Somewhere south in Sonora

by Will Levington Comfort

Diciendo adios’

That song was like an ever-continued story. A woman’s voice with guitar, this time, and the old wistfulness came over Elbert—the same that he had felt in the Plaza of Los Angeles. Here he was in a little native plaza—far from travel-lines, not even sure of the name of the town, yet he had to stop and think that all he had wanted so restlessly a while back, had come to pass. At least, he was working out the old dream day by day, Sonora at her sleepiest and dustiest now, days interminably long and changelessly hot.

Though the fierce daylight had faded out the shine from her bright bay coat, Mamie was hardening to the road, and the man was coming to know some of her movements and whims, if not all. Gradually Elbert perceived also that she was aware of many of his. He never tethered her at night, yet she never strayed. He hadn’t been able to learn the lip-and-finger call, the way Bob Leadley had shown him, but there was a whistle in the handle of the sheath-knife he carried, and a blast from that brought the mare in from the sweetest herbage.

He liked the nights in the open, Mamie grinding at her forage the last thing—drowsiest sound in the world to him. And her early call; out of the deepest sleep he would hear that. But by the time his eyes were open, the mare was merely to be seen feeding at a distance, her head turned away. If he dozed again, a more peremptory summons would sound, but Mamie was apparently calling to the hazy hills, her farthest concern to do with him.

One morning he didn’t doze a second time, but covertly watched. About ten minutes after first call, the mare stopped feeding and came toward him, her hind feet lifting high and quickly, like a race horse, under the big blanket. Suddenly she stopped, blatted her loudest toward Elbert’s partly covered head, but wheeled on the instant and was cropping again.... Fearless and winsome, a walk-trot mare, ready to go, ready to keep on, invariably increasing the pace as his hand idled at the reins, or his thoughts roamed away. Often Elbert would come to himself finding Mamie in a full ten-mile trot, when he had not been paying attention for several minutes. The pace seemed to steal upon her, and would end in a run if he did not bring her down.

One day it occurred to him that she never dropped into a walk from a trot, or back into a trot from a gallop, unless pulled up. There was no exception that he could remember. But the black night at San Pasquali had left a double-died complex at the core of Mamie’s emotional self. The sound of a motor car made her unreasonable at once. She would have been glad to do the day’s work over again any night, to get away from a town where machines had penetrated. Her one other deranging influence was an oil derrick. One of these attenuated triangles spoiled her whole horizon, like a finger of doom.

Gradually his rides took him farther south and west. Plenty to hear of Monte Vallejo, the bandit, of whom the peons of some districts were passionately fond. But never a word of a possible white man who rode with him. It would be a matter of luck, Elbert often thought, that would bring him up with Bart, if that ever happened. What he needed now, more than knowledge of Spanish, or anything else, and he came to know this very well, was sheer patience to carry on. It wasn’t possible to ask questions about Monte Vallejo, without the people becoming suspicious at once. They thought he was somehow interested in helping the rurales, who did much of the hard work in keeping the districts in order, and yet were disliked as a matter of course by the people. Elbert often wondered what he could ever do single-handed, when the rurales for years had failed to bring in the bandit. Also General Cordano, who commanded the military of the whole country-side, was Vallejo’s sworn enemy for political reasons, and yet with all his soldiers had been unable to put a stop to the activity of the bandit.

Everywhere it was related that the notorious Monte had the best horses in Sonora. Elbert was in a way to hear much of this, because the people seemed inevitably reminded of the point by his own coming to their different towns. It wasn’t himself who attracted the people, however, nor held their eyes. It was Mamie whom they gathered to see, looking her over, even bringing lanterns in the evening, ever drawing near and saying to each other:

‘Monte Vallejo would like that mare,’ or, ‘Monte Vallejo rides a horse like that.’

Many weeks passed before his task became actual. He had been as far as a hundred and fifty miles southwest, and had made a big circle north again toward the Border, when word sped from town to town that Monte Vallejo had held up a westbound Yuma Pacific train in the San Isidro Gorge, not primarily to loot the passengers—that was incidental—but to relieve two express coaches of a string of thoroughbreds en-route to the running meeting at Tia Juana.