“Law?” Biron snorted. “Law? They aint no law against shootin’ dawgs, is they?”
His seemed a reasonable attitude, demonstrating the superiority of a real American over the contemptible greaser. This excitable mixture of half a dozen inferior and treacherous races turns ugly when our boys, out for a harmless lark where it will do least harm, shoot up his towns and his neighbors, and violate his women. Then the Mexican uses a knife. No decent man uses a knife. And so our border is kept in a state of constant turmoil.
“There aint no harm potting Mexicans,” continued Biron, “especially when they get fresh. The Mexican girls aint so bad. Sometimes an American will marry one, but it has to be a pretty low white girl that will marry a greaser.”
“That’s so. I—” drawled Tucson. He seemed collecting his slower wits for a narration, but Biron rattled on.
“This Lee is out hidin’ somewhere now, in the mountains,—him and his brother. The sheriff shot at him just as he was ridin’ past a glass window, and cut his eye half out so it hung down on his face. But he got away into the canyons, and was ridin’ with them on his heels for three days and nights, with his eye like that.”
“Then the law did try to redress the murder of those five hundred Mexicans.”
“I guess not. They was after him for committing a crime, and serve him right,—he tried to evade the draft.”
“They was two ignorant boys,” explained Parson Tucson to me, “raised in the backwoods, who didn’t rightly know what the draft was for, or they wouldn’t have done it.”
The attitude of both men was gravely patriotic. Yet one could see they cherished the idea of the outlawed boys, eighteen and twenty, who could bear with traditional stoicism such unendurable pain. The West clings pathetically to these proofs that its old romantic life is not yet extinct, even though it is but the wriggle which dies at sunset. Stories like those of Biron’s are still told with gusto even amid the strangest familiarity with Victrolas,—though the saloon is replaced by the soda fountain, and the only real cowboys are on film, and the hardy tenderfoot now rides so well, shoots so well and knows his West so well that he is an easy mark for the native, only when the latter tries to sell him an oil well, an irrigated ranch, or a prehistoric skull.
We made a move for our tent, but Biron had not finished his thirty years’ Odyssey. He had lightly skipped from tales of outlawry to big game, and the dangers of the hunt. He was now among the Mormons, and the subject was deftly moon-lit with sentiment. He was enjoying himself, and he glanced from one to the other of us as he rattled on.