CHILDREN OF THE DESERT.

BY LOUIS DODGE.

PART I.

HARBORO AND SYLVIA.

CHAPTER I.

They were married in the little Episcopal church in Eagle Pa.s.s on a September day in the late eighties. The fact may be verified, I have no doubt, by any who will take the trouble to examine the records, for the toy-like place of worship still stands.

The church structure is not, perhaps, so small as my imagination presents it to me; but I cannot see it save with the desert as a background--the desert austere and illimitable. You reach the prim little front door by climbing a street which runs parallel with the Rio Grande, and the church is almost the last structure you will pa.s.s before you set forth into a No-Man's land of sage and cactus and yucca and mesquite lying under the blazing sun.

Harboro his name was. Of course, there was a Christian name, but he was known simply as Harboro from Piedras Negras to the City. She was Sylvia Little. Sylvia, people called her, both before and after her marriage. The Little might as well never have belonged to her.

Although neither Harboro nor Sylvia really belonged to Eagle Pa.s.s, the wedding was an event. Both had become familiar figures in the life of the town and were pretty well known. Their wedding drew a large and interested audience. (I think the theatrical phrase is justified, as perhaps will be seen.) Weddings were not common in the little border town, unless you counted the mating of young Mexicans, who were always made one by the priest in the _adobe_ church closer to the river. Entertainment of any kind was scarce. But there were other and more significant reasons why people wanted to see the bride and the bridegroom, when Harboro gave his name to the woman of his choice.

The young people belonging to some sort of church guild had decorated the church, and special music had been prepared. And indeed when Harboro and Sylvia marched up the aisle to the strains of the _Lohengrin_ march (the bridegroom characteristically trying to keep step, and Sylvia ignoring the music entirely), it was not much to be wondered at that people craned their necks to get the best possible view. For both Harboro and the woman were in a way extraordinary individuals.

Harboro was forty, and seemed in certain aspects older than that. He was a big man, well built, and handsome after a fashion. He was swarthy, with dark eyes which seemed to meditate, if not to dream. His hair was raven-black, and he wore a heavy mustache which stopped just short of being unduly conspicuous. It was said of him that he talked little, but that he listened keenly. By trade he was a railroad man.

He had been heard to remark on one occasion that he had begun as a brakeman, but there were rumors of adventurous days before he became a member of a train crew. It was said that he had gone prospecting into Mexico as a youth, and that he had spent years working at ends and odds of jobs about mines and smelters. Probably he had hoped to get into something in a big way.

However, he had finally turned to railroading, and in the course of uncertain events had become an engineer. It was a year or two after he had attained this position that he had been required to haul a special train from Torreon to Piedras Negras. The General Manager of the Mexican International Railroad was on that train, and he took occasion to talk to the engineer. The result pleased him mightily. In his engine clothes Harboro looked every inch a man. There was something clean and level about his personality which couldn't have been hid under a _sarape_. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the General Manager, making the latter look like a manikin, and talked about his work and the condition of the road and the rolling stock. He talked easily and listened intelligently. He was grave in an easy fashion. He took no liberties, cracked no jokes.

The General Manager got the idea that the big fellow would be a good man to stand shoulder to shoulder with in larger events than a special trip.

When he got back to headquarters he made a casual inquiry or two, and discovered that Harboro wrote an exceptionally good hand, and that he spelled correctly. He a.s.sumed that he was an educated man--though this impression may have been largely due to the fact that Harboro was keenly interested in a great variety of things, and had a good memory.

The General Manager waited for certain wheels to turn, and then he sent for Harboro and offered him a position as chief clerk in one of the headquarter departments.

Harboro accepted the position, and said "Thank you," and proved to be uncommonly competent.

The people of Piedras Negras took a liking to him; the women wanted to get acquainted with him. He was invited to places, and he accepted the invitations without either belittling or magnifying their importance. He got on rather well from the beginning.

The social affairs of Piedras Negras were sometimes on a fairly large scale. The General Manager had his winter residence there--a meticulously cultivated demain which lay like a blue spot in a cloudy sky. There were gra.s.s and palms and, immediately beyond, the vast desert. At night (on occasion) there were Chinese lanterns to add their cheerful note to pretty revelries, while the stars lay low and big over all the desert expanse.

The General Manager's wife had prominent social affiliations, and she used to bring winter guests from the north and east--from Chicago and New York and Boston. There were b.a.l.l.s and musicales, and a fine place for conversation out on the lawn, with Mexican servants to bring cigars and punch, and with Mexican fiddlers to play the national airs under a fig-covered band-stand.

The young people from Eagle Pa.s.s used to go over when the General Manager's wife was giving one of her less formal affairs. They were rather refreshing types: the Texas type, with a good deal of freedom of action and speech, once they were drawn out, and with plenty of vigor. On these occasions Eagle Pa.s.s merged itself into the Mexican town, and went home late at night over the Rio Grande bridge, and regarded life as a romance.

These affairs and this variety of people interested Harboro. He was not to be drawn out, people soon discovered; but he liked to sit on the lawn and listen and take observations. He was not backward, but his tastes were simple. He was seemingly quite as much at ease in the presence of a Chicago poetess with a practised--a somewhat too practised--laugh or a fellow employee risen, like himself, to a point where society could see him.

In due course Eagle Pa.s.s gave an entertainment (at the Mesquite Club) and invited certain railroad officials and employees from the other side of the river. Harboro was included among those invited, and he put on correct evening dress, and rode over in a coach, and became a favorite in Eagle Pa.s.s. He seemed rather big and serious for complete a.s.similation, but he looked well with the club settings as a background, and his name appeared later in the week in the Eagle Pa.s.s _Guide_, in the list headed "among those present."

All of which he accepted without agitation, or without ceasing to be Harboro himself all over.

He did not meet Sylvia Little at the Mesquite Club. If you had known Sylvia and the Mesquite Club, you would laugh at so superfluous a statement. Eagle Pa.s.s was pleasantly democratic, socially, but it could not have been expected to stand for Sylvia.

People didn't know much about her (to her credit, at least) except that she was pretty. She was wonderfully pretty, and in a way which was all the more arresting when you came to consider her desert surroundings.

She had come, with her father, from San Antonio. They had taken a low, homely little house, standing under its mesquite-tree, close to the government reservation, where the flagstaff stood, and the cannon boomed at sundown, and the soldiers walked their posts. Back of the house there was a thicket of mesquites, and through this a path ran down to the river.

The first thing people mistrusted about Sylvia was her father. He had no visible means of support; and if his manner was amiable, his ways were furtive. He had a bias in favor of Mexican a.s.sociates, and much of his time was spent down under the river bank, where a few small wine-shops and gambling establishments still existed in those days. There were also rumors of drinking and gambling orgies in the house under the mesquite-tree, and people said that many strange customers traversed that path through the mesquite, and entered Little's back door. They were soldiers and railroad men, and others of a type whose account in the bank of society n.o.body ever undertakes to balance. Sylvia was thought to be the torch which attracted them, and it was agreed that Sylvia's father knew how to persuade them to drink copiously of beverages which they paid for themselves, and to manipulate the cards to his own advantage in the games which were introduced after a sufficient number of drinks had been served.

Possibly a good deal of this was rumor rather than fact: an uncharitable interpretation of pleasures which were inelegant, certainly, but possibly not quite vicious. Still, it seemed to be pretty well established that up to the time of Sylvia's marriage her father never worked, and that he always had money--and this condition, on any frontier, is always regarded with mistrust.

Sylvia's prettiness was of a kind to make your heart bleed, everything considered. She was of a wistful type, with eager blue eyes, and lips which were habitually parted slightly--lips of a delicate fulness and color. Her hair was soft and brown, and her cheeks were of a faint, pearly rosiness. You would never have thought of her as what people of strictly categorical minds would call a bad woman. I think a wholly normal man must have looked upon her as a child looks at a heather-bell--gladly and gratefully, and with a pleased amazement. She was small and slight. Women of the majordomo type must have regarded her as still a child. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were little, her neck and shoulders delicate, and she had a trick of lifting her left hand to her heart when she was startled or regarded too shrewdly, as if she had some prescient consciousness of coming evil.

She was standing by her front gate when Harboro first saw her--and when she first saw Harboro. The front gate commanded an un.o.bstructed view of the desert. It was near sundown, and far across the earth's floor, which looked somewhat like a wonderful mosaic of opals and jade at this hour, a Mexican goatherd was driving his flock. That was the only sign of life to be seen or felt, if you except the noise of locusts in the mesquite near by and the spasmodic progress of a horned toad in the sand outside Sylvia's gate.

Yet she was looking away to the vibrating horizon, still as hot as an oven, as yearningly as if at any moment a knight might ride over the rim of the desert to rescue her, or as if a brother were coming to put an end to the existence of a Bluebeard who, obviously, did not exist.

And then Harboro appeared--not in the distance, but close at hand. He was pa.s.sing Sylvia's gate. He had a natural taste for geology, it seemed, and he had chosen this hour to walk out beyond Eagle Pa.s.s to examine the rock formations which had been cast up to the surface of the desert by prehistoric cataclysms.

He was close enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been observing away on the horizon.

He stopped as if he had been startled. That was a natural result of Sylvia's appearance here in this withered place. She was so delicately, fragilely abloom. Her setting should have been some region south of the Caucasus. Her period should have been during the foundations of mythology.

She would have made you think of Eve.

And because her hand went to her heart, and her lips parted tremulously, Harboro stopped. It was as if he felt he must make amends. Yet his words were the inevitable ba.n.a.lities.

"You have a fine view here," he said.

"A fine view!" she echoed, a little incredulously. It was plain that she did not agree with him. "There is plenty of sun and air," she conceded after a pause.

He rested a heavy hand on the fence. When Harboro stopped you never had the feeling that some of his interests had gone on ahead and were beckoning to him. He was always all there, as if permanently.

He regarded her intently. Her voice had something of the quality of the _Trumerei_ in it, and it had affected him like a violin's _vibrato_, accompanying a death scene--or as a litany might have done, had he been a religious man.

"I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another," he suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. "You live here, then?"

She was looking across the desert. Where had the goatherd hidden himself?

She nodded without bringing her glance to meet Harboro's.

"I know a good many of the Eagle Pa.s.s people. I've never seen you before."

"I thought you must be a stranger," she replied. She brought her glance to his face now and seemed to explore it affectionately, as one does a new book by a favorite author. "I've never seen you before, either."

"I've been to several entertainments at the Mesquite Club."

"Oh! ... the Mesquite Club. I've never been there."

He looked at her in his steadfast fashion for a moment, and then changed the subject. "You have rather more than your share of shade here. I had no idea there was such a pretty place in Eagle Pa.s.s." He glanced at the old mesquite-tree in the yard. It was really quite a tree.

"Yes," she a.s.sented. She added, somewhat falteringly: "But it seems dreadfully lonesome sometimes."

(I do not forget that path which led from Sylvia's back door down to the Rio Grande, nor the men who traversed it; yet I believe that she spoke from her heart, and that her words were essentially true.)

"Perhaps you're not altogether at home in Eagle Pa.s.s: I mean, this isn't really your home?"