Crossroads (5 page)

I
n the capital city of the state Sheriff Oñate was a personage to be sought out and flattered with ceremonious greeting. The vast majority of the electorate in that state admired him for a pomp of presence and a grace of manner that no one west of the Mississippi could rival. Represented by a man of such dignity, they felt confident he would get for them all they might wish. It is true that Sheriff Oñate did not achieve much in the way of arrests, but his own small office was an insignificant matter. What really counted was his position in the state.

It was known that, if he dropped a word in the ear of the governor, action was apt to result. What number of votes Oñate controlled even he himself could not estimate. At least it ran up into the thousands. Accordingly, in the capital, men listened when he spoke. He was more revered in a lobby of the legislature than he was in his office in Guadalupe.

The time of his coming was particularly well chosen. For the state election was within striking distance, and Governor Boardman, though he had lined his pockets comfortably during his term, was not yet in such a position that he could build a house with white verandahs that he had in mind. Accordingly, there was probably no one in the entire city so glad to see the great sheriff as the governor himself.

All of this the sheriff knew perfectly well. He knew also
that in his heart the governor hated the ground upon which he walked, and this merely increased the satisfaction of the benign Oñate. Straight to the offices of the governor he walked—walked, for he wished that many men might see him coming. That night many invitations to dine would wait for him at his hotel.

The man in the outer office had red hair and a pug-nose. He was a newcomer also. For both reasons his reception of Oñate was far from cordial, for he saw in the smoky whites of Oñate’s eyes that the man was of Indian blood, and the Irish remain the Irish the world around. He told the sheriff to sit down and wait his turn. Whereat the cheeks of the sheriff swelled with poisonous anger.

Luckily, the private secretary passed through the outer office at that moment. The effusiveness of his greeting made amends in some degree. With one eye Oñate enjoyed it; with the other he relished the red-faced discomfiture of the pug-nosed Irishman. He followed the secretary into the inner sanctum.

The governor had just signed an important letter and was screwing back the gold-chased cover of his pen while he pondered deeply whether or not he had made his terms a little too cheaply with a certain corporation. At sight of the sheriff he rolled to his feet—literally rolled, for he was a very plump little man and slid into and out of a chair with a singular undulatory motion. His pudgy hand met the soft palm of Oñate, and they smiled upon one another. If the color of their skins was different, the color of their hearts was the same.

“I have called…,” began Sheriff Oñate, tucking his hat under his arm and half bowing.

“Cut out the formality, Don Porfirio,” said the governor breezily, “and try that chair…no, that one by the window. Here’s a box of cigars…and here’s a milder brand.”

In slang the governor kept abreast of the times. If in other things he backslid a little, he did not lose votes thereby. So the account left a comfortable balance in his favor.

“Shoot!” repeated the governor and, so saying, he balanced his stubby feet on the edge of his desk and smiled again beneficiently upon his visitor.

“I have called,” went on
Señor
Oñate, “to find out how the election promises and to learn what I may do.”

He was never quite sure of his English, and the result was that he always spoke it with a painful grammatical correctness.

“Everything!” exploded the governor. “You can do everything, Oñate. I came into office by the flicker of an eyelash, and I’m liable to go out again by a lot bigger margin. Some of the boys don’t like my policies. They claim that I’m too partial to the Mexicans.” Here he winked broadly, the whole side of his face wrinkling with his mirth. “Of course, that’s nonsense, Oñate!”

“Ah,” murmured
Señor
Oñate, “naturally it is nonsense. You will smile, sir, to know that in my district the Mexicans think you hold a prejudice against them.”

The governor still smiled but in a sickly fashion. “But you, Oñate, will round them out of such foolishness?”

“I?” said Oñate, and he waved his pudgy arms. “I do what I can, but, when ten thousand tongues start wagging, I cannot stop them all…not without great trouble.”

The governor knew the symptoms. He waited for the request that he knew was coming and guessed at its size by the length of the prelude—an infallible token. The picture of the big house with the white verandah grew dim in his mind’s eye.

“However,” went on Oñate smoothly, “I do what I can. I talk here, I talk there. But at my heart, ah,
señor
, my heart is troubled with doubts.”

“The hell it is!” exploded the governor, rolling half out of his chair. He gripped the arms of it and controlled himself with a mighty effort. “I’m sorry to hear it, Oñate. Let’s have the reason.”

As for
Señor
Oñate, he was rolling every second of the situation under his tongue like a seasoned gourmand. “I wrote not many days ago asking the governor for a thing…for so little a thing…it was merely to scratch with a pen on paper…so! But there came back a note of few words that said: “I will not do it.” I was much grieved. I am still troubled.”

“I refused you?” queried the governor in real astonishment. “What was it about? The matter’s out of my mind.”

“It was the matter of a man’s life,” said Oñate. His next words snapped out with a little harsh purr after each one. It was like the warning of the rattler before it strikes. “That of
Señor
Van Dyck…the swine…the pig…the dog who murdered my brother…my brother, Vincente!”

The violence of his emotions set him wheezing, and he fell back in his chair with heaving chest and closed eyes. In the moment during which he could see without being seen the face of the governor hardened into sardonic contempt. He smoothed it to a look of serious concern when one of Oñate’s small eyes squinted open again.

“About that matter,” he said, “I remember now. But your enemies advised you to send the letter to me. It would have been to your harm if I had done what you asked.”

“To my harm? To mine?” cried Oñate, so surprised that he forgot both anger and grief.

“Exactly,” explained the governor. “When I got your letter asking that Van Dyck be outlawed by proclamation, I looked into the thing. This is what I found. Van Dyck is a big, husky fellow who has run about getting into mischief all his life. But there’s nothing venomous about him, and,
though he’s killed several men, he’s always acted in self-defense. I can’t have a man like that outlawed, Oñate.”

“And my brother,” said Oñate with ominous quiet, “is he not to be avenged?”

The heat that had been accumulating for some time in the governor broke out in a noisy surge. “Your brother,” he said fiercely, “got two hired murderers and attacked Dix Van Dyck from behind. Van Dyck tore a shelf down from the wall of the saloon, brained two of the men, and strangled your brother, Vincente. It was a fine thing for a man with bare hands to do. And by God, he’s not going to be touched for it! That’s final!”

The sheriff, for a time, sat speechless. It was, perhaps, better for him that he could not utter a syllable, for during the interim the governor had a chance to quiet down, and very brightly there rose again in his mind the picture of the broad house, the white verandah, the stretch of green lawn, the pleasant vista down the hall and from room to room. For four years in his dreams he had wandered through the apartments of that mansion. And now he was destroying the thing he loved. He was throwing away perhaps ten thousand votes; he was signing his abdication. For whom? For a wild daredevil somewhere in the south country, a ne’er-do-well, a good-for-nothing mischief-maker. The sweat stood out upon the forehead of the governor.

“So!” breathed
Señor
Oñate at last, and heaved himself slowly from his chair. His basilisk eyes glittered against the face of the other. Between fat thumb and fat forefinger he reduced his cigar to a shapeless pulp; he dropped it on the floor; he ground it under his heel and into the fine, soft carpet. All the time his silent eyes were saying that such were the things he would relish doing to the chief executive. “So!” he said for the second time, tucked his hat under his arm (as he had seen a fine gentleman
do once in a picture of olden days), and turned toward the door.

“Wait!” said the governor weakly.

But
Señor
Oñate proceeded toward the door, though with a shortened step.

“Wait!” called the governor, and enlivened by his alarm he sprang after the Mexican and seized him by the arm. “What the devil, Oñate, you’re not leaving me like this?”

“I have stayed long enough,” said Oñate, his voice still broken by panting, “to learn that what I have heard is true. You care for nothing…nothing but the
gringos
. Mexican gentlemen may be shot down in cold blood by white dogs who drink their blood. You do not lift your hand. You do not care. Pah! I have stayed long enough…too long!”

He turned once more toward the door, but this time the governor seized him by both shoulders and whirled him around.

“Come back here, Oñate! Listen to reason, man!”

Oñate waved both his short arms and, in so doing, brushed off the grip of the governor. “This,” he moaned, “is my reward. I who have slaved for you. I who have brought you votes by the thousand and the ten thousand. I who have held you in my heart for a friend.”

Grief, self-pity, raised real tears to his eyes. The governor was much moved. He pushed his visitor into a chair—so hard that he landed with a thump that cut short what promised to be a sob.

“Oñate,” he said, “rather than break off our friendship, I will do what you wish. I will have the proclamation prepared.”

Oñate seized both hands of the other. “My benefactor!” he cried and could only repeat with monotonous joy: “My benefactor!”

“After all,” muttered the governor, “it is only one
man…only one life…and the fellow has been wild…too wild. I must put a stop to such things. This is no longer the wild West, and it’s time people should know it.”

He paced back and forth across the carpet, his hands clasped behind him. His voice rose. He might have been rehearsing a campaign speech. He repeated: “This is no longer the wild West!”

It was a good phrase. He smiled contentedly over it. It almost rubbed out the memory of the proclamation to be prepared and signed.

“And the price?” said Oñate, taking advantage of the smile.

“What price?” growled the governor.

Oñate bowed low. “The price on the head of the renegade?” His voice trembled with suppressed joy. “The price of blood that will draw out the pursuers…what price?”

“A price?” murmured the governor, and his rosy cheeks blanched a little. “A price on the head of this man?”

“In Double Bend,” said Oñate rapidly, “he resisted arrest. He shot down a deputy marshal.”

“Killed?”

“Nearly. In his heart he wished to kill him.”

“White?”

“Mexican,” said Oñate, and showed his teeth,

“Hmm!” grumbled the governor. He smashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand, rousing his own anger. “A common man-killer, by God!” he cried.

“It is true!” echoed Oñate.

“It’s only just there should be a price on his head…it’s…it’s justice!” He had to swallow before he could finish the sentence.

“How much?” begged Oñate.

“Five hundred dollars,” said the governor and repeated in a lower voice: “Five hundred dollars for a man’s life.”

“Five hundred?” echoed Oñate shrilly. “A good horse costs more. A thousand my friend, my dear friend, a thousand dollars. I shall talk for you in the campaign until my voice is hoarse…till it is gone!”

“A thousand dollars,” said the governor. He turned his back and stared through the window. He felt as if he had taken upon his own shoulders the awful duties of Death, the Reaper.

Oñate took his cue. He backed through the door, calling: “In the morning, my friend, I shall come again. You shall command me in all things.
Adiós
.”

“After all,” said the governor, “there has to be law and order.” In front of him rose again the delightful mirage of the palm trees and behind them the broad, white verandah, a place of rest.

L
et us consider for a time the case of the
Señor
Oñate now that a double blessing had descended upon him. In the first place, he was sheriff of Chaparna County, a rich office, for the county was near the border and a sheriff who would close one eye was heavily paid for that kindness. But there was one thing dearer to the heart of this gentleman than personal success, and that was the ruin of his enemy. He would sacrifice a thousand dollars if he could take five hundred from his foe. He would go hungry two days and nights if he could deprive his enemy of a single meal. Think, then, of the joy of the good Oñate when he saw, without personal sacrifice the destruction of Dix Van Dyck accomplished. It was not because of the death of Vincente alone that he hated Dix Van Dyck. It was rather because of that day when the big man damned Oñate thoroughly and conscientiously in the hearing of many people—damned him for a political blood-sucker, a species of cowardly vermin.

The memory of
Señor
Oñate was painfully clear. He could even recall the faces of those who had stood nearby—the
Americanos
with open grins of delight and the
Mejicanos
with a silent enjoyment that was no less profound.
Señor
Oñate hated them all—all who had witnessed that scene of humiliation. He remembered with a bitter coldness of heart how he had yearned with all his soul and striven mightily to draw his revolver and
plant a Forty-Five caliber bullet in the midst of the teeth of Van Dyck.

All of this
Señor
Oñate remembered. He remembered also how the hand that twitched uneasily toward his hip had been frozen under the calm, all-seeing eye of Van Dyck. There was still room in Oñate’s heart for gratitude to the Deity that he had
not
touched his gun in sight of the man-killer. After all, it was better this way. Even supposing that he succeeded with the gun play, Dix Van Dyck would have fallen forward on his face, dead before he touched the ground. A stupid act of revenge. Death robbed the victor of his triumph. Where was the pain in an instant oblivion? No,
Señor
Oñate saw far beyond such a petty revenge.

The blood of Indian ancestors flowed through his veins. In Mexico that is the blood of command. Juarez was pure Indian; Díaz was seven-eighths Indian. In Oñate there lived an instinct inspired by his Aztec ancestors who took prisoners in order to sacrifice them at the altar of their god or to torture them in a lingering, hideous death for their own pleasure. It was for this reason that he sought the outlawry of Dix Van Dyck. Men have lived long years as outlaws in the Southwest, but in the end they are sure to fall. They may leave their haunts and flee far away to escape the heavy hand of the law, but in the end an instinct as inevitable as the homing sense of the carrier pigeon makes them circle back, and they are caught. Moreover, from the date on which their outlawry begins, they are followed by the consciousness that their capture is preordained. They sever themselves from friends, for the best of friends may betray them for the price. Every stir of dead leaves may be the approaching footfalls of the captors. Every shadowy night may be the screen by which the trailers will stalk up to their prey. The mouth of every cave is like the yawning throat of a
cannon; the head-hunters may lurk there. Every day is a lingering death.

All of this
Señor
Oñate knew perfectly. It was for this reason that he rubbed his fat hands together as he left the office of the governor. His heart was at peace with the world.

Still, he was not utterly content. No sooner did he know that a price would be laid on the head of Dix Van Dyck than he was beset with a mightly fear lest someone else might collect that thousand dollars. Not that he cared deeply for the money itself. He loved money for the power it gave him rather than for the coin. In this case, however, the money meant more than gold. It would be a symbol of his victory; a memory of the crushing of Dix Van Dyck. Moreover, and above all, Dix Van Dyck must know, when he fell, what hand brought him down. Half the sweetness of revenge would be lost if some other hand accomplished it. He himself would net the outlaw. He himself would take the thousand dollars. He would cash the reward in fifty twenty-dollar gold-pieces. Five neat piles that would make. Five handfuls.

In the evening, when he sat on his verandah drinking tequila and nibbling the slices of lemon, he would carry the gold in his pocket. He would count it with one hand, letting the heavy coins fall together in chiming showers. He would call out his son, Rodriguez, a tall and handsome youth, and tell him how a
gringo
had dared to insult an Oñate within the hearing of many men, and how that Oñate took revenge, carefully, without danger to himself, and how that made the revenge trebly sweet. At last he would take the gold from his pocket and pour it from one hand to the other for the admiration of his son. At the thought of these things the mouth of
Señor
Oñate moistened, and his eyes filled with tears of delight—for his was a simple soul that could be filled to overflowing
by little things, the burning of an enemy’s house or the death of an enemy.

It was, however, one thing to determine that Dix Van Dyck should fall by his direct power. It was quite another to accomplish this feat. He might, of course, hire a posse of noted gunmen to take the trail of the outlaw from Double Bend where he had been last seen. But the noted gunmen were mostly
gringos
, and they would have little enthusiasm for trailing one of their kind.

There was another alternative. It came to
Señor
Oñate that night while he sat on his verandah, sipping his tequila and letting the white-hot poison trickle, drop by drop, down his grateful throat. His house sat on the outskirts of Guadalupe, and, while the sheriff sat there on the verandah, he saw a tall figure of a man swing up the slope of the nearest hill, pause beside a great Spanish dagger, and then plunge into the gloom on the farther side. He knew by the gait of the runner, even at that distance, that it was El Tigre. At that the inspiration came to him. He stamped violently on the floor of the verandah. Instantly a house servant stood respectfully behind his chair.

“Bring one of the Indians to me,” commanded Oñate, “and quickly.”

The house servant disappeared as silently as he had come, and within a short time a second figure trotted up outside the verandah, jerked off his sombrero, and stood in an attitude something like that of a soldier at attention. A tall, somber figure, the sun in profile struck him and painted in black the cavernous hollows of the cheeks and the deep-sunken eyes. A hungry leanness in the eyes in the half light were like cavities of darkness touched with sparks of fire.

“Alvarado,” said Oñate, his voice losing most of that terseness with which he had addressed the house servant
and taking on a tone of mingled awe and fear, “find me El Tigre. I saw him run over the top of that hill.”

The Indian, in place of answering, replaced the sombrero on his head, whirled, and swept up the slope of the hill with the long stride of the tireless runner. Oñate remained still and straight in his chair until Alvarado dipped out of sight over the crest of the hill. Then he slumped back in his chair.

Now the house holds of
ricos
are always numerous, but there needs some explanation for the fact that Oñate’s establishment included Yaqui Indians. The Yaqui is to the Mexican what in the Middle Ages the Arab was to the Gentile. A Yaqui will walk many hungry miles to get one shot at a Mexican; and a Mexican will walk as many miles to avoid a Yaqui. The railroads in the Southwest had employed Yaquis and Mexican peons at the same time, but always the Yaqui had to be lodged and fed apart from the peon. In the eating hall a peon would rather storm the gates of hell than take a seat he knows is reserved for a Yaqui.

The conflict between Yaqui and Mexican was not new. It had been warmed and cherished by four centuries of hatred and murder. It goes back to the time when grim Cortez conquered most of the tribes but did not conquer them all. Neither did his successors. For four hundred years the war continued. Both sides used rope and fire and bullet and knife. Still the issue had not been decided. The mutual hatred had become an instinct; it is almost a religion. As the Algonquians, Mohicans, and Hurons once feared the Iroquois, so the Mexicans feared the Yaquis. Give a Yaqui a knife and he will trail two Mexicans armed with guns, and probably he will come back with his knife-blade reddened by something besides rust.

A Yaqui is made by nature to be the conqueror of the Southwest. He will put salt and tobacco in his pouch, sling
a short-barreled rifle over his shoulder, and strike into the burning heart of the desert at a dog-trot that he maintains from morning to night, stopping only long enough to kill and eat raw meat. What that meat is he does not care. He will devour a prairie rat. He has been known to tear the flesh of a coyote, newly slain and warm. A fire is a luxury to him and cooked meat a delicacy, not a necessity. Running at his shambling trot, he will cover in ten days more miles than any other man in the world will cover on the finest of horses. In twenty-four hours he will cover a hundred and twenty miles the first day, and on the following days he will travel nearly as far. Moreover, he knows the desert, not because he has to know it, but because he loves it. He can follow a trail almost through the night, and some astonished travelers have sworn that he is gifted with an animal power of scenting.

He fights because he loves fighting, and, when a Mexican is in sight, he is filled with what amounts to a religious joy. With a rifle, to be sure; he is never perfectly at home. For that matter, few people in that world, outside of the whites, ever quite understood the use of powder and lead. Nevertheless, he achieves a tolerable accuracy with the gun, though he is nearly useless with a revolver. On the other hand, he is a genius with any sort of cold steel, and at a short distance he throws his camp hatchet or whips across his knife with as much accuracy and almost as deadly an effect as the six-gun of a border ruffian.

Taking all these things into consideration, it must be clear that a Mexican would rather take a rattlesnake into his house hold than have ought to do with a Yaqui. It is doubly strange, therefore, that
Señor
Don Porfirio Maria Oñate should keep six of these deadly fellows about him day and night. But his reason is perfectly clear.