Children of the desert

by Louis Dodge

“He got away with his skin,” was the way the bartender put the case, “but he left his coat.”

There was a voice from one of the card-tables: “Well, any man that gets Fectnor’s coat is no slouch.”

There were a good many expressions of undisguised wonder at Fectnor’s behavior; and nobody could have guessed that perhaps some sediment of manhood which had remained after all the other decent standards had disappeared had convinced Fectnor that he did not want to kill a man whom he had injured so greatly. And from the popular attitude toward Fectnor’s conduct there grew a greatly increased respect for Harboro.

That, indeed, was the main outcome of the episode, so far as the town as a whole was concerned. Harboro became a somewhat looming figure. But with Sylvia ... well, with Sylvia it was different.

Of course Sylvia was connected with the affair, and in only one way. She was the sort of woman who might be expected to get her husband into trouble, and Fectnor was the kind of man who might easily appeal to her imagination. This was the common verdict; and the town concluded that it was an interesting affair—the more so because nearly all the details had to be left to the imagination.

As for Sylvia, the first direct result of her husband’s gun-play was that a week or two after the affair happened, she had a caller—the wife of Jesus Mendoza.

She had not had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite Club, and that lower stratum identified with church “socials” and similar affairs, did not know of Sylvia’s existence—had decided definitely never to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church to the strains of the Lohengrin march. Nevertheless, there had been that trip to the church, and the playing of the march; and this fact placed Sylvia considerably above certain obscure women in the town who were not under public condemnation, but whose status was even more hopeless—who were regarded as entirely negligible.

The wife of Jesus Mendoza was one of these. She was an American woman, married to a renegade Mexican who was notoriously evil. I have referred to Mendoza as a man who went about partly concealed in his own cloud of cigarette smoke, who looked at nothing in particular and who was an active politician of a sort. He had his place in the male activities of the town; but you wouldn’t have known he had a wife from anything there was in his conversation or in his public appearances. Nobody remembered ever to have seen the two together. She remained indoors in all sorts of weather save when she had marketing to do, and then she looked neither to left nor right. Her face was like a mask. She had been an unfortunate creature when Mendoza married her; and she was perhaps thankful to have even a low-caste Mexican for a husband, and a shelter, and money enough to pay the household expenses.

That her life could not have been entirely complete, even from her own way of thinking, was evidenced by the fact that at last she came to call on Sylvia in the house on the Quemado Road.

Sylvia received her with reticence and with a knowing look. She was not pleased that Mrs. Mendoza had decided to call. She realized just what her own status was in the eyes of this woman, who had assumed that she might be a welcome visitor.