“I’m glad that I didn’t.”
Up to that moment the raiders had accepted the situation with Indian stoicism. Two of them were still puffing cigarettes Sliver had placed in their mouths while Jake adjusted the nooses. But their fatalism did not preclude hope. Though Lee had spoken in English, the language of pity is universal. They knew she was interceding, and now the fellow with the pock-marked face loosed upon her a veritable torrent of Spanish.
They were poor hombres with families back in their pais reduced to the point of starvation by incessant revolutions. Of themselves they would never have conceived this great wickedness! They had been tempted to banditry by an evil one with the offer of a great price! For themselves, they cared not! A few kicks, a gurgle or two, and there would be an end! But their women? And the little niñas? These would be left in continual suffering!
Children? It drew instant response from dominant maternalism, the deep instinct that caused Lee to tyrannize over the Three. Dismounting, she began to question the prisoners concerning their families and women. Their number, names, and sex? Were they good children? Had they been duly christened by the priest? Their dispositions and traits? Thus and so on till from a lynching-bee the occasion was in danger of lapsing into a catechism. For, once started, the bandits were equally willing. Oblivious of nooses and bonds, they plunged into family history and reminiscence, reminding each other of this or that, and while they related and recalled, the sullen hardness died out of their faces, leaving them soft and human.
Vividly, as in real life, Lee saw their corn-stalk jacales with their brown wives in the doorways looking anxiously from under shading hands for their men’s return; their small, nude children playing in the hot dust. Here was little Pancho, who would some day be a great vaquero, roping chickens and cats with a string riata, then dragging them, captive, to the feet of chubby Dolores, who was, as her father swore by the saints, sweet as the Infant in the arms of the Blessed Virgin. It was then that she turned to the Three, her face aglow.
“This man has three little girls. The others all have families. They were driven to steal by want. Under the same circumstances any one of us might have done the same thing. If you had and were caught, how would you feel?”
“Under the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing!” She was looking at Bull, but as her glance returned at once to the prisoners she did not see him flush. He looked at Jake, who looked at Sliver, who looked away.
A busy and useful present soon buries the memory of a doubtful past, and beyond the pleasant span of to-day’s existence the old rustler life of yesterday loomed very far away. The fact that, by tacit consent, it was now never mentioned among them had helped to bury it more completely. But now, perhaps more vividly for the lapse, there rose in the mind of each the spiteful bead eyes, scorpion utterances of Don Miguel in Las Bocas, urging them to raid these very horses. Small wonder if they looked away, or that, as their glances returned, they exchanged sheepish grins.
“Under the same circumstances,” Bull answered, slowly and truthfully, “we-all ’u’d expect to hang. But if you feel different”—his glance interrogated Sliver and Jake—“it goes as you say. On’y, if you let ’em go, we’ll have to run ’em out of the country in fairness to the other haciendas.”
“Of course.” Lee joyfully accepted the compromise. “We’ll take them home now, and to-morrow Sliver and Jake can run them out.”