“Then John bent up his long bende-bowe,And fetteled him to shoote.”–Robin Hood.
“Then John bent up his long bende-bowe,And fetteled him to shoote.”
–Robin Hood.
Into the crowd before the café, the Storm Centre pushed the argument of shoulders, and quickly gained for himself the place which his pseudonym indicated. Then he stopped, and looked puzzled. Which side to take? The French, being outnumbered, offered the larger contract.
“What’s the row?” Driscoll inquired of Ney. But he was ignored. “Might answer,” he suggested insidiously, “for it’s only a toss-up anyhow which way I enlist. Look here, Sky-Blue, if you don’t understand Spanish, just say so, and tell me why you don’t start the game.”
Ney shoved him aside impatiently, but he calmly stepped back again.
“Come now,” he argued plaintively, “let me in, don’t be selfish? But–goodness gracious, man, why don’t you draw your gun?”
“Because, my good fellow, I haven’t any.”
The mystery cleared at once, for now Driscoll understood the strategic outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney’s head, and quite statuesque the romantic Mexican looked. But out of the tail of his eye Fra Diavolo noted the American, at first with contemptuous amusement only. Then, as though such had been the situation from the start, he grew aware of an ugly black muzzle under his chin. For very safety46he froze rigid, and dared not turn his own weapon from Ney to his new aggressor. But he wondered how the ugly black muzzle came there. He had not seen the American move. But for those who did see, the action seemed deliberate, with no hint of the actual panther-like turn of the wrist from the waist outward.
With his left hand Driscoll next drew forth the second of the brace, and held it out to Ney in his palm. The Chasseur seized the weapon joyfully. He straightened as the humiliation of a disarmed soldier fell from him. But at once his face clouded, and with an oath he handed back the navy-six.
“W’y, what’s the matter?” asked Driscoll.
“You are trifling, man. That thing has no trigger.”
Much as an artisan would explain the peculiarities of a favorite tool, Driscoll said, “Now look here, you strip it–this way–so.”
And as he explained, he illustrated. He raised the hammer under his thumb, he released it on the cartridge, and Fra Diavolo’s sombrero flew off.
Fra Diavolo threw up his hand involuntarily, and there was a second report. Fra Diavolo’s pistol twisted out of his grasp. The brace of navies had not gone higher than the American’s waist.
“So,” Driscoll concluded.
At the same moment one of the sailors, a bullet-headed lad of Normandy, was observed to do a very peculiar thing. Jumping in front of Fra Diavolo he drew up one knee, for all the world like a dancer who meant then and there to cut a pigeon’s wing. His foot described a circle under the knee, then the performer turned partly round, and as a lightning bolt his leg straightened out full against Fra Diavolo’s stomach. The ranchero dropped like a bag of sand, except that he groaned. Ney captured the fallen pistol. A musket blazed, and a sailor cursed. And forthwith the maelstrom began. It went swirling47round, with weird contortions and murderous eddies, but always its seething vortex was the lone trooper.
Luckily, firearms were out of the question where both sides were so mixed together. But Mexicans and sailors plied their knives instead, so that there was much soppy red spreading over the yellowish white of shirts, and over the blue of jackets. The pigeon-wing diversion, called the savate, also played its bizarre rôle, for wherever a Frenchman found space for the straightening out of a leg, in that instant a little native shot from him as a cat from the toe of a boot. Fra Diavolo was deposited flat on his back each time he tried to rise, till the sole of a foot took on more terror than a cannon’s mouth. As for Michel Ney, he was beautiful and gallant, now that what he had to do came without thinking. He achieved things splendidly with the butt of his enemy’s revolver, and exhorted his men the while to the old, brilliant daring of Frenchmen.
The Storm Centre, though, was merely workmanlike. He put away the six-shooters, and strove barehanded with joy and vigor, which was delightful; yet so systematic, that it was anything rather than romance. It might have been geometry, in that a foe is safer horizontal than perpendicular, and the theorem he applied industriously, with simple faith and earnest fists.
Yet, all told, it was a highly successful affair. Din Driscoll objected to the brevity, but that could hardly be altered for his sake. The little demons of Mexicans crawled from the outskirts of the mess, here one, there two or three, and now many, limping and nursing heads, and rubbing themselves dubiously, with hideous grimaces.
Suddenly the café door opened, and Jacqueline emerged, tripping lightly. Din Driscoll was filling his cob pipe, but he paused with a finger over the bowl. “If there isn’t a woman in it!” he muttered. He felt imposed upon. The game was a man’s game, and now its flavor was gone.
48Jacqueline had seen nothing of the fray, but now she saw Fra Diavolo’s Contra Guerrillas skulking away and the sardonic captain himself fuming in ignoble soreness on his back. “Indeed,” with fine scorn she demanded of Ney, “and how did you manage it?”
“Looks like the wrong side won out,” mused Driscoll, feeling a little uncomfortable.
“Permit me to congratulate you–sergeant,” she went on. “It’s a good beginning for promotion. If you only knew how hard Maximilian tries to win over these natives, and here the very first thing you–Hélas! poor Prince Max!”
Driscoll caught one word from her French. “What’s that about Maximilian?” he interrupted. He had to repeat, and then Jacqueline only glanced at him over her shoulder. Some mule driver, she imagined, and turned again to the abashed Chasseur.
But the pseudo mule driver moved squarely in front of her. He was embarrassed and respectful, but determined. Jacqueline lifted her brows. “My good man, this is effrontery!” But her good man did not quail. She noticed him a little then. He was ruddy and clean, with a stubble growth on his jaw. Since the civilization of Mobile, Lieutenant Colonel Jno. D. Driscoll had backslided into his old campaign ease. His first genuine stiff beard had found him sabre in hand, so that his knowledge of cutting instruments and of arched brows was limited. He said that he would be much obliged to have his question answered. Whereat Jacqueline thought, by her faith, “What a round, wholesome voice these rustics sometimes have!” The one she heard possessed the full rich quality of an Irishman’s brogue, with the brogue worn off.
“You know Spanish, do you not, señorita?”
“Mais–why, better than I thought,” she returned in English; and in English that was piquant because it could not49help being just the least bit French as well. “Much better–because, I comprehend even yours, sir.”
“Con-grat-ulate you,” Driscoll returned. “But what’s this about Maximilian?”
An eagerness in his manner caught her attention. But she answered with her old irony. “His Imperial Majesty seems to concern you profoundly, monsieur?”
“H’m’m–oh no! Only it’s curious how he gets mixed up in this shindy of ours.”
“If–if you are asking about Maximilian, señor,” a heavy voice began. Fra Diavolo at least was not indifferent to the American’s questioning, and now he explained that the lady was the Marquesa d’Aumerle, and that she was on her way from Paris to the Mexican court. But a storm having brought her to Tampico, she wished to finish her journey overland. He, the Capitan Morel of His Majesty’s Contra Guerrillas, had offered her escort for the trip. But the French caballero had presumed to force her to continue by water.
“By water?” Driscoll repeated, glaring at Ney. “That poor little girl!–And make her sick again!”
Jacqueline’s chin tilted. “Ma foi, monsieur, I was not sick.”
Driscoll noted her fragile dainty person, and recalling his own experience, had grave doubts about the consistency of Nature. But this was apart. There was still the mystery of his having blundered into a business that somehow concerned the Emperor of Mexico. And it was a matter that must be set right.
“You say you are an officer,” he demanded of the ranchero, “but your Greaser clothes, that’s not a uniform?”
Uniforms were not necessarily a part of the contra-guerrilla service, said the Mexican; and besides, there might be reasons for a disguise. But as to his own identity, he reproduced the order signed by Colonel Dupin.
“Correct,” said Driscoll, and handed back the paper.
50“Now then,” he added to Ney, “what do you say for yourself?”
Unconsciously the French soldier replied as to a superior officer. “I’ve just been transferred to the service of His Excellency, Marshal Bazaine, in the City of Mexico, and am on my way there now.”
“You are in the French service?”
“Of course I am.”
“Your rank?”
“Sergeant.”
Here, in a caprice of kind heart, as well as of mischief, Jacqueline interposed. “Your sergeant, Monsieur the American, is the Duke of Elchingen.” But she might have called Ney a genus homo, for all the impression it made.
“Too bad, sergeant,” said Driscoll, “but a captain ranks first, you know, and–well, I reckon I’ll have to change sides. I know it’s tough,” and his brow knitted with droll perplexity, “but I’m afraid we’ll just have to do this thing all over again, unless–well, unless you give in, sergeant.”
Jacqueline had been waxing more and more agog, and her boot had tapped impatiently. Now she gave way, and declared that it was too much. What, she demanded, had monsieur to do with the matter in the first place? Driscoll took off his slouch hat and ran his fingers through his hair to grope for an answer. It had never been brought to him before that fighting might be a private preserve. But his face cleared straightway. In this second skirmish, due momentarily, he would be a legitimate belligerent and not a trespasser, because since he had stumbled amuck of Maximilian’s authority, another joust was needed to correct the first. It all depended on whether Miss–Miss–if the señorita–still wished to go by land.
“If monsieur will have the condescension,” returned Jacqueline.
51Then out came the brace of navies once more, as naturally as the order book of the grocer’s clerk on your back porch. Involuntarily Ney reached for his cap.
“Now captain,” said Driscoll.
Fra Diavolo took the cue instantly. “A-i, mis muchachos!” he called, and the little demons came hurrying back, like a damned host with a new hope of heaven.
If there were any police about, or had been, they were mysteriously indifferent. But Jacqueline did just as well. No one had thought to put her back in the café, and she promptly took a hand in the man’s game.
“Michel Ney,” she commanded, “do you hear me; lower that pistol!”
“You, you wish me to surrender, mademoiselle?”
“You know I don’t! If anyone even asks it, I will go back to the ship with you, at once.”
“But I, I don’t understand.”
“You understand that I want your escort overland. Is it gallant, then, to disappoint me by getting yourself killed?”
“But all your trunks are on the ship.”
Jacqueline turned to her Fra Diavolo. He could answer that? To be sure he could, and he was honored. He suggested, with her permission, that she spend the night on shore, she and her maid, since the café was also a hotel. Meantime, the sailors could bring what she needed from the boat.
As he listened, Ney’s slow thoughts came to a focus. And when Jacqueline turned to him again, he gave way graciously, which brought on him a sharp scrutiny from the ranchero. However, the truce between the two antagonists was patched up with a readiness on both sides. Ney restored to Fra Diavolo his pistol, and had his own weapons back in exchange. Next he took the ship’s steward aside, apparently to instruct him about bringing the trunk. “And steward,” he whispered, “don’t forget to make it urgent. The skipper must land all52the troops on board at once.” He decided that meantime he would stroll up to the fort on his own account, and bring down more aid from there.
“Now then,” reflected the beaming young Gaul, “ourspirituellelittle marquise will find that one may have wits, and not read her dense old poets, either.”
He opened the café door for her and both joined the maid Berthe, who was still clinging to sanctuary inside.
The American lieutenant-colonel and the Mexican capitan looked at one another. They felt deserted. Fra Diavolo’s teeth bared. “Ai, que mal educados,” he observed. “They’re ill-bred, I say. They kick a gentleman in the stomach–in the stomach, señor!”
Driscoll turned to go. It was enough of satisfaction to reflect that, if any mention of the affair reached Maximilian, his own part therein would not injure his errand to Mexico. As for the rest, Mexicans and French could go their own ways–he had amused himself. “Well, adios, captain,” he said, and swung on his heel.
“Wait! Which direction, señor?”
“To this mesón here, around the corner.”
“If Your Mercy is not in a hurry––”
Driscoll nodded, and the capitan stopped to say a few words to two of his vagabonds. One of these immediately hurried off in the direction of the river. The other was still loafing outside the café when his chief rejoined Driscoll.
“Looks like you were interested in His Resplendent Majesty,” Fra Diavolo began with weighty lightsomeness. “Mustn’t hurt his feelings, eh, caballero?”
Driscoll laughed easily, “It was all on the girl’s account,” he said.
The ranchero glanced at him quickly, sideways, a dark look of suspicion. “On her account, señor, not Maximilian’s?” he repeated. “Dios mio, caballero, I’ll wager you have forgotten53her already.” Which, to tell the truth, was fairly exact.
At the mesón Don Anastasio regarded the American with much more respect to see him returning in such company. But to Fra Diavolo he addressed himself in his thin obsequious voice, “You see I am waiting, as you wished. But on my, my daughter’s account, I––”
“So, captain,” Driscoll interrupted, “you’re the one that’s holding back Murgie! Just tell him, Murgie, that I am in a rush.”
Fra Diavolo smiled and bade his American have patience, for he quite believed that the Señor Murguía would be starting in the morning.
“Si señor,” he went on in a different tone, when Driscoll had left him alone with the trader, “you set out to-morrow, and you are to have two extra horses ready. But for whom, do you suppose? Bien, they are for La Señorita Jacqueline and her maid.”
Murguía’s countenance changed strangely, a most inexplicable contortion. His little rat eyes focused on the ranchero, and he drew back in a sort of fear. Convoy her whom people called Jacqueline through the lawless Huasteca, at the bidding of this man! “No, no, no!” he cried, and shuddered too.
Trying to read a meaning behind the capitan’s dark scowl, he knew only too well the meaning that was there. He moaned at the thought. Maximiliano would have him shot, or burned, or tortured. He would lose his ranch, his cotton mill. He would be poor. It was vague, what would happen, but it was horrible, horrible!
“Hush, you fool!” growled Fra Diavolo. “The entire mesón will hear you, including that Gringo.”
“That Gringo? He, he is one of your friends?”
“Friend! For Dios, he nearly ruined my little plans for54Jacqueline. Listen, he has business of some kind with Maximiliano.”
“Yes, yes. And there’s a–a mystery in his business.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I knew, would it be a mystery?”
“Who is he?”
“He won’t tell. I only know that he is a Confederate officer.”
“A Confederate officer?” The capitan whistled low and softly. “Come to the Plaza, there you can tell me what you think.”
And in the solitude of the Plaza they planned according to their suspicions.
“Cry ‘holla’ to thy tongue, I prithee; it curvets unseasonably.”–As You Like It.
“Cry ‘holla’ to thy tongue, I prithee; it curvets unseasonably.”
–As You Like It.
“Strange there’s no motion,” thought Jacqueline the next morning, rubbing her eyes. “Why, what ails the old boat, I wonder?” Then she remembered. She was in the Tampico hotel which called itself a café, and the landlord’s wife was knocking on her door and calling “Niñ-a, niñ-a” with a plaintive stress on the first syllable. The word means girl, and oddly enough, is often used by a Mexican servant to address her mistress.
“I’m not a n-e-e-n-ya,” Jacqueline assured her drowsily, “and if I were, madame, why make a fête out of it this way in the middle of the night?”
“Niñ-a,” the unctuous nasal rose higher, “if Your Mercy goes with Don Anastasio, she must hurry. It is late. It is four o’clock, niña.”
“Four o’clock–late?” gasped the luxurious little marquise. “And how much difference, exactly, would your four o’clocks make on the planet Mars, my good woman?”
“But niña, there is Don Anastasio, he is ready to start.”
“And who is Don Anastasio, pray?”
“The trader, niña, at the mesón. He is to take Your Mercy to Valles, as Don–as the Capitan Morel told Your Mercy yesterday.”
“The Capitan Morel,pardi!Faith, if any man had told56me it meant rising at any such unholy hour. Oh well, I suppose it is the hour for larks, too.”
And sighing at the sacrifice of an age of slumber, Jacqueline reached out for the matches. But there was no dainty limbed night table of a Louis XV. beside her bed, which helped her again to remember where she was, and if doubts still remained, they were gone when her bare feet touched the fibrous, prickly native carpet instead of soft furs.
She groped to the door, and opened it enough to take a greasily odorous candle from a dusky hand outside. As the sickly glimmer awakened the shadows, she called the woman back in sudden dismay. “My trunk, señora, kindly have it sent up at once. No,” she added, catching a fluffy garment from a chair, “in five minutes.”
There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. “Niña, it is not here. I believe, niñ-a, it is at the mesón, with Don Anastasio.”
“F-flute!” cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but it may express a lass’s exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is nothing except a catastrophe. “Now just possibly,” she soliloquized, “they permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two days together,” whereupon she sat herself down despairingly among the crisp things that had already had their poor little day. To mock her there was the jaunty handsatchel packed for an hour’s shore leave. She let petulance have sway, and informed herself that she should not go a step, when the voice in the hall pleaded insidiously that Her Mercy make haste.
“But I am, señora, I’m making fast haste,” and she sat three minutes longer, communing with her tragedy. “Oh, this bitten, biting country,” she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and fiery blotches on the soft white skin. “Still, if there’s a brigand for every mosquito, it may yet be worth57while.” Hopefully she rose and called Berthe from the next room to help her dress.
When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord’s wife took their satchel, and led them over broken sidewalks to the mesón, where the street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows. Murguía’s caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.
“Now wherecanit be?” she cried.
The rebosa about the shoulders of the Mexican woman rose. She knew nothing. But the gesture was an unabridged philosophical system as to the resignation and the indifference that is seemly when one knows nothing. Jacqueline refrained from pinching her, and pursued the quest of her trunk even into the mesón.
Hardly had she passed within when a greatly agitated little old man tried to overtake her. But at the door he thought better of it and vented his chagrin on the Mexican woman.
“Why did you let her go in there?” he cried. “She will wake the Gringo, she will wake the Gringo!”
Jacqueline reappeared. “No trunk,” she announced. “Do you know, Berthe, I do not believe it came at all?”
The old man’s voice sounded at her elbow, faltering, placating. “With permission, señorita, we must be starting.”
“And similarly with permission, señor, who are you?”
“Anastasio Murguía, the servant of Your Mercy.”
“Ah, the poor little crow? Perhaps you will tell me, sir, why neither the Señor Ney nor Fra–nor Captain Morel is here?”
“The young French caballero had visited the fort last evening, he replied. Her Mercy knew that? Yes, precisamente. Yes, the caballero had spent the night up there with his compatriots of the garrison. Her Mercy did not know that? No? But it was quite exact, yes, because he, Don Anastasio, had been so informed. But the Señor Ney would meet them out58of Tampico–yes, precisamente, with a detachment of cavalry from the fort.”
“That poor Michel!” said Jacqueline. “He’s determined that I am to have a French escort. But Captain Morel, señor?”
Murguía would not answer. He repeated the question to the Mexican woman, who took up explanations with a glib readiness. “Si, niña, I saw the capitan, not more than an hour ago. He was riding by the café, to meet his–Contra Guerrillas. But he stopped and woke me. He said that I was to bring Your Mercies here to the mesón, and to say that he would meet Your Mercies–yes, surely, before you had gone very far, niña.” Her tone was a sugared whine, and more than once she peered around at Murguía; while he, for his part, stood by as though overseeing a task. But Jacqueline only allowed herself a little inconsequential sniff, and went back to the really serious business that did worry her. She demanded her trunk.
“How, the señorita does not know?” asked Murguía.
“Know what?”
“That the sailors did not come back from the ship?”
“Not come back! Eh bien, I will not go a step.”
At first Don Anastasio’s pinched face lighted with relief. But at once a conflicting anxiety, lest she mightnotgo, seemed to possess him. “But señorita,” he protested, “what will Your Mercy do? The ship, yes, señorita, the ship has sailed already. It left last night for Vera Cruz.”
“And here am I,” Jacqueline exclaimed, tapping her foot, “with only one dress!”
A long bubbling whistle sounded near a gendarme’s lantern in the middle of the street. A block away another sounded, then another, and another, and others yet, each thinly shrill and distant. It was the challenge to slumber and the answer of wakefulness from the watches of the night over the silent city.
59“Another quarter gone by!” Murguía exclaimed nervously. “Come, señoritas, if we are to reach the Valles stage by nightfall, we have no time to lose. There are your horses, I will––”
A tremor cut short his words. Someone had just emerged from the mesón.
“Gracious, Murgie, off so early?” the newcomer observed cheerily.
Murguía scowled. He knew that tone.
“If I’m late, I apologize,” the other drawled gently, from behind the flare of a match over his pipe. “Howsoever, all my eyes weren’t shut, and you wouldn’t of left me. Pretty quiet about striking camp, though! Didn’t want to disturb me, maybe? Well, well, who made you so thoughtful? Not Captain Morel? Now I wonder!”
“I uh, whyshouldI wake you, Mis-ter Driscoll? Have I asked you even to go?”
“N-o, but you evidently asked old Demijohn there.” And Driscoll pointed to his horse, all saddled. “But cheer up, Convoluting Squirmer, of course I know you aren’t a horse thief. No, I just come out to say you forgot the blanket. I was sleeping on it.”
Then he turned to the two girls. They were going also. But why try to leave him behind, even without a horse? He knew, for all his whimsical cheerfulness, that something serious was afoot. It was hardly likely that the girls themselves had interfered. Still, he must make sure. To provoke a reply elsewhere, he asked Murguía if it were the señoritas, perhaps, and not Captain Morel, who preferred his absence? A surprised “Ma foi!” from Jacqueline answered him. As he supposed, she had not thought of him one way or another.
But she deigned to say, that since the Americangentleman–there was a lingering on the word, which opened wide the Storm Centre’s eyes with anticipation of battle–that since the American gentleman had broached the subject of his going60(as no doubt interesting him, being about himself), then she would permit herself to inquire why, indeed, he should be going with them at all. She had not observed any cordiality in the requests for his society.
The light was not good, and she did not see his lips pucker as for a long whistle. But he did not whistle. He replied very humbly; and so sweetly that Murguía quailed for the little shrew.
“W’y miss,” he said, “it all comes of feeling my responsibility. I’m the cause of your going, and that’s why I’m going too.”
His very earnestness gave her to understand that he had forgotten her entirely. The finesse of the Tuileries could not have struck home more delicately, and more keenly. “I’ve often heard,” she thought to herself, “that an awkward swordsman is dangerous.” But she made no cry of “touchée!” Instead she caught at the point to turn the blade aside. “Responsibility? Truly sir, youareconsiderate. But permit me–my safety on this trip, what concern can that have for Your Mercy?”
“None at all,” replied Driscoll, heartily.
His brow, none the less, was crinkled, and he watched dubiously as Murguía helped the two girls into great armchair-like saddles. There was not a woman’s saddle in Tampico, but Jeanne d’Aumerle did not mind that. She, the marchioness, enjoyed the oddity of a pommel in lieu of horn. And the lady’s maid might have been on a dromedary, for all the consciousness the poor child had of it.
“Say,” Driscoll interrupted with cool obstinacy, “where’s our friend the captain and that sky-blue Frenchman?”
Murguía pretended not to heed him. Jacqueline really did not. But Berthe spoke up eagerly. She said that the two gentlemen were to meet them later in the day. At least she hoped so, but–no, no, there could be no doubt of it! Yet her61words faltered, and there was an appeal in them. But if she placed any hope in the strange American, she was quickly disappointed.
“All right,” he said, as if the matter were of no further consequence. “Then I can make a nice comfortable report to Maximilian.”
“Report to Maximiliano?” exclaimed Murguía.
Driscoll nodded indifferently.
“But Señor Coronel, when you do, you–you will remember that I said nothing to–that is, to persuade the señoritas to take this journey.”
“Nor not to take it, Wriggler.”
“Yet you will say to His Majesty that I did suggest–yes, I do now–that they had better not––”
His utterance drivelled to incoherency. The Mexican woman, she of the café, stood before him. There was a warning on her stolid countenance. Murguía wet his lips. “But,” he stammered, “there–oh what danger can there be in their going?”
Driscoll shoved him aside and placed himself at the head of Jacqueline’s horse. “You had better risk the water, miss,” he said quietly.
“My good sir,” she replied, clear and cold, “I commend your prudence, in making certain, before you dared touch my bridle-rein, that neither of the two gentlemen were here.”
Din Driscoll swung on his heel. “Damned!” he murmured, and he pronounced the “n” and the “d” thoroughly, to make the word adequate if possible. “Lord, I believe I feel like a closed incident! And to think, Demijohn,” he went on as he busied himself about his horse, “to think that it’s the first and only time we’ve ever seen trouble coming and tried to keep out of it.”
But the trouble might appear now, he had done what he could. The thought brightened him, and he patted his short62ribs musingly. There was a friendly protuberance there on either side. His belt sagged comfortingly. He opened the pack which he was tying with his blanket behind his saddle, and from it he filled with cartridges the pockets of his rough cape coat.
By now the caravan was passing him. The burros, like square-shelled monstrosities with ears, were settling into a steady trot. Their blanketed arrieros ran beside them and prodded, and were in turn prodded by the fretful Murguía. Then Jacqueline rode by on an ambling little mountain-climber. She had forgotten his presence. This was not a pose with the Marquise d’Aumerle; she had, really. But her little Breton maid coming behind timidly drew rein. Driscoll looked and saw in the moving yellow torchlights that her face was white. A thing like that somehow alters a man’s attitude. “W’y, child,” he exclaimed, “what’s––”
“Monsi–señor,” she said hastily, in pathetic and pretty broken Spanish, “you, oh, you will not leave us! In the mercy of heaven, tell me that you will not! Ah, seigneur,” she sobbed, “mademoiselle will yet lead us to our death!”
“Berthe,” mademoiselle at that instant called, “oh you little ninny, are you coming ever?”
The maid obeyed. “Just the same,” she sighed, “God bless her!”
“And did I,” Driscoll had begun angrily, but she was already gone, and he finished it to himself, “did I once intend to leave you?”
He leaped astride his buckskin horse, who trotted with him briskly to the head of the caravan. Behind was Anastasio Murguía, a quaint combination of silk hat, shawl, and ranchero saddle. The two Frenchwomen followed, and behind came the straggling file of burros and pack horses.
Yet the American was as a solitary traveller leaving a town for the wilderness at the first touch of dawn. The road soon63narrowed down to a trail as it wound through the undergrowth of the Huasteca lowlands, then westward toward a bluish line of mountains. At each cross trail the American would turn in his saddle to force an indication of their course from Murguía. Then on he would ride again, the while sinking deeper and deeper into his thoughts; thoughts of why he had come, of how he might succeed, and of the Surrender at that moment perhaps a fact. For him, though, there was his sabre yet, dangling there under his leg. And there were the sabres of comrades that likewise would not be given up, for to save them that shame was he in Mexico. Riding there, so much alone, and lonely, he was a rough, savage, military figure. But in his meditations, so grave and unwonted in the wild, hard-riding trooper lad, there was nothing to indicate a second nature in him, an instinct that was on the alert against every leafy clump and cactus and mesh of vine.
“And many a Knot unravell’d by the Road;But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.”–Omar.
“And many a Knot unravell’d by the Road;But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.”
–Omar.
Another young person, Jacqueline herself, was also pondering rather soberly this morning. And her thoughts fitted as oddly with her piquant, lightsome, cynical youth as the gloomily patriotic ones of the Storm Centre did with his youth, which was robust and boyish and swashbuckling. To judge from the way their brains worked now, both young people might have been grave wielders of state affairs, instead of the lad and the lass so heartily and pettily scorning each other a short hour before.
Yes, the great rugged Missourian had his disdain too, and for none other than the darling beauty of two imperial courts. The beauty would have been vastly amused, no doubt, had she known of the phenomenon. But knowing a little more, such as its source and the man himself, she must have flushed and drooped, piteously hurt, as none in her own circle could have wounded her. The shafts which flashed in that circle were keenly barbed. They were the more merciless for being politely gilded. But she understood, and despised, the point of view there. It was a dais of velvet, of scarlet velvet. And a worldly little gentlewoman like the Marquise Jeanne was not one to be unaware of the abyss beneath, of which the flaming color was a symbol. But she rather65enjoyed the darts, if only to fling them back more dazzlingly tipped.
The perspective of the Missouri boy was different. And his disdain was different. A titled belle mattered little with him, and was apart, like the girl in a spectacular chorus. Operettas and royal courts were shows, which real men and women paid to see, and to support. He was a deep-breathing, danger-nourished man of life and of things that count. And his only cynicism, and even that unconscious, was the dry honest sort which sheer unpolished naturalness bears to all things trivial and vain and artificial. One can readily understand, then, the attitude of such a man toward a playactor off the stage; toward a playactor, that is, who thinks to impress the great, wide, live world with the superficial mannerisms of his little playacting world. Here was Din Driscoll, Jack Driscoll, Trooper Driscoll, here he was, traveling near a handsome young woman who for the moment had been cut off from her precious wee sphere. And he saw her outside of it, playing coquettishly, and to her own mind, seriously; playing bewitchingly her shallow rôle patterned after life, yet without once realizing the counterfeit. The Western country boy, whatever his Cavalier stock, had a Puritanical backbone in common with the whole American race. And without being aware of it, his personal, private bearing toward the light and airy French girl was a sneer, a tolerant, good-natured and indifferent sneer.
However, Mademoiselle la Marquise was neither amused nor hurt, because, quite simply, she rode in happy oblivion of the rustic and his standards for the appraising of a girl. He looked very straight of neck and spine, and she wondered if he had been cradled in a saddle, but that was all.
Now if Lieutenant-Colonel Driscoll had had the slightest glimpse of what was actually passing through the winsome and supposedly silly little head behind him, there is no reliable66telling into what change of opinion he might have been jostled. But this is certain, that if he had known, he could have saved himself some rare adventures afterward.
In Jacqueline’s musings there was poetry and there were politics. The poetry justified the politics; moreover, was their inspiration. A dilettante such as Jacqueline, æsthetic and delicately sensitive, was naturally a lover of the beautiful in her search after emotions. A sentiment for her surroundings came now as a matter of course. If she turned, she beheld the chaparral plain stretching flatly back of her to the sands and lagoons of the coast. If she flirted her whip overhead, down hurtled a shower of bright yellow hail from the laden boughs. Her nostrils told her of magnolias and orange blossoms; her eyes and ears, of parrots and paroquets and every other conceit in fantastic plumage. They were a restless kaleidoscope of colors blending with the foliage, and from their turmoil they might have been quarreling myriads, and never birds of a paradise. Little red monkeys grinned down at her as they raced clutching among the branches, while a big bandy-legged sambo, an exceedingly ill-tempered member of the same family, bawled his reproaches in a tone gruesomely human. Now and then her horse reared from an adder squirming underfoot, or she would see a torpid boa twined sluggishly around a limb, as about a victim. Once in a jungle-like place she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she made out the sleek form of a jaguar slinking into the swamp. The ugliest of the picturesque “properties” was a monstrous green iguana with his prickly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet along a rotten log.
But the things of horror merely gave to those of beauty a needed contrast, and did not hurt the poetry in the least. They were every one on the same grand, wild scale. As the palms, for instance, rising like slender columns a hundred feet without a single branch. As yet other palms, which were67plumed at the summit like an ostrich wing; or as the smaller ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green. Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite vines were of the same Titan designing, for they bound the girders of the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the flowers–Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and aristocratic a shepherdess.
And then it was a thing for wonderment, that beyond, where the mountains were, all this world changed, yet changed to another as strange and vast. And that still farther on there stretched yet other regions, and each one different, and each no less marvelous and grand. A bewildering prodigality of Nature, spelling the little word “romance”! Jacqueline’s lip quivered as she gazed and imagined, and as the poetry of it filled her soul. But of a sudden the little woman sighed. It was a sigh of rebellion. And just here the politics leaped forth, inspired of the wild thrilling beauty of the world.
“To think,” she half cried, “that we are losing this–all this! And yet we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet for whom, alas? Maximilian?–Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to have, to take from us, such as–this! Now suppose,” her lips formed the unuttered words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning, “just suppose that we–that someone–reminds His Majesty how ingratitude falls short of courtesy between emperors.”
The boy’s thoughts were of the country he had lost. Those of the resplendent and wayward butterfly were of an empire68she meant to gain. But in her, who might suspect the consummate diplomat? Even then she was speaking to Murguía, asking if it were not time that Fra Diavolo remembered his engagements. Driscoll heard the query, and his comment was a mental shrug of the shoulders.
“And when he came bold Robin before,Robin asked him courteously,‘O, hast thou any money to spare,For my merry men and me?’”–Robin Hood.
“And when he came bold Robin before,Robin asked him courteously,‘O, hast thou any money to spare,For my merry men and me?’”
–Robin Hood.
For all his campaigner’s instincts, the first of Driscoll’s expected troubles came and was gone before he knew that it was trouble. It arrived so naturally, and was so well behaved! With a stop for a bowl of coffee at a roadside fonda, they had been traveling for perhaps five hours, when Driscoll saw the heads of two horses and their riders over the brush, and at a turn in the trail he found that they were coming leisurely toward him. He observed them suspiciously, and wistfully. The wild tropics around him had quite won his heart as peculiarly adapted to violent amusements of a desperate tinge, far more so really than his own Missouri woodlands. Yet thus far the uneventful tameness had depressed him as a shameful waste of environment.
To boot all, here was this brace of villainous, well-armed Mexicans not giving the least promise of entertainment. There was nothing to distinguish them from the usual sun-baked rancheros of the Huasteca, unless it were the first man’s straw sombrero, the heavy silver mounting of which must have been worth in bullion alone a fair pocketful of pesos. There was a cord of silver hanging over the broad brim, and there was a silver “T” on one side of the sugar loaf, an “M” on the70other side, and a Roman sword in front, and all three were linked together in fanciful silver scrolls. But the rest of the man was wretched. His feet were encased in the guaraches, or sandals, of a peon. One of his eyes was so crossed that hardly more than a baleful crescent was ever visible. The other vaquero, his companion, had no relieving trait at all, either luxurious or strikingly evil. His breeches of raw leather flapped loosely from the knee down, and at the sides they were slit, revealing the dirty white of cotton calzoncillos beneath. Though the April morning was hot, a crimson serape covered his shoulders. Both men had pistols, and each also had a long machete two inches wide hanging with a lariat from his saddle.
They lifted their sombreros, and he of the gorgeous one inquired if that were Don Anastasio’s outfit coming up behind. A civil answer was merest traveler’s courtesy, and Driscoll reluctantly took his cob pipe from his mouth to reckon that they were pretty nearly correct. He might have loaned them a thousand dollars, to judge from their gratitude, and they made way for him by drawing off the trail entirely. Here they halted till all the burros and horses had gone by. The muleteers in passing them, confusedly touched their hats. Murguía, who was then in the rear, stopped when he saw the two strangers. Driscoll looked back, but judged from the greetings that the three were old acquaintances. The assiduously respectful bearing of the timorous old man was to be counted as only habitual. And when he saw one of Don Anastasio’s mozos bring a bottle and glasses, he was completely reassured, and rested like the others of the caravan some little distance ahead.
Murguía dismissed the mozo, himself poured the cognac, and begged the honor of drinking health and many pesetas to his two “friends.” They craved a like boon, and the clinking of the copitas followed ceremoniously.
“I counted three hundred and sixty-eight half-bales,” said71he of the crossed eye, with a head cocked sideways and tilted. The evidence was against it, but Murguía knew well enough that the sinister crescent was fixed on himself. “Three-sixty-eight, at half a peso each, that makes one hundred and eighty-four pesos which Your Mercy owes us, Don Anastasio. Add on collection charges, ten per cent.–well, with your permission, we’ll call it two hundred flat.”
Don Anastasio manifested an itch for argument.
“Oh leave all that,” he of the crimson serape broke in. “Why go over it again? We are loyal imperialists, and only our lasting friendship for you holds us from informing His Majesty’s Contras how you contribute to that arch rebel, Rodrigo Galán.”
“But,” weakly protested Murguía, “but who believes that Don Rodrigo turns any of it over to the Liberal–to the rebel cause?”
“A swollen-lunged patriot like your Don Rodrigo–of course he does, every cent,” and the cross-eye took on a jocular gleam.
“Now, Señor Murguía,” he of the same eye continued, “the favor of your attention. See that ‘T’ on my sombrero? That’s ‘Tiburcio.’ See that ‘M’? That’s ‘Maximiliano.’ And that sword? That’s ‘Woe to the Conquered,’ at least the sombrero maker said so. Well, Don Anastasio––” and he ended with a gesture that the poor trader saw even in his dreams, the unctuous rubbing of fingers on the thumb.
Sadly Don Anastasio unstrapped a belt under his black vest, and counted out in French gold the equivalent of two hundred Mexican dollars.
Don Tiburcio took the money, and observed, as in the nature of pleasant gossip, that Don Anastasio had quite an unusual outfit this time.
Murguía took alarm immediately. “Not so large as usual, Don Tiburcio. The crops up there––”
72“Crops? No, I don’t mean your cotton. I mean fine linen and muslin, and silks, and laces–petticoats and stockings, Don Anastasio.”
“They–they are Don Rodrigo’s affairs, not mine.”
“Enough yours for you to be anxious to deliver the goods safely, I think. But the rate on that class of stuff is rather high. Now what do you suppose, my esteemed compadre, Don Rodrigo would say if we had to confiscate the consignment?”
But Don Anastasio did not need to suppose. “How much?” he whimpered.
“Well, with the American––”
“Fires of hell consume the American! Collect your tolls from him yourself. He’s no affair of anybody’s.”
The vaqueros laughed. “We’ll throw in the American for nothing,” said Don Tiburcio generously. “Besides, to look at him, he may not be very–tollable. But delicate dress goods now, there’s a heavy duty on them. I should say a hundred apiece.” And without any seeming reference to this revenue statement, the toll taker placed the tip of an index finger under each ear, then pointed them lower down against his throat, then lower again, and at the last the two fingers met in an acute angle, significantly acute, under his chin, while the half-veiled black bead in the outer corner of his eye had a sheen unutterably merry and malignant.
The pantomime bore a money value, for Murguía stifled his wrath, again drew out the belt, and more Napoleons changed hands. Murguía was then for remounting, leaving the flask of brandy with the two imperialist emissaries, as had become his custom. But the jovial Tiburcio stopped him. “What must you think of us, Don Anastasio?” he exclaimed contritely. “We haven’t offered you a drink yet.” Murguía dared not refuse, and he paused for the return of hospitality from his73own bottle. At last he was on his horse, when Tiburcio again called.
“I say, Don Anastasio, if you want a big return for your money”–Don Anastasio halted instantly–“if you do, well, we ought not to say it, being devoted to Maximiliano. But no matter, I will tell you this much, poor old man–look after your daughter! Look after her, Don Anastasio! We’ve just come from up there.”
A half cry escaped the father as he jerked back his horse. He demanded what they meant. He pleaded. But they waved him to go on, and rode away indifferently, taking a cross trail through a stretch of timber.
Rigid, motionless, Murguía looked after them until they had disappeared. But when they were gone, a frenzy possessed him. He turned and galloped to his caravan, which was again moving. He did not stop till he reached the American. “You owe me two hundred dollars,” he cried. Thus his decent emotion concerning his daughter found vent. “Two hundred, I tell you!”
“Will you,” asked Driscoll, “take ’em now, or after you tell me what I owe ’em for?”
Murguía wavered. The simple question brought him to his senses. But he had gone too far not to explain. Besides, his insane device for reimbursing himself appealed to him as good. “Because–don’t you know, señor, that travelers here must pay toll? You don’t? But it’s true, and–and I’ve just paid out two hundred pesos on Your Mercy’s account.”
The trooper’s brown eyes flashed. “Which way did those thieves go?” he demanded. “Quick! Which way?”
Murguía’s avarice changed to trembling. He feared to tell. Driscoll caught his bridle. “Which way, or by–by–Never mind, you’ll pay toll to me, too! I’ll just learn this toll-taking trade myself.”
74Murguía saw a six-shooter sliding out. “You also!” he cried.
“Also?” laughed Driscoll. “There, I knew it, they were robbers.”
He wheeled and rode back with the fury of a cavalry charge, heedless of Murguía’s cries to stop by all the saints, heedless of the saints too. Murguía did not care what happened to his guest, but he cared for what might happen to himself, afterward, at the hands of Don Tiburcio and partner. He frantically called out that he was jesting, that Driscoll owed him nothing. But Driscoll had already turned into the side trail, and was following the hoof prints there. Murguía could hear the furious crackling of twigs as he raced through the timber. But in a little while he heard and saw nothing.
“He’s a centaur, that country boy,” observed Jacqueline critically. “The identical break-neck Centaur himself. Really, Berthe, I think we shall have to dub him Monsieur the Chevalier. Why Berthe, how pale you are!”
“I? Oh, mademoiselle, is there any danger?”
“Danger, child? Nonsense!”
“But what made him do that, that way?”
“Poor simple babe! That was a pose. Our mule driver knows he can ride, but we did not. And there you are.”
“But the little monsieur, he looks like a ghost?”
Jacqueline laughed. “That, I admit, is not a pose. With the little monsieur, it’s become–constitutional.”
A half-hour later they heard an easy canter behind them, and Din Driscoll reappeared, flushed and happy as a boy pounding in first from a foot race. His left hand covered the bowl of his cob pipe from the wind, the other held his slouch hat doubled up by the brim. As for bridle hand, old Demijohn needed none. Driscoll seized Murguía’s silk tile and poured into it from the slouch a shimmering stream of coin and a mass of crumpled paper.
75“To be robbed while I’m along, now that makes memad,” he said. “You won’t tell anybody, will you, Murgie?”
The old man did not hear. His palsied hands were dipping down, dipping down, bathing themselves in the deep silk hat. The hat was heavy with gold and silver pesos, and foaming with bills.
“Greenbacks, Confederate notes,” he mumbled. “Some I’ve paid before–only, lately, the rascals won’t take anything but coin.”
“Why’s that, Murgie?”
“Why, because these green things are not worth much now, while these gray ones”–he fingered them contemptuously–“would not, would not buy a drunkard’s pardon from our cheapest magistrate.”
The slur on Mexican justice only emphasized his scorn of the Confederate notes.
“Give ’em here!” Driscoll snatched them from the yellow, desecrating fingers. “These here are promises,” he muttered, “and we’ve been fighting for four years to make them good. For four years, even the children and old men, and–yes, and the women folks back of us!”
The impulsive mood carried him further. He counted and pocketed the despised notes. Then from an humble tobacco pouch he sorted out a number of British sovereigns, and flung them into Murguía’s hat.
“Prob’bly my last blow for them promises,” he murmured to himself.
Meantime a burro back of them had become possessed of an idea, which for some reason necessitated his halting stock still directly across the trail to think it over. The caravan behind stopped also, while the arrieros snorted “Ar-re!” and “Bur-ro!” through their noses, and prodded the beast. Jacqueline lost patience. She touched her horse, which bounded out of the trail and galloped past the outfit almost to Driscoll76and Murguía. So she had seen the exchange of money and she had heard. She looked thoughtfully at the trooper’s straight line of back and shoulder.
“Monsieur the Chevalier,” she murmured softly, as though trying the sound of the words for the fast time. She would have supposed that none but a Frenchman could have done that.
As to Don Anastasio, the Quixotic redemption in specie was beyond him entirely. He gave it up. The counting of discs was more tangible to his philosophy. His rusty black tile, so wondrously become a cornucopia of wealth, had by that same magic upset the old fellow into a kind of hysterical gaiety, which was most elfish and uncanny. He motioned Driscoll to ride faster.
“Ai, ai, mi coronel,” he cackled, when they were gone out of hearing, “you talk of bandits! Ai, ai, Dios mio,youhave robbedthem!”
“What the devil––”
“Si señor, robbedthem! A-di-o-dio-dios! here’s more than they took from me!”
“N-o?” said Driscoll in dismay. “Gracious, I hadn’t any time to count money when I searched ’em!”
“You!–searched Don Tiburcio?”
“Why not? Isn’t he a thief?”
“But–he permitted––”
“W’y yes, they both let me, I had the drop. But they got indignant and called me a thief–I believe they’d of called a policeman if there’d been one handy, or even–– Now what,” he exclaimed, “what ails the old bare-bones now?”
The senile mirth had left the trader’s face, and his olive skin was ashen. “Next time,” he moaned, “next time, Santa María, they will be in force and they–they will take the very horse from under me!”
“Tough luck,” Driscoll observed.
77Murguía darted at him a look in which there was all the old hate, and more added. But it disturbed the trooper as little as ever. “Come,” he said, “own up. You knew we were going to meet those fellows?” Murguía said nothing. “Of course you knew. But why didn’t you change your route, seeing you’re too high-minded to fight?–What’s that?–Oh that voice! Dive for it, man!”
“I, I couldn’t change on account of my passport.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“In the passport I declare the route I take.”
“I see, and you can’t change it afterward?”
“No.”
“Now look here, Murgie, have you got any more of these dates on?–Yes? No?–Murgie, if you don’t dive, by––”
Murguía dove, and denied with eagerness that he had any further toll-paying appointments. But Driscoll reckoned that he was lying. “And,” he added, “we are going to change our route, passport or no passport. We’ll take–let’s see–yes, we’ll take the very next crosstrail going in the same general direction.”
Murguía’s alarm at the proposal belied his former denial. The law required him to follow the course laid down in his passport, but he feared the law less than the disappointment of road agents. Don Tiburcio’s receipt protected him from those controlled by Don Tiburcio. But Tiburcio was not powerful, except in blackmail. Murguía paid him lest he inform the government of tribute also paid to Don Rodrigo. Now Rodrigo Galán was powerful. His band infested the Huasteca. He called himself a Liberal and a patriot, and he really believed it too. But he also declared that the tolls he collected went to the revolutionary cause, which declaration, however, even he could hardly have believed.
Don Rodrigo gave receipts, and his receipts were alleged guarantee against other molestation, since he controlled the78highway more thoroughly than ranger patrols had ever done. But lately a competitor had appeared in the brush, and he was that humorous scoundrel, Don Tiburcio of the crossed eye. Goaded near to apoplexy by the double tolls, Murguía had once ventured to upbraid Don Rodrigo with breach of contract. There was no longer immunity in the roadmaster’s receipts, he whined. Then the robber chief had scowled with the brow of Jove, and hurled dreadful oaths. “You pay an Imperialista!” he stormed in lofty indignation. “You give funds to put down your struggling, starving compatriots! So, señor, this is the love you bear your country!”
It was a touching harangue, and the remorse-stricken trader ever after denied that he even saw Don Tiburcio, at which times a queer smile would supplant Don Rodrigo’s black frown.
It was this same Don Rodrigo who had been reported as slain by Jacqueline’s Fra Diavolo. But Driscoll, not having heard of his death, was quite ready to expect more brigands. He insisted, therefore, on changing trails.
“The Señor Coronel is most valiant,” sneered Murguía.
“So darned much so, Murgie, that I want to dodge ’em.”
But his struggle against temptation was evident. He glanced back at the two women and again denounced the unfamiliar feminine element in men’s affairs. To avoid the brigandage encounter took more of manhood than Don Anastasio might imagine in a lifetime.
But they had not followed their new route five minutes before Murguía was again at the trooper’s side. An “I-told-you-so” smirk hovered on his pinched visage. “Segundino has gone,” he announced.
“So Segundino has gone?” Driscoll repeated. “Well, and who’s Segundino?”
“He’s one of my muleteers, but now I know he is a spy too. He will tell the bri–if there are brigands–where to meet us.”79Murguía was thinking, too, of their reproachful increase on collection charges for the extra trouble.
“Then,” said Driscoll, “we’ll go back to our old trail,” which they did at once. Soon after he was not surprised to hear from Murguía that “this time it was Juan who had disappeared.”
“Didn’t I tell you to set a close watch?”
“Y-e-s, but what was the use? He slipped into the brush, and,” the trader complained, “I can’t spare any more drivers.”
“Don’t need to. We’ll just keep this trail now.”