Chapter 16

Dunwoodie was not given to talkativeness; moreover, he was a considerate man, and he respected Harboro. Therefore it may be doubted if he ever said anything about that unexplained drama which occurred on the main street of Eagle Pass on a Sunday morning, before the town was astir. But there was the bartender at the Maverick--and besides, it would scarcely have been possible for any man to do what Harboro had done without being seen by numbers of persons looking out upon the street through discreetly closed windows.

At any rate, there was talk in the town. By sundown everybody knew there had been trouble between Harboro and Fectnor, and men who dropped into the Maverick for a game of high-five or poker had their attention called to an unclaimed blue-serge coat hanging from the ice-box.

"He got away with his skin," was the way the bartender put the case, "but he left his coat."

There was a voice from one of the card-tables: "Well, any man that gets Fectnor's coat is no slouch."

There were a good many expressions of undisguised wonder at Fectnor's behavior; and nobody could have guessed that perhaps some sediment of manhood which had remained after all the other decent standards had disappeared had convinced Fectnor that he did not want to kill a man whom he had injured so greatly. And from the popular attitude toward Fectnor's conduct there grew a greatly increased respect for Harboro.

That, indeed, was the main outcome of the episode, so far as the town as a whole was concerned. Harboro became a somewhat looming figure. But with Sylvia ... well, with Sylvia it was different.

Of course Sylvia was connected with the affair, and in only one way. She was the sort of woman who might be expected to get her husband into trouble, and Fectnor was the kind of man who might easily appeal to her imagination. This was the common verdict; and the town concluded that it was an interesting affair--the more so because nearly all the details had to be left to the imagination.

As for Sylvia, the first direct result of her husband's gun-play was that a week or two after the affair happened, she had a caller--the wife of Jesus Mendoza.

She had not had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite Club, and that lower stratum identified with church "socials" and similar affairs, did not know of Sylvia's existence--had decided definitely never to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church to the strains of the Lohengrin march. Nevertheless, there had been that trip to the church, and the playing of the march; and this fact placed Sylvia considerably above certain obscure women in the town who were not under public condemnation, but whose status was even more hopeless--who were regarded as entirely negligible.

The wife of Jesus Mendoza was one of these. She was an American woman, married to a renegade Mexican who was notoriously evil. I have referred to Mendoza as a man who went about partly concealed in his own cloud of cigarette smoke, who looked at nothing in particular and who was an active politician of a sort. He had his place in the male activities of the town; but you wouldn't have known he had a wife from anything there was in his conversation or in his public appearances. Nobody remembered ever to have seen the two together. She remained indoors in all sorts of weather save when she had marketing to do, and then she looked neither to left nor right. Her face was like a mask. She had been an unfortunate creature when Mendoza married her; and she was perhaps thankful to have even a low-caste Mexican for a husband, and a shelter, and money enough to pay the household expenses.

That her life could not have been entirely complete, even from her own way of thinking, was evidenced by the fact that at last she came to call on Sylvia in the house on the Quemado Road.

Sylvia received her with reticence and with a knowing look. She was not pleased that Mrs. Mendoza had decided to call. She realized just what her own status was in the eyes of this woman, who had assumed that she might be a welcome visitor.

But Sylvia's outlook upon life, as has been seen, was distorted in many ways; and she was destined to realize that she must form new conclusions as to this woman who had come to see her in her loneliness.

Mrs. Mendoza was tactful and kind. She assumed nothing, save that Sylvia was not very thoroughly acquainted in the town, and that as she had had her own house now for a month or two, she would expect people to be neighborly. She discussed the difficulties of housekeeping so far from the source of supplies. She was able, incidentally, to give Sylvia a number of valuable hints touching these difficulties. She discussed the subject of Mexican help without self-consciousness. During her call it developed that she was fond of music--that in fact she was (or had been) a musician. And for the first time since Sylvia's marriage there was music on the piano up in the boudoir.

Mrs. Mendoza played with a passionateness which was quite out of keeping with her mask-like expression. It was like finding a pearl in an oyster, hearing her at the piano. She played certain airs from _Fra Diavolo_ so skilfully that she seemed to be letting bandits into the house; and when she saw that Sylvia was following with deep appreciation she passed on to the _Tower Scene_, giving to the minor chords a quality of massiveness. Her expression changed oddly. There was color in her cheeks and a stancher adjustment of the lines of her face. She suggested a good woman struggling through flames to achieve safety. When she played from _Il Trovatore_ you did not think of a conservatory, but of a prison.

She stopped after a time and the color swiftly receded from her cheeks. "I'm afraid I've been rather in earnest," she said apologetically. "I haven't played on a good piano for quite a long time." She added, as if her remark might seem an appeal for pity, "the climate here injures a piano in a year or so. The fine sand, you know."

"You must come and use mine whenever you will," said Sylvia heartily. "I love it, though I've never cared to play myself."

"I wonder why?"

"Ah, I could scarcely explain. I've been too busy living. It has always seemed to me that music and pictures and books were for people who had been caught in an eddy and couldn't go on with the stream." She realized the tactlessness of this immediately, and added: "That's just a silly fancy. What I should have said, of course, is that I haven't the talent."

"Don't spoil it," remonstrated the other woman thoughtfully. "But you must remember that few of us can always go on with the stream."

"Sometimes you get caught in the whirlpools," said Sylvia, as they were going down the stairs, "and then you can't stop, even if you'd like to."

I doubt if either woman derived a great deal of benefit from this visit. They might have become helpful friends under happier conditions; but neither had anything to offer the other save the white logic of untoward circumstances and defeat.

The wife of Jesus Mendoza did not know Sylvia well enough to perceive that a certain blitheness and faith had abandoned her, never to return. Nevertheless, the fact of her visit has its place in this chronicle, since it had a cruel bearing upon a day which still lay in Sylvia's future.

Sylvia's caller went home; and, as it chanced, she never called again at the house on the Quemado Road. As for Sylvia, she did not speak to Harboro of her visitor. From his point of view, she thought, there would be nothing to be proud of in the fact that Mrs. Mendoza had called. And so Harboro was destined to go on to the end without knowing that there was any such person as the wife of Jesus Mendoza.