The Popular Magazine/Volume 32/Number 1/Just Strawberries

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Just Strawberries

By Robert Welles Ritchie

Author of “The Goblin's Treasure House,” “Fate Maketh His Circuit”, Etc.

A color story of the Mexican revolution. The tatterdemalion figure
wanted the jefe politico; General Palazar wanted the bank; a news-
paper man wanted a “story;” and another wanted—just strawberries

Two men sat under powdered stars, and each to his capacity cursed all things beneath the arch of heaven.

A feeble fire at their feet stabbed with puny flames at the clotting dark, heavy as cloth of chenille. Behind them other sparks of fires winked and flickered, and occasionally by their light the leprous white of a tent showed for an instant, and then passed like a restless spirit. Beyond and beyond the vague black-on-black of a blocking mountain range, stars set on its thread rim were tiny incandescents strung on wire. All about the murmur and stirring of men at rest—a single laugh cracking the stillness like the pop of a castanet; a quick, thrumming guitar chord; the neigh of a horse, petulant and unearthly. The cloying sweetness of the yucca bells, cerements of desert death, weighted the night air to choking; that and the bitter smoke of the mesquite burning.

It was a night when the Spirit of Things Unseen stoops to gather in its palm the souls of men and 'quicken their pulses with its own overpowering surge of the transcendental. The ear of earth is open to the whisperings of some being beyond earth, but the coarser ear of man hears only the rhythm of something attuned beyond its grasping, and, as the dog that bristles before the moon, man stands nonplused and vaguely disturbed.

“Strawberries! One dish of strawberries!”

One of the two before the fire lifted his pipestem to the stars with a dramatic gesture.

“For one dish of strawberries—with cream—I'd mortgage my soul to the devil and sell the roof over my old mother's head.”

“Tortillas,” the other answered, with a languid snort. “Tortillas con carne—and maybe without the carne—is what you'll get to-morrow, next week, next month. Bull meat, from behind the ear; bull meat, from just above the hoof; bull meat, with the horns thrown in—and tortillas!”

“Yes, but listen, you Johnson fella; there are strawberries in Mexico. I know. I tasted 'em once in Torreon. Big—sorta furry with taste all over the outside and rich with another taste inside—they squirt—yessir, squirt—when you crunch down on 'em. But you don't want to put your teeth to a strawberry; you just want to cram it up against the mansard roof in your mouth and push against it with your tongue. Just linger over each berry like you was saying your prayers at mamma's knee.”

“Shut up!” snapped the one called Johnson. “Pass me some more of that stuff they call tobacco.”

Still the voice in the gloom raved of strawberries. The peculiar merits of strawberries plucked, earthy and hot with the June sun, in the garden patch down by the old well; the transcendent glory of strawberries crisped on ice; even the abiding worth of strawberries that may be wormy or mashed—the oratorio of the scarlet fruit was whined in a fretful monotone. `

“What do you want for your four pesos per and found in the Army of the Constitution?” the unwilling listener snarled, and his question was final.

For the man who would pawn his soul for strawberries was a paid mercenary, fighting for large and alloyed Mexican dollars in a mournful land of shadows. Strawberries were not on the menu of the Army of the Constitution. That menu was, as the other had truthfully said, thin corn cakes and thick, blood-drenched slabs of meat; the corn cakes were certain, and the meat undependable. The desert of the State of Chihuahua does not yield abundance even in piping peace; now, after three years of plunder and brigandage called war, it was swept as clean as a pauper's plate.

The man who prayed for a miracle was from Texas. The other, named Johnson, was from New York. One, whose trade name happened to be Sykes, was of the type of American irregulars willing to trade a good eyesight and quick trigger finger for a share of the finances provided by some astute Mexican politicians to serve political ends. He killed for pay—and for loot.

The other was a soldier of a news agency, who traded comfort, energy, love of life, and unbelievable loyalty for a niggardly salary and the joy of duty—one of the army of anonymity, whose banner is the column of type and watchword, “The Story.” Johnson had joined the Army of the Constitution with a camera and a portable typewriter; Sykes had brought with him across the Rio Grande only a vagabond spirit and a first-class rifle with telescope sights. Because they were the only two gringos in General Pasquale Palazar's division of the Army of the Constitution, they had fraternized. Each, however, held the other in slight disdain—Sykes, because Johnson took so much risk and worked so hard for so little pay; Johnson, because Sykes was a professional man-killer and had manners that were not nice.

This night when Sykes thirsted for strawberries marked the end of the third week of deadening inaction. Baked by day and frappéd by night, the nine hundred of General Palazar's command had shilly-shallied over several score miles of forbidding mountain-and mesa, plundering an occasional ranch, shooting now and then a hapless peon when the blood lust called for a victim, but delaying eternally for “reënforcements,” which meant, translated in terms of Mexican revolution, dollars from the backers of disorder. General Pasquale Palazar was not a tactician. He had been a bullion guard for an American mining camp and a mule skinner; a certain native capacity for command and a widespread reputation for refined cruelty had lifted him from the ruck of peonage and placed him over an armed mob of petty banditti, striking coal miners, half-savage Indians, and mescal-drinking malcontents. The army's professional shibboleth was “The Constitution.”

Johnson had smoked his third pipe and was tinkering with the shutter of his camera when the darkness at his elbow suddenly breached a scarecrow. One instant blackness; the next a tatterdemalion figure stood in the fire glow, impassive, dumbly expectant. At first glance it seemed a folded dog tent, erect about two spindling struts; clearer sight revealed a boy, maybe fifteen, who was almost totally enveloped by a faded and tattered smoking jacket and who carried in his right hand the ghost of a gun. The firelight struck bronze on his scraggy cheeks; his bare legs sprouted beneath the smoking jacket like two rusted mullen stalks. His hair was a rat's nest.

From the scarecrow's eyes, deeply glowing like two pools in granite, came a mute, doglike appeal, oddly mixed with a strange, ascetic light; they might have been the eyes of an ante-Nicene anchorite whose life had been spent listening for the rustle of angels' wings.

“Say, muchacho, who let you out of the rag foundry?”

Sykes' challenge was querulously impatient. He surveyed the ragged waif of the dark with a critical eye.

“I do not speak English, señor,” came the answer, in liquid Spanish patois. “Did you ask me why I am here?”

“Yes.”

“I am here to fight for my country in the Army of the Constitution, and, I hope, to kill the jefe politico of Coralita, if the good saints will grant it.”

The boy spoke in a dull monotone, solemnly and almost as one in trance. His eyes,were fixed on the dancing fire petals; he stood motionless save for the opening of his lips.

“Where did you come from?” Sykes asked.

“From over there”—a skinny hand waved back into the shadows—“from Coralita, four days away.”

“Hungry?”

“Yes, señor; starving, perhaps.”

Johnson, who had been fidgeting impatiently, barred by his slender knowledge of the language from knowing what was passing, put in a word:

“Get who he is, Sykes; who does he want to see; what brought him pussyfooting to our fire? Maybe he's got a story—he looks as if he might have.”

Sykes, smiling tolerantly in enjoyment of his companion's fettered eagerness, translated the queries.

“I am Fernando Mayortorenna,” the lips answered, while the eyes continued to stare into the fire. “I do not come to see anybody, but I come to fight for my country and to kill the jefe politico of Coralita. That is all.”

Sykes reached behind him where his saddlebags lay and brought out a battered tin bowl, half filled with lukewarm beans. From the open mouth of a sack he speared with a pointed stick a black and soggy piece of beef, which he threw upon the coals. The boy, accepting the invitation offered by these preparations, squatted on the opposite side of the fire and began to devour the beans by the handful. He could hardly restrain himself for the sound of sizzling fat to betoken the beginning of the meat's cooking; he had the chunk of beef off the coals before it was warmed through and was tearing it with short, eager grunts.

While he ate, Sykes picked up the gun he had carried, and turned it over and over in his hands with low whistlings and cluckings of surprise.

“The kid's a patriot, all right, ” the Texan muttered, “if he wants to fight for his country with this weapon. Why, Noah might have—say, cast your eye on the handsome breechlock the poor old branding iron's got, Johnson!”

He passed the heavy rifle over to the correspondent, and with a connoisseur's finger pointed out the wire auxiliary which bound the breech by a loop over the barrel, the stock, half battered away from the frame, the blunted hammer pin and the trigger, unprotected by a guard. It was a single-shot weapon of accepted gauge standard, such as might have been carried by some long-dead franc-tireur against the Prussians at Gravelotte. To load it must have demanded the mathematical precision of a telescope maker; to fire it, the inspiration of the Mad Mullah. Fernando Mayortorenna looked up from his beef with a solicitude almost maternal in his eyes as they followed the gringos' handling of his gun. He started and was ready to forget his feast in greater regard for the precious weapon when he saw Sykes trying to undo the looped wire that bound the breech.

The lad finished his meal, smiled a “Gracias,” when Johnson handed him coarse tobacco and papers, deftly rolled his cigarette, and inhaled the first breath with the slow, lung-filling luxury of a strong swimmer's first intake after a dive. He said nothing. Only his eyes spoke as they lifted occasionally from the fire to fall. in a slow, grave glance. upon the faces of the two hosts.

Johnson, the nervous, insistent delver for truth, tried to read the message of the boy's eyes and was baffled.

Sykes, the more obtuse, strove clumsily to draw the ragamuffin out. He wanted to know how Fernando had reached the camp of General Palazar; why, specifically, he had come to be a soldier; what were his hopes of loot and his demands of reward. But to all questions he received the same courteous answer: Fernando had come to fight for his country and to kill the jefe politico of Coralita. Finally Sykes cut his cross-questioning with a gruff:

“Well, tell me one thing, muchacha; do they have strawberries in your Coralita?”

“Strawberries—strawberries—ah, yes, señor! There are very wonderful strawberries in Coralita. At the Hotel Diligencia one sits at table under the arcade and eats strawberries with rum. I have seen them.”

“Eating them now?” the guerrilla demanded eagerly.

“Perhaps not this minute; but at this season they eat strawberries in Coralita, señor.”

Fernando slept that night in the ashes of the fire, and the next morning Sykes and Johnson sponsored him before General Palazar. That patriot, disheveled with sleep and not yet steadied by his morning's peg of aguardiente, appraised with a jaundiced eye the waif's bandy legs and shrunken cheeks, his outrageous smoking jacket, and the wreck of a rifle, and then, as he thrust a sodden orange through the bristles of his beard and sucked noisily at it, he conducted an extempore examination.

“You are another of these desert rats who come to nibble off the revolution?” he sneered.

“No, señor.” Fernando's back straightened, and pride burned in his eyes. “No, señor; I do not ask to fight for money. I fight for my country only because I believe my country needs me.”

Palazar winked ponderously at the two gringos and jammed the orange harder against his teeth.

“Ah, a true patriot!” he sneered. “But you expect me to give you a real gun and cartridges when guns cost fifty pesos and. cartridges are worth their weight in silver?”

“No gun, señor; I have this one. Only a few cartridges when we go to battle against the enemies of our country.”

Sykes whispered something in the general's ear with an exaggerated air of giving confidence. Palazar's eye brightened and the bristles on his lip lifted in a wry smile.

“A-ha; that is a worthy idea!” he chuckled. Then to the lad, who stood in reverent attention:

“So, besides fighting for your country you desire to kill the jefe politico of Coralita, eh? Why is that?”

Upon the face of the ragamuffin standing there the fingers of the soul wrought swift transformation. They deepened the line of the cheek until even the vestige of adolescence became wire-drawn into a mask of tragedy—the tragedy of the world's first hate. They tightened the lips and furrowed the brow, and into the eyes, deeply glowing like pools in granite, they fused the fire of the ascetic.

“Because, señor, before the shrine of the Virgin Mother in the little church at Coralita I made oath to kill him. I went there in the night with my gun, and as I made oath I asked the Virgin Mother to bless my gun. This she did. I know she will grant me——”

Fernando's avowal was interrupted by Palazar's booming laughter.

“Oh, ho! ho! The Holy Mother blessed that gun!” The frowsy guerrilla made a mock motion of crossing himself with the hand that held the sucked orange. “We want sanctified guns in the Army of the Constitution, little tree rat; we'll take yours—and you. You may go and find Francisco 'la Vaca,' who guards the sacred bull meat and tortillas; perhaps he will give you some—if he has any. Also a dozen cartridges will be yours—the last one for the jefe politico of Coralita, remember.”

The boy turned to go. Palazar stopped him.

“How many banks are there in Coralita, muchacho?”

“One bank, señor; it belongs to the jefe politico, and there is much money in it, people say.”

“Ah! And how many Federals guard Coralita, my little brown owl?”

“Two companies, señor—about one hundred men.”

“Enough. Now go.”

So Fernando Mayortorenna joined the Army of the Constitution—an idealist in a smoking jacket, pledged to murder as to a holy covenant. Johnson, the searcher for hidden truths and student of what lies behind men's eyes, became foster father for him, and to Johnson Fernando paid the unquestioning fealty of a slave to a master. On bivouac nights the shabby little shadow, ridiculous weapon under head, curled up for sleep as near Johnson's dog tent as he durst, and in the hot days of the army's inactivity his flapping coat and the bobbing shock head were never far behind the gringo. But when Johnson tried to probe into Fernando's soul by adroit scalpel strokes of seemingly careless questioning he failed utterly. To the correspondent's halting questions in the vernacular, Fernando answered readily enough except when they began to touch upon the reason for his coming to be a soldier for the Constitution. When such subject was raised, the youth's eyes would burn with the zealot fire of a militant of the old church preaching crusade, but his answer was always the same:

“I fight for my country and, the saints favoring, to kill the jefe politico of Coralita.”

For a week Palazar led his command on paltry plundering expeditions about the circle of the helpless haciendas, taking toll in horses, money, and supplies, but ever dodging like a sly weasel the towns where Federal garrisons offered a fight. Grumblings of discontent began to be heard among the soldiers, self-styled, who were not stayed by the thin pickings of country loot, but were eager to crack a real nut, even at the cost of a fight. A certain amount of pride prompted their demand for more positive action. Over the mountains from Sonora had come word of the siege of Guaymas and the capture of Hermosillo—a steady march of triumph for the rebels; emulation having no basis at all in real patriotism, but arising only from the promptings of the blood lust, the pride of slaughter, pricked the freebooters and bandits. Johnson, eager for action which meant “copy,” was beside himself with impatience. Even the phlegmatic Sykes was willing to earn his four pesos a day at actual fighting.

“If old 'Prickly Pear' Palazar asks me where to go, I'll plug for Coralita—and strawberries,” was the way the Texan framed his opinion when Johnson brought up for the hundredth time the burden of his plaint.

“Coralita ought to make a good fight,” Johnson's enthusiasm was quick to flame. “It controls the railroad north of San Louis, and then there is that fat bank of Fernando's jefe politico—loot!”

Johnson, who held no false notions about General Palazar's dignity or his merits as a tactician, and who enjoyed a fair share of the ex-mule skinner's confidence, did not hesitate to go before the leader and urge a campaign of action. Sykes was the third in the council of war, highly regarded as he was by Palazar because of his merits as a fighter. Both pressed the taking of Coralita. Johnson urged the strategical advantage of the town, Sykes subtly played the lure of the bank. The correspondent was fighting for a story; the hired killer for—strawberries. In the end, they prevailed. Palazar promised action.

It came; not promptly, for nothing is prompt in Mexico. But it came. By dawn of a day promising great heat the whole command was on the move. Before noon a freight train running north from Coralita and bound for the mines with timber, machinery, and dynamite, was flagged and seized. Many hot hours thereafter were spent in dumping. the contents of the freight cars onto the desert and running horses into spaces thus provided. When the sun dropped behind the burnt mesas the train, bristling guns, and with each car top covered with fighting men, began slowly to back down the track in the direction of doomed Coralita—an ugly and poisonous adder of revolution ready to sting.

Johnson sat on the brake wheel of a box car, packing films into his camera; his shadow, Fernando, squatting atop the running board near him. The boy had his gun in sections, and was diligently rubbing at the rust with a shred torn from his crazy jacket. Sykes, dangling his feet over the edge of the car, was whistling “Casey Jones.”

“Say, kid,” he suddenly broke off to address Fernando in the vernacular, “do you know it's back to the old home town for you?”

“If you mean we are going to Coralita, I already know that.” Fernando sighted through his gun barrel at the blinding red in the West.

“Who told you?” the Texan challenged.

“The saints told me last night while I slept,” came the answer simply.

Sykes turned and gave the boy a quizzical look.

“You don't say! And did your friends, the saints, tip you off to anything else of an interesting nature?”

Fernando rubbed the long iron tube in his hand with the sleeve of his jacket for several minutes before he answered; then, his eyes on the far rim of the mountains, all aflame, he answered:

“Yes; they told me I would die fighting for my country to-morrow, but that the jefe politico would die, too, and my oath would be paid.”

“I got another papa on the Salt Lake line,” Sykes hummed. Then:

“Say, Johnson, get this. Little Ragged Reginald, here, says the saints passed him the hunch last night that to-morrow he's going to hit the toboggan, but that William Henry Heffy-politico'll take the chute before he does.”

The newspaper man, looking up at the illimitable desert sky, with the light that was before the world was born scorching the western horizon in a furnace glare—all about the seared and slag-scarred mountains of a creation's first day—sensed what the Texan could not know. He believed, of a truth, that the saints had whispered to Fernando.

 

Coralita lay under a pitiless sun, beleaguered.

The first attack of the rebels had been repulsed, even at the moment the town seemed in their grasp. Many dead lay in the streets and on roofs. The remnant of the Federals was intrenched before the railroad station, facing the defile in the mountains, down which the railroad ran and through which Palazar's men had launched their assault. They lay behind a barricade of railroad ties and iron, hastily thrown across thetracks, flanked right and left by the stone machine shop and station. Before that rough breastwork the impetuous charge of the Constitutionalists had shattered itself, and now far up the track on the hills beyond the town Palazar was reforming his men. Only the plip-plip! of the sharpshooters' advance guns up among the rocks; for the rest the silence and suspension of all energy that presages the earthquake.

Back among the attackers, grouped along the railroad track on the high grade out of range of the Federal fire, Johnson was kneeling by the side of Fernando, sousing wet bandages, torn from the flamboyant smoking jacket, about the boy's forehead. The correspondent, crawling among the rocks in the very forefront of the attacking line on the quest of “shots” for his camera, had come upon his shadow, lying behind a bowlder, creased across the forehead by a bullet and babbling in a delirium. Johnson had carried the lad on his shoulder back to safety with the retreat. He had even slung Fernando's ridiculous rifle under his arm when he rescued the ragamuffin—the heat of its antiquated barrel burned through Johnson's coat to his very heart.

Something was going forward on the tracks, and, leaving his charge in the shade of a stunted pine, Johnson grabbed his camera and ran down to where scores of men were pacing the ties from one end of the captured freight train to the other. As he drew near, he saw that each carried on his shoulder a square box, the size of a cracker box, but heavier. It was dynamite. They were unloading it from a car back near the engine and reloading it into an empty car at the end of the train nearest the town. Palazar, cursing savagely and striding back and forth from group to group, was urging speed with fist and boot.

Fully fifty boxes of the deadly stuff were banked inside the car. Then the ragtag rebels seized their guns and scampered for the rim of the hills overlooking the town, like bleacher warmers at a world's series game fighting for choice place. One man crawled under the loaded car and uncoupled it. The engine, far up the line of red blocks, tooted warning, and: then came the bang-bang-bang of impact down the string of buffers as the train cautiously got under way. Johnson, standing on a little rise, and with his camera poised to get a snap of the dynamite car when it should detach itself from the rest of the train, and go blundering down grade on its work of death, heard a yell. He lifted his head and saw——

A prancing, jack-o'-lantern shape, with shrewds of some outlandish garment fluttering back from shoulders and waist, and a long rifle brandished over its bandaged and bloodied head, was leaping through the scrub for the moving train. Like a fiend out of the Pit the scarecrow raced, drew near, and, with infernal strength, caught and swung itself onto the lower step of the ladder on the end car's side. Even as this happened there was a scream of brakes, and a widening slice of light showed between the rest of the train and the wild car.

Calls, curses, wildly beckoning fists, white, distorted faces!

Faster and faster, as it gathered the momentum of the grade, the dynamite car sped down through the gorge upon the damned Coralita—upon the breastwork of the defenders across the tracks. On the car's top, sharply cut against the raw blue of the sky, stood the imp of the streaming tatters, feet straddling to brace against the swaying, and hands fumbling at the breech of a long rifle. The Army of the Constitution saw the rifle finally broken at the breech, saw a movement as of pressing a shell home. Then the soldier of the Constitution on the car of death knelt and held his weapon at the ready.

The gorge swallowed him.

 

Johnson, exploring the streets of the captured town, given up to looting and worse, came upon Sykes at the door of the Hotel Diligencia. Sykes was battering in the wooden panels with his gun butt, but he paused to grin cheerfully at the correspondent.

“Come on in; the water's fine!” the Texan called.

“T want you to help me,” Johnson answered, his face deeply etched with lines of seriousness. “Ask somebody around here where the house of Señora Mayortorenna is—I want to tell—his—sister something—if she is alive.”

“Who—you mean—the kid's sister; how'd you know—say, what you want to tell her?”

“That the jefe politico of Coralita is dead for one thing,” Johnson answered quietly.

“Then the kid——”

“Yes. I guess it would be hard to tell which died first.”

Sykes leaned on his rifle butt and cupped his chin in his hand. He seemed to be laboring in thought.

“Say, Johnson,” he finally broke out; “funny game, what? The kid wants to get the heffy and he gets him. Old Palazar wants the bank, and he's crashing in now. You want to get a story, and you get it. And now look at me——”

“Well?”

“Well, I wanted strawberries—and you see me going after 'em!”