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into the pot while we were gone and baked themselves. I about threw up, and Ben laughed, and Jeff, who was a book-reading man, said that over to Europe folks considered grasshoppers a delicacy and dipped them in chocolate and ate them like they was candy.
I was impressed with Ben right off the bat, but in a different way than with his brother. He was skinnier and light on his feet, but he was one helluva man with a horse or with a rope. And there was something watchful about him, like he was expecting someone to jump him any second, but it wasn’t a scared kind of watchfulness. He was relaxed and coiled up at the same time. You got the impression that if somebody did jump him, the one who did the jumping was gone to come out second best. Ben had a funny way of smiling, too. One end of his mouth would go way up and the other end way down, and I saw later on that if he smiled at you like that, well, you had better talk fast or shoot fast.
I told you Jeff was a book reader. Most of the books were about cattle breeding. He was taking a correspondence course from some agricultural college somewhere, and every now and then he would ride over to the post office in Lochiel and pick up these books they sent him, and he even took the tests and mailed them back. Like I said, a serious man.
That year of 1910 was the year of the big comet, Halley’s. It was pinned up there in the sky like a carnation made of fire. On full moon nights, with that comet shining up there, you almost thought it was daylight. Truth to tell, I didn’t know what a comet was till Jeff explained it. Said that one come from way out in the universe somewhere and was traveling, oh, hell, I can’t remember how fast he said, maybe a million miles an hour. I remember asking him, What do you mean, a million miles an hour? I been looking at that thing for a week and it ain’t moved an inch. But I took his word for it.
The reason I’m talking about that comet is the trip we took into Mexico in the fall to buy more steers. We’d got a herd together in the corrals over to Naco and were fixing to drive them to our range the next day. We overheard some vaqueros talking about the comet, that the big extra light in the sky got the cattle fidgety, and they said that it was un mal agüero, a bad omen, that it meant war and death were a-coming. It was real spooky talk. They were saying that they’d heard about pillars of fire in the middle of the country. I come to find out a long time later that it was a volcano that blew up, but to them vaqueros, who was about as unscientific as anybody can get, it was another omen. The days of Díaz were over, there was a fella named Madero who was gone to take power and give the land to the people, but there would be a lot of war and death and famine and disease first. Lord they was talking like folks out of Bible days. It had been up to me, we would have cleared out right then.
So the Revolution got started, and I thought the revolucionarios were right. The rich folks in Mexico and the big-shot foreigners like Colonel Greene had pretty much treated ordinary folks like dogs, and now the dogs was biting back. Jeff and me had some right lively conversations about that. He said the revolucionarios weren’t like ours, George Washington and all, but were socialists, and that made them dangerous. He explained to me what a socialist was, and the way he explained it, I agreed that a socialist wasn’t anybody I would care to associate with. But I didn’t think the Mexicans fighting Díaz were like that. They wanted a fair shake was all, and I sure couldn’t fault any man for that. Ben didn’t have much to say on this subject. He never was one for talking, but I got the idea that he saw things like I did. He would not tolerate nobody trying to push him around, and didn’t think any man had a right to push another man around.
I know one thing—the Revolution made it tough for Jeff to buy Mexican steers. Pancho Villa and his like had run the