“MURGUÍA”“He had evidently passed through salty spray, hadbraved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black”
“MURGUÍA”“He had evidently passed through salty spray, hadbraved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black”
17“You mean that you won’t pay here, because I am the one in danger here, and not you? Bien, you want a money-getting man for your daughter, eh, Don Anastasio, though you’ll deny that you would give her to any man? Bien, bonissimo, I am going to prove myself an eligible suitor. In another minute Your Mercy will be frightened enough to pay. Attention now!”
So saying he drew a reed whistle from his jacket. It was no thicker than a pencil, and not half so long.
Murguía gripped his arm. “My daughter?” he cried. “It has been weeks since I–but you must have seen her lately. Oh tell me, señor, there is no bad news of her?” He had forgotten the threatened extortion. His voice was open too, generous in its anxiety.
“News of her, yes. But it is vague news. There’s a mystery about your daughter, Don Anastasio.”
But at this point Fra Diavolo dismissed mystery and daughter both with an ugly grimace. Nor would he say another word, for all the father’s pleading. Instead, he remembered the little reed whistle in his hand, and swung round to blow upon it, in spite of the palsied hand clutching at his arm. But in turning, he became aware of the amused Parisienne watching him. His jaw fell, whereat Don Anastasio’s hand slipped from his arm, and Don Anastasio himself began to slip away.
“Stop!” roared Fra Diavolo. “No, go ahead. Wait at the mesón, though, until I come. Wait until I give you your passports.”
Then he turned again to stare at the girl who all unconsciously had wrought the poor little crow’s release.
“Come listen to me, you gallants so free,All you that love mirth for to hear,And I will tell you of a bold outlaw.”–Robin Hood.
“Come listen to me, you gallants so free,All you that love mirth for to hear,And I will tell you of a bold outlaw.”
–Robin Hood.
“Oh, oh, now he’s coming to eatus!” Jacqueline gasped.
The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided. His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only stared. Jacqueline peeped through the lashes curtaining her eyes. She wanted to see his face, and she saw one of bold lines. The chin was a hard right angle. The mouth was a cruel line between heavily sensuous lips. The nose was a splendid line, and a very assertive and insolent nose altogether. The forehead was rugged, with a free curving sweep. Here there would have been a certain nobility, only its slope was just a hint too low. The skin was tawny. The moustache was black and bristling, as was also the thick hair, which lay back like grass before a breeze. The shaggy eyebrows were parted by deep clefts, the dark corrugations of frowning. One wondered if the man did not turn the foreboding scowl on and off by design. But all these were matters that fitted in with the other striking “properties,” and Jacqueline was fairly well satisfied with her Fra Diavolo. As she declared to herself, here was the very dramatic presence to mount upon a war charger!
“RODRIGO GALÁN”“The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided.His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only stared”
“RODRIGO GALÁN”“The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided.His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only stared”
19Now when Jacqueline peeped–there was something irresistible about it–the furrows in the black-beetled brow smoothed themselves out, whether the stranger meant them to or not. And a vague resolve took hold on him, and quickened his breath. Her glance might have been invitation–Tampico was not a drawing room–but still he hesitated. There was a certain hauteur in the set of the demoiselle’s head, which outbalanced the mischief in her eyes. He felt an indefinable severity in her tempting beauty, and this was new to his philosophy of woman. But as he drank in further details, his resolve stiffened. That Grecian bend to her crisp skirt was evidently an extreme from the Rue de la Paix, foretelling the end of stupendous flounces. Then there was the tilt to the large hat, and the veil falling to the level of the eyes, and the disquieting charm of both. The wine-red lips had a way of smiling and curling at the same time. And still again there was that line of the neck, from the shoulder up to where it hid under the soft, old-gold tendrils, and that line was a thing of beauty and seductive mystery. The dreadful ranchero went down in humility before the splendor of the tantalizing Parisienne.
Michel Ney leaned nearer over the table. “In all conscience, mademoiselle, your Fra Diavolo is bizarre enough,” he said, “but please don’t let us stir him up. Think, if anything should happen to you, why Mexico, why France would––”
“You flatter!” she mocked him. “Only two empires to keep me out of a flirtation? It’s not enough, Michel.”
A shadow fell over them. “My apologies,” spoke a deep voice, “but the señorita, she is going to the City, to the Capital, perhaps?”
The syllables fell one by one, distinct and heavy. The Spanish was elaborately cermonious, but the accent was Mexican and almost gutteral.
“L’impertinent!” cried Ney, bounding to his feet. No diffidence cloyed his manner now. He was on familiar ground at last, for the first time since fighting Arabs in Algeria.20He was supremely happy too, and as mad as a Gaul can be. “L’impertinent!” he repeated, coaxingly.
“Now don’t be ridiculous, Michel,” said Jacqueline. “He can’t understand you.”
Moreover, the fame of the Chasseurs, of those colossal heroes with their terrible sabres, of their legendary prowess in the Crimea, in China, in Italy, in Africa, none of it seemed to daunt the Mexican in the least.
“How, little Soldier-Boy Blue?” he inquired with cumbrous pleasantry.
“Alas, señor,” said Jacqueline, “he’s quite a little brother to dragons.”
“What are you talking about?” Michel demanded.
“I am keeping you from being eaten up, young sire, but,” and Jacqueline’s tone changed, “pray give yourself the trouble to be calm. He only means a kindly offer of service, no doubt, however strange that may seem to your delicacy of breeding, Monsieur the Duke.”
Michel heaved a sigh and–sat down. He was no longer on familiar ground. Then Fra Diavolo proceeded to verify mademoiselle’s judgment of him. Sombrero in hand and with a pompous courtliness, he repeated his natural supposition that the señorita was on her way to the City (meaning the City of Mexico), and perhaps to the court of His Glorious Majesty, Maximiliano. He offered himself, therefore, in case he might have the felicity to be of use. This she need not consider as personal, if it in any way offended, but as an official courtesy, since she saw in him an officer–an officer of His Most Peace-loving Majesty’s Contra Guerrillas. And thus to a conclusion, impressively, laboriously.
Jacqueline was less delighted than at first. The dash and daredeviltry was somehow not quite sustained. But she replied that he had surmised correctly, and added that she was Mademoiselle d’Aumerle.
21He started at the name, and her eyes sparkled to note the effect. “The Marquesa Juana de Aumerle!” he repeated.
“Jeanne d’Aumerle, no other, sir,” she assured him, but she watched him quizzically, for she knew that another name was hovering on his lips.
“Surely not––” he began.
“Si señor,” and she smiled good humoredly, “I am–‘Jacqueline.’”
It was a name that had sifted from the court down into distant plebeian corners of the Mexican Empire, and it was tinged–let us say so at once–with the unpleasing hue of notoriety.
“His Ever Considerate Majesty Maximiliano would be furious if any harm should befall Your Ladyship,” Fra Diavolo observed, “though,” he added to himself, “the empress would possibly survive it.”
Jacqueline looked at him sharply. But in his deferential manner she could detect no hint of a second meaning. Yet he had laid bare the kernel of the whole business that bore the name of Jacqueline. She betrayed no vexation. If this were her cross, she was at least too haughtily proud to evade it. For a passing instant only she looked as she had in the small boat, when she had said that about the mission of a woman being to give. The next moment, and the mood was gone.
With knowledge of her identity, the project that was building in the stranger’s dark mind loomed more and more dangerously venturesome. But as he gazed and saw how pretty she was, audacity marched strong and he wavered no longer. And when she thanked him, and added that the ship was only waiting until she finished her coffee, he roused himself and drove with hard will to his purpose.
“Going on by water?” he protested. “But Señorita de Aumerle, we are in the season for northers. Look, those mean another storm,” and he pointed overhead, to harmless little cotton bunches of clouds scurrying away to the horizon.
22“Éh bien,” returned the señorita, “what would you?”
He would, it appeared, that she go by land. He hoped that she did not consider his offer an empty politeness, tendered only in the expectation of its being refused. He so contrived, however, that that was precisely the way his offer might be interpreted, and in that he was deeper than she imagined. She grew interested in the possibility of finishing her journey overland. He informed her that one could travel a day westward on horseback to a place called Valles, then take the City of Mexico and Monterey stage, and reach the City in two days, which was much shorter than by way of the sea and Vera Cruz. He spoke as dispassionately as a time table. But he noted that she clothed his skeleton data with a personal interest. And Ney also, who had caught the drift of things, saw new mischief brewing in her gray eyes.
“You really are not thinking, mademoiselle––” he interrupted.
“And why not, pray?”
“Why not? Why–uh–the bandits, of course.”
Jacqueline turned to the stranger who served as itinerary folder. Would he dispose of the childish objection? He would. But he wondered why the señor had not mentioned one who was the most to be feared of all bandits; in fact, the most implacable of the rebels still battling against His Truly Mexican Majesty. The stranger paused expectantly, but as Ney seemed to recognize no particular outlaw from the description, he went on with a deepening frown, “––and who is none other than the Capitan Don Rodrigo Galán.”
“Who’s he?” Ney inquired, willing enough to have any scarecrow whatever for Jacqueline.
“Is it possible?–Your Mercy does not know?”
Ney pleaded that he had never been in the country before.
“But surely,” the Mexican objected, “Don Rodrigo is a household word throughout Europe?”
23“He has certainly been heard of in Mexico,” said Jacqueline, whereat Fra Diavolo turned to her gratefully. “But,” she added, “Monsieur Ney will now find in him another objection to my journeying overland.”
The ardor of the bandit’s eulogist faltered. “The señor might indeed,” he confessed, “only,” and here he hesitated like a man contemplating suicide, “only, Don Rodrigo has been–yes, he’s been shot, from ambush; and his band–yes, his band is scattered forever.”
Having achieved the painful massacre, Fra Diavolo traveled on more easily to assure the señorita that since then the country had been entirely pacified. Ney, however, was not. How did they know the story was true? And if it was, he was sorry. He would enjoy meeting the terrible and provokingly deceased Monsieur Rodrigue, if only to teach him that being terrible is not good manners. But, did they know for certain that the bandit was dead?
“We do,” said the Mexican, again like a reluctant suicide, “because I killed him myself.”
“But how are we to know, sir,” Ney persisted, “that you are so terrible on your own account?”
“My identification, you mean? Bueno, it is only just. Here, this may do,” and the ranchero drew a paper from his money belt and handed it to Jacqueline. The paper was an order addressed to one Captain Maurel, who was to proceed with his company to the district of Tampico, and there to take and to shoot the guerrilla thief, Rodrigo Galán, and all his band, who infested the district aforesaid, known as the Huasteca. The Captain Maurel would take note that this Rodrigo Galán frequented the very city of Tampico itself, with an impudence to be punished at all hazards. Signed: Dupin, Colonel of His Majesty’s Contra Guerrillas.
“Colonel Dupin?” Jacqueline repeated with a wry mouth. Dupin, the Contra-Guerrilla chief, was a brave Frenchman.24But the quality of his mercy had made his name a shudder on the lips of all men, his own countrymen included.
“Yes,” said Fra Diavolo between his teeth, “Mi Coronel Dupin–the Tiger.”
“So he is called, I know,” said Jacqueline. “And you, it appears, are Captain Maurel–Maurel, but that is French?”
“The way it is spelled on the paper, yes. But my Coronel, being French, made a mistake. He should have written it ‘Morel.’”
“No matter,” said Jacqueline, “for you are only a trite, conventional officer, after all. But how much merrier it would be if you were–were––” and suddenly she leaned over the paper and placed an impetuous finger on the bandit’s name. “So,” she continued wistfully, “there is no danger. We ride, we take a stage. It is tame. I say it is tame, monsieur!”
Captain Maurel, or Morel, desired to add that there was a trader who owned an hacienda in the interior, and that this trader was starting for his plantation the very next morning; all of which was very convenient, because the trader had extra horses, and he, Captain Morel, had a certain influence with the trader. The señorita’s party could travel with his friend’s caravan as far as the stage.
“Voilá!” cried Jacqueline. “It is arranged!”
“Diable, it is not!” Michel was on his feet again.
His wayward charge looked him over reflectively. “Our Mars in his baby clothes again,” said she, as a fond, despairing mother with an incorrigible child.
The Mexican had shown himself hostile and ready. But seeing Jacqueline’s coolness he melted out of his somewhat theatrical bristling, lest her sarcasm veer toward himself.
The tempestuous Mars, however, was beyond the range of scorn. He kept one stubborn purpose before him. “We go back to the ship, or”–he took breath where he meant to put a handsome oath–“or–it’s a fight!”
25“There, there,” said Jacqueline gently. “Besides, are you not to go with me just the same?”
Ney turned to the stranger. “I ask you to withdraw, sir, both yourself and your offers, because you’re only meddling here.”
The intruder grew rigid straightway. “Iam not one to take back an offer,” he stated loftily. His voice was weighted to a heavier guttural, and in the deep staccatos harshly chopped off, and each falling with a thud, there was a quality so ominous and deadly that even Jacqueline had her doubts. But she would not admit them, to herself least of all. “And I, Monsieur Ney,” she said, “have decided to accept,” though she had not really, until that very moment.
Ney turned to the one sailor with him. “Run like fury!” he whispered. “Bring the others!”
“Oh, very well,” said the Mexican.
As he doubtless intended, Fra Diavolo’s words sounded like the low growl of an awakening lion, and at the same time he brought forth the reed whistle and put it to his lips. The note that came was faint, like that of a distant bird in the forest.
Ney smiled. It seemed inadequate, silly. Lately he had become familiar with the sonorous foghorn, and besides, he was not a woodsman and knew nothing of the penetration of the thin, vibrant signal. When the sailors should come, he would take the troublesome fellow to the commander of the garrison on the hill. But then a weight fell on him from behind, and uncleanliness and garlic and the sweating of flesh filled his nostrils. Bare arms around his neck jerked up his chin, according to the stroke of Père François. Other writhing arms twined about his waist, his legs, his ankles; and hands clutched after his sabre and pistol. But at last he stood free, and glared about him, disarmed and helpless. Jacqueline’s infernal Fra Diavolo was surveying him from the closed door26of the Café, behind which he had swept the two women. His stiff pose had relaxed, and he was even smiling. He waved his hand apologetically over his followers. “His Exceeding Christian Majesty’s most valiant contra guerrillas,” he explained.
The so-called contra guerrillas were villainous wretches, at the gentlest estimate. Their scanty, ragged and stained cotton manta flapped loosely over their skin, which was scaly and as tough as old leather. Most of them had knives. A few carried muskets, long, rusty, muzzle-loading weapons that threw a slug of marble size.
Almost at once the burly French sailors appeared, but Fra Diavolo’s little demons closed in behind them and around them and so kept them from reaching Ney. Thus both sides circled about and moved cautiously, waiting for the trouble to begin in earnest. Michel only panted, until at last he bethought himself that there was such a thing as strategy.
“One of you out there,” he shouted in French, “quick, go to the fort. Bring the soldiers!”
The Mexicans did not understand, and before they could prevent, a sailor had taken to his heels.
Then Fra Diavolo comprehended. “You idiots!” he bellowed. “You–Pedro! Catch him! Faster!–Catch him, I say!”
A little demon darted away in pursuit of the sailor. Obviously, the situation hung on the swifter in the race.
“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”–Romeo and Juliet.
“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”
–Romeo and Juliet.
“Mesón” is Spanish for hostelry. In the ancient caravansaries, like the one at Bethlehem sacred to the Christ child, the same accommodations were meted out to man and beast alike. More recently there are “hotels,” which distinguish a man from his beast, usually; though sometimes undeservedly. And so the word “mesòn” got left behind along with its primitive meaning. But in Mexico word and meaning still go together to this day, and both described pretty well the four walls in Tampico where Anastasio Murguía tarried. Excepting the porter’s lodge at the entrance, the establishment’s only roof formed an open corridor against one of the walls, in which species of cloister the human guests were privileged to spread their blankets in case of rain or an icy norther. Otherwise they slept in the sky-vaulted court among the four-footed transients, for what men on the torrid Gulf coast would allow his beast more fresh air than himself?
Don Anastasio’s caravan filled the mesón with an unflurried, hay-chewing promise of bustle-to-be at some future date. Except for the camels and costume lacking, the Mexican trader might have been a sheik in an oasis khan. His bales littered the patio’s stone pavement. They were of cotton mostly, which he had bought in the Confederate States, in exchange for necessities of warfare and life. Complacent burros and28horses were juggling into their mouths some final grains from the sacks over their noses. Peon servants stolidly busied themselves around charcoal braziers.
An American leaned in the cavernous doorway. The tarnished insignia on his collar indicated an officer of Confederate cavalry. He was smoking a cob pipe, of which he seemed quite fond. And as a return for such affection, the venerable Missouri meerschaum lent to its young master an air that was comfortably domestic and peaceable. The trooper wore a woolen shirt. His boots were rough and heavy. Hard wear and weather had softened his gray hat into a disreputable slouch affair. A broad black-leather belt sagged about his middle from the weight of cartridges. Under his ribs on either side protruded the butt of a navy-six, thrust in between shirt and trousers. He watched with dozing interest the muleteers inside as they roped up straw, tightened straps, and otherwise got ready for departure. Then Anastasio Murguía appeared coming up the street, just from his lately recorded interview with Fra Diavolo. The weazened little old Mexican was in a fretful humor, and his glance at the lounging Southerner was anything but cordial. He would have passed on into the mesón, but the other stopped him.
“Well, Murgie, are we projecting to start to-night?” the trooper inquired in English. “Eh?–What say?”
What Don Anastasio had said was nothing at all, but being thus urged, he mumbled a negative.
“Not starting to-night?” his questioner repeated. “Now, why don’t we?–What?–Lordsake, man, dive! Bring up that voice there for once!”
Murguía sank to the chin in his black coat. Glancing apprehensively at the cavalryman’s long arm, he edged away to the farther side of the doorway. Experience had accustomed the ancient trader to despots, but in this cheery youngster of a Gringo the regal title was not clear, which simply made29tyranny the more irksome. The Gringo was the veriest usurper. He did not justify his sway by the least ferocity. He never uttered a threat. Where, then, was his right to the sceptre he wielded so nonchalantly? Were there only some tangible jeopardy to his pelt, Murguía would have been more resigned. But his latest autocrat was only matter-of-fact, blithely and aggravatingly matter-of-fact.
By every rule governing man’s attitude toward man, the Señor Don should have been the bully, and the youngster the cringing sycophant. For since their very odd meeting two weeks before, the tyrant had been in the power of the tyrannized. It began on Murguía’s own boat, where Murguía was absolute. Any time after leaving Mobile he had merely to follow his inclinations and order the fellow thrown overboard. Yet it was the soldier boy who had assumed the ascendancy, and it could not have been more natural were the boat’s owner a scullion and the intruder an admiral.
“And whydon’twe start to-night?” the complacent usurper demanded in that plaintive drawl which so irritated the other. “You went for your passports, didn’t you get ’em?”
“Si–si, señor.”
“Good! Then to-night it is, eh?–Can’t you speak out,mygracious!”
“Youmight go to-night,” the trader suggested timidly.
“Alone?–N-o, parting isn’t the sweet sorrow it’s cracked up to be. Besides, I don’t know the roads, but of course that’s nothing to losing a jovial old mate like you, Murgie.”
Don Anastasio smirked at the pleasantry. “ButIcan’t go to-night, señor. I–I have to see–someone–first.”
The trooper betrayed the least impatience. “Now look here–usurer, viper, blanketed thief, honorable sir, youknowI’m in a hurry!”
That his haste could be any concern of Murguía’s was preposterous, and Murguía would have liked nothing better than30to tell him so. But he did not, and suffered inwardly because somehow he could not. He harbored a dim but dreadful picture of what might happen should the amiable cavalryman actually lose his temper. Loss of patience had menace enough, though the Southerner had not stirred from his lazy posture in the doorway nor overlooked a single contented puff from the Missouri meerschaum.
“I’m sorry,” Don Anastasio paid out the hard-found words through his teeth, “but possibly we can leave to-morrow. Will, will that suit Your Mercy, Señor Coronel?”
“Oh perhaps. Anyhow, don’t go to forgetting, now, that I’m in a hurry.”
Don Anastasio breathed easier, and he even grew so bold as to recall a certain suspicion he had entertained. “Your errand down here must be of considerable importance, Señor Coronel?” he ventured.
“There you are again–crawling again.” It was evident that the trooper’s normal condition was a great, hearty, calm good humor.
But the Mexican’s shriveled features grew sharper and his moist eyes more prying. His suspicion had tormented him ever since fate had thrown the Confederate in his way. This had happened one stormy night at Mobile. The night in question was pitch dark. The tide was favorable, too, but a norther was blowing, the very same norther that had turned theImpératrice Eugénieoff her course. Murguía’s skipper had chosen the hour of midnight for running the Federal blockade outside, and he had already given the order to cast off, when a horseman in a cape overcoat rode to the edge of the wharf.
“Wait there!” the horseman trumpeted through his hand.
It was the first word Murguía had ever heard from his future tyrant, and even then the cool tone of authority nettled him. But he reflected that here might be a passenger, and a passenger31through the blockade usually meant five hundred dollars in gold. He ordered the plank held for a moment.
“They tell me–whoa, Demijohn!–you are going to Tampico?” hallooed the same voice.
“Yes,” Murguía answered, and was going to name his price, when without more ado the cavalier rode across, dismounted on the deck, and tossed his bridle to the first sailor.
“Ca-rai!” sneered the astonished Mexican, “one would think you’d just reached your own barnyard, señor.”
“My own barnyard?” echoed the stranger bitterly. “I haven’t seen my own barnyard, or anything that is mine, during these four years past. But you were about to start?”
“Not so fast, señor. Fare in advance, seven hundred dollars.” Murguía looked for the haggling to come next, but somehow the sniff he heard was not promising.
“Usurer, viper, blanketed thief, benevolent old rascal,” the trooper enumerated as courteously as “Señor Don” or “Your Mercy,” “you don’t surprise me a bit, not when you charge us three thousand dollars gold for freight on a trunk of quinine!”
“G-g-get back on your horse! G-get off this boat!”
But the intruder calmly drew off his great coat, and Murguía saw the butts of pistols at his waist. Yet they had no reference to the removal of the cape. The latter was a simple act of making oneself at home.
“I reckon,” said the newcomer cheerily, “there’s no question of fare. Here, I’ve got a pass.”
By a lantern Murguía read the paper handed him. It was signed: “Jefferson Davis, President C. S. A.” Therein Mr. Anastasio Murguía or any other blockade runner was required on demand of the bearer, Lieut. Col. Jno. D. Driscoll, to transport the said Driscoll to that part outside the Confederacy which might happen to be the blockade runner’s destination.
The peevish old man scowled, hesitated. He read the order32again, hesitated again, and at last handed it back, his mind made up.
“Have the goodness, señor, to remove yourself from my boat.”
But the lieutenant colonel placidly inquired, “Carry any government cotton this trip? No, I know you don’t. Then you’re in debt to the government? Correct. So I reckon you’ll carry me in place of the cotton.”
The demand was just. For their golden privileges the blockade runners took a portion of their cargo on government account. But Murguía knew that the army of Northern Virginia must surrender soon. The Confederacy was really at an end, and this would be his last trip. Why, then, pay a dying creditor?
“The favor, señor! Or must I have you kicked off?”
The señor, however, with his charger behind him, was foraging over the deck to find a stall, and in a fury Murguía plucked at his sleeve. But Driscoll wheeled of his own accord to inquire about horse accommodations, and then the Mexican wondered in his timid soul at his own boldness. It loomed before him as unutterably more preposterous than the lone wanderer’s preposterous act of taking possession single handed. Yet the lone wanderer was only gazing down on him very benignly. But what experience of violent life, of cool dealing in death, did poor Don Anastasio behold on those youthful features! In a panic he realized certain vital things. To evade his debt to a government that could never claim it was very seductive and business-like. But there were the Confederate batteries on the wharf, and a line of torpedoes across the entrance to the bay. There were the Federal cannon of Fort Morgan, just beyond. His passenger, if rejected, had only to give the word, and there would be some right eager shooting. And as the Southerners shot, in their present mood, they would remember various matters. They would remember the treasure he33had wrung from their distress; the cotton bought for ten cents and sold abroad for a dollar; the nitre, the gunpowder, the clothing and medicines, rated so mercilessly dear; the profits boosted a thousand per cent., though an army was starving.
And yet Murguía could not lift his soul from the few hundred dollars of passage money. He almost had his man by the sleeve again. But no, there were four hundred odd bales on board. There wasLa Luz, his fleet £20,000 Clyde-built side-wheeler, bought out of the proceeds of a single former trip. Even if torpedoes and cannon missed, the Fort and blockaders outside would be thankful for the alarm, and make sure of him. A few hundred dollars was an amount, but the benignity in Driscoll’s whimsical brown eyes meant a great deal more, such for instance, as cotton and steamer and Don Anastasio plunging to the bottom of the bay.
“Oh I s’y, sir,” interrupted a voice in vigorous cockney, “this ’ere tide ain’t in the ’abit o’ waitin’. If we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!” It was the skipper, and the skipper’s ultimatum.
“W’y yes,” drawled the lieutenant colonel, “let’s be marching. I forgot to tell you, I’m in a hurry. Come on, Demijohn,” and man and horse went in search of beds.
Murguía looked venomous, but the plank was drawn on board.
“God forbid I should be so bold as to press to heaven in my young days.”–Titus Andronicus.
“God forbid I should be so bold as to press to heaven in my young days.”
–Titus Andronicus.
The feathering buckets of the paddle wheels began to turn; andLa Luz, long, low, narrow, and a racer, moved noiselessly out into the bay. A few yards only, and the loungers on the wharf could neither see nor hear her. Except for the muffled binnacle light, there was neither a ray nor a spark. The anthracite gave almost no smoke. The hull, hardly three feet above water amidships, was “Union color,” and invisible at night. The waves slipped over her like oil, without the sound of a splash, almost without breaking. She glided along more and more swiftly. The silent engines betrayed no hint of their power, though breathing a force to drive a vessel five times as large.
There were many entrances to the bay, and Murguía had had his steamer built of light draft especially, to profit by any outlet offering least danger from the vigilant patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels,La Luzhad full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a dash for it.
35For a slender steamer, and in such weather, the risk was desperate. The skipper hoped that the blockaders would never credit him with quite the insanity of it. He held the wheel himself, while beside him his keenest-sighted quartermaster stood guard with a glass. The agitated owner was there also, huddled in his black shawl, but the binoculars glued to his eyes trembled so that he could hardly have seen a full-rigged armada in broad daylight.
Suddenly the quartermaster touched the skipper’s arm under the shrouded binnacle. “I s’y sir,” he whispered excitedly, “they’re–there!There, anchored at the inshore station, just off the bar! My eye, but hain’t they beastly idiots? They’ll smash to pieces.”
The skipper looked and Murguía tried to look. But they saw nothing. Except for the booming of the surf, they might have been on a landless sea, alone in the black night. Don Anastasio was shaking at such a rate that his two companions in the dark wheelhouse were conscious of it. He cursed the quartermaster for a pessimist. The skipper, though, was brave enough to believe.
“We’re expected, that’s gospel,” he muttered. But he did not change his course, for he knew that on his other side there was a second fleet, tugging at drift leads off the entrance to the main ship channel. It was near hopeless, but he meant to dart between the two.
“Now for a reception as ’ull touch us to the quick, as Loo-ee Sixteenth said––” The skipper cut himself short. “Aye, aye, sir,” he cried, “they’ve spied us!”
“They haven’t!” groaned Murguía. “How could they?”
“’T’aint important now, sir, how they could. There might be a gleam in our wake. But any’ow they ’ave.”
They had indeed. Less than a mile to port there suddenly appeared two red lights, two sullen eyeballs of fire. Then, a rocket cleft the darkness, its slant proclaiming the fugitive’s36course. Hurriedly theLuz’squartermaster sent up a rocket also, but in the opposite direction. It was useless. A third rocket from the signaling blockader contradicted him.
“We’re bein’ chased,” announced the skipper. “One of ’em ’as slipped her chain and got off.”
AsLa Luzhad gained the open, the skipper let his quartermaster take the wheel. “’Old her to the wind, lad,” he cautioned. “A beam sea ’ud swamp us.” Next he whistled down to the engine room. They were to stoke with turpentine and cotton. At once Murguía began to fidget. “It, it will make smoke,” he whined.
“An’ steam. We’re seen a’ready, ain’t we, sir?”
“But it costs more.”
“Not if it clears us. Soft coal ’ud seem bloomin’ expensive, sir, if we got over’auled.”
The race was on. In smooth water it would scarcely have been one. But the boiling fury cut knots from the steamer’s speed, while the Federals sent after her only their sailing vessels, which with all canvas spread bent low to the chase. They had, however, used up time to unreef; and with the terrific rolling they would not dare cast loose a gun.
When morning dawned thickly behind the leaden sky, the three men in the wheelhouse made out a top-gallant sail against the horizon. “By noon,” said the skipper, “the beggars ’ull ’ave us.”
He was a small pert man, was the skipper, with a sharp face, an edge to his voice, and two little points of eyes that glowed. Salt water had not drenched his dry cockney speech, and he was a gamin of the sea and as keen to its gammon ways as in boyhood he had been to those of pubs around the old Bow Bells.
Don Anastasio heard the verdict with a shudder. Given the nature of the man, his mortal fear was the dreadfullest torture that could be devised. The game little cockney peered into37his distorted face, and wondered. Never was there a more pitiful coward, and yet the craven had passed through the same agony full twenty times during the last few years. Murguía knew nothing of the noble motives which make a man stronger than terror, but he did know a miser’s passion. He begrudged even the costlier fuel that was their hope of safety.
“Your non-payin’ guest, sir,” said the skipper, pointing downward. “’Spose he wants to buy them ’ere smokestacks?”
The trooper had appeared on deck. He was clinging to a cleat in the rail with a landsman’s awkwardness and with the cunning object of proving to the ship that he wasn’t to be surprised off his feet another time. He swayed grandly, generously, for’ard and aft, like a metronome set at a large, sweeping rhythm. Every billow shot a flood from stern to bow, and swished past his boots, but he was heedless of that. His head was thrown back, a head of stubborn black curling tufts, and he seemed absorbed in theLuz’stwo funnels. They gave out little smoke now, for with daylight the skipper had changed to anthracite again, in the forlorn hope of hiding their trail. But it had lessened their steam pressure, and in a short time, the skipper feared, the pursuer would make them out, hull and all.
A moment later the passenger climbed into the wheelhouse. “Look here–Mur–Murgie,” he said, “for a seven-hundred-dollar rate that was a toler’ble unsteady cabin I had last night; restless, sort of. It’s mighty curious, but something’s been acting up inside of me, and I can’t seem to make outwhatit is!” As he spoke, he glanced inquiringly from owner to skipper. He might have been another Panurge envying the planter of cabbages who had one foot on solid earth and the other not far away. He looked pale.
It afforded Don Anastasio little satisfaction to find a young man not more than twenty-two or three. Without his great coat the Southerner proved lithe rather than stocky. There38was even an elusive angular effect to him. Yet the night before he had looked as wide and imposing as the general of an army. His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard. His features had that decisive cleanliness of line which makes for strong beauty in a man. Evidently nature had molded them boyishly soft and refined at first, but in the hardening of life, of a life such as his, they had become rugged. Most of all, the face was unmistakably American. The large mouth had that dry, whimsical set, and that sensitiveness to twitching at the corners, which foretells a smile. The brown eyes sparkled quietly, and contour and expression generally were those which one may find on a Missourian, or a Texan, or on a man from Montana, or even on a New Yorker born; but never, anywhere, except on an American. Whatever is said to the contrary, the new Western race in its fusing of many old ones has certainly produced not one but several peculiarly American types, and Driscoll’s was American. It was most so because it had humor, virility, and the optimism that drives back despair and holds forth hope for all races of men.
Murguía was right, his passenger seemed a boy. But war and four years of hardest riding had meant more of age than lagging peace could ever hold. Sometimes there flitted across the lad’s face a vague melancholy, but being all things rather than self-inspecting, he could never quite locate the trouble, and would shake himself out of it with a sort of comical wonder. Bitterness had even touched him the night before, as it did many another Southerner on the eve of the Surrender. Yet the boy part in him made such moods rare, and only passing at their worst. On the other hand the same boy-part gave a vigor and a lustre to his occupation, though that occupation was–fighting. He knew no other, and in that the young animal worked off excess of animal life with a refreshing gusto. Even his comrades, of desperado stripe that they were, had dubbed him the Storm Centre. And so he was, in every tempest of arms. The very joy of living–in killing, alas!–always flung him true to the centre. But once there, he was like a calm and busy workman, and had as little self consciousness of the thing–of the gallantry and the heroism–as the prosiest blacksmith. He had grown into a man of dangerous fibre, but he was less aware of it than of his muscles.
“JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL–THE MISSOURIAN”“His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard andbrown from the weathering of sun and blizzard”
“JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL–THE MISSOURIAN”“His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard andbrown from the weathering of sun and blizzard”
39Various items on theLuzstruck the trooper as amusing. There was the incongruity of his seven-hundred-dollar cabin, the secession of his stomach from the tranquillity of the federal body organic, and finally, this running away from somebody. But he quickly perceived that the last was serious enough. The skipper lowered his glasses, and shook his perky head a number of times. “Whosaid life was all beer and skittles?” he demanded defiantly, and glared at Driscoll as thoughhehad. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though this proved that the man whohadsaid it was an imbecile. Murguía, by the way, had come to hate no truth more soulfully than the palpable shortcoming of life in the matter of beer and skittles. And now it was borne in upon him again, for the skipper announced, definitely and with an oath, that they’d have to begin throwing the cargo overboard.
Poor Don Anastasio behaved like a man insane. He wrung his hands. He protested stoutly, then incoherently. He whined. He glared vengefully at the dread sail on the horizon, and then he shrank from it, as from a flaming sword. And as it grew larger, his eyeballs rounded and dried into smaller discs. But at once he would remember his darling cotton that must go to the waves, and the beady eyes swam again in moisture, like greenish peas in a sickly broth. Avarice and terror in discord played on the creature as the gale through the whimpering cordage.
“No ’elp for it, sir,” said the skipper, bridling like a bantam. “Didn’t I try to savemycargo, off Savannah, and didn’t I40lose my sloop to boot? Didn’t I now, sir?–Poor old girl, mebby she’s our chaser out ’ere this very minute.”
“Try–try more turpentine,” said Murguía weakly.
“Yes, or salt bacon, sir, or cognac, or the woodwork, or any blarsted thing I see fit, sir!” The little skipper hit out each item with a step downward to the deck, and five minutes later Murguía groaned, for bale after bale came tumbling out of the hold. Then over they began to go, the first, the second, the third, and another, and another, and after each went a moan from Anastasio. He leaned through the window to see one tossing in the waves, then suffered a next pang to see the next follow after. It was an excruciating cumulus of grief. The trooper regarded him quizzically. Destruction of merely worldly goods had become routine for him. He returned to his contemplation of the two funnels.
The skipper came back, dripping with pray. “The wind’s changin’,” he said, “and that’ll beat down the sea some.”
“Reckon they’ll get us?” Driscoll asked.
Murguía took the query as an aggravation of woe, and he turned wrathfully on the trooper. “Don’t you see we’re busy?”
“I see you’re very damn sullen,gra-cious me!–Reckon they will, captain?”
“We’ll be eatin’ a United States of America supper, chained, sir.”
“Now look here,” said Driscoll plaintively, “Idon’t want to get caught.”
“But I hope as you’ll bide with us, sir?”
“Still, I was just thinking–now that smoke––”
“And I’m a thinkin’ you don’t see much smoke. We’re keepin’ out o’ sight as long as God’ll let us.”
“But, Captain, why not smoke up–big? Just wait now–this ain’t any of my regiment, I know that–but listen a minute anyway. Well, once or twice when we were in a fix, in camp,41say, and we knew more visitors were coming than was convenient, w’y, we’d just light the campfires so they would smoke, and then–meantime–we’d light out too. Old Indian trick, you know.”
The skipper was first impatient. But as that did no good, he cocked himself for a laugh. Then his mouth puckered to a brisk attention, and at the last word he jumped to his feet. “Damme!” he said, and went thumping down the steps again. He splashed through the water on deck, minding the stiff wind not at all, and dived into the engine-room.
“Soft coal!” gasped Murguía with relief.
It was pouring from the stacks in dense black clouds.
The captain returned. “We’ll try to save the rest o’ that ’ere cotton, sir,” he said.
He looked out at the trembling smoke that betrayed their course so rashly, and from there back to the pursuer on the horizon. He waited a little longer, carefully calculating; then sent an order down the tube to the engineer. The dampers were shut off, and the fuel was changed to anthracite. Soon the smoke went down, and a hazy invisible stream puffed from the funnels instead. TheLuzswung at right angles to her former course. The paddles threshed hopefully, and on she sped, leaving no track. The skipper gazed back at the lowering line, which ended abruptly on their port and trailed off toward the horizon with a telegraphy of deceit for the distant sail.
“You soldiers, colonel,” he announced, “don’t ’ave no monopoly on tricks and gammon,I’ma thinkin’. But I s’y, w’at if you and me go down to my cabin and have anoggin?”
ThusLa Luzran her last blockade, and came safely into port. She reached Tampico some two days before theImpératrice Eugénie. Whereupon Din Driscoll, as he was called anywhere off the muster roll, informed Don Anastasio that he42would continue with him on into the interior. And as seen already, Murguía humbly excused delay, though his guest was not invited, not wanted, and cordially hated besides. That meek smirk of Don Anastasio’s was the absurdest thing in all psychology.
Yet what perhaps aggravated the old man most was curiosity. He craved to know the errand of his young despot. In the doorway of the Tampico mesón he still hovered near, and ventured more questions.
“How was it that, thatyouhappened to be sent, señor?” he asked.
“Well now,” observed the trooper, “there you go figuring it out that I was sent at all.”
“It must have been–uh, because you know Spanish. Are you a–a Texan, Señor Coronel?”
“They raised me in Missouri,” said the colonel. “But I learned to talk Pan-American some on the Santa Fé trail. We had wagon trains out of Kansas City when I was a good sight younger.”
“I thought,” said the old man suspiciously, “that perhaps you learned it with Slaughter’s army, along the Rio Grande. Slaughter, he’s near Brownsville yet, isn’t he?”
“Is he?”
“With about twenty-five thousand men?”
“Lord, I’ve clean forgot, not having counted ’em lately.”
“Where did you come from then, when you came to Mobile?”
“W’y, as I remember, from Sand Spring, Missouri, near the Arkansas line.”
A more obscure crossroads may not exist anywhere, but its bare mention had a curious effect on the prying Don Anastasio. In the instant he seemed to cringe before his late passenger.
“Then you–Your Mercy,” he exclaimed, “belongs to Shelby’s Brigade?”
43The Missourian nodded curtly. His questioner was extraordinarily well informed.
“And, and how many men has Shelby at Sand Spring?”
“Oh, millions. At least millions don’t appear to stop ’em any.”
“But señor, how, how many Confederates are there altogether west of the Mississippi?”
Driscoll, though, had had enough. “Look here Murgie,” he said, “if you keep on crawling, you’ll crawl up on a mongoose one of these days, andthosethings have teeth.”
He might have gone further into natural history, but a sudden commotion down the street interrupted. “It’s a race!” he cried. “No–Lordsake, if they ain’t fighting!”
He drew off his coat, took the pipe from his mouth, and shoved it into his hip pocket, all with the air of a man who has smoked enough and must be getting to work. His brown eyes quickened. It was akin to the satisfaction a merchant feels who scents an unexpected order. He was ready to deliver the goods instantly. His heavy boots went clattering and his great spurs jangling, and soon he was stooping over two men rolling in the dust. But he straightened and thrust his hands into his pockets. He was disappointed. The unexpected order was a hoax. The combatants were one to one, and he could not fairly enter into competition. Then an unaccustomed method for getting into the bidding occurred to him. He might be peacemaker. He leaned over again, to separate them. Each long-fingered hand reached for a collar. Yet even as he caught hold one of his prizes went limp in his grasp. He pulled out the survivor, who proved to be a ragged Mexican with a knife. The other was a French sailor. Driscoll shook the native angrily, whereupon the little demon swung the knife with vicious intent. But Driscoll held him at arm’s length, and the sweeps fell short, to the amazement and rage of his captive.
44“You miserable little chocolate-hided galoot, why couldn’t you wait for me?”
But the chocolate-hided only squirmed to get away. Driscoll glanced up the street whence the two had come. At the next corner, before a café, he saw things more promising. A ranchero with a drawn revolver was holding off a young officer in sky-blue uniform, while around them a swarm of natives and ten or eleven sailors were circling uneasily, as if waiting for some sign to begin hostilities. The joy of battle dilated the trooper’s nostrils.
“W’y, here I’ve been wasting time on a smaller edition.”
So saying, he flung aside his prisoner; and in another minute he was the centre of the main affair, and having an excellent time.