Somewhere South in Sonora
9781465679703
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was her doings that they called the child Bart, after some saint of her religion. She had a lot of saints, one for every day or so—a Spanish woman, and she hadn’t asked much, come to think of it. The oddest thing Bob Leadley had ever done was to marry her. He never would have thought better of it, except it made a difference in the town. It would make more of a difference now—leaving a boy with her blood in his veins. They wouldn’t call it ‘Spanish’ blood in Bismo. Mexicans weren’t held high on this side of the Border.... Queer little birdlike ways, she had—little vanities and secrets—always shrinking farther indoors in daylight, always more alive in the night time. She had sung and cooked and washed for him; pleasant to be with, but he never really knew her. She was like ripe fruit that couldn’t last—pleasant to the taste and pretty to look at, but nothing much for real hunger. Come and gone with her curious ways, her brightenings up in the dark—only asking one thing—that the boy be called after this particular one of her saints, and ‘Bart’ was as good a name as any. So there was a gray-eyed white man in Bismo, Arizona, with a black-eyed boy in his cabin. No problem about it at all, from the standpoint of the other miners, just scorn—only Bob Leadley had been known from away back as cool and gamy as they made them; nothing like the squaw-man, cholo-man type. The miners couldn’t give much play to their contempt before those pleasant gray eyes of Bob’s, which might inquire their meaning, and look into it. Men weren’t mind-readers in Bismo. They saw the steady eyes, the whimsical smile, but no one knew what was going on; not even Mort Cotton, who had punched cattle, skinned mules, and washed for gold with Bob Leadley for ten years; not even the Mexican woman and her daughter who brought Bart up. But it was all a matter of how you gave advice. Bismo found out gradually that Bob wasn’t set up very high in his idea of being a successful parent. They found he listened attentively to comment given within a certain range of tones; discovering this, the miners supplied it plentifully. The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’
