The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’ Letchie Welton, the town marshal, wasn’t even to be approached on a matter like this, and sounds of mourning from one or more dobe huts seldom reached as far as the ‘Damask Cheek,’ any more than the strumming of guitars....
Several times in the next dozen years, Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton were on the point of leaving Bismo, but the Rio Brava had a way of suddenly picking up, the gold eke rising to quite a little color. There was another thing; it was hard for Bob to make up his mind to take Bart away from the Mexican woman and her daughter. It didn’t seem fair. The old señora had been a friend of Bart’s mother and loved the white man’s boy; also her daughter loved him. But Bart was growing up more Mexican than white; talked Spanish in preference to English; was more often seen across the stream than on this side, and running with the Mexican boys, one Palto especially, than with the four or five white boys of his age in town. Bart’s whole business was horses, but Mexican words having to do with them were too easy on his tongue—hondos, latigos, reatas, conchos, yakimas. A slim, black-haired youth, slow to rouse, not cruel or a fool; an easy way with him; not stirred in the least by the thought of washing gold; no idea of working hours, as being superior to all others.
Just to see Bart leaning against the doorway—on his feet, but relaxed in a way no white boy could stand, a guitar in his hand, perhaps—had a way of filling his father with a revulsion that Bob had to take out to the mesa to quiet. It was as if the man saw the face of his boy under a high-tinted sombrero (instead of the cast-off cavalryman’s campaign hat with a Copley peak) as if a sash of seda were thrust back over the shoulder. Bob didn’t quite know it, but it was because he was seeing Bart with the eyes of the other miners at these times—that he was stung so. The town had put a secret fear on him that his boy was not showing up white.
The father lacked one thing that parents usually have to work with. He didn’t have the sense of being right at all times. Once or twice he felt so sure of himself that he treated Bart to a whipping, which the boy took without a murmur, minding pain no more than an Indian. He never explained. The father got one of the starts of his life to find he had whipped Bart for a thing he didn’t do, the boy not taking the trouble to clear himself. Bob’s feeble sense of rightness was shaken by that; it about all went out of him, and something else with it. The deep hurt of it was that Bart held no grievance afterward.
A master at letting other men alone, Bob couldn’t keep his thoughts and his will-power off the boy. He made up for his rare rough periods by being lenient. All the time his actions and reactions brought advice from his fellow townsmen. It was Letchie Welton, the town marshal, who started the saying that Bart wouldn’t live to be hanged. All this time Bob Leadley’s eyes were the most light-hearted anywhere.
‘As a male-parent, I’m considerable of a botch—I admit that,’ he would say, in a way to delude anybody that he ever suffered real care, and at the same time there was a sorrow burning at the center of him like a red lamp. Often at work on the placer, he knew a loneliness to get close to his boy. He might have seen Bart at breakfast, but that made no difference. He felt lonely for him more than once, when they were in the same room together.
II
Bart was past twelve, when he was missing for a day or two, and rode back into town on a gray rat-tailed pony that was raked from shoulder to crupper with fresh wounds and old scars. Letchie Welton, in the capacity of deputy sheriff, halted him at the edge of town, looking the outfit over.
‘Where did you get that briscut?’