throw a better loop than Miss Lee.”
“What?” As, sighting them just then, Lee swung her hat, emitting a clear cowman’s yell, her knotted hair fell down on her shoulders, Gordon exclaimed, “Why, it—it is a girl! In this country do they usually wear—”