and lighters went out to it to transfer the cargo to the wharf.
The next day was graced with perfect December weather for the region, cloudless and almost cool. The Brownsville train arrived shortly before noon, bringing the mail and a handful of passengers and a load of Mexican imports for shipping to Galveston and New Orleans. The train then took on the Brownsville mail and all cargo bound for the Mexican ferry. It was early afternoon when its whistle blew and the last of the passengers for Brownsville got aboard and the train chugged away from the depot. The twins wore suits and each carried a money valise and under their coats an S&W five-shooter, less powerful than the Frontier Colt but also less obtrusive. Marina’s bag held a change of clothes for each of them. The rest of their belongings were padlocked in the boat cabin’s razor-tricked lockers. The harbormaster assured them the quay was under guard around the clock and they need not worry about their boat being thieved.
The rail line to Brownsville was less than twenty-five miles long but spanned a number of short bridges in traversing the marshiest regions. The wagon road alongside the track was intermittently corduroyed with logs. But there were wide expanses of drier ground too, vast pale sand flats, here and there clustered with prickly pear cactus and stands of mesquite. In some places the thorny brush was so dense it seemed to them not man nor beast could penetrate it. Chaparral, the locals called such countryside, sometimes el monte. The twins liked its roughness. Marina thought it was an ugly place, but she agreed the immense sky was dazzling.
The track terminated at the freight platforms at the east end of Levee Street. A clamorous place where goods for Mexico were loaded onto carts and conveyed to the ferry landings on the river. From a clerk in the freight office they got directions to the White Star Land & Title Company. It was only a few blocks distant, mostly by way of Elizabeth Street, the town’s main thoroughfare.
They went to the hotel and James and Marina sat in the lobby while Blake registered, and then they set out again. On this market Saturday afternoon the town was loud with traffic and a babble of Spanish and English. Elizabeth Street was a graded dirt thoroughfare teeming with wagons and carts and buggies and horsemen, its sidewalks with pedestrians. Many of its buildings were two-storied and had verandahs, and most of the single-floor structures had wooden awnings to shade the sidewalk. There was a thin haze of dust. Odors of horse droppings and aromas of Mexican cooking at once familiar and yet of somewhat different piquancy. The muddy smell of the river. There was no shortage of saloons.
How strange it was, Marina said. Mexico was just across the river but it seemed so very far away. And although she was walking on a street in the United States, there were so many Mexicans around her she did not feel like she was in the United States.
“I’ll wager it’s the same way all along the border from here to California,” James Sebastian said. “Like a country all its own.”
Blake agreed. It’s all that English and Spanish being spoken at the same time, he said. And so much of it mixed together. “What’s the word that . . . patois. You hear those fellas we just went by? Hey Juan, the jefe’s looquiando for you.”
James laughed. “Looking and buscando. Border lingo. It’s what happens when one language gets in bed with another.”
“You have a much dirty mind,” Marina said.
“It’s what you love about me,” James said.
She punched his arm. “Sinverguenza.”
They stopped in at a bank. Its air of decorum a contrast to the boisterousness of the street. While James Sebastian conferred with a bank officer named Fredricks about opening a joint account in his and his brother’s name—speaking in easy emulation of Charley Patterson’s East Texas accent and using his real name—it was Blake’s turn to sit with Marina in the lobby. The banker’s smile widened as James took bundles of currency from the valise and placed them on the desktop and then emptied the bags of gold and silver specie. Fredricks made quick work of arranging the bundles and coins into neat stacks. Nearly half the money was in Mexican pesos but he was glad to convert it to dollars at the official exchange rate. It was a deposit of uncommon size and the man could not stop smiling. James beckoned Blackie to the desk to cosign the account form. Fredricks asked where they hailed from and James said they were born in Galveston and lived there till they were nine, when they moved with their parents to Veracruz, where their father had been posted as an assistant to the American consul. The banker was impressed—then tendered his condolences when James added that they had lost both parents to yellow fever the previous summer. They had come to the border with an eye to investing part of their inheritance in some promising enterprise, but they wanted to take their time about it and first get acquainted with the region and its economy, with the character of the town and the local ways, before deciding where to place the funds. “Very sage,” said Mr Fredricks. He kept glancing at the valise in Blake’s hand. It was exactly like the one James had emptied of its money and the man was obvious in his hope that there was more to come. But they ignored his pointed looks at it. It held their operating money. Once they took up residence somewhere they would decide where to keep it cached. They shook the banker’s hand and departed with Marina between them.
Where Elizabeth Street met the perimeter of Fort Brown they turned north and at the next corner found the White Star office. They presented the deed to an agent named Ben Watson, an agreeable man of middle years. When James told him he won the property in a card game in Mexico, Watson nodded as if it were a commonplace occurrence. They gave him the same brief sketch of themselves they had given banker Fredricks, and he too was impressed and commiserative by turn. They saw his curiosity about Marina and introduced her. He shook her proffered hand, said in accented Spanish he was charmed, and thenceforth addressed her as Senora Wolfe, assuming she was married to one or the other, and nobody corrected him. In his presence they addressed her only in Spanish, and he said they surely spoke it well for Americans.
He examined the deed to make sure the two transfers recorded on the back of it were in order, then got out the ledger in which the original title was recorded and found no liens entered against it. According to the record, Watson told them, their property had once upon a time been part of a Spanish land grant. Much of South Texas had once been part of one grant or another. Who could say why the Spaniard who held the grant had measured off the portion of it described in their deed, or why in 1875 the deed was transferred to a man named Mizzell. “Could be the Mizzell fella bought it,” Watson said, “or could be he won it in a bet, same as you did. Or could be he somehow hornswoggled the Spaniard’s descendants out of it through the courts. There’s been plenty of that sort of thing in South Texas with regard to land grants, I can tell you.” At James’s request he drew up a new deed in the name of both brothers, then Marina and one of the office clerks signed as witnesses and Watson entered the transaction in the company ledger. He would also record the new deed with the county clerk.
There was a map of Cameron County on the wall and he showed them where the property was. It was bounded on the south by the Rio Grande and on the north by a creek that ran about a mile below the Point Isabel rail line and roughly parallel to it. The creek had never received an official name and so had been called Nameless Creek for as long as anybody could remember. Traversing the twins’ property was a road with state right-of-way from Brownsville to Boca Chica Pass. The property was six miles long, somewhat less than three miles wide at its west end and somewhat more than three along its east side. But owing to the river’s meanders, the width between the north and south boundaries varied from barely a mile in some places to almost four miles at others, and so the area of their land was at best a loose estimate.
“An average of two and a half miles between the creek and the river is as good a guess as any,” Watson said. “That would give you roughly fifteen square miles. Good-sized piece of land, but if you’ll pardon me for saying so, fellas, it aint really much good for anything. Most of it’s too mucky for raising cattle and it’s way too risky for farming. Even if you cleared it for planting—and there’s parts of it I don’t believe you could clear in a lifetime—that region floods over so often you couldn’t hardly count on a crop. Brownsville’s got a levee, but out there the river comes over the banks just about every time there’s a big storm or even a steady spell of hard rain.”
“Yeah, well,” James Sebastian said, “we aint thinking to farm it, Mr Watson. Could be we’ll just use it for picnics and such. For going out to look at the birds.”
Watson’s smile was wry. “Every man to his own pleasures, I always say.”
“This a lake?” Blake Cortez said, putting his finger to a crescent figure near a sharp bend in the river along
