"Not with you," she replied, evenly. And again the ripple of laughter
spread.
"Why not?"
"Because you're a coward," she said. "I'd rather dance with a Chinaman."
"If you think I'm here because I'm afraid to fight you can think again.
Not that I care what you think."
He had meant to boast a little, to intimate that he had pulled off a big
thing, but he saw that he was ridiculous. The situation infuriated him.
Suddenly he burst into foul-mouthed invective, until one of the girls
said, wearily, "Oh, cut that out, you slacker."
And he knew that no single word he had used against them, out of a
vocabulary both extensive and horrible, was to them so degraded as that
single one applied to him.
Late that night he received a tip from a dealer at one of vingt-et-un
tables. There were inquiries being made for him across the border. That
very evening he, the dealer, had gone across for a sack of flour, and he
had heard about it.
"You'd better get out," said the dealer.
"I'm as safe here as I'd be in Mexico City."
"Don't be too sure, son. You're not any too popular here. There's such
a thing as being held up and carried over the border. It's been done
before now."
"I'm sick of this hole, anyhow," Rudolph muttered, and moved away in the
crowd. The mechanical piano was banging in the dance-hall as he slipped
out into the darkness, under the clear starlight of the Mexican night,
and the gate of the compound stood open. He passed it with an oath.
Long before, he had provided for such a contingency. By the same agency
which had got him to the border, he could now be sent further on. At
something after midnight, clad in old clothes and carrying on his back a
rough outfit of a blanket and his remaining wardrobe, he knocked at the
door of a small adobe house on the border of the town. An elderly German
with a candle admitted him.
"Well, I'm off," Rudolph said roughly.
"And time enough, too," said the German, gruffly.
Rudolph was sullenly silent. He was in this man's power, and he knew it.
But the German was ready enough to do his part. For months he had been
doing this very thing, starting through the desert toward the south
slackers and fugitives of all descriptions. He gathered together the
equipment, a map with water-holes marked, a canteen covered with a dirty
plaid-cloth casing, a small supply of condensed foods, in tins mostly,
and a letter to certain Germans in Mexico City who would receive
hospitably any American fugitives and ask no questions.